Acoustics for Voice Over

When you are listening to someone speak one-on-one close together in person, and you are really engaged and paying attention to every word they say, you hear things differently. The sound of the outside world is irrelevant. It fades away. You could be chatting in a cafe, but the bus that just passed outside barely registers in your awareness of sound. You also have no awareness of the voice echoing around off the hard floors and ceiling, or of any annoying buzz or drone that continues throughout the conversation. The speech is intimate, and seems to go straight from the voices to your brain. The words have a potent impact.

Let's compare that to the experience of listening to a public speech at say a lecture or a convention meeting. If your hearing is good, the buzz of the public address monitors will be slightly annoying. The harsh windy break-up of plosive Ps and Bs of the person talking into their dynamic or lavalier microphone will be distracting to one's ability to follow the pattern of speech. In order to allow for the greatest volume before there is feedback from the microphone, the audio engineer will have altered sonic frequencies away from the natural tone of the voice. No matter how good the acoustics of the hall are, the sound will still bounce around and have reverb and sound like you're in a giant bathtub listening to someone far away: not in a cafe talking in person to a peer. The speech is not intimate, in fact public speakers must alter their speech to make it adapt to the environment and audience of a public gathering. There is no direct connection from the voice to the brain, even if the concepts discussed are otherwise readily adapted and have their intended effect. The words, as they arise, do not have as much potent impact as the conversation in the cafe.

All these differences between the reception of intimate and public speech are matters of acoustics, not matters of content. If you transcribe a personal conversation and then read them aloud at a meeting, even with convincing acting, it would not have the same effect.

What does this have to do with Acoustics for Voice Over? In recording your speech for voice over, you want to re-create the quality that personal engaging conversations have on your ears and brain. As voice actors, we have been trained to "speak to just one person". Our recording acoustics should facilitate that effect.

Audio should be clean and clear and free of reflections and distortions: not in the name of being Professional or Technically Superior, but in the name of Being Personal and Engaging. There should be no hum or buzz or noticeable noise floor or ambiance to the sound, and there should be no noticeable reverb or reflections of sound. With the rise of home voice over studios, often standards outside of the best studios have plummeted. We're saying more and more via voice over, but is it all having the impact that it ought to if it isn't conveyed with proper recording techniques?

For example: small voice over booths with glass windows should not be used for voice over. Did you ever try to have a conversation in one of these "Audio Coffins"? You can't hold a natural conversation in them, because your ears don't get the proper audio feedback of natural acoustics. It's tubby sounding with lots of short reflections. Most of the best voice over studios in the world are very large rooms. It allows the sound to leave the room and die out gracefully and slowly...when the reflections of the voice return to where the mircophone is, they are negligible. The voice actor in this environment may be in a giant slick studio in Los Angeles, but the captured voice on the recording is captivating, intimate, engaging, and personal. Importantly, having acoustics that enable an engaging personal sound has nothing to do with the microphone or microphone preamp. You can use competent cheap equipment in such a studio and still re-create excellent personal sounding voice overs. A cheap mic in a good room trumps a Neumann in a bad room. Of course, if you've got the good room, then save your pennies for the better microphone. First, find the good room acoustics.

In my recording environment, I use a room that is 20'x15'and over two-thirds of the walls are covered either by bookcases (rather good for acoustics, actually) or bass traps and acoustic panels by GIK. There is some acoustic foam in places, but these do not address acoustics anywhere near as well as proper acoustic panels or even bookshelves do. Also, I have a "cloud" of sound blankets on the ceiling above the microphone. I use microphones with self-noise of 14dbA or lower, high quality Mogami cables, and quiet and clean solid-state microphone preamps. There is some liveliness to the room, in so far as it doesn't sound artificially deadened: but noticeable reflections of sound are avoided. The goal has been to re-create the sensation one has when listening to someone in person. In my work I try to "speak to one person" and be personal and engaging in the delivery (unless directed otherwise). The acoustics of my voice over recordings are designed to capture the experience of listening to a personal conversation.