In the wake of January 12th’s damaging earthquake in Haiti, people all over the world have paused to consider ways they can provide some solace to the affected communities. Finding the most appropriate channel to do this can be a challenge, and it is always assuring to learn about organizations with strong existing ties rooted in respect and trust.
In Cambridge, MA you do not need to look further than the productive relationship between the Fayerweather Street School and the Matenwa Community Learning Center in Haiti, located on the island of La Gonave. The two schools have been growing with each other for some time now as sister schools. Teachers from each school visit each other throughout the year and share ideas. Students and alumni get involved in trips and long-term projects. FSS and MCLC even share common missions around social justice, experiential learning, and creative problem solving.
One of the most remarkable components of the exchange is the Mother Tongue Book Project. In this effort, students reflect on an aspect of their life that they would like to share with peers at the other school, and write and and illustrate a story about it. The story is translated from their own mother tongue, to the mother tongue of the students at the other school, the finished product having the languages of both children presented. The significance of recognizing Creole as a language just significant in the educational process as English is immense. The story is then printed and bound and usually hand-delivered.
NewTapes.net is happy to partner with the Mother Tongue Book Project in a new effort to implement an audio component to the existing exchange. Starting this week at Fayerweather Street School, I will be helping the students record the stories they have written. All students from 1st to 6th grade have stories to share, so it will be wonderful to see so much original material. In two weeks I will travel with a group of teachers from FSS to MCLC where I will then record the students there reading their own stories and the translation of the FSS stories. The final component will be again recording the FSS students narrating the translated texts of the MCLC stories. At this point the stories will be spliced together with SoundSlides to result in a finish product that is just as interconnected and meaningful as the original impulse for the sister relationship itself.
Ever get tired of your GPS ladies’ voice? Now you can change it to Snoop Dogg. That’s right, the big Bow Wow loaned his voice to a new VoiceSkin for the Tom Tom GPS Navigation System. The VoiceSkin contains extra information about some of his favorite Los Angeles area hangouts and includes such phrases as, “turn around when possible and keep it ‘G’, ya d-i-g?” See VoiceSkins.com for more information.
In other news, BBC Audiobooks America, with the help of the twitterverse, released today an audiobook written mostly via tweet and some help from author Neil Gaman. It is called Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry. It is narrated by Katharine Kellgren. Check it out at #bbcawdio. Shout out to all the tweeps who helped them with that!
Last but not least, as promised, you can check out our first audio book – “Winter Dreams,” a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now available to stream or to download. It is melodramatic because we like that. Let me know what you think.
Welcome to the permanent home of NewTapes.net. This project has consumed my thoughts for the last several months and I am happy to finally have a stable site to launch.
First, some notes. I won’t make an appeal for the usefulness of audio books, because many others have done that before:
- As superior learning tools, (exhibit A) (exhibit B)
- For reading when you are too busy to stop and read, (breathe.)
- Or just because they are entertaining and relaxing. (fun!)
There are also many places to grab your favorite audio book, from your neighborhood bookstore, to major online marketplaces, to some free smaller projects (a couple of which I’ve listed to the right in the Reference Roll.) I’ve experimented with all of these avenues. But something I’ve always been concerned about in my listening is the sameness of narration. We always hear the same sort of extremely Western voice, no matter what story is being recounted. Basically, they’ve sounded the same since Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1877, partly with intentions to record books. The other day I came across an audio book rendering of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass that didn’t exactly sound like… Himself. This put an entirely different tone to this classic text, but it was one I did not find so flattering.
The anthropologist Ruth Finnegan who embarked on a career investigating the idea of Africa is an “Oral continent,” maintains that oral literature is by definition dependent on the performer who formulates it in words. Finnegan has since revisited her work to clarify that though this tradition is strong in Africa, there is not, and there has never been one voice, but multiple voices. In the same way, in a world that is being brought ever closer together through the internet and civic media, the important books which shape thought have now been shared all across the globe and really don’t read the same way as when Edison was around. Generation after generation have contextualized these works in new settings and interpreted them in many ways.
Literature has always been about imagination. So just allow your mind to “go there” and think about how a story’s interpretation can be completely different depending on the narrator. Part of what I will do on this site is provide some outlines of new interpretation, but really, that will be a job left up to the reader to enjoy.
