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Elements of Voiceover

DISTANCES

Amplification (and additional processing tools like compression and EQ) allows for a huge range of distances to be implied between the speaker and the listening ear. In a theater or other room situation (where the listening is not taking place on headphones), this means that a recorded voiceover can dispense with all the vocal techniques of projection, otherwise necessary to be heard clearly. Hearing an amplified voice speaking softly, intimately, plays a spatial trick, pulling the listener toward to the speaker, or making it feel like the listener has surveillance access to the interior mind of the speaker. 

On headphones, the voice is literally at the ear of the listener, so amplification for the softest voice, instead of playing a trick, completes a logical circuit. Close headphone speaker, close speaking voice. Walking audio can capitalize on this default proximity or work against it, using distancing effects. But it’s worth asking where the speaking voice should be addressed. Are you speaking directly to the listener, or is the listener overhearing voices. Is it communicative in function or archival? All of these things effect the sense of proximity or distance you want to create. 

TONES

Some microphones have what’s called a “proximity” effect, so that speaking with your mouth very close to the mic creates a warmer, more ambery sound than speaking 6 or 8 or 12 inches away from it—but if you want to eat the mic, you have to use a screen or watch your plosives (puh sounds) because they can max out the mic at that distance. Some mics will roll certain frequencies off that aren’t optimal for voice. Voiceovers are usually recorded on dynamic microphones, which differently prioritize sound coming from different proximities and directions. Usually, the farther you are from a dynamic mic, the more sound it will grab (imagine a cone coming out from the microphone), so room noise will start to show up in your recording. 

Every mic is different, so the first thing to do when recording a voiceover is to spend time logging the change in sound from different points around the mic and speaking at various degrees of loudness. (Tip, useful to say things like “I am speaking from 6 inches away” so you can log easily.) Try to listen on a spectrum of warmth (warm feel, cold feel) and width (expansive feel, thin feel). Listen to the playback through different headphones and different speakers. Although there’s a lot you can do to process the sound of the voice in a DAW, it’s good to get a baseline in the raw recording. 

If you’re going to do a lot of home recording, the gold standard entry level mic is the Shure 58. You’ve probably seen it—they’re ubiquitous because they’re great and they’re indestructible so music venues like them. If you go this route, you will need an interface between the mic and the computer. I am a fan of M-Audio interfaces.

LISTENING STUDY

Listen to the different voiceovers in listening party links, clocking them on that scale of warmth and width, proximity and distance. What vocal sounds do you like? What don’t you like? Try to reverse engineer the vocal sound. How far from the mic do you think the speaker is? How much breath or projection is being used? How do all these things combine to make you, the listener, feel addressed? 

TOOLS: EQ

If I had to limit myself to a single processing tool, it would be EQ, through which you can raise or suppress different portions of the frequency array of any given sound file. EQ will alter the sense of warmth of width, intimacy or distance, allowing you to fuzz out a voice by boosting the low ranges or make it tinny by suppressing the low and boosting the high. 

(You can usually add an EQ effect or plug-in to a track; in some programs like Garage Band, you have to go into the effect’s pantry (say you use “telephone voice” you can find the set of effects that are combined to make that voice in “—“ and you can alter the parameters. In a simple EQ tool, you draw a sine curve. In a more complex EQ tool, you can draw different curves for individual segments of the frequency range. (See pics.))

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?