<i> Sometimes, It’s All in the Voice</i>

Television is such a visual medium that we often take for granted some of its sounds.

Not sound cards, sound effects, surround sound, sound design, sound dissolves, sound loops, souped-up sound, Puget Sound or “The Sound of Music.” Not the noise of Conditmania. Not laugh tracks, not music tracks, not buzz tracks.

Think, instead, of the natural sound of a voice. This voice:

“September, year 2000. The final weeks of the Clinton Administration on the occasion of an official visit by a foreign leader and the planning of a formal presidential press conference.

“White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart grants unprecedented access to himself, his press office ... and even his president.

“Lockhart’s purpose? To show how the frenetic pace of today’s 24-hour news business, accelerated by the Internet, threatens journalism and government alike.”

The enticing deep tones belong to Will Lyman, their application here to words written by filmmaker Theodore Bogosian for “The Press Secretary,” a documentary airing Sept. 17 on PBS.

Relatively unnoticed and certainly unappreciated, narration is more than mere reading of words. It’s a critical element of documentaries, for how words are read can be worth a thousand pictures, even subliminally, the accompanying speech influencing in what manner we absorb the images before us. A narrator can strengthen a documentary or wound one, as in that fine actor Kenneth Branagh not meeting the challenge of “The Cold War” in 1998. Although he does a nice “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” his narration here detracted from that ambitious CNN documentary series because he didn’t have the voice for it.

Others do; former network news correspondent Marlene Sanders and actors Edward Herrmann, Peter Coyote and David Ogden Stiers crowd onto a tiny pedestal reserved for TV’s narrating royalty. No hammy scene stealers or Mickey Mouse falsettos here, nor anyone sounding even remotely like a computerized voicemail.

With the arguable exception of noted historian David McCullough, though, no one quite ranks with Lyman as a narrator. As an authoritative off-camera voice, the man’s a rocket, an audio auteur. No telling the number of documentaries I’ve watched while thinking how much better they would be were Lyman the narrator. He and his tubes are that good, his sense of pitch and instinct for the moment flawless. Not one misplaced vibrato.

All this from a humble start two decades ago, making ends meet as a struggling actor by anchoring his voice to industrial films about cinder blocks and fire retardants.

A veteran with many stage and TV credits, Lyman is a vocaholic whose typical workload of 30 documentaries a year most notably features the PBS series “Front- line.” He’s been its primary voice since 1984, his flat, somber delivery especially fitting for tableaux with a dark side.

Yet everyone, even this narrator himself, is a critic. “I wish it flowed more easily,” Lyman said modestly from his home in Boston. “I hear the work in my voice, and I hate that. There seems to be so much effort involved in making it happen.”

It doesn’t reach the ear that way. Listen:

In the 21st century, the White House has become ground zero in the battle to control the nation’s news agenda.

Although subjective, that line is launched by Lyman with the tone of an impartial, uninvolved observer, in contrast to narrators in literature and contemporary plays, from “A View From the Bridge” to “The Glass Menagerie,” who nearly always have a stake in what they’re describing.

It’s a fine line, and here’s the trick. Unlike most other actors hired as narrators--often because of their celebrity--Lyman, Herrmann, Coyote and Stiers check their stagecraft and mellifluous crescendos at the door when reporting to the recording studio. In other words, they don’t act , nor does Meryl Streep, happily, while narrating next week’s PBS documentary series, “School: The Story of American Education.”

“I’ve been asked to do it, but I fight against it,” said Lyman. “I say it’s not right. An actor’s job is to portray a character, and a narrator is not a character. You have to learn how to let those emotions go. When you tell the story of an emotional event, you have to be removed from it. You want them to feel the horror without the emotionality from the voice.”

Lyman has been asked to “put a little bit of a smirk in a line,” but never would he inject an opinion. “If there is an opinion being given, the viewer wants to see who is giving it and wants to see some credentials,” he said. “As a narrator, you’re not validated by a picture.”

If an actor gets into character before performing, what kind of narrator mode does Lyman slip into when reading a script? Just a couple of years ago, for example, he narrated a devastating “Frontline” about dominant Hutus shooting, clubbing, knifing and hacking to death perhaps 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in the early 1990s, its pictures showing bodies everywhere, skulls crushed and limbs askew, forming a carpet of rotting flesh. What goes through a narrator’s mind when verbalizing events so grisly?

“Basically, it’s just information,” Lyman said.

If that seems removed, carrying detachment too far, consider that, unlike actors who may have weeks to rehearse, Lyman and his documentary script sometimes arrive at the studio about simultaneously, meaning that his first recorded reading may be a cold one. What’s more, there are times when he’s unable to see in advance the footage into which his narration will be inserted.

That he makes it sound so connected, nonetheless, is a mark of his professionalism, experience and great talent and why he remains the man. His own voicemail, by the way? Magnificent!

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.