Listen to the article (Italian) I leave you because you are too much for me, I don’t deserve you, I realize that I am clipping your wings… I leave you because I know you can have better… I leave you because your life is wonderful and I would only ruin it… I leave you because I love you too much… The kindness in being dumped like this, seduced and then abandoned with these senseless phrases, perhaps sent via a simple SMS or a WhatsApp message followed by the immediate blocking of the recipient, phrases so stereotyped as to be more of an insult than a cordiality that, in the end, probably had the purpose of not hurting your wavering and insecure little heart… But what if they weren’t always clichés? What if sometimes it was the truth? I’m not actually talking about heart problems, but I’m obviously referring to some small experiences on some projects presented as works of excellence… I start with what stimulated my post: A (more or less) recent wonderful project in which I would have had the honor of participating, if I had met certain requirements. Far be it from me to come across as arrogant or haughty, I am not at all like that, in fact, I am one of the most available people in the world, open to any type of work because in my eyes anything becomes as prestigious as possible. They call me for an offer where they were looking for a fairly important role for an innovative and very high-level project, directed by a person with extraordinary experience and sensitivity, I listen to the description of the figure sought and candidly exclaimed: “My God! But he’s talking about me!”, so it was clearly one of the reasons why I had the honor of being considered, the agency in question had old data of mine, not updated and some rough demos made at the beginning. The thing was presented to me and it was a very attractive project, so much so that we didn’t even talk about economic issues… It was a beautiful idea, presented in a wonderful way and first of all, I would have wanted to be part of it, more than to pay the bills, to give free rein to creativity or simply to unleash my little inner voice actor, so I agreed to do a test. A very informal dialogue ensues, with description of the scene, dynamics, special requests, a cinematic-style project that would have required attention and cinematic vocal acting, concluding with a somewhat suspicious question: “Would you be able to do it?” I am a person with a thousand doubts and uncertainties and before taking any step in any field, I try to achieve what for me is a sort of perfection, I will have doubts even about my name, but I certainly don’t have any about my work, so I answer: “Of course, this is my job, so I am able to do everything and I can adapt to any request! So trust me…”. It needed, I said, a test of some parts to make a pre-assembled with what they had already recorded, among many candidates we were left with two, so a 50% chance of victory… I finish another job calmly and with a clear mind I set out to record my track… I get caught up in the part and record it all, edit it and send it off, with some speed, sure but it was a test and I had the confidence that it was a good test. I send the file, the person doesn’t listen directly but decides to test both audios on his recording right away and I politely wait for news. The working day had come to an end and I still hadn’t received an answer. Patience, “do and forget” is part of the job… The following day I received an answer, this time very formal: "Mr. Nicola, I apologize for not having given you any news but only today I was able to carry out the test with the sound engineer and I apologize for having stolen your time. Unfortunately, we have concluded that despite the quality of your work being excellent, it is not possible for us to present it to the client for budget reasons (what does that mean?). I hope to be able to bla bla bla". In essence: “I leave you because I love you too much…” I immediately thought it was a trivial excuse, but they would have raised fewer doubts if they hadn’t answered me at all. The budget issue was not clear to me, so I reply by underlining my availability to redo another test and that we had not talked about budget at all, so on my part there was no problem… I receive a call: “The fact is that you made a real cinematic dubbing, with the dynamics of a film, if we presented it to the client, they would probably ask us to redo everything from scratch following your style… So our budget does not allow us to hire people like you (because how am I?) to be able to redo all the work… Unfortunately times are tough etc etc…”. “Well, you asked for something cinematic…” “Yes, but you were really good, seriously, but we expected something less, certainly not something from a real film…” A strange and unexpected compliment… How to take it? I felt more and more like the victim of a: “I leave you because I don’t deserve you…” I thank him for the clarification and for the promise: “Next time…” and say goodbye with the doubt that remains on whether it was all a huge excuse and a huge joke… But if it had been an excuse, why bother writing to me, calling me and even complimenting me, for that matter? Not long ago, among the various sponsorships, I came across a title that seemed familiar to me, my eye fell on it unconsciously and that worm in my mind started gnawing again, I clicked on it and was redirected to a site where it was possible to buy this fantastic “innovative” project (there are many of them and it was nothing innovative) where it was also possible to listen to extracts from the various chapters… Well, “I leave you because I don’t deserve you”… There are really good and excellent people, others who will become so, others still who are working on it, there is space for everyone, but in this case it was a real shame, a nice potential expressed in the wrong way, and here I come to tell another anecdote related to a simple course… Courses in general are very technical, you have to explain something to someone, in that context you are the tool for teaching and transmitting knowledge… For effective communication it is important to vary the tones, use the right pauses, lean on certain words to emphasize their meaning and many other technical aspects to consider. One thing to absolutely avoid is monotony. 2 hours of course read with the same intonation will not produce any result, they will bore and will not have anything special to communicate, in essence, both you who produce it and those who listen to your work will have only wasted time. Anyway, I come across an excellent and particular course in my hands, another one of those jobs that I would have wanted to do at all costs, precisely because it was very “different from usual”, narrated in first person with a very informal and simple language, very close to mine, almost a podcast, I dare say… Well, they communicate budget and deadlines to me, I accept but for correctness I communicate that I would not have been able to start working on it immediately as I had a commitment for the following day, but I would have delivered everything well before the set date. The weekend passes and on Monday I start my production early. Not having received confirmation, I suspend the work and communicate it with the excuse of some technical doubts, the morning passes and I receive no communication… So I decide to search for the person’s name on Google, among the various results a profile with the name that refers to a well-known platform of “freelance slavery” (of which I am still part, eh) catches my eye. Last review dating back to the day before (Sunday): “Thank you for everything! It seems well done!”, I click on it and listen to what was the course I was producing at that moment, no editing, various clicks, background noises and above all monotony, a powerful and wonderful text expressed in a single note… I ask for explanations and finally get an answer and the subjects were: “Budget and times” Let’s start from the assumption that she had told me the budget, I would have respected the times, it would have taken a minimum of trust and I would have concluded everything, but no! Here goes another powerful text… “I leave you because I love you too much, but also because you cost me too much…” Patience, but the main problem was only one for me: “It seems well done!” Does it seem well done because that’s how you imagined it or does it seem well done just because it cost less and you made a colleague do the “hard work” to deliver it to you in record time? So one was worth the other, as long as he delivered as soon as possible and if in the meantime he had saved you something, even better… The “seems well done” will increasingly help to conceive people without hands and we, who are striving to manufacture ever better gloves, will take it in that place… “I leave you because your life seems well done and I would do nothing but ruin it”…

Listen (in Italian) Evolution… The initial air of an infinite work played by Mother Nature herself… From time immemorial, small organisms have adapted to cope with new difficulties and new needs, until they grew and built the foundations on which the countless forms of life present in the universe were founded… Each species then chose a different path, improving morphological, physical and intellectual characteristics to favor the evolution of its own species and preserve it. In this huge orchestra, all the life of the universe plays and you can hear the perfect harmony that emerges from it, from the breaths of unicellular organisms to the percussions of mastodontic mammals. Here comes a variation in the main air, as when gently, in an orchestra, the strings begin to enter and Survival makes room. Each species plays its part following the score dictated by Mother Nature, trying to keep time for the good of the work and its own survival. Our species is based precisely on survival. Let’s face it, perhaps Mother Nature had not foreseen our arrogance and our ambition, but in the end we always managed to exploit everything around us: tools to get food, animal skins to warm us up and so on… We found a way to “bypass” instincts and natural rules by developing our own language and leaving signs of our passage to pass on information that cannot be transmitted with simple instinct… In that wonderful harmony there is our overbearing section, out of tune, out of time and tending to overwhelm all others. Now, after this long premise, we come to the “juice” of reflection: We are following a path that requires a lot of attention. We must maintain a certain balance, now more than ever… We are all working for a glove factory and the next step in evolution could involve beings without hands… I often reiterate the concept, especially because at this time we are all becoming potential employees of the glove factory… Not one category yes and the other no, ALL of us will be replaced by a machine, developing a future mechanism with the classic system of the past… Shall we put in a sci-fi parallelism? As if we were approaching the Sun with a 1974 spacecraft, the technology of an Amiga600 applied to an interstellar cosmic journey, but no one realized that this time, the step we want to take will be much longer than the leg. Progress and evolution must not stop, but we should first wait a few seconds and reflect: Some of us have developed artificial intelligences that will inevitably be able to replace us in everything and for everything, but I’m not just talking about voices, I also mean translators, copywriters, web designers, secretaries, accountants, lawyers, programmers, technicians, workers, maintenance workers, plc experts, cashiers, pilots, mechanics… Everyone! No one excluded! It was necessary to foresee this and take shelter, but the shield will have to wait and, before it is regulated globally, some damage will probably have already been done. Starting from the assumption that an AI is mathematical, an algorithm that can vary and modify, giving the impression of being sentient, but it will never be completely so because it will always need someone to learn from and “steal”, and then resell that information as if it were its own. That’s what the human race has done for millions of years, the only difference is that we have never copied a specific piece of information 100%, but rather we have processed it, made it our own and transmitted it with our personal modifications to our successors, adapting it to the times, which in turn updated it, processed it and transmitted it to their successors and so on, from time to time, an infinite and unstoppable evolution, always growing… Until today! In the last 30 years, many have been afraid of losing their own garden, the advent of Photoshop scared many photographers of the time, the advent of vending machines made shopkeepers go through a bad quarter of an hour, the arrival of Telepass scared many toll collectors and so on… But the path we are taking is different, not only one sector will be at risk, we will all be hit by technology and will suffer the most influential evolutionary arrest in our history. The idea that I can personally expose concerns my sector, and today we have a new competitor, it costs little, does more or less decent things, is quick and has been widely advertised and sponsored without spending anything, a somewhat unfair behavior because it is on everyone’s lips and everyone talks about it: The Digital Voice… Listening to a podcast by a great and highly esteemed colleague, I thought of revisiting part of a famous historical story from the late 1800s that fits well with what we are experiencing: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you: A Voice Talent Carol Lanciano, 2023, Ermanno Scrugi is an elderly banker, very rich but monstrously greedy and selfish, who spends nothing even for himself (to the point that, despite his wealth, he dresses in rags and lives a life of nothingness) and strongly hates Voice Talent, considering them greedy and arrogant people who hide behind their beautiful diction and flaunt their equipment to earn money without “having done anything”. So annoyed by the senselessly excessive requests, that Scrugi forces his humble accountant employee Roberto Crachetti, to whom he gives a starvation wage, to write, record and publish courses, commercials and voice overs, forcing him to stay in the office until late, heavily reprimanding him for the unprofessional results. For this insane attachment to money, Scrugi is quite hated by many citizens and even Mr. Crachetti carries with him a lot of mockery and various ironies, due to his unclear and somewhat “amateurish” productions, but he is just a simple accountant and this is evident only to the most. Scrugi begins to report all the commentators, begins to take it out on his competitors as well, who unlike him finance that foolish and senseless market that is that of audio productions, copywriters and voice talent. He looks askance and responds badly to all those who have hired a Voice Talent or who advise him to do the same; he is not even kind to his affectionate nephew Francesco, his only living relative, son of his deceased sister, who visits him in the office, tells him that he has opened a VAT number as a dubber and tries to invite him to dinner with his family to show him what his skills are. When, returning home, he arrives at the doorstep, Scrugi seems to glimpse, reflected in the intercom of his gate, the face of his deceased business partner Giacomo Manley Voxbox, who died exactly seven years earlier, and is deeply disturbed by it. Entering the house, while dining seated near the fireplace, he begins to perceive strange phenomena: he hears a Larsen effect on the stairs enveloped in darkness and a noise of Phantom activated in the microphones in the cellar, then sees a monitor box connected oscillating by itself. At this point a door opens and Manley’s ghost appears: a terrible vision, made even more terrifying when, uncovering the bandages to show his face, an anti-pop filter falls from his face. Around his waist he carries an xlr cable, cable ties, mixer knobs, intra-community invoices and microphone stands, all things that, in his opinion, led him to do good for others. He had lived a life closed in his own vocal booth, helping deserving people who loved him, it was his choice of life and in death he was damned to pay the penalty of approaching inexperienced speakers and dubbers who were about to participate in text to speech with machine training purposes, an eternal penalty and only one fighter for thousands of opportunities but he fought with pleasure, a damnation that forces him to wander the world and unplug the phantom +48v from the young dubber who was about to start his 20 hour audio recording with repeated phrases with different intonations in exchange for 50/100 or at most 400€. His only relief is being able to warn Scrugi because the cable he was forging was much longer and unbalanced than his own and if he had continued like this he would have suffered a much worse fate as evidenced by the fact that in the meantime even the ghosts of Hindi Voice Talent replaced entirely by Revoicer have also appeared. Manley then announces to him the imminent visit of three spirits: the first at one o’clock on the same night, the second at one o’clock on the following night, the third at midnight on the day after that. However, Scrugi is not too disturbed by this and when Manley Voxbox disappears, he lies down. The spirit of past Voices As announced, at one o’clock in the night appeared the Spirit of Past Voices, a white ghost surrounded by a reel-to-reel tape and with its head covered by audiocassettes. In his hand a Sennehiser shotgun microphone connected to a tube preamplifier. The spirit wakes Scrugi and takes him back in time to revisit his forgotten childhood, in one scene he is a child at school desks, sent to study in boarding school by his father, Ermanno was alone, sad and without friends, studying in a dark and cold classroom, his only company was listening to the radio that broadcast dramas. In another scene, some time later, he was at home watching TV with his little sister. It is a happy moment, foreign comedy films that speak in his language, laughter, fun and jokes. The ghost reminds Scrugi of the affection of his nephew Francesco who, even as a child, dreamed of dubbing a film, but also reminds him of the rudeness with which he treated him, Scrugi begins to feel remorse. A few years later Ermanno and his friend go to a cinema to watch a western film, a cinema too small for both of them. Scrugi is faced with the memory of how much the voice talent and dubbers of the past have helped him in his personal growth, for his moments of leisure and for shopping advice. The scene changes again and an adult Scrugi appears, now rich, having moved with Manley Voxbox as chief financier in his new eponymous studio. Overcome with remorse, Scrugi turns off the preamplifier on the ghost’s head and he finds himself back in his bedroom sleeping and resting, ready to face the Spirit of Present Voices. The Spirit of Present Voices Scrooge is awakened in the middle of the night by the second spirit, that of Present Voices, very similar to a chubby bearded man, a sort of Neumann Santa Claus, wearing an Isovox 2 as a headdress and holding USB sticks with Waves licenses in his hands, paid for their weight in gold but soon to be useless. A giant with a jovial and cheerful air, stuffed with the thick presence of regular and non-regular speakers and voice talent who are about to fight each other for some casting that offers an extra or for a vile mention on Audible. The suit is made from a 4k screen, the cufflinks are power buttons of an M1 and he wears an Apollo knob as a necklace. With a hearty laugh he leads Scrugi into the homes of Speakers and their home studios, where he shows him how, while at night he was enjoying a well-deserved rest, a few kilometers away from him there was a speaker busy dubbing a video for YouTube on the fat eels of the Apennines, there was no compensation, in exchange they would put his name in the details, but he did it all with his 2000+ euro U87. In another house he saw a young man reciting radio commercials, exhausted and worn out, blocked from going to sleep by a platform that did not approve his work because at the moment there was no one on the other end to confirm it. In another house he found a girl busy creating her first Gig, dreaming of becoming a podcaster, dreaming of being able to transmit her emotions to someone, dreaming of helping someone overcome a difficult moment… There was still someone practicing difficult scenes, trying to hit the right support, the right intention and then someone living surrounded by the fog of his vape while editing for 10 hours of course that he would have to deliver the next morning. He saw that there were those who worked on Sundays, those on Christmas Eve, those on Easter and those every day of the week, in exchange for only a small glory. Then they visited Crachetti’s house, still awake studying the book “Parlare Bene” to try to please his boss. His son, Wind, entered his room all scared, mumbled something, but the poor child could not articulate well and confused the words, they told him that there was a group of dubbers who could help him by providing him with stories read by them, but his father’s boss hated the category too much and if he had found out, Crachetti would have been left without a job. Scrugi slowly begins to redeem himself and begs and asks the Spirit if Crachetti’s son will one day be able to speak well and express himself with greater naturalness, but the spirit replied in a hoarse voice: “He will do it, but his emotions will be dictated by a habit that you yourself are helping to create!” Scrugi rightly believed that Talent do not work and therefore do not deserve anything since they do not honestly earn their money but did not consider that his employee even though working honestly will never be able to produce something professional if he can never take inspiration from what others are doing, from what others have done and consequently his son Wind will never be able to speak well if surrounded by a deviated reality… But there is someone else who has taken inspiration from what has been: They go to another house and there is Francesco who in order to pay the bills receives a particular request from a gentleman who proposes a fair solution, a reward of a few coins in exchange for his soul, his voice, as things are going he will no longer need it. Before leaving, the specter takes Scrugi inside a dubbing room, announcing his imminent death at midnight, since his life lasts only one night, he then shows two ragged, embittered and miserable children who represent Ignorance and greed, to which poor talent are condemned by the class of people intent on senseless saving, and of which Scrugi is a part. A small reflection came from the specter: “If your bank is so prosperous, if your business is doing so well, why do you continue to want to save on marketing, on courses for your promoters, on various services… You are perpetrating a deception, no one would want to entrust their savings to you knowing that your management is so miserly or poor that it cannot afford a valid sponsorship and you will most likely resort to AI trained by your own nephew Francesco who may even copy his voice destroying him both in spirit and in finances…” The spirit dies slowly laughing with a weak voice while Ignorance and greed turn into dust. Alone and lost in the fog Scrugi awaits the arrival of the third and final spirit. The Spirit of Future Voices Scrugi felt a strong shiver down his spine, looked around and saw a gigantic figure covered by a huge black cloak appear in front of him, there were many questions, but he began a short monologue: "Hello, I am Roberto, I am everyone’s favorite voice, I am used to narrate documentaries, for advertising, tutorials, audio guides, I have my natural intentions that I am transmitting to all humanity and for years I have been waiting for an updated version of myself… Unfortunately I no longer have anyone to draw information from, but people are fine with me as I am and even if while listening to the radio they can no longer distinguish one spot from another it is not a problem at all because after all I only cost $49 a month. Sure, I repeat everything they tell me to repeat sometimes without even needing a correction I can talk for hours and return the job in no time. Individuality no longer exists now I am the only one left to compete with but I have other voices that I could use. They will all have more or less the same intonations but the timbre will change at least you will be able to distinguish a documentary from a spot. Come on! After all you’ve been listening to electronic music for years and you’ve never complained about sampled drums or musical instruments emulated by a machine now why would you complain about a Voice? I only cost $49 a month and with me you can do whatever you want." “LET’S END THIS S***!!! A speaker armed with a microphone stand and TLM103 appeared and destroyed the ghost of Future Voices: "SCRUGI, STOP BEING A CHEAPSKATE… Let me do my job… And stop tormenting Crachetti! Differentiate yourself and appear as someone who knows what they’re doing and who really cares about their image, who doesn’t just care about profit! Humanity depends on you! Redeem yourself!" Scrugi woke up with a start, the next day he hired Francesco and had him redo all his archive of courses, audio guides, spots and more, he got many more customers, people trusted him thanks to the quality of his marketing activity. He raised Crachetti’s salary and appointed him marketing director. He paid Francesco for a series of interactive audiobooks and gave them to little Wind, who not only learned to speak well but began studying and became a great lawyer… Unfortunately lawyers were targeted by an ultra-updated AI that upon entering the parameters of a given crime applied the corresponding laws automatically and elaborated various ploys to escape it on all fronts. The world order of lawyers sued it and began an eternal and long battle… The AI was so advanced that it defended itself alone and at the same time managed to join the cause of the AI of accountants artists PLC maintainers etc… The end of humanity had only been postponed…