Royal Heart - Andrea Gibson

Voice Recipe:

1. Tempo - Gibson begins the poem very slowly and deliberately. As the poem continues, Andrea picks up the tempo until it is rapid and almost desperate. At the very end, it slows to about the original tempo.

2. Rhythm - Various important words of the poem are stressed, which shapes the rhythm. Often these words are near the end of a sentence and the beginning of the sentence will build up to the word most emphasized then the rest of the sentence peters out from there.

3. Articulation - Gibson's articulation is clear enough that you can make out every word said, but in my opinion could be crisper. Andrea was born in Maine and later lived in New Orleans, and I notice a bit of a dialect, which influences articulation. In this particular case, r's are slurred or dropped at times.

4. Pronunciation - Andrea pronounces "world" almost as if it is two syllables as opposed to one, and "bury" as "barry." You can hear Southern influence when Gibson pronounces "sweetheart" because the end is dropped making it sound like "sweet-hah," and the same is true for many other words.

5. Pitch - Gibson's voice is neither very low or very high. It sits somewhere in the middle and hovers around the same three (or so) notes but occasionally drops lower, usually at the end of a sentence.

6. Volume - It is hard to make an accurate claim about volume because Gibson is speaking into a microphone. With the mike, Gibson is speaking loud enough to be heard clearly and seems balanced with the mike (not too loud).

7. Quality - There is a harsher sound when Gibson pronounces the short "A" sound, but a longer, more fluid sound on vowels like "O." The quality is smoother when Gibson is speaking slowly, but becomes frenetic and choppier as the tempo quickens.

8. Word choice - Word choice is instrumental in poetry, however Gibson doesn't use a particularly large vocabulary. The words selected are fairly simple and ones that most people would generally know, perhaps so the listeners can focus more on the meaning of the piece that figuring out individual words. Words used frequently include rain and love.

9. Non-verbals - Gibson consistently take audible, gasping breaths and has a slight lisp on a few s's.