I’ve been listening to a bunch of audiobooks from the public library here recently and there are various levels of production effort. I listened to a Star Wars audiobook (Alphabet Squadron) when I needed something simple for a flight and was blown away by the amount of sound effects (lasers, start ships flying around, environmental sounds etc) and different characters. Is there a term for this?
Some examples:
- Basic narration: One voice artist, maybe they do different voices for characters and narration. Maybe not.
- Multiple artists: Different characters get voiced by different actors. It might be for different POV chapters or even line by line when characters speak to each other.
- Sound effects: Environmental sounds (wind, rain, cafe chatter etc), event sounds (alarms, gun shots, etc), audio effects (speaking with radio effect, echos, cave sounds)
- Music: In the Star Wars book there was even background music for the various characters. Wow! Also the Star Wars into music is always welcome.
I guess it’s way more expense to do it this way and would love some more examples of good audio production.
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Yes. The industry standards are:
Solo narration: pretty much self-explanatory.
Dual: used primarily in romance. Each narrator voices everything in the chapter that is their POV. Chapters alternate.
Duet: Alternating POV. The narrator voices all narrative, AND their dialogue in all chapters. When POV switches, so does the narrator, who then does all dialogue for their gender.
Multicast: I use this a LOT when narrating RH (reverse harem). So the FMC does narrative and their dialogue, and all other roles are cast for dialogue only. I had one with 14 narrators. Totally like herding cats, but fun.
Immersive: this is your Graphic Audio/ Soundbooth Theater style. Sfx, music, etc. I will be playing Elle McGib in the upcoming Dungeon Crawler Carl fullcast audio.
“booktrack edition” is the same narration with "ambiance"and other effects set behind it.
I just learned of this a few days ago.
Cast edition tends to be the performers from whatever medium the work is best known in, rather than an individual narrator.
The Levar Burton Reads podcast, where Levar Burton reads a short story each episode, uses some background sound effects and some light thematic music at and at some point [I’m going through all the previous episodes first] they started using spatial audio of some sort. The spatial audio is really cool in headphones because it really sounds like the characters are in different places when they talk. There’s one episode where some voice filter is used to make a robotic alien sort of voice, which was pretty neat. He does all the voices himself as far as I’ve listened and I think it’s pretty good. He also just seems like a really good dude, but I’m probably biased from watching him on Reading Rainbow when I was a kid.
The buy-it-at-a-truck-stop Deathlands series used to advertise it as “The theater of the mind”. They used different voices and background sounds and such.
The only real term I’ve seen thrown around is “Full cast” when they use different people for different roles. I haven’t heard many of them but I was blown away by the full cast Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I had read it previously so I’d like to think it wasn’t the story itself that blew me away, although I really like it. It looks like it’s the one on Audible that lists multiple narrators. The sequel Fall of Hyperion and the two long-way-off sequels (Endymion and Rise of Endymion) are all by one narrator, though (which is one of the previous full cast narrators). That guy was good/fine but the full cast one was awesome.
Edit: I just remembered that World War Z has a full cast audiobook, but it’s an abridged version of the book I think. I want to say there are some famous people in there? I think Alan Alda reads a part? That book is really suited to a full cast sort of thing as all the chapters are vignettes of different survivors of the war.
