The idea behind my new soundscript is to sap the manly, warrior voice of the narrator and replace it with a weaker, objective male voice. This will maintain the gender of the narrator, but the change in tone and word choice should drastically affect the audience’s mood. The narrator in my new soundscript will be a historian introducing the legend of Leonidas from an objective viewpoint. I will be providing the voice of the narrator, and I will try to keep my voice as steady and emotionless as possible. My clip starts with the fight between young Leonidas and the wolf, so I might start with something like “Spartan legend holds that King Leonidas defeated a giant wolf before returning to Sparta during his trials of manhood. Here we see young Leonidas engaged in combat with the wolf. Notice how he uses the terrain to gain advantage over a superior foe, much like he does later at the Battle of Thermopylae.” While the visuals remain the same, this soundscript will turn an epic war movie into a sort of documentary, weakening its emotional hold on the audience.

My research question that I developed in my Response 1.4 is “How does the narrators’ male warrior tone of voice and word choice affect the audience’s mood during the clip?”

My primary claim that I will seek to support in Major Paper 1 is that the narrator’s strong warrior tone is critical to the momentum and intensity of the movie clip by creating a relationship of awe and wonder with the audience. This claim is reasonable because 300 is an extremely manly war movie, so the presence of a male warrior narrator naturally enhances the mood. The claim also has risk attached to it because, as my new soundscript should illustrate, the narration carries the mood of the audience rather than the visuals. Showing that a change of tone from strong male to weak male drains the visuals of their effect would be dramatic indeed.

The significance behind my research question and claim is that my Major Paper 1 should offer insights into the effects a commanding male voice has on the listener, and even offer commentary on the male-dominated dynamics of action-movies, war, and society in general. Analyzing how a commanding male voice affects listeners will be useful for the final project in which we make an audio narrative presentation about service learning at the Boys and Girls’ Club.

The artifact I intend to use is Kozloff’s piece about voice-over narration. As Sohroosh mentioned in his blog entry, my new soundscript will do plenty of “telling” so using Kozloff’s piece will be very useful.

The only question I have now is how I can stretch one claim into a full length paper, or whether I should include multiple claims.