In her letter (29 April), Mary McKeown refers to “hearing” and “audibility”. Certainly, audibility is an essential precursor to comprehension but, on radio and television, a simple remedy is to turn up the volume. It’s careless articulation that constitutes the main problem. Whole words are frequently not articulated with requisite precision. The majority of the applauded weather presenters fall down lamentably on the “test-word”, “occasionally”. The word contains five syllables, yet most of the time one hears “occasion-y” and, at times, “casion-y”. Might the BBC stretch to hiring a speech therapist?
Alan Huntington
Alderley Edge, Cheshire
• Richard Lee is quite right to suggest (Letters, 29 April) that people have a 50-50 chance of needing hearing aids by middle age. The cause is often the wearing of headphones playing music far too loudly and going to pop concerts where the music is deafening. A drummer colleague was asked by his doctor if he was a deep-sea diver because his eardrums were scarred – but he was only playing in a rock band with loudspeakers beside him.
Helen Keating
Gatehouse of Fleet, Dumfries and Galloway
• Dame Judi Dench (Get off the sofa and learn your Shakespeare, Dench tells young actors, 28 April) attributes the inaudibility of many actors to their laziness. But surely the fault lies with Rada etc, which no longer seem to teach voice production and projection, and theatre directors who continue to give jobs to mumblers. Nor is the problem confined to the provinces: the National Theatre is also at fault, though it is redeemed by having an excellent system of earphones, which I regularly use.
Peter Greaves
London
• There are some occasions when opera singers can be forgiven for not being understood (Say it again Carmen: diction coaches to help opera audiences catch every word, 28 April); if the house is huge and the conductor does not restrain the orchestra, no singer will be understandable in louder passages. Occasionally a set or costume will deaden the sound, making it more difficult to hear the details of what is being sung. Sometimes the director places the singer at the very back of the stage or in a very awkward position, or perhaps the vocal writing is so extreme that it makes comprehending the text problematic. In the vast majority of cases, though, the “problem of diction” is not about diction at all, but rather a problem of vocal production, leading to unclear vowel sounds that make it very difficult for the audience to “fill in the blanks” between vowels in the way that all of us do in everyday life. There are so few singing teachers now, including in major conservatoires, that teach singers how to stand and breathe. Too often they concentrate on creating an “operatic” sound, instead of focusing on the core of the singing voice – the breath. A well-supported voice singing “on the breath” will, in almost all circumstances, have little trouble in making itself understood. Many singers sacrifice the text in favour of the “sound” but with correct posture and breathing, leading to clear vowel production, there is no reason that a singer should not be clearly understood. ENO does not need diction coaches, but rather singers who have been properly taught and who stand and breathe properly.
Ashley Holland
Former ENO company principal, Muthill, Perthshire
• Rolling content screens on digital radios have transformed my Classic FM listening. Turning up the volume, when no one else is in the house, allows me to enjoy the music. But no amount of adjusting the volume or my hearing aids lets me hear the broadcaster giving the title, conductor, etc (Sorry John, Aled, Alan et al). Now the screens allow the “Of course, that’s what it was!” moment. Unfortunately, no one’s managed to radio screen roll John Humphrys or Jenni Murray yet. And no, reading a transcript just isn’t the same.
Hilary Grim
Oxford
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