PH Audio Blog

Mark Griffiths, one of PH Audio’s dedicated Sound Producers, offers his take on a small but critical element of voiceover editing.

My job is to take people’s breath away.

I edit voiceovers for a living. One of the main tasks is to remove all the breathing sounds.

Voiceover artists’ voices get compressed in the final mix. This has the effect of making all the quiet parts of speech louder. It’s one of the studio techniques that gives that extra oomph to the voices of radio announcers and pop singers.

But if you compress a voice track with the breaths left in, the breaths are amplified. These noises, which are normally so quiet we don’t notice them in normal speech, are boosted to the same volume as the words.

It makes the speaker sound like the Elephant Man.

So I get rid of them.

I’ve been doing it so long I don’t even need to hear it any more.

Using a digital sound editor like Adobe Audition, you can see the breaths on the screen in front of you. They look like little clouds, floating between the mountain peaks of the words.

Press a key and you can flatten the waveform into silence, evaporate the clouds.  Rob a person of their breath like a goblin in a fairytale.

But instead of choking them, removing their breath makes them stronger. A voiceover track without breaths sounds slick and confident. Somewhere at the back of your mind you’re thinking this announcer is so dynamic they don’t even need to breathe air like a normal person.

A lot of people think they have what it takes to be a professional voiceover artist just because someone once complimented them on their nice voice.  The truth is to make a living at it you also need the vocal precision of an opera singer, the versatility of a character actor and a lot of very expensive kit.

So in short: save your breath.