Karima's Notes on Making Recording in Villages

I realized I hadn't written anything about Tunen, and I had these notes already typed up. I typed them out right after Tunen, when I was in Younde, so I wrote a lot of them with the Tunen team in mind. So here are my findings. I wrote this like I was teaching someone what to do, because they wanted me to write something for others who came. I ended up not giving it to them, by the way, if you're freaking out about my informality.

   1.       Try not to go during the harvest season. No one will be on time and they will always want to be on their farms rather than working with you. Unless you have a really forceful leader among them who makes the others come in and work with you.

   2.       If there is a weird noise in the background of the recordings but there wasn’t a car driving by, try unplugging your computer. That happened to me and I had to do all the recordings on battery power.

   3.       Make sure you reiterate that the readers should be practicing their chapters. And if they read for you and you feel like they haven’t practiced, it is easier to tell them to keep practicing and come back than to fix the same mistake on the recording five times.

   4.       Edit the recordings with a native speaker on hand. Even if you can read their language, you can’t speak it. Some of the Bantu languages have tones, and tones are hard to hear/read when you aren’t native.

a.       If the language has tones, prepare yourself to re-record a single word several times. If the readers are picky, you could basically record the whole chapter over again with all the words they want to redo. It may sound the same to you, but it is not to them. If you get stressed out with having to record something every five seconds, I suggest you could go take a walk. Or get something to eat. Just try not to snap at them, because these really are important things they are correcting and you’ll feel really bad later, when you’ve come to your senses.

   5.       At the very start, ask if anyone knows how to use Audacity and if it is on any of the computers there. If someone does then they will be the greatest boon on the whole team. I don’t care if they have ten farms to work at; they are staying by your side. Give them some files to edit while you edit others. Once you get a feel for how fast each of you works, you can split the files up more evenly. Make sure to retrieve the files from their computer once you finish.

   6.       If you are more attentive than me and do not want to goof off while they are recording, I suggest you keep some paper close at hand along with a copy of the words. This is what I did at first, but then I started editing with the team and found it to be superfluous. But, if you want to, I would right down the time on the recording when a mistake was made. That way, I could go through and take out most of the mistakes before listening to the whole thing. Keep in mind, though, that if you do this you’ll have to work from the end to the beginning or else all the times will be off after you fix the first mistake.

a.       That being said, I worked out a system which I consider much better than this. First I went through and took out all the spaces (the pauses) and extra noise (like the birds) I could easily notice. Then I went through with the words in front of me (and preferably with a native speaker beside me) and took out the mistakes (when people stumbled or reread a sentence). My last step was to listen through again. If I could follow along easily and there weren’t any mistakes, then I exported it as a wav file and considered it finished. Yay!

   7.       Birds, children, and cars are your enemy. Your mortal enemies. If you feel like it is too loud, don’t be afraid to stop the reader. It’s so much easier to wait for the car to drive by, or go scare away the birds/children than to take out all their noises. I mean, no one minds a few birds in their recording and children far off aren’t a problem, but a bird in the bush or someone yelling right outside the window? Those are problems. And cars are always a problem. If you can hear them then the microphone is picking them up. You’ll have to experiment and see how sensitive your mic is, but know that you will get other noises in there so it is best to try and minimize what you can.

   8.   Try not to have an audience. In one village all the readers sat behind me while the person who was recording was reading. And they corrected the mistakes. All of them. I have so much audio of people speaking who are not the readers. I’m not going to lie, it was hilarious, but besides being a hassle to take out later, I think it made the readers more nervous than they already were. This was a group where no one would sit in front of the mic unless they were recording, even if it wasn’t on. And it was really odd because when they were practicing they sounded good, but when they came to record they suddenly stumbled over every other word. I really think they were nervous.

   9.   So try to make them relax. It is actually not a big deal.

   10.   Make a schedule. Line out a schedule the very first morning. I didn’t always do this, and that sometimes created problems. It is best if everyone has a time to come in and record and everyone has a time to come and help you edit. And you don’t have to do all the recordings before you edit. You could spend five hours with one person one day and never see him again the rest of the time, but his two chapters will be completely finished.

   11.   Get to know your team. If all you do is work, work, work, you’ll get finished, but what have you really done? Have you made any friends? Do you have any fun stories to tell? Can you name the reader just by listening to his voice because you listened to the recording so often or because you hung out and talked with him? I did not do enough of this and I regret it.

   12.   Do not let them sit back from the mic. Pick it up and hold it to their mouth if you have to. You may have a fluent reader, but they are sitting five feet from the mic. That’s ridiculous. The reader should sit right in front of the mic. The closer they are to the mic, the clearer and the stronger they speak, the better the recording will be. If they don’t do those things… I hope you know how to use the effects on audacity because you’re going to need them. That being said, you should know how to use amplify at least.

a.       Also, with amplify, sometimes just one section needs to be amplified. Totally possible, but I hope you knew that. If not, you may want to consider a little more training in audacity before you start your work.

   13.   If you have a cold, show the reader how to press the ‘record’ and ‘stop’ button and go sit in another room. You are going to cough, you are going to sneeze, you are going to sniff, and the reader will just keep talking. No one wants to listen to your sniffles when they are listening to the recording and, my word!, it is hard to take them out.

   14.   With each new reader, tell them the basic points. Sometimes I only told the first few people and figured that the others had told the others – I was wrong.

a.       Read slowly. It is easier to take out pauses than someone stumbling over a word fifty times. (“bo, bo , bo, bo, bo’o” is a hassle. "……………………………….. Bo’o” is simple.)

b.      If you do make a mistake, go back and read the last few words. (It is easier to fix “Yesobega’awen…..Yesobega’avewene” than “Yesobega’awen….vewenela.” I don’t know if this makes sense… If not, you’ll figure out soon what I mean.)

c.       If you hear a car or motorbike drive by, please stop and wait for it to leave before continuing.

   15.  It doesn’t matter in what order you record chapters. Each chapter is a new track on the CD, so they all have to be recorded separately, anyway. You could go backwards for all it matters. Make sure the readers know that the order doesn’t matter or else you may have people trying to work out complicated schedules so you can record in order.

   16.   If you are working with a mother of a baby, make sure the baby is out of the room and she has practiced. Babies are temperamental and she is only going to be able to be away from it for so long if it is a tiny baby. Don’t get me wrong. Babies are adorable and so much fun to have around, but they make noise and they give the mother limited time to do recordings. So she’s one person who is going to have to work fast. Don’t tell her to work fast, in case she becomes flustered, but do tell her it is better if she has read through the chapter multiple times and knows it almost by heart. In my opinion this applies to everyone, but to mothers it is especially crucial.

  And those are my notes. The ones about re-recording the same one syllable word fifty times... That, specifically, is about Tunen. I worked with a bunch of old men - very fluent readers and Godly men - but so nit-picky. I almost walked out on them. But I also hadn't eaten in probably 8 hours.

I I finished my chapters, by the way! All my work for my internship is finished and I mailed it off yesterday! Yay! I have one more post planned because I do want to talk a little bit more about Tunen and then I will share what I think God has worked in me while I was there. And that's it. I've been home for 22 days now. I should really wrap up my blog.