The digital audio book and the varieties of audio narration

Abstract

A digital audiobook is a document of digital origin as well as a media experience. How it is distributed, and how listeners access and consume it, is similar to other forms of audiovisual content in today’s digital ecosystem. Nowadays, we have many tools at our disposal to enrich the narrative structure of digital audiobooks through the creative use of sound language. However, there still persists the idea that digital audiobooks are merely an extension of print books, a simple voice recording of the written text. This perspective limits the expressive, creative, and artistic possibilities of the narrative structure of digital audiobooks.  

The goal of our work is to establish the modes of sound production in digital audiobooks by looking at how they utilize sound language. To do this, we employed a qualitative methodology, and framed the history and concept of the audiobook from the perspective of sound documentation. We defined audiobooks as documents of digital origin and established their defining traits: their content, structure, context, format, and medium. We chose structure as our category of analysis, since it relates to the physical and intellectual features of sound information. We also defined the elements of sound language as essential components of sound narrative. Then, we listened closely and carried out a content analysis of the elements of sound language in three classics of literature: Homer’s The Iliad, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and Fyodor Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment. In doing this, we determined how the elements of sound language were employed in the narrative structure of digital audiobooks. As a result of this investigation, we identified two modes of production that relate to narrative structure: 1) the traditional mode, which we might call “book reading,” and 2) the enriched mode.