Speaker For The Diodes - March 27th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"If you study the basic chords [C, F, G], you should play for many people. Even if you can play only three chords, it is just enough.

"If your family and friends' faces turn bitter, you don't have to worry. If you are a poor player, just back up slowly and fade away."

-- from "Ukulele Lesson" by Kunishige (quote appears in chapter 6 - "Playing the Ukulele Live")

07:51 am - Transcription Experiment

As I've mentioned recently (and not so recently), I'm not always sure of the best way to transcribe speech. A couple of people responded positively to my suggestion that a few of us try the same passages and compare what we wind up with -- which wee corrections to make silently, which to mark with editorial square brackets, and which vocal quirks / possible mistakes / dialect cues to let stand; where to bother to add emphasis in the text; and the part that I find most tricky: when to insert a period versus semicolon, colon, or em-dash.

So here are the ones I've transcribed that I happen to still have the recordings of handy, with all the words (as I heard them) in the right order, but no other markup except to show when I couldn't make out a word or phrase, along with links to short MP3 files, so those of you who feel like it can add your own punctuation and fixups without having to the getting-all-the-words part from scratch. (Do point out errors you catch in my transcriptions, of course.) On a couple of them, the recording includes a little more than what I've transcribed.

Pick as many or as few as you feel like taking a whack at. These are three clips that I plan to stick into the quote-of-the-day queue, and two that I've already used (in case you want to compare your version to mine right away). Differences in accent, speaking speed, and emotional intensity make some much easier than others...

I tried to get every word, including the ones I usually filter out unconsciously (like, y'know, the third 'like' in, uh, the same, like, clause, y'know?), which turned out to make transcribing noticeably more difficult. (Wait, was that 'uh' that I almost failed to notice before or after the preposition? Rewind yet again ...)

I look forward to seeing how others' renderings of these passages differ from my own.

And yes, my posting to LJ at this hour does mean that my sleep cycle remains messed-up. (I actually slept nearly until dusk yesterday, waking several times from dreams or pain but falling asleep again quickly, but then (gosh, what a shock) being unable to fall asleep at a normal hour last night ... or at all so far this morning, though I'll try again after I post this and grab a wee snack.) Still working on getting to the point that I can cope with grocery shopping -- this evening looks possible, if I can squeeze in a little sleep between now and then.

Some of the dreams were really strange. I was also sweating a whole lot despite the bedroom being cold, so maybe I had a fever part of the time?

I'm hopelessly behind on my friendslist reading.