Erik Singer

Erik is a dialect coach and a teacher of accents, speech, phonetics, voice, text and Shakespeare. He coaches accents for film, television & theatre productions, both on location and in and around New York City. Acting-training programs in which he has taught include the MFA program at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and the “Core” conservatory program at HB Studio in New York. As an actor, he has played leading roles Off-Broadway and at many of the nation’s major regional theatres. Erik has also voiced numerous television and radio commercials, documentaries, animated shows, and New York Times best-selling audiobooks. From 2010 to 2013 he was the Associate Editor for the “Pronunciation, Phonetics, Linguistics, Dialect/Accent Studies” section of the Voice and Speech Review, the peer-reviewed journal for the profession. He blogs for the Knight Thompson Speechblog and occasionally posts videos about various aspects of accent work on both ErikSinger.com and DialectCoaches.com. Erik is a Master Teacher of Knight Thompson Speechwork and a Certified Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. He is a graduate of the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London and of Yale University. He plans to speak ten languages to B2 or better (CEFR) by his fiftieth birthday.

Actors Be Damned! (or: What I Don’t Think)—What Is the Value of (Super) Narrow Transcription?

March 10, 2016August 4, 2018 Erik Singeraccents, Oral posture, phonetics, physicality, questions, roots, teaching, transcription, Vocal tract posture

All actors should learn narrow transcription. And I mean super narrow, with multiple diacritics hanging off of every symbol like crazed Christmas ornaments. All teachers and coaches should employ similarly narrow transcription in all their prepared materials, and whenever taking […]

Collecting accents

February 9, 2016September 23, 2019 Erik Singeraccents, phonetics

I wrote a thing. Two things, I guess: two short texts for eliciting useful accent samples. Here they are: Dali’s Last Hurrah* What frosty land is this? How was its fate decided? Coal-black mountains loom; Glassy pools reflect their huge, […]

Why the Detail Model Had to Go

February 4, 2016September 23, 2019 Erik SingerDudley, Principles (perhaps), roots, Skinner, standard language ideology, Uncategorized

(Roots, part III) The teaching of any prescriptive speech pattern as some sort of basis or ‘neutral’ will inevitably encode privilege and elitism, alienate actors from nonstandard speech backgrounds, and actively impede the acquisition of accurate and detailed perception and […]

Roots, Part II

November 20, 2014September 23, 2019 Erik SingerDudley, linguistics, phonetics, Principles (perhaps), roots, Skinner

The other day I wrote a bit about some of the intellectual and linguistic foundations of Knight-Thompson Speechwork. Today I’d like to write a bit about how Dudley found his way from there to here, as it were, and […]

Roots

November 7, 2014September 23, 2019 Erik SingerDudley, linguistics, Principles (perhaps), roots, standard language ideology

I’ve been thinking a lot this fall about the roots of this work. Unitarian Universalists like to talk about roots and wings. Roots ground you, connect you to where you’ve come from and what’s important. They form your support system […]

The Name of Action

December 11, 2013 Erik Singeracting, action, Dudley, Earle Gister, Oral posture, physicality, Principles (perhaps), Vocal tract posture

I studied acting with the great Earle Gister some years back. He was a brilliant man, and his way of teaching and speaking about acting resonated deeply with me. It felt, at the time, like the missing piece of […]

Rhoticity, Part Two: Symbol Confusion

December 3, 2013 Erik Singerconventions, phonetics, rhoticity, transcription

This post is a part two of an answer to a question posed by Kim Mappleswitch. Part one is here. As a reminder, Kim writes: At The High Standards Academy of Dramatic Art (HSADA) we’re required to teach Standard […]

The Bird is the Word

November 14, 2013 Erik Singerdeep in the weeds, Jabba the Hutt, Oral posture, rhoticity, Skinner, Vocal tract posture

Kim Mappleswitch writes: At The High Standards Academy of Dramatic Art (HSADA) we’re required to teach Standard Stage as a basis for learning IPA. I have asked the faculty here how they teach the /ɜ˞/ sound. On one hand – […]

Email address!

November 5, 2013 Erik Singerquestions

We’ve just established an email address for the blog. You can now write in with questions to: ktspeechblog@gmail.com We’d love to hear from you. Any question you may have about transcription, exercises, pedagogy, philosophy, linguistic resources, etc.—send them in! (The […]

Adding Insult to Investigation

October 15, 2013 Erik Singerconsonant muscularity, exercises, fun, Omnish, Outlandish, The Empty Chart

One thing I think we’d like to do with this blog is share ideas for new and fun Omnish exercises. One of us will write a post soon sharing one or two that aren’t in the book. I have also […]