Today we have one of my favorite people, voice actor Trendane Sparks. He talks about the value of human performance in book narration versus the lack of emotional context of AI “narrators.”
When you’re watching someone perform live music, sometimes they mess up. They miss notes or they forget lyrics and they have to recover with, hopefully, some measure of grace. Maybe with laughter. But it is those imperfections which make a performance really memorable, really endearing. While studio versions have been “perfected” with adjustments to pitch or tempo or whatever, it loses some of that aliveness and starts to feel very mechanical.
I guess I’d say that’s what makes voice acting the most enjoyable for me, including narration. The story contains the lines, the setting, the stage direction. All of it. And the ‘imperfections’ may not be written in the text at all, but are clearly implied by it. A character who is nervous or afraid might stammer, one who is crying may sniff or cough as they choke up. Voices may crack, breath may be ragged, huffing in frustration, or the gurgling in the throat as someone is dying. Even if they aren’t specifically noted in the letter of the story, they can be inferred from the context of the scene and they add a tremendous amount of character to the…well…characters.
Some might say that such thinking only applies to the characters. And, in many cases they would be correct. But when one of the characters is also the narrative voice, I feel like it works. Maybe not open sobbing or physically emotive stuff like that. But if they are happy, afraid, sad or any of that stuff, it should be detectable, even in their internal voice. In a scene like a chase or other, high tension moment, the pace should be faster. Not quite too fast for the listener to keep up with, but fast enough that they have to focus more so as not to miss anything.
There are some who feel that we should not deviate in any way from the words on the page; that the author’s words are sacrosanct. And I’m not saying that we should change them, per se. But as we bring the work into a new medium, some elements can be used to make the work even better. That’s why I feel it is so important to not simply read the text, but to perform the story as any actor worth their salt would.
When it comes right down to it, we are actors. As such, it is our job to bring our audience along on a compelling and fulfilling emotional journey. We have to make them feel, or at least relate to, joy, sadness, fear, anger and all the other emotions in a story. It is the ‘imperfections’, the deviations from or additions to the exact text on the page, which elevate our work from that of AI or a text-to-speech engine to the true human expression we call Art.
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Trendane Sparks. Born in Texas when Unleaded gas was ‘fancy’ and still under 25¢ per gallon, Tren eventually wound up in California where he crawled through fiberglass insulation to run CAT-5 cable, did tech support for Netcom, had several jobs on a PBS children’s show, worked as a freelance mascot performer and did videogame QA. Then he became a voice actor and life became fun again! Now you can hear his voice in games, animations, and audiobooks. Most commonly, he narrates Catalyst Game Labs in the BattleTech and Shadowrun franchises as well as for the DrabbleCast, Escape Pod, and PseudoPod podcasts.
