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| ● | Listen to these speakers. Listen not to what they say, but only to the tone of their voices, the noise their voices make. (You can hear us in the background making this clearer!) |
| Manchester Cockney Standard English | |
| ● | Listen to the way we identify and tune in to the tone of each, and then sustain that tone as we count to ten. |
Now get those mimicry muscles working. Have a go yourself. Match your tone to the tonal quality of the speakers.
Of course, the zone and the tone are intrinsically connected: you can’t get one without the other! Identify which zone you feel the tone vibrating in. Feel the tone resonating in that zone.
Visualise the tone resonating in the specific zone you have identified.
Have a go with our other sample speakers (TRACKS 84-100) in this way in order to really exercise your zoning and toning skills. Don’t try to be subtle. Really try to mimic what you hear. Be playful and have fun.
THE SETTING
By layering the tone and zone together you are creating anchors for the foundations of the accent in your mouth. In order to move through the zones and find new tones, you will have had to change the position or shape of your tongue, mouth, soft palate, lips and/or jaw. You were changing your Setting.
Take a look at the active articulators in ‘Knowing your equipment’ (page 202). They are the cheeks, the lips, the jaw, the tongue and the soft palate. These are the movable parts of your speech system, and all of these are involved in creating a setting. Your own articulators are held in their particular setting for your own accent and in order to do another accent they will have to find a new setting.
We were laughing as we wrote this section, because we remembered a game that we play when we’re on the tube. We watch people in the next carriage and try to guess their accents simply by watching their faces as they speak. Even though we can’t hear them, we are able to see some of the muscular settings of the face and mouth that contribute to the sound. Jan’s mum, who is not famed for her ability to do accents or impressions, gets one bit spot on: when recreating a speaker she will always pull a slightly bizarre face! What she recognises is that the speaker is using a different muscular setting from her own. Fortunately (perhaps) she doesn’t have to walk on stage and recreate an accent, so her work can stop there; but if she did, this would be a very useful starting point.
In each accent the muscles of the face and mouth are shaped and held in a particular position. After all, if your mouth has to make the same set of moves over and over again it is bound to take up a position that makes those moves possible. In Arabic, for example, the root of the tongue is tense, ready to make those guttural sounds; in Indian the tongue tip is curled up and back for the retroflexed consonants; in Canadian the body of the tongue is bunched up, ready for those Rs; and so on…
When we worked with an Australian actress (who did have to walk on stage), she said that in order to get into the English accent she had to relax her cheek muscles, get a ‘scooped-out’ feeling in the cheeks, and make a gap between her top and bottom back teeth. These three small adjustments made a huge difference to her setting, and through this setting she was more able to find and keep the zone and tone.
Feel your muscles being held in different settings from the ones they’re used to while you count to ten, or speak the days of the week. Focus on maintaining the setting, letting that inform the sound. We’ve gone through the articulators one at a time so that you can really focus on the effect changes in each of them can have.
Listen to the way the quality of the sound changes with each setting.
Look at the changes in the mirror.
Cheeks:
| ● | Let the cheeks hang loose. |
| ● | Scoop the cheeks inwards. |
| ● | Widen the cheeks in a half smile. |
Lips:
| ● | Tighten the inner muscle of the lips (‘cat’s bottom’!). |
| ● | Stretch the lips out into a thin, wide line. |
| ● | Pout with fat lips. |
Jaw:
| ● | Clench the teeth. |
| ● | Bounce the jaw open for the vowels. |
| ● | Drop and hold the jaw loosely open. |
Tongue:
| ● | Squeeze the tongue up and forward in a strong ‘EE’ position. |
| ● | Relax the tongue and let it feel fat in the mouth. |
| ● | Hold the back of the tongue high up in the mouth, as if about to do a ‘G’. |
Soft Palate:
| ● | Hold a yawn at the back of your mouth. |
| ● | Let the soft palate become heavy, squashing the space at the back of the mouth, like almost saying ‘NG’. |
Now listen to us as we describe the settings of three accents as we speak in them:
| ● | Yorkshire |
| Cheeks: Loose | |
| Lips: Slack | |
| Jaw: Dropped | |
| Tongue: Heavy and flat | |
| Soft Palate: High | |
| ● | Scottish |
| Cheeks: Soft | |
| Lips: Pouted and held small |
