I Hear Voices

First, beauty tips from the guy with the perfect face for radio! Actually they're from Audrey Hepburn.

Audrey Hepburn at BrainyQuote.com

I got into the instructional media business as a small-town radio announcer. We broadcast from a place in the mountains east of Salt Lake City. I had the morning shift, so I was "big-time," competing with the metro drive-time DJs. My most popular program, though, was something that I never heard the big-market announcers read.  My most popular feature was reading the school lunch menu. If I ever neglected to include the school lunch menu in my news line-up, I got angry phone calls.  "How am I supposed to send my kid to school if I don't know what they're serving for school lunch?" You try and make the menu sound interesting.  It's tougher than a server telling you the day's specials in a restaurant. So I'd try to liven up my presentation with false enthusiasm: "Pizza slices, cheddar cheese sticks, green beans, crisp carrot sticks, and milk!" (Ha, ha, I just looked up my local school's menu online and there are far better offerings that when I was reading... and I can get the nutritional info on everything!)

As I got into media production, I'd actually hire and direct some of those big-market voices to read my scripts. Since I read several myself, it's easy to see why those ladies and gentlemen have the reputation and the following they do. They make the content seem understandable, easy to learn. One of the best narrators we ever worked with was a schoolteacher. She was accustomed to reading stories to her students. Perfect!

Once, not too long ago, we were auditioning voices for a project.  The voice was a low-key male version of Apple's Siri. "Sorry," we said. "We don't want an automated voice for this project."

"Oh, that's not an automated voice," we were told.  "That's so-and-so, who must have been in a quiet mood that day."

"Uh, how 'bout you give him a cup of coffee and give us a different narrator?" If our learners have to listen to someone for a long bit of training, we'd like the voice to sound interested in the content and sound interesting in its own right.

I've worked with some wonderful voices over the years. Those voices belong to some wonderfully professional people. Let me gather up some stories and contact info about them and I'll include them in an updated post.

To steal some of Billy Crystal's cachet, "It doesn't matter how you feel, as long as you sound good.  And darling, you sound maaarvelous!"