My new headphones arrived this week, so I sat down once again to begin recording myself using the voice banking program ModelTalker. After measuring the silence levels in the room (I sat there, trying not to breathe), the program presented me with 10 phrases to read aloud. Among them:
The grizzled old fellow could see on one side.
He had rides in the wheelbarrow.
Is he made of tin or stuffed, asked the lion.
The whole circle was agitated.
The wolves surged to meet him.
There’s another way you can get a tooth out.
So, you know, everyday stuff that normal people are always saying to each other. As each sentence flashed onto the screen, I tried to assess the best way to vocalize it. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to use any kind of inflection or really explore the possibilities behind why the whole circle was agitated and how that might make me feel. Also, wolves surging? That sounds serious. Should there be, like, urgency in my voice?
It’s possible I was overthinking this. (That sentence will be the title of my memoir, if I ever write one.)
Anyway, I did the best I could with the emoting and the pronouncing. The site then told me that my “inventory” was complete and to wait two days for a staff member to get back to me. Less than an hour later I received an email, which said:
We have reviewed your 10 screening sentences, and there is a significant amount of echo in the recordings. I have a couple of questions/suggestions for improving your recordings in order to obtain a good quality synthetic voice.
The suggestions included getting out of whatever cave I was recording in (my dining room) and going somewhere with carpeting or curtains. If moving to another room was not possible, I should put blankets all over the floor.
The next day, I decided to hide out in Scarlett’s room and try again. But the microphone made its own decision to stop working. It picked up none of the sentences I was reading, and it seemed equally oblivious to the creative curses I muttered into it. After 30 minutes of taking the headset off, looking at it, and putting it back on (oddly this did not help. Have I mentioned that I am not a tech person?), I restarted my Mac. Why does that work? Don’t answer this question—I’m fine with the mysteries of computers remaining mysterious.
I started yet again. At that moment, a team of construction workers appeared outside Scarlett’s window and proceeded to drill up the concrete driveway at our neighbor’s house. I’m sure that provided fabulous background to Round Two of the Ten Least Uttered Phrases of 2014.
So I’m fully expecting to have to do this again, and I think next time, I’ll ask someone to just cover me, my computer, and the wheelchair with a bunch of blankets. And if they look at me funny, I’ll just give them a blank stare and say something really wise and excellent, such as, “There’s another way you can get a tooth out.”
Apologies to those of you who wrote and asked me for an actual update on this process. I should be hearing from ModelTalker soon, and moving on to the hours of recording that await me. But I think for now, I can say it’s certainly not as easy as I expected it to be. (And that would make a good title for my second memoir.)
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I say you and I use those phrases in another attempt at a two-person short story.
I did model talker. After my trial session the staff person said I was using too much inflection, reading in too much drama. Say the lion roared not ROARED. So my advice is to tone it downed and treat it as the bundle of boring exercises that it is. My voice turned out pretty well. Alex Schmid
Do it in your sexiest voice possible. See how that works out.
Thank you, Alex!