On Friday January 22nd, Ollie Samuel taught us about the purpose of doing surveys to help us to understand the views of our target audience in preparation for making our audio books. The main points I learned was to identify the genders of each person who responds and that a census has to be taken every 10 years to identify a country’s status and anyone outside the target audience is Secondary Audience. We then had to listen to samples from five existing audio books (specifically by British Writers) available from Penguin Books and comment on recording quality, SFX and how the reader brought the characters to life. It turned out to be much harder to tell which writers were British and which ones were foreign than I thought as it did not actually say on the website where the writers came from and so I had to research them separately. I had to listen to at least six samples.

The samples I eventually listened to were The BFG, James and the Giant Peach and Matilda by Roald Dahl, it was very tempting to focus only his works but I could not do that and also The Diary of Dennis The Menace by Steven Butler, Silent Night by Jack Sheffield and Peppa Pig Goes Camping. Steven Butler and Jack Sheffield also provided the narration for their works. The other samples were read by the likes of David Walliams, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Kate Winslet and John Sparkes. One constant throughout was that none of these samples had any background music but the Roald Dahl works tended to feature rather a lot of opening and closing music. David Walliams occasionally lowered his voice to a whisper and spoke slower with increasing intensity. Julian Rhind-Tutt tended not to change his tone of voice apart from trying to put on character voices. Steven Butler started off whispering as if in secrecy and occasionally raising his voice to emphasize this. Jack Sheffield started off as if it were a diary entry of his own experiences as he mentioned a particular date, September 3rd 1984. He described his and the other characters’ appearances in great detail, right down to the style of clothing and their characteristics and even the furniture.

Kate Winslet’s voice remained relatively calm and collected until the part where she describes parents becoming so sick of their kids that they ask for a basin which was distinctly in a disgusted and exasperated tone. Kate Winslet then started to talk like a teacher expressing dissatisfaction with her pupils and putting such a point across to the parents, distinctly no nonsense and strong and firm or using poetry and history as a means of being sarcastic as well as brutally honest.

John Sparkes tended to change his voice according to the different characters such as old and gruff for Granddad Dog and squeaky and high-pitched for Peppa and George and soft and soothing with a strange echoing sound in the background for the voice of the satnav.