radio – The Way We Talk

Sarah Sheperd; The Interview

Philippa Louise Waterhouse-Biggins / February 17, 2012February 17, 2012 / Contributors, Interviews

Whilst we were in London, Sarah and I managed to get some ace audio for our documentary!

Unfortunately two of our three interviewees couldn’t attend the original times planned for our interviews whilst we were in the capital, due to unforeseen circumstances. However, these have been rescheduled for next week, and we still had a fantastic interview with Sarah Sheperd, a voice coach based in Covent Garden.

Sarah spoke to us about how her love of talking and doing impressions ended up helping her towards her career, and what her favourite regional British accents were.

As always audio will be uploaded very soon, keep checking the blog to keep posted!

Camden Market

Philippa Louise Waterhouse-Biggins / February 14, 2012 / Contributors, Uncategorized

Today Sarah and I went to Camden Market, one of the most multi cultural places in the UK. There we managed to talk to several passers by about the way they talk, discussing what situations they’ve been in where they’ve had to alter their accent. We also spoke about the connotations people often made about their personalities when hearing them talk, e.g. a young lady told us that coming from Essex often meant people assumed she was stupid. The audio is great, and we will be sharing some of it on the blog very soon.

Recording the Introduction

Philippa Louise Waterhouse-Biggins / February 12, 2012February 12, 2012 / Contributors

On Friday, Sarah and I held a small gathering at my place where we recorded over 20 people reading this paragraph;

The UK is probably the most dialect-obsessed nation in the world. With countless British accents shaped by our history, there are few English-speaking nations with as many varieties of language in such a small space. The way we talk is influenced by many factors; our friends, our family and our jobs. It’s one of the only parts of our identity we can change without spending a penny. It creates our first impression, it can change when we are on the phone, and it makes people say ‘bath’ wrong. Whether you’re from Liverpool, London, Leicester or Bristol, we all have something unique to us, the way we talk.

This is the intro paragraph for the documentary. Our plan is to record as many people from different places around UK reading it aloud. After we have finished collecting all the audio, we are planning to edit everything together, so there are different accents saying different phrases and words. We managed to record people from all over including Plymouth, Norfolk, Leciester, Lancashire and Nottingham.

Sarah and I would love to say a massive thank you to everyone who gave up their Friday afternoon to help with our project.