The first thing David Ley does when he introduces himself is apologize for his voice. "I've been suffering from viral laryngitis this week, so I sound like Barry White," he says, in a deep bass voice that is quite at odds with his wiry figure. "But it's kinda fun; I might keep this one."
Choosing which voice to adopt, whether in life or onstage, is the specialty of this actor, voice coach and professor in the U of A's Department of Drama. For the past 15 years he has been helping actors discover new dialects, whether they are students in the BFA program or professionals on the main stage at Stratford.
His own repertoire of dialects is pretty impressive. In less than a minute he transitions from the rolling lilt of Tennessee hill folk to the languid Southern drawl of an East Texan and back to the rounded vowels for which Canadians are famous. His vocal tour of the British Isles is even more astounding.
In addition to his dialect work, Ley's research focuses on textural analysis: how an actor can interpret the structure of language to best convey a text's meaning, especially Shakespearean texts, which can be hard for modern ears to decipher. One trick he uses for teaching actors how to interpret the Bard is having them read aloud from the works of another poet: Dr. Seuss.
Recently, his research has taken him in a new direction: using external vibration to improve voice quality. It began when he was asked to help a fellow actor who had suffered from her own bout of viral laryngitis, the effects of which were so severe that she couldn't seem to break out of the Barry White bass her voice had maladapted to. So Ley thought to try massaging her larynx, a common practice in speech pathology, but using an innovation of his own: a hand-held vibrator. Yes, that kind of hand-held vibrator.
"It's amazing," he says of the technique he has developed. "It's like instant resonance. When I do my [vocal] vibrator warm-up, I can get in seven or eight minutes what it would take me 30 minutes to do with a regular warm-up." Ley is now busy exploring the implications of his discovery for everything from the natural vocal deterioration that occurs with aging to a therapy for TMJ disorder, painful "popping" in the joints that make up the jaw.
The story of the vibrator that can add colour to your voice as well as your love life went viral online this spring, but the personal media attention is less important to Ley than spreading the word about the restorative powers of such a simple device.
"It's something truly wonderful to help people find their voice," he says. "Whether you're exploring the voice or acting in general, fundamentally what you are studying is human nature, and humans are endlessly fascinating."
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