A digital avatar of the medieval king Richard III was displayed on Sunday at the York Theatre Royal (England) after experts helped generate a replica of his voice. Yes, technology is now capable of recreating the voice of someone who died over 600 years ago. Richard III was king of England from 1483 until his death in 1485, at the age of 32. That is to say, he was king for just two years; life can be cruel like that. And interestingly, his remains were discovered in 2012 under a parking lot in Leicester […]
A digital avatar of the medieval king Richard III was displayed on Sunday at the York Theatre Royal (England) after experts helped generate a replica of his voice. Yes, technology is now capable of recreating the voice of someone who has been dead for more than 600 years.
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Richard III was King of England from 1483 until his death in 1485, at the age of 32. That is to say, he was king for just two years; life can be cruel in such ways. And interestingly, his remains were discovered in 2012 under a parking lot in Leicester by Philippa Langley through her project Looking for Richard.
His skeleton was identified through various scientific disciplines, including DNA analysis, and now experts have managed to recreate his voice.
Regarding the recreation, Langley stated to Sky News: “We have leading experts in their fields who have been working on this for 10 years, so everything has been meticulously researched, meticulously evidenced, so you are seeing the most accurate representation of Richard III.”
This is what King Richard III’s voice sounded like
It quickly became a research project with a unique goal: to explore the possibility of recreating the voice of the long-deceased king.
A team from the Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University created an avatar based on a reconstruction of the head of Richard III, led by Professor Caroline Wilkinson, an expert in craniofacial identification.
Experts from various fields helped to fit the pieces of the puzzle, such as speech therapy, dentistry, forensic psychology, and archaeology.
The result of the recreation, as explained in The Guardian, is that Richard III’s accent sounds more distinctly Yorkshire than the English spoken by characters like Ian McKellen and Laurence Olivier when portraying the monarch in Shakespeare’s play.
For the curious, Richard III died in the Battle of Bosworth on August 22, 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat was the penultimate battle of the Wars of the Roses.
Author: Chema Carvajal Sarabia
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