Audio Book Thoughts.

I've been thinking a lot about Liz's post a couple of weeks ago about listening to someone read, and whether it makes it better if the author is the one who is reading, since they would know best what the affect is supposed to be. It is certainly an interesting thought, though I think many people still would prefer to add their own affect anyway, since that is part of the enjoyment!

When I was in elementary and high school I read TONS of books. In the last 3 or so years I've started listening to a lot of audio books, due to the development of vision trouble. Since I grew up reading books and adding my own interpretations, and I'm not blind, I don't think that my experiences are very representative of how blind people typically feel about audio books, but I do appreciate the storytelling feel of having a narrator. The thing that trips *me* up is that sometimes several books that I want to listen to are narrated by the same person, who dutifully creates different voices for each character in a book, then then reuses some of those voices for other books! I've found myself stopping my iPod, and trying to figure out how I changed stories w/o knowing it, only to realize that I'm still in the right story, the narrator is just reusing a character voice that I've heard before.

It could be interesting to experiment with different people reading the same passage and see how listeners feel about the different voices. In most screen readers you can choose among several voices, and the same for GPS navigation systems. Sometimes people choose one voice over another because they have a hard time with a cerain range of tones, or they want to listen to something with an accent (do people who rely on screenreaders for information like the accents?). I recall reading a study about the selection of voices for GPS navigators...specifically that they favored male voices because women don't mind as much hearing directions from men (or male voices) and men DO mind hearing directions for women (or female voices). Though, in constrast, the only person I know who uses a GPS navigator regularly is a guy, and he prefers the female voice and has named her 'natalie'. Goes to show that a trend is a trend, but not representative of EVERYONE! I wonder what goes into our preferences for different voices?