VoiceGuy

2007-07-03T16:43:00.000-04:00

VoiceGuy.ca Goes Live

Today marks the first regular posting to the VoiceGuy.ca website. Today's post is the first post in the Basic Warm-up Series, which will lead you through a ten-step warm-up. Though the material is all on the site already, I'll be posting it daily to the front page of voiceguy.ca so you can follow along in your RSS reader. [Don't HAVE an RSS Reader??? Well, try Google Reader out if you don't!]

2007-06-08T10:01:00.000-04:00

End of VoiceGuy on Blogger, the Beginning of VoiceGuy.ca

July 1st, 2007 marks the official release of VoiceGuy.ca, my new website that grew out of the ideas I experimented with here on my Blogger site. Eventually, I will take down this site, but for now, it will sit here and point to VoiceGuy.ca.

VoiceGuy.ca, or "The VoiceGuy" aims to target a specific audience: Professional Actors and Actors-in-Training who are seeking voice work that they can explore on their own, guided by daily blog posts and weekly podcasts.

Thank you to anyone who subscribed to this Blogger site, and I hope that you will subscribe to my new site, whose feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/voiceguydotca

New Speaking-Hearing Exercise

2006-06-13T11:51:00.000-04:00

I continue to develop new exercises for students to practice their IPA skills. This one may be too challenging, I fear! It's a listening exercise. Please try it out. Print out the file at
http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/introducing_the_ipa/speaking-hearing_comp.pdf then listen to the two audio files, and try to put the transcriptions in the right order for what is said. Version two is MUCH more challenging.

The audio for these (which can be done by pairs of students in class, btw) is at:
http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/introducing_the_ipa/audio/speaking-hearing.mp3

and

http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/introducing_the_ipa/audio/speaking-hearing_2.mp3

The second version is much more difficult. I'm fearful that it is just way too challenging... but we'll see what you think. I like to remember that students can listen to these several times to "check their work" which I think makes it more valuable practice.

I'd love your feedback on the exercise!

Eric

Practice Material

2006-05-30T08:51:00.000-04:00

I'm in the process of developing new resources for "Introducing the IPA," my workbook for learning the International Phonetic Alphabet. They will be posted at: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/introducing_the_ipa/. So far there are only two things available, but that number should slowly climb. Special thanks to Mark Ingram, D'Arcy Smith, Brad Gibson, Danielle Wilson & Jeffrey Simlett for their help in editing these worksheets.

Practise, Practise, Practise. But for how long?

2006-04-20T10:36:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I got an email from a student wondering what she should be doing over the summer to maintain the work we'd been doing all year. She needed to know how much work to do so she didn't lose anything.
In my response to her, I said:

"As the body shuts down systems it doesn't use, in order not to regress you must practise at least once every three days, though doing it more often will probably have better results. Then you're likely not to regress but to progress over the summer. Not a bad goal, I'd say...

" Remember that several short practice sessions are better than a marathon session in any given day, though a minimum of 15 minutes is probably required for you to ever hit your stride. More than an hour at a time and fatigue starts to kick in. So make sure you get enough, but not too much..."
That seems like a fairly do-able guideline.

Kinkless GTD

2006-04-14T17:01:00.000-04:00

I've been experimenting with some strategies to stay on top of my to do list, to keep my INBOX empty in my email, and to get more stuff done. I'm using Omni Outliner with something called Kinkless GTD based on the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. Interesting stuff to be sure, and I'm finding I'm actually GETTING THINGS DONE! Wow.

I've also started using something called "quicksilver" for my mac which allows me to jump to just about anything on my computer (files, applications) with just a couple of key strokes. Very interesting. And it's FREE. Gotta love that. I really got hooked on all this stuff thanks to a site called "43 Folders" which focuses on productivity & how to be more effective with your time. Cool stuff.

Back in Business

2006-04-14T16:57:00.000-04:00

Well, we've managed to create a class for 2006-07's Acting Area. After 2 full days of auditions and 1 day of callbacks, we're getting set for next year already. Busy times ahead for all! This really marks the end of the school year for me, so this is quite good news. I'm excited because it means that I can shift gears into prepping for next year and then beginning to check things off in my "to-do" list! Good times ahead. I'm essentially back in business as a coach and as a writer. Yeah.

2006-04-06T09:33:00.000-04:00

End of School Year, Beginning of Spring/Summer Projects

The time for more VoiceGuy posts is upon us and I'll be beginning to write more regular updates on what I'm up to right now in the world of voice, speech, dialects and text. Plans for the summer include work on more materials to support my teaching, more Podcasts, more IMAGINE IPA newsletters, plus coaching on shows and privately. I'll also be teaching beginner voice at Equity Showcase this June and July. So keep you eye on the VoiceGuy.

2006-02-12T14:59:00.000-05:00

Audio from MetroMorning Appearance on CBC Radio One

On February 9th, Andy Barry's interview with me was featured at about 8:15am on CBC Radio One's MetroMorning show in Toronto. It's a bit of a dog and pony show, trying to get as many dialects into the 4 minute spot as possible, but it is coverage...

2005-09-26T13:33:00.000-04:00

Morning Voice Remix by Jenn White
I had the most surprising and funny experience last week when one of my students brought in a remix of my podcast warmup for morning voice. She and her room-mate had taken my podcast and mixed it in such a way that it became a funny dance-mix version! If parody is the strongest form of flattery, a remix has to be a close second.

2005-09-12T14:04:00.000-04:00

Podcast 05 Now Available: Breath Exercise.
The fifth VoiceGuy Podcast is now available. Today's issue (7.5 MB, 8min 10sec) features a basic breath awareness exercise for beginners, encouraging the listener to take some time to notice where breath is in the body. Some time is spent imaging breath three dimentionally.

For those gathering versions of the exercise to gather into a playlist, you'll want to get this version, which lacks the VoiceGuy intro/extro theme music.

2005-09-11T07:57:00.000-04:00

Podcast 04 now available: Centering Exercise
I have finally had a moment to get back to podcasting. This week's podcast (5.1 MB -- 5min 38sec) features an exercise to center yourself: it's a great way to start a standing warm-up. Basically you check in with your alignment and sense your body in space.

For those who are building a playlist of exercises, you might prefer the version without the intro/extro music so your practice isn't interrupted by music at the end of every exercise.

2005-07-13T08:38:00.000-04:00

IPA Letters 10 & 11
I haven't blogged in a while, and have managed to put my Imagine IPA Letters up, this time with a little twist: the letters are puzzles! Number 10 is a Word Search, while number 11 is a Crossword Puzzle. These took a little longer to create, having to come up with words to search for to begin with, and then the layout was more complicated than I "imagined" it would be.

2005-06-27T21:21:00.000-04:00

Today, while waiting for my van at the dealer, I did up this week's Imagine IPA Letter. It's based on a recording of Lorraine Hansberry talking about her play A Raisin in the Sun, which I found at the History Channel's Great Speech Archive. I also chose to include the poem by Langston Hughes that inspired the title for the play, A Dream Deferred. There was a lot of variability in her speech, with some lexical sets taking some r-colouring, and some taking none! And then there was some free variation, too, where she was inconsistent of her usage. The happY "-y endings" set of words were sometimes very open, with the KIT vowel, and sometimes quite tense, with almost a FLEECE quality.

2005-06-20T15:19:00.000-04:00

VoiceGuy Podcast #3 — June 20, 2005 (2:12)
Today's podcast is a brief clip talking about the fact that I managed to record the podcast itself from my iPod. I used the iPod-Linux installer to put Linux on my iPod. The software (free, of course) comes with a recorder that allows you to hook a microphone up to the iPod and record at very high quality. Now it isn't fantastic, I must say. The levels are all a bit weird, but it is working, which is a good thing. I probably would get better results with my MD recorder. The benefit of this thing is that it is very easy to transfer the file to the computer. But since I have to do editing anyway, perhaps the MD machine makes more sense. It sure is nice not having to lug the iPod AND a recorder around though. I'm getting excited about the possibilities for going to Scotland in August!

2005-06-16T12:29:00.000-04:00

VoiceGuy Podcast #2 — June 16, 2005 (16:48)
In this edition of the VoiceGuy Podcast, I take you through a full-body scan. This is a great imaging exercise to help get you present in your body, through visualization, kinesthetic sensing and breath.

2005-06-16T09:42:00.000-04:00

This past Monday I was in Kitchener for the MT Space PerForum on Diversity in the Performing Arts. It was a day long event that took place at Your Kitchener Market. The day started off with a talk by Guillermo Verdecchia, and he was the highlight. He certainly embodies the Canadian experience of diversity and multiculturalism, and passionately pursues these themes in his artistic life as an actor, director and playwright. And wow, he has some great things to say. He highlighted how Canadian Theatre for Adults rarely reflects Canada's multicultural landscape, and that we have had to look to our Theatre for Young Audiences to show us the way. He challenged Canadian theatre to connect with The Others as full-citizens, and not as exotic minorities. He spoke of how he has chosen to "take charge of how I am represented" and that we must "perform and write ourselves into the centre of the drama."

Verdecchia was particularly skilled at quoting from others to support his argument. For example, he quoted Noam Chomsky when he stated that our job as artists is to "tell the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them." "Passion without technique is like a letter without a stamp: it doesn't go anywhere." – Meyerhold.

Of particular interest to me was a story about a children's theatre tour he was involved in where an actor played a Jamaican with a strong accent. When visiting a particular school with a large number of children of Jamaican decent, each time the character walked on stage, the audience went wild. It turns out that, at that school, students were forbidden to speak their native dialect, and so this character/actor was doing something taboo, incendiary, even revolutionary. We are reminded that, when we do not see/hear ourselves reflected in the world around us we are denied our identities.

He stressed that "identity is worked out with others: we shape each other, we invent each other." This is something that we must attempt to bring into the classroom and rehearsal hall every day. I take away from the workshop a desire to increase my knowledge of non-mainstream authors to draw on for texts and examples in the classroom, and a hunger to learn more about traditions of story-telling that go beyond traditional theatre of the Western World.

Forgetting

2005-06-16T09:41:00.000-04:00

Forgetting
Originally uploaded by voice guy.

I've finally finished my article on Memorization and Practice for the VASTA Voice, which should be coming out in a few weeks. You can see the article, such as it is, in a draft of the newsletter.

Now I can finally get on to finishing my course outlines!

My new look

2005-06-16T09:30:00.000-04:00

eric_headshot.JPG
Originally uploaded by voice guy.

Here's my new "headshot" that Amy, my wife, took for me this morning. It's not a studio shot, like my old headshot, but it isn't 9 years old either! A more realistic view of what I look like these days. And you can (barely) make out my new goatee...

2005-06-15T00:18:00.000-04:00

Just posted the most recent Imagine IPA Letter to my site. I really enjoyed this week's text, which comes from the small paper in my wife's home town of Wingham Ontario. Thanks to my wife, Amy, for reading me that brilliant story over the phone when she visited her parents last month. I hope you enjoy it too. And this issue marks the first Letter to feature a quiz, so people can test themselves on their IPA skills, both reading and transcribing.

2005-06-10T08:32:00.000-04:00

VoiceGuy Podcast #1 — June 9, 2005 (11:08).

In this installment: a warmup for MORNING VOICE - 11 minutes of getting out of the basement (or is that bass-ment?), waking up the jaw, and tongue, so you're ready to start a vocal work out. This might serve as a begining to a longer warmup.

2005-06-09T06:49:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I "finished" or approached finishing my article on Memorization for the second year voice class. I'll be turning it into an article for the VASTA Voice (Newsletter) in the next week, but there's a fair bit of editing down, 'cause it's w a a a y too long at present. And it's written for the wrong audience -- students rather than voice trainers. Still, I think it is a good bit, and I feel pretty pleased with how it turned out.

This morning I managed to create my first Podcast! More on that in the next post. Now there should be a way (once I figure this stuff out a bit more) for you to subscribe to my podcast through your RSS newsreader. I'll let you know once I figure it out.

2005-06-01T19:03:00.000-04:00

Today I finished off my rendition of A Modern Major-General for my Imagine IPA series. I did it with Comic Life, which seems to be a bit of a pain to do IPA with, but is fun nonetheless. ( I love that word, "nonetheless," the way you get to tie three words into one – it feels like I'm writing in German or something!)

Still haven't managed to do my podcasting thing yet, but have been thinking about it somewhat. But most of my brain cells seem to be focused on the handout I'm working on on Memorization. I've asked the VASTAVOX to help out, too, and I'm get quite a flurry of responses, which is nice. Seems like many out there in voice trainer land worry about this.

Anyhoo, back to the prep for next year. Plan plan plan plan plan...

2005-05-30T16:11:00.000-04:00

Been a very long time since I posted to VoiceGuy. I am pretty certain that no one ever reads this, but now I've set up a way to feed this through Feedburner, it may be more accessible. I am also planning on starting a podcast, so this should be an interesting and exciting development in VoiceGuy! (To learn more about setting up a podcast, you might enjoy the macworld article that got me started. It might make it USEFUL! So stay tuned. I'll be posting a test file soon, to see whether this podcasting thing can really work or not.

Apart from reading macworld, what am I up to? Well, I'm preparing for the Glasgow VASTA conference in August, and I must say that that preparation is taking a LOT of time. I'm working on a DVD of elements from the personal story sequence at York, for my presentation, and my goodness, video editing is a time consuming prospect! On top of it all, there was a horrendous noise on top of all the video, so making it work was a real challenge. In fact, I am currently sitting right in the Faculty Support Centre waiting for "SOUND SOAP" to finish cleaning the camera noise off the video that I recorded. Note to self: next time, get a camera with a microphone that isn't attached to the camera, so that the sound comes from the actor, and not from the camera itself!

I'm also busy these days photo editing for the Voice and Speech Review, assisting editor Mandy Rees and copy editor Julia Guichard in massaging the various image files into 600 dpi eps or jpg files for inclusion in the VSR. And I also had to redo all the images that I had created for my own article, so I got to learn more about Praat, that remarkable program that makes spectrograms and pitch profiles from your sound recordings. And to make the recordings to use with Praat, I had to get a better microphone and a good mic pre-amp to connect to my computer. So I'm all set to make hot shot recordings. Hence my interest in exploring podcasting.

And what ELSE, pray tell, am I up to? Well I'm working on my series of fun IPA learning tool "Imagine". Each week I write an IPA Learning Letter to help my students practice and retain their IPA skills. This week I am preparing an IPA letter using Comic Life, a great tool for making comics from ordinary photos and images that I download from stock.xchng (free stock photos), or from Google Images. I think that Imagine is fun and helpful, and students have told me so.

I also spent a few hours inputting Learning Objects into MERLOT, which stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. It's a place where people like me, who create online teaching resources, to get those resources Peer Reviewed, and to make them available to a wider audience. For instance, my Journey of the Voice is one such tool, as is my interactive IPA Charts that I made with Paul Meier.

So THAT's what I've been up to...

2004-12-10T09:28:00.000-05:00

Today I am doing prep for a coaching gig that I'm doing for Geva Theatre in Rochester NY. The show is "That was Then," an Ayckbournesque Irish play about two couples who get together for dinner. The twist is that it takes place in the past and in the future, both at the same time. It is a clever play, and it should be a lot of fun for the actors involved. Perfect fare for this type of regional theatre.

My prep is really to figure out how best to outline the sounds of Dublin Irish. I have a number of samples to analyse and I'll need to layout some kind of description of the sound changes that the actors are expected to do, especially the Irish actors. I think that the British (RP/Estuary) speech in the play will be quite easy to coach. That said, I don't know the actors yet, so this will be, as always, a experiment. You do your research, you make a pitch to the actors and the director about how you envision (enhear?) the play, and then you see what's what.

I bet I'll have more to say after I get back.

On another note, this is the end of a long week of conferences with students to discuss this semester's work, to give some guidance for the break, and prepare them in some way for next semester. Our students are a great bunch, but it is difficult to talk about their work in this manner, it always is. It's an emotionally charged setting for them, so it's really important to as clear as possible. Challenging but supportive.

2004-11-30T23:28:00.000-05:00

Just spent the evening reading Progress Reports from my students. I am amazed at the courage acting takes and where we must go to truly find our creative selves. Reading my student's writing on their process has really inspired me to believe in the value of the training of actors and how acting, voice and body work, though separate, can really come together and change people's lives. These students are remarkably different from where they were three months ago.

And Failure is such an important part of the process. It's the kind of struggle that is so important - in learning and discovering how acting works, and doesn't work - and makes all the difference in someone's career as a student, and ultimately, as a working professional. Failure hurts, but it doesn't kill. It changes you, and shows you your fears, and the issues that are holding you back. It's a signpost showing you where you need to go next.

My students are brave people. They inspire me to want to be a better teacher.

Noah, Eric, Benny winter 03

2004-11-30T15:55:00.000-05:00

Noah, Eric, Benny winter 03
Originally uploaded by voice guy.

I'm testing my ability to add photos to my blog, so here's an old picture from about a year and a half ago, when we were still in Forest Park. Noah still doesn't have his baby teeth in this picture! Amazing how much he still looks like this! And Noah is now the age that Benny is in this photo!

2004-11-29T16:47:00.000-05:00

I've been contemplating a podcast concept - doing some kind of regular radio program that I would post to a blog, like this one. It's very odd, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how best to do this. I imagine that I could probably insert links to mp3 files somewhere and then there could be audio associated with my blog. But a true podcast is done using an RSS feed, and I really haven't a clue how to do that.

Life right now is very busy with grading student projects, such as transcriptions and process reports, though today I spent mostly watching the boys and listening to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on audiobook (on my iPod). What with all the jobs that I inherited at the VASTA Board meeting in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago and with the end of term it is a hectic time. Add to that a new dialect coaching gig at Geva Theatre, and it's going to be a challenge to start to do this more than once every 8 months. But I'd like to try to do this more often, to see how it works for me. I imagine it like a professional Artist's Way exploration. Maybe my blog can be my Morning pages.

I always hated Morning Pages, when I tried to do The Artist's Way. They tended to make me very angry. Spent a lot of time being bummed about all the things I wasn't doing, rather than the things I was doing. Maybe there is a way to change that.

Amy just called to remind me that I have to get Benny to swimming in an hour, and I have to make dinner and feed them before we go... So here ends my blog entry for today!

2004-02-10T16:17:00.000-05:00

I've thought about posting a blog on voice and speech for some time, and now I've gone and done it. Probably I don't have enough time to do this, but I'm going to try anyway.

eric