Voiceover/Voice Over
When people ask me what line of work I’m in, it’s ironic how many times my reply is met with the secondary question, “What’s voiceover?!” I find that quite amusing bearing in mind that most of us have been exposed to a continual barrage of voiceovers since the day we were born, daily, repetitively competing for our attention, throughout the course of our entire lives.
Advertising agencies, production houses, television and radio networks, lean heavily on voiceovers to define their commercials and promotions for radio and television broadcast. As the term is industry specific, it appears to have become enveloped within the shadow of its own umbrella and closely mirrors the voiceover artist’s lot of being subject to an irony of occupational obscurity. That might not be so surprising considering that voiceover artists are often heard but rarely, if ever, seen.
When I entered the voiceover industry several years ago, I was initially under the impression that the term ‘voiceover’, referred to the voice artist’s skills to project their voice over and above competing influences. That was a semi-educated guess. The early history of the voiceover industry had been dominated by a liking for announcer-y read styles that were often notably pretentious, pompous, and assertively sales-like. Listeners were left feeling as if they were being spoken down to. It wasn’t too long before prospective consumers were learning to switch off to the perpetual ranting of the barrage of sales pitches that were being directed at them daily.
In more recent years, market players have determinedly veered away from employing this traditional announcer-y style delivery in favour of a natural read style that has come to be recognised as being more relevant, believable and compelling. This paradigm shift was certainly undertaken as an effort to make advertising more persuasive by circumnavigating growing consumer resistance.
The term voiceover was actually coined to describe the process of laying recorded voice over a background of picture frames, music or sound effects, not quite what I had originally imagined.
But to plunge the subject of voiceover into further obscurity, voiceover artists are also commonly referred to as voice artists, voice actors and voice talent. The terms are completely interchangeable. Then there are specialist titles such as ‘voice animator’ and ‘narrator.’ And if all that doesn’t add enough confusion to the matter, it remains equally grammatically correct to spell ‘voiceover’ as a single word or as its two separate component words juxtaposed as in, ‘voice over.’
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