Options for audio recordings

[Arun Prasad]

Moved from Discord with minor edits:

Ideally, any text we present with a history of oral transmission should be made available with a high-quality recording. Roughly, we have three options here:

- Make or reuse recordings through a credible authority

- Allow volunteers to contribute audio

- Use text-to-speech (TTS)

I generally like all of these options, but volunteer audio can get a little political -- I expect it will be both more copious and of higher variance, which means that we must then become curators according to our own tastes and preferences. I expect that we can learn to do this well, but it's a very different task from mere proofing, which is more cut-and-dry in terms of our inclusion criteria.

Right now, it's a moot point since we don't have support for audio. But as we get closer to that step, I'd love to hear what people think about the options above and how to balance our competing priorities (an archive, a pedagogical tool, a community project, ...)

[Ashwin Ramaswami]

I think that if we do support audio recordings, we should highlight the multiplicity of ways to chant / sing the text with multiple recordings and not necessarily prioritizing one over the other. For example, see Kaumaram’s approach to having multiple recordings:

https://www.kaumaram.com/thiru/nnt0006_u.html

I’d also note that the same political issue (though perhaps a bit less intense) would crop up in displaying textual variations of the same text. Again, here, I would suggest having a way to showcase the multiplicity of different texts.

Basically Ambuda should very clearly advance the proposition that: there isn’t exclusively one way to chant / sing a given work, and there isn’t exclusively one text for it either. 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ambuda-discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ambuda-discus...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ambuda-discuss/cb437301-5e82-402f-853f-fb4d0a089ed8n%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

--

Ashwin Ramaswami

[Shreevatsa R]

Curation is uncomfortable but unavoidable: we'll soon have to do it for the list of texts, list of dictionaries, maybe later for multiple translations, and so on.

I know what you mean about the high variance in quality of audio (there exist earnest efforts that are hard to listen to), and tastes: one person's "wonderful" is another person's "unbearable". :)

One approach to curation is to simply include everything.

Additionally: one could have ranking by user votes (with its own set of potential problems: I wouldn't expect anyone to want to abuse this but you never can tell).

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ambuda-discuss/CAPjddF5Of0gDHb64Hg0cfyhhSwB%2B6kA0o543KyiO-1AU2%2B%2Bhog%40mail.gmail.com.

[srinivasa kasyap munukutla]

Another reference for how audio versions might be handled: https://tanzil.net/#19:1