I did not do much with audiobooks in the past, not speaking about working on one. Thus, I was looking forward to this assignment. To produce an audiobook, we worked in a group of five people. Maggi was our editor, Kevin was our presenter, while Lisa, montage, and I were three readers. At first, Lisa worked with the text, using Google Docs, and edited Melville’s novella to have an abridged version of his work.

As one of the readers, I started thinking about the parts to select. Although, as I mentioned, we had an abridged version of the work is was still acceptable to choose a piece Lisa removed in a Google Docs file. Also, it was possible to select a part which the other reader decided to read. I wanted to read the beginning of Melville’s novella and part of the text, where the author introduces other characters of this story. The end of this novella was still available. I decided to read it, too, so the whole audiobook has some cyclical form–i.e., starting with one voice and ending up with the same.

As someone who has an accent in English and has a long record of mispronouncing words, I am especially concerned about how Melville’s text will sound in English. And even though I am very excited and enjoy reading aloud, reading in English may be tricky sometimes. Therefore, I decided to lower my reading speed, and this way, I could pay extra attention to my pronunciation’s clearness. (In the end, it should be pointed out: no matter how hard I tried, there are cases which require additional attention.) However, Maggi did a terrific job with editing the sound. In particular, she added a variety of city sounds that attract the lister’s attention and make the reader’s way of reading sound more smooth. While speaking about the adventurousness of the whole process of working on an audiobook, the critical thing is that by having three readers, the consumer has three distinct attitudes to this text, three private and close readings, in their ways, of Melville’s book. Since all three of the readers opted to read several parts of the text, our audiobook is a palette of readers’ approaches to the text without any specific order.

All three readings were beneficial; I read these essays before our group began working on the project–and then I had one sense of them. But, in the end, after we completed the assignment, I then had a different grasp of these texts. Having your own practical experience is essential to understand these articles better. 

I served as the sole voice actor for the Ginger Nuts’ production. This was my first time voice acting for anything, really, and I think it turned out pretty solid. I must say though, without the presentation (Conn), the script (Georgette), and the sound effects and audio editing (Lola, Martin), the project would absolutely not have been the same. Specifically, there would be regular sounds of me clicking to start and end segments of my recording, which would have really thrown off the sound, I think.

I want to start off with two aspects of note: number 1, I thoroughly enjoyed my role voice acting during this project. It was something of a heavy load, but there’s something very fulfilling about voicing so many characters at once and having a product that came out sounding at all well. Number 2, while I never had any anxiety about the part I played in this project, I did have something very similar going in – something solemn, I’d even call it having a “heavy heart.” Perhaps it was because of the existential bizarre and at times terrifying nature of the subject matter. Perhaps, then, it was simply me getting into character.

My planning for my role involved writing down a few prompts for me to come up with a voice for each character. At first, I simply wrote down the voice of a familiar character or person I could easily envision or remember back to. This was what I went into recording with – however, from my first line as narrator, I realized that the voice I used was radically different from the voice I had planned (which was a memorable voice of a speaker I heard once at a public event). However, I really liked the voice I went with, so I adjusted my notes to remind me that I’d be using this voice in future parts of the reading.

As I went forward, I went about the same sort of changes: I’d try the voice I wrote down initially, end up falling into a voice that was at least somewhat different, and using that voice instead, using a more long-form description for the voice I’d want to use, including notes on what I’d have to do to reproduce it, rather than writing down a name (Turkey’s voice, for instance, I rendered as “[Narrator’s voice] but somewhat older, goofier, and with tongue against roof of mouth”). This continued until I reached the latter end of the piece, at which point several of the voices I did were more off the cuff.

I tried to emulate what I remembered from the George S. Irving reading I posted some time ago, although in Aaron Kelly’s Bones, the narration is in the third person, so there was less onus on me to “characterize” the narrator. That is, the first-person perspective of Bartleby, the Scrivener very explicitly characterizes the narrator, at least compared to many third-person narratives. Instead of Irving’s jovial enthusiasm, I went with more of a somber, reserved feeling. While Aaron Kelly’s Bones is a horror story that’s meant to be lighthearted and silly on some level, Melville’s piece has always struck me as something that’s meant to be sad and disturbing on many levels; thus, I figured the tone I struck was quite fitting.

All in all, I’m as happy as I really could be with the way this turned out, especially considering it was my first time doing voice acting for something like this. I honestly hope I get the opportunity to doing something similar to this in a future. However, I must say I’d count myself quite lucky if I could get a team as supportive or helpful as the Ginger Nuts.

For the Bartleby audiobook assignment, I was part of the Office Crew team, acting as the groups presenter. While the majority of my work was towards the end of the project due to the nature of my role, I still had the opportunity to collaborate with my team and discuss how we’d go about the project. We discussed ideas and collaborated through Zoom and a Gmail thread, and shared files through Google Drive and Dropbox.

We began the project discussing through a Zoom call, deciding to fist define our constraints and overarching goals of how we wanted to go about the project. We ultimately wanted to be as independent as possible, and wanted to be considerate of our external workloads and personal lives. In many ways, we also seemed to agree that we were less interested in producing a perfect final product than we were hoping to have a good experience working on this project as a group. As such, montage proposed that we use the “Exquisite Corpse” game as our project’s model: a parlor game devised by Surrealists in the early 20th century, in which participants in a group would individually draw parts of a body on one piece of paper, folding the paper over what they drew each time. Once everyone had drawn something, the paper was opened to reveal the final product of everyone’s work. In this way, using the Exquisite Corpse as a framework for our project allowed us to hold as much freedom as possible in our contributions, while provide a method of refusal: specifically, the refusal of pre-meditated meaning and organization, instead opting for a method that allowed for spontaneity and surprise. Using this framework, everyone in the group worked on their parts of the project independently: choosing what ever lines they wanted, recording however they wanted, editing how they wanted, and finally, presenting how they wanted. Because we didn’t care much about producing an amazing final product, we went in with low expectations and standards, making the production process less stressful and more fun.

Once everyone had done their part and Maggi had published the final product, everyone was pleasantly surprised with the final outcome, all of us not expecting it to be that good. In our final meeting, I facilitated a group discussion reflecting on the process and our thoughts on the audiobook; including the way we loved all the speakers voices in different ways and loved Maggi’s sound editing. One comment that stuck out to me was when Lisa noted how they found themself frustrated trying to listen to montage’s TTS voice, from which they made a brilliant connection between her frustration and the narrator’s with Bartleby. I was really interested in how our framework—as a way to refuse order/meaning—produced new ways in which to understand refusal; here, thinking of quiet/noise as a place to just that.

All of this in toto—the process, the audiobook itself, the Exquisite Corpse framework, and our final discussion—were central, and elaborated in, my presentation. I approached my the presentation like a reading/analysis of all these moving parts; keeping in mind our readings from the class, as well as this higher-level trope of refusal. I started by outlining my slide deck, looking to first highlight our framework, from which to understand and move through our group’s process, audiobook, and discussion.

Once I’d outlined the slides, I created script. Because this was something my group had never seen before, and because it was, in a way, a piece of the exquisite corpse of our project, I wanted to not only narrate the our process and such, but break the fourth wall in a way through my analysis of a project I, myself, had participated in. I also wanted to do this by specifically pointing out during my presentation that this was a piece of the corpse, and that my team had no heard the presentation yet.

Overall, this was a fun project, and I had a good time not only participating in the audiobook, but also using my role, as the presenter, to look at our work from a birds-eye point of view.

For the Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853) audiobook project, I was in the Office Crew team. We collaborated over Google Docs and Zoom so as to discuss our process and progress. As the framework for our project, we chose ‘Exquisite Corpse’, a method invented by Surrealists where participants collectively create texts of images, each contributing to the whole as they wish/in their own style, and the whole is revealed only at the end. This way, we were able to “hack” (Allred, 2014) Bartleby without relying on an interpretive reading/editing of the text, and allowing each participant to creatively and freely work with the text culminating in a plurality: multiple interesting voices, readings, and takes on Bartleby. Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text” are particularly relevant here – each of us were present as readers and performers as we played with and reproduced the work, thus approaching it as a text. 

For my role as a ’reader’, I decided to go the ‘computable/DH’ route, and also approached this as a sound project:   1. I chose the reactions of the narrator each time Bartleby uttered “I prefer not to” – whatever he says or does immediately following the utterance. We could perhaps then see how they contrasted (or not) Bartleby’s monotone presence. We could see the score (as in musical score) that’s in the text.    2. I used an AI powered (which minimizes the robotic-ness) text to speech tool. I recorded them onto my phone from my computer, which added a lot of glitch (the distance + my computer’s damaged sound card). I am fairly fond of experimental music and used to do a radio show (where I got phone calls like ‘hey your signal is broken’ to which I had to respond ‘no, that’s actually what I am playing on my show’), so my individual contribution as well as my suggestions to the group/group process were very much influenced by that. I had also been part of music improvisation groups, where each person contributed to the sound created in their own individual way, so to me, our audio project was in line with those creative endeavors. 

I was completely fascinated by the final outcome -it was like one of my radio shows in one sense 🙂 : my teammate Lisa’s fantastic voice and reading of her own parts, my teammate Ostap’s equally fantastic but at the same time completely different reading of his part, all of our different voices/reading styles combined, and the amazing editing job done by Maggi,  all made for a very interesting audio project/product to listen to. Kevin pulled all our ideas together greatly so I could better reflect on our project. One could just as well see this as an experimental radio play where we hacked Bartleby in such a way that not only we -the performer/producers- contributed idiosyncratically, but also the listeners would inevitably  hear and make sense of it in idiosyncratic ways (love/hate it, focus on completely different parts or aspects of it, etc). While this is true for any sort of reading/sense making, the nature of this audio project might lend itself to further diverse ways of reception. Referring to Benjamin’s Storyteller here – how would they remember/reproduce our version of Bartleby?

Our project made me reconsider my take on audio books. I have so far enjoyed being the isolated reader that Benjamin describes – one who, as he perfectly put it- “seizes upon [her] material more jealously than anyone else… ready to make it completely [her] own” (p. 100).  I wanted to read and process words in my own way. May be re-read them, may be slower or faster, may be forget they were there, may be think about how I wold translate them, etc. I did not want anyone else’s imagination in the imaginary worlds that I created and so enjoyed. Even though I love experimental works – opening my mind to the unusual, the edges of others’ imagination.  To me, those (reading unintruded vs being open to anything that might come my way) were separate joys. I have now decided that this is indeed a good take, I can listen to audio books as audio projects, not necessarily a replacement of novel-reading, but an experience entirely its own. 

I served as an editor on the Ginger Nuts audiobook project of Bartleby, The Scrivener, although that is not what I originally thought I would be doing. During our first meeting, we discussed what our roles would be and opened the floor to any initial ideas. We did decide on an abridged version, but were still finalizing how we would present the audiobook. I think we were all immediately in agreement with Matt reading, but were unsure if the rest of us wanted to. I thought I would be a reader, as I had no experience with production or editing sound. The idea I liked in the beginning was the Zoom meet. It would require all of us to perform, and would feature video. I thought it would be great for each character to have their own unique background, but Bartleby would turn off the video, as he would “prefer” not to be seen. Zoom has been an integral part of office life in 2020, and I was excited to use that. But when the 2020 sound theme was brought up, it worked best for all of us. Whether the theme would be Zoom or 2020, I knew that we would have to edit the text and break it up like a script to make it easier for readers to deliver their lines as none of us are professionals. I began by editing out some of the Lawyer’s text, mainly overlong descriptions of characters like Turkey and Nippers. It was important to keep some description of the characters, but information about Turkey’s coat could be cut. I condensed most of the scenes, but made sure to keep all dialogue from interactions between Bartleby and the other characters. I made sure to also keep text relevant to the theme of the work, passive resistance. 

After editing the text, I formatted it to look like a script so it would be easier to distinguish who is speaking and how they are speaking. I labelled and color-coded each character, and in brackets kept any description of how he delivered the line. For example, the Lawyer exclaimed or Turkey cried. I wanted to keep this to assist the reader(s) so they would have an idea of how to deliver the lines. I also put any of the Lawyer’s monologues in italics to separate it from dialogue. These edits made me realize how much of a performance an audiobook reading is (or should be). Readers have to be aware of these descriptions to accurately deliver a line, or risk producing a flat performance. I submitted my draft to the team, explaining my process and what I left out, for further edits. 

The team were happy with the abridged version and added a few pieces including where some sound should be played. Matt did a fantastic job as Reader and Martin and Lola found amusing yet relevant sounds to include. Once Martin finished editing the audio, he shared it with us and asked for feedback. Conn then presented our work and did a great job despite technical difficulties! 

I admit that I approached this project with some trepidation, as I have no experience with audio production and overall did not enjoy reading Bartleby. I am glad to say Ginger Nut’s audiobook version changed my mind. Thank you to Matt, Martin, Lola, and Conn for this experience!