If the voice is not just “too much of the same thing”, but a precious, delicate sound perfume where quality would be more important than quantity. Consider the perfect 60 seconds.
But first a question that often arises from newbies to the VO industry: how can I price a job based on words per minute?
For many jobs you may want to charge the client based on a price per recorded minute basis as opposed to a price per project. In order to do this you are going to need to understand how many words you can reasonably speak in a minute.
Think about that for a second- nobody’s timing you so you can take more than a second if you want to! If you are given a script by your client then read it aloud and time yourself. Don’t base the time on reading the copy in your head because you will do this much faster.
A calm, well paced read will be around 2.5 words per second so that will be 150 words per minute. If the script happens to be a hard sell radio commercial then you might want to step up the pace to 3 to 3.5 words per second so that’s 180 to 210 words per minute. That’s really pushing it however. The faster you go the more unintelligible some of your phrasing becomes so it takes quite a bit of practice to read at that pace. As a general rule, around 150 words per minute will serve you well for most narrations.
Interestingly some research by Sheffield University in the UK worked out a mathematical formula for the perfect voice delivery. This formula was based on a combination of tone, speed, frequency, words per minute and intonation. Their findings were that the ideal voice should speak no more than 164 words per minute and pause for 0.48 seconds between sentences. They also concluded that sentences should fall rather than rise in intonation.
How do you calculate the price of your VO jobs? And what do you think makes the perfect voice? It would be great to hear from you.