Modern Voice: Working with Actors on Contemporary Text has been designed to follow on from Catherine’s previous book, Classic Voice: Working with Actors on Vocal Style, focusing on the less defined demands within contemporary drama. Lifting contemporary speech rhythms off the page can be a challenge for actors. Sometimes these rhythms are realistic, resembling or mirroring the speech patterns of real human beings, sometimes they are non-realistic, distorting speech patterns for particular effect. Modern Voice not only provides an accessible approach for understanding speech rhythm but also presents an overview of different types and styles of contemporary text (including the rise of dramatic realism in England, America and Australia). Along the way there are a myriad of practical ideas for directors, lecturers, teachers, trainers and coaches to explore in their workshops and rehearsals.
The Modern Voice of an Irish Immigrant is author Imelda Cummins-DeMelkon?s fascinating account of her experience growing up in Ireland as one of twelve children, and the struggle for autonomy and independence that led to her choice of immigration to the United States.The author speaks honestly of the conflicts she experienced as a child and the overzealous paternal control that dominated her young life. The reader follows the author?s journey as it weaves between her experiences in both countries. Ultimately, The Modern Voice of an Irish Immigrant shows us that through a deep commitment to personal growth, one can indeed emerge whole and able to enjoy a full and complete life.Among the highly interesting topics the book explores are the changing face of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the United States, the uniform wish of immigrants to recreate the best of the culture they left behind, what it is to be a conscientious parent, the reality of ill and aging parents, and finally, the joy of the discovery of a life that is worth the often challenging effort.
This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives. Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period. These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial, and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology, and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities. Chapters 2 and 5 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Speech coding is a highly mature branch of signal processing deployed in products such as cellular phones, communication devices, and more recently, voice over internet protocol This book collects many of the techniques used in speech coding and presents them in an accessible fashion Emphasizes the foundation and evolution of standardized speech coders, covering standards from 1984 to the present The theory behind the applications is thoroughly analyzed and proved
Dramatic Experiments offers a comprehensive study of Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of European modernity. Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, art critic, and editor of the first major modern encyclopedia. He is known for having made lasting contributions to a number of fields, but his body of work is considered too dispersed and multiform to be unified. Eyal Peretz locates the unity of Diderot's thinking in his complication of two concepts in modern philosophy: drama and the image. Diderot's philosophical theater challenged the work of Plato and Aristotle, inaugurating a line of drama theorists that culminated in the twentieth century with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. His interest in the artistic image turned him into the first great modern theorist of painting and perhaps the most influential art critic of modernity. With these innovations, Diderot provokes a rethinking of major philosophical problems relating to life, the senses, history, and appearance and reality, and more broadly a rethinking of the relation between philosophy and the arts. Peretz shows Diderot to be a radical thinker well ahead of his time, whose philosophical effort bears comparison to projects such as Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis.
Monologues are an essential part of every actor's toolkit. Actors are required to perform monologues regularly throughout their career: preparing for drama school entry, showcasing skills for agents or auditioning for a role. Following on from the bestselling first volume (2008), this book showcases selected monologues from some of the finest modern plays by some of today's leading contemporary playwrights. These monologues contain a diverse range of quirky and memorable characters that cross cultural and historical boundaries. The pieces are helpfully organised into age-specific groups: 'Teens', 'Twenties', 'Thirties' and 'Forties plus'.
Practitioner Research in Voice Studies aims to support the artist-scholar who wishes to design and publish research in voice. The book is useful for the novice, who wants tangible tools to begin, and for the more experienced researcher, who wants varying perspectives on how voice scholarship has evolved. The book contains three sections: • Conducting Practitioner Research in Voice Studies • Getting Started • Practitioner Research Examples. The first two sections outline major themes, debates, and research approaches in the field, and many chapters offer step-by-step guides and tips. The final section presents example research articles that highlight numerous methods including qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, action research, performance as research, practice as research, literature review, narrative review, and other kinds of multidisciplinary practices. This ambitious project includes leading international figures who write in a scholarly and accessible manner. Utilizing research ideas and examples from a variety of voice disciplines, this book will be of interest to those studying voice, speech, singing, acting, public speaking, voice science, communication, music, theatre, and performance. Those writing a dissertation or thesis may also draw from this text. Articles from this book were originally published in the Voice and Speech Review journal.
Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts—including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid—Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.
