{"id":20536,"date":"2018-11-30T11:16:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-30T08:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=20536"},"modified":"2022-04-24T22:17:02","modified_gmt":"2022-04-24T22:17:02","slug":"robert-e-howards-the-hyborian-age-in-audiobook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2018\/11\/30\/robert-e-howards-the-hyborian-age-in-audiobook\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” in audiobook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another audio experiment. This time it’s an experiment with the voice of a human reader, rather than a generated TTS robo-voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Text:<\/strong> Robert E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” (c. 1930s), in which Howard recounts the historical background for Conan. <\/p>\n

Source:<\/strong> A full reading of “The Hyborian Age” in the form of the April 2018 public-domain Librivox recording. The Librivox reading was done by a young reader named ‘Klaatu’<\/a> whose voice I felt was not quite suited to the weight of the material. I added some pauses to this audio, for pacing, and I also had to remove one section in which a few lines of text had been repeated twice but not excised.<\/p>\n

Task:<\/strong> To use the free audio software Audacity to try to change this higher Librivox voice down to a more suitably deep “Wayne June” style, if possible. Listeners to H.P. Lovecraft audiobooks will be familiar with Wayne June’s deep gravelly voice. More bass could of course be approximated on-the-fly in real-time with the likes of AIMP<\/a> and its pitch-shift and bass-boost options, but here I wanted to see if a better result could be had by using the power of Audacity and its specialised plugins.<\/p>\n

Workflow:<\/strong><\/p>\n

1) I added a “Wayne June” effect in Audacity with the free RoVee VoiceChanger<\/a> plugin. Settings used are seen on the screenshot…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

2) The result was certainly rather “Wayne June”, but was slightly ess-y in my high-response headphones. I then de-essed in Audacity, with the free Spitfish De-esser<\/a> plugin.<\/p>\n

3) There was some “bass bubble” on the pitch shifted reading. I tried the addition of suitable background music, as a subtle form of masking.<\/p>\n

Conclusion:<\/strong> Successful, but not entirely so… mostly due to a little ‘more bubble than gravel’. A slightly lighter touch on the RoVee VoiceChanger settings might be tried next time. However, the level of the success suggested that longer audiobooks on Librivox could be “Wayne June-ised” with relatively little effort, and with more aesthetic success than pitch-shifting and bass-boosting in AIMP.<\/p>\n

The result:<\/strong> A reading of R. E. Howard’s “The Hyborian Age”<\/a> on Archive.org. 55 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another audio experiment. This time it’s an experiment with the voice of a human reader, rather than a generated TTS …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lovecraftian-arts","category-podcasts-etc","category-reh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53839,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20536\/revisions\/53839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}