Vita and professional career
(Doris Lauerwald, 2007)

"Speaking or Singing"
or "The chicken or the egg?"

People often ask me how I became a voice artist and what came first - speaking or singing?

Well, if you asked my parents, the answer would probably be "crying" - "She cried so hard in the beginning that the nurse had to take her out of the room", they often recount. Don't worry, they got me back eventually and raised me to a respectable size. Today they believe that this was probably lung training that set me up for my present job.

Granted, maybe that was too much exercise for the time, after all, my first encounter with a recording studio did not happen when I was an infant.

It all began a bit later when I got into acting as a young child. I played in several movies, TV series, commercials and educational movies. My on-screen parents, fellow actors and directors included Vera Tschechowa, Gabriel Barylli, Walter Sedlmayr, Florian Gallenberger, Ruth Kappelsberger, Klaus Ickert and Uli König, among others. I played in children's tv series and movies like "Anderland", "Das feuerrote Spielmobil", "Pumuckl", "Gefühlssachen", "Die Sprechstunde", "Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst" (cp. "America's Most Wanted") and others.

One part is still particularly fresh in my mind. I got to eat so much pudding when shooting a commercial for Danny Plus Sahne (German chocolate pudding brand) that I had trouble holding on to it later during a dance performance at school.

When it eventually came to dubbing some of my lines, I found myself inside a dubbing studio for the first time. From that moment on, I was hooked to this very special atmosphere inside a recording studio. It wasn't long before I got to dub the parts of other children, next to Gudrun Landgrebe in Annas Mutter for example. I also did audio plays for children like Burg Schreckenstein and various educational movies and commercials. And so I grew up gathering quite a lot of experience in front of both camera and microphone.

Despite growing up in Unterfoehring with its booming media industry (just around the corner from German tv stations like ZDF, BR and others), I grew up in a traditional environment. Upon the advice of my parents (Dad: "Get a real job!", Mum: "You are going to end up hanging around at castings all the time. That's frustrating!"), I decided against taking acting classes, at least for the time being. It was a decision I never regretted. Getting "a real job" (working as a stewardess was my longest and last employment before I became a full-time freelancer) and the resulting financial security afforded my the opportunity to finally set up my first own studio, as well as taking singing classes and getting breathing and voice training.

In the meantime, I had already developed a new passion and with it, one more reason to be in a studio: Singing.

I spent every free minute (mostly at night, to the regret of those living around me) working on my own songs and arrangements in my old basement studio. Using my first microphone, an AKG C2000B (replaced by a "Neumann U87" later) and other equipment including a Yamaha CS1X synthesizer and various plug-ins to mix them with my singing voice and speech. This resulted in demo productions at the Pilot Tonstudios München studio and later at the Farao Studios München in cooperation with Andreas Caemmerer.

It was a key event during a 7-day vacation in the Maldives as part of my job as a flight attendant that finally allowed me to see my future clearly. I was lying on a beach in the white sand on a tropical island in the Indian Ocean under clear blue skies. A place that may seem like paradise to most. But all I could think of was to be in my basement! Of course, I couldn't tell anyone..

When I got back home, I quit my job as a flight attendant and immediately started working on a professional recording studio. I took speaker training and a course in media acting, which included acoustic acting, camera acting, elocution training, role analysis and hosting. I also took more traditional singing classes and piano classes and continued my speechtraining and logopedic training. After completing my acting classes and after years of on-the-job experience, I eventually started my own business in 2003, "Doris Lauerwald - Native German Voice Talent, Session Singer and Producer".
I have been supplying recordings of my speaking and singing voice from my own studio (now fortunately no longer located in the basement but in my attic) to clients all over the world ever since.

In the beginning, I worked for various telecommunications companies as speaker, writer and producer of voice recordings for telephone systems, voicemail systems and IVR mailboxes. It wasn't long before I also returned to my beloved dubbing studio, where it all began, and to the recording studios of other companies.

Now, in 2007, I still sometimes work as a producer of commercials and various voice-overs for the Internet (website voice guides), telephone voice messages and corporate jingles (Corporate Identity) and, on rare occasions, radio commercials. For that purpose, I acquired an extensive, royalty-free music and sound library. I also still have a passion for directing other speakers in many languages. For example, I directed Michael Ballack, Christoph Metzelder, Sebastian Kehl, Gerald Asamoah and Kevin Kuranyi for a T-Com project. I also did voice recordings with Sky Dumont for another project.

As for acting, I had some more small parts in TV productions not worth mentioning, but soon focused exclusively on my work as a voice artist.

Companies like Siemens, o2, Swisscom, German Telecom, NAVTEQ Navigation Systems, Avaya, Lonely Planet, DHL, Intel and IBM hire me as speaker, singer, host and corporate voice for on-camera presentations, commercials, E-learning, voice messages and documentaries. For a detailed list of my projects, please see the References section or the Newsblog of my website. Many of these productions originated from my own sound booth, others were recorded at my clients' studios.

With what kind of interpretation may I give a voice to your production?

Doris Lauerwald