Fabrice Desmarais AUTHORITY VERSUS SEDUCTION: THE USE OF VOICE·OVERS IN NEW ZEALAND AND FRENCH TELEVISION ADVERTISING ABSlRACT Cross-cullUral conlen! analysis of New Zealalld and French lelevis;oll advertising has revealed marked differences in the use of voice-overs. New Zealand voice-overs were found /0 be mostly aulhorilalive and adhered 10 a strong code 0/ masculinity whereas French voice-overs II.fed a more seductive approach, utilising more jeminine voices which {leled as a relay of masculille values. Interviews wilh creative directors suggested that (he selection of a voice-over was influenced by strong cultural stereotypes and was mostly the result oj u subconscious or mechanical choice, This paper argues Ihar voice-overs are sigllifiers which (Ire embedded ill {j cullurDl and communicative COlI/eXf. It also draws al/ell/iOIl to the Ilslwlly IIl1suspecled presellce of highly naturalised 'vocal formaliolls' which exist ill the advertising discourse of each COl/lllry, shapillg and subjeclillg us as sociocullUral beillgs. INTRODUCTION The study of voice-overs is a neglected area of communication research. Definitions of voice-overs found in advertising texts are usually very short and limited in scope. One such example is found in Wells et a1. (1998: 451) where a voice-over is referred to as 'a technique used in commercials in which an off-camera announcer talks about the on-camera scene'. Most of the research on voice-overs consists of a few quantitative American studies from the 1970s and 1980s in which the communicative approach of voice-overs in tenns of voice qualities is not questioned. In the 1990s, very little research has been conducted and studies do not explore voice-overs as cultural constructions. In general, studies of television advertising relegate voice and sound to the background and tend to focus on visual elements. Semiotic analysis, for example, neglects the encoding and decoding of vocal signs in advertising and is never used to investigate what voice quality can signify and what it adds to commercial communication. This is very surprising, as voice - just like visuals - is a very important feature of the communicative process. Careful listening to the aural track of commercials without visuals shows that the system of signification through sound is very developed and difficult to decode in a\l its complexity. This paper will contrast the vocal characteristics of voice-overs used in commercials and program advertisements from New Zealand and France. Perceptive auditory analysis of two different vocal envirorunents will identify the main prosodic features of voice-overs and attempt to illustrate how voice-overs are signifiers of altitude, emotion and gender orientation. Very often, communication studies arc discouraged from including vocal parameters because of the complex difficulties of using No. 96 - August 2000 135