Voice

sus

sus

Moderator
Terribly embarrassing but when lit profs talked about "voice" I never made the connection to the literal throat and tongue, it was always prose style in my head, silent read-it-to-yourself, more like tics and personality than intonation.

And then listening to Pound read I realized he does this fake Northumbrian accent to make his poems work, it sounds weird if you don't read them that way, even before I heard him read, I sorta did an approximation.




And of course there's the Wake, where Irish speech patterns are baked in.

It's not just accents and dialect though, it's the kinds of words and grammatical structures that a sort of person would use. Spoken voice encodes gender, age, culture, class. It would be very weird to hear John Wayne read the Wake.




So I've been working on composing lines out loud, messing around with different voices, trying to find a voice I like. I think I'll have to learn the New England / New Dutch accent a bit, and maybe the Brooklyn accent, so I can try to write about those areas in an appropriate voice.

Mainly I am curious if anyone else has thought about this stuff, if they can point me to things to read or keep thinking about it all. Advice for developing.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I am trying to improve at doing accents, but I am still terrible at them.

I'm also considering training some text-to-speech engines on different fictional characters, and then having these different iconic personas (e.g. a Wayne, an Alec Guiness, etc) read different texts, as a way of testing out what works and doesn't work.

I'm also trying to write things in voices I find—e.g. I've been writing something short about Lucia Joyce using the voice of Linda Manz from Days of Heaven.

But if there are any suggestions or tips
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I often read aloud to myself when reading poetry. (A "tip" from me would be to try and stick to your own voice, because I have a tendency to e.g. read Wordsworth in an affected posh voice that might fit all the "O!"s and so on, but the effect of this is to alienate myself from it emotionally.)

Obviously you can do this in your head but I do think it helps--not least to remind you that poetry probably originated in song.

Shakespeare, too, works a lot better for me if I read it aloud, especially if I stop to think about the emotion behind the speech.

OTOH I must admit the more subtle auditory effects tend to fly over my head/ears. Unless it's obvious alliteration or assonance I don't hear or perceive these linkages in sound that someone like Helen Vendlers is so adept at picking out.

Interestingly I think a lot of ppl nowadays listen to audiobooks instead of reading, which I've never managed to crack because my attention inevitably drifts and I want to stop and dig into things.
 
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WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
sus said:
I am trying to improve at doing accents, but I am still terrible at them.

I'm also considering training some text-to-speech engines on different fictional characters, and then having these different iconic personas (e.g. a Wayne, an Alec Guiness, etc) read different texts, as a way of testing out what works and doesn't work.

I'm also trying to write things in voices I find—e.g. I've been writing something short about Lucia Joyce using the voice of Linda Manz from Days of Heaven.

But if there are any suggestions or tips
Click to expand...

try comparing a posh Edinburgh accent compared to east-end Glasgow

try the vowel weighting for Bristolian/West Country accents compared to northern Irish, southern/western/south eastern Irish voices

now you have the foundations of Boston and New England, VA, the Carolina’s and the Deep South or at least foundations prior to pre/post WWI migration

you could explore extinct dialects and pronunciations - no one in the US sounds like WC Fields any more, just as here no one looks like WG Grace, not until Coil went full beard any way

add the changing voices of London too
 
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WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
A colleague on lunch, a Yorkshireman, says to listen to the soft tones of John Arlott and compare them to Fred Truman and Boycott

 
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WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Voice and the Mason-Dixon Line - Philly vs southern MD - if you’re from the west coast they’re very different, different associations

I can hear my own voice alter at work: flattened vowels, slowed down, neutralise any twang, simply put to be understood clearly and quickly in acutely stressful environments

In writing, this quote struck ..

luka said:
I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes—what to the doctor know of lands like that?—and I lived on rum, I tell you. It’s been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me; and if I’m not to have my rum now I’m a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my blood’ll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab”; and he ran on again for a while with curses. “Look, Jim, how my fingers fidges,” he continued in the pleading tone. “I can’t keep ’em still, not I. I haven’t had a drop this blessed day. That doctor’s a fool, I tell you. If I don’t have a dram o’ rum, Jim, I’ll have the horrors; I seen some on ’em already. I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, I’m a man that has lived rough, and I’ll raise Cain. Your doctor hisself said one glass wouldn’t hurt me. I’ll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim.”
Click to expand...
 
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WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
thought an accents thread existed in the mists of time

The accents thread

I don't have a strong accent, though I daresay one could tell I'm from the South East of England. You?
www.dissensus.com

pitch, brevity, resonance, delivery, we recognise (and judge) so much from a voice - from presentations to Stephen Hawking to RP to ai-augmentation, just as long as it isn’t this particular voice set up

IMG_6085.jpeg
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
One of the finest takes on the American voice is still Richard Pryor’s bit on the Mafia, yeah it’s old just don’t want to spam vids

even if it’s a pastiche it’s still brutally funny and absolutely on the nose

Rodney Dangerfield‘s act was posted recently and that type of vocal delivery seems extinct now *straightens tie

US stand up voices are generally annoying as fuck now exempting the above, Patrice O.N and K Williams but the medium draws the voice, either grating or adenoidal

no one does the clear rat-a-tat Don Rickles fire breather any more but getting off topic
 
version

version

Well-known member
Something a lot of people seem to do when reading aloud is this rhythmic drawing out of words. You can hear Tom McCarthy doing it here at 0:35...




And the guy playing the Ginsberg character reading Lee's manuscript at the beginning of this scene...

 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
sus said:
And then listening to Pound read I realized he does this fake Northumbrian accent to make his poems work, it sounds weird if you don't read them that way, even before I heard him read, I sorta did an approximation.

Click to expand...


Basil Bunting, an actual Northumbrian and Pound's friend, reading Canto 1 - itself a poem written to imitate Old English Northumbrian alliteration.

 
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WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
version said:
Something a lot of people seem to do when reading aloud is this rhythmic drawing out of words. You can hear Tom McCarthy doing it here at 0:35...




And the guy playing the Ginsberg character reading Lee's manuscript at the beginning of this scene...

Click to expand...


the talking asshole bug voice takes some beating, one of the elements within the film I don’t think I’ll forget in a hurry

 
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