Voice Characterizations

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » April 18th, 2009, 12:30 am

Hehe, that's the lovely thing about Librivox. You read things the way you want to. I think I am incapable of reading fiction without doing voices. They just appear of their own accord.

But it's certainly true that voice characterizations are not necessary for a good reading, and many listeners do prefer to make their own interpretations from a plain vanilla version. That's one of the reasons that Librivox welcomes multiple recorded versions of texts to give listeners the "choice of voice".

Ruth

kristin · Post by **kristin** » April 18th, 2009, 1:48 am

edp05mab wrote: Does anyone know how some narrators mimick the sound of someone calling on the phone? I realize for the kind of works that are in the public domain, we are unlikely to need to do this, but still curious

You can get an effect like that in audacity by using equalization under the effect menu and turning the high and low frequencies all the way down.

Secrets · Post by **Secrets** » April 18th, 2009, 3:56 pm

A "dummies" question coming up....

How do you get "expressiveness" into a reading?

I'm a geek... sadly no art or drama background (not even in Infants school).
So how do you aim to become what I would call Expressive, with the right rhythm and tone?

What is the first thing you look at ?

Peter Why · Post by **Peter Why** » April 19th, 2009, 1:54 am

I would say, read aloud from a book you enjoy (especially books for children) ... not recording, and without witnesses ... and ham it up. Read the narration in your ordinary voice, but speed up, slow down, be frightened or happy as you read ... and so on.

When you read the various characters, don't try to get consistent voices for the different people, just feel for the character and situation.

I'll read a fragment of a Terry Pratchett story (because I like to read them out aloud) and post it here shortly, without any editing, to show you what I mean.

Peter

Hokuspokus · Post by **Hokuspokus** » April 19th, 2009, 2:07 am

Hm, not sure, but I think posting a recording of a copyrighted text in the forums can cause trouble ...

Peter Why · Post by **Peter Why** » April 19th, 2009, 2:14 am

I would have thought a short fragment was reasonable use .. but I'll do a little from Three Men in a Boat. A shame, the Pratchett was fun to do.

Peter Why · Post by **Peter Why** » April 19th, 2009, 2:36 am

Here you go, a two minute speck of Three Men in a Boat, with me exaggerating the narrator's voice and timing as he moves from humorous to tragic. It's a lot of fun to do.

http://upload.librivox.org/share/uploads/xx/ThreeMenTest.mp3

I've just edited out a little empty space, and amplified the whole thing, leaving re-readings in.

A couple of other exercises you could do is take a paragraph from a book you like and read it with different emphases that might fit it, or try putting on the characters of different readers.

For me, although I would like to use a different voice for all the characters in the fiction I read, I have little experience at creating voices, so I cheat a little and choose stories with relatively few voices in them (Through the Looking Glass was *very* hard work, with lots of characters turning up for just a few sentences!).

But the narrator, where you can use your own voice, is where you can work best. Read as if you were reading to a child, with creepy, happy, running, walking in your head as you read.

Peter

Cori · Post by **Cori** » April 19th, 2009, 3:19 am

Adding to Peter's suggestions, and I know I'm completely stating the obvious, but anyway: Understand what is being read. And then care about explaining it to the listener.

It's possible to be expressive without really understanding what the author's going on about, but ... it's not going to be very meaningful that way. Caring about the text means that we're going to naturally be expressive, as we emphasise what we each find important, change our voice slightly for an aside and so on. Reading is a bit different to normal lecturing, because we can have the overall flow of the piece in mind, rather than speaking individual points and perhaps becoming a bit monotone because of the concentration involved in using the right words in the first place.

Finally, simplest of all, actually smile when reading something happy or funny. It's audible in the voice and is a lovely way to shade the text for listeners.

icyjumbo · Post by **icyjumbo** » April 19th, 2009, 5:56 am

I'd also like to re-emphasize Peter's point about hamming it up. It feels really awkward at first, but when you listen to a recording where the reader did ham it up, it sounds much more expressive than the limited amount of expressiveness that normally feels natural.

On a related note, hamming is a good technique for getting a decent accent in a foreign language. Or at least, that's what I've found when speaking French. My shoulders and hands move differently too! One has to lose all fear of standing out in the crowd. And it's the same for reading with expression. It's a performance.

And speaking of performance: take a look sometime at stage makeup. It's a lot more over the top than normal makeup, because it has to be visible from futher away. When you read for LibriVox, you are also further away from the listener, because the listener can't see your face, which carries a lot of the expression of the reading. You have to make up for that lack with more expression in your voice, hence the over-acting.

Now you know why I record in a larder. There's no room for a live audience, and I can be as hammy as I like.

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » April 19th, 2009, 7:37 am

icyjumbo wrote: There's no room for a live audience, and I can be as hammy as I like.

I second the hamming up. You really wouldn't want to see me doing Heathcliff and Cathy's lines. I frighten myself, even.

Ruth

ExEmGe · Post by **ExEmGe** » April 19th, 2009, 11:50 am

And, of course, listen to the professionals. There are at least three readings every day on BBC Radio 4, normally with first class readers.

Secrets · Post by **Secrets** » April 19th, 2009, 3:02 pm

Thank you all so so much! Especially Peter, I loved your reading. You hold the listener enraptured, which is what I can only dream of doing. You're able to to read a piece, and to leave a listener "spellbound".

So if I see a phrase that seems happy, then I smile, to illustrate it ? Like a "telephone voice".

I have no angle on how to show anger, frustration, awe or unrequited love. It's how to express all these emotions... at that one moment in time. Apart from generating the emotion.. to fake it, well...
Without drama training, that leaves me at a loss.

When you see a poem, any poem, do you read it through first... and pick out the emotive words? If I started by showing emotion on the easy words, like "smiling", "joyous", Sad... is that enough?

And the pauses are great. How do you "feel" how long to hold a pause? do you count to 2 or 3 or does that vary?

I'll dig out some old children's books and start having a go. I'll probably get arrested as a nutter, so this post is evidence for the defence. **Waves to the Judge**
Time for me to go into the CLOSET. My goodness. Life is exciting.

icyjumbo · Post by **icyjumbo** » April 19th, 2009, 3:19 pm

Smiling is a well-known way of getting an emotion into the voice. If you listen on the phone to someone who is smiling, then you know it. And it's easy to smile. So if you are reading something that wants to be read in a happy voice, smile as you read it.

It works pretty much the same way for other emotions. Think about how you know, just from the way they are speaking, that someone is sad. As you listen to someone sad, you'll find your own face taking on a sad expression. You'll know it when it happens, even if you can't describe what is happening to the face.

The same thing goes for anger, disgust, shock, and fear. Those six emotions (happy, sad, angry, disgusted, shocked, and afraid) may not seem like much, but everyone in the world recognizes them from facial expressions. (Wikipedia seems to think there are seven universal emotions.) I'd be willing to bet that some of the emotion comes through in the voice too. And it turns out to be a really good start for getting expression into the voice. I happen to think there are other emotions that are easy to voice, such as outrage, but that's another post.

Try it. Think of something disgusting, and then record yourself describing it. Try all those emotions. Experiment. But make sure you record your experiments, as you don't hear your own voice the same way as others hear it.

Peter Why · Post by **Peter Why** » April 19th, 2009, 3:28 pm

Thank you for the compliment, but it's only come from reading aloud to myself, for the pleasure of it. I do love doing Detritus the troll in the later Pratchetts.

I really do think that imagining you're reading to a child helps. Think of the difference between reading "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman" as a cold bit of poetry and the way you'd put the growling ogre in your voice to read it for a child.

And the timing's not deliberate, at least not much, when I'm recording, though sudden things and anger or panic tend to be faster than creepy, frightening, sad or loving speech.

It's a bit esoteric, but I do tend to adjust some of the timing when I'm editing, afterwards. I partly do this by adding silence copied from somewhere else in the recording, when I think my voice is hurrying; I also do it by watching the Audacity sonogram while I'm listening and note where I expect the next word to begin, and cut out or add silence to make it fit. But I'm really a bit too finicky about this.

It'll come .. honestly.

Don't work at it, relax to it, enjoy what you're doing, and let that show in your voice.

You may come to works that bore you or that you can't understand, as Cori said; it may be best not to record them at this stage. I had an enormous amount of trouble with the small bit of Shakespeare that I read, because the meaning of what I was reading didn't come naturally to me, so I didn't know where to emphasise.

Peter

BellonaTimes · Post by **BellonaTimes** » April 21st, 2009, 6:26 pm

icyjumbo wrote:Smiling is a well-known way of getting an emotion into the voice. If you listen on the phone to someone who is smiling, then you know it. And it's easy to smile. So if you are reading something that wants to be read in a happy voice, smile as you read it.

It works pretty much the same way for other emotions. Think about how you know, just from the way they are speaking, that someone is sad. As you listen to someone sad, you'll find your own face taking on a sad expression. You'll know it when it happens, even if you can't describe what is happening to the face.

The same thing goes for anger, disgust, shock, and fear. Those six emotions (happy, sad, angry, disgusted, shocked, and afraid) may not seem like much, but everyone in the world recognizes them from facial expressions. (Wikipedia seems to think there are seven universal emotions.) I'd be willing to bet that some of the emotion comes through in the voice too. And it turns out to be a really good start for getting expression into the voice. I happen to think there are other emotions that are easy to voice, such as outrage, but that's another post.

Try it. Think of something disgusting, and then record yourself describing it. Try all those emotions. Experiment. But make sure you record your experiments, as you don't hear your own voice the same way as others hear it.

Some of the salesmen and customer service people at the company I work for have large mirrors in their cubicles to maintain smiling or friendly faces....seems to work for them.