Vocal Visions

Leigh Wilson Smiley
Leigh Wilson Smiley
Associate ProfessorSchool of Theatre, Dance, and Performance StudiesUniversity of MarylandRead Bio

The Visual Accent Dialect Archive (VADA) was created as a central resource for performers seeking authentic dialects and accents of the English language in which they could see the speakers as well as hear them. The gestural characteristics of the speakers from different regions, while unique to the speaker, are also unique to the culture of the region and help the researcher to acquire the sounds intrinsic to that dialect or accent by the formation of the lips and use of the vocal and articulatory musculature. As a crowd-sourced website, or "wiki", the Visual Accent Dialect Archive has the potential to attract dialect and accent donations from all over the world. Donors may speak a story, or a list of words, or a paragraph. Once the VADA website is populated, researchers can click on a specific region, country, or state and locate the specific dialect or accent. In addition to being a central resource for performers, the website provides excellent cultural information for anthropologists and linguists.

Leigh Wilson Smiley is a professional actor and expert on voice, accents, and dialects. She is the Associate Director of Theatre, and the Head of the MFA in Performance Program in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. With the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Leigh created the first website to focus on both the visual as well as the auditory characteristics of accent and dialect called The Visual Accent & Dialect Archive (acronym VADA). Amongst the companies with whom Leigh consults are: Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts; Ford’s Theatre; Folger Shakespeare Theatre; Signature Theatre; Pig Iron Theatre; Cirque de Soliel; and NBC Washington.

Media

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues page.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions. Viewers can watch the live stream as well.

All talks free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: MITH (mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 301.405.8927).