Kim Cattrall Can Talk to Me About Anything

Radio is an even more intimate medium than premium cable television with a Mature Audiences content rating, and Ms. Cattrall’s speech, isolated from other sounds, conjures those sedative tickles of faint euphoria associated with the phenomenon known as A.S.M.R., or autonomous sensory meridian response. Her real voice is breathy like Samantha Jones’s, but less fluctuant in pitch and volume. It rushes up from her diaphragm full of theatrical resonance and then hums along at a soothing, slow register. It is crisp. When Ms. Cattrall says the word “didn’t,” she respects each and every D and T.

Indeed, it could be said that alveolar plosives — the consonant sounds made by tapping the tip of the tongue to the alveolar ridge, just behind the teeth, as when hitting one’s D’s and T’s — are some of Ms. Cattrall’s best work. She is a careful enunciator who takes time to pronounce distinctly every element of a consonant cluster. Her diction might be described as intricate.

Most native speakers of North American English don’t distinctly pronounce their alveolar plosives (in other words: stops) when they occur at the end of a word. Take, for example, this very sentence, which starts with the word “take” and ends with the word “it.” For many Americans and Canadians, the T of “it” sounds semi-swallowed. Linguists debate whether this muted effect is the result of a failure to release a final, teensy puff of air, or of something happening way down inside the throat, in the space between the vocal cords called the glottis. The point is, the sound is different — smaller sounding — than the T in “take.” Not so for Ms. Cattrall or, as Ms. Cattrall might say, noT so for Ms. Cattrall.

And this is just one tic of the hypnotic swinging-watch pendulum of Kim Cattrall’s radio voice. We could linger here all day attempting to deconstruct precisely what makes Kim Cattrall’s speaking so appealing, but self-care begins with you and ends with Kim Cattrall describing the vitality of stage performance.

With that in mind, here is my curated playlist of the top four easily accessible podcast appearances by Kim Cattrall. They will soothe you and educate you about her life. May she one day host a six-hour daily podcast of her own.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/style/kim-cattrall-voice-samantha.html?partner=rss&emc=rss