Is Audiobook Casting Noisy 2? Casting vs. Choosing

Casting vs. Choosing by Eljinproductions.com

A short, kind of obvious aside on casting:

Imagine a set of judgments made by three to five people about several hundred narrators. It’s a thumbs-up / thumbs-down vote: approve/disapprove, like/dislike, care/don’t care. Just choose.

In the end, the voting reflects a fair amount of disagreement. Sure, there are straight thumbs-up votes for particular narrators (a rare outcome) and straight thumbs-down for others (less rare, but still infrequent). Far more common? A single yes and a couple of nos. Two yeses, two nos. One no, two yeses. In other words, the voting betrays lots of variability—or noise. (Thank you, Daniel Kahnemann.)

The source of all this noise? Subjective response. Each voter has distinctive tastes, needs, levels of sophistication and experience, even levels of attention. Different subjective states, different choices.

The role of subjective response in audiobook casting

As we discussed in our last blog, casting audiobooks is far more complex than checking a box yes or no. It’s about setting parameters to aggregate possibilities, weighing choices among those possibilities, then reaching a point at which the best candidate emerges. That is to say: Casting involves not a single decision but a series of them. More decisions, more chances for variability between one person’s decisions and another’s, more noise in casting outcomes—from the inexplicable and wrong to the unexpected and inspired and everything in-between.

Let’s agree (for the moment, at least) that minimizing noise in casting audiobooks is desirable. We want to delay intuition with a decision-making process that’s repeatable and disciplined—and find an appropriate narrator for each program.

Well . . . that’s the promise of algorithmic casting.

Next time: How audiobook casting gets done—and why talent marketplace apps can help.

Like this blog? If you’re interested in being cast as a narrator, or looking to get in touch about a new project or opportunity, we’d love to hear from you.