Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Audiobook Week: Sound Effects in Audiobooks

Love them? Hate them? Take them or leave them? How do you feel about sound effects in audiobooks?
Alternate suggestions: Single narrator vs. multiple narrators vs. full cast, audio dramatizations, etc.


I'm a day late (and a dollar short) on this one - forgive me. I had to work a twelve hour day yesterday so please cut me some slack and now I have the morning off to compensate me so I am catching up! Regarding today's (yesterday's) question... I am probably in the minority saying I am not a big fan of sound effects. I must have the attention span of a gnat because the "voice on the phone" effect or hearing some music in the background just totally yanks me out of the story and makes me notice the sound effect rather than attend to the story.

I had a great time reading other people's thoughts on narrators. It really opened my eyes to the times when multiple narrators would be a good thing. One example was The Help which I read in print but can totally see being great with multilpe narrators on audio because of the way the point of view changes with the change of each chapter. Now, my bad multiple narrator experience came from a recent David Baldacci book - Hell's Corner. Rather than have one of my favorite narrators Ron McLarty read the whole thing as he has done in the other books I've listened to. They added a female voice for the women in the story. I found it very disconcerting because she would just pop in whenever a female talked. So it would be going along great with McLarty voicing all the men and doing the narrative portions and then all of a sudden this woman would pipe in and jar me - yuck.

Thta's it for Tuesday. Happy audiobook week everybody. I am going to giveawy some audiobooks with the Thursday post about book suggestions so check back.

1 comment:

bermudaonion said...

I'm the same way. I was driving through Atlanta one time and the audiobook I was listening to had sound effects. I jumped out of my skin when they fired a gunshot and kept looking around when the sirens went off.