Requesting ideas for a voice audio recording project.

July 7, 2013 5:01 PM

I have a decent microphone and I like recording audio for Librivox and some language learning sites. I would like to extend this into some other areas. Either reading foreign news, blogs, covering a local issue or any type of suggestion one might have. I have some plans for starting a podcast in the future but for now I would like to commit to recording something and posting it regularly for a while. Can be as dull as the conet project or repetitious as David Lynch's weather reports. Ideally content would be public domain, creative commons, or other permissible copyright.
posted by andendau to Grab Bag (3 answers total)

Could you do something that would be of use to a local visual impaired group. You may have a local Talking newspaper that needs help or would like other public announcements from police, social services etc recorded for inclusion on their output.
Working your way through the pamphlets available in a medical office converting to audio format may be something worth doing.
Making audio versions of theatre,film or tv times that are audio described would be of use as well.
Have a try at making an audio description of a show that would be of interest to others.
posted by stuartmm at 2:51 AM on July 8, 2013

I have two suggestions; one speaks to the regularity and the other speaks to publicly available content. Editorial calendars, which is a matrix box, can be a schedule of when you will post what. For example, on Mondays, you read WX reports. Tuesdays, police arrest reports in the paper. Wednesdays, obituaries, etc. It helps establish a schedule of your content and gets people used to the idea that you will always be distributing "X" on a certain day every week.

The other is about content. If you don't care how mundane the content is, what about reading nutritional information on the back of food labels. That's not proprietary because that information is an FDA requirement. People will listen to it actively or as background noise, but it will certainly be unusual.
posted by CollectiveMind at 8:05 AM on July 8, 2013

Response by poster: Thank you both. I'll look into both of those ideas. For now I settled on an audio blog of recording top trending tweets in three languages. Also a shared audio blog where the other member and I read a sentence in each others language. Ill post the projects if I continue them.
posted by andendau at 12:41 PM on July 10, 2013