Welcome
When I set out in 1995 to design a website for Voice and Speech for actors, I never realized that I would be the first one to do it. (Things have changed a great deal since then...) Most beginner designers learn by exploring the sites of others in their field and then do something in response to what they find. What I found was a couple of websites from Medical Schools, and Voice Science centres, but nothing about voice and speech for actors. So I just started to play.
Page by page, the voice and speech page grew, and as my understanding of HTML expanded, so did the possibilities for what could be done. Squeezing my designing/coding in between my teaching and my coaching and my acting, v+s grew by fits and starts, often sitting unchanged for over a year.
My biggest endeavour has been the Journey of the Voice segment of the site. Based on a lecture given jointly by Diane Pitblado and myself at the (Canadian) National Voice Intensive, it continues to grow as I attempt to a/ fully describe the aspects of how the voice works, and b/ detail the anatomy and physiology required to do so.
When I first began this thing, my greatest hope was to create a library of dialect samples available to all voice coaches across the world. This dream has been realized by Paul Meier at University of Kansas and the IDEA project (International Dialects of English Archive). As an active participant, I have submitted dialects from the Chicago, Illinois area, and will be adding samples from the Central Canada area.
When I started v+s, I was a voice teacher first and foremost, then I becameprimarily a speech teacher, and now I am back to being a voice and speech teacher. In recent years I have spent most of my web designing energies building materials for courses I taught at Roosevelt University. These will be reorganized into the site's content areas.
This site was first developed while I was based in Windsor, Ontario at the School of Dramatic Art, pretty much stalled at Brandeis University and then continued to develop at Roosevelt University, in Chicago. I am now based at York University in Toronto. I would like to thank all those who have supported the development of this site, from faculty and students, to end-users like the professors who have listed this site on their reading lists, to all those people who came only to find a source of Meloids and stayed after they found out that they no longer exist, to the community of web-designers who have taught me how to make this information available and how to make its presentation effective.
Getting around the site should be pretty easy. At the top of the page is a navigation bar which should take you to the various areas in the site. Also, there is a text back-track bar allowing you to work your way back through the directories through which you have come, or skip back to the top level itself, the voice+speech front door.
I am working the bugs out of this new design, and things will continue to change, slowly but surely. If you have any comments or suggestions, or even notice a typo, please contact me via my email address, or telephone me at work - (905) 736-2100 x77353, and I would be glad to discuss with you the ins and outs of this voice+speech site.
Eric Armstrong.