If you’ve listened to a lot of audiobooks, you’ve almost certainly run into multiple narrators. Sometimes they have one per each character, or sometimes they just break up the scenes from the perspective of male characters and the ones from female characters.
The Pros
It makes it easy to know when switching from one point-of-view to another. This isn’t usually a big problem anyway. When a book has been written well, but still. It’s an instantaneous notification. Remember that last guy we were just hanging out with? Forget about him. Here’s someone new.
There are some really talented voice actors out there. Certain narrators can make each character sound like a completely different person, instead of one reader with slight variations. To be fair, sometimes one reader with variations is preferable. If it’s a male reader, I don’t want a fake falsetto when reader female lines. Just soften the voice a little. Jim Dale did an excellent job doing just that with the Harry Potter novels.
The Cons
Some narrators use very different voices for the same characters. I noticed this just last week with one of the Lorien Legacies books. Fall of Five, I think (I’ve been binging the whole series and they’re meshing together.)
Not only did two different readers made the same characters sound really different, but sometimes so character had accents and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes a guy sounded like a gruff 300-pound tank, and other times a lithe acrobat.
Sometimes it really works. Take Michael Kramer and Kate Reading as an example. They teamed up on the majority of the Wheel of Time audiobooks. I never once noticed anything odd when switching between the two. Everything flowed together as it should have. Obviously, they didn’t use the same voice for common characters, but there wasn’t anything vastly different to make me stand up and take notice.
Though there was a strange thing where from one book to another they started pronouncing Moghedien’s name differently. If I hadn’t already read the books, and listening to the audio for the second run, that would have been really confusing.
Even though there are some serious pitfalls, when done right, multiple narrators can really enhance an audiobook.
I’ve never listened to an audiobook with multiple narrators. It would definitely help with telling one character from another! Sometimes when narrators change their voices I literally cringe!
Great feature image! What program did you use?
I agree with the points you mentioned. I usually don’t care for audiobooks with multiple narrators. When it is a dual POV book, it is weird when the same character has different voices depending on who is narrating, as you mentioned. There is an amazing audiobook which features a full cast (Illuminae), including 4+ characters, sound effects and even background music in some scenes. I thought that was an instance where multiple narrators work well!
I also agree that guys doing female voices is an art haha. It can be done well, but when it is done poorly, it can ruin an entire character for me.
Great post!!
Thanks! The image was created in photoshop (I’m a graphic designer by day, blogger/wannabe writer by night)
It definitely shows that you are a designer! There are no wannabe writers- if we write, then we are writers 🙂
Lol. Okay, okay. ‘Wannabe PUBLISHED writer’
P.S. I just started reading Illuminae (like last night). The actual book, though. Not the audiobook version. Loving it so far. I would have though it would have been a tough listen. But, I guess if anything is done well enough…
LOL then I think we are in the same boat 🙂
Glad that you are liking the book! I heard that the print edition is really amazing and I will have to check it out one day. I just finished listening to Illuminae (last night haha 🙂 )! I wasn’t used to the audio in the beginning (they read out every detail like email addresses, incept times, etc), but overall I thought the direction and narration are very good. For example narrators for Ezra and Kady actually alternate during their text message conversations, which usually isn’t done even in other books with multiple narrators. It is one of the best audiobooks I’ve listened to!
Sounds cool. I’ll have to listen to it someday when I want to revisit the book.