can you hear me now?

Or, a disquisition on the "cultivated American" accent
I was barely reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about cell phone problems when, in a section about sound quality, I came across the intriguing term “Harvard sentences.” Evidently cellular systems engineers actually travel around the country testing signal quality-- somewhat like the familiar Verizon "can you hear me now" guy-- by sending out aural snippets known as Harvard sentences:

a collection of phonetically balanced sentences that measure a large range of different qualities in the human voice. These were originally published in 1969 as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recommended practice for speech quality measurements.

The sentences go a little something like this (in random selection):

"She has a smart way of wearing clothing. These days a leg of chicken is a rare dish. Cars and buses stalled in snow drifts. Both lost their lives in the raging storm. The pencils have all been used. The stale smell of old beer lingers. The beetle droned in the hot June sun. A gold ring will please most any girl. When the frost has come it is time for turkey..."

Sort of open-mic beatnik free verse, no? Then I got the mental image of someone in a florescent-lit cubicle reciting all 200 sentences with overly precise diction into a large reel to reel tape recorder. No indication as to how they were named but I would guess Harvard is the stand-in for the concept of a precise ideal.
So I started thinking about pronunciation and the classic tone and phrasing found in movies and newsreels of the 1930s and 40s. Listen to Katherine Hepburn, William Powell, Cary Grant, and notably, FDR whose "fear" was rendered as "fe-ah." Without having really focused on it I'd wondered where that manner came from, and more importantly, where did it go? Along with its socio-economic and narrative opposite, the Toity-toid an' Toid /James Cagney New York Gangsterese, hearing that mode of speech creates as much a sense of temporal distance ("I don't relate to this as part of my continuum, I'm listening and watching something from the past") as the b/w of old footage or the style of period clothes. Perhaps New England regionalism was a part of the equation and, yes, Cary Grant was British but that was just a technicality. Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens is probably the last time I've heard a version of this pronunciation "in public." Even more exaggerated were the stentorian, "Voice of God" intonations from newsreels like the March of Time...
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This just in: I've found that what I've been talking about here is called "Mid-Atlantic English" according to wikipedia:

a style of speech formerly cultivated by actors for use in theatre, and by news announcers...institutions cultivated a norm influenced by the Received Pronunciation of southern England as an international norm of English pronunciation. According to William Labov, the teaching of this pronunciation declined sharply after the end of World War II.

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Amazing sound resource here
• Hear an interview with a 101 year-old former slave
• A civil war soldier remembers his experience on the morning Abraham Lincoln died.
• Mae Timpano remembers living under Coney Island's tallest roller coaster.
and more... and also at the Library of Congress

minor casualties of the 21st century

My friend Doug and I are making some letterpress notecards (who isn't these days?) and we're looking for something to print and line the envelopes with. Onion skin I thought. Kind of like the old air mail paper. Its mottled translucence, theoretically, could be interesting and it has that crinkley, unusual sound. Nice. So I started calling some stationery shops and got some chuckles on the other end of the line. One nice man mused, surely with some hyperbole, "we sold that about 40 years ago." Another said, with amusement, " you have to talk to Abe, he remembers that," and put me on hold. Alas, when Abe, evidently too busy to be troubled with memories of antiquated stock, picked up he simply said, "No, we don't got that." Todd Bielen over at Papertec Inc, which specializes in, well, "specialty papers," was very helpful. They had onion skin that, according to their site, "was approved for use by the US government and meets military spec P-157A... used in the production of military flares, munitions, and detonators." Unfortunately it was the cockle finish I was looking for and there was none left. Not only that, the "only mill in North America" that made onion skin had just ceased production. "So whatever's out there now," said Mr. Bielen with sympathy,"that's it."

I thought of something I'd read somewhere about a group of sound engineers in the 1970s who went around with microphones and reel-to-reels recording everyday sounds that were "endangered" like hand cranks and, presciently, telephone rings...

Doug and I have several options (we can try eBay, we can try Bible paper, we can go another route entirely) but I find it strangely sad.

Addendum: I've gotten an (relatively) outrageous amount of traffic from onion skin queryists. Now, in the comments for this post, The Paper Mill Store reports they have onion skin-- although I do not see any of the much-celebrated cockle finish...