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Are you reading comfortably? Then we'll begin... visual stress and reading comfort

4/10/2016

Illustration by Abstrusa. Please click on the picture for artist's website.

Quite rightly, much of the focus in narration is on the vocal performance. The breathing, control, pacing, tone and expression is what makes a good audiobook.

But narration also involves reading. A lot of reading. From the preparatory pre-read while note-taking, to the actual performance read, there is a great deal to take in before it is translated into speech. That can be straightforward for many people, but some people may suffer from varying degrees of 'visual stress'. This may be so mild that you scarcely notice it, it is simply part of your reading experience. But it may be worth experimenting to see if you can improve your comfort, and therefore your fluency, to reduce stumbles or flubs.

Meares-Irlen Syndrome (visual stress)

Perhaps visual stress is most commonly known in relation to dyslexia. Around half of dyslexics may be affected by it, but it can similarly affect people prone to migraines, those with epilepsy or other conditions such as ME or MS - or those who have no accompanying illness. Approximately 5% of the population have severe symptoms, but 20% still have milder aspects, so it is not uncommon.

Visual stress can include symptoms such as sensitivity to light, movement and blurring of words while reading, discomfort from screen or page glare, and difficulty reading more cramped fonts. It may not be immediately visually obvious while you're actually reading, but can lead to headaches, migraines, tiredness from concentration and sore eyes.

The specific syndrome was identified by a combination of the observations of the New Zealand teacher Olive Meares and the psychologist Helen Irlen, working in California. Both women discovered that coloured paper or overlays could reduce visual stress in some readers. The most effective colours varied from person to person, and the results were variable. It was not a cure for dyslexia, but it could improve reading fluency in many cases.

Reading in colour

It goes without saying that you should always visit your optician first if you are having visual difficulties and have regular check-ups. However, if your eyes are healthy, you can still experiment for yourself in whether using a coloured background makes your reading feel more comfortable and fluid.

This is, of course, looking at personal preferences while recording in your home studio, rather than arriving at a professional studio with acetate or perspex sheets. However, if you do find dramatic improvements in your reading comfort, it is possible to buy tinted glasses from specialists to wear for reading.

Fonts

Reading flow can also be affected by the font used. The results of a study in Barcelona in 2013 found that the best fonts for increasing readability for people with dyslexia were:
Helvetica, Courier, Arial, Verdana and Computer Modern Unicode.
Fonts that were sans serif, roman and monofaced were the clearest, whereas italics made readability harder.

Some fonts have been created for this purpose, such as Dyslexie, Opendyslexic and Lexia Readable. The optimum size seems to be between 14-16pt.

Once more, this is only for home studio situations, but if you have the option to change the typeface, you could also experiment to see whether using a sans serif font helps your reading flow in your own studio.

For narrators who want to find out more about optimising their reading comfort, there are a lot of resources on visual stress, Meares-Irlen Syndrome, Dyslexia and related issues. Please follow the links below to find out more strategies and suggestions.

Reference and further reading

http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/dyslexic/eyes-and-dyslexia
http://www.dyslexiasw.com/advice/all-about-dyslexia/meares-irlen-syndrome
http://www.migraine-dyslexia.com/Meares-Irlen-Syndrome.htm
http://www.ceriumoptical.com/vistech/visual-stress.aspx
http://www.dyslexia-reading-well.com/support-files/italian_study_on_fonts_2013.pdf
http://www.dyslexia-reading-well.com/dyslexia-font.html

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Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style

4/2/2016

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A friend very recently introduced me to the Bullet Journal method, originated by Ryder Carroll. It is a flexible way of keeping track of life, prioritising and tracking everything from work projects and yearly goals to fitting in household tasks. A quick Google sees it credited for 'curing' "Idea Overload Syndrome", helping people with ADHD or simply lots to do, and it has spawned a number of videos and Pinterest boards.

At its simplest, it's really a flexible 'to do' list, all in one place. Some people make it into something more creative, colourful and expressive. It's a personal thing, which probably explains its rise in popularity, and so it's possible to adapt it to audio drama management.

Audio books - often 8-10 hours long plus, as Karen Commins mentions on her very informative blog, will take six times that many hours as a conservative estimate to produce. So you will be dealing with projects of around 60 hours.
That may take a lot of accurate planning to fit into your daily schedule.

I have always used very detailed breakdowns of the process in tables, colouring in progress as I go, alongside a calendar schedule, all online.
The bullet journal appealed to me in that it is a visual approach, but also a handwritten one. There is a fascinating article here by Lauren E (Cugliotta) Proctor, citing many pieces of research suggesting that "handwriting may play a role in superior synthesis and retention of complex ideas."

Whatever the reasons, I personally find physically ticking a box or scrawling a quick note can be satisfying.
So, I set about making a Bullet Journal style audio book production overview. In line with the movement, it's freehand rather than drawn up digitally. Many Bullet-journal creators seem to draw new designs for every project, but frankly it's less time-consuming to do it once and scan it.

Here is the page I came up with, which contains basic information and progress boxes, so that it's quick to fill in, and it fits neatly into an A5 size notebook. It may be worth doing a longer, more detailed character breakdown, perhaps with any pronunciation queries for the rights holder (if necessary). But this just allows for a very immediate overview of the state of progress and the number of hours' work remaining.

If you're also wooed by this approach, then have fun designing your own, personalised work schedule!

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Splitting Audio Files in Adobe Audition 3.0

30/6/2015

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Image taken from page 231 of 'Pawson and Brailsford's Illustrated Guide to Sheffield and neighbourhood, etc' The British Library Edited in Phixr.com

If you are recording e-learning materials, or even lines for an audio drama, you may need to record many hundreds of tiny files. Trimming your recording down into these files can be time-consuming.

Fortunately, Audition does offer some solutions to partly automate this process.

First of all, if you have Audition CC, then please go straight to this video by Timothy McKean, as that version is capable of copying and pasting room tone with a marker, so is a little faster than in Audition 3.0.

If you're still here, then here's a suggestion on how to approach file splitting

Step 1 - Record your audio

Record the full text for all files in one, long file.

For this, I do strongly recommend using a Punch and Roll method of recording. This is a way of setting up your DAW so that, if you make an error, you set the cursor after the last good phrase of audio. Then, with a click of a button or two, your DAW will play aloud your last few seconds of recording before slipping into Record mode. Therefore, you can hear your last phrase and match the tone seamlessly as you continue. It results in one long take with no errors (that you've noticed!), and if you time it well, no extraneous pauses, coughs or passing lorries.

I use Presonus Studio One for recording, as the Punch and Roll is integrated and very user-friendly, but many other DAWs offer it. Steven Jay Cohen has written a script to enable punch and roll in Adobe Audition, if you prefer to use the one program.

So, record the script using punch and roll, but every time you start a new file, click or clap. This will give you a visual spike in the waveform that will speed the process later. So you'll end up with something like this:

You can clearly see the clicks between files in the raw recording.

Step 2 - Set the markers

I do this before any other post-processing. By placing markers first and saving that draft, if anything goes awry in post production, then you still have a neatly divided recording to work from again.

Each file needs a marker at the start to label it. So your first marker will be right at the beginning of file 1.

Now you have two options. If your client is happy with tails of silence on either side of the audio, there is a way of adding that when exporting. In that case, you'll be placing your first marker right up at the start of the first word. And from then on, between the last word of this file and the first of the next with no other space at all.

If your client wants room tone on either side of the audio, then you can follow this process:
In the case of this recording, I need to leave tails of room tone of 0.3 seconds for each file. So I place marker 1 at 0:00, and leave 0.3 seconds after it, before the first word begins. That marker is going to describe the file following it, so label it as the finished file name that your client or producer wants it labelled.
Here I've called it Lesson1page1.

If all of your files have identical prefixes and run in numerical order, you can automate the prefix for each file to save time typing in. Please refer to Step 6 below for further details.

Then, there will be a gap of 0.3 seconds at the tail end of Lesson1page1, and 0.3 seconds at the beginning of the next file, Lesson1page2. So I've found the first click that signifies the beginning of Lesson1page2, selected the entire area up to the edges of the words, and pasted in 0.6 seconds of room tone.

Next, set the marker in the middle of that room tone. Here, I'm leaving 0.3 seconds on either side, as required.
If you have Audition CC, it is possible to copy and paste markers along with the room tone. Sadly, that's not the case in 3.0, so you'll have to do this individually each time.

Step 3 - Set a Final Marker

Keep on going like this, setting and naming each marker until you have placed your final one.

Then, it is vital to place one last marker (here 0.3 seconds after the last file). You can call this anything: End; Last; Fin; Good Grief it's Over! It doesn't matter because it's simply there to enable the next stage, rather than to label anything.

Once all the markers are set and labelled, you should end up with something like this.
All the markers are visible on the track, and to the left, you have a list of the marker names and their positions at the beginning of each of those files.
It's worth checking now that they're correctly named and all there. Simply select any one in the list by clicking on it, and rename in the 'Label' box on the right.

Step 4 - Do All Your Post-Production

Now save this file as a raw but marked file. Then do all your normal post-production routine as normal to clean up and optimise the sound.

If you are using Izotope RX for the processing, all of your markers will remain intact along the journey.

Save the new file as a processed one, and you're ready to split it up.

Step 5 - Merge your Markers

Merging your markers, as above, basically divides them into your final files - each one the audio between two markers, and you'll see that they all now have an 'end' time and 'length' now, too. Again, it's worth checking that they look as you'd expected.

Step 6 - Batch Process your Marker Regions

This is the point where, if your client is happy with you using silence instead of room tone you have the opportunity to set a fixed amount before and after a marker.

If you've added room tone so far, then all you have to do is check 'use marker label as filename' - OR you can automate the prefix for each file, rather than type them in as you go, as suggested above.

Choose your output format and destination folder just as in normal exporting.

And go! Every individual file will light up as it is saved, which is very pleasing. And once all have been batch processed, you are left with your final files to send. You're done!

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What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

25/8/2014

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With thanks to Leslie McMurtry

At first glance, voice acting may seem less complicated than 'full body acting' for stage or screen. After all, a voice actor doesn't have to worry about the immediate effect of their physical actions or physical appearance on the audience. However, acting is communication in action, and according to research by Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA, speech only accounts for 45% of communication.
This breaks down as only 7% of communication being words, with tone of voice being 38%.

Voice acting is not simply stage/screen acting with the physical removed. As an experiment, listen to an extract from an unfamiliar movie with your eyes shut. The actors will be using their voices to create character, but in harmony with their physical movements and their surroundings, so it will usually sound like a movie with the picture part missing. Listen to a similar dialogue in a radio play, and the acting should sound 'complete', so that the audience is not distracted by the lack of visuals.

That's not to say that voice actors neglect their physicality. Posture, gestures and facial expressions all affect and change the sound of the voice. A smile will carry over the airwaves, as will tension or energy.

While the limitations of audio can actually be liberating, they can be a challenge. The voice alone has to do the job of all the other senses, so voice actors learn to use it rather like an instrument. The actor is left only with the words, noises (and the rhythm and space within them) with which to express meaning and emotion, but also accent (and related background nationality or ethnicity; age; class; implied physique; speech impediments, etc). Here are some ways in which they may do that:

Vocal Tone
To get different tone, the actor can use different parts of their body to resonate the sound, like head, nose, chest, etc. to make the voice sound reedier, more nasal, broader and stronger (as it goes downwards).

Accent
To find accent, they will usually study the accent from authentic examples (found on Youtube, or on specialist sites such as the fantastic IDEA one. They can practice the shape of the mouth and throat and, eventually, be able to apply those sounds to a script.

Interpretation and Emphasis
Note that Mehrabian's studies showed that tone of voice is responsible for well over a third of communication. Meaning leads to a lot of experimentation and practice. Audio scripts typically have few directions if any, and a sentence like "What are you doing?" has 4 different interpretations to start with, simply by emphasising a different word. Add an emotion, or several and all the takes mount up.

Emotion
Emotion is surprising - as mentioned previously, a smile does travel extraordinarily well over the airwaves, and if the actor is tired, it's quite frightening how the microphone can pick that up. In Old Time Radio, emotions tended to be almost as intense as in stage performances. Nowadays, the general trend is much more for 'Realism', so listeners' ears are tuned in to hear subtle emotional performances.

Of course, actors can do all of the above in a stage play, as well as a whole lot of physical exercises to find posture, movement and so on, but the listeners' focus on the voice alone and the intimacy and sheer sensitivity of a microphone make accuracy and control essential.

Technical Technique
Voice actors also have to take the microphone's sensitivity and quirks into consideration when breathing, making louder noises, positioning themselves (and not accidentally shifting about while speaking). The microphone is an extension of their body and voice, in a way, and so they need to master microphone technique to avoid puffs or clattering about.

Sounding Natural
For satellite audio drama, actors may be cast around the globe. They record several takes of their lines in home studios and then send them back to the mixer/producer. This may happen in screen acting, too, and actors need to work hard on sounding as involved with their imaginary fellow actors as possible.
The mixer can help in treating the lines to make them sound as if they are recorded in the same size/shape space, but it is the actors who can make it truly believable.

My own experience in mixing satellite audio soon taught me that the actors who sounded most natural in their conversation, when mixed in with another characters' lines, were ones who said the words in the same way: they all delivered any dialogue lines as if they were unfinished.
So instead of the listener almost hearing the deadening crash of the question mark in:
"Lovely to see you! So how are you?" the actor would -sometimes almost imperceptibly- continue. It might just be a short intake of breath; or a tiny, abstract vocal sound; or a very slight elongation of the last word in anticipation of the answer. Or occasionally, they would actually begin the first sound of a new sentence.

When they were then placed in a conversation, those extra bits would ride gently under the other person's response and it would compensate considerably for the conversation being recorded separately.

To do this, the voice actor imagines themselves really having that conversation. Perhaps they improvise with it in their head (and often in takes, as well - which is always an extra blessing for the mixer). I personally found that reading and 'hearing' the other characters' voices responding to the lines helped in getting into that mode.

So all in all, voice acting is a slightly specialised form of acting, with the detail that such an intimate medium brings. The aim for all voice actors is to gain control over a wide range of aspects of their voice, in order to express outwardly the character they are feeling from within. Like all creative processes, there are large elements of craft mixed with imagination and experimentation until they find the voice that fits.

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What a scene from an audio drama looks like in a Digital Audio Workstation

11/4/2014

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This is for everyone who loves listening to audio drama and who is interested in seeing the equivalent of the 'musical score', either out of general interest, or with a mind to making your own audio one day.

You have chosen your cast from their audition files, you've emailed the script to them all, and you've received the actors' lines.
It's time to start mixing.

Different mixers/producers have different ways of working, but for the purposes of this, let's use the 'numbered script' approach.

When the script is finalised, every character's line is numbered in order from 001 upwards. The actors will then record the lines and send them as separate mp3 files (.wav files are higher quality but are much, much bigger, so can be trickier to send and store if you're doing a lot of mixing. 128mbps is standard CD quality, but 192mbps is better quality again, and so many people recommend asking their actors for files of 128 or 192mbps, 44100hz).

You then process the clips, reducing their background noise, possibly evening up volumes or using EQ to make the actors' recording environments sound as similar as possible. You can also choose fx and music in advance. You now have all the parts you need. Now comes the piecing together of all the elements.

Most Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) have horizontal staves onto which you can click and drag clips, as if they are musical notes on a stave.
Just like the mechanism of a barrel organ, the cursor travels left to right and plays the clips as it comes along to them. So moving clips to the left makes them play earlier in the mix, and to the right, later.

If you put any clips parallel on their staves, those clips will play simultaneously as the cursor passes over them all, rather like chords on that barrel organ.

The screenshot is an annotated scene from Der Tickentocker, to give an example overview of a DAW in action, and how a finished scene may look.
The DAW used here is Adobe Audition 3.0, but there are a huge range of DAWs. Free ones include Audacity and Ardour. Read an article on creating audio drama in Audacity here.

Download or stream Der Tickentocker to follow along with the screenshot below here. Happy experimenting!

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Removing clicks using Adobe Audition's Spectral Frequency Display

6/10/2013

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Beautiful, isn't it? That's the spectral frequency display view in the Edit screen of Adobe Audition. Other digital audio workstations will also have one. Here, we're looking at the squeak of a door opening. The frequencies are displayed vertically, so reds and yellows along the bottom of the display are lower frequency sounds, and here they taper up to the higher ranges. The louder the frequency, the closer to yellow it is, going through red to much quieter purples.
It's possible actually to see the overtones of a sound in the horizontal stripes they create.

But this view is not just pretty, it can also be useful for dealing with identifying and removing specific frequencies, like electrical hums - but also the bane of voice actors' lives that is the mouth click.

There are lots of suggestions for preventing naturally-occurring mouth clicks, from drinking lots of water, chewing on green apples, drinking apple juice or avoiding dairy products, but even with these precautions they can still creep in.

They are often painfully easy to hear, but can be tricky to hunt down. There are two loud clicks in the above wave form. There's a tiny vertical barb at 1.32 that might be noticeable by squinting but it's impossible to spot the other without zooming in and manually looking all the way through for that distinctive little zigzag blob - and that is time-c0nsuming, fiddly and frustrating.

But now look at exactly the same wave form in the spectral frequency display.

Most of the sound is horizontal, but here there are some very distinct vertical forms that look like little strings of beads. One of them is at 1.32, but there's another very strong red one at 1.55. We can position the cursor there, then return to the normal waveform view and zoom in and...

There it is - those sharp zig-zaggy peaks around 1.548 and 1.551. To remove the problem, we can simply highlight that section so that, when that pink part is removed, the two ends will join up together seamlessly (here, the two 'valleys'), and the click disappears.

Yes, clicks are still irritating and fiddly, but, thanks to spectral frequency analysis, a little bit quicker and quite satisfying to squish.

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Clarity in Audio Drama - Don't let your characters disappear!

24/6/2013

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This article is published in Alexa Chipman's great blog: "Sci-fi, Fantasy and Historical Writing".
The article and blog are here and I thoroughly recommend reading Alexa's own articles, and other guest pieces.

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A guide to using automation in Adobe Audition

22/3/2013

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Another Jing guide, this time to using automation in Adobe Audition.

This is another assignment based on a topic area covered in the Introduction to Music Production Course from Berklee College, via Coursera.

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Video: Editing Basics in Soundation (free DAW)

17/3/2013

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Soundation is a free, online Digital Audio Workstation, complete with audio and midi samples.

Here is a 5 minute overview of the basics of editing audio in Soundation.

This was my first attempt at using screen recording software (Jing), so I need to look into improving the audio quality next time, as it's suffered through having a visual going on simultaneously.

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An Illustrated Overview of Microphones

15/3/2013

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This was an assignment for a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that I am studying, via the University of Berklee and Coursera on an Introduction to Music Production.
I would thoroughly recommend the course for those interested in audio production. While much of it is music-based, it has a lot of useful information which equally relates to audio drama and the use of Digital Audio Workstations.

This is a little wobbly - it was done on a train, without computer access, which is why it is also hand-drawn, and as I say, a little on the wonky side. But I still thought it might be of interest or use to anyone unfamiliar with microphone types and their capabilities, so here it is in its askew glory.

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<<Previous

Are you reading comfortably? Then we'll begin... visual stress and reading comfort

Meares-Irlen Syndrome (visual stress)

Reading in colour

Fonts

Reference and further reading

Narrator Notes, Bullet Journal style

Splitting Audio Files in Adobe Audition 3.0

Step 1 - Record your audio

Step 2 - Set the markers

Step 3 - Set a Final Marker

Step 4 - Do All Your Post-Production

Step 5 - Merge your Markers

Step 6 - Batch Process your Marker Regions

What Makes Voice Acting Performance Different?

What a scene from an audio drama looks like in a Digital Audio Workstation

Removing clicks using Adobe Audition's Spectral Frequency Display

Clarity in Audio Drama - Don't let your characters disappear!

A guide to using automation in Adobe Audition

Video: Editing Basics in Soundation (free DAW)

An Illustrated Overview of Microphones

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