# Dramarrator: Object-Based Audio Editing for Audio Drama Production from Books

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08349 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08349/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [MM-StoryAgent: Immersive Narrated Storybook Video Generation with a Multi-Agent Paradigm across Text, Image and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05242/) (2025)
- [NewsPod: Automatic and Interactive News Podcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07146/) (2022)
- [TalkLess: Blending Extractive and Abstractive Speech Summarization for Editing Speech to Preserve Content and Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15202/) (2025)
- [StoryEnsemble: Enabling Dynamic Exploration & Iteration in the Design Process with AI and Forward-Backward Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03182/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio dramas weave dialogue, sound effects, and music into immersive stories. Creators often adapt books into audio dramas, but this process remains labor-intensive, requiring them to interpret source material, author scripts, generate audio assets, and assemble them on a timeline. Because story elements like characters and scenes manifest across many interdependent assets, a single change can ripple into manual updates across the entire project. We present Dramarrator, an audio drama authoring tool built around object-based audio editing, where these story elements are represented as editable objects. Dramarrator extracts these objects from a book, generates linked audio assets (speech, sound effects, and music), and composes a multi-track audio drama. Edits to any object (e.g., a character's voice) automatically propagate to all dependent assets. In a user study with professionals (N=8), Dramarrator significantly lowered task load when creating audio dramas. A listener study (N=300) shows that creator-refined output from Dramarrator approaches the quality of productions made with existing professional tools, and an exploratory study (N=3) suggests object-based editing lowers entry barriers and generalizes beyond audio dramas.