Tell me about your ear

[darkemeralds]

Who here likes audiobooks? Can I ask you some questions?

What's important to you in a reader/narrator/actor--particularly in fiction? Have you ever figuratively thrown an audiobook across the room because some particular thing about the reading bugged the crap out of you?

For example, do you value voice quality above all? Can't stand certain types of voices? Would listen to Alan Rickman reading the phone book?

Or is vivid characterization most important? Do you like really dramatic character readings? Or are subtle variations enough for you to keep track of the story?

How much do you care about authentic dialect, accents, and accurate representation of, say, foreign words in a text? 

What about male versus female voices? Have you ever felt that an audiobook would have been improved by an actor of a different vocal gender? 

And pacing: do you use the playback speed control on your audiobook app if someone is too slow? Too rushed?

Here's why I'm asking: I'm thinking seriously of hiring a voice actor to create an audiobook of Restraint. I know what I like, but in the long process of workshopping the novel I've learned that my taste is pretty specific, maybe even alienating to people who might like my work if I opened it out a bit more.

I can't please everyone, of course, but if I'm gonna shell out for this production, I'd like to get a sense of your taste, too, and try to meet it.

Comments

[legionseagle]

There needs to be a certain timbre in the voice: Robert Powell is perfect, as is Alan Rickman. It's not gendered; women like Harriet Walter and Emma Thompson are equally good. Contralto and tenor ranges; vocal variation, authority and not too much acting.

A flavour of accents and dialect, but not playacting or too much drama. A good pace.

[darkemeralds]

"Not playacting too much" is the perfect description of one of my own strongly held preferences. Thank you!

What about the idea of the right voice for the story? That's a pretty subtle nuance, kind of hard to pin down. Sometimes it comes down to accent more than anything for me: I found Juliet Stevenson, whose voice I love and whose acting I admire, wonderful on Sense and Sensibility--wry, humorous, and terribly British--whereas I couldn't figure out why on earth they hired her to read Liz Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, whose main character was 19th century American. It wasn't as if she did a bad job. It was just an odd choice, and detracted a bit from the story for me. Juliet isn't one of the British-trained actors who has conquered the American voice.

One really interesting case was Lindsay Crouse reading Stephen King's Misery. You could make an argument that, the protagonist and POV character being a man, a woman reader was an odd choice. Yet it was so damned refreshing to hear a woman's voice reading a "man" story, I loved it. I've listened to quite a few "women's" stories (notably Georgette Heyer's Regency romances) with men readers. I don't mind, but it's not always clear how or why the choice was made.

There's a lot of nuance to this business!

[legionseagle]

I think if you choose an accent which is not a natural one for the story - so you have Mark Twain read by Stephen Fry, say - you've got to have a feel for how that apparent mismatch is going to come over, and a point to it. So it hasn't got to default to "This is culture; therefore the person reading it has to have [specific qualities of class and privilege] in their voice" but more "This accent reading these words will add another dimension" (like someone with a pronounced Yorkshire accent reading Ruth's declaration to Naomi, from the KJV, for example: Ruth stands in tears amid the alien corn, and that slight "non-Biblical" wording adds that dimension.)

Someone did a great podcast of one of my Sherlock stories and she was either Australian or New Zealand and somehow that accent worked perfectly, because it gave a sort of detachment, a not-acted quality which added that kind of shadow.

[darkemeralds]

Such apparently inapposite pairings of reader and material would add a layer of meaning to the story. I remember taking a while to settle in to Joss Whedon's Much Ado because Alexis Denisof sounded so jarringly American in it. Once I did settle in, however, Shakespeare took over. (I imagine there were some who couldn't get past it.) But the upper-class California setting and American voices did add a fresh dimension.

[darkemeralds]

PS: On your recommendation, I've just bought The Secret History of the World read by Robert Powell. It's right in the wheelhouse of my next novel, which involves secret societies, so it was a great find that I wouldn't otherwise have stumbled on. Thanks!

[darkemeralds]

PPS: Now listening to the Robert Powell narration and yes! He's wonderful. A lovely, easy voice with what sounds to me like perfect RP, while remaining friendly and approachable. And so clear and definite about the meaning of the sentences he's reading. <3 <3

[cathexys]

I listen to tons of audiobooks and I quit the ones that do too much playacting or accents. (Example, I thought about getting Naomi Novik's Uprooted and didn't after listening to a sample.)

I prefer female voices if it's a first person female narrative but don't mind either for everything else.

For me clarity and pacing are really the most important thing. Often authors don't do a good job, so I tend to skip those unless they're unusually good. As for pacing...I do listen to a lot of books on 1.25, but that's a personal preference. Usually I'd rather have a book too slow than too fast.

Your narrative's in the UK, right? I personally don't care, but I think some folks would prefer a British accent...

Good luck!!!

[darkemeralds]

We're two for two on "too much playacting"--three for three if I count my own strong vote. I'm a huge Georgette Heyer audiobook fan, and I return to those stories over and over again as my comfort-food listening. Some, sadly, I couldn't bear to revisit even once because of over-dramatized reading.

More than a few books--fiction and nonfiction alike--have been ruined, too, by the feeling that the actor went into the studio, opened the text for the first time, and started reading, unprepared to deliver inflections and emphases correctly, altering or destroying the actual meaning of the text.

I think for quite a long time audiobooks were an afterthought to publishers, and nobody in the business really gave much of a damn about them. Now, however, they're such a big part of the market that quality seems to be rising.

And yes, my novel is very English. I couldn't bear to have it read by anyone but a Real Brit™.

[grrlpup]

My audiobook listening is exclusively fiction, and mostly YA novels.

With children's books especially, the dealbreaker is an Overly Bright And Interesting inflection that makes me feel that the narrator thinks I'm a bit dim, or that is trying to sell the book too much.

I don't have a discriminating ear for accents but I love to hear them. It can diminish my enjoyment if a British narrator makes American characters sound like weird cowboys, but I wouldn't quit a book over that unless it's a big portion of the narration. Overdone funny voices for characters to differentiate them annoy me, but sometimes I stick with it and become sort of fond of the narrator's efforts eventually.

There are books that feel girl-centric or woman-centric for which I would find a male narrator an odd choice. And I think I notice whether the narrator's gender matches the author's and/or protagonist's, when selecting audiobooks. I might also prefer female narrators in general because that's a voice that will be in my head for ten hours and there's Too Much Man already in much of my world. But gender considerations don't last past the first few minutes, and are overcome pretty easily by individual narrators I love.

[darkemeralds]

Excellent perspective on the question of narrator's voice gender. There is decidedly "Too Much Man" in my world--or at least in my head, and yet, as for you, I find that a good narration will quickly begin to feel gender-neutral.

My experience of YA audiobooks is limited, but I've run across a kind of teacher-ly voice in certain adult nonfiction that felt condescending and "explainy". A similar issue arises with degrees of articulation. There's a fine line between clear and unnaturally precise.

One of my very favorite readers, Simon Prebble, read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and also has done a Complete Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle did like to include Americana in his stories, and yes, in Prebble's voice they do sound like weird cowboys. LOL! Perfect description! But I forgive him because he's wonderful.

There's a reader named Eve Mattheson who does a couple of my favorite Georgette Heyer novels and makes an absolute MEAL out of some of the funnier characters. It took a little getting used to, but yes, eventually (because I return to those books time and again), I became fond of those readings.

[andeincascade]

Even worse than the phone book, I own the audiobook of Alan Rickman reading Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native, the only way I could ever endure that book. I have audiobooks for long drives but I can't use this one on the road - AR's voice is too soothing.

[darkemeralds]

Hah! I have that one too! I'm afraid that even Rickman, rest his beautiful soul, couldn't quite make me stick with Hardy. But God, the opening descriptions of the landscape are still with me.

totally OT

[cathexys]

I love Hardy, but I had to LOL at that comment!!!

(Incidentally, I've always loved the 9th doctor because I'd just seen Eccleston as Jude the Obscure and that unimaginable sorrow of one just worked perfectly for the other...also, when I try to explain to my students naturalism I always use that moment when they find the children....)

I've recently spent a lot of time falling asleep to the Aaronovitch narrator. I have some podficcers too who are perfect for going to sleep (and I mean that in the best way possible because I always go to sleep with audio :)

Re: totally OT

[darkemeralds]

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is fantastic! I enjoyed his reading of all the Aaronovitch books and revisited the first three volumes more than once apiece because I found him so enjoyable.

Another audio-book reader

[jesse_the_k]

I popped in to support your "it's a book, not a staged reading!" position. Too much character in the reading is excruciating: I read books so I get to determine who I care about.

I greatly prefer female narrators -- I think they're easier to hear. But I'm willing to listen to David Oyelowo read John LeCarre (outstanding!)

I have thrown audio books back in the library slot for pronunciation errors, though. In a book about libraries, the narrator said "lie-berry" five times and I Was Done. A director should have caught this, but I guess audio-book directors are also getting canned a lot.

p.p.s. I was browsing your tags to see whether your work would have inventive linguistic challenges (without conclusive answer) and I discovered your OATCAKES recipe. I'm also GF, and was searching one out! Are you still enjoying it?

Re: Another audio-book reader

[darkemeralds]

Thanks for weighing in. We DW/LJ/fandom listeners seem to be 100% united on NO PLAYACTING OR OVER-DRAMATIZATION.

Audiobook directors are rare these days. Seems like only the big publishing houses are dealing with the media production firms that do a full-crew type of recording. The expense must be enormous!

Most of the voice talent out there is freelance. They have their own studio setups and do their own recording and editing. Microphone and digital recording technologies have come such a long way that unless you're a huge audiophile, good enough really IS good enough for spoken word.

But of course we listeners are going to run across amateur work, and our only protections are ratings and samples. I've tried books with grossly underprepared readers, readers with sinus problems, readers who mispronounced key terms...someone's brother-in-law, basically. Lie-berry is way outside the pale, but I remember one book that featured some discussion of wine, and the reader seemed to think that the correct pronunciation of a certain French red was Château Nee-oof du Pa-pay. Sigh...

It's only fair to say that I've also run across errors in the top-of-the-line media-company productions of classic or bestselling works by big name actors. Mind you, these are typically editing errors where a repetition that should have been cut was left in. But a certain small percentage of slight misreadings seems to be allowable. I don't mind this sort of thing. It's clarity, voice quality, correct pronunciation and flow above all for me.

My own novel doesn't have a lot of pitfalls, but there are some accents (French, Scots, English regional and class-based) and a few French and Italian phrases and place names; the style is a bit on the classical, Jane-Austen side, and there's a large-ish cast of characters. It will absolutely require a real British actor with a fair education.

I still make those oatcakes regularly, and they're still a hit with the fam. I hope you give it a try. To me, the key is getting them baked to a crisp in a fairly slow oven--and eating them with delicious butter and cheese. :D

[thishobbitslife]

I would listen to Alan Rickman no matter what.

That being said, I really enjoy Campbell Scott: he can do women without making it all false and high-pitched. There's something about the way he changes tone that makes it obvious it's a woman, but a real woman, not a caricature of one.

Also, some energy to it. Some readers are dry as hell (tends to be the author-read ones for some reason, unless it's Gaiman); others have just the right...'I'm a voice actor for an animated film' aspect to it, but without being over the top. Again, Campbell does this just right.

Aside...I'm glad to 'see' you!

[thishobbitslife]

This is the first audiobook I listened to that he narrated: https://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Time-and-Again-Audiobook/B002UZL4SU?qid=1500524311&sr=2-15

Won me over. I didn't even realize it was a man doing a woman's voice. He's that good.