After a summer like the one we endured, it's an honor to write again and record a podcast without a fan whirring at my feet. Still, the paradoxical issue I want to explore in the following post is the AI in Substack that is totally robotic, and it made me think about standards for narration.
I’d always thought that reading aloud and faking another identity made the craft of narration sound cartoonish, despite my respect for the artist who recorded Donald Duck in the Walt Disney early days. Can I do that? Of course! But it sounds like an awful overwrite.
I once had a friend, Arantza, who made a living reading books aloud for the blind people. Sometimes, reading a book about horticulture, for example, could be hard, so Arantza adopted a neutral tone, the standard so the listener could follow her narration unhindered.
This last summer, my iPhone began to read out loud when I checked my Substack with a feminine doll voice, which was surprisingly good at least as far as the diction went. But the voice had a normalized volume without any breathing of the human pipes, and such a know-it-all tone that killed all my soul with the first line.
Arantza has probably lost her job because of this damn AI. However, I don’t think I will lose any advertising work to AI, because an educated listener cannot be seduced by a robotic voice. And if he fall under the AI spell, it would be… cursing to one of the usual gatekeepers! An electronic supermarket cashier, that virtual assistant Siri from Apple, or her stupid cousin Alexa from Amazon!
In the meantime, I bought a new preamp because I want to sound as natural as I am. I’ve also learned to record inside a cozy tepee to avoid reverberation. But hey! If you expect me to roar like a cartoon lion, notice that arresting words are just whispers of a unique sound wave, a bit of quantum mechanics running through the nineteen billion of transistors of your iPhone.
I have nothing personal against the neutral tone of my long-ago friend. It was lovely to hear how well she did pronounce some vowels and consonants. However, a narration must be entertaining, a treat to enjoy, a pastime. And that's my luck because while I’m recording inside the padded interior of the tepee, I have the best time of my life and lose track of time. On the spur of the moment, I have not the slightest idea of which tonality could be better, what it’s commonly known as ad-lib, and all I have in mind is the flow of words and why the hell Romeo and Juliet was written in unrhymed iambic pentameter or blank verse.