Season Four of High Notes Launches; Secretly Sporty Podcast Launches “Secretly Spooky” Halloween Series; Nerd Alert Podcast Launches
High Notes is a podcast that features conversations on the art and business of voice, hosted by voice actor and BRAVA CEO Melissa Thom. From Mongolian throat singing to vocal health, accents, gaming, and more, HIGH NOTES uncovers the craft behind the business.
Season 4 of HIGH NOTES, the podcast about the business and art of voice, launches on Thursday 8th October for seven weeks. It will see host Melissa Thom talking to leading figures on both sides of the AI debate: those whose voices have been affected by AI, and those using it for good.
Experienced voice actor and communications specialist Melissa Thom founded BRAVA. Joining Melissa is a highly experienced team of actors, educators, and producers from the UK and the U.S.
What happens to the human voice as AI gets good enough to replicate it? It’s a conversation that reaches further than most people think, affecting not just performers, but anyone who’s ever recorded a voice note, sat in on a Zoom call, or had their voice used by the business they work for. If you speak for a living, work with people who do, or just want to understand what’s happening to your own voice in an AI-shaped world, this season’s for you.
The full lineup of episodes and release dates are as follows:
Thursday 8th October
Episode 01: AI or human voice? Why brands choose both, with Mark Graeme from OCX (Omnicom Production) and Mark Eaves from Gravity Road
This episode explores when and why a creative studio chooses AI over a human voice, and when it doesn’t, from two vantage points in the advertising industry.
Mark Graeme is Head of Studio at OCX UK (Omnicom Production, part of Omnicom Group, the world’s leading marketing and sales company). Mark and his team produce work for creative agencies such as Adam & Eve/TBWA, AMVBBDO, and McCann, plus work directly with a mix of local and global brands. He has also hosted the Shiny Awards, supporting emerging directing talent.
Mark Eaves is Founder of Gravity Road, part of The Brand Tech Group, working across brands including Unilever, Booking.com and TikTok. He led Gravity Road’s build of ‘Ode,’ an AI poetry companion made in partnership with Microsoft AI and Poetry Pharmacy founder William Sieghart. ‘Ode’ is trained on Sieghart’s own voice to listen and prescribe a poem. A real actor reads every poem aloud — Stephen Fry, Harriet Walter, Dominic West and Indira Varma among them — rather than a synthetic voice.
Between them, Melissa gets the industry-wide picture and one deeply considered case study, both circling the same question creative directors are still grappling with: AI or human voice?
Thursday 15th October
Episode 02: Cloned Without Consent, with Voice Actor Faye Dicker and Equity’s Shannon Sailing
Voice actor Faye Dicker discovered her voice had been cloned and sold via a US platform without her consent. It was downloaded more than 900 times before it was taken down. She’s joined by Shannon Sailing, Industrial Official for Audio and Games, from Equity, who dealt with Faye’s case and is now handling a wave of similar claims.
Thursday 22nd October
Episode 03: UK AI Law: Unfit for Purpose? With Dr. Mathilde Pavis
In this episode, Melissa talks to Dr Mathilde Pavis, an expert in intellectual property law, ethics and new technologies, who helped build Equity’s AI toolkit and has worked directly with AI platforms including ElevenLabs. Melissa asks why the UK currently has no personality right for voice, how that compares to other countries, and whether the law is keeping up. The real value here is practical: exactly what to check, ask and do to protect your own voice, as things stand today. The landscape is changing fast, so staying informed matters more than ever.
Thursday 29th October
Ep 04: Across all sectors: Games, Dubbing, Ads and Animation with Actor and Voiceover Artist David Menkin
David Menkin is a London-based actor and voiceover artist with an impressive portfolio across commercials, dubbing, animation and gaming, including major AAA titles, Lego Star Wars, Final Fantasy XVI and Pragmata. In this episode, Melissa talks to him about how working across these four sectors creates very different relationships with AI risk. They also discuss David’s advocacy work on how studios treat performers, and whether any one sector is leading the way in AI and human voice working together.
Thursday 5th November
Episode 05: The Audiobook Pipeline with Award-Winning Director, Dan Jones
Storytelling’s as old as language, but the recorded audiobook industry is barely three generations old, and already facing real disruption. AI-narrated titles now make up around 23% of new releases in the US, and Audible alone has released over 40,000. Yet the Audio Publishers Association’s own data shows willingness to actually try AI narration has been falling, not rising. Dan Jones spent 22 years at Hachette, one of the world’s biggest publishers, including 7 as Head of Audio Services, and is now an Audio Specialist and Senior Manager at Glassboxx, and a visiting coach at BRAVA. We ask Dan how decisions get made at scale, what he wishes more performers understood about the other side of the process, and where he thinks the human voice in audiobooks is headed.
Thursday 12th November
Episode 06: Owning and protecting your voice with BAFTA award-winning actress, Cissy Jones
Melissa talks to BAFTA award-winning actress Cissy Jones, known for voicing Delilah in Firewatch, alongside performances in The Walking Dead, Baldur’s Gate 3, Fallout 4, Starfield, Life is Strange, Halo 5 and The Owl House. Cissy is co-founder and CEO of US-based company Ethovox, the only voice AI company owned and run by voice actors.
Ethovox has an agreement with SAG-AFTRA, made during the video game Interactive Media Agreement negotiations, to build a foundational voice model on a union contract. How an individual performer’s own voice replica is actually used, SAG or non-SAG, remains a separate decision made by that performer and their agent. Melissa asks Cissy what performers should check before licensing their voice, and whether her model is the exception to the rule or a preview of where the rest of the industry is heading.
Thursday 18th November
Ep 07: Negotiating AI: Inside a Talent Agency with Bonnie Nordling
AI is now a significant factor in negotiating VO contracts, so in this episode Melissa sits down with Bonnie Nordling and asks what negotiation looks like in a talent agency for 2026. Bonnie is the MD of Nordlings, representing around 200 voice actors across commercials, animation, and gaming. Bonnie talks through her agency’s approach to negotiating AI clauses, where AI and human voice are working well together across her roster, and where more work remains. She also gives her take on the agent’s role in the age of AI, and what she thinks the future holds.
Melissa Thom, HIGH NOTES host, said: “We’re at a moment when AI can replicate, reshape and deploy a voice in ways most of us are only beginning to understand. This season is about making sense of that change and giving everyone who uses their voice — professionally or personally — the conversation, context and tools they need to navigate what comes next.”
Check out the fourth season of High Notes.
Secretly Sporty Podcast Launches “Secretly Spooky” Halloween Series
What if working out was about more than the workout? For the
month of October leading up to Halloween, Secretly Sporty, the podcast where writer Sebastian Langdell talks with authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creatives about how their fitness practice intersects with their artistic practice, is transforming into Secretly Spooky.
The first episode dropped last week on October 5. Every guest this month works in the horror genre: from a film composer to a special effects makeup artist. The format of the podcast stays unchanged, with
honest conversations about exercise and nutrition, and how moving the body shapes the guests’ creative work. Secretly Spooky brings dedicated episode art, new spooky theme music, and a lineup of horror-themed lightning round questions.
“At Secretly Sporty, we view fitness and creativity as intertwined, two sides of a thriving artistic existence. We started the show to learn from our artistic heroes how fitness fuels creativity, stabilizes anxiety and counteracts depression, generates ever-new ideas, and generally makes the tough stuff of life more bearable. We have intellectually rich discussions with creatives who have endured all manner of obstacles, fought through, and used these specific activities — whether climbing or cycling, powerlifting or surfing –to make their art, and their lives, possible,” says Sebastian Langdell, co-creator and host of Secretly Sporty.
Episodes will feature creatives such as Holly Amber Church, the “scream queen of scoring,” who earned an Emmy nomination for the main title theme to Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix. She talks about live online HIIT workouts and how she broke into film and TV composing. The episode also includes her score for the indie horror film The Other, which she created using a dismembered Barbie doll and a bucket of slime.
In another episode, Sebastian talks with makeup artist and specialty costume builder Dan Crawley, known for his work on several Marvel films, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Terrifier 3, and Ghostbusters. He shares how he went from an overweight kid who hated sports to the owner of a CrossFit gym.
Other guests include Transylvanian writer and editor Alex Woodroe, editor-in-chief of Tenebrous Press, a publisher of “new weird horror,” and indigenous American horror author Erika T. Wurth, who wrote The Haunting of Room 904 and White Horse.
“If I’ve learned anything from watching horror movies, it’s that fitness and
horror go hand in hand; you need to be able to run, climb, and swim if you’re going to escape the monsters. Plus, a good scary movie gets your heart thumping. So asking horror professionals about their exercise routines felt like the perfect way to celebrate Halloween and all of spooky season,” shares Austen Rachlis, co-creator and producer.
Each episode of Secretly Sporty explores topics such as how boxing and
bouldering boost mental health and how long bike rides can offer a shortcut to transcendence. By the end of each episode, listeners should feel inspired both to hit the gym and to write their novel.
Sebastian Langdell writes fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, Witness, Electric Literature, the Vassar Review, and the Oxford History of Poetry in English, among other venues. Author of two books, he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library. He grew up between London and Los Angeles, and now lives in Austin, Texas.
Austen Rachlis is a multi-faceted writer and producer living in Los Angeles. She is currently a writer and senior producer for Audible and has written over 150 produced podcast scripts, including for the shows American Scandal, Business Wars, and Against the Odds. Her podcast writing has earned a Signal Award and a Gracie Award. She directed and produced the documentary Naughty Books about the rise of self-published romance novels after Fifty Shades of Grey. It won Best Indie Documentary 2020 at Film Threat’s Award This Ceremony and was licensed by Hulu, Kanopy, Tubi, SundanceNow, and more. Her novel Hacker Mom was a launch title for Amazon’s Kindle Serial initiative, and she has ghostwritten five installments of a middle-grade mystery series for Simon &Schuster.
Nerd Alert Podcast launches — D&D Fans And Gamers Unite
The Players Keep is a live-play D&D group with a table of British actors who livestream new episodes every Tuesday. Starting on YouTube and Twitch, they launched the TPK podcast ahead of their second campaign launch in February 2026, as they continue building the UK's biggest new RPG content brand.
The show has grown a global fanbase that has traveled from all corners of the globe to help them sell out a live show. The Players Keep has spawned a fan account and is now nominated for Best Gaming Podcast at the 2026 Independent Podcast Awards.
From the cast of The Players Keep, Ben and Pete sit down every week to talk about everything they love that makes them the nerds we all know… Mainly Dungeons & Dragons.
The first four episodes are now available and are the perfect companion for anyone new to The Players Keep or D&D, as they weave through the lore, the rules, and the terminology… with the occasional cameo from their fellow cast members. It is the perfect entry point for anyone curious to learn about D&D, or for existing fans of The Players Keep who want to understand what the heck they’re listening to.
Nerd Alert is available in both audio and video formats, and is part of the Mercury Podcast Network.
TPK launched The Players Keep podcast in February, and recently celebrated their first Independent Podcast Award Nomination for Gaming. They share the category with fellow Mercury podcast PastMaster, as Mercury build a best-in-class, British-led slate of gaming and RPG podcasts.
“I like to take some credit for Nerd Alert,” jokes Mercury’s founder and CEO Liam Heffernan. “Before I met the TPK cast, I knew absolutely nothing about D&D, and today… Well, I still know absolutely nothing about D&D, but after listening to about 50 hours of them playing, I wanted someone to explain it to me like I’m five. Ben and Pete have duly delivered.”
“It has been an amazing first year with Mercury, and it isn’t even over yet,” say The Players Keep. “Following the successful launch of the podcast, we are so excited to give Nerd Alert to the world.”
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Check out books by Frank Racioppi. Everything from novels and nonfiction to podcasting books and essays. Coming in 2027: The Best Independent Podcasts Of 2027.
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