A Voice for Richard III
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Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Guess what I'm talking about in this episode? You'll never get it. I know, it's going to be a complete mystery. Well, you'll be amazed and shocked to discover that it's Richard III. Wait, wait, hear me out. I know I talk about him a lot. I've heard all the recommendations for professional help that I might be able to get, but we are where we are.

And this is a really good reason to talk about Richard III again. Over the last 10 years, a project has been going on that's drawn together history, science, linguistics, archaeology, technology and manuscripts to see whether it was possible to recreate a voice that hasn't been heard for more than five centuries.

The discovery of Richard III remains in 2012, along with the survival of some key documents, helped make this monarch the ideal candidate to test the concept. On Sunday 17th November 2024, the results of the project's decade of work were revealed at York Theatre Royal.

History Hit was there and our senior producer Anne-Marie came along too to grab some exclusive behind the scenes chats with key members of the project. We spoke to Professor David Crystal, the linguist behind the pronunciation used

Professor Caroline Wilkinson, who with her colleagues at Facelab have created the digital avatar and animated it. And to Thomas Dennis, the actor whose voice and facial movements sit behind The Rich of the Third You See and Hear. First though, I wanted to get a word with the project's lead, whose idea this was 10 years ago.

Yvonne Morlichism is a professional voice coach who teaches actors on stage and screen how to use their voice. We sat down backstage at the theatre and I began by asking Yvonne where the idea for the project came from.

I was on a weekend away with speech therapists and voice teachers on a study weekend away and we met in Leicester one weekend and they asked could I find the after dinner speaker and something to follow the Saturday night dinner and I thought well we're in Leicester didn't they find that chap under a car park better do something about him and what I did that night was bring two actors along one of

them to give us a rip-roaring Shakespearean opening speech. But something in me thought, I'm not sure. A playwright doesn't normally write history. I wonder what the real Richard was like. And contacted the Richard III Society. Lovely Sally Henshaw came along to talk to us that night. And I spoke to her before the event and said, tell me a little bit about the real Richard. And then she showed me the craniofacial reconstruction that Professor Caroline Wilkinson had done.

And I thought, wow, look at that jaw. Look at that face. I had just been getting into a methodology to work with actors that I had been training and working with and also on professional production to be able to accurately imitate a voice where we have a recording of the voice using something called vocal profile analysis scheme that was put together by

by scientists in 1981, Lever et al., University College London. And I thought, wow, we don't have a recording of him, but we know a bit about the muscles. And I wonder, I just wonder how far we could go. And the more I was learning about the real Richard, I thought, aha, yep, Shakespeare was writing probably as he was employed to write. This might be interesting to see how far we could go. And then I discovered

discovered Caroline Wilkinson was giving a presentation. So I went and watched the presentation and she had Richard's reconstructed facial muscles and then her computer slightly animated it, at which point I nearly fell off my chair. I thought, right, we know some muscular stuff. But that was over 10 years ago and I thought,

Back then, there's a lot of stuff we don't know. Am I ever going to find the answers? There's something about Richard III and his story that just grabs hold of people, isn't there? I'm not sure I can relate. I'm not sure it's ever affected me in that kind of way. But it's easy to become more deeply and more deeply interested in Richard III, I think. How did you then work out who else you needed, what other expertise you needed to move the project forward? Yeah.

That's a great question. So I started by thinking, you know, where does voice come from? What do we know about voice? We know voice is embodied. So first of all, can I find out more about his physical body? And that led me in all sorts of wonderful directions. Number two, we need to know about his background and the kind of day in the life of because voice

Depending what job we do, how we live our life, it impacts on our voice. You could have two baby boys, twins at birth separated, and one of them goes off to be a farmer and one is a dancer, a lead up dancer with the World Ballet Company. They're going to walk down the road differently. They're going to breathe differently. And we would expect some influence on how they produce their voice. Then another piece of the puzzle is

How about his actual speech? So that's not his voice now. That's not his basic noise, but it is how he's going to choose to pronounce his words. What about his pronunciation and his accent? And so that was another piece of the puzzle to find. And then what I call the inner voice, Matt, the emotions and thoughts, the personality of the person, because that can drive voice as well. It informs the energy in our facial muscles and how we breathe, and this impacts everything.

on voice as well. I mean, it went on and on and on. And I ended up talking with over the years dentists, looking at what the forensic psychologists had done, Dr. Tobias Capwell's work on his armor. And biographically, you know, amazing historians like you, what you've written. And it just went on and on and on.

with finding Professor David Crystal was like a gold moment because he is our leading linguist when it comes to original pronunciation. And he agreed to work on that for me and then came back and said he could come up with 95% accuracy, which blew me away. And then

There's all sorts of other bits, but another key bit, there's a professor who can predict the likely pitch range of a voice from a skeleton. And I thought, okay, we can do his pitch range. We can do his pronunciation. We can get a sense also of what the day job required of him to be a public speaker. So he's not going to be mumbling and be at the back of the crowd, or people would have written about that, as people do rather unkindly. They'll

level criticism if they've got it if they can justify it but the absence of criticism is helpful you know he he was able to deliver what he had to across different acoustic environments different size crowds in different situations and I've only found so far and I will keep looking beyond this project but only one written reference to him at

Actually Speaking, which is the Croiland Chronicle, where he is accused of murdering his wife. And he responds, it says it in Latin, in Clara et Elevata Voce, a clear and elevated voice. He could be heard at the back.

and he could be understood. So yeah, I mean, lots of jigsaw pieces to come together. Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible story of 10 years of work and such an interdisciplinary project. There is so much that's gone into this. You must be incredibly excited to be on the brink of seeing the results of it all. I am. I'm incredibly grateful to the key people

other person in this, which is Professor Caroline Wilkinson and her team at Facelab, because there would be no project without Caroline and her team. So they have worked at a forensic level, obviously, to recreate his face. And then they have worked with all this amazing new technology to animate his voice by creating a facial avatar from the actual reconstruction of his face. And it's been

painstaking work. And, you know, and her team have been incredible, especially within her team, Dr. Jessica Liu and also Mark Ruffley and their wonderful PhD student, Thomas, has just spent forever. I mean, we have sat at that screen with me saying things like, okay, when he makes an S sound, we need the tongue tip to lift up or we're going to see the teeth come closer together. If he's smiling, you know, when we do a O sound, we need the lip

around so sometimes the avatar wasn't quite moving

as accurately as it needed to at that minute level. And I mean, it's been a very long time putting it all together. Yeah. I mean, I'm sitting here and I can't tell you how excited I am. I can't wait to see it. All of the effort that's gone into it and all of that minute detail that you're talking about. I mean, I think this is going to be something incredibly special. How interesting was it for you as well as a professional voice coach to work with Thomas Dennis, the actor who is providing the voice? Yeah.

to train him to recreate a 500-year-old voice. That must have been an experience. Do you know, Matt, I could not have asked any more from Thomas. Listen, I've worked in the theatre film television business for 43 years. It's been a privilege to work with the top theatre companies and amazing actors in all sorts of places. And I knew that it all was about the face. So in terms of casting someone, it was about measurements.

of the face that would work. And it was Caroline Wilkinson that had to do that sign off. He was shortlisted. I didn't know what his acting would be like, but when he walked into the room and he'd already worked on some of the pronunciation from an early sample, and he was digging right down underneath the words, as we say in the business, to work with his author, in this case, Richard III.

I'm used to coaching people in all sorts of plays and we always say, honour the invisible artist in our midst, the writer. Well, Thomas then went on to beyond what he was contracted for really, just to ask me forever

for every bit of time I could spare so that he could work in huge detail, but getting underneath these words to sort of really dig down and sense where these words had come from. So, do you know, it was strange because you felt that you were getting to know the writer

through the writing, his choice of language, his turn of phrase, his attitude. And Thomas had to carry all of that as well as deliver it in a medieval pronunciation, not just any medieval pronunciation, but specifically for King Richard III from the evidence that David Crystal found.

and deliver it accurately. And when we came to the capture, to recording what he had to do, I mean, I had Professor David Crystal there, our linguist, and I said, please call a stop if any one phoneme

is wrong. Professor Caroline Wilkinson, obviously, to call a stop if something was wrong in the movement and the capture. Our sound recordist, Guy Michaels, if anything was wrong there. If Thomas wasn't happy, if anybody else wasn't happy, it was quite a pressure that he worked under and nobody had ever done this before. So I could not have asked more of Thomas Dennis. He's been the greatest privilege, actually, to work with him. And after 10 long years of looking for someone with the right face...

This is the year it happened. It's incredible sometimes how the stars align, the technology's in the right place, Thomas is available, all of those things. And in a weird kind of small world way, Thomas Dennis is actually a friend of mine and I know that he is ridiculously excited to be doing this. And I can't imagine anybody better to do it either. I think he's going to be incredible. Yeah.

Can you give us a little bit of an idea as well, as a professional voice coach, what goes into creating our voice? So when Richard III would have spoken, what is going on in his body to produce that sound? And how can you...

How can you get close to that from sort of skeletal remain? When we are voicing, when we're speaking, the air comes up from our lungs. It passes up through the windpipe or the trachea. And in our throat is a little lump that moves up and down when we swallow. That is our voice box. That is our larynx. Inside that are two, sitting horizontally, two little sort of curtains or doors that we call in the, as an anatomical level, the vocal folds.

The common term for them is vocal cords. And they are moving together super fast to chop up the air, depending what pitch we're in. If I'm very low, they move more slowly. And if I'm terribly high, they go really fast. If anybody knows what a middle C is, they move together and apart nearly 262 times every second. So they give us our pitch range.

But then the sound passes up from that little moving lump, as it were, into the hollow spaces, the resonating cavities in our throat, in our mouth, in our nose and other places too, that begin to give us our unique sound.

tonal qualities. And that is still just sound. Like any mammal, every mammal has a larynx, a whale sings, a cow moos, a dog barks, you know, but to turn it into speech, that is then a part of our brain that is choosing the language and the effect that language is to have. The words then that are spoken are shaped through other bits and pieces, our lip,

our tongues, our soft palate at the back of the roof of our mouth, all sorts of other bits of kit produce and shape the actual pronunciation, which can be at that point said or sung. And in terms of the skeleton, one of the things I had hoped they would have found was a little tiny bone called the hyoid bone, which is what the voice box hangs from. And they didn't have it. I look often at pictures of when they first found the skeleton and with it in place thinking,

it's disintegrated but it's in there somewhere and maybe in the future we could have reconnected that. I'd spoken with archaeologists that had found the mortal remains of other people much older than Richard III where they do have a hyoid bone. We didn't have a hyoid bone but the

Professor that can predict the likely pitch range of a voice looks at the size of the skeleton, the implication of the muscle mass over that skeleton. So Richard was slender in his legs and his arms is what we know from contemporary accounts. And the skeleton would bear that up because they thought they found a female skeleton. He's gracile, he's gracile. It's fully male, but he's gracile. He's got metrics and measurements. And then he superimposes, as it were, what we call

a vocal tract that starts at your lips and it finishes at your larynx. It winds down through the back of the mouth, down into the throat. So he positions then with a good guess, a vocal tract, but he will have also looked at the muscle mass generally.

And he will have also considered the life of that person, their kind of fitness, what they had to be able to do. So Richard is riding a horse. He's fully able to wear armour and fight in combat. And then he works out, finally, the hormonal influence on the voice. So, yeah, it's mad. I never thought we'd get that far, but we have. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. And just to finish off this part of our chat, I wondered whether... Were you interested in Richard III before you came to this project? Or was he just...

something about the discovery of his remains you saw an opportunity to do this project with him.

No, actually. I mean, for me, he was just another historical character. I was taught all sorts of grim things about him at school that not even Shakespeare writes about. So that's interesting. It was only at that weekend with the Voice Care Network and the lovely Lady Ros Cummins that founded it. I'm going to do something on Richard III because we're here, they've found his remains. But at that point, I was no wiser, Matt. It was only after I contacted and had lengthy discussions with Sally Henshaw that I

I thought, hang on a minute, this is interesting. This is very interesting. But also, look, we've got his face. And that really, really excited me because of the work I was doing in parallel, if you will, to create for actors, vocal profiling that started with those scientists, but I wanted to make it useful for performers to use when, you know, like when you get a film where somebody's going to reconstruct a meeting of two historical people, and we've got the act

Yeah.

It's interesting to think about where this could go next as well, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the faces exist in different laboratories globally where that's been created from a skull or a death mask. So I'd be interested, maybe the listeners would suggest who they'd like or who they'd hope for. Yeah, fascinating. And did you learn anything in the course of this project specifically?

that surprised you or that's really struck you? Well, what struck me in terms of the voice work is just how far we could go. I mean, 10 years ago, we couldn't have got this far. If we'd tried to turn it around within 12 months, we wouldn't have got anything like this. And in fact, Caroline Wilkinson about six or seven years ago was saying to me, I wish we could just get on and finish this. And she now says she's really glad we didn't because with the state-of-the-art technology that is driving this now,

And what we're learning in the age of AI and metahuman and all of that, we are now very happy with what will be presented. We hope other people are too. We know we're not going to please everybody.

But we are delighted with how far we've been able to come. It's exceeded our expectations. And then in terms of Richard himself, I just feel I've learned a lot more. I've been very keen, Matt, knowing there's a lot of emotion around Richard III. I'm always saying, you know, it's quite extreme polarization sometimes. People hate him or they love him. And I've

tried to walk a path that is based on evidence. What can we actually say? We do have an actual skeleton that was proven to be his with actual DNA and carbon dating and blah, blah. We've got this, we've got that. What can we evidence? Can we do this unemotionally and just look and

And that's why I say people might not like what he looks like, or they may have seen the model of the face, but then the avatar will be a different experience watching that avatar move and speak. And how he sounds, it's not an accent that we hear anymore today. So people need to acclimatize to it. But I can't help that. I can't, you know, I have to put my head on the pillow at night and think, I believe I've done everything I know at this point in my life to do. We've worked with great detail and integrity.

And again, back to Thomas, our actor, who ended up having to voice Richard's words within how I was instructing him from what we knew of the pitch range, the pronunciation, all of that. And then also his face moving. It has driven the avatar for Richard's face. And again, it was through a rehearsal process in terms of both of us considering quite deeply what do we know about Richard III, the real man, to, as I say, work with integrity and try to do our best. ♪

Professor David Crystal is a leading linguistics expert who's been working with Yvonne to hone the pronunciation of words as they were spoken in the 15th century. It's a complex process, but David knows better than most how to uncover OP. What is OP? Well, that was my first question.

Ha! OP for short, I mean Original Pronunciation. There's too many syllables in there. So people normally talk just about O-P.

And it's a movement really now. It started more or less in Victorian times when people became increasingly interested in history generally, but especially earlier times. And not just the usual history, archaeology and so on, but the linguistics of it was called philology in those days. And so they wanted to find out how people spoke in the 18th century. Then they went back earlier, 1760, right back to Anglo-Saxon times.

So, OP is relating to any period at all. There have been studies of how the Anglo-Saxons must have spoken, and then into the medieval period, how Chaucer must have spoken. He attracted a lot of interest in the 19th century. And then, of course, the crucial guy of all, Shakespeare, and the OP movement there has been really, really dominant in the last 20 or so years.

And so the Richard Project fits neatly into all of that. But if you had to say what's the main thrust of original pronunciation as a movement these days, it has to be Shakespeare, really, because, of course, he's so well-known. And how do you find the way that people spoke all of those years ago? First of all, you've got a time frame from the beginning to now. We know how people speak now, so that's clear.

And we've got recordings going back the last hundred years or so. So we've got a sense of how language changes over the last hundred years. And of course, everybody knows if you've listened to earlier programs on the BBC back in the 1920s and 30s, you hear the differences. So people know that pronunciation changes. So the end point is pretty clear.

And then you go back to the very beginning point when the missionaries came over to England and started to write down the sounds of this new language they'd never heard before using the letters of the Latin alphabet, whose pronunciation is pretty well established.

And so suddenly you get Old English being written down very clear, very precise, nice phonetically, really, not like present day spelling. You know, it was pretty clear if there was a sound like A, it was written down with the letter A. If there was a sound like O, it was written down with the letter O and so on. That must be really helpful for you, though. Almost standardized spelling must be the backbone.

bane of the OP movement? Well, absolutely. At the beginning, you see, it was very, very clear. And then in the early Middle Ages, along come the French and they mess it up. So the French scribes come in and they don't like the way Old English was written at all. You know, terrible, terrible stuff. I mean, a word like queen, for instance, is written in Old English

Four sounds in it, isn't there? Q-W-E-N, queen. And it was written with four letters in Old English, C-W-E-N. And they, oh, can't have that, you know? And so what do we get today? Q-U, which is a very sort of French kind of spelling, two E's in the middle, and an N at the end. I mean, at least they kept the N, fair play. So that kind of thing suddenly altered Englishness.

English spelling dramatically. And it became increasingly difficult thereafter to work out just from the spellings what the sounds were. But the good news is that people still did try to write as they spoke. So we get to Chaucer's time now. And in one of his tales, The Reeves Tale, is a lovely story about how a couple of students go to a miller who's cheating them of their grain and

And Chaucer writes the students and the miller in two different accents. And it's the first time we see this happening in English literature. So a word like go, for instance, is spelt G-O by the miller who's from the south and spelt G-A from the students who are from the north. So you get go and ga.

Well, of course, "gah" you'll hear today in many accents up north. And so you suddenly find that the spelling is an absolutely crucial guide to pronunciation in the Chaucerian period. And that carries on right through until Richard's time.

In between, of course, we have Caxton coming in and saying, you know, we have to sort this mess out somehow. I've got to have a system that everybody can understand the spelling for my books. And so at that point, spelling now starts to separate from pronunciation. But in Richard's time, it wasn't so bad. By the time we get to Shakespeare, it becomes really quite tricky, but still possible.

Would there have been a difference? So there's regional differences in language that we start picking up from, say, Chaucer's time. Is there a difference in class language? So someone like Richard, who is upper class, would he have spoken differently based on his class or just where he's born and raised? Oh, no, born and raised. There may have been. There were certainly differences between the North and the South like there are today, but there was nothing remotely like the kind of class plight

class accent that you get from the 18th century onwards, what is today called received pronunciation. Received pronunciation, you know, dear boy.

The Queen's English. The Queen's English, the BBC English of the early period and so on. This is a very recent accent in the history of English. It develops around about the year 1800 or thereabouts. And it's quite a conscious effort. I mean, the people who started to speak in that way, and we're talking now about the lexicographers who wrote about pronunciation, John Walker, for instance, in

1791 writes the first dictionary of pronunciation. In the beginning, he says, I'm going to teach everyone how you should speak. And how you should speak is like we speak in London, in the court and around. And he actually says in the introduction, and we don't want any of this rubbish talk like you get in Ireland and in Scotland and Wales and so on. And he's really very rude about it. Nor do we want any of the way these horrible Cockneys talk, you see. It's very clear. It's a new movement.

And some of the sounds that are in this new movement are deliberately different from the way people used to talk previously. I mean, the best example I can think of off the top of my head is the words like heart and car and cart, which in received pronunciation are heart and car and cart. But before that, everybody pronounced the R with heart and car and cart, or sometimes trilled heart and car and cart.

and so on, you know? And why? Well, if all these regional people pronounce the R, we will not.

And similarly with a sound like H at the beginning. People drop their H's all throughout the Middle English period and into Shakespeare's time and beyond. Well, if you know these horrible cockneys drop their H's, we will put them in, you see. And so you get all the features of modern received pronunciation developing at that time. And then a class accent very, very definitely. But before that, kings and queens pronounce their R's just like everybody else did. ♪

I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast, where every week we'll be delving into the real life history that inspires the locations, characters and storylines of the legendary Assassin's Creed franchise.

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Monday.com. For whatever you run, go to monday.com to learn more. It's interesting how we're only just getting back to those regional accents becoming much more acceptable

on things like TV and everything else again. I feel like we should celebrate that. Someone from Wolverhampton, I'm going to celebrate that. Well, absolutely. And you'll hardly ever hear a C pronunciation in the popular shows these days. Right from the very beginning of English, from the very beginning, there were regional accents. You could tell from the spellings of the old English manuscripts that the way that people spoke in one part of the country was different from the way they spoke in another. And in the Middle English period, of course, those accents developed

amazingly so that today as then there's an accent shift in England every on average 25 miles or so. Yeah, fascinating.

And I guess then language is constantly evolving, so we might not sound the same in 200 years more. Certainly not. Interestingly, which way is it going to go? That's the difficult thing, because language change is always a reflection of social change. And so to predict the future of speech is to predict the future of society and international society. Pronunciation continues to change. If I was to land in Richard III's England in 1483...

Would I understand what people were saying to me? Could I at least get by or would it be like a foreign language? No, it wouldn't be foreign, not in 1483. In Chaucer's time, that would be a bit tricky. Which isn't all that much earlier really, is it? Which isn't, but you know that 50 years, 60 years or so, was critical because of something that happened in the history of English. It's called the Great Vowel Shift.

And what it means is that the long vowels in English, and nobody knows quite why, suddenly shifted in a direction which makes Chaucer's English sound very different from the English of 50 or 100 years later. So when we go back to the beginning of Chaucer, for instance, when that April with his sweet showers happened,

When that April with his shore assoch'd, the dracht of March hath perc'd to the rota, and bath'd every vine in switch-liquor, of which varque engender'd is the floor. Sorry, can you say that again, please? Then you do need a bit of commentary, a bit of explanation, but by the time you get to Richard's period, and certainly by the time you get to Shakespeare, you don't need that kind of commentary anymore. Think Shakespeare now for a moment.

Two households both alike in dignity and fair Verona where we lay our sin. Two households both alike in dignity and fair Verona where we lay our sin. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Well, you know, everybody can understand that. It sounds a bit odd. It has echoes of different modern accents in those words, but you don't need a gloss for it really. And Richard is right bang in the middle. And so on the whole, as people will hear when they hear Richard speaking in the voice that had been reconstructed for him, they'll understand him for the most part. Occasional words, they'll say, what was that?

but just occasionally, and they won't have any real difficulty. Yeah, brilliant. And just as we move closer and closer to people hearing this voice, how close do you think you are to what Richard would have sounded like in real life? Oh, as with all original pronunciation, you get to about 90% confidence, and that remaining 10% is...

Oh, it's a bit of guesswork, really. I mean, nobody will ever know exactly what his voice quality was. And voice quality is such an important thing. We all know that people speak differently. We recognize people's voices. We know that he speaks, I know who that is from the voice. We can never reconstruct that. What you reconstruct is the sound system underlying the speech.

Now, you and I are speaking today both in modern English, but your voice is different from mine. Your accent is slightly different from mine, but we're both basically using the same system. We're both speaking modern English. And it was the same then. People spoke in late middle or early modern English with the same basic system, but they would have spoken in slightly different ways depending on where they came from and who they bumped into and all that sort of thing.

So you reconstruct that basic system. You make sure that Richard has all his R's pronounced, for instance, even though at the time some people might have said the R in a slightly different way from other people and so on. One of the most noticeable features is that the medieval I-O-N endings, as in, you know, conversation and vacation and musician and all of those, they were

They were spelt out like in French, you know, conversation in Shakespeare's time, vocation, musician, passion and all of those. Richard would do that. And so you'll notice that diminution you'll hear later on this afternoon, for instance. And there will be certain features like that which jump out at you.

But apart from those, some of the sounds haven't changed at all. The short vowels, for instance, the a, e, i, o, e, pa, pe, pi, po, pu, you know, they've hardly changed. You'll hear some northern features in there, not rather, but rather.

Not sun, but sun. Nice little northern uh in there. You know, you'll hear that. You'll hear some features of Richard's voice which are definitely associated with Yorkshire today. So great. Not so great. So great. Ooh, that's Yorkshire, isn't it?

So people will hear these echoes of modern accents. But one of the things everybody says when they hear O.P. for the first time is, that reminds me of where I come from, wherever they come from. Because they hear little echoes. People with an R, they'll think Somerset or somewhere like that. Not Yorkshire, Somerset.

But so great is Yorkshire, not Somerset. And oot for out. Well, that's more Scotland than anywhere else, you know. So these little echoes are coming through all the time. But the accent as a whole is unique. Professor Caroline Wilkinson is an expert in forensic facial reconstruction. She's the go-to person if you want a face reconstructed.

We had a chat backstage before the reveal and I asked Caroline how it felt to revisit the face of Richard III because she was also the lead on the project that created the original facial reconstruction at the time his remains were discovered.

So that was 2012 that the original reconstruction was produced. It's not really a revisit because it's been constant since then, the kind of trying to get this off the ground. So it feels like a long time in the making to finally get there. Yeah. And just to give listeners an idea, when you're doing a facial reconstruction, what are you using? So with Rita the Third, you've got the skull. What measurements, what information do you get and do you need from that to build a face onto that? Yeah.

So in this case, I never actually saw the original skull. We did it all from the CT scan, so the computer tomography scan that was taken and photographs. But we've got a computer system that's in 3D. We can take in the CT scan.

scans and create a 3D model of his skull. And that's what we worked on. And we use the photographs as reference for detail of skeletal detail where we needed it. And what we do is we use anatomical and metrical standards for predicting his face from the skeletal structure. So we start with the muscles of the face. So we all have more or less the same anatomical structures.

And the detail of the skull tells you where those muscles have attached because they leave their mark on the bone. So we can build the muscles of the face and that gives the proportions and overall shape.

And then we use these standards for looking at specific areas to tell us about facial features. So we look at the nasal aperture and take measurements to tell us about the nose and we look at the teeth to tell us about the lips, etc. Fascinating to think that the muscles of your face leave marks on your bones that you can come along 500 years later and recreate what that face most likely looked like. Yeah, no, it is amazing, actually. It amazes me all the time that what we're able to do, not all of the muscles attach to bone, many of them in your face don't.

But the ones that do are the biggest ones and they're the ones that give you overall face shape and proportion. Yeah. And how has the technology moved on? So since you did that original facial reconstruction, this time you're working with a digital avatar effectively. How has that technology changed what you do? Massively. So 10, 12 years ago, we were talking about trying to create an animation and then we were looking at really large,

time-consuming, highly skilled animation. We're not highly skilled animators. And we didn't want to do it if it was going to look clunky and hit that uncanny valley that often happens with animation. So we waited until technology caught up with our kind of expectations and that has happened.

and in the last three years. So we use a software called MetaHuman Creator, which means that we can texture things really quickly and things that used to take months take minutes to do. And we can also do performance transfer from an actor to his avatar. It must be a bit like a dream come true for you. It is, yeah. It's amazing that we can do this and it works perfectly.

really well and really easily and they update it all the time. When we spent, for this, Thomas, who works in Facelab, spent months of his time just tweaking some of the lip movements so that they match the sound that was recorded. And then last week, MetaHuman released a new version that did sound to lip movements. So everything moves on really quickly and I'm sure that this digital avatar world will become commonplace for all of us in the future. ♪

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It's incredible to think about. And when we came to film with you at FaceLabs, we saw you as well creating the crown that will sit on Richard's head, using some clothes to give extra movement. How important are all of that in adding to, because presumably just a bare face doesn't give you all that much. No, and we wanted this to be as authentic as possible based on all the information that we could get. So we had all the voice information that came from Yvonne's team. We then had these

the clothing that was made that we scanned on Dominic Smee, who's the actor who has some scoliosis that matches Richard's. So we could scan him wearing the clothing and then that could be added to the avatar. So when we scanned the crown, that allowed us to have the 3D shape, but then a lot of additional work happened to the clever people that I work with to make it look like a perfect 3D crown on the avatar. I've been trying to think of a way to phrase this question that won't offend you. Oh.

I was going to ask, how accurate do you think the face that we'll look at is? How close is it to Richard III? And obviously, you've done an incredible amount of work and I'm not suggesting that you just guessed what he looked like. It's the most commonly asked question to us anyway. So we're pretty confident in our ability to predict face shape from skull because we've tested them.

that on living people. And we're able to take your CT data, create a reconstruction, and then compare it to your face. So we know that about 70% of the surface of the reconstruction has less than two millimeters of error. We've tested that. So we're pretty confident in shape.

We're also pretty confident in terms of what we call texture, so skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, because we've got the DNA results that came from the University of Leicester. So we know all that detail and we also know how he wore his hair because of the portraits. And we also know some details about his clothing and the crown, for example, from historical documentation.

And then all the work that's been done on the voice and accent and pronunciation, I think means that we have created the most authentic 4D portrait of Richard III based on all the available evidence that we have currently. Yeah, it's incredible how it brings together all of those different elements. So the physical remains, but the DNA too, portraiture, clothing, all of that stuff is coming together to help recreate it. Is there anything that's missing that you wish you had?

Or do you feel like you had everything you needed in your toolkit to produce this? Well, I guess the thing that we don't know is...

idiosyncratic facial expression. So we can see asymmetry in a face because it's inbuilt into the skull and we can see where someone might be slightly wonky. But what we can't see is those individual movements of the face that is down to their personality and character and learned responses. So it might be that he had a really asymmetrical smile when he smiled. And when

We're not going to know that. And that movement and facial expression is based on the actor that the performance came from. So I guess that's the bit that is a little bit more estimation and less scientific knowledge. What would you like to see as the next big step forward? So you're saying technology has moved on a lot in the last 10 years or so. What would you like to see happen next? What would you like to be able to do?

Well, I think there's quite a lot of movement now around taking more information from DNA about facial appearance. So there's been big strides in terms of eye color, skin color, hair color, but now they're looking at things like balding patterns and whether someone has freckles and how likely they are to have-

No, I mean, it's something that is built into your genes. So if we can get that information, that will give us more information for any depiction. And it's possible down the line, not yet, but down the line that DNA to face will be an automatic process rather than an interpretation. Is there a medieval person who you really love to do a facial reconstruction of?

Well, I've always fancied doing reconstructions of the wives of Henry VIII because women are underrepresented in history and we do a lot of men and some women, but not as many. So as a batch, it would be really good to do all of the wives.

Last up, I grabbed a word with Thomas Dennis, the actor behind the performance. I asked Thomas about his experience being involved in the project. How do you recreate a specific voice from 500 years ago and get all of that tone and accent and the OP? Is that as difficult as it sounds?

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of pressure, I think, on it. It's very, very important to me that we do it justice. As actors, you want to give any character you play justice. You want to make sure that their story is told

within the set circumstances of the production or the show, the theme, the style, whatever. But you want to give them a truth. You want them to be real. You want them to, you know, their flaws, their pros, their cons. You want them to be real and you want them to be likable in some ways. And even villains, you know, can be like, we can love a villain. So when it comes to a real human being who lived 500 years ago, has had the extent of

of character defamation really thrown at him. I think what was really important for me was trying to find the human voice, trying to remove any form of bias, try to remove any form of pre-determined ideas of what he would sound like or what he would think on something or whatever, and just start with a blank slate, listen to the research, embed it in the research,

And just try and bring it to life as truthfully as possible. And it was quite a daunting challenge and it was very much taking baby steps one step at a time and building it up. But a very unique and special challenge all the same. We're building up to everyone getting a chance to hear your voice of Richard III at the end of this podcast. But I was wondering, what was the hardest bit? What's the hardest thing to learn about the way people spoke 500 years ago?

I think it's understanding the difference between original pronunciation and accent. Because original pronunciation does almost in a way sound like an accent, but it's not an accent. It's a way of speaking. So you have to start from the ground and build those foundations strong. And getting that original pronunciation was the first challenge. Once we then learned how to speak in that way, which took time,

many hours of work with the experts, it was then about going, okay, now we're going to throw an accent into it as well. And so suddenly you've kind of got, wait, wasn't I doing the accent? No, no, no, no. That's just the way he would have spoken. Now we've got to put in his accent. And then on top of that, we're going to put in personality. On top of that, try and understand a piece of writing that is 500 years old with all of the words that they would have used and the speech rhythms they might have used, all of that stuff. So just when you thought you got it, someone said...

Now the work begins. Yeah, exactly. And then you spend another chunk of time working on getting that into it. And then it's almost like you put on all these layers and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you realize, okay, now we're almost doing too much. And then you have to, a bit like sculpting a marble sculpture, you have to then start chipping away at it and taking things out. And it's always that moment of magic for actors is once all the work has been done, it's almost about forgetting it and then just

speaking it and i think that was the big leap of faith of going trust all the work is there

Now let's make it human rather than trying to piece every little piece of the puzzle together and make. We don't want people listening, hearing all of those bits of the puzzle, all of those thoughts, you know, his entire life story, every part of the country he spent time in. We don't need all of that information. What we need is to hear a voice and we need to hear a human being speaking. And so once you've built it all up, it's about going, let's just now start taking things away and let it flow. Let it be real.

Let it breathe. Was there a bit of that that you struggled with the most? Is there a word that's the hardest to say in OP? Oh, that's tricky. Do you know what it was? It wasn't specific words. It was specific sounds that creep up where in the OP words we say today, for example, like if I was to say it's written the same way, but they sound different.

You're going through the piece and you say a word in one way and you're like, okay, I've got that sound. And then two sentences later, that sound sneaks up again, but you haven't necessarily realized it. It's the same sound for them, but it's different sounds in the modern pronunciation. You instinctively go to the sound that makes the word understandable to a modern audience without actually going, hold on a second, it needs to be the same sound. That's

that we've used earlier on. So words that would normally sound very different to our modern ear sound very, very similar and almost a little weird for us. It was very, very specific, which is why when people say, oh, can you just give me something of it? Give me a line or two. I tend to be hesitant because I'm like, we spent so long trying to narrow it down and get it as close to him as physically possible that to just kind of say it off the cuff, how

having not done it for a few months, it doesn't feel quite right. It doesn't feel like it does it justice. It sounds a bit like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle and then someone comes in and flips it over and it doesn't go back together again the way it did last time. Yeah. And it's all messed up and you've got to start all over again. Literally, yeah. As an actor, how do you work on...

Or how much do you work on connecting to the words that you're going to say? So these are words that Richard III has written down. He's created this speech. How much do you work on getting kind of inside his mind in the moment when these words are written? I think that's the gift. That's the really unique thing about this particular project for me.

is we did a lot of work with Yvonne on his personality, but also on things like his face. So the particular texts we looked at and we worked on involve faith a lot. Faith comes up. And it's something that I think in the modern world,

We don't attribute quite the depth of understanding and significance of that to these people's lives. Richard would have been praying very strictly at certain times on a regular basis. He would have had a very personal connection with God. It would have been incredibly intimate.

And there we are trying to speak his prayer out loud that he had adjusted for himself. You can't take it more seriously. You have to really think about his relationship with God and his relationship to that faith. And I think delving deep into that, the understanding of the Catholicism of the time, the Bible stories he's drawing reference to, what lessons he might be learning from in those moments.

Things we understand from his life, events that he would have had to handle or deal with, and how that might connect with those moments. Once we have the understanding of what values are important to him, once we have an understanding of where we place the moment in which he's saying these words as well. So for example, his prayer, when is he at prayer? When is he saying this? Is he saying this just after his coronation or the morning of his coronation? Or is he saying it the morning of Bosworth?

both of those bring up an incredibly different version of that prayer and he likely would have said that prayer on both of those occasions and would have been feeling very different on both of those occasions how are you feeling uh yeah it's i think it's slowly sinking in obviously there's been so many moving parts on this project that we've been working quite separate at times and then coming together for brief moments of high intensity and then disappearing off again

Whereas today we're all here, we're all in the building, it's happening, it's counting down. And I think it's going to be quite an overwhelming experience actually. And also just for my love of Richard and my interest in him as a historical figure, but also a human being to just try and separate myself a little bit from it and just watch it and take it in and see that it's, this is, this is him talking, you know, and they did say 95% accuracy. That's quite close, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, incredible. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Tom. I know you're in the play, so give us a quick plug for that. Oh, yeah. So I'm currently, I've just opened at the New Vic Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent in the Three Musketeers, their Christmas show. We run through till the 25th of January and I am playing Aramis. So lots of sword fighting, swashbuckling adventure on stage and it's perfect for a family outing.

Do you know what? It's interesting to sit opposite Thomas as he talks and think that he was chosen because of his similarity, at least in terms of his jaw shape and things like that, to Richard III.

I've actually known Thomas for a good while, so I hope he'll excuse the weird ways I was looking at him. Facelabs led by Caroline have done an incredible job in creating this animated talking avatar. The attention to detail in the clothes, the hair, the subtle movements that make it appear more real are an amazing window into where technology is and where it might be going.

I'd like to offer a huge thank you to Caroline, Jessica, Thomas and Mark and all the team at Facelabs. David Crystal is a fascinating guy. I feel like we need to get him back on Gone Medieval to talk more about OP and medieval linguistics. He's one of those people I could definitely listen to for hours.

I can't go without congratulating Yvonne one more time too. A decade of work has culminated in something as impressive as it is exciting, that opens new doors into heritage interpretation and gives us a new way to think about an old story. Now, we couldn't give you all of this behind-the-scenes goodness without letting the man himself have a quick word. Here's a snippet of the reconstructed voice of King Richard III.

have determined to honour her dearest firstborn son Edward, whose outstanding qualities with which he is singularly endued for his age, give great and be the favour of God unduted hope.

of future uprightness as Prince and Earl with grants, prerogatives and insignia and we do make and create him Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester to have charge of those parts and to govern them and defend them and we invest him as the custom is be the girding on of the sword the handing over and setting of the garland on his head

and of the God-ring on his finger, and of the God-staff in his hand, to Alfe and all, to him and his heirs, kings of England forever. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Gone Medieval. You'll be unsurprised to hear that I have.

And if you'd like to find out more about the project's work and the process of creating the voice and animated avatar of Richard III, then you're in luck. There's a full documentary out now on History Hit for you to watch. If you're a subscriber, you can go and indulge right now. If you're not, explain yourself. Come on, I'm waiting.

Then head over to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe and avail yourself of a free trial. Watch this and loads of other great content and then realise that being a History Hit subscriber is the best value gift you can give yourself in history. We've got previous episodes on Richard III. There may, in fact, be a few. A lot. Sorry, not sorry.

You can catch an episode with Philippa Langley too on the recently uncovered evidence relating to the fate of the princes in the Tower. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've got some Richard III related work to do, as always. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hits.

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