Capturing the voice within

Jonathan Moffat was trying to record his voice under stairs, face-to-face with sheets and towels and the intermittent thud of footsteps when he decided he needed a new solution.

This was a new move for Jonathan. He had spent his entire career in public service, from working in northern England, and then to central British government, then moving to Tasman District Council and onto Nelson City Council to manage its archives.

But he had also always enjoyed reading stories to his three girls. He liked doing voices of characters and really drilling into the pacing of books to maximise their enjoyment. Jonathan would also sometimes find himself voicing different characters as he went about his day.

People told him he had a nice telephone voice. Then, about three years ago, his eldest daughter, Freya, interrupted him while he was reading to her.

“You should do this, Dad. You should be one of those people who do this.”

By ‘this’ she meant a voice over artist — someone who lends their skills and manages their vocal range to any number of purposes.

From advertisements, to cartoons, to video games and even to books.

“I thought ‘ok’. Maybe I could. What would that look like. What do I do?”

He signed up to a weekend course in Auckland that taught him the basics and he came away with his own professional voice reel. He started building up the equipment he might need to do his first gigs. He set himself up under his stairs, next to his hot water cylinder. He started posting his voice reel on websites for people looking for artists.

“And I got precisely no responses.”

But he kept with it. He got fed up with practising under the stairs so he started to build himself a little studio in his garage. He started with a pallet and then put some pine panels around it. Jonathan bought some sound inclusion foam to line it with, as well as some cheaper foam bed roll.

Pretty soon he had an acoustically dead sound box. He learned all about editing and processing audio files. He had to train his ear to hear the subtleties of adjusting his voice to maintain consistency across sessions.

Jonathan got a couple of small gigs under his belt before a serendipitous meeting with a friend led him to a local author who had just released her first fantasy novel.

Robyn Prokop’s novel, ‘Taelstone Stones of the Azuri, Book One,’ tells the story of Ash — a kitchen slave who is swept far from his home by fate, and the most mysterious of quests.

She also wanted an audio book to go with the physical and e-book versions. Jonathan’s friend had been suggested but he was a Kiwi and his voice wasn’t quite right for the fantastical world that Robyn had created. But Jonathan’s subtle Newcastle accent might be.

So, he recorded a passage and sent it to Robyn who loved what she heard. Jonathan was now going to be the voice of Taelstone. But it’s a tricky thing to read a large fantasy book. It was filled with fictional places and names and religions. Jonathan had to learn the correct pronunciation for all of those. He had to mark up where to build tension and how to pace the story.

“One of the hardest things is, if there is a twist, not to give it away in the way you are reading it.”

But Jonathan got his head around the material and then he got to work. He drank a lot of water and started to read his screen in the studio. If there was a mistake, he would use a dog clicker to show a spike in the sound file that he could go back to and amend.

Sometimes he would pause awkwardly in a sentence or record two sessions and they would sound different. It was meticulous, long work. The final novel is 11 hours long. Jonathan says its many multiples of that to get a final result.

But then, after many months, he handed in the finished result to Robyn.

“What ticked boxes for me was helping someone achieve something. Robyn was passionate about these stories and wants people to be able to hear and read them, so it was really nice to help her achieve her aims.”

And Robyn’s series is a trilogy so there may well be more for Jonathan to do. But for that to happen people need to download it.

One demographic who got a free copy was Jonathan’s daughters. His youngest, Iris, became one of his biggest critics. “It was nerve wracking,” he says.

It was also quite strange to be walking around the house only to hear his own voice emanating from a room somewhere as she listened to the book.

“That embarrassment of hearing your own voice is waning now.”

As for what’s next, Jonathan would love to get more voice work but recognises the world of the Taelstone just fell into his lap.

“I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time.”