Tricky reading section help

[teas_me]

I am currently working on a podfic of a story where the great majority of it takes place on the internet through chats, emails, and blogs. I've recorded most of the fic and have it all set, but there is one particular part that has me stumped

Comments

[heard_the_owl]

OMGOODNESS! /0

[teas_me]

I know! It's so crazy. That's kind of what I was thinking of doing - the reading phonetically part. A friend of mine suggested stuttering through it.

It's really tricky and I'm actually scared/nervous to do it, wondering how it will sound. *shrugs*

[lap_otter]

You could also putting it through a text-to-speech program, and then imitating what the robot voice makes of the mangled words? Or recording a sound for each letter, and editing together the letter-sounds in sequence, but that might be even less understandable. These are both weird crazy ideas, but I thought I'd toss them out there in case they were helpful.

I also like heard_the_owl's idea of editing the extra sounds into the correctly-read recording! That could be really cool, I think.

[teas_me]

I played around with text-to-speech programs online. Most of them were reading it either letter for letter, or a jumble that couldn't even be understood. I thought maybe I could get away with having a text-to-speech thingy read it for me and record that... most likely not.

heard_the_owl has a good idea!

[busaikko]

There are a lot of programs like JAWS and speaking keyboards which will read both letters and words -- you could maybe use that as a kind of background, and your own voice for all the words

[teas_me]

I looked up some information about that today. Other than what is already available via online text-to-speech and even what is on my Mac (which I've tried and sound quite bad), I don't really have access to any of the other things I could use.

But thanks for the suggestion!

[mothlights]

Great story! :) There are several ways that would work in comments above. If it were me, I'd add a few seconds of a sound effect of typing on the keyboard and then fade it out under the words shortly after you start speaking the typed part. Then I'd do something similar to what heard_the_owl suggested, slowly pronouncing each word phonetically. I'd probably take the first word tttthhhiis, for example, and draw out the th sound and then slightly draw out the i sound of the word rather than saying tee, tee, tee --- though tee, tee would work too! Just my preference.

(I had a few chat typos in my last podfic, and I went with sounding out COMPAF;DS’ and HABJD as though they were real words. But luckily the character had the flu. Since his typos were due to illness, I was able to transition some of them into coughing, which made it easier than what you've got.)

[teas_me]

It is a great story, right? And yeah, I'm probably going to figure out how to pronounce most of those because I can't think of anything else.

Reading typos for podfic sucks!

Question though, did you read the punctuation too? (ex: COMPAF;DS’)

[mothlights]

I didn't read the punctuation. I was more interested in pronouncing it like a (crazy) word and getting across the sense that he was messing up because of his flu than I was in making it clear exactly which errors were included. I thought saying "semicolon," though technically correct, would've had less of the feel that the author intended, which I imagined was more like a keysmash while hacking up a lung.

[alethea_eastrid]

This would be a heck of an editing challenge, but looking at the text I immediately "heard" it as basically a bad record--skip-skip-skip-hissssss, kind of a crackle effect on the words, pronouncing or stuttering on some of the typos. Again, heck of an editing challenge, but it's an idea at least!

[teas_me]

That would be a challenge! I might include a sound effect to make it sound more machine-like.

Thanks for the suggestion!