Richard III’s Voice Recreated with Yorkshire Accent

The voice of King Richard III has been reconstructed using advanced technology, featuring a Yorkshire accent. A digital avatar of the medieval monarch, developed by a team at Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University, was exhibited at York Theatre Royal on Sunday. Richard governed England from 1483 until his death at 32 years old. His remains were found beneath a car park in Leicester in 2012. Vocal coach Yvonne Morley-Chisholm described her work on the project over the past decade as “exciting,” noting her increased understanding of the former king’s likely speech patterns. Ms Morley-Chisholm recounted to the BBC: “In a nutshell, it came about while I was on a weekend away with a bunch of voice teachers like myself, speech therapists, and we were meeting in Leicester and we had to come up with an after-dinner speaker.“I thought, ‘they found someone under a car park didn’t they?’ and then I realised Face Lab had rebuilt Richard’s face and got very excited and thought, ‘we’ve got muscles, so what more can we learn?’“From there, I went into a deep dive of finding evidence of how he would speak through speech and language therapy, dentistry, forensic psychology and archaeology.” She subsequently collaborated with Professor Caroline Wilkinson, a cranio-facial identification expert, and her team at Face Lab, along with Professor David Chrystal, who specializes in pronunciation. Following a 10-year search, actor Thomas Dennis was selected to provide the vocal performance for the avatar. Philippa Langley, credited with discovering Richard III’s remains beneath the car park in 2012, stated that experts deduced his probable speech patterns by examining his “own handwriting, as well as looking at how words were spelt in medieval literature.” She added: “We also looked at the contemporary source material we had about his personality and who he was as a king, along with public and private descriptions of him from diaries and letters.“His character is very clear, he was very able and earnest , he was loyal, brave, devout and just.“That is not to make him a saint, but that is what the evidence provides – people say he was nice.” Richard III met his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. He represented the final monarch of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat at Bosworth contributed to the establishment of the Tudor dynasty and concluded the Wars of the Roses. For highlights from North Yorkshire, listeners can access BBC Sounds, view the latest episode of Look North, or submit story suggestions. This content is copyrighted by BBC 2024, with all rights reserved. The BBC disclaims responsibility for the content of external sites and provides information regarding its approach to external linking.