Audiobook DJ

Realism, that's what I want.

When I'm working on a sound design for an audio drama or audio book my major goal is always to make the background ambiences and sounds effects sound real, sound like they are naturally part of the world of the story; and I want the story to sound like it's part of the world.

So, I was standing in my backyard the other day listening to the world, and unfortunately reality isn't nearly as interesting or arty as one might hope.  Chain saws.  What is it about Midwest suburbs, winter and chain saws that are almost ubiquitous?  There's just a lot of noise out there.  Jet planes flying overhead.  Heating and air condensers moaning and rumbling.  Trash trucks wheezing.  Even late at night the constant backdrop of traffic on the Interstate three miles away can just be barely heard over the barking dogs.  All this racket kind of wrecks the ambient effect of the outdoors or at least what one would want the outdoors to sound like.

So, what is the poor sound designer to do?

Award winning Skywalker Ranch sound designer, Randy Thom, has an excellent special features discussion about creating natural sounding backgrounds on the DVD version of CASTAWAY.  He explains that his original intent for the film was to travel to a South Pacific island and record what they heard, the waves, the trees in the breeze, the loneliness.  Instead when they got to the island they realized that all they could hear was not just the din of the surf, but the deafening unrelenting roar of the waves.  No matter where they recorded on the island all they got was a giant overwhelming crush of noise. 

So, Thom goes on with a marvelous explanation of what he had to do to give ambient "personality" to the each location on the island.  He and his crew painstakingly created different sounds for each place on the island:  Roaring waves out in the surf, gentling lapping water sounds on the beach, rustling tree leaves in the interior forest.  It ended up being a brilliant soundtrack, because it was more than real, it was ultra-real. 

A sound designer often has to build the story's reality by picking and choosing, by editing the world of sound.

However, sometimes you get lucky and you hear something perfect.  The snow had stopped falling.  The air was still.  Three vees of Canada Geese approached from the north honking away and as they came overhead it was so quiet I could hear their wings flapping. That's the sound and presence I want to hear in audio books.

-- 

Sound has so much to do with memory and memory has so much to do with Christmas.  We all have Christmas soundtracks in our heads, probably one from childhood and maybe a compilation greatest hits of sounds that evoke very personal memories about the holidays.

-- 

 I was just reading an article that says much of Alaska can get 45 minutes or less of sunlight a day in the dead of winter.  So, this article was recommending ways to stay "up" and be "positive" by avoiding depressing films and listening to soothing music.  I say all you have to do is listen to Native Alaskans and they'll chase the midnight blues away.

In August I was invited to Anchorage to help produce and edit Raven's Radio Hour for Native Voices At the Autry and Native American Public Telecommunications.  Rarely have I worked with such a talented group of professional singers, storytellers and actors.  They just made me smile and it was a joy to be around these folks for eleven days.

The show deftly mixed comic spoofs with traditional tales and juxtaposed their amazingly syncopated drumming with show tunes.  The script was smart and insightful and I'm sure after hearing Romeo and Juliet performed by a stuttering Raven and a gorgeous Eagle you'll never quite hear Shakespeare in the same light again . 

My favorite skit was called, The First Yuk - the creation legend of the Yup'ik people.  I remember there was a big discussion about what the first man should sound like.  We tried goofy accents and odd deliveries and finally realized the obvious-the First Yuk should sound like a guy from Alaska-way back in Alaska.  Because the sound of Alaska sounds like no other place on Earth.

Just recite the village names of Nunapichuak, Shishmaref, D'Loi Chet, Sivuuquq and Naparymuit.  These are the places the cast hailed from and these are sounds of words and imagines that inform their performances.
 
Raven's Radio Hour has just been released on PRX by Native American Public Telecommunications and I'm sure mostly Native radio stations and maybe a few outlying community radio stations will air the show.  That's too bad.  Raven should be played in New York and L.A. right along side Prairie Home Companion and the sports news.  So contact NAPT and get a copy.  It's that good and besides how else are you going to melt the winter blues away? 

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
 Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
B y Brian Price



  Who Voices History Usual Owns the Book
(part of my  Let's Make Sweeping Generalizations Series)

There's an old saying that says history is written by the winners.  I think that's also true in the audiobook industry.  History is voiced by the winners.  And when I say winners, I say it with an English accent. 

The more one listens to the classics, classic histories of ancient Greece and Rome and classic retellings of the classic myths, the more you'll realize that they are all told with English accents even though the British Isles were fifteen hundred miles and a couple of written languages away from the center of the action. 

-- 

October 30, 1938.  Creatures from Mars have landed.  Grover's Mill, NJ waits for news.  And the world would never be the same.  Nor would audio entertainment.

 
So when War of the Worlds pops up on Halloween, listen to it again.  Let the horror and surprise soak in.  There's nothing like it.  War of the Worlds will always be the biggest monster in the room.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

You've heard me complain before about how little information audiobook publishers sometimes divulge about their products.  The descriptive blurbs on the packaging are the same descriptive blurbs used on Amazon's listings, which must have been copied from Audible's descriptions, which are the exact same blurbs written on the back of the packaging.  The lack of information goes full circle in its murkiness.  Sometimes you've got to wonder-do the publishers or distributors listen to any of their own books?

When I'm reviewing a title I always get curious.  I want to know what other books the author has written.  I'd like to know a little more about the narrator's acting career and what other works they've narrated.  I want to know what other people have said about the book.  The publishers seldom provide this kind of information, so I end up heading to the Internet and good old Wikipedia. 

Wikipedia sites about books and authors are often fan based.  In other words, the writers of these sites are happily sharing information about one their favorite subjects-the books they love.  So critically speaking, the sites might lean a little (or a lot) towards the positive side, but for plot and story summaries and the exact order of a 20-book fantasy series that spans a 30-year career Wikipedia is the place to go.

Trying to find out what critics think of a book is getting crazier and crazier on the Internet, because everybody's a critic and everybody has an opinion.  However, it can be entertaining.  I often find myself flipping through customer reviews of sites like Amazon, Audible or Netflix.  I'm a sucker for the five-star customer rating reviews.  

Most products often start out with a five star gushy review-the person loved the book so much because it changed their life when they were 15 years old. Not much help there.  I find that the really interesting, really worthwhile books often have reviews that cut across the boards--a slew of 5-star reviews, a few 4 and 3-star reviews and then a couple deadly one-star reviews that I always find illuminating.  The one-star reviews aren't going to take a boring book lying down; they almost died trying to suffer through the whole thing and they're going to tell you why.  The one star reviews show that the book had enough guts to not be for everybody.

What I know for sure is that when the customer reviewers can't agree on a book, there must be something worthwhile to talk about.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

Hi folks.  Sorry about being out of the loop for so long.  But here's the explanation.  A month ago I returned home from Alaska having worked as producer/editor for two weeks with six amazingly talented Native Alaskans on Raven's Radio Hour, a project of Native Voices At the Autry out of LA-this is one of the absolute coolest gigs I've even been a part of. 

So, I arrived back in sticky, gawmpy end-of-the-summer, rag-weedy Indiana and came down with one of the worst cases of the flu I've had.  I'm talking about hardly knowing who I was for the past three weeks.  Rib cage crushing coughs, sneezes, no sleep, a come and go temperature, blocked sinuses.  It doesn't seem fair.

And what saved my sanity through this episode?  You guessed it.  Good old books-on-tape.  All I could do for the past three weeks was lay on my back either watching or listening to something, anything.  I couldn't concentrate enough to read.  I tried daytime television-it made my brain hurt, heck my whole body hurt-after a couple mornings of TV the flu felt worse than ever.  I tuned into the radio, which was full of news and talk-too loud, too much shouting.

But, ah, audiobooks.  I plugged in my iPod (actually it's my daughter's back up iPod and I had explicit instructions not to mess things up) to my wife's little speaker bay and listened to everything I'm supposed to have reviewed by October.  I listened to a novel, to a couple wonderful plays, a biography and a history.  I even went back and listened to a couple old favorites.  It was just a thing. 

One thing I've always felt very strongly about is that if one is going to review an audiobook one should try to listen to every word.  You own that to the author and the narrator.  You've actually got to concentrate when you're critically listening.  Of course, with laying on one's back with the flu there might be the ever so slightest tendency to nod off now and then.  I'm not saying this happened, but for some reason I have no idea how Alexander the Great got from the Egyptian Pyramids to the Khyber Pass.  I promise I go back and listen to that part.

It's good be back among the living.      

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

Audio theatre or radio theater as it used to be called continues to remain an art form that falls "between the cracks" -- it's not quite a part of books-on-tape publishing, nor radio broadcasting, or the recording industry. It's just a lot of fun to listen to.

I keep waiting for my beloved audio theater's big break, when an original full-cast, full-sound effects and music with all the bells and whistles production goes flying up the best sellers list, and the consumers ask librarians and bookstores -- "Where can we get more of that stuff?"

The big break doesn't seem to be happening, but independent audio theater producers are starting to get some notice. In this year's Audies "Excellence In Production" category 4 or 5 out of the 19 finalists were from small producers not affiliated with or distributed by major publishers. The winners of the Mark Time Science Fiction and Ogle Horror/Fantasy Audio awards this year were both independent producers.

The hard part for independent producers, just like small book publishers or Indie record labels, has always been to try to get their work out in front of an audience, to be given a chance. Once upon a time (not so long ago) a radio station program manager had to agree to put one's work on the air, or a record label had to press and release a CD. Money, often lots of it, had to change hands. It was complicated and very hard to get heard.

Suddenly (in the last four or five years) the playing (and listening) field has been leveled. Now, there's podcasting. Dozens and dozens of independent producers are writing, directing, and acting in their own stories. They are free of the constraints of large budgets, traditional distribution problems and time (they aren't worried about how long or how many podcasts they produce -- it's refreshing). Podcasters just put their work up on the web and listening subscribers download what they want to hear. It's like the Wild West.

Most independent audio theater podcasters are small operations. A core group of college friends or fantasy fans or community theater enthusiasts get together and put up a show. Some get a little more serious and start producing elaborate series, putting up more shows and using voices of friends and fans recorded remotely from around the world.

I've always had a soft spot for first novels. I try to pick one up now and then to hear what a brand new voice has to say. Sometimes they're good and sometimes, not so good, but every now and then I run into a real gem.

I feel the same way about independent audio theater. There are a lot of stories out there waiting to be told and most of the stories aren't going to be published by the big boys. Still, the writers and producers tell their tales. I like that. It seems very American to me. So, I recommend you google around the Internet and find a few audio theater podcasts to listen to. You might find a really good story or two and you very well might be listening to the future of how stories will be told.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

Apparently long ago (probably around December 1969) someone at the National Air and Space Administration "accidentally" erased, or more likely just simply recorded over, the original NASA video tapes and audio recordings of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Recording over and reusing videotape time after time was a common practice back then -- just like recording over security camera footage is still fairly common practice today. Besides, that old videotape was expensive, spooled on big two-inch wide metal reels, and took up a lot of storage space. You had to use them over and over.

But don't worry. In the short article I read about the little glitch, NASA assured the public that there were a number of "quality" copies of the original out there; AND, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing NASA was going to digitally enhance the historic footage.

This got me to thinking -- when I've been asked to teach an introduction to audio or history of radio class one of my favorite examples to use to is play "ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MAN, ONE SMALL STEP FOR MANKIND" for the class and see if anybody notices that I made a slight edit in Neil Armstrong's quote. It takes about 10 seconds to cut and paste GIANT LEAP with SMALL STEP; there's plenty of space between the words, and lots of background hiss in the recording to cover up the sound of an edit. Ninety percent of the time nobody notices on the first listen.

I do a lot of digital editing nowadays -- from editing a live performance recording for broadcast to choosing audio examples for a review to assembling the hundreds of edits for a book-on-tape project. Each edit can affect the pace, clarity and sometimes even the meaning of a piece. Hopefully (and this is important) these edits are being made (as Maxwell Smart used to say) for good and not evil.

But, what about history? History is always being edited. It's just too long and has too many slow places. NASA's presentation of the Moon Landing basically was early reality TV -- hundreds of hours of tape were recorded and broadcast, but the media and the public can only digest just so many sound bytes and quotes.

Neil Armstrong's gave us a perfect sound byte for the perfect occasion -- one of the more positive shared memories in history. We know where we were and nothing bad happened -- remarkable. The quote was honest, thoughtful, amazingly well delivered and struck a nerve. Now the original recording is gone and the quote itself can be digitized, turned upside down and enhanced, and still we know it. We know exactly what it was supposed to sound like. That's a pretty good memory.

Happy Anniversary Neil, Buzz and Michael.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

When I read a book I read everything. I read the forward, the preface, and if it's got one -t he preamble. I read the copyright page. I look at the smudgy maps and peruse the acknowledgements. And I'm a sucker for reading all the "unique, entertaining, ground-breaking, original and first-rate" synopsizes on the back of the dust cover.

I do the same thing with audiobooks. I listen to the introduction from the publisher and listen all the way through to the credits at the end. I even usually suffer through the "if you'd like a complete catalogue of all our complete titles please call 1-800-555-5555 or visit our website at wwwdotwebsitedotcom."

While listening, I try to glean what facts and credits I can from the audiobook packaging, which is like a starving man trying to get a meal from a wasted and gnawed chicken leg in a dumpster. The recording credits are usually slapped on the side of the box written in a 4-point font and there are seldom any tidbits about the performers.

I want information. And the problem is that in this new age of audio downloads it is getting harder and harder to find out anything about anything. The audiobook download sites basically leave the idea of pertinent information up to the mercy of Google. Looking up Moby Dick will give you a 50-50 chance of getting either Melville or a porno site and the porno site probably is listed first.

I often go to Wikipedia sites to check on author credits and story lines. I've had to practically bust down a publisher's door when they listed a group of multiple narrators as various. When I'm reviewing an audiobook I want names, I don't want various.

The problem is that I'm demanding two things that the audio parts of audiobooks don't do well: Lists and spellings. One really needs to have a cast list or a list of credits in front of them to make sense.

I've noticed that a number of publishers are including ebook files along with their audio versions of the book. I propose that (just like the extra feaures on a feature length DVD) the publishers include a few files with background and bonus information about the audiobooks. I'm a big snoop and love extra information and as an added bonus when I review the book I might be able to spell their names right.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

When I first started writing book-on-tape reviews somewhere towards the end of the last century, I must've run into the word sonorous a couple dozen times in the first six months. Sounding more like a description of coffee than vocal quality, every richly toned, full-bodied, darkly hued narrative voice was described as sonorous. These sonorous voices were serious and trustworthy, resonant, and easy on the ears. They were delightful.

But what deep, bassy voices really do is cut through the crap -- the white noise, office hum and blaring background sounds of everyday life. These days we are constantly listening in louder, noisier, lawn-mowing decibel rumbling environments with smaller and smaller little buds stuck in our ears. The program you're listening to has to be able to get above and through all that. That's why most AM and FM deejays have those good old blaring, overly reverbed low voices -- you can hear them driving 70 mph down the highway with the top down.

You can't hear subtle, theatrical, nuanced performances driving 70 mph down the highway with the top down. You can't hear children's reading voices at 70 mph. You can't hear an oboe solo at 70 mph. Deep voices and sounds get heard.

It's physics: high notes, high tones, soprano voices are very directional. In other words, when a high tone comes out of a radio or CD speaker, the tone goes in the one direction that it is pointed toward. Bass tones come out of the speaker in an all-around, omni-directional path. Just like those annoying bass thumps from a boom-box car, lower tones can be heard in all directions.

The sounds and recordings of history are so different to our ears. I was listening to the British Library: Voices of History series the other day and it is amazing how nasally, mid-range and Midwestern P.T. Barum and Charles Lindbergh sounded. Great orators like Abraham Lincoln (whose voice was never recorded), Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Bryant (who were recorded) had high or mid-range voices. Their voices could be heard and would resonate just fine in a good lecture hall, in a barn yard, or sitting in front of the radio, but not at 70 mph with the top down.

Recently, a Harvard study concluded that women of certain third-world tribes are more attracted to men with deeper voices and believe they are better hunters, better providers and better mates. Oh well, now I'm even more jealous of those who are sonorous than ever before.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

A while back I was listening to an audiobook about the Founding Fathers and the origins of their thoughts and philosophies. When reading quotes, the narrator jumped back and forth from a broad Boston Irish brogue for John Adams to a NASCAR southern twang for Thomas Jefferson. It got me to thinking - that's probably not quite what those guys sounded like, but what did our American ancestors really sound like?

The answers are influenced by where any given individual forefather was living, where (meaning what part of England) did their forefathers come from and what kind of education they received. So, let's see, that would mean that John Adams would've probably spoken some variation of a nasally East Anglia influenced Puritan accent with its loss of syllable ending "r's and stretched out "ough" (as in bought) sounds. Still very English, the Irishness didn't arrive until the 1840s. George Washington was of Virginia Cavalier stock and most likely would've spoken an accent from southern Britain, which leaned toward the beginnings of a modern southern accent, but was decidedly more British than HeeHaw sounding.

Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson is said to have had a "high country" accent influenced by north of England and Scottish speech patterns, which in turn later led to the distinct Appalachian accents. However, you'd also need to mix in Jefferson's formal French and Latin studies. This thumbnail sketch argues that those figures from our Revolutionary days probably didn't speak in any accents we'd readily recognize. Still, after 200 years of accent evolution, their words would've been understandable to somebody in the 21st century. Which is more than one can say, for example, about Middle English.  With its mixture of Germanic roots and Latinized (from the conquering Normans) endings, it apparently sounded like a collision between the Swedish Chef and Jacques Costeau.

After all this blather the question remains--when narrating a contemporary history book should getting the accents historically correct matter? A little. Not a lot, but a little. An actor might argue that what our forefathers really sounded like might not be as important as conveying the emotion behind what they really meant. To create emotion and truth with your voice you need to create character, and character is what creates exceptional listening.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price - Great Northern Audio

Continuing for a little longer to talk about styles in audio production, I think perhaps the most stylized audio medium of all may be radio theater. Within five seconds of listening one can almost always tell what era those pieces came out of. That's not a bad thing. Those old radio shows were always entertaining, evocative and representative of their times.

I was scrolling through the Mark Time Science Fiction Audio Awards Hall of Fame webpage the other day and I was amazed at how wonderful, still listenable and hugely influential those half-forgotten chestnuts are. You've got to go look at the list: http://www.greatnorthernaudio.com/MarkTime/MT_HoFame.html. There are the depression-era sounds of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The high water marks of the late 1930s-early 1940s live-broadcast productions of Orson Welles and Norman Corwin, and then the droll atomic black and white 1950s sensibilities of Ray Bradbury and the Dimension X, X Minus 1 series.

As serial radio programming (radio as fiction) stumbled into its quick death by television in the late fifties early sixties LP comedy records took on science fiction's need to comment about the how the worlds going to look. Bill Dana doing the weak-in-the-knees astronaut, "Jose Jimenez." The Firesign Theatre taking on our Disney-future with "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus." And then back to (BBC) radio (which Americans heard as recordings) the Monty Python-like (because Douglas Adams worked with them) "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Along with Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby those records are the hit parade of my youth and listening to the sound, the audio style, and the delivery you know right where you were when you first heard them.

But in the amazing list of Mark Time Award Hall of Famers there's one odd stand-out-a-little-more, otherworldly chestnut among chestnuts. It's the 15-part 1981Wisconsin Public Radio adaptation of Walter Miller, Jr's 1961 novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. When I first heard this show I couldn't guess where it came from or when it was produced. It sounded and stills sounds timeless, or perhaps separated from time. It's as weird and as thoughtful as the book.

Like the Leibowitz blueprints in the book this show is buried, seldom played and hard to find (I did see a knockoff MP3 version on ebay recently). And maybe that's my point-for these chestnuts, your memory of what they sounded like and what they meant may be just as important as what they were.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price www.greatnorthernaudio.com

Our everyday listening world is split into three different dimensions: what we hear, what we think we hear and what we expect to hear.

I want to talk about what we expect to hear, because that's practically the whole basis for how audiobooks and story telling in general works. Hearing is all about suggestions, especially in my little neck of the woods -- multi-cast audio theater. With voices, sound effects, music and silence -- basically with just words and noise -- you create a world within itself. Our minds and senses have the amazing ability to take all the sounds and syllables we hear and make them make sense while turning them into pictures.

Audiobook producers and actors use shortcuts to get us in the mood, to get our brains in the game. I'm talking about style. And not just individual reading styles, but I'm talking about broad, sometimes set-in-stone performance and audio production styles.

Here are a few examples: (1)The detective noir style -- Hard-boiled, seen-it-all, and used everywhere all the time from film to television to books. (2) Broadcast style -- This just in, the news is the story and the story is the news. (3) Broadway -- The book-on-tape on stage. (4) Disney --  Hey kids, let's have fun. (5) Classics style -- this stuff is old, it better not be fun. The classic style amazes me, because it is pretty obvious that many audio producers think certain books, certain works from certain eras should and must sound certain ways. Which usually means Greek myths should sound loud and boring, all "literature" should be done with British accents, and if it's good for you it should be read in a monotone. Of course, there are grand and glorious performances of the classics going on out there.

My point is that the audiobook industry often produces books certain ways because they believe that there is a certain way certain books should and must sound. Here's an extreme case: A few years ago I reviewed a reading of Alice In Wonderland with a middle aged "Dame" (I'm not kidding) performing Alice. It was sooooo nineteenth century and I can't imagine anyone now days doing a TV or movie version with anybody but a very talented kid playing the part of Alice. But I could hear in the performance that they had plugged into a very stylized idea and thought kids would love it. They really thought that's the way Alice was supposed to sound. Not necessarily how it could be creatively interpreted or how they would like it to sound, but how it should sound. All I'm saying is that is if this were a bus, style should be treated as part of the engine, not the driver.

THE ECHO OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Notes on Audio Publishing and Production
By Brian Price www.greatnorthernaudio.com