Coming together from various fields – including speech and language therapy, dentistry, forensic psychology and archaeology – the expert team created an avatar of the king and his voice.
The avatar, currently on display at York Theatre Royal, was based on a reconstruction of Richard III’s head. It was created by a team at Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University, led by cranio-facial identification expert Professor Caroline Wilkinson.
The avatar speaks with the pronunciation the king would have used. The voice project was led by vocal coach Yvonne Morley-Chisholm in collaboration with Professor David Crystal OBE, internationally acclaimed linguist and leading specialist in Original Pronunciation. They found that Richard III would have spoken with a Yorkshire accent.
“What started for Yvonne Morley-Chisholm, expert voice teacher and vocal coach, over ten years ago as an after-dinner entertainment to compare Shakespeare’s character with what we know of the real man, developed quickly into a research project with a unique focus: to explore the possibility of creating a literal voice for a long-dead historical figure,” York Theatre Royal said.
Richard III was King of England from 1483 until 1485, when he died at the age of 32 during the Battle of Bosworth. He is considered the prime suspect in the disappearance of his two nephews, Edward V and his brother Richard, the so-called ‘Princes in the Tower’. The young princes were placed in the Tower of London by Richard III and never seen alive again. Richard invalidated his nephews’ claim to the throne and had himself crowned king.
The king’s remains were discovered in 2012 under a car park in Leicester by writer and producer Philippa Langley, who had been searching for the remains as part of her ‘Looking for Richard’ project.
