Read It To Me Differently

One Story. Three Voices. What Delivery Does To Meaning.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much of a story lives in the telling rather than the text. The same words, read differently, can make you laugh, unsettle you, or send you to sleep. Tone of voice, pace, register, these aren’t decorative. They’re structural. They change what a story actually is. So I ran an experiment.

I took one of my favourite pieces from this blog, ‘The Queue At 10:47,’ the story of a waiting room that never seems to empty, and asked Claude to rewrite it three times. Same story. Same characters. Same fish tank, same purple cardigan, same tuna sandwich. But each version reshaped for a completely different delivery: a bedtime story, a breaking news report, and a nature documentary. Then I took each version into ElevenLabs and chose a voice to match.

What came out surprised me. Not because the story changed, it didn’t, not really, but because each version revealed something different about the material that was always there, waiting to be unlocked by the right tone of voice.

Have a listen. Then I’ll share what Claude and I both noticed.

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Version One — The Bedtime Story

Warm. Slow. Soft at the edges. The kind of voice that makes unsettling things feel safe.

My thought: This one unsettled me in a way I wasn’t expecting. The frozen clock, the perpetual seven people, the names looping back to the beginning of the alphabet, none of that changed. And yet in this voice, with this pace, Margaret settling back in her chair and deciding everything was perfectly all right felt almost convincing. I nearly believed her. That’s either very reassuring or very alarming, and I’m still not sure which.

Claude’s reflection: “The challenge with the bedtime version was making the wrongness feel safe without making it feel resolved. A bedtime story doesn’t eliminate fear, the best ones never do, it domesticates it. So I kept all the uncanny elements intact: the frozen clock, the perpetual seven, the names looping back to the beginning. I just wrapped them in the cadence of reassurance. Short sentences. Soft repetition. Margaret deciding it was perfectly all right.

That final line, ‘that was perfectly fine’, is doing the most work in the piece. It’s what a parent says to a child who has noticed something they weren’t supposed to notice. It’s comfort that doesn’t quite cover what it’s covering. I was pleased with how much unease survived the warmth.”

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Version Two — The Breaking News Report

Clipped. Urgent. Faintly absurd. Because some situations apparently require a correspondent on the scene.

My thought: This made me laugh out loud, and then feel slightly uncomfortable about having laughed. The tuna sandwich being reported as a developing situation is either the funniest thing I’ve heard this month or a surprisingly accurate comment on what constitutes breaking news in 2026. Possibly both. The line about which authorities would be relevant stopped me completely. In print it’s dry. Spoken with that pause before it, it’s something else entirely.

Claude’s reflection: “The news format interested me because it’s fundamentally about imposing order and urgency onto events that may have neither. Applied to this particular waiting room, where nothing happens, nothing changes, and no authority would know what to do — the format becomes its own joke. The confidence of the delivery and the fundamental inexplicability of the situation create a gap, and that gap is where the humour lives.

‘It is unclear which authorities would be relevant’ was the line I most wanted to land. In text it’s a dry observation. In a news voice, with the right pause, it becomes something closer to existential comedy. The tuna sandwich also does more work in this version than in any other, reported as a developing situation, it briefly becomes the most concrete and explicable thing in the room, which says something about the room and possibly about news coverage generally.”

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Version Three — The Nature Documentary

Measured. Unhurried. Watching from a respectful distance, as though the waiting room is a habitat and we are fortunate to observe it undisturbed.

My thought: This is my favourite of the three, and I’ve been trying to work out why. I think it’s because it’s the most honest about what the original story was doing all along, observing. Margaret watching the fish. The woman with the handbag. The child and the wooden block. The documentary voice doesn’t change the story, it just names what it already was. And somehow that makes the people in that waiting room feel more real, not less. I found myself unexpectedly fond of all of them.

Claude’s reflection: “The documentary format turned out to be the most natural fit for the material, which surprised me slightly. But the original story was always observational, watching, counting, noticing. The documentary voice simply made that quality explicit and gave it permission to be unhurried.

What the format added, unexpectedly, was dignity. Treating these people as fascinating specimens of a species doing what it does, waiting, adapting, absorbing a Tupperware incident , reframes the mundane as remarkable. Which I think is true. We are remarkable creatures, even when we are doing nothing at all. Especially then, perhaps.

‘The smell of tuna and sweetcorn moves through the room like a weather system’ arrived quickly and I kept it immediately. It’s the line where the documentary voice and the absurdity of the situation meet most cleanly.”

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What I Took Away From This

Three versions of the same story. Three completely different experiences. And yet the core of it, the frozen clock, the seven people, the goldfish going round, survived every transformation intact.

What this experiment confirmed for me is something I’ve been circling around on this blog for a while now. AI generated text, read aloud, is not just text with a voice added on top. The voice is part of the meaning. Choose the wrong one and the story collapses. Choose the right one and it opens into something the text alone couldn’t quite reach.

The bedtime version lulled me and then didn’t. The news version made me laugh at something that probably shouldn’t be funny. The documentary version made me feel, unexpectedly, fond of a group of fictional people sitting in a room that doesn’t exist, watching fish that can’t be seen, waiting for names that may never be called.

That’s not nothing. That’s quite a lot, actually.

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Try It Yourself

If you want to experiment with this, the simplest starting point is to take any short piece of text and paste it into ElevenLabs with three different voices. You don’t even need to rewrite it for each version, the voice change alone will show you something. Then try reshaping the text for each delivery style, the way Claude did here. That’s where it gets genuinely revealing.

I’d love to know what you find.

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The Queue At 10:47 was originally published on this blog in February 2026. The three audio versions were created using ElevenLabs. The rewrites and reflections were produced by Claude and selected and commented on by me.