Technology was used to recreate the voice of the medieval king Richard IIIcomplete with a distinctive Yorkshire accent.
A digital avatar of the monarch went on display at the York Theater Royal on Sunday after experts helped create a replica of his voice.
Richard III was King of England from 1483 until his death in 1485, aged 32. His remains were discovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012 by Philippa Langley through her Search for Richard project.
His skeleton has been identified through a range of scientific disciplines, including DNA analysis, and now experts have succeeded in recreating his voice.
Langley talked about the relaxation Sky News: “We have leading experts in their fields who have been working on this for 10 years and so everything has been carefully researched, carefully proven, so you’re seeing the most accurate portrayal of Richard III.”
Yvonne Morley-Chisholm, a voice teacher and voice coach, became involved in the voice project more than 10 years ago to provide after-dinner entertainment comparing Shakespeare’s Richard III with what is known of the real man.
“It fell to me to provide the entertainment,” Morley-Chisholm said BBC News. “And I thought, well, ‘We’re in Leicester, better do something – haven’t they found that bloke under a car park?’ and it started there.
“I got two actors together that night. I found someone who would give us roaring Shakespearean standard English … and then I thought, ‘I wonder what the real man was like?’
“So I contacted the Richard III Society and they sent Sally Henshaw along [the secretary of the society’s Leicestershire branch] to talk about the real man, but the turning point was when she said they reconstructed his face.”
It quickly developed into a research project with a unique focus – to explore the possibility of recreating a voice for the long-dead king.
A team at Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University created an avatar based on a reconstruction of Richard III’s head, led by craniofacial identification expert Professor Caroline Wilkinson.
Experts from various fields helped put the pieces of the puzzle together, including speech and language therapy, dentistry, forensic psychology and archaeology.
The result of the relaxation is that Richard III’s accent sounds more distinctly Yorkshire than the English spoken by the likes of Ian McKellen and Laurence Olivier when they portray the monarch in the Shakespeare play.
Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat was the penultimate battle in the Wars of the Roses.
