Over the past two and half months—despite a slurry of personal engagements, deadlines, and responsibilities—I’ve listened to seven audiobooks. And throughout this journey, the one thing I continue to ask myself is: Why?
Have I discovered an overwhelming love for literature and storytelling? No, not really. Do I live by some incredulous belief that reading improves your vocabulary? Hogwash! I don’t even know what incredulous means.
The best explanation I’ve got is this: The reason I’m so obsessed with audiobooks is that the people who read them are just so darn funny—especially when they’re not trying to be.
Take, for example, the differences between recording methods. Two weeks ago, I listened to a Kurt Vonnegut story called Sirens of Titan. Total classic. What made it even better, though, was the story’s narrator Jay Snyder.
Snyder offered perfectly crisp audio, a wonderfully active way of storytelling, and stellar voice work—to the point where you could hear Snyder pause just a second longer for all the comedic paragraph-breaking moments. Which makes sense. As a professional audiobook, you’d at least expect the audio category to be up to snuff. But I’ve since learned that’s not always the case.
After Sirens of Titan, I listened to the first half of Breakfast of Champions. Same author, but read by some different this time. John Malkovich. The John Malkovich. And, who could’ve guessed, the audio was terrible!
Heavy static and clipping filled the background. A monotone Malkovich read the entire first chapter without ever adjusting his volume or tone. But in a way, as described by one NY Times reviewer, it worked. The drab narration fits the bleakly comedic mood of Vonnegut’s piece perfectly. Here, the words are allowed to stand alone, devoid of character work or vocal interpretation.
And so it goes. After a month and a half of reading, I’d learned that audiobooks don’t need perfect recordings to be compelling.
With the cat out of the cradle, I listened to a few more books. This time, paying close attention to how different voices and audio production methods interacted with the story.
I found one more fascinating aspect of audiobooks that relates to our class: Character voice acting. Imagine listening to a completely normal telling only for the narrator to break their voice while telling dialogue of a secondary character—adjusting their pitch and tone perfectly, without any digital help. As I work on the ADR porject I’ve become good friends with the pitch adjusters, so it amazes how people can naturally make these voices.
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There’s just so much we could talk about when it comes to listening to and recording audiobooks. So, I leave you with a recording of The Old Man and The Sea read by American Actor Charlton Heston. Listening to the guy who played Moses in The Ten Commandments repeat “the fish, the fish, the fish” in a desperate fisherman’s voice is bound to make you laugh. Or it won’t, i’m going mad, and I’ll be darned if I don’t drag you down with me.
Happy listening!