ElevenReader Brings Frankenstein to Life with a Full Cast and Original Score

Frankenstein, the first cinematic audiobook created with Eleven v4, is coming just in time for Halloween

“The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Today we’re releasing a cinematic audiobook adaptation of Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein,” free and exclusively on ElevenReader. It’s the first full-length production made on Eleven v4, ElevenLabs’ most emotive model yet. It’s also the  first ElevenReader Original performed entirely by voices from the ElevenLabs voice library.

Frankenstein is a long and demanding book, making it a perfect choice to highlight the capabilities of Eleven v4. The story is told through letters and nested narrators, with a creature who has to sound by turns tender, articulate and terrifying, and it arrives just ahead of Halloween.

Putting v4 to work

Eleven v4 was built to interpret tone, pacing, emotion and context from the text itself. It can hold a speaker's identity steady across long stretches of narration and dialogue. Those qualities are vital for creating a production like this. The production team directed the full cast of voices with natural-language direction and inline audio tags, so a line could be marked to be whispered, shouted across a storm, or delivered with the creature's particular mix of grief and menace. Because v4 understands the context of a whole scene, the exchanges between Victor and the creature sound like a real conversation rather than a set of lines recorded separately.

The score, sound design, and every voice you’ll hear in the audiobook were generated in ElevenCreative, by a team of two producers in two weeks.

What this changes for audiobooks

Only a small share of books ever get an audio edition, let alone a dramatic production version with a cast and a score. But with the tools available now to everyone in ElevenCreative,  it changes who can make this kind of audio.  ElevenLabs plans to bring this treatment to many more titles, in more languages, over the coming months.

"For a long time a produced audiobook, with a cast, a score and sound design, was something only a handful of titles ever got," said Madeline Shue, part of the Growth team at ElevenLabs. "Frankenstein was made by a small team on Eleven v4, using the same voices and tools that are open to anyone with an ElevenLabs account. That is what we find exciting about it: the production stands on its own, and the way it was made is available to everyone."

Listen today

Frankenstein is free for every ElevenReader user starting today, with a preview and the full production at elevenreader.io/frankenstein. Every voice in the cast is also available in the app, so you can choose any of them for your own reading – perhaps you want Victor Frankenstein to read you a novel, or the creature to narrate todays’ news to you. 

And if you'd rather make something than listen, the model, the voices and the tools behind this production are live now in ElevenCreative. 

Frankenstein is available free, exclusively on ElevenReader. Start listening today.