Your throat hurts, your brain hurts: the life of the audiobook star
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For an author who wants to narrate their own book though? Yes, if they don’t have vocal training. Which is why that might not always be the best idea, among other reasons.
I firmly believe that even a trained actor would become strained after three consecutive ten hour days of constant speaking.
When you're rehearsing, it's all day long, for weeks and weeks. And once performances begin, Broadway actors are known to make further money during the day doing voiceover work since it fits their schedule, being one of the few acting gigs with a fixed, predictable daytime schedule.
Now certainly, you can't be belting high notes all day long. (Which may explain your story about Michael Crawford -- extreme singing is different, and that's a professional tenor range.) But a normal speaking voice? Absolutely.
That's also why, if you'll notice in the article, only one person is quoted as their throat hurting. Because for trained voiceover artists, it's simply a non-issue.
Fun fact: the vocal cords are one of the muscles in the body that don't ever get fatigued (similar to the diaphragm, heart). Which isn't to say you can't damage them (you can, with improper technique -- which is the case with most people without vocal training). But they don't "tire out" with use the way most muscles do.
That said, I don't have enough information to refute your points for professionals. Just testimonials from YouTubers. :) Thank you for the insight!
I spoke to some friends who had done work for the same studio to find out what typical production times were for a quick-working editor, then quickly moved on.
Ray Bradbury narrated some of his own audiobooks. Hearing him was a mixed bag though.
Do they retain all that they read? Is it an enriching experience?
And, as members of the actor's union, they are paid scale. (edit: and royalties.)
I'm struck by the irony that voice actors (who work for a day or two on a video game) are paid royalties for years, while developers (who work crazy overtime for years on a video game) are paid a straight salary, then laid off after it ships as a "cost savings" measure.
So "your throat hurts" after a few days' work? I'm finding it difficult to muster sympathy.
It's not their fault that developers aren't using unions to extract their share of the massive wealth that successful video games generate, and instead choose to work for free.
Not really -- depends on the game. If it's a big budget Batman game you're going to need Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, they don't come cheap.
Even using Troy Baker as a stand in -- fans absolutely notice -- even though Troy is good and big as a voice actor in his own right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21520129
On the one hand, programmers are called impossibly naive for trying to organize.
Then when others do organize, rather than revising the claim that it's naive to even think about organizing, they simply resent those who do.
Organizing means losing the right to individual bargaining when signing a new contract.
Edit: I'm not against this, but American Individualism makes people think they can get a better deal by negotiating alone.
It can perhaps be an issue if you feel that you can be more attractive on the market by undercutting the competition, but I'd guess that the majority of game developers are not in that position.
They're not the usual temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They're temporarily comfortable billionaires.
That's not accurate - Actors, for example, conduct individual bargaining all the time. They just get a guild minimum that protects them from being taken advantage of. It's not a cap on earnings.
One would think individualism should encourage a healthy level of skepticism towards corporate FUD, rather than unreflecting acceptance of trivial falsehoods as true.
>"Why should someone hurt after any work?"
Because some work is just HARD. It involves dangerous things (chemicals, biologicals, heavy things, powerful equipment, sharp edges, heights, etc.). The world is built by people willing to take on these tough tasks and not all of it can be accomplished by a digital assistant, or through pushing a button.
The bit about the actor bursting into tears from the idea of being paid to read a second day shows a serious lack of self-awareness and perspective.
Ask a stone mason how his shoulders and knees feel after a few days of stacking block. Or the oilfield worker, after a few hours of stacking straws on a derrick. Same goes for the guy in the steel mill working hour 10 of a 12-hour shift, the office janitor tidying up at night, the line cook at the restaurant on the corner, or the long haul truck driver clocking mile 600 with 200 more to go. Some work is just hard.
For the actors, watching a season or two of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" would be a suitable counterbalance.
Not really. Developers have a monthly salary and a kind of work insurance paid by the company and/or the state in many parts of the world while most actors work in a risky business with sporadic work.
Also, if developers start getting royalties voice actors will receive less royalties or the company income will be reduced and all this could rebalance to, for example, more expensive games or lower developer salaries that at the end could be the same total.
Not saying it is not fair to paid developers royalties, just saying that sometimes there is a state of economic balance and changing it doesn't make it fairer at the end.
I don't think that is what that person said or intended.
I do not think it's necessarily the case that they're paid royalties. I've considered getting audiobooks made for my books and Findaway Voices[1] and ACX both provide options where you just pay per finished hour.
A good narrator can cost $200 or more per finished hour, so it's not bad money and they're not assuming any risk. There are also options where the upfront payment is less and the narrator gets royalties.
Also, did you notice that in all major animated films (think Disney or Pixar), while the imagery are all computer-generated, the voices are not?
[0]: https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-voices.htm...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWK_iYBl8cA impresses me and it just feels like a low quality recording.
It's concerning given how computing power and resources advance over time.
and an unnamed start-up a while back: http://web.archive.org/web/20190803012012/https://instaud.io...
What it doesn't do is the acting. In an audiobook, the voice actor will change their voice in various ways for dramatic effect, and in that respect the book becomes something like a radio drama. With TTS you're getting "just the book". I think that's the major difference and the refuge in which voice actors might hope for continued employment.
Having said that, some fairly small scale audiobooks that have the authors narrating them are also very good as you can hear the interest and the passion of the author in their subject:
e.g.
I guess what I'm saying is don't underestimate neuroplasticity. I wager you could even achieve casual fluency with morse code if you listened to it long enough. I'm under the impression that some telegraph operators did.
The best/only way to get most of that computer-generated imagery is by huge amounts of manual labour: designing, animating, simulating, sometimes motion-capturing. It's painstaking detail work involving many people.
The best way to get the voices is with a small amount of manual labour: voice acting.
If you put as much manual effort as the imagery into controlling the nuances of a TTS engine, you might get acceptable results, but it's far easier and cheaper to use voice actors. In fact, the easiest way to tell a TTS engine exactly what you want would probably be to voice act and have it mimic you. This might be worth trying to do if remapping vocal anatomy (e.g. woman voicing man or vice versa, or monster, etc.), but for most purposes it's easier to hire appropriate voice actors and/or manipulate the vocal recording audio than to use it to drive a resynthesis by simulation.
Those are deliberately made to sound unnatural. Not to say it changes anything, and they've already shown up once or twice in anime.
(Though the only example I can name off the bat is Black Rock Shooter, and that doesn't include the voice. It's complicated. Mato is complicated, too.)
Well, big budget theatrical animated films from major studios like Pixar or DreamWorks, sure.
But most animated films aren't those.
Having the choice between a monotone narration and the voice actors in this case would be a much welcome improvement.
I am not sure if some of the brands advertising on YouTube realise what crap inventory their adverts are being run on.
It's similar to saying that voice actors (and then actual visual actors) will soon be out of business because we can soon 'automate' that too...
Voice (audiobook) acting is a _performance_, not a routine task to tick the "available on Audible" box.
For anyone who hasn't ever read the Dresden Files, it is a fantasy series set in modern Chicago with a young wizard way in over his head. The series starts off kinda bleh with the first few books, but steadily picks up pace as the main character gets more involved with all the crazy things going on. The author puts basically every single (ok a lot) of diverse mythologies as if it is all real (Odin, Mab, Erlking, Skinwalkers, Trolls, the Fae, Necromancers, 4 different kinds of Vampires, Roman Gods, the White God, Angels, Demons, Lucifer, Dragons, Cthulhu, and about a dozen other bad and good things all with a single coherant plot. The main character starts to see that all of these major supernatural entities are moving their armies like 3D chess. The characters take some time to develop, but are seriously good.
The dresden files subreddit has one of the author's beta readers that sends us some updates although no spoilers of course. She says it will be as big of a whammy as "Changes".
There was also a new Goodman Gray shirt story released recently.
However, I'd guess that it's simply quicker and more efficient for someone to just properly act and speak the lines with a dramatic effect and any explicit annotation of how exactly they should be said takes much more time and effort.