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THE FOUNDATIONS

IN THIS CHAPTER…

You will learn how to lay the Foundations of an accent. Solid foundations hold the whole structure of the accent in place.

When asked what makes one accent different from another, most people will point to differences in tune (what we will call the ‘groove’, page 149), two or three vowels (the ‘shapes’, page 113), and maybe one or two consonants (the ‘bite’, page 55). These are all valid, important observations, but underpinning all of these are the foundations on which the groove, shapes and bite sit.

One day we were sharing our stories of how we each discovered that we had a passion for sounds and accents. When Jan was young, she and her friend Julie Brown used to pretend they were French. This didn’t involve any French language, just gobbledygook using a generally ‘French’ sound. They also pretended to be the ‘Fonz’ doing an American accent, and Liza Goddard in Skippy doing an Australian accent. At the tender age of ten, Jan taught Julie what the difference was between those accents, explaining that:

●	‘American’ was in the back of the mouth.
●	‘French’ needed to have a particular tone to it.
●	‘Australian’ was similar to ‘London’, but you needed to smile and grit your teeth.

Contained within these apparently naïve early descriptions are the first three of the four building blocks that are the foundations of an accent.

To establish solid accent foundations, you will need these three elements to be firmly in place:

●	The Zone – Where the sound is placed.
●	The Tone – The resonant quality of the accent.
●	The Setting – The setting of the muscles of the face and mouth.

With these in place, and because the voice is not a static building, you will need one more element…

●	The Direction – The direction in which the voice is sent.

Without these foundations your accent will be unfocused and difficult to sustain, but with all four elements working together you create the solid foundations on which the rest of the accent is built.

So before we go any further let’s learn how to:

●	Focus the voice in a specific Zone.
●	Hear and create a specific Tone.
●	Feel and sustain a specific Setting.
●	Send the voice in the right Direction.

…and thereby build your Foundations.

THE ZONE

Each accent has a resonant focal point, or ‘placement’, in the mouth that we call a Zone.

Small changes in the shaping of the throat and mouth, tongue and soft palate affect which zone the voice resonates in. These changes are very small, and the muscles do not respond easily to direct instructions. They are programmed as ‘mimicry’ muscles, and from an early age we all use them to learn how to recreate the sounds we hear around us. Be bold: dive into copying the sounds in this section and wake up your basic childhood skills of mimicry. Do this consciously and notice the results you get. This will increase your skill at zoning. Notice how the voice feels in the mouth and where you feel it is focused. In order to focus your voice into the specific zone for your accent, it helps to have a good visual image of the inside of your mouth and to picture the different zones you are aiming for.

As you can see in the illustration below there are seven zones.

These zones are focused on the following areas:

When you focus your voice into each of these zones, the quality of the sound will change.

●	In order to isolate the effect of changing the zone, listen to the voice being focused into each of the seven zones.
●	Then listen to Jan as she tunes in and finds different accents lurking in each zone.

Notice the way we ‘tune in’ to the zone and then keep the voice in that zone, counting on one note. By staying on one note you can hear that it is the resonance that changes from zone to zone, and not the actual pitch of the voice.

Listen to us a few times and then have a go yourself.

Pick a comfortable note of your own to use and stick to it. You can reverse the order if you find it easier. Sometimes the zones at the back of the mouth are easier to feel, as the vibrations are creating stronger sensations.

You may find it hard not to change accent: each zone may bring a different accent to your mouth. That’s the power of zoning!

Visualise the zones inside your mouth as you speak with us. See your voice travelling and hitting a specific target point in each zone. Do this a few times to get a good sense of each zone. Remember you are flexing those mimicry muscles and using your mind’s eye! The more you do it, the better you’ll get.

Feel the vibrations hitting the target points in each zone.

7	Nasal cavity: Aim the voice right down the nose, and only the nose, and feel it vibrating.
6	Naso-pharynx: Aim the voice behind the soft palate, keep those vibrations at the back of the nose, not down it.
5	Pharynx: Aim the voice to the back of the mouth in the space behind the tongue. (You may need to think of a yawn to create more space.)
4	Soft palate and Uvula: Aim the voice onto the soft palate and uvula. Feel this soft tissue vibrating.
3	Hard palate: Aim the voice straight up into the roof of the mouth. Feel the vibrations driving up onto the hard palate and through the bone.
2	Gum-ridge: Aim the voice forward onto the gum-ridge. Feel the full effect of the vibrations in this area. Vibrations also pass through the gum-ridge and upper lip and vibrate in the nostrils.
1	Teeth and lips: Aim the voice onto the teeth and lips and into the open space beyond! This time you may not feel the vibrations very strongly as you are aiming right through and out of the mouth with the voice touching nothing else on the way.

Some of the zones may be easier for you to feel and hear than others. Keep working on seeing, hearing, and feeling them to really develop sensitivity and flexibility.

TOP TIP

As the voice moves in the mouth you may think it sounds higher at the front and lower at the back. Don’t be tempted to change the pitch: let the zone do the work!

THE TONE

The second essential element in building the foundations of an accent is the ability to identify and sustain its specific tone.

Ever stop talking and think you can still hear the sound of your voice? Or maybe someone else stopped talking and you could still hear the sound of their voice? Listen to a person speak for a while, don’t listen to the words, but just listen to the tone of their voice. You can hear a tonal drone that underpins the voice no matter where the music or pitch may travel. Think of the way bagpipes sound, with the constant drone underneath the complex melody: that’s the kind of thing we mean.

Every accent has a tone of its own, and when you listen to all the examples on the downloadable tracks you can hear how different tones can be. Just as with the zone, the tone is created by small changes in the shaping of the throat and mouth, tongue and soft palate. The effect can be to give a sound greater depth or make it more lightweight; it may seem ‘harsher’ or ‘softer’. Think of the twang of Tennessee or the soft airy sound of upper-class Georgia. Think about how the Queen sounds, or David Beckham. We might use words such as ‘thin’ or ‘tight’ to describe the Queen’s sound. We might use words such as ‘light’ and ‘sweet’ to describe David Beckham’s. We use words like this all the time to describe voices: brassy, throaty, nasal, plummy, hoarse, squeaky, boomy, whiney, etc… It is not the pronunciation of words we are describing here, but rather the tone of the voice, the quality of the sound – in fact the balance of the tonal frequencies.

●	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
	Jaw: Mid-open
	Tongue: Rolled forward and gripped
	Soft Palate: Low
●	Cockney
	Cheeks: Held
	Lips: Flat (corners pinched)
	Jaw: Closed
	Soft Palate: Low

So how do you identify what the setting of a particular accent is? Well, it really is a circular process: get the tone and zone and you have the setting; get the setting and you have the tone and zone. If you can see a speaker then you will get some visual clues, and when you listen to a speaker your own muscles may well find the setting for you through a sort of sympathetic response; but if you’re still not sure, the biggest clue is to be found in one of the smallest sounds the speaker makes…

The Hesitation sound

The hesitation sound ‘um’ or ‘uh’, that you hear when speakers are thinking of what to say next, is the sound that is made when the mouth relaxes into its own neutral setting.

By listening for and recreating this sound you can often identify the setting of an accent, especially if it is very different from your own!

Listen to all these hesitation sounds… You can hear how different they can be from one accent to another!

Copy the hesitation sounds and feel the shapes you have to make to get each sound right.

Freeze mid-sound and notice the position your muscles are in. This can give you the neutral setting for that accent.

Do the above exercise, and this time look in the mirror to see how your face changes from one accent to another.

Finding and keeping the setting is crucial. It enables you to sustain your accent and gives it authenticity. What is most significant, and often surprising to realise, is that the settings you have to hold to make these sounds are the relaxed effortless settings of those speakers. When they stop speaking it is those settings that their muscles fall back into.

TOP TIP

Make sure you relax back into the setting of the accent between phrases of speech, and not your own setting. The accent is still there in the setting of your muscles, even when you are not speaking!

THE DIRECTION

One more thing…

…by layering the Zone, Tone and Setting together you have established the essential foundations of an accent, but to make it come alive you need one more thing: a direction in which to send it. Not sure what we mean? When working on any accents think about the way in which the sound seems to travel out of the mouth: it may be quite different from your own accent. When you listen to different accents you can imagine seeing the sound travelling around and out of the mouth in different directions, like arrows. It could be travelling forwards, backwards or even sideways. Listen to these examples to hear what we mean.

●	Cockney: Forward onto hard palate and teeth.

●	Liverpool: Spilling sideways.

●	Manchester: Held at the back, circling.

●	Newcastle: Lurching back and forth.

●	Glasgow: Falling back.

●	NSEA: Forward and out like a wave.

Using the KIT LIST or Set Text (pages 179–180), have a go at any of these accents and send your voice in the described direction and you will notice what an effect it has!

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER