Tuesday, February 28, 12:30-1:45PM
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135
Co-sponsored by the School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
“Vocal Visions” by LEIGH WILSON SMILEY
The Visual Accent Dialect Archive (VADA) was created as a central resource for performers seeking authentic dialects and accents of the English language in which they could see the speakers as well as hear them. The gestural characteristics of the speakers from different regions, while unique to the speaker, are also unique to the culture of the region and help the researcher to acquire the sounds intrinsic to that dialect or accent by the formation of the lips and use of the vocal and articulatory musculature. As a crowd-sourced website, or “wiki”, the Visual Accent Dialect Archive has the potential to attract dialect and accent donations from all over the world. Donors may speak a story, or a list of words, or a paragraph. Once the VADA website is populated, researchers can click on a specific region, country, or state and locate the specific dialect or accent. In addition to being a central resource for performers, the website provides excellent cultural information for anthropologists and linguists.
This talk will be held in the MITH Conference Room, in the basement of McKeldin Library.
Leigh Wilson Smiley is a professional actor and expert on voice, accents, and dialects. She is the Associate Director of Theatre, and the Head of the MFA in Performance Program in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. With the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Leigh created the first website to focus on both the visual as well as the auditory characteristics of accent and dialect called The Visual Accent & Dialect Archive (acronym VADA). Amongst the companies with whom Leigh consults are: Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts; Ford’s Theatre; Folger Shakespeare Theatre; Signature Theatre; Pig Iron Theatre; Cirque de Soliel; and NBC Washington.
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All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.