In the course of revising a Wired story I’ve been working on, I’ve had to dive into the technical history of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That little research tangent brought me in contact with this lengthy piece about Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who voiced HAL, the movie’s murderous AI system. There’s a lot to chew over here, including a bevy of info about Rain’s main gig as a Shakespearean specialist, but what I found most gripping was the discussion of accents. The author makes a convincing argument that what made Rain’s performance stand out was the nondescript nature of his manner of speech, a trait that may be a great asset to his countrymen who seek their fortunes down south:
University of Toronto Professor of Linguistics Jack Chambers, in considering what Kubrick was aiming for, says “you have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place.” HAL’s Canadianness stems not from “the specific stuff. It’s not the Canadian Raising (‘out’ pronounced as ‘oot’ and ‘about’ pronounced as ‘aboot’)”.
“Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal –the vowels are in the right place, the consonants are in the right place, it covers a large piece of ground. That’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as newscasters, as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from. It’s entirely wrong to describe Rain’s voice as ‘mid-Atlantic’–the Canadian accent has almost no trace of Britishness.”
At last, an explanation for the total miracle that is the voice of Pat Kiernan.
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