Sound Recordings of People Talking (Not Reading, Not Plays, Not Lectures)?

October 7, 2004 10:51 PM

I am looking for sound recordings (preferably available online) of a person/persons talking. No reading, no poetry, no spoken word, no plays, no lectures. Just ordinary, everyday talking. Single person rambling preferred, but conversations are okay.
posted by TheIrreverend to Grab Bag (7 answers total)

I think you might enjoy the many podcastings (or voice-blogging) that keep popping around the Web these days : people talking instead of typing.
posted by XiBe at 2:28 AM on October 8, 2004

You can browse the CHILDES database here. This is a database of children's language. Please read the ground rules before using any data.
posted by SNACKeR at 5:45 AM on October 8, 2004

Depending on the purpose, either the "Please call Stella" Speech accent archive or English contrasted may be of interest. Another from New Zealand. There's another I can't find at the moment which had people from all over the UK talking about life Back In The Day. That was entirely rambling. I am pretty sure it was linked from Metafilter, and think it might have been on NPR.
posted by whatzit at 5:57 AM on October 8, 2004

There are a bunch of databases here.
posted by jeb at 6:27 AM on October 8, 2004

Another thing you might try is the audio archives over at Archive.org.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 7:06 AM on October 8, 2004

If you go to my page, audible frequency and do a search for talking a bunch of posts pop up and each has a sound recording (or several) of talking.
posted by alicila at 7:47 AM on October 8, 2004

Some of the Quiet American field recordings have talking in them.
posted by sad_otter at 12:01 PM on October 8, 2004