Doing audiobook research: Local voices, national markets, global contexts

ABSTRACT

Since 2024, the advent of high-quality AI-generated voices – driven by advances in speech synthesis technologies – has sparked widespread public discourse in German newspapers and feuilletons. The potential integration of artificial voices into the audiobook market raises fundamental questions concerning listener perception, notions of authenticity, and the broader cultural...

The audiobook boom has created a new profession: the audiobook performing narrator, with its own forms of popularity and prestige tied to it. There are prizes awarded for best audiobook narration, and publishers are currently standing in line for the narration stars whose voices large groups of readers appreciate.

The rapid technological development is however about to cause the next...

Responding to the rise of synthetic narration in audiobooks, I founded the publishing house nAIrrative Press in 2023: a publisher of AI-written and AI-narrated audiobooks (nairrativepress.com). In this presentation and article, I trace the changing Canadian landscape of AI-narrated audiobooks and its (im)possibilities through the example nAIrrative Press. As a research-creation project,...

When painstakingly pondering the prevailing problematics, perpetuating polemics, and persistently perplexing potentials pertaining to prototypical phenomenon of AI—which seems to have purportedly permeated the very core of the Artworld at large—it could plainly be postulated that one is presently posed with something of a perfidiously potent and perturbing predicament. In place of either...