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Broadcast Speech and the Effect of Voice Quauty

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BROADCAST SPEECH AND THE EFFECT OF VOICE QUAUTY ON THE LISTENER: A STUDY OF THE VARIOUS COMPONENTS WHICH CATEGORISE LISTENER PERCEPTION OF VOCAL CHARACTERISTICS JOHN CHARLES HERBERT PhD Thesis Department of English Language, University of Sheffield OCTOBER 1988 CONTENTS SUMMARy 1 CHAPTER ONE: 2 VOICE QUALITY AND THE BROADCASTER'S ART CHAPTER TWO: 11 DESCRIPTION AND FEATURES OF VOICE QUALITY The notion of voice quality in literature; early British writings; the American elocutionists; voice quality description; gender differences. CHAPTER THREE: 37 ATTRIBUTES OF VOICE QUALITY Physical; psychological; social information in voice quality; vocal characteristics and personality perception; voice dynamics. CHAPTER FOUR: S4 ACCENTS AND THE BROADCAST VOICE Radio accent; status of accents; listener personality variants; importance on radio; the 'BBC' voice; pronunciation prestige; accent persuasiveness; the 'world service' voice; the 'ILR' voice; the 'reporter's' voice; voice quality questionnaire; the 'radio speech register'. CHAPTER FIVE: 78 VOICE QUALITY CONTROL Reflex control mechanism of the larynx; use of the larynx in language; laryngeal adjustments in voice and speech production; voice features; articulation; voice quality deviations; skeletal framework for respiratory activity; inhalation muscles; sequence of respiratory muscular activity; respiratory activity associated with suprasegmental features; prosodic features; speech production; speech sounds; formant frequencies; resonance and the resonators; resonance and voice quality; supraglottic resonators; the oral cavity; the nasal cavity; experiment. CHAPTER SIX: 117 DISORDERS OF VOICE QUALITY AND THEIR EFFECf ON THE BROADCASTER Vowel resonance; pharyngeal resonators; balanced broadcast quality; resonance and hyperfunction; taut pharynx; faulty tongue position; mouth opening problems; improper palatal movement; resonance disorders; the tongue; articulation disorders; strident voice; improving oral resonance; nasality; voice mismanagement; laryngitis; cord thickening; vocal nodules; vocal polyps. CHAPTER SEVEN: 139 USTENER PERCEPTIONS OF VOICE QUALITY ACCEPTABIUTY Voice quality tests; subjective discussion of part one; control tape discussion of part two. CHAPTER EIGHT: 233 PERSONALITY JUDGEMENTS AND VOICE QUALITY Subjective dependability; stereotypes; the Archers; analysis of part one; 'liked' persentational qualities; 'disliked' presentational qualities; 'liked' physical qualities; 'disliked' physical qualities; analysis of part two; dominant characteristics; voice histograpbs; frequency polygons; conclusion. BIBUOGRAPHY 253 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Inevitably in a work of this kind there are many people who need to be thanked - too many to list them all here. But there are some special thanks due: to Graham Nixon, my supervisor; to all those past students of mine now scattered throughout the broadcasting industry in the United Kingdom who knowingly or unknowingly have been helpful in crystalising my thoughts about the relationships of the voice to broadcasting. Thanks also to many members of the BBC and the staff of the University of Sheffield library for whom no request, however esoteric, was too difficult. A particular thanks to Maggie who typed the manuscript. SUMMARY OF PhD THESIS John Herbert Title: BROADCAST SPEECH AND THE EFFECT OF VOICE QUALITY ON THE USTENER: A STUDY OF THE COMPONENTS WHICH CATEGORISE USTENER PERCEPTION OF VOCAL CHARACTERISTICS Voice quality is crucial to the art of the broadcast speaker. Acceptable voice quality is a necessity for an acceptable microphone voice and essential therefore for employment as a broadcaster. This thesis investigates the characteristics of the voice which provide that acceptability; and categorises the features which lead the listener to make judgements about their vocal likes and dislikes. These subjective judgements are explored by investigating the psychological, medical, and innate features contributing to the vocal perceptions of the listener. Voice quality is related to the efficiency of the larynx and its importance to voice production; and to the various vocal disorders which can affect the broadcaster. It becomes evident throughout the thesis that each listener receives a clear impression of the personality of the speaker through the features present in the voice. Many of these impressions however are based on stereotypes. The thesis relates these stereotypical judgements to accents, investigating their relationship to the 'BBC' voice, the 'World Service' voice, the 'ILR' voice and the 'reporter's voice' . It is shown that the listener's subjective impression of the voice and the broadcaster personality is formed by the presentational and physical aspects of voice quality. Listener perceptions of voice acceptability are tested and discussed. The data is analysed to provide a set of dominant characteristics from which are drawn voice histograms and frequency polygons. The result is a set of preferred voice characteristics which apply specifically to the broadcast speaker and which can be sought during the selection process. 1 CHAPTER ONE VOICE QUALITY AND THE BROADCASTER'S ART Broadcasters are a unique creation of our times - an "essential product of the electronic age" (Hyde 1979 : 5). The problem is that their audience is scattered; but they are related to the preliterate story tellers in that they speak directly to their audiences. This makes VOICE QUALITY an important aspect of performance. It is the broadcaster's voice personality, invisible to the listener, but essential to the communication process. Radio made it possible for one person to be heard at the same time by millions throughout the country. These voices had a great responsibility thrust on them because most of the people who listened assumed they were hearing the authentic sound of perfectly spoken English (Lloyd-James 1928 : 16). As John Reith pointed out a few years after the BBC had begun broadcasting in Britain, "Since the earliest days of broadcasting the BBC has recognised a great responsibility towards the problems of spoken English. These are vexing but intriguing. They might have been evaded, thus leaving both general principles and particular words to chance". (Lloyd-James 1928 : 17). Reith and those early broadcasters had the fundamental insight that the broadcaster was a most influential person. So broadcasters were from the beginning open to 2 criticism from every quarter because they addressed listeners from all parts of the country and walks of life. Reith was conscious - as indeed were linguists like Daniel Jones and Lloyd-James - that this new art form could work very much for either the good or ill of the English language. Reith made it plain that there was no attempt on the part of the BBC managers to establish a uniform spoken language but it seemed desirable to adopt uniformity of principle and uniformity of pronunciation on the part of announcers (Reith 1928 : 12). The difficulty was that they wanted to even out the country's dialects and reform them upon the base of received pronunciation. Reith described it as: "seeking a common denominator of educated speech" (Lloyd-James 1928 : 42). Today, the aim of BBC Local Radio training is very different. It is to make listeners and broadcasters realise how precious accent and dialect is to our spoken heritage. But in those early days Broadcasting helped people rediscover the spoken language; and reminded people that speech, not print, was the basis of language. It is interesting that so much about this time - in the 1920's influential linguists in Britain and elsewhere were developing a new approach to language. It seems significant that this was happening at or around the time that broadcasting was beginning to influence the population. It became clear, by observation if by no other means, as people listened to this new phenomenon in their living rooms, that writing and printing were an incomplete form of our language. They showed words, but not the full range of 3 features of the spoken language - the rhythm, the stress, the accent, the quality of the voice which can do so much to a cold piece of prose, and vice versa. Broadcasting allowed the transmission of many ideas to people who would otherwise never have read them. Broadcasting brought a new consciousness of the primacy of speech. It began to affect pronunciation, intonation, the structure and composition of the language like nothing had for more than 500 years. The broadcast sound became all pervasive in a way even the ancient story tellers had never been; and available to a number of listeners unimaginable to those ancient communicators. In 1932, Hilda Matheson, one of the first BBC broadcasters said: "a generation accustomed to relate much of its thought to spoken English may question whether even our words need remodelling as well as our spelling, if they are to be adequate for new purposes and ideas". (Matheson 1932 : 54). One of the most influential popularisers of this new concept of the language of the broadcaster - and the quality of the sound of the 'proper' broadcaster as decided by those early broadcasters, and which has had so much influence on the sound quality of voices on our radios ever since - was A. Lloyd-James, Professor of Phonetics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; and Honorary Secretary of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. It had a distinguished membership and, according to Briggs (1965 : 467) at least in the early days the BBe profited from the association with it of
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