I’ve just come across an interesting post from American VO artist and voice coach Terry Daniels. I liked it because it’s all about the importance of listening. In a industry where we work with our voice all the time its amazing how as voice over artists we sometimes forget how important using our ears is.

Terry makes the point that it’s really crucial to listen to what the clients wants – not just in terms of the style of voice presentation they require but also the more mundane details of things like the technical specification of the audio file (this can be really important if you’re producing audio for phone prompts where the technical requirements are often really specific)

The post struck a chord with me for two reasons.

One – Terry talks about how the tone of an email can often come across in a different way from how you intend. I increasingly get voice over jobs via email – sometimes there’s no phone call or other physical interaction involved. Increasingly I’ve realised you do need to actually talk to the client everytime to get a proper understanding of what they want.

Terry also talks about being distracted by doing something else when you should be listening – like checking email or surfing the internet while on the phone to a client.

So this was the second thing that resonated with me. Recently I was calling a client – a production company in the Netherlands – about a script I was doing for them for a major electronics company. Although the script was in English there were a couple of Dutch words and I wanted to get the pronunciation right.
On the phone to producer Michiel I diligently wrote down phonetic spellings for a name of an artist and a museum. While writing the second I said “Oh there’s some dates here – are we saying Twenty Thirteen or Two Thousand and Thirteen?” He told me the answer – but because I was still in the process of writing the museum name phonetically I didn’t write it down.

After I’d hung up I looked at my notes. What had Michiel said about the dates? I hadn’t written it down….and I couldn’t remember because I hadn’t been concentrating: I hadn’t been listening properly because I was busy writing something else.

So I had to record two versions for the copy each time a year came up. A few seconds longer on the phone and I would have saved time in the studio later. It’s only a small example but I think it illustrates the point.

Terry says “take time to listen…so we can communicate more effectively”   It’s good advice and I love his final quote too:
“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” ~Robert McCloskey

My voiceover was for an information item for Philips.  It’s being produced by Voxcast in Holland