Audio — whether used in podcast, radio, or marketing — is great at storytelling and conveying emotion. We know this intuitively. It’s how we react to a scene or an idea that often prompts us to share with others and generate word of mouth. We say, “This spoke to me, you have to hear it.” But why and how? Today’s conversation: How great storytelling and hosting engages audiences and influences listener behavior! We’re going under the covers with Jodi Krangle, host of Audio Branding. Curious about how a professional voice actor engages audiences? Welcome to Part 1 of a two-part episode with Jodi Krangle. In addition to hosting Audio Branding, Jodi is a Toronto-based voice actor whose voice is heard on commercials for Dell, HGTV, Nespresso & Kraft, among thousands of others.
We’re doing something different on this episode. Jodi and I interview each other – and discover some real similarities and big differences between voice acting & hosting. One of the biggest similarities: As hosts and voice actors, we need to communicate emotion authentically. That’s where the joy and the success lies – and where many of the problems do, too.
Parts 1 and 2 of this conversation with Jodi Krangle are running on Sound Judgment and also on Audio Branding. Thanks to Audio Branding editor Humberto Franco for doing beautiful work in audio and video.
Follow Audio Branding here.
To learn more about Jodi Krangle and connect with her, visit voiceoversandvocals.com.
To watch shorts from this episode and other Audio Branding episodes, visit Jodi’s Youtube channel, JodiKrangleVO.
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How to be a great host: Jodi Krangle’s takeaways
1. Sound needs to change as culture changes.
Remember the old movie trailers with The Voice of God? We don’t hear those much any more, and for a good reason. Younger generations experience sound in a very different way – they want to be shown what’s will be on the movie screen, for instance, not told to. They do not want to be sold to at all. So if we’re not hearing the Voice of God from voice actors any more, we’re also not wanting that newscaster, anchor voice – the Walter Cronkite voice – in journalism and podcasting, either.
2. Emotional context is what sound does for us.
I was surprised to hear Jodi say, when she’s recording a commercial, for instance – “If I don’t have a movie or play going on in my head, it’s hard for the person listening to understand the emotion that’s coming across.” Storytellers, when you’re using a script, this is key to avoiding sounding like you’re reading. We need to embody what we’re saying.
3. Hosting is strategic. We need to start treating it that way.
In the advertising industry, directors often make the mistake of tacking on voiceover at the end of a production, rather than thinking about it strategically from the beginning. Many folks in Jodi’s industry mistakenly believe voice acting is just standing at a mic and talking. That’s my pet peeve as well. We should be thinking about hosting – and creating an intentional sound for our shows – at the beginning of the process, not throwing in a voice at the end. Hosting well is how you engage listeners, and hosting poorly can lose them.
Tune in next week for Part 2, a bonus episode.
Credits
Sound Judgment is a production of Podcast Allies, LLC.
Host: Elaine Appleton Grant
Project Manager: Tina Bassir
Sound Designer: Andrew Parella
Illustrator: Sarah Edgell
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This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
Elaine Appleton Grant
There’s a truism in podcasting: what spoken word audio is really good at is storytelling and conveying emotion. We know this intuitively—it’s how we feel that often prompts us to share with others. We say, “This really spoke to me, you have to hear it.” But did you ever wonder why?
Today’s conversation: The psychology of sound! We’re going under the covers about how sound influences our feelings and behaviors, and even what we buy and what we eat. My partner is Jodi Krangle, host of Audio Branding. Jodi is a Toronto-based voice actor—you may have heard her in commercials for Dell, HGTV, Nespresso, and Kraft, among thousands of others. Her podcast, Audio Branding, explores audio in many forms, from movie trailers to the little pings we hear at the cash register and the hospital.
We’re doing something different today. Jodi and I interview each other—and discover some real similarities and big differences between voice acting & hosting. One of the biggest similarities: As hosts and voice actors, it’s on us to communicate emotion authentically. That’s where the joy and the success lies—and where many of the problems do, too.
Welcome to Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved podcast host.
I’m Elaine Appleton Grant.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Storytellers, one note before we get started: This conversation has been broken into two parts. Today, part 1; we’ll run part 2 as a bonus episode next week, so make sure you’re following Sound Judgment on your podcast app so you don’t miss part 2. Let’s get into it.
Jodi Krangle
Well, to start off, I'd like to say that I have been really looking forward to having this conversation with you because I think it's an important one for both of us. And I'm really interested in where the idea of hostiness—which is kind of what you explore a lot of on your podcast—meets with the communication aspect of audio, and how important sound is to our everything, really. So I think this is going to be a really interesting conversation, and I'm glad that we've got this chance to collaborate.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I could not agree more. And, you know, Jodi, you and I have known each other for a while, I've been watching your journey with Audio Branding with a great deal of curiosity, because you're delving into a lot of psychology, really, of how sound affects our behavior, and our ability to trust or not trust and how we feel, even crazy things like how food tastes, changes based on the sounds we're hearing. So some of this stuff is just astonishing to me. And people who are voice talent, and podcast hosts, and other kinds of people who are involved in sound—the world that you investigate pretty broadly—there's so much overlap between my world and your world.
Jodi Krangle
Totally. Yes, definitely. And I interview a lot of podcasters, who are, you know, some of them have been doing this for years and years and years. And yeah, that aspect of how a host connects with an audience and becomes compelling, and is able to tell a story well, that's all about communication. It's all about sound. So yeah, I've been fascinated with your podcast as well.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Thank you. And, a lot of the people I work with, a lot of my colleagues in the industry, are very interested in voice coaching. But we don't do it very much in our industry, whereas you do a lot of work around the actual voice. And I am very curious to learn more about that. And I suspect that there's some vice versa, where we may do more work on things like story structure, interviewing skills, etc, that can be very helpful to voice talent and commercial producers and animation producers and all of that. So it's gonna be really interesting, sort of—what are we doing? We're sort of cross breeding. Cross pollinating.
Jodi Krangle
Cross pollinating. That’s a better word. Yes. I actually really enjoyed your interview with John Barth. Because he went into this, right, he was talking a lot about how voice needed to be coached for podcast hosts, which I thought was fascinating. Because as a voice actor, I've been doing that since day one. That's what I was trained for. And it's interesting how much of an overlap there really is in becoming a good storyteller. Because ultimately, that's what I'm doing. I might be reading someone else's words, but I have to relate them to how I feel. Because if I'm not relating them to how I feel, I can't project that. I can't make other people feel. So that's really what a lot of this is about, making people feel.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yes, yes. And you and your guests talk about emotive qualities and emotion a lot, which is one of the two things that podcasts do best, when they are working well, is to evoke feelings to put us there. And the other is storytelling. So this is very similar—
I should say, for listeners who don't know what Jodi is referring to, John Barth was my guest on the second episode of Sound Judgment. He is a talent scout. He is a producer’s producer. He's been in the public radio world and the audio storytelling world for more than three decades. He founded Marketplace. He was the person who saw The Moth on stage and said, you know, that should be a radio show. And then with a team of people at PRX, developed The Moth—and at The Moth—developed The Moth into the Moth Radio Hour, which has since had something like 100 million downloads. So it's insane. I mean, it's been over quite a long period of time. But still, I mean, The Moth is revered. So a good one to call out. And he’s the nicest guy.
Jodi Krangle
Yeah, he sounded really sweet.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yesh he is. So Jodi, I would love to start with kind of a simple question for my audience, which is, how do you define what audio branding is? This is not a term that we throw around in the podcast industry.
Jodi Krangle
Yeah, it's something more in the advertising, marketing vein of things. And I'll tell you what the International Sound Awards defines it as because they're the ones that kind of started giving people awards for coming up with innovative uses of sound. And that, I think, started for them in 2009. So it's been around for a while. But they define it as a brand sound that represents the identity and values of a brand in a distinctive manner. So that could be the audio logo or the sonic logo. Lots of people think of it as that, but that's not the only thing it is. It's also branded functional sounds. So say your GE kettle makes a sound when it's finished, you know, it makes a little beep or something like that. But it's a specific beep. Right? It sounds high end.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah, yeah.
Jodi Krangle
It might have a different sound, right? So that’s a branded functional sound. Or brand music that you would hear on a commercial or, you know, McDonald's has a particular brand music that they use all the time. And they may change the tone of that, they may change the beat of that, but it's still the same tune. It's still the same DNA, right? And the brand voice. So some people use the same voiceover, the same voice, the same actor for whatever there’s appearing on screen.
Elaine Appleton Grant
So we all know that the voice of God, of the movie promos, right—I think there was a famous voice talent who did that for decades.
Jodi Krangle
Yes, there definitely was. Yeah, there are several of them. But yeah. And that was around for a long, long time. And came about by accident, really, because he was replacing someone who was supposed to be doing the job. And he had a very distinctive voice. And so they decided to hire him again and again and again. And they don't do that a whole lot anymore, actually. Because nowadays, people don't want to be told, they want to be shown.
Elaine Appleton Grant
You mean they don't do voice of God very much anymore. But they still do hire the same voice actor—brands will hire the same voice actor for a long time.
Jodi Krangle
Oh, totally, yes they will. But for movie trailers, movie trailers don't really have—not a lot anymore. They do if it's coming out on streaming media sometimes. And it depends if it's an ad, but you'll very rarely hear them in the movie theater. It just doesn't happen all that much anymore, because the audience is more interested in being shown what they're going to see on screen, rather than told by a voice on high, right? That's the switch that's been happening for a long time because of the way that the younger generations experience sound and advertising, because they don't want to be sold to at all.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I heard that in some of the episodes that I was listening to recently. I mean, you've got 160 some odd episodes, as of this recording. And I've been listening off and on since you started this, and the ones that I was listening to recently, I did hear something exactly about that. And that is also true and something that I talk about, that some of my guests talk about, that people don't want to—
Show not tell, obviously, show not tell, over and over and over again, let's think in scenes, let's describe scenes, put people in scenes, using sound and words and voices. But also don't…
Glynn Washington, of Snap Judgment is strict on this. He says, I'm not going to tell you what this story means. That's for you to decide. Now that there's a huge range, a huge range in decisions around that, and we can get into it later. But I found it very interesting that this is a cultural thing that crosses our industries. Because younger people say, you know, it's the end of the newscaster voice.
Jodi Krangle
Well, totally. And that's why voiceover styles have changed over the years, too I can't sell to, I can't be talking to, talking from on high to someone. I have to be talking with them. So it's very much a relational thing.
And if I don't have some kind of movie, play, something, going on in my head, that relates to what I'm saying, it's really hard for the person listening to understand the emotion behind what I'm trying to get across.
And really, it's all about emotion, because you want to make that connection with the person on the other end, whether you're seeing them or not. And that's emotional context. And that's what sound does for us. It just in general gives us emotional context. All about—you know, you've probably heard this many times before—we don't buy based on logic. We buy based on emotion, right? So the whole trust thing becomes super important. And oftentimes, the first thing you're going to experience is the sound of someone bringing something to your attention.
A lot of the advertising that we see on television or in streaming, or whatever—these days, specifically, people are very rarely focused on one thing. We're all multitasking in so many different ways in our lives. And so what's becoming so important about sound right now, as far as advertising is concerned, is that you aren't always sitting in front of a screen watching what's happening. You could be walking around, you could have earbuds in, and you're doing the laundry, or washing dishes, or having a walk or something like that. There's so many other things you could be doing. And sound is what is going to fit within that life, as opposed to having to focus on something that you're looking at. So the sound aspect of that, even if you do have a visual aspect, is super important.
Elaine Appleton Grant
It's totally important, and creates an enormous challenge for probably both of us, for everyone in our industries. Because we're all trying to find ways to get attention. And there are effective ways, there are good ways, there are ways with integrity. And there are ways that—maybe you or I might argue are less so, and are sort of cheap, short term ways, or even just lacking in strategy.
But I feel like we're jumping ahead a little bit.
Jodi Krangle
You’re probably right.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yes. So let me reel us back for just a second. And let me just ask you—so you described what audio branding is. And you're a singer, you're a longtime voice talent, you've done amazing stuff in your career, and you continue to…
What made you decide to start a show on audio branding, more broadly than starting a show for other people who were voice actors?
Jodi Krangle
Well, that's a really good question. And one of the main things that I thought of, and actually, this was as an offshoot of a conversation that I was having inside Vincent Pugliese’s mastermind—
Elaine Appleton Grant
Total Life Freedom.
Jodi Krangle
Yes, exactly. Which sort of was what got me started into podcasting in the first place. Because I fought it for a long time. I was just convinced—
Elaine Appleton Grant
For good reason!
Jodi Krangle
It's a lot of work, a lot of work. And yeah, I did fight it for a long time, for good reason. But at the time, I jumped in really, really quickly, about six months before I started the Audio Branding podcast, and just did something called Jodi’s Silver Linings, which was a sort of offshoot of a blog that I had been writing, a really short blog, about common sense stuff. Like, you don't have to be productive every second of the day. And if you're in a gathering, you don't need to be taking pictures all the time. You could just actually experience the moment. What a shocker. You know, all of this stuff that just came from the fact that I was a little older and had experienced some things and just wanted to tell people look, it's okay. Self care is okay.
So I called it Self Care For Creatives. That was kind of my tagline. And I did it for about six months, just because I wanted to jump into podcasting, figure out what it was about, figure out my processes and get things in line. And I stopped because people started asking me to be a life coach. And what that told me was that clearly I'm being thought of as an expert in something I didn't want to be thought of as an expert in. So I had no intention of doing life coaching, no interest in coaching at all, honestly.
Elaine Appleton Grant
I was gonna say, do you, are you a life coach?
Jodi Krangle
I don't. And I have no interest in doing that. Yeah, I’m more of a—I call myself a fellow traveler. So I'm asking questions that my audience might want to ask of the people that I'm interviewing. That's kind of the point of what I'm doing.
But ultimately the idea was, okay, well, if that's not what I want to be known for, then what do I want to be known for? And I had to think about that, because there were other other voiceover related podcasts already out there. It wasn't like I was going to be reinventing that wheel. So I thought, you know, a lot of us who work in sound have a problem with the people in our industry not understanding what it is we do, and not understanding how important what we do is to their end production. And not just voiceovers, but anyone who works in sound—sound designers, filmmakers, video production people, content creators, anyone who works in sound—has experienced the, oh we’ll fix it in post. We've all heard that, right?
Elaine Appleton Grant
Oh, yes.
Jodi Krangle
If you capture it correctly on the set, you won't have to do that. You know what I mean?
Elaine Appleton Grant
We have an even simpler term for that. And I'm sure you've used it as well, which is garbage in, garbage out.
Jodi Krangle
Exactly. Exactly. So yes, a lot of what I deal with is—not that I feel like I'm lesser in a production, not that anyone makes me feel like that, necessarily. But that because it's tacked on at the end and not considered in the beginning of the production, it's not nearly as effective as it could be. And that, for me, is just—people need to pay more attention to this. And I wanted them to understand psychologically how this works on us, and how much more effective it could be for advertising and marketing, if they thought about this beforehand, instead of trying to tack it on at the end.
Because it's such a big part of any production. And it's the emotional part of that production. And so that is why it's so psychologically important. You're not going to have that connection unless you think about this. So that was the impetus behind starting the whole podcast, because, really, I wanted to raise all boats for all of us who worked in sound, because it's important.
Elaine Appleton Grant
It is important, and you are so right that people don't—people, I mean, we could go down a rabbit hole of defining who exactly we're talking about who doesn't understand it—but there is a lack of understanding, I think, of sound and even from me to your industry, it's like, Oh, I really am just eating up the science of why this matters and how it works.
Jodi Krangle
It's pretty amazing.
Elaine Appleton Grant
It really is. But people really do not understand—this is why I started Sound Judgment.
Jodi Krangle
And I wanted to turn that back on you as well. I want to know why you started your podcast because, again, that whole podcast host being a good communicator idea. What are you discovering that you didn't think you would find?
Elaine Appleton Grant
Oh, well, those are two different questions in a way. They're related, but—I had long wanted to do a podcast about podcasting, but like you, I didn't want to do another general interest one, or just one that recommended other shows, or anything to do with growing your audience or measuring it, because there's a lot of that out there. There's a lot on the business and the mechanics of podcasting. There's almost nothing about hosting, and really by implication, producing.
And that quality—I did not coin the term hostiness, that comes from PRX many years ago. But it's this ineffable quality that makes us go, Oh, I love listening to Ira Glass or Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, or Anna Sale, or Brené Brown, or whoever. We connect, and different people obviously connect with different hosts. But what is it that makes us connect?
So it's the same thing. It's the emotion, it's the connection, it's the identification. It's what's called that parasocial relationship, where I feel like Jonathan Fields of Good Life Project is my best friend, and I could chat with him on the street, but he doesn't have any idea who I am. Or people know you, Jodi, because they've been listening to your podcast now for a couple years. They get to know your voice and your mannerisms and your style, and they like the warmth and the friendliness, or whatever. There's very little about that. And the interesting thing to me is, well, two things. One is that there was some research that I'm still trying to track down again. This is a few years ago, I believe from Radiotopia, that said…
Data that showed that people return to the same podcast again and again when they fall in love with the host. So that clearly indicates a lot of important things about who your host is. But very little attention is paid, particularly by these millions of creators who are starting podcasts every day, and organizations starting podcasts every day, to what the host sounds like and thinks and behaves. And there's a performative aspect to it—there's a lot going on, to choose and coach and be a great host who people fall in love with.
And it is completely ignored, almost completely ignored. And as somebody who, you know—my company produces podcasts for other organizations, and I've been involved in this for a long time—but it goes way back. I mean, I was in theater as a little kid, all the way up through my 30s. I would do it again, if I had time. I’m a writer. All the writing and the theater and the voice talent and sound, the technical sound quality. So much goes into this. And I've been just fascinated with it. And when I work with new hosts, it feels to some degree intuitive, but it's really not. It's years of doing it; working with people, being in public radio studios, where there's always a producer. So you're honing your ear, or if you're a news editor, you're editing a reporter’s story, and a lot of it is through listening. And you go, Oh, that doesn't sound right. Or there's a logical leap or the tone is wrong. Read it a different way to match what you're trying to get across, that emotion, all of that stuff.
And so finally, I hit on that when I heard a show called Standing Ovation, which is a dissection show for public speakers.
Jodi Krangle
Oh, I see. Okay.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Done by Jay Baer, who is a National Speakers Association Hall of Famer. And I couldn't stop listening to it. And so I got in touch with him, who I did not know. And I said, Jay, can I steal your idea but apply it to podcast hosting? And he said, sure. I stole it. And he told us—and in fact, I interviewed him quite recently. And I asked him where he stole it from and he stole it from a show, whose title is escaping me right now, where the host was bringing comics on and they were dissecting stand up comedy, and he loves stand up. And so he went, oh, public speaking, I can do the same thing. Bring on a great public speaker, have their signature story on and dissect it with them. And it's fascinating. And I love that kind of living case study sort of thing. You know, it's like being in a rehearsal in the theater and getting notes. Anyway, so when I did interview him, we talked about that conversation where he said, sure, I stole it, go ahead. He said, you at least had the guts to ask me, I just did it. So you're twice the person I am.
Jodi Krangle
That's great, though. It is a really fascinating idea. And I'm looking forward to hearing that episode when it comes out. But the one question I have from hearing all of that, because I mean, it's a great background, and I love what you're doing with the show so far. So do you see common problems with hosts when you are putting on your producer hat? And are you trying to dissect what that is in your show? I'm just curious if you ever touch—because I know that that's kind of backtracking and sort of going into the negative, unfortunately, as opposed to the positive. But I'm just curious as to if there are certain similarities between issues.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Between issues between different podcast hosts, or between—some of the issues that show up among podcasters also show up, say, with voice talent?
Jodi Krangle
Well, I'm sure that's definitely the case. But I'm curious as to if when you're a producer, if there are common problems that you find new hosts come into contact with, come up against?
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's easiest to talk about it in two big buckets. So there's the scripted podcast bucket, which is probably more like your world. Because you're typically using a script, I assume?
Jodi Krangle
Well, when I'm interviewing someone, sort of, but sort of not.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Oh, I’m sorry, not as a podcast host, but as a voice actor.
Jodi Krangle
As a voice actor, yes, definitely as a voice actor.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah. Sometimes you're using a framework. You and I built a framework so that we would stay on point and cover things, but we're not rolling all over the place.
Jodi Krangle
I’m going all over the place, but yeah.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Well, as I am. But so there's scripted—narrative nonfiction, audio drama, where people are reading from a script, and typically there will be a producer, tracking with them in studio, and listening and saying, well, you know, let's try it this way. Or try it that way, or whatever.
Versus conversation shows like this one, where we're not following a script. And so there are common problems in each of those categories. The most obvious one, the easiest one to point to, is new podcast hosts using scripts have a very hard time not sounding like they're reading.
Jodi Krangle
Ah, yes, the voiceover problem.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Exactly, it's the same problem. And I don't know about you, I'm curious about this. But when I hear somebody and I know they're reading, what's missing is the emotion. They're not in it. They're reading words on a page. And as a listener, I start to tune out very quickly. And it's just missing the heart and soul of—and this is often true, and I would say that I fell into this, when I first moved over from being a news reporter to a podcaster, I mean, there's a huge range of problems there.
Jodi Krangle
Oh, yeah. There's a lot of differences, I would imagine.
Elaine Appleton Grant
There are a lot of differences, but they're not immediately obvious. Especially if you're moving say from being a feature reporter, which—I did a lot of features in public radio—which has a narrative feel to it, to, say, documentaries, which it's easy to think are basically long feature stories.
And so you'll hear a lot of—I've done a lot of judging of podcasts for podcast award shows, not actually allowed to say for whom—and I was surprised by a whole bunch of documentary shows coming from very big shops, from the BBC to big podcast networks to PBS, where that same problem existed. Because the focus is on the reporting and the research and getting all these voices out. But they're not thinking or feeling about what it is they're saying. It's a huge problem.
Jodi Krangle
See, that's where the voice acting comes in. Right? That's the difference between the people who wrote it and the people who should be speaking it.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yes.
Jodi Krangle
Not all the time, I will say not all the time, because a good reporter certainly knows what they're talking about if they were the one that wrote the script. But the difference between emoting in a realistic, authentic way that can connect with an audience, as opposed to reporting on something journalistically can be quite different. Not always, but can be quite different.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah. The reason I paused when, you know, when you said, well, that's the difference between the person writing it and the person voicing it, they can be very different. But often, they're not. And that's where learning about hostiness comes in.
Jodi Krangle
That's the coaching aspect, right?
Elaine Appleton Grant
Yeah, and a lot of times. And also, I wonder if this is true with voice acting. Sometimes when a host is really struggling with a script, in studio, it's not because the host isn't good. It's because the writing isn't that great. Or it doesn't fit their style and their voice. And so then, sometimes I'll say to a host I work with a lot, rewrite that sentence, it's clearly not working for you. Write it how you would say it.
Jodi Krangle
Yeah, yeah. And that's definitely helpful. In a voice actor's vocabulary, that isn't really possible, because we are specifically hired to say someone else's words. So we have to take what's on that script, and make it our own, use the theater of the mind to make sure that we can relate to what's on that page, and then speak it as if it's a truth of ours. So that's, that's kind of the idea. That's where the coaching comes in, in that that will help you take what's on the page and make it yours.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Well, let me ask you two questions. Which is such a no-no, you don't ask two questions at once, I always tell people don’t do this.
Jodi Krangle
Well, I did, so you go for it.
Elaine Appleton Grant
But I’m gonna do it! And the first is, is there a problem that is common to new voice talent that you notice? And then second is, how do you help correct that problem that we just discussed? Of, you're not in the theater of the mind, and therefore the emotion of the words that you're hired to speak is just not coming across?
Jodi Krangle
Well, I think first of all, a lot of people think voice acting is just standing in front of a mic and talking. And unfortunately, it's not quite that simple.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Or fortunately.
Jodi Krangle
Or fortunately. Exactly.
So the issue becomes that—and I think that this was mentioned in episode two as well—that a lot of people who start off both in hosting and in voice acting start off by mimicking someone else. So the problem becomes that that person doesn't know how they sound, they only know how someone else should sound. And they try and mimic how that someone else should sound. Whereas when I'm being hired as a voice actor, I'm being hired to be me, just more me with their script, but I'm hired to be me.
So I have to know who me is. That's where the coaching comes in. So the coaching makes you comfortable enough with your own voice that you can just be you, with the theater of the mind speaking that script, connecting to what's on that page. And that is a lot like learning how to act in general. It's going to seem like a process at first, and you're going to be slow at it, and it takes a moment to think about, but after a certain amount of time, it becomes second nature, and then you just fall into you using those tactics.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Mm-hmm. And what's interesting about that is that there may be many yous in a way, right? Not only do you, as a voice actor—and I've done some voice acting over the years—want to be able to say, well, I can be very straight and serious, or I can be warm and friendly, and the girl next door, or I can be this or that, or this age or that age, but what I don't do is x. There's always, I don't do this, I'm not the right person for that.
So tell me a couple specific tangible coaching, tactics for learning who you are, and learning the range of who you can be sincerely and believably. You're not putting something on. It's just that we all have sort of a range.
Jodi Krangle
There are so many different ways that coaches do this. I'm not a coach, so, for that, it's a little bit more in depth than I would normally go. But I can say that from all of the coaches I've worked with over the years, I usually get a golden nugget from each one of them. And the thing that has impressed me the most is that you need to find something in your own life that is similar to what's on the page. It doesn't have to be exact. If it's about Apple, and I don't care about Apple, but I really like Surface Pro, then I'm going to think about a Surface Pro in my head while I'm speaking this script for Apple. Do you know what I mean?
Elaine Appleton Grant
I'm sure they would not be happy to hear that.
Jodi Krangle
No, they wouldn't. I wouldn't tell them. But if I really love Pepsi, and I'm doing a Coke commercial, then I'm thinking of Pepsi while I do this commercial. Do you know what I mean? You have to find the thing that you appreciate, the thing that really resonates for you. And then you need to think of that thing. And emotionally, your voice will follow. It just does.
There's not anything you have to put on. When you're passionate about something, it comes out. And that can be in a straightforward script, it can be in healthcare, it can be in, you know, a tech gadget, it could be in selling real estate, it could be in—whatever it is that you are trying to make someone feel. They're not going to feel it unless you do. But if you feel it, it'll come through in your voice.
Elaine Appleton Grant
Right. And this is a conversation we could probably have for hours. There's a lot to this.
Jodi Krangle
Definitely. Yes.
Elaine Appleton Grant
That’s the end of Part 1. Tune in next week for Part 2. If you’re a regular listener, that’s a bonus episode, because we usually release only every other week.
If you now want to know more about how sound influences us – and how the many different makers in the audio branding world make their work, make sure to follow Jodi’s show, Audio Branding. I’ve been listening for the last two years and I always learn something fascinating. There’s a link to it in the show notes. They’re on our site, podcast allies dot com, along with a full transcript. You can watch shorts from Audio Branding on Jodi’s Youtube channel at JodiKrangleVO. That’s Jodi with an I—J-O-D-I.
At the end of every episode, I give you a few takeaways. You don’t have to take notes! Visit our podcast page on our website and go to the show notes under each episode. You’ll also find these takeaways there.
There’s so much more to come in part 2, but that’s it for today!
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Sound Judgment is a production of Podcast Allies. It’s produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Sound design and editing by production manager Andrew Parrella. Our cover art is by Sarah Edgell. Podcast management by Tina Bassir.