Voice Characterizations

KentF · Post by **KentF** » February 24th, 2006, 10:54 pm

I know that the official LibriVox position is that you don't need to try and use voice characters for your recordings, but I would like to make my recordings sound as close as possible to professional audio books (at least in terms of my delivery. I know my home studio leaves something to be desired).

I'm always amazed at the number of clearly defined believable characters that some of the pro readers can deliver. One of my problems right now is that I have a limited number of voice characters at my disposal. I would love to see a discussion on how to develop good stable of character voices.

Some of my areas of concern are:

Developing feminine and child voices. My voice tends to rumble around in the basement anyhow and I don't have much falsetto range.

Developing distinct voices in the same gender without having to rely on accents when the author doesn't call for them. I can work my voice in different pitches, but they all still tend to sound like me...if that makes sense.

Keeping the characters sounding like people not cartoons.

I'm sure I could probably come up with a million other questions about this art if I tried and I'm sure other folks on here would have a million questions of their own.

Again, for myself, I really do have a desire to develop as professional as possible delivery for audio books. I may never be a Dick Hill, but I would love to push myself as far in that direction as my natural abilities allow.

The student is ready...send in the teachers.

ChipDoc · Post by **ChipDoc** » February 25th, 2006, 6:10 am

Well I'm not a teacher - just another student. You never really stop learning this sort of thing. First off, I'd like to commend you for trying to improve as much as you can. We'll all become better as we do this more, but you'll become better a lot faster if you are consciously aware of trying to improve.

I just had the pleasure of listening to George Guidall reading Elie Wiesel's Night. The author did a mighty work in creating a compelling narrative for George to read, but I noticed a few things which he did to seperate the characters in that reading.

1) He learned Hebrew, at least to the point where he could speak the words of that language with the same passion with which he expressed the English words. Now I speak but one word of Hebrew (L'hiam) so I might be wrong on that one, but he sure was convincing.

2) He spent time listening to ethnic Jews speaking English. You can tell because his characterizations were absolutely spot-on. Once he got that Yiddish lilt to his voice, it was a simple matter to differentiate between the characters because he was SO comfortable in speaking that way.

and THIS is the really important one

3) He worked with a director.

When we do this, we generally work alone. We pick a way of voicing a character which sounds right to us and then just go with it. But when George did his reading, he had someone sitting on the other side of the glass who collaborated with him to create that reading. If you and I were sitting in the same room as one of us were reading, we'd feed off of each other and exchange ideas on what worked and what didn't. By eliminating all of the things which don't work, the whole piece comes out a lot more "professional".

There's really nothing quite like a live audience to put a spark into any performance. You can actually do this alone by imagining the audience. That's what I do to liven my readings, but to have a real live person sitting there and participating in the creative process is invaluable. It's also beyond the reach of most of us.

Now comes the place where I'll either incur the wrath or the love of the many librarians around this place.

Go to your local library and explain what you're doing with LibriVox. Librarians, kind of by definition, are passionate about books. You might spark some interest in the readings you're doing and convince someone to try this with you. It's easy enough to do this at the library - just bring your microphone and some portable memory and you can do it right there in a study room. It doesn't really take all that long to read a chapter out loud and if you can schedule a time when this works for both you and the librarian then you can get something regular going with someone who's actively participating in the creative process with you - someone who can bring their own perspective on the work and with whom you can discuss options in real-time.

Each of us has our own "inner voice" which we hear when we read. Combining these voices can't help but improve the final product.

RobertG · Post by **RobertG** » February 25th, 2006, 10:08 am

I've done voices that worked extremely well and others that have not come off well at all.

When my mother turned seventy a few years back, I called her to welcome her to the Crone Society and offer to bring by several gifts especially meant for old crones. This spiel went on for about ten minutes non-stop and was completely unscripted. She never knew it was me. I was into my old, absent-minded man mode with a querulous and confused manner.

After he was done speaking to her, he handed the phone over to me and I seamlessly moved back into my normal speaking voice.

I am no teacher, either, but I can do a few voices credibly well and this is what I've learned about making it successful:

Study the characters who have the voice you want to acquire. Chip described the method George Guidall used and that is spot on. You can never be credible with voice characters without study and much practice. I have spent years around people from north Texas and south Oklahoma and so Eugene Pinto's voice is born through real study. For some reason, old men always seem to want to come around and talk to me about their lives. So I have had years of study of them, too. That makes my voice characterization of the old man with no name credible.
Immerse yourself in that character while reading. This is not as easy as you might think, because you really have to set your own personality aside while you assume the other. You can get locked up in some states for doing this. When I played the old man to my mother, I could feel my flesh sag and my thoughts become more jumbled and slower.
Accept that there will probably be some voice characters forever outside your range. A friend of mine in Calfiornia has put her daughter through numerous acting and singing classes under fine coaches in the Los Angeles area since she was a small girl. She is now in high school and sings well and does some acting in the local community theater - even winning an award for her role as Ann Frank. But she works within her range and that range is not unlimited, despite the professional training.

My voice tends toward the deep side, too. When I read a chapter from Through the Looking Glass, my Alice sounded dead - I fondly think of her now as Prozac Alice. If you are going to do voices of women and children, study the pattern and manner of speech instead of just trying to figure out how you are going to hit the high notes. Not all children and women speak in falsetto tones.
My uncle (John Wrisley of Columbia, South Carolina) was in radio and television from the 40's on. He also performed in stage plays. But I never noticed that he had remarkable range despite all those years in the business. His own voice was powerful, smooth and envied and he continued to do video voice-overs well into his 70's.

He has what I think of as radio-voice. There is a training that takes place with people in that business -- and I know we have many radio people here and I want to reassure them that I am not critical of this particular school of voice development-- so that there is a uniformity of style and tone as you twist the dial across the radio band. Because of that training, I'm not sure that many radio people make the leap to producing professional audio books. Actors, on the other hand, are more used to studying and falling into character. It's probably no coincidence that actors have found a home in the professional audio book business.

If you are really serious about developing your ability to do professional-grade voice characters, I would recommend enrolling in an acting class and getting involved with your local community theater.

There's my dos centavos on the topic! It's a good topic, too. I look forward to hearing other's views on it!

ChipDoc · Post by **ChipDoc** » February 25th, 2006, 4:57 pm

RobertG wrote:He has what I think of as radio-voice. There is a training that takes place with people in that business -- and I know we have many radio people here and I want to reassure them that I am not critical of this particular school of voice development-- so that there is a uniformity of style and tone as you twist the dial across the radio band.

All professional radio folks are, whether they know it or not, trying to sound like the great CBS Radio voice from WWII, Edward R. Murrow. The foremost proponent of this school is the man Murrow mentored, Walter Cronkite. These folks worked for Bill Paley, and Paley demanded that his people be "the best" - by which, of course, he meant what HE liked to hear. That calm, stentorian Voice Of Truth became so engrained in the cultural psyche that absolutely everyone you hear on TV (and on what survives of network news) sounds that way, even if they don't know why.

Incidentally, there's another example of this phenomenon in a completely different field. Ever listen to pilots? They all adopt the West Virginian twang of test pilot Chuck Yeager.

It does take some doing to break out of that mould, and I'm only partially successful at it. This is why I tend to read things like prefaces and narratives without a lot of dialogue - I'm staying within my range with that stuff. I'm far less practiced at doing dialogue. I can slip into the mindset easily enough, but that old Voice Of Truth thing (I never had a whit of professional voice training - mine is just old habit) is difficult to shuck.

RobertG · Post by **RobertG** » February 25th, 2006, 11:58 pm

I seem to recall somethig about Curt Gowdy being a benchmark for sports casters at one time. I suppose every form of the media business has its Morrow...

I've never had any training outside of a public speaking class I took in college once and I have no doubt that it shows up more often than not. But what the hell... a million years from now this will have all been forgotten. In the meantime, we can all just read and listen and have a few laughs.

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » February 26th, 2006, 12:12 am

perhaps one of you could start a librivox wiki page with these suggestions for voice acting?

RobertG · Post by **RobertG** » February 26th, 2006, 12:38 am

As I said, I don't feel that I'm an expert in this area. Even so, I will jot some things down and put together something on this topic for the wiki.

ChipDoc · Post by **ChipDoc** » February 26th, 2006, 6:10 am

Ooooh, check THIS out! It's an interview with George Guidall, the guy who read Elie Wiesel's Night for Recorded Books. He's got over 800 of the things to his credit and does it for a living, reading from 9 AM to 4 PM four days a week.

It's a wonderful look into the mind of a man who has more experience at doing this than all of us put together!

http://www.liljas-library.com/guidallint.html

RobertG · Post by **RobertG** » February 26th, 2006, 8:34 am

Just took a quick look and already see it's giong to be priceless!

George Guidall wrote: I do always have a book with me, though. If I find myself somewhere with time on my hands and I'm "bookless," I go into a form of withdrawal and read whatever is near. Billboards, discarded newspapers, bumper stickers, even the fine print on credit cards can suffice in an emergency.

kri · Post by **kri** » February 26th, 2006, 10:48 am

RobertG wrote:Just took a quick look and already see it's giong to be priceless!

George Guidall wrote: I do always have a book with me, though. If I find myself somewhere with time on my hands and I'm "bookless," I go into a form of withdrawal and read whatever is near. Billboards, discarded newspapers, bumper stickers, even the fine print on credit cards can suffice in an emergency.

You know I do that too, to some extent. I generally read everything around me, and sometimes re-read things I've passed a million times and already read.

peastman · Post by **peastman** » February 26th, 2006, 11:48 am

I'd also be grateful for any tips in this area. I have the opposite problem to Kent - my voice is fairly high pitched. So I can do children's voices reasonably well by just raising the pitch a little further, and women's voices half decently by speaking entirely in head voice. But I have a lot of trouble with characters who are supposed to have deep voices. I can't lower my pitch very far before it starts to sound very artificial.

I recently made my first attempt at giving a character an accent (the Sea Rat in Wind in the Willows). Unfortunately, there's not much guidance about what kind of accent he's supposed to have - he describes himself as equally at home anywhere from Constantinople to London! So I tried to come up with a fairly generic European accent and not overdo it too much. The result was alright, though I think he came out sounding more Irish than anything else...

Anyway, I'd appreciate any other tips on how to make characters easily distinguishable from each other. I recently listened to a professional recording of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. The person who read it was incredible. He had a huge number of different characters, including people from lots of different parts of the world, and every one of them was instantly recognizable.

Peter

kri · Post by **kri** » February 26th, 2006, 12:00 pm

The problem that I have with voices is that I forget what/if I've done for voices.

KentF · Post by **KentF** » February 27th, 2006, 7:18 am

I love some of the things I've seen so far. This George Guidall interview looks great. Here's another link that may be of interest. Audio File Magazine has several profiles of narrators on their web site. The ones I have looked at don't get very technical, but they do make good reads.

http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/gvpages/short_profile.shtml

I used to do the billboard thing all the time when we took trips. Then my girls got old enough to complain loudly that dad was embarrassing them. I don't read the billboards any more.

One of the things I will say about radio is that it's often described as the most intimate of the mass medias. The listener is almost never more than an arms length away and they listen while doing the most personal of things (I always found the shower radio to be a frightening device if I thought about it too much.)

We are taught the "one to one" concept early on....I think chipdoc mentioned it...the idea of imagining your listener while you are reading. I think a lot of that mind set carries over into audio books, but at the same time narration of audio books is still more of a performance. The downside is that we all do have this one character we do very well...the "me" character. Like I said before I try changing up my delivery and still come away with the sense that I am listening to me. I'm sure practice will help me get away from that. The other thing I have noticed is that bad habits stick around longer than good habits. After not having spent much time in a studio for several years I find myself constantly fighting to not "announce" when I am reading chapters, especially if I am in the narrative voice.

kri mentioned loosing track of the voices. I've had the same problem a few times in the book I am reading now. A bad cold forced me to put the book aside for a week or so and when I cam back to it I found I couldn't find the collective "voice of the gods" anymore. I had to go back and re-listen to the chapters I had done to find it again. I am seriously considering going through a book before I start listing all of the characters and recording a short reference file of each one, so I have it on hand to check as I work.

Another radio habit I am trying to overcome is the dependence on multi-track technology. I know when I used to do production that required multiple voices I would record them all separately and then piece the whole thing together for a final product. I get the sense that this is not how the professional narrators work. That it is much more of a straight read through.

gToon · Post by **gToon** » February 27th, 2006, 10:30 am

Thanks for the interview links and the excellent comments on voice acting. I'd like to put my 2cents in and mention that reading aloud is not that same as acting on stage or in front of a camera. It is really a form of "oral interpretation" that places emphasis on the story above all else. The idea of "getting into your character" is deceptive, I think, because as KentF mentioned the only reall charcter in a reading is the Narrator. Research, vocal work, imaginination, mimicry; all of these help to make a reading better, but what I think is finally most important is the Story. Too much of a performance takes away from the intent of reading aloud which is to communicate the story of the book to the listener.

I actually prefer the Librivox readings to most professional recordings because of the simplicity of the readings. Most readers really love the books they are reading from and communicate that love through their reading. Many professional readers do it as a job and simply have gifted voices and reading skills; which is not to say that these aren't assets in a reading, but I really like the roughness and immediacy of our Librivox readers. It's the roughness around the edges that I like very much.

And, of course, we are discussing reading aloud works of fiction. The challenges of working on non-fiction bring a whole different set of factors to consider.

RobertG · Post by **RobertG** » February 27th, 2006, 1:24 pm

I'm glad that gToon made these comments. Although I am able to fluidly do a few "voices" -- I really much prefer to simply read the story in my own voice. Subltle changes to modulation can be made to distinguish different characters in a story and it's not really necessary to go whole hog with character development in order to tell a good story.

I, too, enjoy the rough edges that appear when "common" people tell a story.

This thread started because Kent was interested in taking it to the next level. It is probably likely that a few people participating in the LibriVox project have dreams of doing something like this for a living. I certainly would like to-- it would be a lot more fun than teaching engineers how to create 3D computer models of aircraft structures for a living!

gToon wrote:I'd like to put my 2cents in and mention that reading aloud is not that same as acting on stage or in front of a camera. It is really a form of "oral interpretation"...

I agree and yet disagree. Creating a voice character is very much acting, in my opinion-- but it is not physical acting as you would expect from a stage actor. I guess it becomes a matter of semantics-- can acting not have physical action? Can an act be all inside your own head?

Many well known actors are attracted not only to audio books but to performing voices for films that consist entirely of animation. It must be a real joy for them to show up for work, unshaven and in their grubbies and not have to worry about costuming and make-up. Just strap on the headset and go!

In any event, there is a real danger in trying to create voice characters: going over the top. Readers who are not willing to spend a significant amount of time in developing a credible character voice should just stick to developing their own voice.

If I throw in this two cents, how much money have we accumulated so far?

<- This is not the face of an expert!