Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Looking for More Volunteer Voices

A number of people have kindly recorded for me quotes for my audiobook of Future Imperfect, but there are still a fair number to be done. I could do all of them myself but would rather  have voices that better fit the speakers. 

 A list of the quotes that still need to be done is webbed.

The book is also webbed.
 
Voices I could use are:

William F. Buckley
H.L. Mencken
Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz
Hamlet
The King James Bible
A sexy female voice
A mild French accent
A mild Arabic accent
A mild Chinese accent
An Australian accent
Some random male and female voices.

Anyone more want to help? Ideally quotes should be recorded in .wav, but mp3 or anything else that most sound programs can read — I use Sound Studio, Audacity, and Switch — is fine. You can email them to me at ddfr@daviddfriedman.com.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my previous post on this. Special thanks to Tim Worstall, who is the reason I no longer need any more English accents.

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Looking for Volunteer Voices

I am in the process of converting my book Future Imperfect into an audiobook. It has embedded quotes from a wide variety of sources and it occurred to me that, instead of reading all of them myself, I should get each read in a voice different from mine and more suitable to the person I am quoting. The voices I need are:

Chinese accent (for "May you live in interesting times")
English accent (Arthur Clarke, George Orwell, Samuel Johnson)
New York accent, possibly Queens (Richard Feynman)
Sophisticated East Coast accent (William F. Buckley)
Russian accent (Manny from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — other accents for him are possible — and a KGB agent from "The President's Analyst")
Mark Twain accent (recordings probably exist)
H.L.Mencken accent (a recording of an interview exists)
Female Cornell administrator
Female scientist (a different female voice from the preceding)
Girl's voice — Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz
Sexy woman's voice
French accent
Arabic accent
Shakespearean actor (Hamlet)

There are a number of other quotes that just need a clearly understandable voice that isn't mine.

It may be a crazy idea, and I may give up and do all the quotes myself, but I thought that the magic of the internet and the open source approach to doing it might work.

Most of the accents should be mild — I want all of the quotes to be easily understandable.