What Do Audible Narrators Sound Like?
Note: This was originally published as an Observable notebook.
Recently while looking for audiobooks I came across Eragon, a children's book about a telepathic dragon.
I scrolled down to read the reviews and found these gems:
Ok the story is good! HOWEVER I had a real problem with the way the narrator made the female dragon sound just like Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.
It's a telepathic connection. No vocal cords are being used. The Dragon is not straining her throat to mimic human speach. ITS TELEPATHIC!!!
The voices used for creatures is like trash gollum.
Narrator Gerard Doyle tries to do different voices for the characters but they all end up sounding like poor imitations of the muppets.
GERARD DOYLE MADE SAPHIRA SOUND LIKE AND 60 YEAR OLD SMOKER WITH BRONCHITIS AND SOLOBUM SOUND LIKE A HIGH PITCHED YODA WITH STREP THROAT.
What the actual fuck is wrong with the narrator? [...] I absolutely want to yeet you off a large cliff. [...] may the sun never shine favorably upon you. seriously GO FUCK YOURSELF WITH A STOLEN DICK!!!!
They made me wonder — if a single book can bring out so much emotion and creativity in people, what would we find if we went looking for more reviews like this?
So I decided to plumb the depths of bad narration, collecting the top reviews for 40,000 Audible audiobooks and searching through them for phrases similar to “sounds like” to get a sense of what people find remarkable.
It turns out that narrators often sound:
RuntimeError: Failed to fetch
RuntimeError: Failed to fetch
RuntimeError: Failed to fetch
RuntimeError: Failed to fetch
RuntimeError: Failed to fetch
RuntimeError: Failed to fetch
Below you can search through reviews that talk about narration. Click any review to jump to its book on Audible, where you can listen to a sample.`
Narrator. Sounds like drinking water arrrrgh
Narrator? His main character is okay but the best friend Crane? He sounds like a Muppet
Narration. Dialogue does break out from time to time, but usually only for a line or two. This sounds like a recipe for boredom, but George is a charming and delightful narrator (if not human being), and I found myself completely absorbed in the story
Reading, and found the new voice really unpleasant and hard to listen to. Later on in the book, Luke starts to sound more like his old self from Books 1-3, and I was able to decrease the playback speed to 1
This might be a good book, if not the reader. At least the performance sounds like he was in speed reading contest, consisting of words he does not understand
Voices to the characters (e.g. Jean Luc, a refined lawyer with a deep baritone should not sound like a high pitched Ross Perot)
Narration, it sounded like a dick Tracey movie
Reader . Unfortunately , the narration was much to be desired. The Blackthorne was so monotone and depressing, Grimm sounded like a newscaster, the prince was almost comical
Author was talking to me as opposed to lecturing me
I like the story very much but the narration was distracting. Her voice for Anne was childish and sounded like she was mocking her
Narrator sounds like every voice on every science film I had in high school
Narrator started talking and it was one of my top 3 fave narrators, Joel Leslie
Narration that made the book sound like a 6 hour run on sentence this is one Event worth missing
Narrator made the male lead sound too stuffy at 1st where i wondered if i was going to be able to finish it, as he sounded like a real ass but as the story progressed she got better with his voice as he relaxed
Narrator. I don't know if it was just me, but it kept sounding like there was some noise in the background
Reading this book. It sounds like he's falling asleep reading a long list of atrocities
Narrator who made all the older characters sound like effete British aristocrats
Narrator’s voice, she really sounded like she could be around the same age as Cath, and she did a pretty good job changing her voice a little bit for the different characters
This guy had a terrible voice answer sounded like he had a mouth full of marbles
The reading is choppy, stilted and sounds like someone is trying to read a children’s book with the pronunciation of every single letter of every word
Authors reading their own material. With infuriating consistency, Holiday sounds like he's reading someone else's manuscript for the first time, ending sentences early and splitting up words within the same phrase
Narrating this title. He sounds like an engaging history professor
The narrator ended every sentence in an up tone which became very distracting. It sounded like she was interpreting every sentence as iif it was a question
Narration for this is best described as robotic monotone with strange emphasis on the wrong words of sentences and often sounded like one of those computer synthesized voices which was very distracting and only added to my dislike of this book
Narrators. He also does a great job at accents 😂
I wasn’t sold on Elena Wolfe. She’s great at dramatic lines, but when she narrates, she sounds like a bored, higher-pitched but soft Siri
Narrator was good, but I didn’t care for the male narrator. He was too over dramatic. During tense scenes, he sounds like he’s an announcer for a wrestling match
Is it just me or does this narrator sound like Paris from Gilmore Girls? there was so much going on in this book
Narrator! He has mastered dramatic pauses in a way I have never heard from other narrators. He knows how to use silence as well as sound. I feel as though he is relating a true event that he actually witnessed, rather than just reading a story
Narrator was intolerable. He sounded like he was doing a voice over for a commercial or narrating one of those cheesy Discovery/TLC TV shows like "How Stuff is Made"
The book is really good, the reader sounds like a robot, and a bad one at that
Narrators do this) and in so doing creates an image in the listener’s mind. Homais is proud and bellicose, Emma is generally soft and earnest. Charles sounds like more of a dullard than he probably is, being a doctor
This Narrator is so good, he sounds like he is Greg
I don't know what was worse, the narration or the story. The narrator sounded like William Shatner's daughter, pausing after every few words
Narrator sounds like she is going to fall asleep at any moment: slow, if not hesitant, with some quite unnatural pauses
This was a great story however The narrarator for this book was awful, she was the worse I have ever heard. Many times it seemed that she was just not a good reader. The book also sounded like narrarator was not edited but thought she would be and therefore did not care about her clear mistakes
Narrator tries to come up with cleaver voices for everyone and just ends up sounding like a bunch of uneducated fools
Narration is a three, too. It sounds more like a business seminar than a narration
Reader for Derrick constantly sounds like hes way to suspenseful like something huge is building up but it never happens, I guess after 10 books it's just hard to accept change
Narrator has an odd way of speaking, and it's distracting. You should make sure to listen to the preview to see if you can take it. To me, she sounds like she puts periods in the middle of words, e
Reader, Justine Eyre, sounds like she is trying to force her voice down a register that it is not comfortable
Show More
P. S. If anybody is wondering what a telepathic dragon cookie monster does sound like, she sounds like this:
And that's it!
Thanks to Zora Killpack, Ben Cartwright-Cox, Yuriy Rusko, and Anthony Vastano for advice and feedback.
Bonus Quotes
Here's a collection of a few more reviews that I found amusing.
RuntimeError: Failed to fetch
TypeError: Failed to fetch