A digital re-creation of Richard III’s face.
Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University and the Voice for Richard team
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Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University and the Voice for Richard team
Yvonne Morley-Chisholm was on an annual retreat in England in 2014 when she had something of a eureka moment.
“We were meeting in the city of Leicester, and I thought, ‘Leicester, Leicester — oh, didn’t they just find that guy under a car park?’ ” she told NPR.
That guy she’s referencing is Richard III, the English king from the late 15th century who is mostly known these days as one of Shakespeare’s most iconic villains.
His skeleton had been found two years earlier, buried under a parking lot. It was an exciting enough discovery for the general public, but a game-changer for Morley-Chisholm, who’s a voice coach and a vocal profiler.
Because it turns out there is a lot a skeleton can tell us about a human voice.
Assembling the clues like a puzzle
King Richard’s skeleton was already capturing the attention of experts keen to uncover its secrets, starting with a professor who had done a craniofacial reconstruction — meaning his entire face had been digitally mapped. That got Morley-Chisholm’s attention.
“I took one look at that and thought, ‘They know the muscles. Wow. What else could we know?'” she said.
That question became the catalyst for a decade-long project to re-create Richard III’s voice. Morley-Chisholm assembled a team of specialists across every field, from dentists to doctors to surgeons, as…