Do you like watching movies?
In Italy, Italian and foreign movies are both shown on a variety of channels. About 80% of foreign movies broadcast in Italy are American, and nearly 100% of them are dubbed. Until very recently, the techniques of Italian voice actors had an excellent reputation. That said, many things have happened along the way to achieving this high rating.

When film dubbing began (probably around the 1920s), dubbed voices were recorded by Italian-born Hollywood actors. I am sure Italians in Italy burst into laughter seeing the movies dubbed with Americanized voices speaking Italian in an odd accent.

There were a few clear reasons why movies could not be produced in their original voices in Italy. The fascist regime that feared the infiltration of foreigners and even foreign languages blocked everything, so they required dubbing to be used. This likely affected the English abilities of Italians. The same went for Japan that commonly used dubbing and subtitles. In Italy’s case, however, many Italians were illiterate at the time, so subtitling movies would not have made any sense.

Ciro Imparato, an Italian actor who passed away recently, conducted a very interesting analysis on voices.He is also a voice actor, writer, and psychologist, and he published a book called La tua voce può cambiarti la vita (meaning “your voice can change your life”). Voices have six types of colors: the wavelength of red means passion, green means empathy, blue means authority, yellow means affection, gray means boredom, and black means anger or aggression.

I never paid much attention to the way I used my voice differently in different situations, and I thought it would be an extremely fascinating experience to try intentionally using different voices to see the other person’s reaction. In fact, someone has done this to me before. I was calling this person for the first time to try and bring him into a project I was working on, but he left a really bad impression with me. Then when we talked on the phone a few days later, he was somewhat different from before. Now we have become such close friends we share fits of laughter with each other, so I openly confessed my first impression of him, and he told me that he had actually been purposely using a blue-colored voice during that first phone call. I was speechless. He said that he had been interested in the use of different voice colors in different situations and paid attention to the tone of his voice in his daily communication.

These days, communication is often by text rather than phone. Can this be color-coded too?