A reader presses me as to why I don't produce a podcast version of this blog, someone apparently thinks it would be fun to have an accent that sounds like the late Joe Perham reading the kind of things I write.
I do use recording and editing equipment to record music and produce instructive audio for my students regularly and have since I worked in a primitive electronic music lab in the day when that meant wading through miles and miles of patch cords finally getting the idea that you should label all of those and then forgetting to do it often enough so it wasn't really much help.
Back when I had better eyesight I was a fair hand at editing reel to reel tape, which means I hated the cassette format and never much used the multi-track one I was forced to buy but found almost impossible to use and just loved it when digital, computer based audio got cheap enough to buy and found it was even infinitely easier and more effective than editing tape - the most overrated format in the history of audio recording. The 130 dollar Zoom H1n I use is, in every way, better than the huge, very expensive reel to reel tape machines I grew up on. And cassetts? Even at double speed recording? Give me a break if you can't hear that digital, set up well sounds better.
I use the downloadable Acoustic Labs Audio Editor which was a steal when I bought it what now seems like a long time ago, alas the creator has discontinued his company so I have to make sure I have a backup copy. I expect I'll be maintaining computers old enough to run it for as long as I'm doing editing. By "modern" standards it's bare bones but it does more than everything I want to use it for, recording real sound and it is absolutely simple to use. The last thing I want to spend my time doing it's wading through features I'll never use and learning complicated routines. If I had gone into electronic music - after some experiments - I'd probably use something with more features, but, then, I always found musique concrète, using recorded natural sound more interesting than synthesized music.
Some of the more recent experiments with microtonal synthesizers are interesting in potential but, other than Dolores Catherino's music, I don't find it very interesting to listen to. As Virgil Thomson lamented about the legendary music of Harry Partch, it's too bad after all that effort the results weren't very interesting. He said they lacked intellectual substance, which is true. But like the more interesting Ezra Sims and Ben Johnston he used acoustic instruments.
See how easily I got off the topic of recording my voice for podcast? I'll reconsider it but I wouldn't expect I'll change my mind. Flattery will get you only so far.
Maybe because I read this stuff while watching TeeVee or listening to music, or maybe I just prefer to read, but u tend to skip audio stuff.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe I'm just old fashioned.
I prefer text because I can read faster than I can listen or speak. What I really love is reading text searchable formats, it makes checking to see if you can remember what you'd read yesterday so much faster. I always remember what my father said when someone asked him why he bothered with braille and he said it was hard to find stuff on a recording if he wanted to review something. Ink on paper might be expendable but readable text will never be replaced by listening. If it does the nightmare of Wells in The Time Machine will come but in a different form than the biological one he imagined. Probably between that and Aldous Huxley's fantasy.
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