{"id":10289,"date":"2023-02-21T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10289"},"modified":"2023-02-20T17:56:15","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T22:56:15","slug":"read-me-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10289","title":{"rendered":"Read Me a Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You may have seen actor Robin Miles (pictured) on the TV shows Law & Order <\/em>and Murder by Numbers, <\/em>but her principal creative outlet is the approximately 500 books she\u2019s narrated\u2014many, many of which have won awards. Journalist Daniel Gross\u2019s recent New Yorker article<\/a>, \u201cHow a Great Audiobook Narrator Finds Her Voices,\u201d centers on voice actor Miles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she began narrating books, Miles was shocked to find how pigeonholed narrators were. If you were Black, you read books by Black authors; if you were Jewish, the same. \u201cWhen a little more diversity came in (to the pool of audio narrators), it was like, well, nobody can do anything outside of their yard. And now, I think we\u2019re also beginning to hopefully, break through that again.\u201d Certainly the talented Adam Lazare-Smith is equally convincing narrating the Black and white characters of SA Cosby\u2019s thrillers, as is Sullivan Jones narrating a whole array of ethnicities in Joe Ide\u2019s I.Q. books, set in East Los Angeles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Generally, a narrator is chosen who shares some major trait (gender, race) with the story\u2019s main character. So, what about all the other characters? People different in terms of gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, level of education, country of origin? The best audio narrators move between characters easily and make their voices simultaneously distinctive and authentic. As another skilled narrator, Adjoa Andoh, describes this challenge, \u201cYou are the entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miles says that growing up in a town full of immigrants\u2014Matawan, New Jersey\u2014exposed her to accents from pretty much everywhere. Versatility, combined with creativity, serves voice actors well. In NK Jemisin\u2019s fantasy books, a number of which Miles has narrated, the way characters sound must be created from scratch. They can\u2019t sound like they came from Brooklyn or New Orleans or Maine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been an Audible subscriber for more than twenty years. I\u2019ve listened to hundreds of books. In 2004, I listened to all of Dickens, as well as Jane Smiley\u2019s biography, Charles Dickens<\/em>. Back then, audiobooks were a small part of the literary marketplace, but in 2008, Amazon paid about $300 million to buy Audible. They\u2019ve done nothing but gain listeners in droves ever since. Today, audiobooks \u201care about as popular, in dollar terms, as e-books, and may soon generate more revenue than Broadway,\u201d reports Gross.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some authors decide to save the approximately $100 to $400 an hour it costs to hire a narrator\/producer and read their book themselves. Having listened to so many terrific narrators, this seems risky and I\u2019d never do it, but John le Carr\u00e9 did a great job reading his Agent Running in the Field<\/em>. As in so many creative domains these days, AI is rearing its computer-generated head in the field of audio narration. When I think of the subtlety deployed by my favorite narrators, my instinct about this development is pure Luddite. As an example, Gross describes how Miles recognized a line was a bad joke and let her voice trail off as the character realized how unfunny she was. A manufactured voice might be able to read a textbook, but subtlety . . . I don\u2019t know. How about sarcasm? Dawning uncertainty? As Gross says, \u201cWhen publishers and producers inevitably try to sell us synthetic voices, it\u2019ll be up to us to hear the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have seen actor Robin Miles (pictured) on the TV shows Law & Order and Murder by Numbers, but her principal creative outlet is the approximately 500 books she\u2019s narrated\u2014many, many of which have won awards. Journalist Daniel Gross\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"I love a well-narrated audio book. The narrator makes a whole cast of characters live in my head.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[269,77,61,40,126,60],"tags":[2060],"class_list":["post-10289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actor","category-audio-books","category-character","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-storytelling","tag-robin-miles"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2FX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10291,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10289\/revisions\/10291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}