Your throat will absolutely not hurt if you’re a trained actor with a trained voice. You learn how to sing and speak with proper technique — years of classes — exactly so that doesn’t happen. Otherwise no one would survive on Broadway doing eight shows a week.
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.
One of the bigger reasons professionals are able to do broadway 8 shows a week is that they limit their voice to those 2-3 hours. Michael Crawford (who is the Phantom of the Opera to my ears) refused to sing at a tribute to him and the Phantom cast, because he had another play later that evening and didn’t want to damage his voice.
I firmly believe that even a trained actor would become strained after three consecutive ten hour days of constant speaking.
Well, as someone with friends on Broadway... I hate to tell you, but your belief is just wrong. Sorry :)
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.
Interestingly, as someone who worked as an audio engineer for 8 years, engineering for audiobooks is very poorly paid. The studio I negotiated with (one that record some very well known titles) pay all their engineers by the _finished_ hour. So all the added production work for a poor reader falls on the editor.
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.
> I agreed to the challenge only because I was assured it was not unusual for a first-person, non-fiction book to be read by its inexperienced author. But I never met anyone else like that in my three days at the studio. I met only professionals.
Ray Bradbury narrated some of his own audiobooks. Hearing him was a mixed bag though.
I'd like to know how the readers benefit from reading. Someone like Grover Gardner or David Timson - these guys ready pretty substantial books - Herodotus, Shelby Foote, Boswell, Gibbon...
Do they retain all that they read? Is it an enriching experience?
Are there any good resources for learning more about voice acting? I'm a complete amateur and probably will never record an audiobook, but I love reading to my kids and always feel like I could do better with differentiating character voices, accents, etc.
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.
> 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.
Here in Sweden where collective bargaining is widespread I haven't found that it's somehow in conflict with individual bargaining. Collective bargaining results in minimums, like this is the worst deal we can give you based on collective agreement. You can still bargain individually to get a better deal than that.
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.
In the US, in particular at least one NYC government agency, unionized "system analyst" jobs are common. They get a defined salary based on experience and level, an assigned eight hour shift with half-hour lunch break, and a clock that must be punched into on time. Another has kind and caring help desk people who nevertheless carefully watch the clock.
>Organizing means losing the right to individual bargaining when signing a new contract.
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.
And programmers in particular are taken with the notion that they are exceptional. They are, or aim to be, "10x programmers" who deserve multiples of their coworkers. They're already paid multiples of workers with comparable skills and comparable working hours -- though they do like to reinforce the myth of their superiority by working long hours.
They're not the usual temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They're temporarily comfortable billionaires.
> Edit: I'm not against this, but American Individualism makes people think they can get a better deal by negotiating alone.
One would think individualism should encourage a healthy level of skepticism towards corporate FUD, rather than unreflecting acceptance of trivial falsehoods as true.
Which is interesting because a voice actor could be replaced in a day with minimal impact, but if all the tech workers in a game shop went on strike, the shop would be shut down. It's worse than that, because even if the shop could replace them all the next day, it would take months to regain momentum, if at all, using new labor.
Just because another profession is worse off doesn't mean it does not deserve sympathy imo. Why not hope for both professions' working conditions to improve ?
On a side note, unionization is gaining traction amongst game devs, which will hopefully bring some (very needed) changes within the profession.
That has to do with consistency of employment. Most developers have reliable income; at any given time, approximately two percent of the actors guild is employed. Most actors, voice and otherwise, have day jobs; fifteen percent of actor's guild members make over sixteen thousand dollars from acting.
What do you mean with So "your throat hurts" after a few days' work? I'm finding it difficult to muster sympathy.? Why should anyone hurt anything after work? Where is the health and safety service for these people? And for you I guess... Is this some kind of sentiment I am to Dutch to understand?
I don't think it's a Dutch vs USA thing. More a white-collar vs blue-collar dichotomy. Some people don't seem to understand or appreciate how good they have it, and their complaints ring hollow to me. It's a matter of perspective.
>"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.
> 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.
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.
It's really depressing when people see that group A is doing reasonably well while group B is treated poorly, and conclude not that we should treat B better but that A needs to shut up about their problems.
Maybe not in the most literal sense, but I can't see how to read "So your throat hurts after a few days' work? I'm finding it difficult to muster sympathy" as anything but dismissive.
Shouldn't your contempt be saved for the devs who are dumb enough to work without royalties or a union contract? It seems like the voice actors are the ones who have it figured out and we are the dumb ones.
> And, as members of the actor's union, they are paid scale. (edit: and royalties.)
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.
Despite advances in deep learning, it's still very easy to tell a TTS voice from a human voice. Even companies like Apple that has paid special attention[0] to the naturalness of TTS can't get it completely.
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?
Here's why I think animated films are done like that.
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.)
I use Apple's TTS to read books. It may not sound like a human, but after a few hours of listening to it the strange nature of the voice gets abstracted away by your brain. It's very functional. I knocked out Neal Stephenson's Anathem a week ago in about two days using TTS to read probably 75% of it.
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.
I can imagine using TTS to catch up on news articles, magazine articles, reviewing a textbook, maybe even listening to opinion columns while out on the go or multitasking with my Photoshop time, but I can't imagine it doing anything except ruining a novel, or anything else involving drama or comedy.
Far from ruining novels, it's quite pleasant. After you've become accustomed to it, it becomes a very low-fatigue way to read for extended periods of time. I find books read by TTS are just as immersive as reading print. In fact the experience of TTS and reading print seem closer to me than print vs audiobooks.
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.
That's really interesting. Basically the audiobook is more of an interpretation of the text. It's perhaps closer to a movie adaptation. Once you lose the exception for the TTS to "tell you a story" but rather to "tell you the words", it becomes just a different input stream. I didn't think about it like that until now. I'll give it a try.
I listen to a lot of non-fiction in TTS but I haven't found it all that satisfactory for novels. Although part of the reason is if I'm listening to a novel via TTS it's because there isn't an audiobook available and I've had to do some hacky OCR to get the text in the first place.
I do this as well. I used Samsung's TTS engine at first, but Google's has mostly caught up.
As a bonus, I can switch between listening (in the car or working out) and reading (most other times) without losing my place.
The audible audiobook version of Anathem is extremely good in my opinion. Probably one of my favorite readings... I’m surprised that speech synthesis does a reasonable job given the language involved.
The Audible version of The Baroque Cycle is one of the best voice performances I've heard.
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:
It costs 100s of millions of dollars to animate and market a feature Pixar film. It would be very penny-wise/pound-foolish to try to skimp on voice-acting. Animated films will be the last place to start using TTS. Honestly they might ADR people in low budget live-action with TTS before it reaches the major animation studios.
I don't know... whilst I'm not an audio book fan myself, people who are fans seem very sensitive to different audiobook performers. For example, James Marsters wasn't able to read a single book in the Dresden Files series, and lots of fans quickly noticed and complained.
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.
I was just about to post this when I saw your comment. Yeah, when we accidentally got the non-Marster's (still good) audiobook my wife and I were immediately like "this is not right". Master's is the only audiobook personality I know and is talked about by fans all the time (think he used to be in Buffy).
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.
Peace Talks is supposed to be in December or January I think. He has been wrapping up the editing since September.
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.
Marsters did eventually record that book. I listened to the original and definitely missed his reading of the book. I felt the other reader did a decent job (way better than most readers), but Marsters simply does a masterful job.
Peter Kenny is the narrator for most of Iain Banks' Culture series. Hearing a different narrator for Matter just felt off, I've come to associate Peter's accent with the setting.
Solid example. That lone book using a separate narrator was jarring. I agree with the performance aspect. It will take general AI to understand timing of a joke, or pausing for drama. One must literally understand the text to deliver a good narration. I don't expect to see AI capable of that in my life.
Most I could see it do is to allow voice actors change their voice, using it by itself is not feasible because DL doesn't know where to put emphasis, where to speed up and slow down, it doesn't sound emotional. I don't know who would like to have their book read by monotone voice. Maybe it could voice dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Tbh that doesn't sound like a particularly troublesome task. Super-set the language with some new accents, symbols, and new punctuation markers and then off you go.
I read the parent post as suggesting that the appropriate "acting" cues and emphasis might be explicitly annotated in the text just as the intonation and punctuation in normal text.
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.
If anything it could be _improved_ by deep learning. Shitty narrators will disappear, and we'll get high production values audiobooks instead, assuming humans want to get paid, a-la Dune, where there's an entire cast of well selected voice actors narrating the book, and the result is amazing.
I agree. I once put down an audiobook (Xenocide or Children of the mind, don't remember which one) because I couldn't stand one of the voice actors. She did a Japanese accent so overdone, it was so bad that I just skipped all those sections of the story.
Having the choice between a monotone narration and the voice actors in this case would be a much welcome improvement.
At least one of the narrators (who were all American) did a Chinese accent for some sections of Xenocide, and I felt that was the wrong move, considering that the characters were speaking to each other in their native language, not Chinese characters speaking English.
Oh yep. I listened to a full cast reading of The Man of Legends by Kenneth Johnson a couple of months ago and the narration was pretty good on the most part. There was a section that was told from the point of view of a young Hispanic girl and I couldn't understand much of it all. Really annoying.
Let's put it this way: it's difficult for me to find the time to even listen to an excellently narrated audiobook. I'm not going to listen to something narrated by a machine without intonation if I can avoid it. But I had to suffer through one book (Disciplined Entrepreneurship, if you must know) where narration was so bad I wanted to drive my car into a tree more than once. Those guys will be replaced with a machine. The rest have nothing to worry about. The people described in the article are clearly far above anything machines will be able to do in the foreseeable future. Their professional work is closer to that of a theater actor than it is to reading the book.
Low to mediocre? There's more than enough existing audio files for specific voice actors to give it the Deepfakes treatment and synthesize the voices accurately. Of course, that's just voice synthesization, for stories they would have to be able to do different voices for different characters and be able to understand context and emotional moods and the like.
Sounds like AI would basically make the low to mediocre end of the business _exist_ at all, it really, really hard to find audiobooks of some lesser known stuff and I hate having to use TTS because it's awful, but if TTS sounded like that one demo Google did of their AI appointment booking service for Pixel, I'd be way less unhappy about it.
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.