Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Archive for October, 2009

This post has nothing to do with my mission work.  Just to let you know.

I’ve had a problem in trying to change notifications in the Skype Preferences pane (I’m using OS X, by the way).  But, every time I clicked on the red flag (Notifications), Skype would freeze for up to a minute, then crash.  BOO!

With some help through the Skype forums, I have fixed my problem with a small deletion.  Apparently the text to speech feature, the voice of Alex to be exact, caused the problem.  Being a dedicated non-text to speech user, I had no problem ridding of my new enemy. I went to the following location and deleted the Alex.SpeechVoice folder.

Main HD > System > Library > Speech > Voices

If you happen to stumble upon this post and have pulled out numerous hairs, I hope this helps more than Rogaine.

I climbed out of bed at 5:52am this morning.  We have had quite a day at the dedication ceremony up in the Vwanji language area mountains.  We have lots of video and photos but I’m way tired so I’ll have to leave you with this one shot from today…

It is from just after they brought the books into the church.  One of the many, many pastors is taking a turn reading out of the Gospel of Mark (green cover).  The lady you see in the picture is Vwanji and probably in her 60s.  All the other hundreds in the church were equally as captivated.

I kid you not, Scottie kicked in the warp speed around the time I started recording Mark in the Vwanji language.  The ensuing months have blown by like streaks of light from passing stars.  Today, he turned the switch back off.  The Gospel of Mark in the Vwanji language now has 198 complete and ready-to-sell sets of cassettes!  I don’t think I’ve realized the project is complete yet because that kinda ‘urgent’ feeling is still lingering inside.  Hope that doesn’t last too long because I’m ready to slow back down.  I actually like looking at the stars as they go by.

Just before quittin’ time yesterday, a good Tanzanian friend of mine called me.  He said, “Jonathan, God has been good to us!”  I asked him why he said that.  He proceeded to tell me that someone had brought to him a cassette tape duplicator trying to sell it.  He noticed it matched the description of the slave unit which was stolen out of my studio back in March.  I gave him the model and serial numbers from my records and he confirmed it was indeed MINE!

He had it in his possession because he gave the ‘dealer’ a deposit under the pretense that the remaining balance would be paid yesterday evening.  I picked it up but unfortunately it was only the duplicator.  No cover.  No power cable.  No control cable.  The latter being the most important missing item because it is such a unique cable. 13-pin male to 13-pin male.  Then, I remembered that I have a big roll of very thin wire.  So, I made my own ‘cable’ as you can see (lots of red & white between the machines)…

The power cable, a common computer one, was plugged in followed by the insertion of 1 master and 7 blank cassettes.  I hit the button to test it and VOILA! it works.  I can’t believe it is back in my possession.  My prodigal cassette duplicator has returned home!  Kill the fatted calf!

If you’ve been following my recent tweets, you’d know that I finished my first editing phase on Mark in the Vwanji language.  What does that mean exactly?  Glad you asked.  Glad to answer.

As I’ve recorded more and more books here in the local languages, I’ve searched for my personal, best-fit method to go from beginning to end.  In terms of just the technical part of the recording projects, they have grown to look like this:

(1) Record all of the words speaker-by-speaker. For instance, the translator who spoke the MANY words of the narrator in the gospel of Mark spent nearly two straight days in my studio recording his words and only his words. All of the other characters’ words, like Jesus, Bartimeaus, Peter, etc., are skipped over. Once the narrator is finished, I move on to the next person to record and continue this process until all the words for the book are recorded.
(2) Edit phase I this is probably the most time consuming step. I’ve taken some screenshots of the audio clip for Mark 4:36-38a to help you see what this looks like.

This first shot is what my audio looks like at the beginning. From there, I normalize the entire clip. Normalization is the process of increasing (or decreasing) the amplitude of an entire audio signal so that the resulting peak amplitude matches a desired target. That’s Wikipedia. The next shot is the result.

See how the whole thing is bigger? That just means I increased the overall volume (amplitude) to get it in my desired range. From here, I now clean up the silent areas in between sounds. Most of the time, those are just breath sounds where the speaker is reloading for the next word(s).

Look closely. In between the sound waves, the silent areas are now completely flat. No more breath (or other) sounds. Each of those sections are done manually, one-by-one. Time to cut off that little tail on the end.

Easy edit. At this point, I add this audio clip into my overall timeline, the place I compile all of the clips into the final product. Sometimes, after I’ve done this and added sound effects to the timeline, there may be some of a clip that is still a little low in volume. So, I go into that particular clip, highlight the low section and normalize it to a higher level.

Take a look at the area between about 00:06 and 00:17. That’s the area I raised to a higher level.

That is an explanation of one clip’s edit.  Mark has almost 720 clips.  You understand why this is the most time consuming part of my editing.

(3) Edit phase II is where I take all of these clips and place them on a timeline, adjust the timing in between each one and add sound effects.
(4) Translator testing is next. I sit down with the language translators and listen to the entire book, allowing them to point out any obviously needed corrections. I usually do this on the spot so we can arrive at a final draft.
(5) Community testing is the [hopefully] last step in the technical audio part. This takes place in a village in that respective language area. A group of pastors are usually selected to listen to the entire book. Upon their approval, the audio is ready for duplication and distribution.

If you’d like to hear the before and after of the above audio clip, here you go:


For the book of Mark in Vwanji, I just finished Edit phase I.  Today, even with my stomach issues, thank You Jesus, I was able to finish the intro and chapters 2, 3 and 4.  The rest of the steps have to be completed before Saturday, October 24.  Actually earlier because I still have to design the labels and covers, then print them.  And duplicate the cassettes.  Still quite a bit left.  No prayers will be unwanted!