Marketing: For Your Voice Over Clients – How To Match And Balance Voice With Background Music, by Carmi Levy

MARKETING
For Your Voice Over Clients: How To Match
And Balance Voice With Background Music
January 16, 2015

Note: This article informs voice over clients about the critical need to match voice and music in projects. It’s valuable advice for you to pass along to your own clients …

By Carmi Levy
Senior Writer, Voices.com

Choosing the right music for your
brand – and ensuring it matches up to the voices and spoken-word content you
expect to use in any project – can make all the difference in crafting
successful audio-based messages.

Everything must work together to create the
soundtrack of your company.

When selecting music for your
project, a number of factors come into play that will determine how effective
your production will be. Key considerations include:

• Your brand sound
• What you’re trying to express through the music
• How the music supports the message you are conveying

Remember, while music plays a
critical role in the production, the music is meant to set the stage for the
words that will move your audience to action.

MATCHING TO YOUR BRAND …

Before you commit to music, a
particular style or voice type, be sure to answer the following questions to
shape a framework for you to work from:

• What does my brand sound like?
• How does the music reflect my goals?
• What type of voice should I use?

Let’s explore each of these aspects …

1.
Your Brand Sound

You’ve probably given some thought
to brand sound without even realizing you were doing so. Knowing what your
brand sounds like means first knowing about your brand.

• What’s your company
  like?
• How do people perceive you?

Generally speaking, the mission,
vision and values of an organization are baked into their brand. By writing
those attributes down, you can begin to form a clearer picture of your brand.

Your brand lives in words, pictures and yes, even sound.

Take a step back and think about the
words and what they represent. How might they come across when put to music?

If
you’re an innovative, exciting and youthful brand, music choices might be more
upbeat, bright and dynamic. If you’re better known as being trustworthy,
authoritative and reliable, the music you choose might reflect more of a
corporate sound paced at a moderate speed featuring more traditional
orchestration.

2.
Match Music with Your Goals

Every project is different. That
said, the music you choose should always represent your brand while matching up
with the sort of presentation you are creating.

Music choices will vary
depending on application.

If you’re producing a radio
commercial, the music should align with what the audience of that particular
station expects to hear. If you’re airing a spot on a country music station,
the opening music from an opera by Mozart may not do the trick.

The goal is to meet the audience
where they are. The more closely you can align your music choices with the
tastes or sentiments of the people meant to hear them, the better.

When working
on a production that is meant to teach someone, you may use less music or more
subdued music throughout to better maintain focus on the instruction. Make sure
that the music you choose ultimately supports the message and plays to its
strengths.

3.
Choosing a Voice

The human voice is an instrument. As
we know, voices come in all shapes and sizes with no one voiceprint being
alike.

The four primary classifications of voice are Soprano, Alto, Tenor and
Bass.

Think of a choir. Within these sections, voices will have different types
of tone color and characteristics. Some voices have a larger presence while
others are less pronounced.

Some voices will have more vibrato whereas others
produce a purer tone. Where one voice may have a lightness to it, another could
sound the trumpet for battle.

Recognizing the uniqueness of a voice is
important, but more so, you’ll want to know if that voice, and the way the
talent is interpreting your script, goes well together.

BALANCE VOICE AND MUSIC

Balancing the voice with the music
is also important.

Remembering that the voice is another instrument in the mix,
you need to find a way for the voice to act as a soloist in your production,
allowing for the voice, which is the vehicle for the words, to stand out and do
the job it has been tasked with.

You may have heard of Hertz in
relation to sound measurement. Hertz, named for the German physicist Heinrich
Hertz, measures the number of cycles per second. Where the human voice is
concerned, this means the number of times the vocal folds vibrate per second.

• A healthy male voice usually falls between 110-120
  hertz
• A healthy female voice usually falls between 200-210
  hertz
• Children’s voices usually fall between 300-400 hertz

The higher the vibrations per
second, the brighter the sound.

For example, you might be familiar with A440,
also known as Concert Pitch. As an orchestra prepares to tune, the principal
violinist will play this pitch to help others in the ensemble tune their
instruments.

DON’T DROWN OUT VOICE

If you are working with a voice
artist who has a lighter voice, perhaps in the treble range of a soprano or
alto, you’ll want to make sure that the instrumentation used doesn’t drown out
the voice.

Having too much treble in this case might result in the treble voice
getting lost in the chorus of other voices such as the treble of the piano or
violin.

Choose your music first and then
find a voice talent whose instrument and interpretation of your script fit
well. You could start with the voice and then find appropriate music, but
usually people know what music they want to work with before hiring a voice
talent.

The more you know about what you are
aiming to do, the better equipped you are to bring the right people -and their
instruments! – together to get the job done.
———————
ABOUT CARMI
Carmi
Levy is a technology analyst, journalist and Senior Writer at
Voices.com, the voice over industry website that connects businesses
with professional
voice talent. At Voices.com, Levy is responsible for engaging
Voices.com’s audience in
innovative ways and positioning the organization as a thought leader in
the voice community and beyond.

Web: www.Voices.com