Recording for the Blind

Actually, it’s Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, or RFB&D. They have studios all over the country, and one of them is only a few blocks from my house. I’ve been driving past it for years and years, saying Gee, I should volunteer.

I’m one of those people who can read a sentence off the page and get it right, almost every time. Not many people can, as we know from listening to the radio.

But somehow, I never felt like I had the time to spend — until I got laid off from my job.

So a while back I knocked on the door at RFB&D, and said I would like to volunteer to read. They were very nice and explained that you don’t start by reading, you start by directing. Recordings are made by a two-person team: a reader who does just that, and a director who runs the equipment, gets the sound level right and keeps it right as the reader goes through moods and shifts back and forth in front of the mike, follows along in the text and stops the reader when he blows it so they can go back and fix it, logs the session in a carefully structured way so it can be picked up where it left off (usually by a different reader and director) and so on.

There is a lot to it. And even before the reader and director sit down to their work, a “booksetter” goes through the whole book and marks it up in a very detailed way: little penciled notes that say things like “say the page number here,” “don’t read this note until the end of the chapter,” “read this marginal note when you get to this point in the paragraph” … you get the idea. There is a lot to it.

So by now I’ve spent three two-hour shifts being trained as a director, and in another two days I’ll attempt my first shift as a director on my own. Hope I don’t screw it up too badly.

In the three shifts I’ve done, we have recorded parts of

* A psychology textbook about the use of personality-type theory in selecting people to do telemarketing;

* A management textbook about how to build teams;

* A manual covering all phases of what sounded to me like a giant pyramid scheme to market home-care and personal-grooming products, ultimately screwing the lowest tier of salespeople who have no subordinates to screw.

Sounds horrible, eh? But it isn’t. The whole process is fascinating for itself, regardless of the book being recorded. The people I’ve been working with are fascinating people. I look forward to spending some time directing, then taking the reading test to see if I can do reading. I think I can, but I’ve learned enough to realize that I don’t know much about this.

I do have an ulterior motive. When the iTunes Music Store came out, one of its interesting features was the “Audiobooks” section, which offers most or maybe all of the huge Audible.com catalog. And I realized that people are making a living reading books out loud.

Many books are read by their authors, and many others by well-known actors. But quite a few are read by people whose names don’t google in any other context. And a couple of kind people in the industry, when I emailed them out of nowhere, confirmed that yes, sometimes some unknown person just sends a demo CD to to a publisher, and gets hired.

After I develop some chops working with RFB&D, maybe I’ll take a shot at the commercial recording world. But I hope that if I ever get paid to read, I’ll also keep on volunteering. Anyone who has some time and finds this intriguing should really check out RFB&D.