The Book of Me - Prompt 49 What do I sound like?

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Fritzi Scheff demonstrating Magnavox for Fifth Liberty Loan in New York City, 1895
from The Powerhouse Museum


Julie Goucher's Blog Angler's Rest each week posts a new prompt for The Book of Me.

This week's prompt is - What do I sound like?


Describe your voice
Perhaps include an electronic recording of your voice reciting a poem or reading a piece of writing. Maybe even this prompt response
Do you have recordings of other family members?

Hmmm - well it's hard to describe your own voice because you are sitting in your head so it sounds completely different I am sure from the outside.  So I will just have to imagine what it sounds like.  Australian.  Australian voices are usually renowed for being quite nasal and for having an upward inflection at the end of each sentence as if asking a question.  It is my earnest hope that my voice doesn't sound too much like that.

I have recorded other family members voices but have been very slack about preserving those recordings for future posterity.

Recording my own voice was a bit of an exercise I have to say.

First of all I recorded my voice using the Voice Recorder on my phone which I hoped to transfer to Audacity but it didn't like the file type.

Then I tried to download Audioboo to my phone but it kept telling me that there wasn't enough storage space on my phone which really is absolute twaddle.  Audioboo is only 11,67MB and I have tons of room on both my SD card and my phone so I'm not sure what is going on there. Grrr...



In the meantime I managed to download VoiceBo to my phone.  It wanted me to follow three people before it would let me record so hey ho, I'm following some other people recording their voice.  Somehow I suspect they will be sorely disappointed with what I am banging on about.

In the meantime I managed to make Audioboo work on my desktop.  At first I had dreadful feedback and echoing but I fiddled with the settings and managed to reduce that so here is the Audioboo recording. It is 2 mins 47 seconds in duration.


listen to ‘The Book of Me Audio Recording’ on Audioboo

Just because I could, I did another recording using VoiceBo.  It's a bit longer at 3 minutes and 58 seconds.  However I don't seem to be having any joy in embedding it into this blogpost.  Aha - I figured it out.  It's got to go to the side as a Widget.  If you wanted my opinion on which app was better, at the moment I would have to go with Audioboo although I wish it looked better in it's embededness, if you know what I mean.
This has been a fantastic exercise for me.  Thanks Julie.  At first I was incredibly frustrated because I seem to have all the gear but can never make it work.  I persevered and without really knowing what I did to fix things, somehow it all came together.  Sigh.  But I am pleased I did it because now I feel more confident in setting people up to perhaps do things like oral history exercises and the like.

 Addendum - After I wrote this blog I realised that Audio Boo immediately tweets anything I record which is a bit off-putting (including dud recordings) so I would probably prefer to use VoiceBo until I worked out how not to tweet recordings from AudioBoo automatically.

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