February 26 1999
To alleviate those migraines, Paul Meier, associate professor of theatre and film at the University of Kansas, has created a Web site containing recorded accents that can be used by actors to learn dialects from around the world.
The year-old site, located at http://www.ku.edu/~idea/, is now being tested on KU's home page. Called International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA), it holds both English dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages.
Visitors can listen to dialects and accents from all over the world. Countries are then broken down even further. For example, South African dialects are split between Pretoria and Cape Town.
"I've been collecting recordings for years," Meier said. "Now, with sound processing programs, making such an archive is a natural idea."
Meier has spent much of his career traveling to movie filming locations as a dialect coach, often using recordings to train actors. Experiences like a job last summer established a need for this quick referencing system, he said.
"I was called out to Hawaii for a movie shoot and had no time to collect and gather any recordings," Meier said. "Now, if I have a laptop and an Internet connection, I'll be in better shape."
While IDEA is still in the test stages, future applications include a larger archive, global usage and an independent Web address. IDEA has nearly 50 dialects now.
Shawn Muller, the site's webmaster, said the future applications of IDEA are vast.
"Not only can this be a valuable resource for dialecticians, actors and directors, but for historians as well," Muller said. "Recorded samples could also be used to teach on-line dialect courses."
The archive is playable on both PC and Macintosh computers. All that is needed is a format called MP3 that compresses large sound files into smaller ones so that they can be heard. To do this, an MP3 player must be downloaded from the Internet. For more information, contact Meier at 864-2692.
Story by Todd Cohen, University Relations, at (785) 864-8858 or tcohen@ku.edu