Vol. 13 No.2

VASTA

IDEA - An Online Database of Accent and Dialect Resources

by Paul Meier

We've all seen the postings on VASTAVOX. "I'm dialect coaching Dancing at Lughnasa, (or an Athol Fugard piece or Our Town). Anyone know where I can get primary source recordings?"

I've put out such calls myself and received great help from around the world. Usually within two to three weeks one can assemble recordings from here and there that prove invaluable in showing actors how real people from the places in the plays or films actually speak. Then, with some analysis, drills, isolation of key words and phrases from the scripts themselves, we dialect coaches are able to get our casts sounding pretty much the way they should. But we all know, too, that often we have to scramble for good material, sometimes resorting to watching actors in films which sound right to us, or to other dialect coaches demonstrating their imitation of the dialect. And often, good primary sources just aren't there.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were an archive of hundreds or even thousands of recordings of real people speaking in their native accents and dialects? One could look up, say, Australia, zero in on Melbourne and find not just one but maybe a dozen different people in the age range, of the gender, and of the class we needed, each recording lasting two or three minutes!

And wouldn't it be wonderful if this archive lived on the world wide web and you could download the samples you needed with just a few mouse clicks? Free!

If such a dialectal nirvana existed I would never again find myself in the situation I was last summer. With a mere three days notice I was whisked away to Hawaii to dialect coach the actor with the title role in Father Damien, a feature film about the life of the famous Belgian priest who ministered to the lepers of Molokai in the 1 870's. With no time at all to gather samples, thus thrown back on my own personal memories of Flemish speakers I had encountered, I was on location to guide the star of the film. Had an archive existed such as I have described, I could have plugged my trusty lap-top into the nearest phone line and downloaded perhaps half a dozen samples of well-educated male Flemish speakers to guide the actor and me in fashioning a style of speech appropriate to the character. But no. The cameras rolled and we had to commit to something that we would all live with for the duration of the film. Millions of dollars would be spent on authentic costumes and sets and period transportation, but not until this late in the game was a dialect coach brought in, and then at such short notice that he arrived without tools except what he carried in his head! As is often the case, however, a pretty fair job was accomplished, but not, it has to b.e admitted, under ideal circumstances.

Well, we now have the embryo of such an archive here at the University of Kansas. We have called it IDEA, an acronym for International Dialects of English Archive. It contains just a handful of recordings at present, but they are all well-recorded, are between two and fve minutes long, take up less than 3MB of computer memory each, are available free and downloadable from our website. Over the next few years, if all goes to plan, IDEA may eventually contain hundreds of recordings of English language dialects and foreign language accents, as well as special collections devoted to significant sub-groups. (Holocaust survivors will be the first such special collection.) Various VASTA colleagues have been consulted and we will continue to respond to suggestions from the voice and speech community. (Some of my VASTA colleagues have been peer-reviewers in major grant applications we have made and, as I write this, we await the result of an application to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a large grant to support the work over the next two years).

On your first visit to the site you will be linked to another website from which you can download a sound processing program (Winamp if you use a PC, Macamp if you use a Mac). Once you have installed this program on your own computer, you simply click on the sound file you want from the archive, downloading it straight to your hard drive, where, thanks to a compression technology miracle called Mpecker, it will take up less than 3MB of precious memory. You can then play that recording any time you want. (All this is assuming you own a computer with a sound card and speakersãpretty much standard equipment these days.) All the subjects whose speech has been captured by IDEA are asked to do the same thing. First they read a standard passage, a public domain text that has been used for years by speech pathologists and othersãThe Rainbow Passage. They then talk for up to three minutes about their lives, so that the listener gets a sense of the educational, geographical, and social influences that have shaped their way of speaking. (IJsing a digital editing program called ProTools the files have been edited down from master recordings lasting up to fifteen or twenty minutes each, and separately archived.)

On other pages of the website one finds the text of The Rainbow Passage, links to other sites and most important, information on how to contribute dialects.

For the plan is to enlist the help of colleagues around the world who will contribute recordings from native speakers where they live. Such contributors will be honored in special ways. For example, they may purchase at cost the entire archive on CD. The website will contain links to their own website or e-mail addresses. In this way, IDEA could become the hub of a globally linked network of voice, speech and dialect professionals, and not the domain of a single authority.

Will IDEA rob dialect coaches of their livelihood? Perhaps you are thinking that if actors can simply listen to such a superb collection as IDEA hopes to be, they won't bother to employ a dialect coach or to cough up the money to purchase dialect acquisition tapes. We have given a lot of thought to this. After all, I am a dialect coach myself. My take is that while certain actors who are great mimics will download the samples and do-it- themselves, most film and theatre companies recognize that the analysis and instructional skills of a specialist who designs the dialect palette of a show are well worth purchasing. And it takes a specialist to guide actors into the particular text at hand. My instinct is that IDEA will be a rising tide that lifts all ships. With a dialect resource such as this, theatre and film companies will think in terms of dialects that much more, and the services of dialect experts could be more in demand, rather than less. I strongly believe that IDEA, by being a comprehensive archive of real speech, will show us that we have come to rely on theatrical stereotypes as "signs" for dialect. We have, over the years, come into agreement about what Germans, Dubliners, Scots, Tennesseans, sound like. Faced with the real thing, and many examples of it, one realizes that the theatrical convention is often just that, a convention, just as surely as Disneyworld's national pavilions at EPCOT are cliches and generalizations of the countries they purport to represent. An extensive collection of dialect primary sources will surely raise our consciousness and make us realize more pointedly that what passes for authenticity in the theater is a convention. I am deeply conscious that much of what I think I "know" about Ireland, India, Mississippi, is "knowledge" gained from plays and films. Wouldn't it be nice if we folks who present distillations of other peoples' cultures modelled our work on larger samples than we do? A resource such as IDEA could surely help.

A point about electronic publishing. In the academe we are prisoners of a literary paradigm, one that implies that real "knowledge" is captured only in written form, pressed between the covers of books, preserved and transmitted to our posterity that way. We in the theatre have our literary heritage, to be sure, but we are also guardians of an oral tradition. We must have appropriate ways of recording, storing and retrieving the data appropriate to oralityãthe accents, rhythms, intonation and phrasing, vocabulary and syntax of the cultures we represent. This cannot be stored in books. And we in VASTA know better than most that electronic publishing, now widely available, is an important additional medium for our scholarly discourse. Writing about speech? Almost an oxymoronãa sometimes redundant exercise when we can publish the sounds themselves.

So it is my hope that you will click on our website, invest a little time in downloading the sound processing program you need, then download and play authentic recordings of real people in their native accents and dialects. And then consider contributing samples you collect from your neck of the woods! IDEA is supported by The University of Kansas' General Research Fund. Paul Meier, Associate Professor of Theatre and Film, is the project director. Shawn Muller, student assistant, is the project's Technical Director and designer of the website. IDEA can be accessed at: http://www.ukans. edu/idea/index.html .

VASTA Newsletter Archive
The newsletter archive is finally online (at least in part)! Currently available are newsletters from 1998. To go to the newsletter archive page, start at vasta.org's front door and follow the link to the archive (under Publications), or follow this link to go directly there: http://www.vasta.org/newsletter/.