Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
My Voice and Me
• PaR (online version and portfolio)
A project investigating the potential of music to contribute to prosthetic voice communication. A score reflects the musical language of opera to this end.
300 word statement - Information about the research process and/ or content
The research interrogated the nature of the relationship between music and text when performed together. The overarching research question asks, ‘How might those with prosthetic voices be assisted to communicate better?’ A mechanical voice reduces communication and negates many human characteristics, including identity. The aim here was to test the hypothesis that music can endow poorly delivered text with real emotion.
The specific research questions included:
> can music endow sincerity and other emotions to a dry delivery of text?
> can it do so without obscuring the text?
A narrative was developed around a fictitious opera singer who lost his voice in the 1980’s and had been given the same technology as Stephen Hawking (a 1983 Dec Talk DTC 01 Speech Synthesiser). The monologue, although dramaturgically strong, is impossible to listen to when delivered by the synthesiser alone, as findings proved. However, in My Voice and Me the monologue is performed with a piano score, played by the fictitious, mute opera singer. The score reflects the musical language of the opera at the centre of the narrative, Pagliacci, which, being melodramatic, carries strong emotional potential.
This outcome resulted from a context of collaborative, interdisciplinary research on the ESPRC funded CreST international network over three years, involving scientists, artists, programmers and technicians focussing on synthetic speech. A resulting recording was toured as an installation in the CreST Roadshow in three cities in the north of England in December 2012, and My Voice and Me was also performed live in the CreST Roadshow Final Concert in Scarborough, in January 2013 and at the Tete-aTete opera Festival in London in August 2013. It may be experienced on-line: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXHHouy9KiM. A related article interrogating sincerity, 'Can a computer-generated voice be sincere?',co-authored with writer-director Chris Newell, is published in Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology Oct 2013, Vol. 38, No. 3: 126–134.
