My Google History: From The Wizard of Oz to Lost Accents
When I was in high school, I created a really fun and easy game to waste time and entertain myself and my friend. The game is simple:
- Pick an object.
- Designate a person as the “timer”
- Think about that object (Ex: apple) Then ask yourself, what does that object make you think of? (Ex: teachers)
4. Repeat Step 3. (Ex: chalkboard)
5. Repeat Step 3 again. (Ex: A cloud of chalkboard dust)
6. Keeping repeating Step 3 until the “timer” says “stop.” (We usually stop after a minute or two.) (Ex: A cloud. Rain. A hose. A flower. A lady bug. Lipstick. The movie Holes. Shia Labeouf. My blog post on him. “Stop!”)
7. Ask each person what was the last thing they thought of (The answers are incredibly diverse!)
8. Have each person list their train of thought. You can see mine in the parentheses.
This game is really fun. It’s amazing how I can go from apple → my blog post and another person might go from apple → “my third cousin Tony.” Some people might start off on the same path, but then they branch off into completely random directions. Please play this game today with someone.
Anyways, sometimes I find myself playing this game by myself while I am on my computer. I start off reading one article and suddenly that article makes me want to look up another article, which in turn makes me want to look up something else… In the end, I’ve learned new and random and it’s great.
So I figure I’ll post some of my Google adventures once in awhile in a (hopefully) recurring series called “My Google History.”
Today my Google History started with the Bit of News article “Composer reveals the two magical notes in “Over the Rainbow” that makes the song so lovable” which I realize now is a horribly long headline. (For those who don’t know, Bit of News is a really great daily e-mail newsletter that lists news highlights and other popular articles of the day. It’s a must-read, I think, just like TheSkimm.)
The article is about how a musical technique featured in in the song “Over the Rainbow” — going from a low note to a high note — makes the song irresistible to one’s ears and so enjoyable to sing. It was hard to deny the argument because I love the song so much. I decided to take a few extra minutes out of my afternoon to listen to Judy Garland sing the whole song… and that’s when my curiosity started getting at me. Not only were the low to high notes captivating, it was also her voice … the way she sang… her accent. What was it?
Listen to her. She sounds so different from singers of today, even when you cut out the possibility of autotune and just listen to a modern day live performance. Was it the way audio was recorded in the 1930s that made her sound so different? Did people just sing differently? Had evolution changed the human vocal chords in the decades since? What was it about her voice that seemed so… foreign to me?
I had to Google it. I typed in “why did people sound different in the 1940s” and found a 2011 article from The Atlantic, “Language Mystery: When Did Americans Stop Sounding This Way?” In it, the author muses over the voice of a narrator in a video clip from the 1930s. He wites:
“You cannot imagine a present-day American using it with a straight face. It’s not faux-British, but it’s a particular kind of lah-dee-dah American diction that at one time was very familiar and now has vanished.”
Hm… so this article was about old speaking voices rather than old singing voices, but the theme was the same. Why did this diction vanish? Now I know I wasn’t the only one curious about it.
But his mystery was easily solved. Apparently the accent in the video clip he was listening to was a “Transatlantic accent,” also know as the “Midatlantic accent” taught to actors and announcers at the time. Weird. But why did that accent stop being a thing? And where oh where did Dorothy’s voice go?
My hunt continued. I went back to my original Google search results page and clicked on an archived Reddit page where a user had posed the question, “Why does it seem like people from the 40s/50s had distinctly different voices than people today?” Since it was Reddit, the comments ranged from stupid to serious.
Stupid comment: YeahAndRealFastTalking. OhStuffYourFatHead, YouJabberjawedMonkey. WipeThatStupidLookOffYourFaceAndKissMe.
Smart comment: Mid-Atlantic English (less ambiguously known as a Transatlantic accent) is a cultivated or acquired version of the English language once found in certain aristocratic elements of American society and taught for use in the American theatre.
Same answer!! Seeing as I have only heard people in the 1940s speak through film and radio clips, it makes sense that I probably have only been exposed to this cultivated Transatlantic accent. Does it apply to singing though? I don’t know. My Googling could go on forever… but I just love the fact that I started off with Dorothy and ended up here:
