The Week in Voice: Two Farewells, a Union Yes and a Cloned Podcast

Two of the most loved voices anywhere, a union that said yes, and a podcast that kept talking long after its host stopped. Here’s your week in voice, in about four minutes.

Hello again. It’s Friday, and this one’s been heavy. We’ll take the sad news first, gently, and then work our way up to an airport with very strong feelings about the word “wicked”.

Two voices we lost

Eric Bauza, the modern voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, died on Sunday at 46. He was a kid from Scarborough, Ontario who studied Mel Blanc as a teenager and grew up to speak for almost every character Blanc made famous, winning three Emmys along the way. “Who grows up thinking that they’re going to voice Bugs Bunny?” he once said. He did, and a generation of children grew up hearing him.

Then on Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died at his home in Los Angeles at 86. He was Picard to most of the world. For those of us who work with our voices, there was another career too: twenty years as Avery Bullock on American Dad!, a Grammy for Peter and the Wolf, and a final year spent recording all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets for an audiobook. “There is something so wonderfully private, even intimate about the audio format,” he said of it.

Our thoughts are with both families, and with everyone who loved them.

The unions had a busy week

SAG-AFTRA’s voice actors ratified the TV animation contracts, with close to 95% of those who voted saying yes. The change most people will feel first: a studio now needs your consent before your digital replica can dub you into another language. The pay rises are backdated to the summer, too, which is the nicest sentence anyone’s written about a contract this year.

In Britain, Equity told members to “proceed with extreme caution” over a video game casting that wants voices for AI training, along with a full assignment of rights. Equity’s plain English reading of the terms is that the client could use your voice “in any way they want, wherever, forever.” Worth one email before you sign, then.

And the BBC is switching off Radio 4 Extra. Every repeat on that station pays the actors who made it, and Equity calls the closure “a significant blow to the income of audio artists”. That’s a quiet pay cut for a lot of people, and we’re sorry to see it.

Awards, from Madrid to Bogotá

Congratulations to Marta Angelat and Luis Porcar, Spain’s Premio Actúa winners for voice actors, honoured in Madrid on Monday. She’s the Spanish voice of Emma Thompson and of Sandy in Grease, he’s Dr. House, and she once said of dubbing, “I came to think it was my curse.” Some curse.

In Colombia, the Premios A Voz handed out 25 statues for the spoken voice, and Colombian voices took 11 of them. Every entry was judged “identified only by a number,” which is the fairest way to judge a voice we’ve heard of.

And in the UK, Nicola Walker, Cush Jumbo and Clarke Peters made the Audio Production Awards narrator shortlist, alongside four freelance and indie narrators. Winners are named in London on 26 November. Good luck to every one of them.

AI, voices and whose they are

The strangest story of the week: a podcast that went quiet in 2021 came back with new episodes in its host’s cloned voice. Sanderson Jones hadn’t made any of them. Someone had taken his feed, and his voice. After the show Hyperfixed got involved, the podcast host it had been moved to paid the $1,293 it had earned back to him, which makes it the rare podcast money story with a happy ending. If you run a show, the piece has five things to lock down.

Then there’s Laurie Burke, the original voice of Google Voice, who found out Google had bought the company seven months after it happened, from a clue in an email signature. She’d been paid by the hour with no written contract. Her advice now is short and worth taping above the mic: “Understand what you’re recording, how it will be used, for how long, and whether your recordings can be transferred, repurposed, or used for AI training.”

And to finish on a smile

In Boston, Logan Airport put its new announcement voice to a public vote, and the script includes the line “we’re wicked glad you’re here.” The prize, according to the official rules, has “no monetary value,” and the airport keeps the recordings forever. Forty million travelers a year, and the fee is a title. We’re wicked glad too. Now pay the voice.

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Emily McGonagle, a former London lawyer who used to finish work at three in the morning, now voices eight characters in Netflix’s Spike. She did it from a booth at home in Essex, with no acting background. Spike is now Netflix’s number one children’s show in the UK. Eight characters. Most of us can’t keep two accents apart before lunch. Congratulations, Emily.

That’s the week. Be kind to your voice, and to each other, and we’ll see you next Friday.

Sources: Voice Over Herald reporting this week, linked above.

Lee este artículo en español: La semana en la voz: dos despedidas, un sí sindical y un pódcast clonado

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