I’m giving a TEDx talk at UCSD tomorrow. The conference theme is “Word Play,” and my talk is called “Vowel Sound Merry-Go-Rounds.” It’s about vowel sounds and all the different ways they morph and change over time, their connection to felt identity, and what the mechanics of language change ultimately reveal about our shared humanity.
City on Fire
The first several episodes of the new AppleTV+ show City on Fire are out, and they are 🔥! I loved working on this show (I coached Brits Jemima Kirke and Max Milner for all eight episodes). Based on Garth Risk Hallberg’s 2015 novel, City on Fire is a sweeping New York City epic, set against the backdrop of the city in the aftermath of September 11th. Reviews have been all over the map, but audiences seem to be loving it (85% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes right now). It’s a big, ambitious show, with sharply drawn characters from all over the social spectrum, great performances, tons of vivid NYC locations, and excellent music, with a murder mystery at its center. It’s a really fun watch!
Ramón Rodriguez as Will Trent
I had the great pleasure of working with Ramón Rodriguez to create the voice of Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Agent Will Trent for the hit new ABC TV show (also available on Hulu). Ramón gave a great interview with the Washington Post about the process of working together to develop Will’s voice and idiolect.
I found this incredible dialect coach. His name is Erik Singer, and he’s just a really brilliant guy and understands several dialects and really is very intellectual about it. He breaks it down in a really interesting way with the history of dialects and where they come from. So when we spoke about this character and where he came from and his childhood and what his surroundings were, we came up with some models and ideas of people that we could use — just as inspiration, not to copy them but, like, are there things and traits that we can take from them that will help ground this dialect and make it very specific?
One of the voices that we really responded to and liked a lot and, again, this isn’t like I’m not trying to mimic this at all, this sound, but it was something that we can kind of look at and reference was André 3000 from Outkast. You know, he’s got such a beautiful voice and how he speaks and his rhythms and intonations. So we looked at that as a model and would sort of reference it and go back to it.
As a Latino actor, how do you feel about playing someone who doesn’t have a specific Latino identity? In your mind when you’re playing him, is there a part of you that thinks Will could have a Latin identity?
In the books, he doesn’t know his identity. He was orphaned as a child. He grew up in the foster-care system in Atlanta. And so there’s a bit of an ambiguity as to where he’s from. So I liked sort of playing into that in a way.
Because he doesn’t know his background, I didn’t want to lean on any sort of Latino flavor for him because if someone grew up in the group home system and didn’t know his parents and didn’t know anything about his background, there’d be a lot of things that — he would just be mostly shaped by his environment. There would be maybe obviously some DNA stuff there, maybe how he looked. But we kind of just played it as, like, this is a character that we don’t know much about. And in the season we wanted to slowly begin to kind of explore, potentially, his identity.
That’s a big piece of his life puzzle that he has no idea about — to not know anything about your family, your roots, where you came from, that could leave someone with a lot of questions. And I think for someone like Will, it’s definitely a big part — he hopes to try to find some of those answers to understand himself better.
Ramón also discussed our accent work with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show:
Will Trent has been renewed for a second season, so there should be lots more of this delightful show and Ramón’s great portrayal.
Elvis
In 2019 and 2020 I worked intensively with Austin Butler on Elvis’ voice and idiolect for about 9 months. Accents are hard, but tackling an utterly iconic voice like Elvis’ multiplies the degree of difficulty by, oh, say, a factor of a hundred.
I’ve spoken often about how important accents are to actors and audiences alike, and how we don’t always get the amount of time and support we need to really nail them. (We = dialect coaches and the actors we’re working with.) Elvis—and Austin’s extraordinary performance—are a testament to what can be accomplished when a gifted and dedicated performer is given the time and support needed to do this work properly. I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out, and with all the recognition Austin has received for his beautiful, compassionate, soul-deep portrayal.
There’s been a bit of “discourse” around Austin’s voice and accent, post-filming, with some corners of the internet alleging that he “can’t shake” the “Elvis voice.” I think this is largely nonsense. I’m generally wary of speaking to the press about specific projects, both because the work a dialect coach does with actors is private—even intimate—and also because it’s often hard to tell if a writer has a particular agenda, and it’s ridiculously easy for the story to get garbled. At the same time, I do really want people to understand this work a little bit better: what goes into it, why it’s hard, why it’s important, how it works, why we still need to do better as an industry in getting actors appropriate time and support for this ultra-challenging but ultra-important task.
Luke Winkie, a writer for Vox, approached me about my work with Austin, and I felt confident he’d tell the story straight. I hate the headline of the piece that resulted, “Why Austin Butler still sounds like Elvis, explained by his own vocal coach.” After all, the main point is that he doesn’t still sound like Elvis. But I doubt Luke is responsible for the headline, and I’m pretty happy with the piece as a whole. If you’re interested in reading more, you can find it here:
https://www.vox.com/culture/23672646/austin-butler-elvis-accent-vocal-coach-erik-singer
Webby Awards! Vote before the end of April 20th!!
The video I did with WIRED last fall, which has now been viewed over 3 million times (!!), is up for a Webby. I'm really kind of amazed by this. As far as I'm aware, it's the first time a dialect coach has been nominated for a Webby, or really anything like it. And what's more, we've been leading the voting since the beginning...until we were passed sometime yesterday or today by Conan O'Brien! I just checked again, though, and it seems like we're in the lead again!
Voting closes tomorrow, so clearly we're neck and neck going down the stretch! If you'd like to vote for us and help make history, you can vote here.
It's true, Conan is tall. But I'm taller. So surely I deserve to win, right? Here are a few other reasons why you should vote for me and WIRED:
Reddit AMA #2
I was asked to do another Reddit AMA on Wednesday, after the new Wired conlang video started going viral. Thanks so much to all who tuned in and asked questions. I really enjoyed it!
The event is over, but you can still read through it here.
Have a look if you're at all curious about the subject, or about accents and dialect coaching generally. There were some really excellent questions.
New Wired video on #conlangs
A new video I made with Wired went live on Tuesday. It was so much fun to research and to shoot, and the extraordinary Joe Sabia at Condé Nast did an unbelievable job editing it. 47 hours after it dropped, it's had 497,500 some views. Thanks to everyone who's watched it!
TEDx—Saving the world with Arash Derambarsh
Arash with food that will not go to waste!
I had the great pleasure of working with the brilliant and inspiring Arash Derambarsh for the first ever TEDx event in LA. Arash single-handedly got the French government to pass a law prohibiting supermarkets from dumping surplus food, with a single stroke saving tons of food yearly and feeding masses of people who don't have enough to eat.
It's estimated that more than 7 million tons of food is thrown away in France each year. The figure worldwide is more than 1 billion tons. Arash is now working to persuade governments all over the world to pass similar laws. The power of this idea is astonishing—it takes nothing more than passing a single law to work a massive change that directly affects the lives of millions of people and the future of the planet.
Arash's TEDx talk was his first ever in English. He worked like a demon to make sure it was intelligible and dynamic, and he hit it out of the park. I'll post video when it becomes available in a month or two.
1.5 million views!
@Wired vid has passed 1.5 million views. Thank you everybody! https://t.co/KyfTlL3Nrr
— Erik Singer (@accentvoiceguy) December 11, 2016
Nerdist's Watch Your Language
Lohan on Turkish TV
I was on Zach Sherwin's Watch Your Language last night to talk about Lindsay Lohan's strange new accent. It was a fun show. You can see it on Alpha now, and I understand it'll be on Youtube before too long. You can hear her sound a little bit Turkish, a little bit...some other stuff in this video.
The quick version of what I said to Zach last night: accent is identity. Identity is a construction of self, even if mostly an unconscious one, and can be quite fluid. However striking Lohan's case is, it's just a pronounced example of something most human beings are doing most of time, even if in a far subtler way.
It was a thrill for me to be on the show with sociolinguist Nicole Holliday. Dialect coaches have a lot to learn from linguistics, and sociolinguistics is particularly applicable to what we do. (I'd also respectfully submit that they have a thing or two they might learn from us!)
1 million views!
The Wired video with me commenting on various accent performances in film and making the case for more prep time for actors has now been viewed nearly 1.2 million times. I'm really floored that it seems to have struck such a chord. But then again, I'm not sure I've ever met a human who wasn't fascinated by languages and accents, so I guess the potential audience for something like this is enormous!
Reddit AMA link
I did a Reddit AMA on Friday 11/18. There were some great questions. You can check it out here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5dnf12/i_am_erik_singer_dialect_coach_and_accent_expert/
Reddit AMA
Wired has invited me to do a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) from their offices tomorrow at noon EST. I'm not really a Reddit user and I've never done one of these before, so be gentle!
Wired invited me to blow up Reddit!
Wired's Joe Sabia invited me to shoot a video commenting on various accent performances in movies (both good and bad). The resulting (sixteen minute long!) video was released yesterday, and it seems to be blowing up both on Reddit (6520 upvotes as of this writing) and on Youtube (over a quarter of a million views and counting).
I think Joe did a great job editing it, and I think it came out really well*. I'm particularly pleased that the video ends up emphasizing that it's not usually the actor's fault when an accent doesn't come together, and that it's nearly always a question of appropriate support and prep time.
(*Two minor issues—a small editing oversight seems to have resulted in them classifying Tom Cruise's target accent in Far and Away as Belfast. It was Southwest Ireland. And I made an error in quickly researching Brad Pitt's accent in Snatch. In spite of the fact that I'd always thought (correctly) that it was a Traveler accent, I read a piece by his dialect coach on the film (Brendan Gunn) that said they'd initially been targeting Belfast. Definitely my bad.)
ARABIC ACCENTS WORKSHOP—RECORDING & MATERIALS AVAILABLE!
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