Navel-gazing about my podficcing
Sep. 13th, 2010 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaI've been thinking about how much my reading has changed since I first started podficcing (which was about three years and more than a hundred podfics ago). This was prompted by listening to some of my earlier podfics. I guess I feel about some of them kind of like the way people sometimes feel about their early writing efforts: do I really want to keep this online? (I wouldn't remove them, though--I know that there are people who appreciate them.) The changes have been partly technical and partly in the reading style. I guess I don't need to say much about the technical aspect--I bought better recording equipment, and figured out how to export files so that the quality is good.
But I find the changes in the reading style interesting: For one thing, I read faster now. In the beginning, I think I heard from several sources that it's easy to read too fast, and so I overcompensated. (Also, I was probably influenced byzabira, who helped me a lot in the beginning, and who is also a fairly slow reader.) This slow pace makes me a bit impatient when I listen to it now, and now I think the important thing is to leave enough space between the sentences, not to read slowly within sentences, which can feel a bit unnatural. (But please do tell me if you think I'm going too fast now.)
The other thing that's changed with my reading has to do with a voice problem called phonasthenia (which is caused by too much muscle tension in the throat) that I got from teaching too much. When I listen to "American Way", which I recorded in the period leading up to the phonasthenia, I'm kind of divided. I like the phrasing and general sound of it, but at the same time, I can tell that I'm tense: the voice is in a higher register, and there's a kind of "creak" in the vowels. In the podfics I recorded during 2009, after I'd gone to the speech therapist, I'd learned to lower my voice to a register that's more relaxed for me, and my throat muscles were relaxed. But I'd also lost something: I didn't have at all the same kind of control over the phrasing and volume and the melody of speech (an example of my reading at this stage is "Real Worlds"). Earlier, I'd done this with my throat, but now that I was focused on relaxing, I'd kind of lost one tool without gaining another.
So, this spring I took singing lessons, which turned out to be exactly what I needed for podficcing, too. I learned to use the support muscles in my stomach to control the phrasing. I'm still learning and getting better at that, but it has improved my reading a lot already. And wow, when you start learning something, you realize how much there is to still learn. Singing and speaking are both very physical activities, and learning to consciously control the muscles you need while still being expressive is quite a challenge.
Another thing that I think has improved my reading is playing around with lots of different fandoms and styles during Amplificathon. Before that, I was pretty much monofannish in my podficcing, and I think you can get stuck in a rut if you're always reading the same character. At least for me, it's easy to fall into a specific melody of speech when reading a specific character, and sometimes you need to get away from that for a while to get new inspiration (which can improve your reading of that character, too).
I do have a bit of a Swedish accent, which bothered me a bit in the beginning, but I think I've gotten over that. Everyone has an accent of some sort, and if there are people who don't like mine, then fine. You can't please everyone, and I think I read clearly and understandably, at any rate. The problem I do still have is mispronunciation of words. I know that I do that sometimes, and the problem arises with words which I have read but never heard spoken. I look up pronunciations often, but the problem is when you're sure of a pronunciation, so that it never occurs to you to look it up, but you are in fact wrong.
Anyway, I'm fairly happy with where I am now, but I definitely want to continue to improve. If you have feedback on my podfics, I would love to hear it. And for other podficcers: do you find that you have learned and changed over time? If so, how?
But I find the changes in the reading style interesting: For one thing, I read faster now. In the beginning, I think I heard from several sources that it's easy to read too fast, and so I overcompensated. (Also, I was probably influenced by
zabira, who helped me a lot in the beginning, and who is also a fairly slow reader.) This slow pace makes me a bit impatient when I listen to it now, and now I think the important thing is to leave enough space between the sentences, not to read slowly within sentences, which can feel a bit unnatural. (But please do tell me if you think I'm going too fast now.)The other thing that's changed with my reading has to do with a voice problem called phonasthenia (which is caused by too much muscle tension in the throat) that I got from teaching too much. When I listen to "American Way", which I recorded in the period leading up to the phonasthenia, I'm kind of divided. I like the phrasing and general sound of it, but at the same time, I can tell that I'm tense: the voice is in a higher register, and there's a kind of "creak" in the vowels. In the podfics I recorded during 2009, after I'd gone to the speech therapist, I'd learned to lower my voice to a register that's more relaxed for me, and my throat muscles were relaxed. But I'd also lost something: I didn't have at all the same kind of control over the phrasing and volume and the melody of speech (an example of my reading at this stage is "Real Worlds"). Earlier, I'd done this with my throat, but now that I was focused on relaxing, I'd kind of lost one tool without gaining another.
So, this spring I took singing lessons, which turned out to be exactly what I needed for podficcing, too. I learned to use the support muscles in my stomach to control the phrasing. I'm still learning and getting better at that, but it has improved my reading a lot already. And wow, when you start learning something, you realize how much there is to still learn. Singing and speaking are both very physical activities, and learning to consciously control the muscles you need while still being expressive is quite a challenge.
Another thing that I think has improved my reading is playing around with lots of different fandoms and styles during Amplificathon. Before that, I was pretty much monofannish in my podficcing, and I think you can get stuck in a rut if you're always reading the same character. At least for me, it's easy to fall into a specific melody of speech when reading a specific character, and sometimes you need to get away from that for a while to get new inspiration (which can improve your reading of that character, too).
I do have a bit of a Swedish accent, which bothered me a bit in the beginning, but I think I've gotten over that. Everyone has an accent of some sort, and if there are people who don't like mine, then fine. You can't please everyone, and I think I read clearly and understandably, at any rate. The problem I do still have is mispronunciation of words. I know that I do that sometimes, and the problem arises with words which I have read but never heard spoken. I look up pronunciations often, but the problem is when you're sure of a pronunciation, so that it never occurs to you to look it up, but you are in fact wrong.
Anyway, I'm fairly happy with where I am now, but I definitely want to continue to improve. If you have feedback on my podfics, I would love to hear it. And for other podficcers: do you find that you have learned and changed over time? If so, how?
