Dialects for Voice Actors.

Yesterday I received an entertaining email from one of my favorite clients, Richard, for whom I’ve done several large jobs requiring accents. His company produces educational software and he hired me to provide an Australian voice for “Miss Melberry” in a maps and graphs project, and a Georgia accent for a lizard (“Miss Lizzy”) in a reading skills module. I’ve also done Teacher’s Voices on several occasions.

Richard’s email included an exchange he’d had with a 4th grade teacher in Lowell, Massachusetts who has just started using the maps and graphs software with Miss Melberry. She wrote that the kids “really enjoyed it” but that one of the children said of Miss Melberry, “She’s not from around here, is she?”

Richard’s response included the following:

“Actually, Miss Melberry is from western Massachusetts; or, at least, her voice is. If you'd like to learn more about the excellent voiceover artist who voiced Miss Melberry (and loves to do accents), check out http://www.mcmvoices.com/. She is very good.”

Well, you can see why Richard is one of my favorite clients.

Australian accents are not easy. One of the sounds that is exceptionally difficult for non-natives to produce is the long “o”. When I was working on this accent intensively I studied that “o” a lot, and took a couple of snippets from Gillian Lane-Plescia’s Australian and New Zealand Accents for Actors CD and listened to them over and over again. The first one, which you can listen to here, is the phrase “in a moment”. I pulled that off the CD and multiplied it so that it is 25 seconds of just that. The sound is almost like mye-oo-munt. Hard to transcribe, hard to say.

Building on that we come to the second snippet, which is, “I know that bloke’s going to roll over in his boat in a moment”. You can listen to that one here. Lots of long o’s to practise!! If you want to try it, break it up into shorter bits and practise each bit until it sounds good. Practise them all separately and then start to piece them together. If you can master that incredibly difficult phrase, you’ll be ready to take on Australia!

I recommend the Lane-Plescia CDs above all others I've used as the ultimate dialect resource for actors. The sound quality varies because many field interviews with native speakers are included. And of course, it’s those field interviews, as well as Ms. Lane-Plescia’s discussion of the sounds that make these dialects what they are, that are so valuable. You can order them directly from The Dialect Resource or, if you live in or are visiting certain major cities you can buy them in the stores listed.

Other dialect resources:

International Dialects of English Archives

The Speech Accent Archive

American Dialect Links

Say it Like a Texan

More on dialects in future posts. Feel free to add to the list above, which is rudimentary!

Another vote for getting out of the house - Dialect Paradise!.

I wrote last week, and not for the first time, about the importance of getting out and doing things. Like going to a climbing wall (and by the way, yes I did go again, and yes I did try the more challenging route again and this time was successful!). But sometimes it’s far more routine things that turn out to be immensely rewarding.

We’ve gone to my brother’s family home for Easter dinner the last couple of years. This year they got an invitation from friends and those friends were kind enough to extend the invitation to us as well. We were touched and accepted gratefully. But as the day approached, we found ourselves wishing we could spend the day at home rather than make the 2+ hour drive each way. There was no question about not going, of course, and we made the journey. Thank goodness, because a fantastic surprise awaited us.

The other people at the gathering, besides my brother’s family, were terrifically interesting and funny. But that wasn’t the surprise. The astonishing thing was that four of them grew up in the Limerick region of Ireland, 3 were from south London and one was from Yorkshire!! A dialect student’s dream! This was my first opportunity since taking up an academic approach to the study of dialects for voice-over to hear some of this speech “live” rather than listening to recordings on the internet such as at IDEA or The Speech Accent Archive or NPR or films or the enormously valuable series of CDs produced by Gillian Lane-Plescia at The Dialect Resource. I was able to listen for and observe some of the patterns I had noticed in my academic work, along with the facial expressions and body language and all the rest that no mere voice recording can convey. I made no secret of my interest in their speech – I couldn’t if I had tried, and they in turn were fascinated by my voice work. In short, it was a wonderful day and we all parted great friends, with all sorts of plans and schemes for the future. Imagine if we had decided, “oh bother, let’s just laze the day away at home?”

Shudder.