... consisting of postings regarding my various pursuits: in software engineering, as an audiobook narrator, and in the field of education and educational technology. Besides these topics, as the title of the blog suggests, I reserve the right to veer off course in various constructive (or completely unconstructive) ways.
Each time I’m ready to begin recording a new chapter of an audiobook, I sit down in my recording studio and go through a ritualized sequence of technical preparations. And then, I begin to read aloud -- TO ABSOLUTELY NO ONE. Nobody is EVER there! How weird is that? It certainly FEELS weird – especially the first few times I did it. And honestly, I still occasionally pause in wonder at the strangeness of the act of reading to people who are not there – who are instead off in some unseeable and untouchable future. This visceral experience is part of what anthropologist Michael Wesch and his students term "context collapse". In their studies of YouTube culture, they not only observed, but also experienced for themselves how strange and awkward it is to sit alone in front of a webcam and say, "I'm talking to you, but … I don't know who you are." (To get a better sense of what "context collapse" is to Wesch and his students, click here to watch a minute or two of their video.) The fact is that I will never meet and will never know most of the people who ultimately listen to my audio and video productions. But I’m actually fine with that aspect of context collapse, perhaps due to my decades of previous experience performing and speaking before LIVE audiences. Instead, my occasional stumbling blocks come from another major component of context collapse: my own spontaneous judgment of my own performance, as I am performing. This instant self-critique can be helpful when I catch myself accidentally deviating from the way I had originally planned to read a passage. In some of these cases, it is wholly appropriate to stop dead in my tracks and go back to re-record a section to correct an obvious mistake. But there are times when an unexpected and unplanned deviation is NOT a mistake, but is instead a moment of creative serendipity. The challenge in such cases is to allow myself to keep going, to overrule the voice in my head that might be screaming "STOP," to permit the spontaneous creation of something OTHER than what I had (sometimes rigorously) originally planned for. The best example of "extended serendipity" that I can offer from my collected works is my recording of THE TELL-TALE HEART by Edgar Allan Poe:
I knew that this reading required a special approach, since it consists of the first-person ravings of a psychopathic murderer. While I carefully studied the narrative beforehand to intimately refamiliarize myself with the arch of the story, I determined that it would not pay to plan my performance with the same level of detail that I usually do. Most importantly, I made the complete recording in two long takes, not stopping for ANYTHING (also very unusual for me). The end result is a recording that captures one serendipitous moment after another, because very little of what you hear was planned out in advance. (Be advised that this material may not be appropriate for small children -- it is, after all, the murderous ravings of a lunatic.)
One of the most profound differentiators between audiobook narration and any other type of oration lies in the need for the lone narrator to create distinctive voicings for all of the characters that engage in dialogue within a story being recorded. While it's not always necessary to go to extreme lengths of making unique voices and personalities (i.e., the job is not to fool the listener into thinking that they are hearing multiple actors performing a work of radio theater), it is absolutely vital to provide enough voice differentiation so that the listener can tell when a particular character is speaking. With that said -- I, for one, do indeed like to strive to give even minor characters as much unique personality and "attitude" as I can. And all aspects of prosody are at my disposal, including tempo, pitch, amplitude, volume, vocal placement (throat vs. mouth), percussiveness, and accent. But I don’t really think of these individual aspects in technical terms as I create a voice; instead I spend some time simply imagining what the character is like. Then I locate some of their dialogue in the text and just start experimenting with it, until I find a sound that "fits". I don’t agonize over this -- the entire process of establishing a voice, even for a main character, usually takes no more than a minute or two. A standard challenge that all narrators face is the cross-gender challenge. For me, being a male with a naturally baritone to tenor speaking voice, the challenge comes in reading the dialogue of female characters. As the best vocal coaches teach, it’s not all about pitch. (Speaking in falsetto is definitely off the menu. I don’t want all of my female characters to sound like they popped right out of a Monty Python sketch.) Again, finding a voice is more about first establishing and solidifying my ideas of a character's personality. With women characters this usually then calls for potentially adding an effeminate lilt or breathiness to the voicing, as much (or little) as might be fitting given whatever persona I've conjured up for the character. But above all, the one aspect that I love to play with is accent. However, I only stick within a narrow range of regional accents that I feel at home with. It's fortunate that I spent some formative years both in Texas and in New York City, so dialectical traces from both those places show up naturally in my everyday speech. When I have a character that needs either a full-throttle New York or Texan accent, I simply take the part of my regular voice that leans that way, and consciously crank it up! In the case of the two O. Henry short stories that I've made recordings of, I came to think of the third person narrator (the author himself) to be a "character". And despite the New York City settings of most of his stories, O. Henry was a southerner who spent some of his formative years in Texas. So I can't imagine reading his stories with anything other than a light Texas accent -- the style of his writing simply demands it. In "The Gift of the Magi" below, you’ll note that I give the lead female character a midwestern accent and her husband, the male lead, a Manhattan/Brooklyn accent, while reading the main narrative with the best Austin (Texas) accent I could manage. Also here for your enjoyment is O. Henry’s "The Last Leaf", a more recent recording of mine that will appear on the upcoming audiobook CLASSIC TALES OF HOPE AND COURAGE.
Let me tell you the story of how I began … with nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button. -- Robert Graves
It was one of my favorite times of the school day: the hour when we would sit on the carpet gathered around my second-grade teacher, as she sat in her chair and read a few chapters of a book to us, in a captivating voice that never failed to completely enchant me. Even though I had devoured the entire book in one sitting the previous night, after my teacher had lent it to me to take home, I still passionately looked forward to hearing her read it to us. And she did not disappoint -- we were all enraptured by her reading of the opening chapters of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. If I recall correctly, she was about midway through the second chapter, when a most annoying interruption came! An emissary from the school’s office barged in, insisting that my teacher come to the office that very instant to tend to some bureaucratic humdrummery that ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT WAIT! As it became clear to my teacher that she could not ignore this edict, a thought appeared to come to her, which she then acted upon with cool certainty. As she stood up and took a step away from her chair, she pointed to it and beckoned me to take her place. She then handed me the open book, pointed to a specific spot on the page, and said simply, “Start here.” And then, she walked out. Someone had raised the curtain on my life and said, “begin”. And so I began. Having absolutely no time to think anything through, I knew, above all else, that I could not let my classmates down. I had already been on this fantastic ride: been there with Charlie as he miraculously stumbled upon the last golden ticket, watched in amazement as Augustus Gloop zoomed up the pipe, sailed with the Oompa Loompas up the river of chocolate and beyond! I had been there, and was now tasked with revealing this wondrous world to the others seated before me. There was nothing to do but the doing of it. So do it, I did! It was, in a word, glorious. In a few more words -- I did not disappoint (neither myself nor my classmates). A rather animated child by nature (who was still several years away from learning the adolescent truth that it was “not cool” to be so outgoing), I let the lid come off, and made my voice do whatever was required to fully communicate the roller-coaster of urgencies, joys, horrors, and wonders that were magically contained on the pages in front of me. When my teacher returned a few minutes later, she (being a sensible and sensitive individual) did not interrupt the proceedings, but stood at the back and respectfully allowed me to keep going for the rest of the hour. And the next day at story hour, still I kept going. To my teacher’s credit, in subsequent days she let some other volunteers in the room take their turn at the helm. But that seat of honor, the reading seat, had clearly become my place. I owned it, and it owned me. Since then, throughout my life, there have been countless opportunities for me to fulfill this fundamental calling -- to be a storyteller. Perhaps I’ll have appropriate chances in future blog postings to relate some of those to you. But for now, let me fast-forward to the present, to the storytelling project that is my professional focus of the moment. I am in the midst of putting together the third installment in my “Classic Tales” series of audiobooks: CLASSIC TALES OF HOPE AND COURAGE. But I’m sure at this point you’ve had quite enough of my writing, so no more tedious text. Instead, here is a video to give you a feel for the upcoming audiobook. You may notice that it’s not just a stand-alone video -- it’s couched within a *Kickstarter* project! I’m experimenting with using Kickstarter as a way to “pre-sell” my audiobook productions, which will allow me to ramp up production of more “Classic Tales” audiobooks. If you like what you see, hear, and feel in this video, then please click on through to the Kickstarter project and become involved in whatever way works for you!
What exactly is prosody? That’s a tough question to answer succinctly, but if pressed for an answer, I would say that “prosody” is roughly synonymous to what we otherwise call “expressiveness” in oral reading. Or to analogize -- prosody is to reading aloud as musicianship is to musical performance. But it might be better to break prosody down to its component aspects, which include rhythm, intonation, phrasing, stress, tempo, and volume. These components represent some of the tools of expressiveness that are available to a storyteller to engage and entertain an audience. It is neither accident nor coincidence that the expressive tools of the storyteller are almost exactly the same as those that a musician uses. In my mind, there is NO distinction between prosody and musicality: prosodic expression in storytelling is merely a specific kind of music-making, and all of my past experiences as a classical musician directly inform and shape my work in the creation of audiobooks. Musicians actively develop their musical expressiveness every time they pick up their instrument, and likewise, good storytellers are constantly cognizant of improving their prosody in the midst of each reading. But musicians and storytellers alike usually feel a need to take things further, to persistently work in a very focused way to develop specific aspects of their expressiveness. A pianist might choose a few pieces from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” to use as the basis of their personal expressive studies, working with them rigorously in a practice room to hone their craft. The equivalent for me over the past year has been to utilize a modern English verse translation of “On the Nature of Things” by Lucretius, the lengthy Roman-era exposition on the fundamental tenets of Epicureanism that was so influential to the predominant figures of the Enlightenment. There are very few pages of “On the Nature of Things” that fail to provide numerous prosodic challenges -- considerably greater challenges than I generally encounter in the modern literature that constitutes the bulk of my regular work. I particularly get a workout with phrasing and stress, since I’m reading English poetry that has been translated from Latin poetry, making for some of the most awkward (yet often, strangely beautiful) phrases and sentences that I’ve ever had to utter. And I’m striving always to make it comprehensible to the listener, because I am giving all of my recordings of “On the Nature of Things” to the Librivox project, to be made part of their public domain collection of audiobooks. To give you an idea of what it’s all about, here are the opening stanzas of Book 1 of “On the Nature of Things” by Lucretius.
This a reposting of my first entry as a guest blogger for the blog ON THE PLUM TREE.
* * * * *
A Principal Challenge of Modern
Story-telling
by Daniel Vimont
I'm very grateful to Niamh for
the invitation to take part in these wonderful Plum Tree conversations, which
seem to me to be something of a 21st century version of the stimulating and
enlightening French salons of centuries past.
Since Niamh's invitation was in
the context of my work (and works) as an audiobook narrator, I'd better begin
my part of the conversation at least somewhere in the neighborhood of that
topic. (Who knows where things might veer from there? But that's where I'll
start.)
Let's talk first about
challenges. (That's like skipping the pleasantries and getting straight to the
car chase.) It may be a bit masochistic of me, but I love the fact that as an
audiobook narrator/producer, I face a broad array of challenges every day:
artistic and technical challenges, as well as marketing and financial
challenges. And all of these challenges are overhung by the fairly relentless
meta-challenge of not losing faith in my ability to effectively take on any of
these challenges. (That last one probably sounds very familiar to you, even if
you're not an audiobook narrator.)
In adhering to what I perceive
to be the belles-lettres nature of these Plum Tree conversations, I'll take on
the artistic issues here and leave discussion of the others to some other blog.
It will come as no surprise to
you if I say that during every moment that I am recording an audiobook, I am
reading words off of a page. However, at any moment in which you are listening
to an audiobook of mine, if it ever sounds
like I am reading to you then I have
failed (and failed rather abysmally), to meet one of the fundamental challenges
that I set for myself. When I am reading to you (and of course, every second
you are engaged in one of my audiobooks I am, in fact, reading to you), it must
never ever sound like I am "reading to you".
When your favorite musician
plays or sings for you, does it sound like they are reading notes off of a
page? Hell no!! They are just making beautiful music for you to enjoy, and any
notation that may or may not be in front of them while they are doing it does
not in any way come into your conscious experience as a listener.
Likewise, if I come across
sounding as if I have printed words in front of me that I am reading to you,
then the magic (that I feel must be
there) has been lost. Even though my voice is physically coming through your
earbuds or emanating from your car or living room speakers, it must feel as if I am having a very
intimate conversation with you (just you),
with a spontaneity that distinguishes a natural conversation from a recitation.
Do I succeed at this? Do I come
across as someone who is simply reading something aloud to you, or do I come
across as someone who is telling you a
story? That is for you to decide.
It is up to you to be the judge and jury (and, if necessary, the executioner --
let's hope it doesn't come to that).
Do I think other audiobook
narrators succeed at this? Honestly, very few. But it also seems that not many
of them are even trying to get beyond sounding like they’re "reading".
Which leads me to tentatively conclude that audiobook narration as an art form
is in its very early stages of development.
So if each of us is on our own
Joseph Campbell "hero's journey", then this is mine: hacking through the underbrush in unexplored, unmapped
territory, working to give birth to a new art form.
In preparation for producing my audio book reading of THE TELL-TALE HEART, I simply sat down on my living room couch and started reading through it aloud. I was of course already familiar with the text and knew that the narrator is completely insane. But there is something particularly striking in the opening lines, in which the narrator takes an argumentative and angry stance toward the reader, like, "How DARE you presume that I am insane?" I didn't honestly think through it too much; I simply let the words explain to me how they should be read. And almost immediately the voice that came out reminded me of Norman Bates in his "mother" mode, with a touch of Dana Carvey's church lady thrown in. Then, when I recorded it, I found myself taking a quite different approach from that which I normally do. Rather than using my standard routine of recording approximately one paragraph at a time, I instead recorded the entire short story in two or three very long takes. And in the subsequent editing process I was much more hands-off than usual, leaving in some of the nastier, guttural sound effects that emanated from my throat as I passionately frothed my way through the story, in character. I generally consider myself much more of a storyteller than a voice actor, but in the case of this story -- it is as close to "acting" as I've ever gotten in my audiobook career. Later on I added some visuals to create a video that I posted on YouTube and on Facebook. It was then that I got a nasty surprise in the form of a couple of curious gay-bashing comments from strangers (apparently kids with Facebook accounts). I of course immediately deleted the offensive comments, but it left me with a question: Had I created a work of art that might prove offensive to some people? When I first started recording the story I wasn't honestly sure of the narrator's gender, much less the narrator's sexuality. But here it was being interpreted by some listeners -- negatively interpreted -- as the voice of a gay male. The specific questions that came to mind were -- Could this be interpreted as a kind of gay-bashing artwork in itself? Or, might it be a work that would encourage gay-bashing? I tend to think and fervently hope that the answer to all of these questions is NO, but I'm curious: What do you think? Have a listen to the story here and let me know. The complete audiobook, CLASSIC TALES OF HORROR FOR HALLOWEEN, is available here: http://bit.ly/17czyKG
A newly posted article on The Atlantic website backs me up on one of my pet peeves: the conflation of "voiceover" with "audiobook narration". The two are leagues apart, yet so many "reliable sources" on the Internet treat the two as if they were the same thing. Here's a pointed quote from the article (written by an author who was considering options for the creation of an audiobook version of one of her works):
"The voices of the performers the audiobook company asked me to choose from sounded, if not robotic exactly, more like the Hertz NeverLost lady than Meryl Streep."
This quote hits it on the head: Somebody who can provide the voiceover for a 30-second blurb to sell Big Gulps at Seven-Eleven does not necessarily have any idea how to narrate and produce a long-form narrative work in audiobook format. (An athlete gifted in the 100-meter dash would not necessarily be able to credibly compete in a marathon without properly training for it.) I am NOT saying that a "voiceover artist" could not do a good job with audiobook narration, but experience with one does not automatically transfer to the other. BTW, another standard conflation is this: the powers-that-be also seem to think that anyone with a Screen Actors Guild membership card can automatically narrate audiobooks. Some no doubt can, but one does not automatically give the other. ------------------------------- Edit Sept. 7, 2013: It appears the folks at Brilliance Audio (who have obviously been in the audiobook business a LONG time) agree with drawing a clear distinction between "audiobook narration" and "voiceover". On their "Careers at Brilliance Audio" webpage, they give this succinct instruction to those who would send them audiobook narration audition materials:
We are not interested whatsoever in voice over or commercial work examples.
I'm supposing theirs to be the voice of experience, to which I defer.
Here's another paper that I wrote up for one of my GWU classes last week:
This software review will focus on a product called VoiceThread, a web-based offering that is described on its homepage as “a powerful new way to talk about and share your images, documents, and videos” (VoiceThread, 2009). This review fills a real-world need for assessment that was communicated to me by the second-grade teachers at an international school in China. It is important to note that the review did not in fact follow from a curriculum-driven process which would begin with identification of a need (in the context of a lesson or a unit of study) and be followed by a search and assessment of technologies that might fill or ameliorate the need. Instead, the VoiceThread product (for which the school had already paid for an institutional license) was offered to the second-grade teaching team as something that might be appropriate for use in their current unit of study called “Communications”. While one team member had been given a brief presentation on the technology at the beginning of the school year, she did not recall any of the details of what had been presented, and the teaching team had not developed for themselves an effective definition of what VoiceThread actually is. So they called on me for help.
What is it? To allow the second-grade teaching team to determine whether usage of VoiceThread could be effectively incorporated into an already-in-progress Communications unit, I first had to establish a simple working definition of what VoiceThread is. Unfortunately, the product’s website seems to be intentionally reluctant to provide solid definitions. My guess is that the VoiceThread team wants to free people to invent their own uses for the technology unhindered by overly narrow preconceptions of what it is. So I began by obtaining a free account and browsing some VoiceThread presentations. To describe its elements in straightforward terms: The creator of a VoiceThread presentation posts an image or set of images (or video clips) to establish what resembles a Powerpoint slide show (although VoiceThread uses the term “page” instead of “slide”). The creator and other authorized participants then attach comments to some or all of the images, with a comment being in one of three formats: text, audio, or video. Once the comment is posted to an image, a small thumbnail representing the comment-maker appears next to the image. When a completed presentation is “played back”, all comments are automatically presented in the order of their creation, but the viewer is free to click on individual thumbnails to alter the play-back sequence, or to manually advance forward and backward through the pages of the presentation.
What is it good for? …conversations? One possibility that immediately comes to mind is that VoiceThread might be a medium for conversations about a given image or set of images. In actuality though, VoiceThread only seems to allow for a single-threaded narrative, with each comment-maker “holding the floor” while their comment is presented. But there seems to be no real possibility for a structured give-and-take between two or more of the comment-makers. Certainly, looking at the screen-shot above, there is no possibility for a sub-thread (a separate conversation) to break out in an identifiable way between any two individuals represented by the thumbnails in the picture. So the prospect of VoiceThread’s effective use for hosting of ad hoc multi-party conversations is apparently quite limited.
What is it good for? …storytelling!! At this point in my investigation, it seemed that VoiceThread’s potential for usefulness lay in the realm of “single-threaded narrative”. Googling about, I found a number of people who also identified this as a prospective use of VoiceThread, with one blog literally identifying VoiceThread’s main reason for existence as being to “support template-based digital storytelling” (Fryer, 2008). Yes, that was the answer – after all, what is a “single-threaded narrative”, if not “storytelling”?
Armed with this realization, I went back to the second-grade teaching team and reported to them that VoiceThread might be useful for single-user or collaborative storytelling. It turned out that the teaching team had been searching for ways to enhance the interactions between their second-graders and their “e-pals” at a South Carolina elementary school. The creation and intercontinental sharing of multimedia fictional or nonfictional narratives could challenge the reading, writing, sequencing, and oral presentation skills of the students within the context of the Communications unit.
Comparison of storytelling alternatives through prototyping Now that the teaching team had confirmed that a storytelling solution might be of use to them, it was time to determine whether the product actually worked as advertised, and also to determine whether alternative storytelling solutions (already available to the school) might also be viable to use. I took some time to create three similar prototypes: one using Windows Movie Maker and YouTube, one using an alternative web-based product (available free of charge) called Flowgram, and one using VoiceThread. Using a few digital images from a recent weekend that my wife and I spent in Beijing, I constructed a brief narrative in all three storytelling environments.
The creation of the WMM/YouTube video and FlowGram presentation was accomplished without any substantial glitches, even though I had no prior experience with any of the technologies. The VoiceThread tools were no less straightforward, but I did experience recurring failures of parts of my video commentaries to be successfully recorded. As can be seen by viewing the VoiceThread prototype, there are several occasions in which the video portion of my commentary freezes up while the audio continues, and one occasion when they both freeze up. My best guess is that these failures are due to the limited upload bandwidth available to me from my home-office Internet connection.
[UPDATE March 2009: If you are viewing this from China, and the blocking of YouTube is still in effect, all you will see here is a gaping white space where an embedded YouTube video should be.]
[I had wanted to embed the Flowgram example here, but there are apparent problems, either with Flowgram's embedding technology itself, or my feeble use of it. I'll investigate as time permits and try to get things properly embedded. In the meantime, you can go to this link to see the Flowgram example.]
There is one decided advantage that puts the VoiceThread solution ahead of the other two storytelling technologies with which I worked. The others provide only for textual or audio commentary, but VoiceThread provides for “talking head” style video commentary. Not only does this feature of VoiceThread making it a more potent communication technology, it simply makes the whole product more enjoyable to work with. At the risk of sounding narcissistic, while I am recording a video commentary in VoiceThread, I can see my own image as it is being captured, and I noticed that this tangibly enhances the effusiveness with which I improvise a narration. Rather than just doing desultory recitations into a microphone, it felt a lot more like I was “putting on a show”. It would be interesting to see whether second-graders feel a similar positive effect.
Conclusions I reported to the second-grade teachers that all three technologies are feasible for usage for a digital storytelling project, but that testing would need to be done with VoiceThread from the school’s computers to assure that video commentaries can be effectively recorded without the “freeze ups” that I had experienced. I personally recommended that they go with the video commentary option of VoiceThread if it proves technically feasible.
References: Couros, A. (2008). VoiceThread presentation: What Does the Network Mean To You? Retrieved February 21, 2009 from http://voicethread.com/#q.b67978.i350123
