When you are sitting at home, with perhaps a friend on your couch, do they constantly say "What?"
Or, if standing with a few people you know outside, is every sentence you speak replied to with a request to repeat yourself?
I bet not. Maybe it happens sometimes, but my point is, being able to understand what someone says, regardless of how they say it, is the key part here.
Yet it sounds as if you believe most people are barely understandable? Including yourself?
And for example, listening to much of the dialog out there, the Picard reference. The guy is in command of the flagship of a fleet, in the military, and would not be in command, in that position, if there was any inability to clearly issue orders, and to communicate fluently.
Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
A CEO? An ex-world class military retiree? Someone working in upper management of the NSA? These people will be heard.
There are indeed roles featuring the "regular person", but if you mumble, if you define your speach style as mumbling, that means you employ the word "mumble" to differentiate you, from how most people speak.
Otherwise you wouldn't be mumbling, you'd just be speakkng.
So that all said, I think your assertion is unfair.
The person I originally responded to was basically calling for actors to homogenize their speech in order to make them easier to understand. I disagree with this notion because I think that both altering how you enunciate things and how you "project" your voice alter them drastically and are not realistic for everyone to speak that way. They are inherently inauthentic, especially if you consider the speech patterns of various English accents and dialects. Certain accents are intrinsically linked to "mumbling." Certain types of voices are inherently not projected.
A great example is this video of Baltimoreans attempting to say "Aaron earned an iron urn." [1] The same person says it how they would naturally and with "proper" enunciation. With "proper" enunciation he was very easy to understand, but it was also not authentic to how he actually speaks.
> Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
Yes, but there's just as many, if not more, that aren't. I'm not saying it's unrealistic for say, a CEO or a news reporter to have adapted a "General American" accent. I don't think it's weird for even most characters to have an accent that is very understandable to most Americans. I just don't think you can or should expect that actors always speak in a certain way just to make it understandable to the most amount of Americans.
Or, if standing with a few people you know outside, is every sentence you speak replied to with a request to repeat yourself?
I bet not. Maybe it happens sometimes, but my point is, being able to understand what someone says, regardless of how they say it, is the key part here.
Yet it sounds as if you believe most people are barely understandable? Including yourself?
And for example, listening to much of the dialog out there, the Picard reference. The guy is in command of the flagship of a fleet, in the military, and would not be in command, in that position, if there was any inability to clearly issue orders, and to communicate fluently.
Beyond that, many of the characters we watch in media, are top tier of their professions, even if that profession is 'thief'.
A CEO? An ex-world class military retiree? Someone working in upper management of the NSA? These people will be heard.
There are indeed roles featuring the "regular person", but if you mumble, if you define your speach style as mumbling, that means you employ the word "mumble" to differentiate you, from how most people speak.
Otherwise you wouldn't be mumbling, you'd just be speakkng.
So that all said, I think your assertion is unfair.