Chopping and Linking
Chopping and Linking
Words that begin with vowels pose a challenge to actors. How to speak these sounds? When anything begins with a vowel, there is a tendency to initiate the sound with a glottal attack. This is done by closing the vocal folds together, and then building up pressure, and then blasting the folds into motion. Let’s try an experiment, so you can see what I mean. Say the first 4 vowel letters of the alphabet: A, E, I, O. (We don’t use "U" because its name actually begins with a consonant sound, which makes it much less likely to begin with a glottal.) Now, try it again, but this time, I want you to hesitate before each letter. ….A…E…I…O. Can you feel how you close off the folds, much like holding your breath, before each of those letters? When we encounter words that begin with vowel sounds, some people put this kind of glottal sound in front of each one them.
When I was first training as an actor, I was taught that glottaling a word that begins with a vowel was a very bad idea. Since that time, I’ve come to realize that glottaling isn’t the end of the world, and that, in some cases, using an occasional glottal sound can actually make your use of language clearer, more intelligible. An example of glottal attacks used in everyday speech is in the expression "Uh-uhn," meaning "NO." In IPA we’d transcribe that with the symbol for the glottal, which looks like a question mark without a dot. [ʔʌ ʔʌ̃]. However, I am convinced that most of us don’t need to use the glottal attack very often, and that most of the time, what we really need is to link to the word beginning with a vowel from the sound that comes before, whether that’s a consonant or a vowel.
Glottal attacks put a certain "punch" on the language, emphasizing those words that begin with a vowel. Sometimes this is necessary, but often, it’s not. We need to learn to use the whole word to catch the audience’s ear, rather than punching the word with a glottal. We need to embrace the thought that the idea and emotion behind a word is carried on the open sound as much as on the staccatto of the initial consonants.
We’ll look at a passage from Henry IV, part one, as he foreshadows his eventual betrayal of Falstaff, and reveals to the audience his duplicitous nature.
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyok’d humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the Sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But, when they seldom come, they wish’d-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So when this loose behaviour I throw off,
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
I love this speech. It’s one of my most favourite plays, and this speech is the first I ever fell in love with. I’ve gone through and put an asterisk in front of every word that begins with a vowel. I want you to go through and punch, via a glottal, everyone of the them. I’m sure you’ll find that some of them are not so bad, if you punch them, and others will leave you wishing you didn’t punch them. Have a go with the first part of the speech:
*I know you *all, *and will *awhile *uphold
The *unyok’d humour *of your *idleness.
Yet herein will *I *imitate the Sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother *up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please *again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d *at,
By breaking through the foul *and *ugly mists
*Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
Of course, that’s not the only way to play it! In fact, I’d say that that’s a rather odd way of playing it. The opposite way of doing it is to link the initial vowels with the sound that precedes it. So, words like you ‿all will link together. In this case, it feels almost as if there was a little linking w between the two words. In other cases, like in I ‿imitate it feels as if there was a little linking y (IPA [j]) between the vowels. Of course, words that begin phrases that begin with a vowel are a different breed. They need to begin with a simultaneous attack, where the breath and the folds come together at the same time. In the passage below, I’ve linked the words with vowels, and I’ve put a tiny h before words that need a simultaneous onset. (This is just a code — they don’t need a big "h" sound!). Try reading that passage again, trying to link as best you can.
ʰI know you ‿all, ʰand will ‿awhile ‿uphold
The ‿unyok’d humour ‿of your ‿idleness.
Yet herein will ‿I ‿imitate the Sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother ‿up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please ‿again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d ‿at,
By breaking through the foul ‿and ‿ugly mists
‿Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
I’ve made a list of all the linked words, including those with vowel links that come through w-ish and y-ish sounding links (I’ve used a superscript to denote those). Try them out of context of the speech:
oo-wall, l-awhile, l-uphold, ee-yunyoked, r-of, r-idleness, l-I, I-yimitate, r-up, z-again, d-at, l-and, d-ugly, s-of.
Now you might thy the whole speech again. If there’s a word that you particularly want to emphasized really strongly, you can skip my linking advice and CHOP at it vigourously with a glottal. But I think you should be able to do the speech with no glottals whatsoever first, and then try it a final time allowing a few glottals where you believe you’ve earned them.
ʰI know you ‿all, ʰand will ‿awhile ‿uphold
The ‿unyok’d humour ‿of your ‿idleness.
Yet herein will ‿I ‿imitate the Sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother ‿up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please ‿again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d ‿at,
By breaking through the foul ‿and ‿ugly mists
‿Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
ʰIf ‿all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be ‿as tedious ‿as to work;
But, when they seldom come, they wish’d-for come,
ʰAnd nothing pleaseth but rare ‿accidents.
So when this loose behaviour ‿I throw ‿off,
ʰAnd pay the debt ‿I never promised,
By how much better than my word ‿I ‿am,
By so much shall ‿I falsify men’s hopes;
ʰAnd, like bright metal ‿on ‿a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring ‿o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly ‿and ‿attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set ‿it ‿off.
ʰI’ll so ‿offend to make ‿offense ‿a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least ‿I will.
Lists of words beginning with vowels are particularly hard, as it very possible, if there is any hesitation on your part, to glottalize them all. Try reading this list of words (that feature just about every vowel sound in English) without glottalizing any of them:
Easter eggs,
Itching powder,
Acorns
Elephants,
Apples,
Underwear,
Urchins,
Udon noodles,
Oak trees,
Awnings,
Olives,Angels,
Eiderdowns,
Oil paintings,
Oceans,
Outdoor lighting,Earmuffs,
Airports,
Oarlocks,
Artists.
It’s a very difficult list. But there is a trick to learning to do this: breathe in, and imagine breathing in the shape of the vowel you are about to say. Then, without hesitating, go straight into the word. Take a tiny breath to prep for the next words in the shape of its vowel sound, and on you go! It’s remarkable how well this works. If you don’t really need to breathe in, make sure your throat is open before you go on to the next word. Hesitating and closing your folds before you begin a word is death here. You need to keep that channel open so that you don’t close down.
Next: Reall Larry: R and L
Tempo: Dragging, Slow, Medium, Fast, and Rushing
“Faster, Louder, Funnier”: Actors often joke about how directors of comedies really only have one note. And part of that note has to do with tempo, the rate at which the actors speak. And more often than not, the demand is for actors to increase that rate. Faster dialogue, snappier dialogue tells the story more quickly, moves the story along, and drives the show toward the moments of tension and release, which in comedy means the laugh lines. But speed isn’t just something demanded of comedic actors. In classical plays, especially very long ones, like Hamlet, the need for speed is a large part of getting through the play and not losing the audience’s attention. Often the issue with speed doesn’t have to do with the tempo of speaking, but more with the tempo of thinking. Getting from one line to the next, picking up one’s cues, shifting from beat to beat, all require a dexterity of thought, nimble thinking. The drive to get what you want has to be tied to getting it now, and actors who wallow in their emotional states are usually seen as being self-indulgent.
Of course in rehearsal, we need to take the time to be a little indulgent as part of the process of figuring out what is needed. In fact, it’s very important to find a balance of slow, medium and fast, all in response to the appropriate play of action and reaction. Also, some characters have different internal tempos, and a dramatic contrast can be created by playing with a different internal clock than that of a scene partner.
Let’s discuss tempo as part of the range of skills that all actors come to integrate into their performance, and we’ll explore the types of demands placed upon the performer by each speed.
Slow
Going slowly is often very difficult for some actors, as they are tempted to rush through their performance. Going slowly through the language, finding the time for thought on the words, rather than between them, demands a certain kind of relish. You need to lengthen vowels and continuant consonants, so that you can stretch things out. In slowing down, you need to work with the smallest chunk of language possible, the word, and, in some cases, the syllable. It gives you a chance to really feel the substance of the language, its sounds, its links, its stops. We’ll use the following passage today for our exploration. Take it for a spin, going very slowly, but being sure to link the words together, rather than putting…. extra… space… between… the… words…
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.Gilbert & Sullivan, The Mikado, "I am so Proud", 1885.
Dragging
Of course, there is always “too slow.” When one is reluctantly changing tactics, one might “drag one’s feet” verbally to indicate that reluctance. But often, actors drag because of an issue, and it’s my experience that they either has to do with poor preparation—they just don’t know what comes next and are desperately searching for the words, or with slow thinking. Both are fixed with focus on why you say what you say, rather than just drilling the words over and over. What is the connection between this idea and the next? More importantly, how does the thought that goes before move you toward the thought that comes after. For instance, if you could get through the first two lines of the above Mikado text, but blanked before “Awaiting the sensation,” you would need to figure out why “lifelong lock” would inspire “Awaiting…” If lifelong makes you wait for a lifetime, then “awaiting” is a logical next word. Making that kind of linkage makes it for easier to remember the text.
To explore the idea of draggin intensionally, work your way thrugh the Mikado text as if you didn’t know what to say next. Hesitate in mid-word, on vowels and on continuant consonants like final "m, n, l, etc."
Medium
Finding a happy balance between too slow and too fast isn’t easy, and certainly we don’t want everything to have too even a tempo. But compared to going Slow, Medium speed is where you play the sentence more than the word. In verse, such as the Mikado text we’re using here, it’s about playing the line. You need to find the operative words, and play them, but let the unimportant ones be just that: unimportant! I’ll put the Mikado text in again here so you don’t have to scroll up to see it, and try speaking it again, play one or two important words per line, but generally thinking your way through the thoughts.
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.
This is the kind of text that is meant to be spoken quickly; that’s a big part of the fun of Gilbert and Sullivan. But when you limit your operative words, you’ll find yourself playing things like nouns and verbs over modifiers like adjectives or adverbs. (If you’re like me and grew up without a solid grounding in grammar, you might want to read up on parts of speech, now known as "word classes".)
Monotonous Pace
Speaking monotonously doesn’t just mean speaking on a single pitch. An overly even pace an can also be flat, dull, and unappealing to the listener. It can indicate a certain sense of boredom on the part of the speaker. Rhythmic text, as we see in the lyric above, when spoken out of the context of the song, can be "sung" as if it were following the rhythm of the song. This is to be avoided, unless, of course, you’re doing it for a reason. Try speaking the text through and see if you can feel the potential for a monotonous pace. (Hint: be boring!)
Fast
If a medium pace demands an awareness of the sentence, then faster pace puts our focus on the paragraph, and its underlying argument. Sentences form steps towards our goal, while the paragraph covers the whole thing. Playing our way through this kind of language forces us to drive through the language, finding momentum to move from phrase to phrase, thought to thought, sentence to sentence, toward the conclusion of our argument. Speed requires agility to move the articulators faster than our habitual tempo, and that demands a sense of lightness or deftness so that we do not trip over complex combinations and alternations of consonants that are made in opposing manners and places in the mouth.
Fast text also demands some awareness of the breath requirements of the text. As we move quickly we want to pause less, for a shorter time, in order to move on with the ideas of the text. Less time to breathe means we have to get that breath in quickly without a build-up of unnecessary tension. Try the Mikado text again, but this time work your way through it quickly—as fast as you possibly can:
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.
I find that switching from the /s/ sound of "sensation" to the /ʃ/ sound of "short, sharp shock" is a a challenge. So I’ll loop the second phrase several times (at least 3) in order to imprint its action into muscle memory. Work your way through it, and any time you trip up, try looping a 3 or 4 word-long group in order to increase your ability to do the text at high speed.
Rushing
This is what happens to an actor who is skipping over the moment, not trusting it or her partner. Sometimes when an actor gets caught up in playing words at the expense of thought or emotion, this can also happen. Rushing is often a symptom of fear, in my mind. There is a disconnect that is occuring in order to get past something terrifying. As the cliche says, you must "feel the fear and do it anyway." Embrace those feelings and pour them through the language, rather than trying to get it done, over, on to the next thing.
[Probably the fastest voiceover work going these days is for the disclaimer text one finds at the ends of commercials for drugs. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have begun to rewrite these disclaimers so they are more intelligible, so there is less of a sense the they're trying to hide something. However, it's worth noting that many of those supersonic speed deliveries are done using sophisticated audio editing software, in order to speed up the audio without raising the pitch, and to allow voiceover actors to do the clips one piece at a time in order to get the fastest clearest takes.]
Next: Chopping and Linking
Energized, De-Energized and Over-Energized
Performing requires a balance of a huge number of factors that can make or break your ability to communicate effectively. Breath and sound, thought and emotion, action and reaction, ease and effort. As you perform, you release energy through your nervous system into action. Finding the right balance is hugely challenging. How much energy is needed to reach your acting partner and your audience? Too much, and you appear false and pushed; too little, and you can’t be heard, and your action/reaction can’t be seen. How do you find that balance?
Imagine a tightrope walker, working her way across the rope, carefully judging each step. Better yet, imagine yourself as the tightrope walker. Visualize what you would see, but more importantly what you would feel. In imagining this myself, my attention is first drawn to the idea of focus: this is a life-or-death activity. I must pay attention to all that I can in order to stay on that line. Where does my focus lie? In my feet, and their connection to the floor; in my alignment, sensing my body in space, adjusting to the sensations around me; in the moment, in moving my feet forward, in getting to my goal at the end of the rope. I’m not thinking about what I’m going to be making for dinner. I’m tuned into this place, this time, this activity: my life depends on it. Is it hard physical work? No. But it requires all my attention.
Acting is like that: it requires all your attention. And yet, it requires a sense of ease: it’s not a tense activity, but one where you are responsive to your environment, which includes your acting partner and the audience. That sense of ease demands a certain confidence. It’s a belief that you are worthy of being seen and heard, that your goal is achievable, that you dare to share your what scares you, that you allow your body/mind to respond "truthfully" to stimulus in the moment, without judgment, without scripting. Unfortunately, we don’t always find ourselves in the place where we have that confidence. Our fears of failure lead to second guessing, to planning the moment in order to get it "right," to limiting our responses to what we imagine before we start. And what so often happens is we fall into two ways of hiding that lack of confidence: we compensate by over-energizing, or by de-energizing.
Patsy Rodenburg, one of the most influetial voice teachers in the world, has taught, written and lead workshops around this idea a great deal. She uses the terms “Bluff” and “Deny” to describe these states. Bluffing is when you push vocally, you force your way through your argument, you demand attention without earning it. It’s a great term to describe the action the actor is using in their performance. They are playing at their objective, faking their way through it by insisting that this work. Denying is when you don’t give enough to the action you’re playing, you speak to quietly, you don’t commit to the demands of the language you’re speaking. Because you don’t believe that you can do it, you either pretend you can and bluff, or you admit defeat and deny. And though Antony is lying in Julius Caesar when he says "I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,/ Action, nor utterance, nor the powers of speech/ To stir men’s blood; I only speak right on," we must embrace his idea: that in speaking “right on,” we find ways to not to bluff through wit or words, but to simply put our focus into the language for all we’re worth.
So how do we practise this ideal, of speaking “right on?” Rodenburg suggests we start simply, and feel our way through the via negativa ("to describe God by describing what He is not"), to explore the idea and sensation of Bluff and Deny, and then try to find the middle road that is neither over-doing or under-doing. Balance is that state where one is neither falling off the rope to the left, nor falling off to the right… it is a constant state of adjustment, not a single thing, but a process.
So let’s take a simple phrase, a kind of affirmation, the kind of thing that is easy to not believe in, to force it, or pull back from because we all struggle with our self-worth, just like Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley. “I am worthy.” It’s nothing magic, it’s just a simple phrase about being “good enough.” It could be very funny; it could be deadly serious: it all depends on your point of view. For the sake of this experiment, let’s play with it as being deadly serious.
Here’s the experiment: Bluff your way through the phrase “I am worthy” in as many different ways as possible. Go to extremes. This is about falling off that balance point. Then begin to find the edge: where does it become questionable whether I’m pushing or not? Can you bluff physically, vocally, intellectually, emotionally?
Now try the opposite experiment: Deny your way through the phrase “I am worthy” in as many ways as you can. How small can you go? What pulls it "off" the balance? What does truth have to do with this? Can you find the place where it’s not clear whether you’re Denying or not? What happens physically, vocally, intellectually, emotionally, as you Deny?
You might now take a passage from something you know: a monologue, a poem, a song lyric. Try to work your way through the text, neither falling to left or right, but walking the tightrope of the language. If nothing comes to mind, try working your way across this tightrope of poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind. © 1958
In both Bluff and Deny, we discover symptoms that keep coming up. Signs that can be read by the audience or your scene partner that in many ways call you a liar. That announce that you’re not speaking “right on.” Many times, there are vocal signals: not enough or too much breath energy, vocal energy, pitch, melody, phrasing, breathiness, vocal press, manipulated diction, that doesn’t suit the space or the relationship. Each of us have our favourites, our habits that we go to by default, that we must overcome in order to go from where we “left off” in order to be “right on.” We must not "mistake / any thing / for what it may not be."
There is no one right way to speak“right on.” There are a million ways, each in response to the moment, the given circumstances, and your personal state-of-being. And there are infinite ways of losing that balance, and falling into bluff or deny. Sometimes the demands of a theatre require a scale that, if we were not acting but merely living “real life,” would feel as though we were bluffing. Sometimes the demands of a film scene, with the camera in a tight close-up, that would seem like denying in “real life.” But neither theatre nor film are real. They are a version of reality, shaped for the audience, filtered by the actor, the director and the crew. Truth is not a single thing, it is many things in response to the changing world around us. And speech is often about feeling out the world around us, sensing out our place in it, and speaking appropriately. We all have the tools to feel that. We must all embrace the world, and our place in it, to find that balance.
We are all worthy.
Endings
Final consonants deserve a fair bit of attention in a speech warm-up. That’s because there is a range of articulations available to the actor that are, for most people, beyond what we do in everyday speech. As contemporary everyday speech tends to be informal and personal, rather than the more formal and public style often called for in classical texts, or the demands of a large playing space, it makes sense that actors have to put some effort into making the adjustment. As I’ve discussed in "Bouncing the Lips," there is an articulation form called unreleased where the final stop consonants, /p t k, b d g/ just stop—the aren’t released at the end of a phrase, or going into another sound. This is the default for many speakers. Of course, the other option is to release these consonants, and for the voiceless consonants, that means releasing them with aspiration. (The range of possibilities of voiced and voiceless consonants was discussed in the "Beginnings" step.)
Voiceless Consonant Endings
Think of saying "I’d like you to stop." In informal speech, most English speakers will not release the final /p/ (that’s [p ̚] in IPA). They’ll make the /p/, that is they’ll stop the sound with the action of closing the lips, but they won’t release the /p/ in a puff of aspiration [aɪd laɪk ju tə stɒp̚]. However, for the stage, that final release is important. Try saying that phrase again with a final /p/ that includes aspiration (that’s [pʰ] in IPA) [aɪd laɪk ju tə stɒp ̚]. That puff of air demands a greater commitment to the final /p/. Now, try it with a phrase ending in /t/: "It doesn’t fit," first with a stop, with no audible release [t ̚], and then aspirated, [tʰ]. Note that the other word-final /t/s don’t get the release, here, though they could if you were being really emphatic. Let’s try that: [ɪtʰ dʌzntʰ fɪtʰ]. See how the aspiration takes time, slowing it down while emphasizing the words? Finally, let’s look at an example with a final /k/ sound: "Pick up the slack, Jack." The /k/ at the end of "pick" must release into the vowel of "up," but it isn’t necessarily very aspirated because "up" is unstressed. The /k/ at the end of "slack" doesn’t have to be released, especially in casual speech, nor does the /k/ at the end of "Jack." Try aspirating both slack and Jack, and you might even try really overdoing the /k/ at the end of Pick, too: [pɪkʰ ʌp ðə slækʰ dʒækʰ]. Fully aspirated releases on all the final /k/ sounds is totally appropriate for a large theatre, though for those who are unfamiliar with playing at that scale, it often feels too extravagant. You have to work on this to get to the point where you’re more comfortable.
Voiced Consonant Endings
When a phrase ends in a voiced stop consonant, speakers are inclined to not release the sound. In the phrase "Bob is a slob," the /b/ in Bob releases into the following vowel. But the final /b/ in slob can easily be unreleased: [slɒb ̚]. To release that final /b/ may make it feel like you’re putting a tiny schwa [ə] at the end: [slɒbə]. That’s too much! Find the version where you release the /b/, but only just.
Try the same on the phrases, for /d/ and /g/ respectively:
"Brad is glad to see Fred."
"The rag is in the big bag."
These two sentences both feature linking stops (that release), stops before other stops (in glad_to and big_bag) where there is no release, and final stops that have optional releases. Some theatre voice people would insist on having a release in glad_to and big_bag though this sometimes gives it the sound of [ɡlædətu] or [bɪɡəbæɡ] if overdone. Try those phrases with a very subtle release, and see if you can do it. Then try the sentence with releases on those words and on the final words, Fred and bag. You really need to relish those sounds, indulge in them. Make a choice to justify why you would be so extravagant with those sounds. Sometimes people find that if they mouthe the words, as if they were trying to be heard through 3 in. of glass, that they are inclined to fully commit to those sounds. I suppose that one could think of reaching the aging audience of many classical theatre companies, whose hearing is beginning to go, as try to talk to them through sound proof glass. You really have to try hard!
It’s worth noting that most speakers devoice their final stops, so that "Brad is glad to see Fred" could essentially sound like "Brad is glad to see Fret," except that the vowel of Fred is sustained longer than it is in Fret. Try that out—compare "Slob-slop, Fred-Fret, Bag-back," but don’t release the final consonants. Notice how the second words have significantly shorter vowels, while the final consonant is pretty much the same? Committing to releasing final consonants helps to enhance the difference between the ends of these words, which is one of the principal justifications voice and speech coaches have for defending their preference for final releases. Try those comparisons again, but this time release the final consonants: "Slob-slop, Fred-Fret, Bag-back." Likely this feels a bit much wherever you are right now, but in a large theatre, it really pays off.
Continuants
Continuants are the opposite of stops (affricates, like "ch" /tʃ/, are combos of stops and continuants): they continue. Final continuants at the end of phrases often have a tendency to not continue very long. Really committing to them takes time and energy. Try this phrase: "Sing the hymn, Tom." To take the time for those final nasal consonants demands a certain relish. Final voiceless fricative continuants, including /θ, f, s, ʃ/ in English are often very short, and final voiced fricatives, which include /ð, v, z, ʒ/, also have a tendency to devoice. Apart from the length of vowel that precedes them, the final consonant in believe-belief is frequently very similar. Especially at the end of phrases, like "I don’t know what to believe," these final fricates can devoice strongly enough that they’re very similar to the sound at the end of a phrase like "That’s beyond belief." By choosing to commit to the voicing and the length of these final consonants /ð, v, z, ʒ/, we can make that contrast greater, which theoretically should make the meaning slightly clearer.
Consider the ends of lines in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17:
Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts:
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say this poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.
So should my papers (yellowed with their age)
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage,
And stretched metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice in it, and in my rhyme.
We encounter a variety of endings worth playing. I’ll go through the lines, one by one, to discuss the choices we have.
- come: take the time to fully voice the /m/.
- deserts: the /ts/ needs to be crisp and quick.
- tomb: relish the /m/ and recognize the rhyme with line 1.
- parts: check off the /ts/ sharply.
- eyes: the final /s/ of this word should be a voiced [z] sound.
- graces: again, final /s/ needs to be [z]; it’s debatable whether it should be preceded by a schwa [ə] or a small-cap I [ɪ].
- lies: needs a final [z].
- faces: make it match the [z] on graces.
- age: be sure that the [dʒ] doesn’t go to [tʃ].
- tongue: take the time to really make the /ŋ/. Some people choose to release this sound with a tiny release; I think this is inappropriate.
- rage: the same as age.
- song: of course this doesn’t rhyme with tongue anymore, but the final consonant needs the length to really be heard.
- time: again, give the final /m/ its due, let time take time!
- rhyme: of course rhyme must rhyme with time; indulge that /m/ just like in time.
Taking the time to indulge your endings gives you a chance to relish the substance of the words. It’s the sound of words that carries their meaning in a large theatre, and committing to the sounds also requires a huge emotional commitment to match the scale of the words. Often we get emotional and take it personal and small. In the theatre we have to take the emotion and support it, share it and make it public. Giving vocally means sharing what’s on the inside with the ouside world, and that happens vocally more than anywhere else.
Beginnings
Aspiration As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, everything has a beginning, middle and end. In terms of speech, awareness of beginnings and endings is helpful is varying your performance for different settings, from the most intimate on-mic technique, to the most challenging outdoor amphitheatre. Both vowels and consonants deserve some attention with regard to beginnings and endings, but we’ll work with consonants for now. We’ll start this exploration by focusing on Beginnings in this post, and Endings in the next post.
In terms of diction, most people think of consonants as an important weapon in the battle to be heard and understood. Learning to commit strongly to the actions that generate strong consonant sounds is a hurdle that most theatre actors in training must overcome, whether in class or merely in production. Teachers and directors for the theatre invariably must demand of their actors to "spit out the words" and commit to the sounds of the language of the play. Of the consonant sounds, the stop-plosive sounds have the greatest potential for impact in a large space, if they’re given the requisite energy to reach all corners of the playing environment. However, this kind of choice is totally inappropriate for more intimate theatre work, and so one must learn to be sensitive to the context in which you play, and how those demands set up a new series of requirements of your speech. To do that well, it helps to appreciate the options available, or the range of articulations, for a given sound.
Let’s dig further into the stop-plosive sounds, /p b, t d, k g/. Each of these pairs has a voiceless partner ( /p t k/ ) and a voiced partner (/b d g/). In English, the voiceless consonants are aspirated at the beginning of words and stressed syllables pin, tin, kin; appoint, attest, akin; that’s to say that these consonants are articulated with a puff of air. I’ve written quite a lot about this and more recently in the early steps of this series in "Bouncing the Lips," where we explored aspiration of the lip-based (bilabial) consonant /p/. Because we’ve done /p b/ already, we’ll focus on /t d/ and /k g/ in this post.
The release of these plosive consonants are goverened by something linguists call "Voice Onset Time" (VOT for short)—which is the length of time from when the consonant is released, and when voicing begins. Generally, voiceless consonants have voicing begin after the release of the consonant (ie going into the sound that follows), while voiced consonants have voicing begin on the release of the consonant, or slightly before the release. There’s a lot of room for variation, and different languages have different expectations. This is important because we’ll need to be able to do different versions for different accents. Aspirated voiceless consonants have the greatest delay between the release of the consonant and voicing.
To learn how to appreciate this difference, we’re going to compare /d/ with /t/ and /ɡ/ with /k/, working our way through a variety of VOT possibilities, and learning the IPA symbols for these variations as we go. We’ll start with the most “voiced” sounds, and work our way toward the most “voiceless” sounds.
- Say “dee” [diː] but stick on the voicing of the /d/ so that you make the place of the sound /d/ release the consonant only after you’ve made the sound for as long as possible. I’m going to transcribe this in IPA with a length mark, that looks like a colon made out of little trianɡles, on the /d/ to indicate the length on the voicing: [dːiː]. Repeat that at least 3 times: [dːiː dːiː dːiː]
- Now, do a “dee” with more voicing time than usual, but less than you just did. I’ll use a half-long diacrictic to indicate this articulation: [dˑiː]. Again, repeast 3 times: [dˑiː dˑiː dˑiː]
- Next, say “dee” with the usual amount of voicing for English: that is, with the voicing beginning just as consonant releases. I’ll just use a plain ol’ [d] for this, no diacritics at all: [diː]. Repeat 3 times: [diː diː diː]
You should know that initial /d/ in English is essentially the same as an unaspirated /t/ in many languages. - We’re now moving into the territory of voiceless consonants, so we’ll use /t/ from here on out. First we’ll do a /t/ that has no aspiration, and essentially perhaps a slightly longer VOT than we just did. We’ll just use a plain [t] for this, too. [tiː]. Repeat that at least 3 times: [tiː tiː tiː]
Without aspiration, this will sound a lot like an initial /d/ in English. - Now, let’s add a little bit of aspiration. The diacritic mark in the IPA for aspiration is a tiny superscript "h" that follows the symbol: [tʰ]. Think of that little "h" representing the puff of air escaping. Try it with [tʰiː]. Now try it 3 times in a row: [tʰiː tʰiː tʰiː]
- To do more excessive aspiration, we want to draw out the puff of air, which we’ll indicate with several "h" diacritics. Be extravagant with this sound: [tʰʰiː]. Now repeat 3 times: [tʰʰiː tʰʰiː tʰʰiː]
If we put all 6 steps together into a sequence from most voiced to most aspirated, this is what we get:
[dːiː dˑiː diː tiː tʰiː tʰʰiː]
I find that I’m inclined to get quieter in the middle, as I negotiate my way around the shift from /d/ into /t/.
Now we want to try the whole shebang again, but this time with /ɡ/ and /k/. I’m going to recommend that you not say “gee” the way you normally do /dʒi/ with a "soft G", but with a "hard G", which is the sound of /ɡ/ [ɡiː], and then that you not say "K" the way we do in English, but as key, [kiː], to rhyme with [ɡiː].
- Lots of Pre-voicing: [ɡːiː ɡːiː ɡːiː]
- Some Pre-voicing: [ɡˑiː ɡˑiː ɡˑiː]
- Voice on the Release: [ɡiː ɡiː ɡiː]
- No Aspiration: [kiː kiː kiː]
- Some Aspiration: [kʰiː kʰiː kʰiː]
- Lots of Aspiration: [kʰʰiː kʰʰiː kʰʰiː]
Finally, we want to string the 6 versions of velar stop-plosives into a single sequence:
[ɡːiː ɡˑiː ɡiː kiː kʰiː kʰʰiː]
Can you do this sequence with the bilabial stop-plosives, /b/ and /p/?
- Lots of Pre-voicing: [bːiː bːiː bːiː]
- Some Pre-voicing: [bˑiː bˑiː bˑiː]
- Voice on the Release: [biː biː biː]
- No Aspiration: [piː piː piː]
- Some Aspiration: [pʰiː pʰiː pʰiː]
- Lots of Aspiration: [pʰʰiː pʰʰiː pʰʰiː]
And the string of bilabials:
[bːiː bˑiː biː piː pʰiː pʰʰiː]
Having a sense of the variations if these beginnings can really help you to make subtle yet important shifts between various accents and dialecs.
Try this tongue twister, focusing on the /t/, first with a lot of aspiration [tʰʰ]. (If you’re a mainstream North American, don’t worry about the second /t/ in "totally".)
Two toads, totally tired.
If you’ve read many of the posts here on the site, you’ll know that I’ll recommend that you try the tongue twister now with less aspiration than normal, then with no aspiration, so it’s almost "Do dodes, dodally dired". This very dry /t/ sound creates a very different sort of beginning than what you may be useful, and that works for dialects and also for mic technique, as we don’t want a lot of aspiration on the mic.
Now for a /k/ sound. This tongue twister involves /k/ and /b/ — focus on the former, and let the latter take care of itself:
Pretty Kitty Creighton had a cotton batten cat.
The cotton batten cat was bitten by a rat.
The kitten that was bitten had a button for an eye,
And biting off the button made the cotton batten fly.
Start by making the very aspirated /kʰʰ/ , then try the other versions, too: less aspirated and unaspirated. Now try doing the same tongue twister but this time focusing on the /b/ sound, trying to enhance its voicing: linger on the "b" — this will slow things down, but emphasize the words.
Finally try the tongue twister, playing the intervocalic /t/ that is, the ones between vowels, as is Pretty Kitty. (Note that many dialects would not aspirate the /t/ in words like "cotton batten", because it would go into the /n/, either with a nasal plosion or with a glottal co-articulation. Put altogether, these changes will emphasize the articulation of the beginnings of most of the syllables in the text. This might be appropriate for an outdoor performance, or perhaps as a character of an actor, "playing" their articulation.
Next: Endings
-
Eric Armstrong is an Associate Professor of Voice and Speech at the Dept. of Theatre, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University.
Eric Armstrong is a Full Member of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, the national organization of professional performers and coaches working in the English-language recorded media.
The VoiceGuy is a proud member of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association.
The VoiceGuy is an Associate Editor of the International Dialects of English Archive.
