Voice Recipe - Girls Who Read

 

For this assignment, we were asked to analyze someone else's voice recipe after previously analyzing our own. Much of this class will be focused on poetry, and this video jumped out at me when I saw it posted on a friend's Facebook page this week, because I immediately noticed multiple interesting things about his voice. 

1. Tempo - He really plays with tempo in this piece. Some of it is very driven and rhythmic, especially parts where he is speeding through rhyme after rhyme then suddenly slows down at the end of a line. It makes it very interesting as a listener, and slowing down certain parts can stress their importance by drawing more attention to it.

2. Rhyme - The rhyme scheme really determines the rhythm in this piece, and each time rhyme occurs, he'll emphasize that word more than the rest. Often times, he'll move through a few words very quickly, emphasize one, pause for a moment, then continue the same pattern. The rhythm is not consistent and changes frequently.

3. Articulation - Because of his dialect, not all of his consonant sounds are articulated, particularly the "t's" and "r's" since they are often dropped with a British dialect.

4. Pronunciation - The speaker has a British dialect, which mainly affects his vowel sounds. For example when he uses the word "glass," he pronounces it with a much longer "a" sound than we do with our American dialects. Other words that differ in pronunciation include "vocabulary" and "girl." 

5. Pitch - In my opinion, his voice is slightly higher than an average man's. He hovers around the same few pitches for the whole piece, never dipping distinctively lower or noticeably higher.

6. Volume - The volume is fairly consistent through the poem, however there are certain times he drops his volume a bit.

7. Quality - You can hear some resonance in his voice. It is very clear - he is not difficult to understand in spite of his accent.

8. Word Choice - In poetry in particular, word choice is vital. In this case, the word choice is probably centered around fitting the rhyme scheme. However, he shows which are most important through emphasis, like in the end when he describes "a girl with passion, wit, and dreams."

9. Non-verbals - Towards the beginning of the piece, he clicks his tongue once, but I did not pick up on any other non-verbals.