Jacques playing guitar to demonstrate his point.

Let's consider for a second the voice as a musical instrument. Like with all musical instruments, you can play the same note (pitch) with different colors. If I hit the strings of my guitar softly or hard or if I place my right hand close to the bridge or far away, the same note will have different sounds, or different colors. It will be the sound of a guitar (the basic voice of an actor), but with different colors (same voice placed differently). Like any serious musician knows how to change the sound of his instrument, any serious actor should be able to work with his voice the same way. The main difference is that the voice placement techniques are still much more mysterious than the instrument techniques, which is probably because there is no vocabulary to define these techniques.

Voice characterization, unlike music, is a new art. Musicians and singers all over the world know how to do a vibrato and use more or less the same techniques to play a common repertoire. This makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that all the actors have the same repertoire but don't share or sometimes don't know the techniques to place their voice correctly, which is the basis of voice characterization.

The first thing to do for an actor is to place his voice in order to get as close as possible to the voice of the character he is dubbing. When the voice is in place, he will then be able to concentrate on the character's attitude. The VD's (voice director) work is to make sure the actor gets the right attitude and keeps his voice consistent during his performance. This is a very common problem with animated dubbing in almost every country. The actor's concentration goes back and forth between the right attitude and the right voice. It is very difficult, especially at the beginning of a series, to remember and control both at the same time. It is the responsibility of the VD to make sure the actor doesn't lose the desired voice. The VD must communicate the voice placement information to the actor. Another problem: the VD, most of the time, concentrates on the attitude or on the acting side and does not help the actors in the voice characterization. One can argue that this voice characterization is so personal an approach to the actor, that only he can understand what he does. Here is where I do not agree. We need to be able to describe the voices and to explain the placement techniques. The same way a musician or a singer is able to describe a sound of a flute or a sound of a trombone and an effect like the vibrato, we should be able to describe the voice placement of any animated voice. Only then, we will be able to guide the actors and more importantly, guide them all the same way, using the same descriptions and vocabulary. How can we describe Marvin's voice? How is it different from the Tazmanian Devil's voice, for example?

Now that we know about the voice placement concept and the necessity of a vocabulary, let's try to create this vocabulary. This will be of course my proposition and like all propositions, they may not be perfect but have at least the merit of starting the process.

Voice Placement Positions
I divided arbitrarily, and based on my experience, the head in six regions or areas, organized around two lines or axis, vertical and horizontal, with the throat as the center. The vertical axis will define the high throat and the low throat and by extension, the top of the head and the very low head or chest. The horizontal axis will define the rear throat and the front of the throat. From the center (normal voice of most of the actors) throat, we can move our voice into the six areas. These six areas will give the basics of all the different characterizations.

1. The high throat (Bugs, Daffy, Tweety, etc.)
Although Bugs' and Daffy's voices are different, they are placed in the same area: the high throat. The difference comes from the effect: a nasal quality for Bugs and a lisp for Daffy. I will refer from now on to "mask" instead of nasal, which can be often misinterpreted and creates a voice of a person who has a cold (stuffed nose). We obviously want to avoid having Bugs sound like he has a cold! We'll explain later these voice effects.

2. The low throat (Taz, Sam, etc.)
Another example of two voices placed identically with different effects. This placement is used in general for big and thick voices such as Taz and Sam. Taz is full and big in the low throat and Sam is compressed in the same area creating a thick gravel effect.