I’ve been listening to a bunch of audiobooks from the public library here recently and there are various levels of production effort. I listened to a Star Wars audiobook (Alphabet Squadron) when I needed something simple for a flight and was blown away by the amount of sound effects (lasers, start ships flying around, environmental sounds etc) and different characters. Is there a term for this?

Some examples:

  • Basic narration: One voice artist, maybe they do different voices for characters and narration. Maybe not.
  • Multiple artists: Different characters get voiced by different actors. It might be for different POV chapters or even line by line when characters speak to each other.
  • Sound effects: Environmental sounds (wind, rain, cafe chatter etc), event sounds (alarms, gun shots, etc), audio effects (speaking with radio effect, echos, cave sounds)
  • Music: In the Star Wars book there was even background music for the various characters. Wow! Also the Star Wars into music is always welcome.

I guess it’s way more expense to do it this way and would love some more examples of good audio production.