Why Are Audiobooks So Damn Hard to Understand? (Part 2)

Continued from part 1.

Two key ideas from Elaine Clark’s There’s Money Where Your Mouth Is are that a) voiceover artists (including audiobook narrators) must have a personal and emotional connection with the message so that it sounds real and spontaneous and b) they must empower the listener through suggestion rather than demand so that the listener feels the message conveys the listener’s idea rather than the narrator’s idea. Otherwise, the message will be difficult for the listener to absorb.

This explains why so, so much audiobook narration is difficult to follow.

The book goes into great detail about how to achieve these goals for advertising voiceovers (for TV, radio, and online commercials). The techniques include much text analysis. Additionally, voiceover artists construct scenarios in which they speak to a specific person. Someone who gets a strong emotional reaction from the voiceover artist, even if they are imaginary. I easily understand commercial voiceovers (even in Mandarin) and the book helped me appreciate how much skill goes into making those voiceovers easy for listeners. I have new respect for commercial voiceovers.

However, it takes much less time to do deep textual analysis and construct an effective scenario on the script for a 30-second advertisement than for an entire novel. Though some professional audiobook narrators do textual analysis before they record, they can’t do the same level of analysis as the commercial voiceover artists because they aren’t paid enough. For a voiceover artist getting paid 200 USD for a 30-second recording (I pulled that number out of my ass, I’m not sure if that’s a typical payment) spending two hours on deep textual analysis makes sense. Doing two hours of analysis on every page of a novel doesn’t make financial sense for audiobook narrators. Okay, two hours of analysis per page is too high since much less analysis is needed once they establish characters and storylines. Nonetheless, audiobook narrators can’t take this to the same level as commercial voiceover artists.

Amateur podcasts, whether they are conversations or a single person ranting at the microphone, usually are spontaneous. They are real because the speakers are saying what they think and feel at the moment, rather than following a script which doesn’t reflect their immediate feelings.

By contrast, the few scripted podcasts I’ve heard are even harder to understand than audiobooks. Therefore, I don’t listen to them. Except for one scripted podcast I heard in Mandarin… which was a drama produced by a radio station and voiced by professional actors playing specific characters.

Clark also discusses ‘reading voice’ which is incredibly difficult to understand. In ‘reading voice,’ sentences start strong and taper off in volume and energy towards the end. Professional audiobook narrators don’t do this, but some authors do when reading their work, which explains why I find some author readings incomprehensible.

Self-narrators have two advantages over professional narrators. First, self-narrators have done a deep textual analysis. Their textual analysis was writing the book. For a professional narrator to match an author in textual analysis, a narrator would have to practically re-write the book. Second, the book’s content stirred the author’s feelings so strongly that the authors literally wrote a book. Professional audiobook narrators rarely have that level of personal connection to the text. My guess is that, if an author avoids ‘reading voice’ and pronounces words clearly, they will outperform a professional narrator 90+% of the time.

In memoirs, the author’s personal bond to the content is that much stronger. Therefore memoirs are the easiest category of audiobooks to understand.

While listening to audiobook samples, I discovered that first person is not the easiest point of view to understand. The easiest is second person. Novels written in second person are rare, but they are over-represented in audiobook recommendations. Every audiobook told in second person I sampled was easy to understand (confounding factor: they were all self-narrated). This is because when a narrator uses the ‘you’ pronoun frequently, they can’t avoid developing a deep impression of who ‘you’ are and why they are talking to ‘you.’

First-person novels evade forming a direct dialogue with the audience, but they still force the narrator to have a strong sense of the narrator’s character and why the narrator is telling this story. Sometimes, audiobooks in first person are still difficult to understand. Third person narration puts the greatest distance between the narrator and the audience. In most third person audiobooks I’ve heard, it sounds like someone is talking to a wall, or more accurately, a wall is talking to another wall in an echo chamber where I’m not invited.

One question remains…

Why are machine voices easier to understand than professional narrators?

Machine voices don’t form personal bonds with the story or imagine scenarios. Machine voices only analyze text in a limited, mechanical way. Shouldn’t they be the most incomprehensible? And yet they’re not. In comprehensibility, they beat most humans reading off a script.

I’ll discuss that in part 3.