To Hear the Dead King Speak …

Hearing someone speak who no longer is alive, normally is a hard thing to achieve and necessitates special esoteric and transcendental abilities of a medium.

But with King Richard III, this could be made possible for everyone of us and we won’t even need special abilities to connect with the otherworld. No, nothing like that.

A group of researchers and specialists might make it possible for us to hear an authentic reconstruction of King Richard III’s voice.

The research takes into account what words the dead king used in his writing, but also from the reconstruction of his skeleton and facial reconstruction, how his larynx would have built his sounds and his facial muscles have formed the vowels and consonants. This way, the most likely reconstruction of the king’s voice will be rebuilt and made audible.

The finding of the king’s bones now might help to not only re-create his history, but also be able to give him back his own voice. Something so many think Shakespeare took away from King Richard III by reducing him to an unrecognizable, though most famous villain.

But what abilities are necessary, to reconstrue something that is already gone and thought forever lost?

• The choice of words – Through King Richard III own writing and handwritten comments and annotations in his own library of books

 

• The dialect and historic pronunciation – through linguistic research into the regionalism and change of language usage over time

 

• The articulation – by reconstruing his throat, cheeks, lips and mouth to re-create his linguistic organs. But also his lungs and body size play a role in the acoustics and resonance of a human body.

Kudos to this project. It is an ambitious endeavor, as so many techniques and expertises are necessary, to create already believed lost sound.

Having already been closely following the reconstruction of a dead man’s voice before, I am really looking forward to the execution of this project “A Voice for Richard”.

(I don’t know if many of you remember the earlier endeavor I refer to: The re-creation of the voice of one of the most famous singers in the 18th century, Farinelli, who even in old age, had a significant influence on Mozart and his music. The voice was re-created by overlaying the voices of a tenor/countertenor and an alto-singer, who were modulated in a very specific way to create a singular hearing experience. The results can be heard in the film about this singer “Farinelli” (1994).)

Let King Richard III speak for himself!

To find out more about this project and to potentially support it, here come more details for you:

The “A Voice for Richard” project has a fundraising event coming up in York soon. We will let you know about it in a separate post with more details.