Because voice actors do it better. Effective communication, creative expression and charisma are only some of the infinite possibilities that the human voice offers. It’s an art to learn and cultivate.
Professional voice-overs require skills relating to technique, vocal talent, knowing how to grasp the different sensitivities of the text: for example, expressing the essence of a brand with a sentence of a few words, not being boring during a long description, giving the right expression to each sentence while highlighting the most important concepts.
A voice-over talent manages to enhance the effects of words using tone, rhythm, intention.
What does it mean to ‘have a beautiful voice’?
The timbre distinguishes one voice from another and allows you to say subjectively ‘this is a beautiful voice’ or ‘this is an ugly voice’, but a voice-over talent’s vocal beauty comes from several elements.
Pronunciation: an Italian voice talent studied diction and has no inflections, no pronunciation defects (for example, they do not have a French ‘R’ and know how to correctly pronounce the ‘gl’ consonant group in words like ‘aglio’) and no pathologies of the vocal tract (like the nasal sound called rhinolalia).
Articulation: no word is neglected, all of them are articulated individually and given the right importance, with a clear pronunciation, even when they need to be uttered quickly.
Dynamism: the voice talent knows how to play with the pitch, intensity and speed of the voice to give colour to the narrative.
Naturalness: the voice talent does not set the voice excessively, so it always sounds authentic. A professional knows how to exploit the naturalness of the utterance to better convey the message and uses it to connect with the listener.
Intention: a professional knows how to stress words ‘harmonically’ in order to change the sense, logic and direction of a message.
The Italian language: standard language, dialects, accents, inflections and intonations
There is another very important reason why you should choose a professional Italian voice actress. In any part of the world, if random people were asked what language is spoken in Italy, each one of the interviewed would answer: Italian! But is it really so?
Standard Italian is the official language that everyone understands, but 24 territorial languages and infinite dialects are spoken in Italy. And there is more: those who speak Italian often do so with accents, intonations and words that are typical of their region.
Italian languages and dialects
When it comes to the variety of linguistic heritages, no other European country is as rich as Italy. In addition to the territorial languages, there are the dialects, actual languages with their own grammar, lexicon and often their own literature.
Those are languages that we, the Italians, love very much, and that we pass on from generation to generation, as part of our history and our territory.
When the Italian dialects appear in their purest form, the speakers may not understand each other: if a person from Sicily speaks in their dialect, a person from Milan may not understand their words, and vice versa!
Accents, inflections, sounds
Even when the dialect does not appear in its purest form, it leaves more or less deep traces in the stress of words, in the pronunciation, in the inflection and in the sentence intonation. It is as if there was a dialect ‘patina’ stretched out over a common ground of Italian language.
For example, in the dialects from Northern Italy, it easy to find the vowels ‘e’ and ‘o’ with reverse closeness than that of standard Italian. A man from Milan, for instance, says ‘béne’ instead of ‘bène’, and ‘perchè?’ instead of ‘perché?’.
In Rome and its surroundings, occlusive consonants tend to double all the time: the word ‘sabato’, for a someone from Rome is pronounced ‘sabbato’, or the word ‘colazione’ becomes ‘colazzione’. Inexplicably, however, the opposite tends to happen with some words: ‘Guerra’ becomes ‘guera’ and ‘terra’ becomes ‘tera’.
Southern Italian dialects show different features: in addition to having all the vowels completely open, for them the intervocalic /s/ is unvoiced. For example, the word isola is pronounced /’izola/ with a voiced /s/, but in the South it is pronounced /isola/ with an unvoiced /s/.
There are also differences relating to the intonation structures and the sounds: in the North-West of Italy, Piedmont has been influenced by the French language, while Genoa shows a sonority with Portuguese traits; in the North-East of Italy, there are the Venetian, the Ladin and the Friulian dialects, which come in dozens of different versions depending on the valley in which they are spoken, and which often show German influences.
For this reason, those wanting to speak standard Italian have to eliminate every dialectal intonation, and study the rules of orthoepy in order to learn how to correctly pronounce words in the standard language.
A voice-over talent speaks and records in standard Italian, without any regional inflection (unless required by the text), without intonations, using the correct closeness for vowels and all the correct sounds for consonants.
What are you waiting for? Start planning your project with a professional Italian voice actress: