Analysis of speakers and their acoustic properties

¶ … Speakers

The two speeches being compared and contrasted in this paper are by actors. Viola Davis gave a commencement address in 2012 at Providence College. Tom Hanks gave his commencement speech in 2005 at Vassar College. While they are both actors, and both chose to speak to college graduates, their remarks were vastly different in style and substance.

Hanks' Theme

Tom Hanks started his speech (after a joke relating to the length of the introduction) by saying he had recently read an article about gridlock on the Southern California freeways. He reported that "Some smart folks" did a computer simulation to see how many cars would need to be removed from the gridlock to get the traffic flowing again. He reported that if four cars out of every hundred were removed from the traffic snarl, or forty cars for every thousand cars in the gridlock were removed, things would flow smoothly.

Hanks said nothing at all about himself or his career. He found his metaphor -- the number four -- and from that he used another four-letter word, "help." He got there by emphasizing that just four people can change a commute, and took that "four" and said four out of a hundred musicians in Northern England -- John, Paul, George and Ringo. "Take the power of four and apply it to any and every area of your concern," he said, and the four-letter word he emphasized and used for the rest of his speech was H-E-L

Davis' Theme

Viola Davis meanwhile (after a little joke) started her speech by talking about herself. She said that if the speech had been made 10 years ago it would have been filled with things that were exaggerated, perhaps untrue. "Thank God it's not ten years ago," she said. She quoted from a friend who told her that the only people who are happy are "…two-year-olds and 80-year-old billionaires. Life sucks," her friend said. From that point she said the image of a 2-year-old "marinated in my head" into scenes from the movie "The Exorcist"; and Davis went into gruesome descriptions of the scene in the movie when the mother comes home to find her stressed-out, wildly animalistic daughter, "…a demon, not really a daughter…tied to a bed with two words carved on her abdomen: "Help me." That is a great metaphor for life, Davis said.

Comparisons between the two speakers

Both speakers enunciated very clearly and meticulously. Both speakers knew exactly when to place emphasis to get the maximum response from their audiences. Hanks is Caucasian and Davis is African-American, but both have the power of presence; both are obviously trained in diction, in rhetoric, and they both know when to pause to get the most out of their oral message. While Davis said that every one of the graduates are "trapped" by the most "negative forces in the world." She was emphasizing how individuals must fight back to avoid the negative pressures of society. "It will be an everyday battle," she said.

While Hanks kept repeating the "power of four" and the word "help," in the sense that students leaving college can get things done to change the world, Davis talked about how humans' real selves are locked up in a box like jewelry, and the demons that plague humans include "lack of purpose." In that context, Davis launched into a psychological, philosophical kind of speech, saying that people tend to want to be what others around them think they should be. And the two most important days of your life, Davis explained, are the day you were born and the day you discovered why you were born.

So, it was clear half way through the speeches that Davis was digging into the psyches of the students, urging them to live up to their dreams, while Hanks was supplying his audience -- through the creative and clever use of the word "Help" -- with ways they can save the world. In other words, both speakers were effective and profound in their delivery, but Hanks was talking about how this generation needs to solve problems and save the planet while Davis was talking about students could save themselves from mediocrity and from being just another insignificant person taking up space. Hanks told his audience they were now living in a new world (post-9-11); a world with political upheaval, global pandemic, world war and "religious polarization."

And while Davis offers personal advice to students, relating deeply personal stories about the death of her father and her marriage at age 38, Hanks totally avoided anything personal in his presentation, and in fact said that while speakers are supposed to give advice during commencement addressed, he wasn't going to give advice but he did share a maxim: "Help," he said. "HEEEEELLLLLP!" It was a Beatles' song but Hanks said students must help by recycling, by conserving, by protecting, and they will make a huge difference to the planet.