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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: October 2018

10 Barnes

27 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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Illustrator Ysemay Dercon visits Lovecraft’s former home at 10 Barnes St, for Halloween. I like the ‘collected leaves’ idea.

Perhaps one could draw on the actual leaves, incising them with the tiny tip of a fine scratch-board pick? And then record their drying out and changing colours and crumbling into weirdness. Or how about shaping them subtly into tiny dreamland-ish face masks?

The Gods of Easter Island and Other Poems

27 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc., REH

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S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post notes an interesting audiobook, The Gods of Easter Island and Other Poems by Robert E. Howard.

27 poems expertly read and with some musical accompaniment. Available as a physical CD by mail-order from Fedogan and Bremer Books.

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: Providence Public Library.

26 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

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The steps to the Providence Public Library. Lovecraft would have known these steps as man and boy.

New book: Je suis Providence

26 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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Announced for publication March 2019 in paperback, Lovecraft : Je suis Providence, being the French translation of S.T. Joshi’s monumental two-volume I Am Providence. The team leader on the translation was the French Lovecraft specialist Christophe Thill, and it looks like it’s in safe hands.

There will be a simultaneous paperback and ebook release. The book is the result of a £23,000 ($32k) crowdfunding campaign which completed in October 2017, and it seems that megafunders have been getting advance peeks at the translation proofs.

The Abbey frescoes of Boston

25 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

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“As for Abbey — you ought to see his Holy Grail frescoes in the Boston Public Library!” — H.P. Lovecraft to August Derleth.

One imagines that Lovecraft or his aunts might have once owned a set of these postcards. Today good pictures can be seen online here.

The Library definitely seems to have been a place Lovecraft would have enjoyed for its creepy atmosphere…

Brooklyn Bridge

25 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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Brooklyn Bridge (1935) by Harry Sternberg. The picture is unlikely to have been an inspiration, but it’s interesting to note that in the same year Lovecraft wrote “The Haunter of the Dark” (November 1935).

“… my face, which is something else again”

25 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works

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On the facial identification elements needed to identify Lovecraft in old photos. Useful as a guide for artists. The long article also looks at the shape-detail of Lovecraft’s eyes.

“Cats and Dogs” as an automatic audiobook

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

≈ 1 Comment

A small experiment, to demonstrate and pin down a workflow for a state-of-the-art ‘expressive audiobook’ reading in 2018, done by affordable consumer text-to-speech software and voice.

Result: The final audio file (42 minutes).

Input text: a difficult one, the complex essay “Cats and Dogs” (1926) by H.P. Lovecraft. Pulp fiction, with simple-sentences and obvious words, might work far better. But this was a stress-test.

Voice used: Ivona ‘Brian’ (British English, 22hz, about $50). ‘Brian’ does not flow across words as smoothly and blandly as the default Windows 8 Microsoft Zira does. As a result Brian sometimes has occasional mis-emphasis of words and a slight slurring, yet is far more expressive in an audiobook than Zira.

1. The text was read by ‘Brian’ in the text-to-speech software TextAloud 4, with the text read out to a standard MP3 file.

* Speed: Normal.
* Pitch: -5 (to deepen the voice slightly).
* Volume: 100% (perhaps too high, you might also try 70%).
* Pauses between sentences: 0.7 seconds (default in TextAloud is 0.5).
* Pauses between paragraphs: two seconds.

(Why not use the free Balabolka reader? Because it doesn’t offer pause adjustment Update: it now offers markup to add pauses and pitch shifts. Further update: Now you can also set universal pauses).

2. I loaded the resulting MP3 output file into the free audio editor Audacity. An Equalisation filter was run to try to cut the 5Khz – 7Khz sibilance. The same preset tried to slightly boost 1KHz – 5KHz, for overall speech intelligibility.

3. The simple free Spitfish De-esser was then run inside Audacity, to further reduce sibilance. (Select All | Effect | Spitfish | Apply | Close). This runs far more quickly than Audacity’s native de-essing filter, as well as being simpler to control. You may have problems seeing the download button so here is a direct .ZIP download.

4. Ran the Effects | Limiter, using its default ‘Soft Limit’ preset.

5. Added Reverb filter, with its default ‘Voice I’ preset.

6. Ran the Spitfish De-esser again, to make a final attempt to reduce the remaining sibilance. Same settings as before.

7. Saved as an MP3, 320bk/s quality, resulting in a 50Mb file for a 42 minute reading.

Incidentally, it’s apparently possible to “chain” these steps (like a Photoshop Action) in Audacity, as a preset, and then play them back automatically. I couldn’t find that option in my Audacity, but that’s perhaps because I have an older version.

Results:

The results were fairly listenable, and (once the raspy ‘synthetic voice sibilance’ was reduced) definitely seems like an advance on previous robo-voices. But the test result was certainly not ideal, due to the ‘Brian’ voice’s unnatural unexpected stresses placed on certain words and the slurring of others. It’s rather like listening to a ‘sticky’/’wobbly’ old cassette tape from the 1980s, and becomes rather wearing after a while. It can result in an aural equivalent of the motion-sickness that one encounters in many videogames.

Perhaps there may be some search-and-replace script that automatically tweaks a text so that ‘Brian’ reads it better, but I couldn’t find one. Simple and immediate global fixes are:

* Change Mr. and Mrs. to Mister and Misses.
* Change capitalised acronyms such as NASA to Nasser, or they will be said ‘En-Ay-Ess-Ay’.
* Change crunched up hyphenation, such as and “then-as you all know-he did something” to “then – as you all know – he did something”.

It also helps to have a good Text Cleaner software running when you copy-paste your text into TextAloud, which will fix line-wrapping and other problems.

There are of course various machine-learning services, such as Amazon Parrot, which claim to offer smoother reading voices for text-to-speech. But they appear to be for big-budget developers, are Cloud-based, and it seems unlikely that owners such as Amazon will ever allow them to be unleashed on the making of long audiobooks (which would compete with Audible). What’s being tested above are the tools available to consumers for less than $100 total.

“Out of the Aeons” in audiobook

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc.

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A full reading of the 10,000 word “Out of the Aeons” by H. P. Lovecraft, one of his best ghost-written tales and with the best reader that I could find offering it for free online. It’s a May 2018 reading by Ian Gordon.

The first half is Lovecraft doing Lovecraft-by-numbers for a revision client, but the second half is excellent. To fully enjoy the story, it helps to know the historical context. While today archaeology is rarely a topic for newspapers, and thus all the press palaver in “Out of the Aeons” may seem jarringly absurd to the modern reader, in the 1930s archaeology was front-page news.

The reading is delivered rather too fast for me, and is also a bit sibilant in high-response headphones. As an MP3 download, in the AIMP player a slower speed of O.92 is ideal. This speed setting also deepens the voice, moving the reading rather nicely from ‘peeved professor’ toward ‘Wayne June’ and the Bass-Boost slider can also increase this effect a little. The graphic equaliser settings for removing the sibilance are…

Eddie Jones

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

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I’ve extracted the best Eddie Jones interior art from the run of Vision of Tomorrow, a short-lived 1969/70 British attempt at a high-quality science fiction magazine which featured occasional cosmic horror.

That’s how you do spreads when you only have black-and-white to work with. Very nice work.

There’s a fine in-progress biography of Eddie Jones, which is so comprehensive that it even tells me that I have a slight tangential connection — he did the covers of the Novacon convention programme booklet a couple of years before I did. Though the biography lacks the wider economic context. He produced a huge amount of painted covers for the German sci-fi paperbacks, a few for Sphere in the UK, and later some covers for the Star Trek paperbacks. But, like many in the UK, he was hit very hard by the 1978-1983 period of economic chaos, collapse and grinding recovery. He never had a book collection.

There was one fairly brief interview with him, in the short-lived British magazine Vortex (#5, 1977).

Wormwood #31

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Doyle, Kipling, New books, Scholarly works

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Wormwood #31 has been published by Tartarus at £10.

Likely to be of most interest to readers of this blog is “The Dark and Decadent Dreams of Doctor Doyle” by Paul M. Chapman, on Conan Doyle’s non-Holmes tales in which… “His work often echoed Poe’s ‘love for the grotesque and the terrible’”.

Looking back over other issues of the last few years, I also see that #26 had a similar survey essay for Kipling, “The Strange and the Supernatural in the Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling” by Colin Insole.

The Thing from the Vaults

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

The original has been found for John W. Campbell’s famous story “Who Goes There?”, a 1938 Lovecraft-alike tale about a team of scientists in Antarctica and their horrifying encounter with a shape-shifting alien entity. Campbell’s unpublished draft for that, known as “Frozen Hell”, had 45 pages of unused material. The original is now set to be published in 2019 by Wildside.

Science Fantasy Review for Spring 1950 lists “Frozen Hell” as part of a forthcoming Campbell collection, but it seems that book never made it to print. The work was recently discovered by Alec Nevala-Lee, just sitting un-regarded in an archive box, while he was doing research for his new book on the history of the famous Astounding magazine.

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