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Why do audiobook narrators speak so slowly?


Ser Not Appearing

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At the outset let me say that I'm less looking to make a point as if to say it's dumb or not a good idea ... I'd simply like to understand the reasoning.

And I assume there is reasoning behind this. Whether it's a historic standard or a limitation of cost or ... something, there has to be a reason that people talk unnaturally slow when they read an audiobook. I further presume it's not a habit narrators developed on their own to ensure that they enunciate clearly. I suspect it's driven by directors or publishers or someone other than the narrator.

Does anyone have background on why this is the industry standard?

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I listen to audiobooks throughout the day, so I consume a lot of audiobooks with many different types of readers.

Some of the readers do indeed read slowly, but I would suggest that the readers' speeds fall on a bell curve, with some much quicker, and others much slower.  For instance, if you listen to a LibriVox recording, you are going to get a fair number of amateur readers who are on the slow end of the spectrum, while more popular professionals tend to read a little more rapidly.

Let's pick a professional like Grover Gardner.  If you pick a typical sample of his reading, he is sort of bang-on in the middle of the speed spectrum.  My perception is that most readers use this tempo, including a great number of British readers, such as Peter Noble, who is deliberate in order to cover a variety of unusual terms.

Slightly faster in his reading is Michael Prichard, as you can hear in this sample.  I also find that if you get audio files that have been transferred from cassette tapes, they tend to be a little faster.  I don't know if this is an artifact of the transfer process, or if readers in the 1980s were faster.  Even more so are the Old Time Radio audio tales like Dimension X or Escape.

I also think that women read faster than men.  I have audiobooks from two different readers for Jack Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy, and Suzanne Toren who recorded them first, before Kevin T. Collins, takes a good hour and a half less to get through each of the books. 

Slightly slower is a classic Librivox reader like Andy Minter, who read the Max Carrados detective stories, or a professional like Stefan Rudnicki, who despite the slower cadence is still excellent.

But in answer to your question, the two producers I know consider speed to be a quality control spec, and they have a goal to hit that "moderate" band of reading speed, either with the talent or in post-production.  That wasn't always the case, so if you have copies of older stuff, you can find some real speedsters.  One example was the library of free audiobooks that Baen produced back in the early 90s and were available online from them and other sources in the wild west days of Internet 1.0.  I downloaded them all back in the day, and some of the readers had surely been into the Peruvian Marching Powder right before they started their sessions (I jest, but they were not slow, nor particularly professional).  You might enjoy this short history of audio books.

As Ser Not Appearing mentioned above, some readers benefit from 1.5x speed.  Some readers are just too slow for my taste, but they aren't bad readers, so I have used Audacity to ramp up the tempo of the audio files to something closer to my preferred speed.  You have to be able to manipulate the individual audio files, but this also gives you a chance to clean up any other annoyances (preview chapters of other books, long introductions, hiss, etc.) in audio books that I file for listening to again later.  I recommend Audacity because it is free, it is easy to use, and it allows you to increase the speed, but then drop the timbre so that the final product doesn't end up sounding like the reader is a chipmunk.

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Professional readers, with professional level audio equipment and production programs, professional level experience are what make the difference.

I have never listened to anything that's 'free,' I don't listen to sf/f (or hardly ever, and when I do, these are professionally read and recorded by the houses that do that, such as Tantor) particularly the free/self-published sort. I listen mostly to history, but there is fiction in there quite a bit, especially in deep summer.  For fiction right now I'm listening to a two novel fictional biography and history of Catherine the Great, written by a Russian, read in English with a variety of Russian accents.  It's quite wonderful.

There is no such thing as standards except in house, and those who offer the productions, such as the Overdrive collections and so on. 

If you think about it for about a bit of a nano second, the very idea of a number of words per minute rule is just -- well, ridiculous (you did say you are a funny fellow! :lol: ).  Words don't have the same number of syllables, don't take the same amount of time or breath to speak, just for starters.  You have to record books the same way one records music -- though there aren't the number of moving parts if there is a single reader.  Think about it -- you don't believe every bar of music must contain the same number of notes, fer pete's sake.

Also, monotonal.

So, you are evidently listening to subpar productions.

 

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Over the course of a novel, average syllables per word will ... average. There's likely some truth to variability but nothing so strong as to render the idea moot. But if it doesn't exist then it doesn't exist.

Perhaps it's just a personal preference for faster speech and I was simply never aware of this tenancy in myself. Most people I know do listen to audiobooks on speeds faster than 1x but maybe it just doesn't bother them as much as it does me. Regardless, I doubt it has anything to do with production quality. It's everything from (authors, obviously) Scott Lynch to Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, Orson Scott Card, RA Salvatore, George RR Martin, Robin Hobb, R F Kuang, Jean M Auel, LE Modesitt Jr, Steven Erickson ... even older stuff like Dune or something like The Art of War.

It all strikes me as incredibly slow and I have to take it to 1.5x just to get it to sound like normal speech. Again, it could just be me (meaning it's everyone else who is wrong).

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It's you. 

How do radio plays sound to you? How does music sound to you.  Keeping sound to an arbitrary number per minute loses all expression, all tonality, all modulation.  You only difference would be louder and less loud.  People don't eve write their books that way in their mind as they are composing, and trying different speeds for how a sentence -- not only dialog -- should sound.

Are conversations too slow for you too?

I'm familiar with many a hearing differentiation among people having spent so much time with musicians and in studios -- and even in the NYPL's own audio book studio for the city's vision impaired.  But yours is a new one to me!

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11 hours ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

Does anyone have background on why this is the industry standard?

Ser Not Appearing -- interesting question. I don't know, but I would speculate the industry probably caters to the common denominator (e.g., Zorral and Jaxom 1974) re focus and attention, to maximize consumer retention. Alternatively, the speaker's speed is moderated with the intent to evoke emotion and memory; again, to retain consumers. Whatever the reason (if one exists), it's most likely motivated by profit.

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5 hours ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

It all strikes me as incredibly slow and I have to take it to 1.5x just to get it to sound like normal speech. Again, it could just be me (meaning it's everyone else who is wrong).

Ser Not Appearing -- that's because you've a more efficient cognitive process (e.g., attention, and corresponding capacity to manage its amplitude, intensity, and control, et al.), relative to the common denominator of audiobook listeners. Otherwise, you've more familiarity with the material, or structure.

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35 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

Wilbur -- very interesting to see how audiobooks evolved, from helping the handicapped to maximizing profit. I appreciate the capitalists filling the various gaps, and I've listened to a few audiobooks out of curiosity, though I don't get as much out of them that way. Reading e-books is faster, more efficient, and has collateral effects. Yet I'll probably resort to audiobooks as my eyes degrade.

Here's the (format) trend, according to Pew Research Center:

  • 75% of US adults have consumed some or all of a book, in any format, in the past 12 months; down by 3% over the last decade. It's shocking a quarter didn't read at all!
  • 65% print book; down 7%.
  • 30% e-book; up 13%.
  • 23% audiobook; up 12%.

The demographic trends are also interesting; re the most prolific readers (of any format) by group:

  • Women
  • White
  • 18-39
  • College, or more
  • $75 thousad USD, or higher
  • Urban
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  • 2 weeks later...

I totally agree. I find 1x audiobooks excruciating to listen to. 1.5x is usually minimum for me, up to 2x depending on the narrator.

Usually this is easily done in playback, but when I listen to audiobooks on my GPS watch for runs, it just takes mp3 files. So I have to download the audiobook, find the associated filed, open it in an audio editor, change the tempo, export the file, then transfer to my watch. This is an enormous hassle and takes several minutes per segment of audiobook, but the alternative is listening at 1x and that's not gonna happen.

But then again people frequently tell me I speak much too fast in real life and I usually watch YouTube videos at 2x as well. Interestingly, podcasts at 1x don't bother me much, though I will sometimes do them at 1.5x if they're long.

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I'm not sure if it's reading too slowly or reading far, far more slowly than I can read. I once ran an experiment with A Game of Thrones (naturally) where I read the first chapter whilst Roy Dotrice moved through the prologue. By the time he'd finished the prologue I was almost three complete chapters into the book.

It's why audiobooks don't work for me, in the time it takes the narrator to read one chapter, I'll have read three or four. And there's zero point having it on "in the background" (as it won't register).

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8 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm not sure if it's reading too slowly or reading far, far more slowly than I can read. I once ran an experiment with A Game of Thrones (naturally) where I read the first chapter whilst Roy Dotrice moved through the prologue. By the time he'd finished the prologue I was almost three complete chapters into the book.

It's why audiobooks don't work for me, in the time it takes the narrator to read one chapter, I'll have read three or four. And there's zero point having it on "in the background" (as it won't register).

This is why I only listen to them on walks or runs, basically. Even doing something as simple as cleaning while trying to listen to an audiobook gets me easily distracted and not following along well enough. And I'd go batty trying to listen in place of actually reading myself!

We also used to listen to them on long family roadtrips as a kid. We rented the cassettes (and later CDs) from the library and it helped 7 of us in one car endure a 22-hour drive from Iowa to SC!

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Yeah the same here as Nora and Wert.  I have the same annoyance when clicking on a news article and finding its fully video.  Please give me an article containing the same content I can read in 30 secs vs spending 5 minutes of video.  Obviously there are exceptions with some movies and TV where great cinematic medium can adequately replace or even provide more than written text, but those are a rarity.   

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For me I really like voices. I'm not a very visual person, and how someone speaks tends to make a bigger impression on me than how they dress or what they look like. So I don't mind the speed of audio books, as long as I like the narrator's voice, accent and delivery otherwise. (One of the things that makes my heart sink is seeing "read by the author" in the audiobook description because their lack of training tends to be very obvious.) 

Also, slow reading is useful when I'm listening in German because it gives my brain extra processing time. And the verb comes as an extra nice surprise. :)

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