Voice in the development of characters in an animated feature

• Grant number: 17/10725-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2017
• End date: October 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Applied Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Sandra Madureira
• Grantee: Alice Rodrigues Crochiquia
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

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)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

ALICE CROCHIQUIA; ANDERS ERIKSSON; MARIO A. S. FONTES; SANDRA MADUREIRA. Um estudo fonético das vozes de personagens do filme Zootopia na dublagem em português brasileiro: o papel dos estereótipos. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, v. 36, n. 3, 2020-12-11. (17/10725-3)