I've been listening to a bunch of audiobooks from the public library here recently and there are various levels of production effort. I listened to a Star Wars audiobook (Alphabet Squadron) when I needed something simple for a flight and was blown away by the amount of sound effects (lasers, start ships flying around, environmental sounds etc) and different characters. Is there a term for this?
Some examples:
- Basic narration: One voice artist, maybe they do different voices for characters and narration. Maybe not.
- Multiple artists: Different characters get voiced by different actors. It might be for different POV chapters or even line by line when characters speak to each other.
- Sound effects: Environmental sounds (wind, rain, cafe chatter etc), event sounds (alarms, gun shots, etc), audio effects (speaking with radio effect, echos, cave sounds)
- Music: In the Star Wars book there was even background music for the various characters. Wow! Also the Star Wars into music is always welcome.
I guess it's way more expense to do it this way and would love some more examples of good audio production.
Yes. The industry standards are:
Solo narration: pretty much self-explanatory.
Dual: used primarily in romance. Each narrator voices everything in the chapter that is their POV. Chapters alternate.
Duet: Alternating POV. The narrator voices all narrative, AND their dialogue in all chapters. When POV switches, so does the narrator, who then does all dialogue for their gender.
Multicast: I use this a LOT when narrating RH (reverse harem). So the FMC does narrative and their dialogue, and all other roles are cast for dialogue only. I had one with 14 narrators. Totally like herding cats, but fun.
Immersive: this is your Graphic Audio/ Soundbooth Theater style. Sfx, music, etc. I will be playing Elle McGib in the upcoming Dungeon Crawler Carl fullcast audio.