‘Do I really sound like that?’ is how people invariably respond when they hear a recording of their own voice. Or they used to, anyway. Your own voice was something you heard a lot but never actually heard from the outside. But in the age of voice memos, podcasts and TikToks, we are much more likely to have to hear our voices.
It was eerie to hear my voice reading words I would have sworn I hadn’t said from just a minute before
I recently read the audiobook of my new book, Gay Shame – all eight and a half hours of it – so I was confronted with vocal reality on a grand scale. I still sound fresh and flush in my own mind, so the obvious – that I sound old now, because I am old now – came as a surprise. I slid through life not acknowledging this until I heard my wheezy cracked pipe, replacing what were once lusty reeds.
The fashion nowadays seems to be for authors to narrate their own books. Surprisingly, it is just assumed that they’ll be able to meet the necessities of this quite demanding acting job. Nobody checked to find out if I was a stumbler, a slow talker, a babbler or gabbler, or monotonous or nasal. I was just booked for three days and left to get on with it. I managed it in two, with – I was told by my affable recording engineer – a record low score of mistakes and retakes. (Though perhaps they say that to everybody.)
I think my success rate is because I had a terrible habit of reading out loud to myself as a child. I found reading so exciting that I had to let off the excess energy it was creating. I often used to pace up and down while reading. I think this might have been more than a little odd, but it seemed very natural to me. As with all one’s amiable foibles, I couldn’t understand why other people didn’t do it.
The audiobook recording process is very simple. You are placed in a tiny booth, headphones are clapped upon you, an iPad is propped before you, and away you go. Any kind of tiny room has been a nightmare for me since I was ten; low lintels and knee-knocking edges, and everything squashed. How the hell was I going to complete this feat?
But I found I soon went into a fugue state. My automatic narrator kicked in. Some energy was supplied from somewhere. At one point I was convinced I’d skipped a long paragraph, but this was rewound to me to prove that I hadn’t. It was eerie to hear my voice reading words I would have sworn I hadn’t said from just a minute before.
Another embarrassing moment was when I realised that a slightly exotic name I’d picked out for use in the book as shorthand for ‘middle-class student busybody’ was just one tiny letter away from the name of that affable recording engineer. I just decided to breeze through that, though I did a whole-soul cringe.
I was also wearing new teeth which were still being run in, and can make me sound either a bit like Tommy Cooper or a bit lispy. I began to regret any use of the words ‘statistics’, ‘institutions’ and ‘temporarily’. Fortunately, I had, before the session, practised the place name of a Finnish archaeological site so I could take it at a lick. (The engineer was impressed. I told him that my briefing notes had said to do a practice run at home on foreign words. ‘Yeah, but nobody else has actually done that,’ he replied.)
The experience gave me a little insight into what it is like to have yourself as a product that you are selling, to have yourself as your job, to have all eyes – or ears – on you. Actors are trained for this and enjoy being looked at. How strange it must be to be typecast as ‘Ugly Man’ or ‘Shrewish Woman’, but it’s work.
A friend of mine who had some success in the musical arena once observed that one of the main reasons why pop stars take drugs is not to enhance a hedonistic lifestyle, or not entirely, but to overcome their terrible awkwardness and embarrassment. They are suddenly thrust, with little preparation, into a world where their identity is everywhere. You feel as if there are two of you, and it warps your mind, so you take the drugs to escape that mindwarp. I had a cheese sandwich and a Fanta, which seemed to do the job. But it was still a relief to finish and get home and hide from myself.
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