In our classes we encourage the storyteller to record a voiceover. Students may want to make a piece with only images and music, and some are working on stories that they feel are best suited to a particular voiceover or character representation. What we have learned in this process is in itself revealing.

I grew up with a lisp. When I was seven or eight, I had to go to speech therapy classes thso I wouldn’t thspeak thso listhpisthly. Like most kids, it made me hate the way my voice sounded. That didn’t stop me from being the class clown and being the ham in the school productions, or perhaps it emboldened me. But when I first ran into a tape recorder, I couldn’t stand the way I sounded. And frankly, it still bothers me.

Having worked with a lot of people who are creating a piece of video that includes their voice for the first time, I realize I am not alone. Either we feel we don’t have the clearest diction, or our voices waver, or we are too soft, or too gravelly, or just not like those caramel-textured assertive voices that come across our television sets and radios.

Truly, our voice is a great gift. Those of us fortunate enough to be able to talk out loud should love our voices, because they tell everyone so much about who we are, both how strong we can be and how fragile.

We listen to words spoken in various inflections and go into different modes of listening, which are also different modes of conscious interaction. When we hear conversational tones, we are listening for the moment that suggests response or affirmation, the "Oh I agree, but ..." or the "hm-hmm." In a speech we are listening for an applause line. In a lecture, we are listening for the major points, the outline. In a story, we are listening for an organic rhythmic pattern that allows us to float into reverie. In the place of reverie we have a complex interaction between following the story and allowing the associative memories the story conjures up to wash over us. Consistency in presentation is what allows us in the audience to participate, and breaking consistency, such as a person who is reciting a monologue suddenly asking someone in the front row a question, is jarring.

We have one specific concern to address about recording our voices: reading versus reciting the script. We all know what it feels like to be at a public event when someone reads a speech from beginning to end. It is downright uncomfortable. We do not know how to interact. We are caught someplace between waiting for the speaker to give pause for us to respond and wanting to drift into reverie, but the cadence and style of presentation does not allow it. We also know why people end up reading texts. They are petrified to speak and/or they simply do not have the time to practice the speech enough so that they can recite from memory. Similarly, in recording a voiceover from a script in our workshops, there usually is a combination of fear and lack of time for practice that means a reading seems like the only option.

The easiest way to improve upon a recording of your voice is to keep the writing terse. Record several takes of the text. The nice thing about a digital sound file is that you can mix and match each of the recording takes to create the best-sounding version. We suggest you work at speaking slowly in a conversational style. Finally, digitally constructing the story from a recorded interview is always a good fallback.