Voice-under

And the louder-and-louder Act III closing septet (quintet, really, with voice-unders; Otello mutters only ten words) has always struck me, for all Verdi's efforts, as more operatic convention than music-as-drama.

But pervading the whole track is an array of individual voices (voice-unders?), filling the sonic space with life, many of them back-of-the-throat squawks and gurgles, others comically ululating melismas (part cartoon, part pseudo-operatic: sirens for the age of the pop diva?), all of them strangely positioned in frame of reference between the simian and the avian.

Over the last thirty-odd years, I've done thousands of television commercials, radio commercials, corporate voiceovers, stadium announcements, narrations, audiobooks, voice-unders (vocal subtitles), museum audio guides, dubbing, re-voicing, ADRs (additional dialog replacements), loop groups (most movie-screen deaths you hear are me and my voices, cartoon and animation voices, in-store announcements, documentary narrations, medical instructions, film trailers, celebrity voices — and 'Mind the Gap' on the Piccadilly Line.