King Richard III voice re-created using state-of-the-art technology
State-of-the-art technology has helped to create an avatar of the voice and face of Britain's Richard III over 500 years after his death in battle.
LONDON — Britain’s King Richard III was immortalized with the Shakespeare line “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”
Now state-of-the-art technology has revealed what it may have sounded like if he did indeed utter those words just before his death in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth.
Unlike the upper-class tones of his modern successors, the re-created king's voice has a more common and earthy twang as he recites a medieval manuscript in a display that opened Sunday at the Theatre Royal in the U.K’s ancient city of York.
The project, which is 10 years in the making, was the brainchild of British vocal coach Yvonne Morley-Chisholm, who approached a team based at Face Lab at the U.K.'s Liverpool John Moores University and has since enlisted the help of leading specialists across a number of fields to create the avatar.
“That involved dentistry, physiotherapy, the craniofacial reconstruction, the original pronunciation, forensic psychology, all sorts,” she told NBC News in a telephone interview Monday, adding that it took them “10 long years” to put “the pieces together in the puzzle, because we wanted this to be based on evidence.”
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