“The Story of an Hour and The Box Social into The Yellow Wallpaper”

Our group’s goal was to create an original audio piece by splicing and rearranging three different texts: “The Story of an Hour”, “The Box Social”, and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” These texts were chosen because all three had the same theme of women finding a response to their oppression and wanting to take control of their lives. 

As we didn’t want to turn the final story into a play, we decided to use only voice acting, without other background elements. In my perception, adding sound effects would be interesting to engage the audience, but it might cause interference in focusing on how the stories were combined. 

My role was to record the voice for “The Box Social.” Written by James Reaney, the story is a concise narrative about Sylvia, a young woman that designs a box to present in a rural farming town’s box-social. I had never read this text before, so I started my work by researching information about the author and the piece. As the narrator, I understood that I had the duty to do some diving into the context of the story. That way I would be able to express the characters’ emotions adequately. 

However, when I started narrating the text, I got stuck with pronunciation difficulties. I had to rehearse several times to produce the final recording. Some expressions were new to me; therefore, I wasn’t sure how to pronounce them. As English is not my first language, I tried avoiding errors using a text-to-speech tool. It was helpful, but as it produced a robotic reading, I couldn’t rely entirely on it to do my work. In the end, I decided to read in a way that I felt comfortable with and in which I could express the characters’ emotions. In other words, I just embraced my accent and decided that this element was necessary for the listener to experience how a foreigner interpreted the story.

This experience also made me think about the work of a narrator in producing meaning while reading a story. I felt like a co-author in a certain way, as there is no such thing as being neutral in making an audiobook.

When I finished my work, I had no idea what the final result would be. As we didn’t discuss how each reader should interpret their texts, I didn’t know if my contribution would be very different from the rest. However, the sound editors of the team mentioned that our pace and volume of speaking were quite similar, and therefore the final result was good.

After we presented the work, we discussed how it would be even more interesting if we could provide the listener with the agency to choose different ways of listening to the three stories. That, of course, would involve much more significant work in interpreting the texts. Maybe creating a tagging system would be a good way to start.