A Voice for Richard III

Recreating Richard III's Voice: A Journey Through Time Join us as we dive into the fascinating project of reconstructing the voice of King Richard III, last heard in 1485. Music from Epidemic sound and All3 Media. Matt Lewis discovers the interdisciplinary efforts involving AI, history, science and linguistics that have gone into this decade-long endeavour. Featuring in-depth interviews with experts Professor David Crystal, Professor Caroline Wilkinson, Yvonne Morley-Chisholm, and the voice of Richard III - Thomas Dennis, discover how they have brought the 500-year-old voice of Richard III back to life. Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of ad-free podcasts and original TV documentaries including the film following this project step-by-step; A Voice for King Richard III, presented by Matt Lewis. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Guess what I'm talking about in this episode? You'll never get it. I know, it's gonna be a complete mystery. Well, you'll be amazed and shocked to discover that it's Richard III.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, hear me out. I know I talk about him a lot. I've heard all the recommendations for professional help that I might be able to get, but we are where we are.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  And this is a really good reason to talk about Richard III again. Over the last 10 years, a project has been going on that's drawn together history, science, linguistics, archaeology, technology, and manuscripts to see whether it was possible to recreate a voice that hasn't been heard for more than five centuries. The discovery of Richard III remains in 2012. Along with the survival of some key documents, helped make this monarch the ideal candidate to test the concept. On Sunday, the 17th of November 2024, the results of the project's decade of work were revealed at York Theatre Royal.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  History Hit was there, and our senior producer Amberi came along too to grab some exclusive behind-the-scenes chats with key members of the project. We spoke to Professor David Crystal, the linguist behind the pronunciation used. Professor Caroline Wilkinson, who with her colleagues at Facelab have created the digital avatar and animated it. And to Thomas Dennis, the actor whose voice and facial movements sit behind the Richard III you see and hear. First though, I wanted to get a word with the project's lead, whose idea this was 10 years ago. Yvonne Morley-Chisholm is a professional voice coach

• 4:20Speaker 00

  who teaches actors on stage and screen how to use their voice. We sat down backstage at the theatre, and I began by asking Yvonne where the idea for the project came from.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  I was on a weekend away with speech therapists and voice teachers on a study weekend away and we met in Leicester one weekend and they asked could I find the after dinner speaker and something to follow the Saturday night dinner and I thought well we're in Leicester didn't they find that chap under a car park better do something about him and what I did that night was was bring two actors along one of them to give us a rip roaring Shakespearean opening speech but something in me thought I'm not sure a playwright doesn't normally write history I wonder what the real Richard was like and contacted the Richard the Third Society lovely Sally Henshaw came along to talk to us that night and I spoke to her before the event and said tell me a little

• 5:16Speaker 04

  bit about the real Richard and then she showed me the craniofacial reconstruction that Professor Caroline Wilkinson had done and I thought wow look at that jaw look at that face I had just been getting into a methodology to work with actors that I had been training and working with and also on professional production to be able to accurately imitate a voice where we have a recording of the voice using something called vocal profile analysis scheme that was put together by scientists in 1981 Leva et al University College London and I thought wow we don't have a recording of him but we know a bit

• 5:58Speaker 04

  about the muscles and I wonder I just wonder how far we could go and the more I was learning about the real Richard I thought aha yep Shakespeare was writing probably as he was employed to write this might be interesting to see how far we could go and then I discovered Caroline Wilkinson was giving a presentation so I went and watched the presentation and she had Richard's reconstructed facial muscles and then her computer slightly animated it at which point my I nearly fell off my chair I thought right we know some muscular stuff but that was over 10 years ago and I thought back then there's a lot of stuff we don't know am I ever going to find the answers

• 6:41Speaker 00

  There's something about Richard the Third and his story that just grabs hold of people isn't there you know I'm not sure I can relate you know I'm not sure it's ever affected me in that kind of way But it's easy to become more deeply and more deeply interested in Richard III, I think. How did you then work out who else you needed, what other expertise you needed to move the project forward?

• 7:00Speaker 04

  That's a great question. So I started by thinking, you know, where does voice come from? What do we know about voice? We know voice is embodied. So first of all, can I find out more about his physical body? And that led me in all sorts of wonderful directions. Number two, we need to know about his background and the kind of day and the life of. Because depending what job we do, how we live our life, it impacts on our voice. You could have two baby boys, twins at birth separated, and one of them goes off to be a farmer, and one is a dancer, a lead dancer with the World Ballet Company. They're going to walk down the road differently, they're going to breathe differently, and we would expect some influence on how they produce their voice.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Then another piece of the puzzle, how about his actual speech? So that's not his voice now, that's not his basic noise, but it is how he's going to choose to pronounce his words. What about his pronunciation and his accent? And so that was another piece of the puzzle to find. And then what I call the inner voice map, the emotions and thoughts, the personality of the person, because that can drive voice as well. It informs, you know, the energy in our facial muscles and how we breathe, and this impacts on voice as well. I mean, it went on and on and on, and I ended up talking with, over the years, dentists, looking at what the forensic psychologists had done, Dr Tobias Capwell's work on his armour,

• 8:27Speaker 04

  and biographically, you know, amazing historians like you, what you've written. And it just went on and on and on with, you know, finding Professor David Cristel was like a gold moment because he is our leading linguist when it comes to regional pronunciation. And he agreed to work on that for me and then came back and said he could come up with 95% accuracy, which blew me away. And then there's all sorts of other bits, but another key bit, there's a professor who can predict the likely pitch range of. A voice from a skeleton. And I thought, okay, we can do his pitch range, we can do his pronunciation, we can get a sense also of what the day job required of him to be a public speaker.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  So he's not going to be mumbling and be at the back of the crowd, or people would have would have written about that, as people do rather unkindly, they'll level criticism if they've got it, if they can justify it. But the absence of criticism is helpful. You know, he he was able to deliver what he had to across different acoustic environments, different sized crowds in different situations. And I have only found so far, and I will keep looking beyond this project, but only one written reference to him actually speaking. Which is the Croyland Chronicle, where he is accused of murdering his wife and he responds, it says it in Latin in Clara et elevata voce, clear and elevated voice.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  He could be heard at the back and he could be understood. So, yeah, I mean, lots of jigsaw pieces to come together.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible story of of ten years of work and such a an interdisciplinary project. There is so much that's gone into this. You must be incredibly excited to be on the brink of seeing the results of it all.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  I am. I'm incredibly grateful to the key other person in this, which is Professor Caroline Wilkinson and her team at Face Lab. Because there would be no project without Caroline and her team. So they have worked at a forensic level, obviously, to recreate his face. And then they have worked with all this amazing new technology to animate his voice by creating a facial avatar from the actual reconstruction of his face. And it's been painstaking work. And, you know, and her team have been incredible, especially within her team, Dr. Jessica Liu and also Mark Roughly.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  And their wonderful PhD student, Thomas, has just spent forever. I mean, we have sat at that screen with me saying things like, okay, when he makes an S sound, we need the tongue tip to lift up, or we're going to see the teeth come closer together. If he's smiling, you know, when we do an O sound, we need the lips to round. So sometimes the avatar wasn't quite moving. As accurately as it needed to at that minute level. And I mean, it's been a very long time putting it all together.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sitting here and I can't tell you how excited I am. I can't wait to see it. All of the effort that's gone into it and all of that minute detail that you're talking about. I mean, I think this is going to be something incredibly special. How interesting was it for you as well as a professional voice coach to work with Thomas Dennis, the actor who is providing the voice, to train him to recreate a 500 year old voice? That must have been an experience.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Do you know, Matt, I could not have asked any more from Thomas. Listen, I've worked in the theatre film television business for 43 years. It's been a privilege to work with the top theatre companies and amazing actors in all sorts of places. And I knew that it all was about the face. So in terms of casting someone, it was about measurement of the face that would work. And it was Caroline Wilkinson that had to do that sign off. He was shortlisted. I didn't know what his acting would be like, but when he walked into the room and he'd already worked on some of the pronunciation from an early sample, and he was digging right down underneath the words, as we say in the business, to work with his author, in this case, Richard III. I'm used to coaching people in all sorts

• 12:31Speaker 04

  of plays. And we always say, honour the invisible artist in our midst, the writer. Well, Thomas then went on to, beyond what he was contracted for really, just to ask me for every bit of time I could spare, so that he could work in huge detail, but getting underneath these words to sort of really dig down and sense where these words had come from. So, do you know, it was strange because you felt that you were getting to know the writer through the writing, his choice of language, his turn of phrase, his attitude. And Thomas had to carry all of that, as well as deliver it in a medieval pronunciation, not just any medieval

• 13:12Speaker 04

  pronunciation, but specifically for King Richard III, from the evidence that David Crystal found, and deliver it accurately. And when we came to the capture, to recording what he had to do, I mean, I had Professor David Crystal there, our linguist, and I said, please call a stop if any one phoneme is wrong. Professor Caroline Wilkinson, obviously, to call a stop if something was wrong in the the movement and the capture. Our sound recorder, Guy Michaels, if anything was was wrong there, if Thomas wasn't happy. If anybody else wasn't happy, there was it was quite a pressure that he worked under and nobody had ever done this before. So I could not have asked more of Thomas Dennis. He's been the greatest privilege actually to work with him.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  And after ten long years of looking for someone with the right face, this is the year it happened.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  It's incredible sometimes how the stars align, the technology's in the right place, Thomas is available, all of those things. And and in a weird kind of small world way, Thomas Dennis is actually a friend of mine. And I know that he is ridiculously excited to be doing this. And and I can't imagine anybody better to do it either. I think he's going to be incredible. Can you give us a little bit of an idea as well, as a professional voice coach? What goes into creating our voice? So when Richard III would have spoken?

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  What is going on in his body to produce that sound? And how can you, how can you get close to that from sort of skeletal remain?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  When we are voicing, when we're speaking, the air comes up from our lungs, it passes up through the the windpipe or the trachea. And in our throat is a little lump that moves up and down when we swallow. That is our voice box, that is our larynx. Inside that are two sitting horizontally, two little sort of curtains or doors that we call in the as an anatomical level, the vocal folds. The common term for them is vocal cords. And they are moving together super fast to chop up the air, depending what pitch we're in. If I'm very low, they move more slowly. And if I'm terribly high, they go really fast. If if anybody knows what a middle C is, they move together and apart nearly two hundred and sixty two times every second. So they give us our pitch range.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  But then the sound passes up from that little moving lump, as it were, into the hollow spaces, the resonating cavities in our throat, in our mouth, in our Nose and other places too, that begin to give us our unique tonal qualities. And that is still just sound, like any mammal. Every mammal has a larynx, a whale sings, a cow moo's, a dog barks, you know. But to turn it into speech, that is then a part of our brain that is choosing the language and the effect that language is to have. The words then that are spoken are shaped through other bits and pieces. Our lips, our tongues, our soft palate at the back of the roof of our mouth. All sorts of other bits of kit produce and shape the actual pronunciation,

• 16:09Speaker 04

  which can be at that point said or sung. And in terms of the skeleton, one of the things I had hoped they would have found was a little tiny bone called the hyoid bone, which is what the voice box hangs from. And they didn't have it. I look often at pictures of when they first found the skeleton and with it in place, thinking, it's disintegrated, but it's in there somewhere. And maybe in the future, we could have reconnected that. I I'd spoken with archaeologists that had found the mortal remains of other people much older than Richard the Third, where they do have a hyoid bone. We didn't have a hyoid bone, but the professor that can predict the likely pitch range of a voice

• 16:51Speaker 04

  looks at the size of the skeleton, the implication of the muscle mass over that skeleton. So Richard was slender in his legs and his arms is what we know from contemporary accounts. And the skeleton would bear that up because they they thought they found a female skeleton. He's gracile, he's gracile, it's fully male, but he's he's gracile. He's got metrics and measurements. And then he superimposes, as it were, what we call a vocal tract that starts at your lips and it finishes at your larynx. It it winds down through the back of the mouth, down into the throat. So he positions then with a good guess, a vocal tract. But he will have also looked at the muscle mass generally. And he will have also considered the life of that person, their kind of fitness,

• 17:36Speaker 04

  what they had to be able to do. So Richard is riding a horse, he's fully able to wear armour and fight in combat. And then he works out finally the horse. Hormonal influence on the voice. So yeah, it's mad. I never thought we'd get that far, but we have.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. And just to, just to finish off this part of our chat, I wondered whether, were you interested in Richard III before you came to this project? Or was he just something about the discovery of his remains? You saw an opportunity to do this project with him?

• 18:05Speaker 04

  No, actually, I mean, for me, he was just another historical character. I was told all sorts of grim things about him at school that not even Shakespeare writes about, so that's interesting. It was only at that weekend with the Voice Care Network and the lovely lady Roz Cummins that founded it. I'm going to do something on Richard III because we're here, they've found his remains. But at that point, I was no wiser, Matt. It was only after I contacted and had lengthy discussions with Sally Henshaw that I thought, hang on a minute, this is interesting. This is very interesting, but also, look, we've got his face. And that really, really excited me because of the work I was doing in parallel, if you will, to create for actors vocal profiling that started with those scientists.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  But I wanted to make it useful for performers to use when, you know, like when you get a film where somebody's going to reconstruct a meeting of two historical people. And we've got the actors that look like them and, you know, maybe we've got a recording of those people. And I can analyse the recording and then train the actor to sound like that person. So I thought I would love to get involved more with this and just see how far we could go with it. But then over 10 long years, it's just really grown on me. And I know that we have a methodology now where we can create other people where we have their face, Matt.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting to think about where this could go next as well, I guess.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I don't know. I mean, there's the, the faces exist in different laboratories globally where that's been created from a skull or a death mask. So I'd be interested, maybe the listeners would suggest who they'd like or who they'd hope for.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, fascinating. And did you learn anything in the course of this project that surprised you or that's really struck you?

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Well, what struck me in terms of the voice work is just how far we could go. I mean, 10 years ago, we couldn't have got this far. If we'd tried to turn it around within 12 months, we wouldn't have got anything like this. And in fact, Caroline Wilkinson, about six or seven years ago, was saying to me, I wish we could just get on and finish this. And she now says she's really glad we didn't because with the state of the art technology that is driving this now, and what we're learning in the age of AI and metahuman and all of that, we are now very happy with what will be presented. We hope other people are too. We know we're not going to please everybody, but we are delighted with how far we've been able to come. It exceeded our expectations. And then in terms of Richard himself, I've just feel I've learnt a lot more.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  I I've been very keen, Matt, knowing there's a lot of emotion around Richard III. I'm always saying, you know, it's quite extreme polarisation sometimes. People hate him or they love him. And I've tried to walk a path that is based on evidence. What can we actually say? We do have an actual skeleton that was proven to be his with actual DNA and carbon dating and blah blah. We've got this, we've got that. What can we evidence? Can we do this unemotionally and just look? And that's why I say people might not like what he looks like. Or they may have seen the model of the face, but then the avatar will be a different experience, watching that

• 21:12Speaker 04

  avatar move and speak, and how he sounds. It's not an accent that we hear anymore today. So people need to acclimatise to it. But I can't help that. I can't, you know, I have to put my head on the pillow at night and think, I believe I've done everything I know at this point in my life to do. We've worked with great detail and integrity. And again, back to Thomas, our actor, who ended up having to voice Richard's words within how I was instructing him from what we knew of the pitch range, the pronunciation, all of that. And then also his face moving, it has driven the avatar for Richard's face. And again, it was through a rehearsal process in terms of both of us considering quite deeply, what do we know about Richard III,

• 21:54Speaker 04

  the real man, to, as I say, work with integrity and try to do our best.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Professor David Crystal is a leading linguistics expert who's been working with Yvonne to hone the pronunciation of words as they were spoken in the 15th century. It's a complex process, but David knows better than most how to uncover OP. What is OP? Well, that was my first question.

• 22:26Speaker 05

  OP for short, I mean original pronunciation. There's too many syllables in there, so people normally talk just about OP. And it's a movement really now. It started more or less in Victorian times and people became increasingly interested in history generally, but especially earlier times. And not just the usual history archaeology, but the linguistics of it was called philology in those days. And so they wanted to find out how people spoke in the 18th century. Then they went back earlier, 1760, right back to Anglo-Saxon times. So OP is relating to any period at all. There have been studies of how the Anglo-Saxons must have spoken.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  And then into the medieval period, how Chaucer must have spoken. He attracted a lot of interest in the 19th century. And then, of course, the crucial guy of all, Shakespeare. And the OP movement there has been really, really dominant in the last, so 20 or so years. And so the Richard Project fits neatly into all of that. But if you had to say, what's the main thrust of original pronunciation as a movement these days? Has to be Shakespeare really, because of course he's so well-known.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  And how do you find the way that people spoke all of those years ago?

• 23:45Speaker 05

  First of all, you've got a timeframe from the beginning to now. We know how people speak now, so that's clear. And we've got recordings going back the last 100 years or so. So we've got a sense of how language changes over the last 100 years. And of course, everybody knows, if you've listened to earlier programmes on the BBC back in the 1920s and 30s, you hear the differences. So people know that pronunciation changes. So the end point is pretty clear. And then you go back to the very beginning point when the missionaries came over to England and started to write down the sounds of this new language they'd never heard before, using the letters of the Latin alphabet, whose pronunciation is pretty well established.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  And so suddenly you get Old English being written down, very clear, very precise, nice, phonetically really, not like present day spelling, you know, it was pretty clear if there was a sound like ah, it was written down with the letter a. If it sounded like oh, it was written down with the letter oh, and so on.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  That must be really helpful for you, though, that almost standardized spelling must be the bane of the OP movement.

• 24:53Speaker 05

  Well, absolutely. At the beginning, you see, it was very, very clear. And then in the early Middle Ages, along come the French and they mess it up. So the French scribes come in and they don't like what the way Old English was written at all. You know, terrible, terrible. A word like queen, for instance, is written in Old English, four sounds in it, isn't there? Q, W, E, N. Queen. And it was written with four letters in Old English. C, W, E, N. And they, oh, can't have that, you know. And so what do we get today? Q, U, which is a very sort of French kind of spelling, two Es in the middle and

• 25:35Speaker 05

  an N at the end. I mean, at least they kept the N, fair play. So that kind of thing suddenly altered English spelling dramatically. And it became increasingly difficult thereafter to work out just from the spellings what the sounds were. But the good news is that people still did try to write as they spoke. So we get to Chaucer's time now. And in one of his tales, The Reeves' Tale, there's a lovely story about how a couple of students go to a miller who's cheating them of their grain. And Chaucer writes the students and the miller in two different accents. And it's the first time you see this happening in English literature.

• 26:21Speaker 05

  So a word like go, for instance, is spelt G O by the miller who's from the south, and spelt G A from the students who are from the north. You know, so you get go and ga. When, of course, ga you'll hear today in many accents up north. And so you suddenly find that the spelling is an absolutely crucial guide to pronunciation in the Chaucerian period. And that carries on right through until Richard's time. In between, of course, we have Caxton coming in and saying, you know, we have to sort this mess out somehow. I've got to have a system that everybody can understand for spelling for my books.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  And so at that point, spelling now starts to separate from pronunciation. But in Richard's time, it wasn't so bad. By the time we get to Shakespeare, it becomes really quite tricky, but still possible.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Would there have been a difference? So there's regional differences in language that we start picking up from, say, Chaucer's time. Is there a difference in class language? So someone like Richard, who is upper class, would he have spoken differently based on his class or just where he's born and raised?

• 27:31Speaker 05

  Oh, no, born and raised. There may have been, there were certainly differences between the north and the south, like there are today. But there was nothing remotely like the kind of class, class accent that you get from the 18th century onwards, what is today called received pronunciation, received pronunciation, you know, de boe.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  The Queen's English.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  The Queen's English, the BBC English of the early period and so on. This is a very recent accent in the history of English. It develops round about the year 1800 or thereabouts. And it's, it's quite a conscious effort. I mean, the people who started to speak in that way, and we're talking now about the lexicographers who wrote about pronunciation, John Walker, for instance, in 1791 writes the first dictionary of pronunciation in the beginning. He says, I'm going to teach everyone how you should speak and how you should. It's like we speak in London, in the courts and around. And he actually says in the introduction, and we don't want any of this rubbish talk like you get in Ireland and in Scotland and Wales and so on.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  And he's really very rude about it, nor do we want any of the way these horrible Cockneys talk, you see. It's very clear, it's a new movement and some of the sounds that are in this new movement are deliberately different from the way people used to talk previously. I mean, the best example I can think of off the top of my head is the words like hart and car and cart, which in received pronunciation are hart and car and cart. But before that, everybody pronounced the R with hart and car and cart, or sometimes drilled hart and carrent and so on, you know. And why? Well, if all these regional people pronounce the R, we will not.

• 29:18Speaker 05

  And similarly with a sound like H at the beginning, people dropped their Hs all throughout the Middle English period and into Shakespeare's time and beyond. Well, if you know these horrible Cockneys dropped their Hs, we will put them in, you see. And so you get all the features of modern received pronunciation developing at that time and then a class accent very, very definitely. But before that, kings and queens pronounced their Rs just like everybody else did.

• 29:58Speaker 00

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• 33:00Speaker 00

  It's interesting how we're only just getting back to those regional accents becoming much more acceptable on things like TV and everything else again. I feel like we should celebrate that. Someone from Wolverhampton, I'm going to celebrate that.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  Well, absolutely. And you'll hardly ever hear a C pronunciation in the popular shows these days. Right from the very beginning of English, from the very beginning, there were regional accents. You could tell from the spellings of the old English manuscripts that the way that people spoke in one part of the country was different from the way they spoke in another. And in the Middle English period, of course, those accents developed amazingly so that today, as then, there's an accent shift in England every, on average, 25 miles or so.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, fascinating. And I guess then language is constantly evolving, so we might not stand the same in 200 years more.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  Certainly not. Interestingly, which way is it going to go? That's the difficult thing because language change is always a reflection of social change. And so to predict the future of speech is to predict the future of society and international society. Pronunciation continues to change.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  If I was to land in Richard III's England in 1483. Would I understand what people were saying to me? Could I at least get by? Or would it be like a foreign language?

• 34:19Speaker 05

  No, it wouldn't be foreign, not in fourteen eighty-three. In Chaucer's time, that would be a bit tricky.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  Which isn't all that much earlier, really, is it?

• 34:26Speaker 05

  Which isn't, but you know, that fifty years, sixty years or so, um, was critical because of something that happened in the history of English. It's called the Great Vowel Shift. And what it means is that the long vowels in English, and nobody knows quite why, suddenly shifted in a direction which makes Chaucer's English sound very different from the English of fifty or a hundred years later. So when we go back to the beginning of Chaucer, for instance, when that April with his sweet showers. Hwan that April with his shor's sochter, the drocht of March hath perced to the rother, and bathed every vine in switch liquor, of which varcue engendred is the flor.

• 35:11Speaker 05

  Uh, sorry, can you say that again, please? You know, uh, then you do need a bit of commentary, a bit of explanation. But by the time you get to Richard's period, and certainly by the time you get to Shakespeare, you don't need that kind of commentary anymore. Think Shakespeare now for a moment. Uh, two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene. Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene. From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil lands unclean. Well, you know, everybody can understand that. It sounds a bit odd. Um, it has echoes of different modern accents in those words.

• 35:55Speaker 05

  Uh, but you don't need a gloss for it, really. And Richard is right bang in the middle. And so on the whole, as people will hear when they hear Richard speaking in the voice that had been reconstructed for him, they'll understand him for the most part. Occasional words, they'll say, what was that? But just occasionally, and they won't have any real difficulty.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, brilliant. And just as we, we move closer and closer to people hearing this voice, how close do you think you are to what Richard would have sounded like in real life?

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Oh, um, as with all original pronunciation, you get to about ninety percent confidence and that remaining ten percent is.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  Oh, it's a bit of guesswork, really. I mean, nobody will ever know exactly what his voice quality was. And voice quality is such an important thing. We all, we all know that people speak differently. And we recognise people's voices. We know that he speaks, oh, that is, from the voice. We can never reconstruct that. What you reconstruct is the sound system underlying the speech. Now, you and I are speaking today, both in modern English, but your voice is different from mine. Your accent is slightly different from mine. But we're both basically using the same system. We're both speaking modern English. And it was the same then. People spoke in late, middle or early modern English with the same basic system.

• 37:23Speaker 05

  But they would have spoken in slightly different ways, depending upon where they came from and who they bumped into and all that sort of thing. So you reconstruct that basic system. You make sure that Richard has all his Rs pronounced, for instance. Even though at the time, some people might have said the R in a slightly different way from other people and so on. One of the most noticeable features is that the medieval ION endings, as in, you know, conversation and vacation and, and musician and all of those, they were spelt out like in French, you know, conversation in Shakespeare's time, vocacion, musician and passion and all of those. Richard would do that.

• 38:08Speaker 05

  And so you'll notice that diminution you'll hear later on this afternoon, for instance. And there will be certain features like that which jump out at you. But apart from those, the semantical sounds haven't changed at all. The short vowels, for instance, the a, e, i, o, uh, p, p, p, p. You know, they've hardly changed. You'll hear some northern features in there, not rather, but rather. Not sun, but sun. Nice look, northern uh in there, you know, you'll hear that. You'll hear some features of Richard's voice, which are definitely associated with Yorkshire today. So great, not so great, so great.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  Ooh, that's Yorkshire, didn't it? Uh, so people will hear these echoes of modern accents. But one of the things everybody says when they hear OP for the first time is, that reminds me of where I come from. Wherever they come from, you see, because they hear little echoes. People with an R, they'll think Somerset or somewhere like that, not Yorkshire, Somerset. But saw great is Yorkshire, not Somerset. And out for out, well, that's more Scotland than anywhere else, you know. So these little echoes are coming through all the time. But the accent as a whole is unique.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Professor Caroline Wilkinson is an expert in forensic facial reconstruction. She's the go to person if you want a face reconstructed. We had a chat backstage before the reveal and I asked Caroline how it felt to revisit the face of Richard III, because she was also the lead on the project that created the original facial reconstruction at the time his remains were discovered.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  So that was 2012 that the original reconstruction was produced. It's not really revisit because it's been constant since then, the kind of trying to get this off the ground. So it feels like a long time in the making to finally get there.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. And just to give listeners an idea, when you're doing a facial reconstruction, what are you using? So with Richard III, you've got the skull. What measurements, what information do you get and do you need from that to build a face onto that?

• 40:33Speaker 04

  So in this case, I never actually saw the original skull. We did it all from the CT scan, so the computer tomography scan that was taken and photographs. But we've got a computer system that's in 3D. We can take in the CT scans and create a 3D model of his skull. And that's what we worked on. And we use the photographs as reference for detail of skeletal detail where we needed it. And what we do is we use anatomical and metrical standards for predicting his face from the skeletal structure. So we start with the muscles of the face. So we all have more or less the same anatomical structures and the detail of the skull tells you.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Where those muscles have attached because they leave their mark on the bone. So we can build the muscles of the face and that gives the proportions and overall shape. And then we use these standards for looking at specific areas to tell us about facial features. So we look at the nasal aperture and take measurements to tell us about the nose and we look at the teeth to tell us about the lips, et cetera.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Fascinating to think that the muscles of your face leave marks on your bones that you can come along 500 years later and recreate what that face most likely looked like.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it is amazing, actually. It amazes me all the time that what we're able to do. Not all of the muscles attach to bone, many of them in your face don't. But the ones that do are the biggest ones and they're the ones that that give you overall face shape and proportion.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And how has the technology moved on? So since you did that original facial reconstruction, this time you're working with a digital avatar effectively. How has that technology changed what you do?

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Oh massively. So 10, 12 years ago, we were talking about trying to create an animation and then we were looking at really time consuming, highly skilled animation. We're not highly skilled animators. And so, and we didn't want to do it if it was going to look clunky and hit that uncanny valley that often happens with with animation. So we waited until technology caught up with our kind of expectations and that has happened in the last three years. So we use a software called MetaHuman Creator, which means that we can texture things really quickly. And things that used to take months take minutes to do. And we can also do performance transfer from an actor to his avatar.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Must be a bit like a dream come true for you.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  It is, yeah. It is amazing that we can do this and it works really well and really easily and they update it all the time. When we spent, for this, Thomas, who works in FaceLab, spent months of his time just tweaking some of the lip movements so that they matched the sound that was recorded. And then last week, MetaHuman released a new version that did sound to lip movements. So everything moves on really quickly and I'm sure that this digital avatar world will become commonplace for all of us in the. Future.

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• 44:55Speaker 00

  It's incredible to think about. And when we came to film with you at Face Labs, we saw you as well, creating the crown that will sit on Richard's head, using some clothes to give extra movement. How important are all of that in adding to? Because presumably, just a bare face doesn't give you all that much.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  No, and we wanted this to be as authentic as possible, based on all the information that we could get. So we had all the voice information that came from Yvonne's team. We then had these, the clothing that was made that we scanned on Dominic's me, who's the actor who has some scoliosis that matches Richard's. So we could scan him wearing the clothing. And then that could be added to the avatar. So when we scanned the crown, that allowed us to have the 3D shape. But then a lot of additional work happened through the clever people that I work with to make it look like a perfect 3D crown on the avatar.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  I've been trying to think of a way to phrase this question that won't offend you. I was going to ask, how accurate do you think the face that we'll look at is? How close is it to Richard III? And obviously, it's been incredible amount of work and I'm not suggesting you've guessed what he looked like.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  It's the most commonly asked question to us anyway. So we're pretty confident in our ability to predict face shape from skull because we've tested that on living people. And we're able to take your CT data, create a reconstruction and then compare it to your face. So we know that about 70% of the surface of the reconstruction has less than two millimetres of error. We've tested that. So we're pretty confident in shape. And we're also pretty confident in terms of what we call textures. So skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, because we've got the DNA results that came from the University of Leicester. So we know all that detail and we also know how he wore his hair because of the portraits.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  And we also know some details about his clothing and the crown, for example, from historical documentation. And then all the work that's been done on the voice and accent and pronunciation, I think, means that we have created the most authentic 4D portrait of Richard III, based on all the available evidence that we have currently.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's incredible how it brings together all of those different elements. So the the physical remains, but the DNA too, portraiture, clothing, all of that stuff is coming together to to help recreate it. Is there anything that's missing that you wish you had? Or do you feel like you had everything you needed in your toolkit to to produce this?

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I guess the thing that we don't know is idiosyncratic facial expression. So we can see asymmetry in a face because it's inbuilt into the skull and we can see where someone might be slightly wonky. But what we can't see is those individual movements of the face that is down to their personality and character and learned responses. So it might be that he had a really asymmetrical smile when he smiled. And we're not going to know that. And that movement and facial expression is based on the actor that the performance came from. So I guess that's the bit that is a little bit more estimation and less scientific knowledge.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  What would you like to see as the next big step forward? So you're saying, we're saying technology has moved on a lot in the last 10 years or so.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  What would you like to see happen next? What would you like to be able to do?

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I think there's quite a lot of movement now around taking more information from DNA about facial appearance. So there's been big strides in terms of eye colour, skin colour, hair colour, but now they're looking at things like balding patterns and whether someone has freckles and, you know, how likely they are to have.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  So staring at me, a balding and having freckles?

• 48:29Speaker 04

  No, I mean, it's, it's something that, that is in, built into your genes. So if we can, if we can get that information, that will give us more information for any depiction. And it's possible down the line, not yet, but down the line, that the innate face will be an automatic process rather than an interpretation.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Is there a medieval person who you'd really love to do a facial reconstruction of?

• 48:51Speaker 04

  Well, I've always fancied doing reconstructions of the wives of Henry VIII because women are underrepresented in history and we do a lot of men and, and, and some women, but not as many. So as a batch, it would be really good to do all of the wives.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Last up, I grabbed a word with Thomas Dennis, the actor behind the performance. I asked Thomas about his experience being involved in the project. How do you recreate a specific voice from 500 years ago and get all of that tone and accent and the OP? Is that as difficult as it sounds?

• 49:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's definitely a lot of pressure, I think, on it. It's very, very important to me that we do it justice. As actors, you want to give any character you play justice. You want to make sure that their story is told within the set of circumstances of the production or the show, the theme, the style, whatever, but you want to give them the truth. You want them to be real. You want them to, you know, their flaws, their, their pros, their cons. You want them to be real and you want them to be likeable in some ways. And, you know, even, even villains, you know, can be likeable. We can love a villain. So when it comes to a real human being who lived 500 years ago, has had the extent of character defamation really thrown at him. I think what was really important for me

• 50:19Speaker 05

  was trying to find the human voice, um, trying to remove. Any form of bias, try to remove any form of predetermined ideas of what he would sound like or what he would think on something or whatever. And just start with a blank slate, listen to the research, embed it in the research, and just try and bring it to life as truthfully as possible. And it was quite a daunting challenge and it was very much taking baby steps, one step at a time, and building it up, but a very unique and special challenge all the same.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  We're building up to everyone getting a chance to hear your voice of Richard III at the end of this podcast. But I was wondering, what was the hardest bit? What's the hardest thing to learn about the way people spoke 500 years ago?

• 51:03Speaker 05

  I think it's the, it's understanding the difference between original pronunciation and accent. Because original pronunciation does almost in a way sound like an accent, but it's not an accent, it's a way of speaking. So you have to start from the ground and build those foundations strong. And getting that original pronunciation was the first challenge. Once we then learned how to speak in that way, which took many hours of work with the experts, it was then about going, okay, now we're going to throw accent into it as well. And so suddenly you've kind of got, wait, wasn't I doing the accent? No, no, no, no, that's just the way he would have spoken. Now we've got to put in his accent and then on top of that, we're going to put in personality. On top of that, try and understand a piece of writing that is 500 years old

• 51:45Speaker 05

  with all of the words that they would have used and the speech rhythms they might have used, all of that stuff.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  So, so just when you thought you got it, someone said, now the work begins.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And then you spend another chunk of time working on getting that into it. And then it's almost like you put on all these layers and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you realise, okay, now we're almost doing too much. And then you have to, a bit like sculpting a marble sculpture, you have to then start chipping away at it and taking things out. And it's always that moment of magic for actors is once all the work has been done, it's almost about forgetting it and then just speaking it. And I think that was the big leap of faith of going.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Going, trust, all the work is there. Now let's make it human, rather than trying to piece every little piece of the puzzle together and make. We don't want people listening, hearing all of those bits of the puzzle, all of those thoughts, you know, his entire life story. Every part of the country he spent time in, we don't need all of that information. What we need is to hear a voice and we need to hear a human being speaking. And so, once you've built it all up, it's about going, let's just now start taking things away and let it flow, let it be real, let it breathe. Was there a bit of that that you struggled with the most? Is there a word that's the hardest to say in OP?

• 53:04Speaker 00

  Oh, that's tricky. Do you know what it was? Is it wasn't specific words, it was specific sounds that creep up. Where in the OP, words we say today, for example, like if I was to say, it's written the same way, but they sound different. You're going through the piece and you say a word in one way and you're like, okay, I've got that sound. And then two sentences later, that sound sneaks up again, but you haven't necessarily realised it. It's the same sound for them, but it's different sounds in the modern pronunciation. You instinctively go to the sound that makes the word understandable to a modern audience without actually going, hold on a second. It needs to be the same sound that we've used earlier on.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  So words that would normally sound very different to our modern ear, sound very, very similar and almost a little weird for us. It was very, very specific, which is why when people say, oh, can you just give me something of it? Give me a line or two. I tend to be hesitant because I'm like, we spent so long trying to narrow it down and get it as close to him as physically possible. That to just kind of say it off the cuff, having not done it for a few months, it doesn't feel quite right. It doesn't feel like it does it justice. It sounds a bit like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle and then someone comes in and flips it over. And it doesn't go back together again the way it did last time. Yeah. And it's all messed up and you've got to start all over again. Literally, yeah. As an actor, how do you work on or how much do you work on connecting to the

• 54:30Speaker 00

  the words that you're going to say? So these are words that Richard III has written down. He's created this speech. How much do you work on getting kind of inside his mind in the moment when these words are written? I think that's the gift. That's the really unique thing about this particular project for me is we did a lot of work with Yvonne on his personality, but also on things like his face. So the particular texts we looked at and we worked on involve faith a lot. Faith comes up. And it's something that I think in the modern world, we don't attribute quite the depth of understanding and significance of that to these people's lives.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Richard would have been praying very strictly at certain times on a regular basis. He would have had a very personal connection with God. It would have been incredibly intimate. And there we are trying to speak his prayer out loud that he had adjusted for himself. You can't take it more seriously. You have to really think about his relationship with God and his relationship to that faith. And I think delving deep into that, the understanding of the Catholicism of the time, the Bible stories he's drawing reference to, what lessons he might be learning from in those moments. Things we understand from his life, events that he would have had to handle or deal with,

• 55:54Speaker 00

  and how that might connect with those moments. Once we have that understanding of what values are important to him. Once we have an understanding of where we place the moment in which he's saying these words as well. So for example, his prayer, when is he at prayer? When is he saying this? Is he saying this just after his coronation or the morning of his coronation? Or is he saying it the morning of Bosworth? Both of those bring up an incredibly different version of that prayer. And he likely would have said that prayer on both of those occasions and would have been feeling very different on both of those occasions. How are you feeling? Oh, yeah. It's, I think it's slowly sinking in. Obviously, there's been so many movies.

• 56:33Speaker 07

  Moving parts on this project that we've been working quite separate at times and then coming together for brief moments of high intensity and then disappearing off again. Whereas today, we're all here, we're all in the building, it's happening, it's counting down. And I think it's going to be quite an overwhelming experience, actually. And also just from my love of Richard and my interest in him as a historical figure, but also a human being, to just try and separate myself a little bit from it and just watch it and take it in and see that it's, this is, this is him talking, you know. And they did say 95% accuracy. That's quite close, isn't it?

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, incredible. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Tom. I know you're in the play, so give us a quick plug for that.

• 57:16Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. So I'm currently, I've just opened at the New Vic Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent. In the Three Musketeers, their Christmas show, we run through till the 25th of January and I am playing Aramis. So lots of sword fighting, swashbuckling adventure on stage and it's perfect for a family outing.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Do you know what? It's interesting to sit opposite Thomas as he talks and think that he was chosen because of his similarity, at least in terms of his jaw shape and things like that to Richard III. I've actually known Thomas for a good while, so I hope he'll excuse the weird ways I was looking at him. Face Labs, led by Caroline, have done an incredible job in creating this animated, talking avatar. The attention to detail in the clothes, the hair, the subtle movements that make it appear more real are an amazing window into where technology is and where it might be going. I'd like to offer a huge thank you to Caroline, Jessica, Thomas and Mark and all the team at Face Labs.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  David Crystal is a fascinating guy. I feel like we need to get him back on Gone Medieval to talk more about OP and medieval linguistics. He's one of those people I could definitely listen to for hours. I can't go without congratulating Yvonne one more time too. A decade of work has culminated in something as impressive as it is exciting, that opens new doors into heritage interpretation, and gives us a new way to think about an old story. Now, we couldn't give you all of this behind-the-scenes goodness without letting the man himself have a quick word. Here's a snippet of the reconstructed voice of King Richard III.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  I've determined to honour our dearest, firstborn son,

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Edward,

• 59:15Speaker 04

  whose outstanding calities with which he is singularly endowed for his age,

• 59:24Speaker 04

  give great, and be the favour of God undutted up of future uprightness, as prince and heir, with grants, prerogatives and insignia, and we do make and create him prince of Wales and heir of Chester, to have charge of those powers, and to govern them, and defend them.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  And we invest him, as the custom is, by the guarding on of the sword, the hand in over, and setting of the garland on his head, and of the gold ring on his finger, and of the gold staff in his hand, to have and hold to him and his heirs kings of England forever.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Gone Medieval. You'll be unsurprised to hear that I have. And if you'd like to find out more about the project's work and the process of creating the voice and animated avatar of Richard III, then you're in luck. There's a full documentary out now on History Hit for you to watch. If you're a subscriber, you can go and indulge right now. If you're not, explain yourself. Come on, I'm waiting. Then head over to historyhit.com/subscribe and avail yourself of a free trial. Watch this and loads of other great content and then realise that being a History Hit subscriber is the best value gift you can give yourself in history. We've got previous episodes on Richard III.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  There may in fact be a few, a lot, sorry, not sorry. You can catch an episode with Philippa Langley too, on the recently uncovered evidence relating to the fate of the princes in the tower. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've got some Richard III related work to do, as always. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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