Echo's
Posted by Patrick on Thursday, November 09, 2006You know that weird vibe you get when you hear your own voice? The last two days of work have been that vibe entirely. I had to record my own voice, edit it, and put it into a demonstration piece for work.
At my last job, I did audio voice-recording and editing all the time... and rarely in English. It was a fun part of a crappy job. Nothing like trying to remember which take was the "good take" when the people are speaking Japanese. It was a rare chance to use a real recording studio, and a good way for me to learn Pro Tools, which was (at the time) the standard for recording musicians. That job ended in 2002, and with it the fun of recording Cantonese voice-overs.
Fast forward to this week. I made an interactive Flash movie for our company's new facility, with lots of moving pictures and the occasional zoom and fade. It came out ok, but most people who viewed it thought it would be better with sound. They were unwilling to fly me home just to record sound, in a studio they didn't have, so I did it myself. 
We don't really have a fully functional recording studio here in the apartment, or professional recording equipment, or the super expensive Pro Tools software. I do have a 4 year old pc tower, an $11 microphone, and the very easy-to-use and Pro-Tools-like free open source software Audacity. Audacity is great, and makes it very easy to record and edit audio files.
So I recorded some marketing-speak, which is harder then you'd think if you haven't done it before. Several takes were required to get it to an almost acceptable level. Audacity's built in Noise Reduction filters removed the noise of the PC's fans and the running cats.
Syncing my own voice with a demo was strange, and time-consuming. I guess it was just strange to me, since everyone else hears my voice differently then I do. I think in the end my work will end up having me re-record someone else's voice, since I'm not exactly James Earl Jones behind the mic.
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