Boooooooks!

May 29, 2008 08:24

Which get the headphones icon instead of the book icon because Librivox is awesome. And kept me quite awake on the train ride, sampling through various books. Yay, audio project gutenberg!

I find, however, that I'm an audio snob of sorts. Mostly it's that, especially when listening to short things, accents can throw me. Podcasts, for instance, in which the speakers have heavy accents (that aren't west coast american), are really hard for me to listen to. My ears have to get accustomed to it, and most of the podcasts are too short for me to really get into it before I've missed half of it already while trying to decipher what's being said. (And for the record, learning Spanish from people who are speaking English with what sounds like an Irish accent - and Spain Spanish instead of Latin American Spanish at that - really doesn't work for me. So much for Coffee Break Spanish. v_v)

Alternatively, while longer works like audio books give me enough time to get acclimated to the reader's accent (look, I spent the entire first episode of Torchwood without a damned clue what Gwen was saying), I'm hyper sensitive to HOW the book is read. If it's inflectionless, or the reader is stumbling over the words, or they paaaaaauuuuusssseee at every comma excessively, or have no emotion or feeling in their voice... [sigh] It can ruin a book that I otherwise love. I'm also finding there's a fine line between reading too slow (irritating) or too fast (hard to listen to). Audio books of favorites make me gleeful, now that I have a commute to listen to them on, but it really depends alot on how the book is read as to whether I can sit through it or not. Ironically? Some of the best amateur audio books I've listened to so far (librivox is all volunteer driven) have been podfics of fanfiction made by fans.

It makes me half want to try my hand at it - I personally think I have a very gravelly voice that I don't particularly like the sound of in recordings, and I have a tendency to read aloud at the speed I naturally read, which is FAST, but with some practice (and ignoring the quality of my voice which I can't do much about) I think I could do a fair job of it. I have no real accent that I know of - the area I grew up in basically tends to sound much like the standard American newscasters (which, I realize, is its own sort of accent if you're used to something else, but it's fairly clear speaking all the same). It would give me practice speaking clearly and enunciating properly, and if I use what I call my phone etiquette voice (which is slightly higher pitched and forcibly smoother than my normal speaking voice) I think I could make myself understood in a fairly pleasant fashion. And goodness knows I could certainly read most things with feeling as that's how I hear them in my head, particularly if *I* wrote it. And, most importantly, I possess a headset/microphone set and am now in possession of a computer capable of sound recording with some software on it that I haven't explored yet.

Soooooo... would anyone be interested in me reading something? And if so, what? Fanfic or original, whatever, just, y'know, one of the shorter ones. I'd probably do a few drafts until I judge I sound remotely acceptable, but it would be fun (if the technology doesn't prove unbearably frustrating) and might be interesting. I'm only offering to butcher my own work as the only person I can offend like that is myself, but hey. It'd be interesting to record it, wait a few days, and then listen to it to see what I really sound like (sort of like waiting a few days to re-read something just written to see what it really reads like [g]). [snort] Self made podfic - the ultimate ego boo. [g]
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