Voice in the development of characters in an animated feature

Abstract

This study takes on an approach of experimental investigation on speech, which introduces methodological procedures of phonetic, perceptive and acoustic analysis. We have elected voice quality as the subject of this study, as it is a prosodic element with linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic functions in speech. The aim of this project is to analyse the expressive use of voice quality settings and its role in vocal stereotyping. As our corpus, we have chosen excerpts of speech produced by actors in an animated feature film, in which characters present negative and positive personality traits. The composition of a character's speech is of special interest to the investigation of expressive strategy in oral production, which explores sound symbolism, the direct link between sound and meaning. As animators (Goffman, 1981), actors make use of voice quality settings to compose the positive and negative character traits in the roles they play. Considering the expressive function of voice quality, we aim to answer two questions in this study: what kind of voice quality settings were used by each actor to give shape to their character's personality? What are the acoustic features of those settings? Using multidimensional statistical analysis, we will establish correlations between the results of acoustic analysis, the description of voice quality settings and the perceptive evaluation of meaning effects attributed to the speakers by the listeners. (AU)