A
female
age
30-35,
anonymous
writes:I haven't seen my friend in 3 months since she was at university, having seen her I was very taken back by her voice. Turns out she did online elocution lessons to lower her voice a bit and speak properly over the months, even when i saw her she was learning then too!She sounded fine before, in fact she had a nice accent and voice so I didn't see why she wanted to do that, but fair play to the girl. Point is, her voice sounds so nice now, in fact she actually sounds more attractive. Her voice sounds deep and alluring and the way she speaks is amazing! She sounds so educated and speaks like the people from Oxford/Chelsea (an upper end part of London).I'm just so impressed with this, when we were out she even had guys saying how sexy her accent is. Which i'll admit even I was thinking it! She said it's hard work training your voice to change it's tone and learning to speak the way she does now. But my question is can elocution lessons and speech therapy actually do this sort of thing? And anybody who has had it, is it really as hard to learn as she says it is?
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female
reader, YouWish  +, writes (19 June 2013):
 Oh absolutely! I didn't do them myself, but I have a good friend who was studying journalism in hopes of getting into broadcasting. Here in the US, just like in the UK, there are different regional accents, from New York to Boston to a Southern Accent to California to the Midwest.
An essential for TV broadcasters is to speak General American, which is close to a Midwest accent (Iowa, Nebraska, North/South Dakota, Wyoming, Illinois (except Chicago)). My friend had to take elocution because her natural accent has a bit of Ozark Mountain twang (which sounds just a hint of the South). Elocution is much more intense than vocal lessons, because it's more than the pronounciation of vowels, consonants, word cadence and inflection. It's which parts of the mouth are used, the very melody of the voice, the way we laugh, and so on.
Just listen to any one of the MILLIONS of people blogging on Youtube, and they reflect easily dialects from whichever region they hail from. Contrast that to a movie voiceover artist, a radio DJ, an animated or video game voice artist, and their voice is no accident, but the result of intensive work on perfecting it.
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