Character Identity Expression in Vocal Performance of Traditional Puppeteers

Abstract

A traditional puppeteer generally uses up to a dozen different marionettes in one piece. Each of them impersonates a character with its own typical voice manifestation. It is therefore very interesting to study the techniques the puppeteer uses to change his voice and their acoustical correlates. This study becomes even more interesting when a traditional style exists that has been respected by the puppeteers for more than a century. Thus we decided to make use of the fact that there are records available of several pieces played by Bohuslav Anderle (1913-1976) and we recorded parts of the same plays played by his son, Anton Anderle (1944), supplemented by his verbal description of personality features of the characters that the actor tries to express in their voices. A summary of variety of characters one puppeteer has to master is given and the psychological, aesthetic and acoustic-phonetic aspects of their personalities are discussed. The main goal of the paper is to present a classification of voice displays of characters, techniques of voice changes, and their acoustic correlates.