He’s a real person with a pretty active anime career fwiw:
I’d guess there’s some sort of processing/post-processing contributing, but maybe he’s just impressively precise. I’ve also come across audiobooks where I wondered about that, but I assumed it was just me not being used that formal narration
Time spent on Aomi from 7月27日 to 8月02日 : 231min (3h51min)
Time spent on Audacity from 7月27日 to 8月02日 : 0min
I think I may be seeing some progress because I struggle less on clearing difficult Aomi cards, the next time I review them.
However, it’s a bit discouraging to notice that even after spending a long time repeating a card and listening to the recording multiple times, I’m still unable to produce a good pronunciation when I read the same text (even with pitch annotations) a day or two later—before hearing the target audio again.
That said, just hearing the audio once usually brings everything back on track. It goes to show how much easier it is to mimic natural speech than to generate accurate intonation based solely on rules and facts.
On a more physiological standpoint, I’ve been wondering how much chest resonance is acceptable for proper Japanese. If I really focus on projecting my speech into my mouth with minimal chest resonance, in some way, it kind of sounds more Japanese-like but this high-pitched voice doesn’t … feel like mine.
The thing is that I have to remind myself that I have to sound unnatural, at least at first, in order to inch closer to a Japanese accent. If I were to try to speak “naturally”, that would imply starting from the position most natural for French, given that I am naturally prone to adopt French vocal placement and habits. So if it feels weird and unusual, that might actually be a good sign because the opposite would mean falling back to old speaking habits unsuited for the totally different language that is Japanese.
I don’t know if this is also true in French, but at least in English I tend to sit in the lowest comfortable range of my voice when speaking non-emphatically. A realization I made the last time I did any pitch accent study was that I couldn’t actually do that in Japanese because if I started at my normal range I couldn’t make the pitch drops that words wanted without going uncomfortably low into my vocal range. I almost wonder if by necessity you have to have a higher baseline voice in Japanese because it’s important to make relative pitch drops as you speak. Anyway, that theory has helped me come to terms with how high my Japanese speaking voice is relative to my English one is.
That’s an interesting insight, I have never thought about it this way!
I have never formally checked but I feel like my baseline pitch gets lower when I speak in English compared to French. I certainly feel more chest vibrations when speaking in English.
I came up with a dummy sentence with a bunch of English loan words to get a feel for baseline pitch in the three languages:
In terms of pitch height, it feels like English < French < Japanese.
Feel free to criticize my English accent while we’re on the topic of accent reduction in foreign languages 
In the spirit of giving feedback because it’s really hard to get when you’re a good enough speaker that natives think it’s fine. 
I don’t have a lot to say. I can tell that you probably aren’t a native speaker, but I’m doubtful I could place your native language if I didn’t know it. You’re definitely in the, “oh your accent sounds interesting” region where I don’t think you’d need to do any accent reduction if you didn’t want to.
That said, for the most nitpicky critique I can come up with, that first vowel in “this” is not quite right. That’s probably the most noticable thing out of everything. It’s really really slight, but it is off.
Also, in my accent at least, I do not hit consonants that section of “took a taxi” nearly that clearly. It’s more like “tookadaxi”. Even if I pretend I’m going to clearly enunciate like you did in that sentence, I’m still going to say “tooka”, and give that final k a lot less weight. You might want to get some of the British English speakers to weigh in on that though, bc your accent sounds like it has maybe a bit of that flavor to it.
Your ee and a (particularly in supermarket) are too long & accented (you can even see they’re where the audio spikes in the clip) - which at least to my Northeast US/New York ear sounds weird. (To be clear, I don’t have a stereotypical NYC accent - most of us don’t - but am from the area).
Otherwise things feel a bit too clearly enunciated, and not slurred enough. In my accent: “this weeken’I took a taxit’th’ supermarket” is about as well as I could approximate it… In taxit’th’, the ’ = like the u in unnecessary (short and unaccentend).
Interesting, I didn’t notice that at all. I do agree that in general it has something of a British flavor to it - in which case all my comments might be irrelevant
It is funny you say that because British English represents a really tiny proportion of my English input, which is otherwise overwhelmingly American. As a matter of fact, I recall sometimes struggling to understand the actors’ speech when I was watching Black Mirror and The Peaky Blinders. Maybe the UK Received Pronunciation I was taught at school had a bigger influence than I imagined.
