There’s a difference between listening to someone read a book aloud, and listening to a performance.
With the recording of “Sebastian’s Tale,” Jane Kronheim and Roger Cicchese have tried to create the latter.
The two make up the owner and the sound design engineer team that runs Voices of Xperience in Harrisville, which serves the Monadnock region in creating audio recordings for musicians, historians, and audiobooks, as well as restoring old or damaged recordings.
They have recently completed a recording of “Sebastian’s Tale,” a book written by Kronheim’s sister, Dylan Weiss, that goes a bit beyond what a regular audiobook might do. For one thing, each of the characters has a distinct voice – to the point that Kronheim and Cicchese trade off on voicing the various characters in the book. And there are other aspects that raise the bar – when the characters, who are mainly woodland forest animals, are underground, their voice has a hollow, echoing quality. When the lead character, Sebastian the skunk, is commanding his troops in battle, his voice sounds as though it is booming through a loudspeaker.
Cicchese said he especially knows how these nuances can change a recording, as he has been blind since infancy. He is also hearing impaired, and took out a bank loan to purchase hearing aids designed for musicians so that he could continue to work as a sound engineer.
“There is something about the world of sound,” said Kronheim. “It gets into our memory and becomes more emotional. You would think that you would get more emotional looking at an old picture, but hearing the voice of someone that’s not here anymore, even through a recording, is immensely powerful.”
Kronheim and Cicchese worked in tandem, with Cicchese providing most of the voices, and Kronheim the narrator and the voices of the female character. As one records, the other follows along – Kronheim with a copy of the book, Cicchese using a special braille volume they had commissioned – to make sure the other is correct on their reading and pronunciation. Kronheim also had to pull double duty during that process to act as a kind of “director,” asking for readings done in a slightly different tone or intonation where appropriate.
And while “Sebastian’s Tale” is intended for young audiences – children to tweens – it tackles some bigger issues. Weiss first wrote the book intending it to help explain Alzheimer’s to her grandson. One of the characters in the book struggles with memory loss. And the main arc of the story deals with the main character Sebastian, a skunk, coming into his destiny as he leads the forest in a fight against the “gas men” who could destroy the animal’s habitat in the name of fossil fuels.
“Clearly, it’s talking about some challenging subjects,” said Kronheim. “I’m very proud of the fact that we were able to work on this book. This is society’s tale.”
“Sebastian’s Tale” is available through Amazon.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.