Buoyant Lightness Intonation

Accents & Intonation

One of the big keys for actors learning accents is getting the musicality right. It's often called Intonation, or even Prosody.

Each accent has its own intonation, which is usually a combination of a number of elements: pitch pattern, tempo, phrasing, vocal tone, loudness. That said, accents usually share some of this intonation quality with a number of other accents.

The most important intonation element for you to get for an accent will come from how the speaker treats stressed words or operative words. 

A secondary element typically comes up in how the speaker treats the ends of phrases.

The combination of both of those will likely result in you learning most of what that accent's prosody is.

General American Intonation

There are a few elements that most American accents have, whether they're a more neutral American accent - what I like to call a Generican accent - or a more regional or location specific accent, like a Philly accent.

One of those is what I like to call the American Clunk, where the pitch and volume drop off severely at the end of a phrase. Even though they can have just a little bit of lift to them, usually they kind of have this weight to them. They kind of have a heaviness to them.

So this heaviness is sometimes a challenge when you're looking at an accent that that falls outside of that.

This is why it's all the more imperative for American actors to work a great deal on accents that don't have this kind of heaviness, and why those accents are usually a big challenge.

Buoyant Lightness Intonation

One of the early accents that I think is really useful for American actors to work on is a Standard British accent, also known as classic RP, Standard English, BBC English, or even the Queen's English - or perhaps it's the King's now?

One of the challenges for actors who are American actors trying to learn this is the lightness that's necessary for it.

In this RP sort of accent, one of the one of the things that I oftentimes have people do is do a little bit of sort of like conducting an orchestra - which you can hear and see me demonstrating in the video above.

To bring in the woodwinds, they conductor may use a slight sort of pop in the action of raising the baton - but not too sharp! It has to be a light, swift, buoyant action. There's a very light element in this that is often a challenge for American actors. They tend to get heavy-handed because that's what they're used to from their own accent.

It's not punchy, like a stereotypical sort of New York Brooklyn accent, it's kind of a heavy punching quality.

Physical Actions to Learn Intonations

I always coach actors to do physical gestures to simulate the intonation that we're working on.

This NYC accent might be helped by punching downwards, contributing to a very heavy version of that American Clunk.

For RP, that light, almost balletic gesture of a conductor is often a key for that buoyant intonation.

A French accent will typically have a lift at the end of the phrase, as well as a slight lift for each operative word. It's certainly lighter than that American punch or clunk.

Accents of Spain, like Castilian Spanish, will tend to have this slight plucking quality, which is also that lightness. Plucking or perhaps dabbing, like you're doing a pointillism painting, may be the key to that buoyand lightness there.

You'll also have this intonation element in a Welsh accent, with almost a bouncing quality. The same thing will happen with Scandinavian accents, especially Norwegian.  It's true of Indian, Pakistani, and other South Asian accents - that same kind of bounce. that will happen there. Georgia accents, and other accents in neighboring states, typically have this slight bounce and lift at the end of phrases. 

You can hear and see all of these in action in the video above.

Actors' Toolkit for Learning Accents

All of this is to say that if you learn this intonation element, and learn how to be somewhat flexible with it, you can apply it to a TON of different accents.

I like to think of all of this as tools for you to put into your actors' toolkit, so that you can bring it out as needed, and apply it to whatever accent asks for it.

I find that there are just a few primary intonation elements, and if you learn each of them for one accent, it becomes easier to apply that to the next one.

Yes, you can learn an accent with the Accent Help materials, but you're also learning skills that apply to other accents as you need to learn more throughout your career.