2a. In Which Ben Cheats

I was recording these for the asynchronous virtual component of the Long Night Against Procrastination Event anyway today and thought I’d include them here.

Tonally I was going for the kind of steady, almost ASMR qualities of other recorded virtual story times that public libraries tend to put on. Not exactly a natural pace or tone of speech, but something that is suppose to feel soothing, maybe even a bit poignant. (I know there are sillier styles of children’s book reading, and opted not to do those for our undergrads XD)

I recorded myself reading these two stories in audacity, but did the audio effects in DaVinci Resolve 18 while I was adding the images to the tracks. I chose to keep in the sound of the pages turning to help create a sonic transition to the next page in the video.

In terms of editing, I mainly did a bit of a fade out at the end of each, and tried to adjust the relative volume of the music to the spoken track. I’m still not entirely happy with how it sounds, but I can’t quite put a finger on what’s wrong with it. My next step will be to fiddle around with the settings more to try and “clean it up,” which would be easier if I knew why it didn’t sound quite right to me XD

[Nov 9th Edit: So I remembered that I forgot to include noise reduction, compression, and normalization effects to these audio files. I also adjusted the music to voice balance at Jonathon’s suggestion. I have edited and re-uploaded the videos]

I do appreciate that the YouTube algorithm generates captions that are fairy accurate, as the process of transcribing by hand becomes exponentially longer the longer the video is. I also hope adding pictures of the books with the text itself helps.