Storytime
Ahhahahahaha! Okay, Garageband has awesome special effects, but makes prohibitively large files. Audion is much more manageable and cleans up nicer, so thank you muchly for suggesting it. (I don't, however, have the right library file to export to mp3s, so I exported to large wav files and then ran it through iTunes to get decent sized m4a files.)
ZPC gave me a ridiculous tongue twister which I used to practice on. [ 0:48, 352kb m4a file ] (This is probably the most pleasant sounding voice I managed, naturally, as it was the first thing I did.)
Strings of Pearls is an odd little original story I sometimes poke at, in nice small, manageable sections. Perfectly PG, kitsunes and dragons and silliness. [ 4:15, 1.9mb m4a file ] (I basically read this cold, with only a few small edits when I totally hopelessly tangled my tongue and had to restart at the beginning of a paragraph. There's some clicks from my harddrive that I can't figure out how to edit out and at one point towards the end there's a crash that's my roommate taking out the recycling under my bedroom window. On re-listening, I probably needed to slow down a bit.)
Luck's Boys - Hello, Goodbye is the only full length complete LB fic I've finished so far. Army boys; R rated for violence, death, and swearing. [ 22:28, 10.7mb m4a file ] (The volume is quite a bit lower than the other two files; quality was sacrificed to reduce file size.)
....oh god, please don't laugh at my pronunciation! x_x I read this in one go, beginning to end (I had, by then, perfected the "I fucked up, shit... insert pause while mentally counting to three... backtrack to beginning of sentence and start over" blooper, which just requires cutting out the messed up part afterwards) and lord help me, I was fielding swaps between english, german and hungarian (the later two by badly phonetically sounding out the words), trying to remember the proper pronunciation of names (as opposed to my bastardized lazy american mental pronunciation), and do a dramatic reading quietly enough that my roommates wouldn't hear me all at the same time. DOOM.
It's long, and my voice was getting noticeably tired (and a little too fast, too eager to be done with it) by the end. (There was more editing done in the last few minutes than all the rest of it combined as my tongue just gave out and started fumbling over things.) There's still small stuttered errors all through it that weren't bad enough to redo, my german pronunciation is horrible, my hungarian is far far WORSE, and yes, I know that both "mathe" and "reine" should probably have an audible E at the end but my mouth finally just gave up and couldn't do it without slurring and tangling hopelessly. I ended up pasting it all into a text file and writing out phonetics for things so that I could read it ("Mihal" for "Michal", "Kolmenka" for "Kalmenka", etc).
Still? There's bits and pieces through it that I think I rather like the sound of. And it was an interesting teaching experience, both in how and when to pause to read it understandably aloud and also in editing terms of when I probably need to break up some carryon sentances, and a few word repetitions that have been already edited out after I stumbled over them. The bloopers have been mercifully deleted but I assure you, they were hysterical; I seemed to have horrible problems with names, not because I don't know how to say them but because my mouth would just go haywire - Jann kept coming out sounding like "John", Adolf came out like "Adle" once, and Hans got introduced no less than five times with me swearing inbetween.
EDIT - in retrospect, after sleep, I'd have to say that no, really, I'm *horrendously* embarrassed by my pronunciation of other languages. I learn languages to read and write them, not to speak them; I can type them all day long but I can't say anything worth a damn. I apologize profusely to everyone's ears. x_x
ZPC gave me a ridiculous tongue twister which I used to practice on. [ 0:48, 352kb m4a file ] (This is probably the most pleasant sounding voice I managed, naturally, as it was the first thing I did.)
Strings of Pearls is an odd little original story I sometimes poke at, in nice small, manageable sections. Perfectly PG, kitsunes and dragons and silliness. [ 4:15, 1.9mb m4a file ] (I basically read this cold, with only a few small edits when I totally hopelessly tangled my tongue and had to restart at the beginning of a paragraph. There's some clicks from my harddrive that I can't figure out how to edit out and at one point towards the end there's a crash that's my roommate taking out the recycling under my bedroom window. On re-listening, I probably needed to slow down a bit.)
Luck's Boys - Hello, Goodbye is the only full length complete LB fic I've finished so far. Army boys; R rated for violence, death, and swearing. [ 22:28, 10.7mb m4a file ] (The volume is quite a bit lower than the other two files; quality was sacrificed to reduce file size.)
....oh god, please don't laugh at my pronunciation! x_x I read this in one go, beginning to end (I had, by then, perfected the "I fucked up, shit... insert pause while mentally counting to three... backtrack to beginning of sentence and start over" blooper, which just requires cutting out the messed up part afterwards) and lord help me, I was fielding swaps between english, german and hungarian (the later two by badly phonetically sounding out the words), trying to remember the proper pronunciation of names (as opposed to my bastardized lazy american mental pronunciation), and do a dramatic reading quietly enough that my roommates wouldn't hear me all at the same time. DOOM.
It's long, and my voice was getting noticeably tired (and a little too fast, too eager to be done with it) by the end. (There was more editing done in the last few minutes than all the rest of it combined as my tongue just gave out and started fumbling over things.) There's still small stuttered errors all through it that weren't bad enough to redo, my german pronunciation is horrible, my hungarian is far far WORSE, and yes, I know that both "mathe" and "reine" should probably have an audible E at the end but my mouth finally just gave up and couldn't do it without slurring and tangling hopelessly. I ended up pasting it all into a text file and writing out phonetics for things so that I could read it ("Mihal" for "Michal", "Kolmenka" for "Kalmenka", etc).
Still? There's bits and pieces through it that I think I rather like the sound of. And it was an interesting teaching experience, both in how and when to pause to read it understandably aloud and also in editing terms of when I probably need to break up some carryon sentances, and a few word repetitions that have been already edited out after I stumbled over them. The bloopers have been mercifully deleted but I assure you, they were hysterical; I seemed to have horrible problems with names, not because I don't know how to say them but because my mouth would just go haywire - Jann kept coming out sounding like "John", Adolf came out like "Adle" once, and Hans got introduced no less than five times with me swearing inbetween.
EDIT - in retrospect, after sleep, I'd have to say that no, really, I'm *horrendously* embarrassed by my pronunciation of other languages. I learn languages to read and write them, not to speak them; I can type them all day long but I can't say anything worth a damn. I apologize profusely to everyone's ears. x_x