After nearly a year of quiescence, I did a reading of my book a few days ago, to an audience of about a hundred local ladies. A great time, I think, was had by all. Public performance is a personal pleasure, having done it many times, starting in grade school and carrying through college and beyond. Jud Frye in Oklahoma; Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, in HMS Pinafore, Conrad Birdie in Bye Bye Birdie. The Wolf, in Little Red Riding Hood)
So, buoyed by enthusiasm, I decided to record myself reading a couple of pages, for blogload, and being a clever surgeon, I figured out a way to manage it. (Blogger supports video upload, but not audio.) Using the tiny, invisible microphone which is somewhere on my laptop (and which provides pretty crappy sound), I used Garageband for the voice recording, then uploaded it to iTunes, then to iPhoto where I used it as the background for a slideshow (if you can call a single photo of the study in my parents' beach house a slideshow), which I imported to iDVD and made it into a movie, then to my desktop, from which I uploaded it here. A long way around the barn; maybe there's a simpler way. After all that, it's an admittedly poor effort, but it's a start. In my performance days, I'd have rehearsed it.
Here it is:
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20 comments:
Dr. Sid,
Thanks for the reading. I enjoyed it.
Wonderful!
That sounds like a lot of work!
But if it is any encouragement, I bought your book after listening to your reading.
(Used, on Amazon, though. Sorry. I'm an impoverished graduate student, and the price difference was, like, 14 cups of coffee.)
It's good to hear your voice, and you did a nice job with the reading.
I've never even uploaded a video to YouTube (much less Blogger), so I admire your ingenuity in finding a way to accomplish such a feat, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way.
But I couldn't help but think of how Vic Richards might have been a little amused with the circumferential pathway you took to get there. There has to be an easier way.
scalpel: you are surely right about Vic. He might give me points for effort, but I doubt it.
I've been reading your blog for a while and enjoyed it very much. Very nice reading, makes me want to buy your book.
Dr. Schwab,
The audio keeps cutting out on my computer so I couldn't really hear your reading in full, but I just wanted to tell you that, coming from a person who was once in a coma and lived off of voices (still do), you have a voice that I would have had a great deal of faith in.
Justine: what a nice thing to say! Wonder if it'd be more or less so, if I had a real microphone...
In spite of already knowing your voice quite well, this was still a wonderful, refreshing experience. Your inflections, emphases, etc. weren't the interpretations of an actor, but the actual nuances of experience.
As we musicians would say, the performance was "definitive." :)
You said you had a makeshift mic solution, but what's posted didn't suffer in the least. I'll write you privately about helping with the Lewis and Clark route you took with the A/V. ;)
I got my copy from the local library, and considering the size of this library - that's pretty impressive. I would've liked to have seen you rather then the lovely study, but alas, you were not there.
Anne, I think you're better off looking at an empty chair...
Well done Dr S!
I don't know why, but I wasn't at all surprised when I heard your voice. You sound just like I imagined. I agree with Justine...your voice, the certainty of your words, evokes confidence. Not so about the empty chair either-I've seen your pic!
So,here is what I am thinking. It is finally feeling like crisp autumn weather in these here hills of NJ, soon to get cold. It would be perfectly wonderful, to curl up on the sofa with a hot cup of something one night while listening to you do a reading.
If you were so inclined...what would you think of doing something like Dr A is doing by going on blog radio so that you could do a longer reading?
This was a treat!
Thank you :)
Excellent reading of your story and great job of getting it here in the post. Sounds like something I might do and do do regularly,not knowing how to do things the easy way but figuring out some convoluted way which works. More than one way to skin a cat I always say.
Dr. Schwab ... this was great. I really hope that there are more of these coming soon ... !
Me too, Sid. Audio Ok, the only video was a static picture of the empty chair.
When you're using Linux, these things happen a lot, mostly it seems as a form of Banishment from the Kingdom, by the likes of Apple and Microsoft.
Greg: the only way I could figure to get it uploaded here was to make it in the form of a video, and I chose to make a "slideshow" of a single slide; so the view you had was what I actually made. Didn't want to distract from the reading; wasn't devoted enough to make a relevant slideshow; not brilliant enough to create an original one...
That was fantastic, Sid!
Wow your voice is nothing like I'd imagined it!
Well, this brought me out of lurkdom. I loved it! I think you should do it more often. Haven't been out much lately, so I'm playing catch up on your blog and having a great time. You're very entertaining, you know.
That was really cool! Just be careful you don't overload your M#c to the point that it catches fire...
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