SansBlogue: Cyber Psalms and the vocal Psalterium

Friday, October 10, 2008

David has finished 50 of his cyber psalms, and since his new job allows so little scope for imagination and fun, he has decided to produce a "Psalterium Cyberium:" which will "Illuminate the cyber-psalter".

He's invited the arty to produce art to create "an illustrated manuscript for the 21st century." He is also inviting us to read a cyber psalm for an audio version - and if I can persuade him potentially multi-media version(s). I'm also trying to persuade him to put the text into the public domain, so we could run the audio project on Librivox ;) He plans to put the whole thing online and also sell print copies...

If you are thinking of recording an audio psalm for Psalterium Cyberium please do spare some thought to the equipment you'll use, it can make a huge difference. To illustrate here are two versions of Cyber Psalm 11 recorded on:

To illustrate the importance of the sound card, here is one done on my old laptop (that had a good sound card built in) using the same headset mic:

headset mic decent sound card

Labels: audio, culture, digital, internet, librivox

¶ 10:43 AM

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Wow. The second is my favorite. What were the specs on the mp3?

BTW #11 is one of my favorites. And hearing you read it gave me goose bumps and made me smile.

By David Ker, at October 10, 2008 12:47 PM

All the MP3s are at 64kbs, which is quite enough to give good quality for mono voice. Though Librivox uses 128kbs, and Archive.org offers a choice.

Both the mic and sound card make quite a difference, so getting a good setup is quite important. Unless we added a backing track ;)

By Tim, at October 10, 2008 1:05 PM

I have a Zoom H2 with fabulous recording quality. But I still haven't figured out the setting that makes me sound like a Kiwi...

Since we're hoping for lots of participation I'd suggest people trying their default computer recorder. What was that thingy you set up here where people could leave audio comments? Could we mash that with the texts of the Cyber-Psalms so that someone could just hit record and read off the screen. Those things tend to not work on WordPress very well but I might be persuaded to do that segment of the project on Blogger (ugh).

By David Ker, at October 10, 2008 2:04 PM

Hmm, could do, though the sound quality was not good. BTW to show how bad it can get here's my laptop's built in mic!

By Tim, at October 10, 2008 2:22 PM

I tried phone through Gabcast:

http://lingamish.com/2008/10/09/recording-a-cyber-psalm-toll-free-by-phone-in-six-countries/

What it lacks in sound quality it makes up for in ease of use (no software/hardware just punch in two codes.)

By David Ker, at October 10, 2008 3:36 PM

At that quality we could always make them AMR files (1/10 size of your MP3).

I still like the idea of making it a Public Domain Librivox project, for the audience...

By Tim, at October 10, 2008 4:00 PM