Kooneiform

Following on the last post, the other night I heard Robin Hobb read at the University Bookstore, on her tour supporting her new book Renegade’s Magic.

I brought the recorder to try it out. I was about ten feet from the podium, and the bookstore is something of a big open space so there was a lot of ambient noise. For the introduction of Robin I had the recorder in my shirt pocket (I don’t have an external microphone yet) and for her reading I held the recorder in my lap pointing up. The PA system for the reading wasn’t very loud — kind of like a little louder than normal speaking voice. The final file was about half a gig of 44.1 khz WAV.

In Audacity I cut out a few spots of the WAV file and used the envelope tool and amplify effect to increase the volume on some points, and the envelope tool to decrease some loud spots, but other than that I didn’t do too much. I still haven’t figured out how much of that works.

I did cut up the file into two parts — so if you just want to hear the question and answer you can skip to that.

Robin Hobb introduction and reading:

Robin Hobb Q & A:

I was impressed by the reading, she seems really cool.