My 2013 American Accent Experiment with Sinatra and Idahosa Ness
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This 2013 mini-project includes two videos from my short experiment with American English accents.
From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014), kept as lived proof of the method. The named products, sites and future plans are historical. See all the missions.
A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.
Mimicking American accents with Idahosa
The first video is a chat with Idahosa (“Ee-dow-sa”) regarding some of the things I learned.
Idahosa had written several guest posts for this blog, including Sound Rehab: A 5-Point Program for Kicking Your Visual-Addiction, Cloud-Tutoring – Combining Automated Teaching and Personalized Learning, The “flow” of fluency: How to freestyle rap in a foreign language, How I Learned to Rap in 4 Languages I don’t speak in 1 Night Using the Free Application “Audacity”, and How to receive language feedback for free and provide it for profit using Soundcloud.
In this project, we used suggestions from that last post to seek specific feedback on SoundCloud. The first video records our discussion of the approach rather than demonstrating my accent.
I was not trying to pass myself off as American. I wanted to notice how accents differ and test a deliberate imitation exercise. Here is our chat:
In the video, we also discussed the free phonetics lessons Idahosa offered through his email list at the time.
Singing Sinatra in a piano bar with Susanna
Next, Susanna and I took some of Idahosa’s tips for the Sinatra song “I've Got You Under My Skin” and worked on parts I tended to sing with Irish English features. We discussed the exercise in an old cinema before trying it at a piano bar.
Susanna and I had recorded together in the Bay Area before, when we explored multilingual San Francisco. She wrote Language is Music (affiliate link), so she helped me examine accent features relevant to singing. Her historical sites were Create Your World and her YouTube channel. Here is the video:
Why the Sean Ogle comparison is no longer embedded
The original 2013 post reproduced a clip from Sean Ogle’s public podcast without contacting him, then embedded my imitations and Idahosa’s detailed comparisons with that clip. This archive does not establish permission to reproduce Sean’s recording, so the source clip, transcripts, derivative recordings and clip-specific feedback have been removed.
At the time, I planned to apply the comparison process during a later mission. My priority in the early stages was intelligibility rather than trying to remove every trace of an accent.
The mini-project lasted only a few hours, but it gave me a first chance to examine an English accent in detail before beginning another three-month language mission.
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