Technology has been used to recreate the voice of the medieval king Richard III, complete with a distinctive Yorkshire accent.
A digital avatar of the monarch went on display at York Theatre Royal on Sunday after experts helped to generate a replica of his voice.
Richard III was king of England from 1483 until his death in 1485, at the age of 32. His remains were discovered in 2012 under a car park in Leicester by Philippa Langley through her Looking for Richard project.
His skeleton was identified using a range of scientific disciplines including DNA analysis and now experts have managed to to recreate his voice.
Speaking about the recreation, Langley told Sky News: “We’ve got leading experts in their fields who have been working on this for 10 years and so everything has been meticulously researched, meticulously evidenced, so you are seeing the most accurate portrayal of Richard III.”
Yvonne Morley-Chisholm, a voice teacher and vocal coach, got involved in the voice project more than 10 years ago to provide after-dinner entertainment comparing Shakespeare’s Richard III with what is known of the real man.
“It fell to me to provide the entertainment,” Morley-Chisholm told BBC News. “And I thought, well: ‘We’re in Leicester, better do something – haven’t they found that chap under a car park?’ and it started there.
“I got two actors along that night. I got someone who would give us a rip-roaringly Shakespearean standard English … and then I thought: ‘I wonder what the real man was like?’
“So I contacted the Richard III Society and they sent along Sally Henshaw [the secretary of the society’s Leicestershire branch] to talk about the real man, but the pivotal point was when she said they had reconstructed his face.”
It developed quickly into a research project with a unique focus – to explore the possibility of recreating a voice for the long-dead king.
A team at Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University created an avatar based on a reconstruction of Richard III’s head, led by the craniofacial identification expert professor Caroline Wilkinson.
Experts from various fields helped put the pieces of the puzzle together, including speech and language therapy, dentistry, forensic psychology and archaeology.
The result of the recreation is that Richard III’s accent sounds more distinctly from Yorkshire than the English spoken by the likes of Ian McKellen and Laurence Olivier when portraying the monarch in the Shakespeare play.
Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat was the penultimate battle in the Wars of the Roses.
