Author: Eneasz

Interrupting is difficult. I imagine it’s always difficult, even when everyone is gathered together in a room or on a stage, because when you’re putting on a show you all have your assigned lines and it’s natural to take turns saying them. It’s hard to leave the “You go, now I go” dance and move into listening for the sentence to come close to the interrupt point and start speaking while the other person is still talking. It’s not made any easier when the lines are delivered remotely and there’s no one else around to actually interrupt. In editing I’ve erred on the side of making sure every word is intelligible (as it is when you read them) and never had any voices overlap. I sometimes wonder if that was the right decision.

Interrupting is also a marker of status, and a sign of politeness. McGonagall is very proper and rarely interrupts anyone. Severus is abrasive and interrupts all the time. Most other characters follow social norms and freely interrupt those below them, occasionally interrupt their peers, and almost never interrupt a superior. It’s interesting to note that Harry Potter will freely interrupt anyone he’s talking to when he feels he has something to add. I asked a friend who didn’t like the fanfic what turned her off, and she said it was the way Harry showed disrespect to McGonagall. I was a bit surprised, because I didn’t feel he had (at least not egregiously). But I had been reading under the assumption that Harry was a person, and so him treating McGonagall as a peer didn’t shock me. My conversational partner was a parent, and viewed Harry as a child, and for him to interrupt her or question her was too great a violation.

Hearing recordings of your own words can make you painfully aware just how much of a disconnect there is between the things you think you’re saying, and the words that are actually coming out of your mouth. Sometimes it’s a simple slip of the tongue – saying “must” instead of “much”. Sometimes it’s a slip of the mind – there has been a lot of times where I’ve said “Draco” rather than “Harry”, or vice versa. While clear communication is certainly primarily the concern of the communicator, I’ve come to realize how important it is to have a charitable audience that helps with the translation. Talking to a hostile audience probably makes inferential distances far worse, as they are no longer working with you to bridge those gaps.

In today’s episode there was a line I simply omitted. An entire line that I thought I’d read out loud, but had instead simply skipped over. How the hell?

When it doesn’t change the meaning of a sentence I’ll generally leave such slips in, but if it’s a noticeable error I have to go back and re-record an entire sentence or paragraph and splice in the re-take. I hadn’t realized that when I started this, but you can’t simply splice in the word that was flubbed. The cadence and rhythm doesn’t match. What’s worse, even redoing an entire line or paragraph, it’s still rarely a good match. A lot of things affect the final recorded sound – distance from the microphone, my energy levels, the posture I’m sitting in, even when I last drew a breath. Over episodes small variations in tempo, tone, and pitch are unnoticed, but a sharp change from one line to the next is jarring. I have to repeat the correct line several times, attempting to manipulate those variables as much as I can to match the original reading, and pick whichever works best. And it still usually doesn’t quite sound right. /sigh

It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, I pay more attention when reading now. Like they say, it saves a lot of time simply doing it right the first time.

But still, how did I overlook a whole dang line?

It’s been quite a while since I began re-recording the early episodes. After the initial push I haven’t done many more. I’ve decided to stop with Chapter 9 – the episodes from then onward aren’t so bad they need a full redo. Up to the mid-teens they still aren’t that great, but I need to draw a line somewhere. I will, however, be going through and doing some re-editing on everything up to the Azkaban arc, which includes replacing my voice for every role that now has an actor. And because I don’t want this to last for months while I do an episode here or there, I’m planning on taking a week off from work in mid-February to dedicate 8-hours a day to podcast editing.

What this means is that if you’ve been wanting to do the voice of Anthony Goldstein, or Sybil Trelawney, or even just “Fifth-Year Slytherin Girl” – sometime in the next few weeks would be a great time to do that. :) It’ll let me mix it in with the least amount of fuss and you’ll get to hear yourself within a month or so. See the submissions page for lines and tips, and please be sure to contact me first to make sure no one else grabbed the part already.