Donate your voice to a classic author and boost their online presence

The UOC’s Voice Donors project is looking for 100 volunteers to record and publish 100 audio readings of classic Catalan literature. Can you help?

The challenge is on for 100 days and ends on 30 July 2021. Your recordings will be published on open platforms and web spaces for everybody to hear and enjoy.

Get involved in this collaborative literary project. If you have any questions, you can email lletra@uoc.edu.

1. Get a team together
The audio readings can be done by just one person, but we recommend recruiting a couple of friends so that you can share out the various tasks: reading aloud, editing and publishing the audio reading. If you need more people, tweet for help by mentioning @donantsdeveu. Someone is bound to come to your rescue!

2. Choose a book
Select one of your favourites or peruse the list of suggestions drawn up by the partner entities on the Voice Donors website. We recommend choosing one that is in the public domain and emailing lletra@uoc.edu with the title. This way, everybody will know which ones are already taken.

3. Record your audio reading
Recording your voice is the fun part. All you have to do is find your storyteller voice and have access to a mobile phone or webcam. Don’t worry about re-recording anything. If you get muddled up, just read the sentence or paragraph again. You can always just cut and paste it later.

4. Edit your recordings
Your recordings may contain noises that need cleaning or fragments that need to be cut and pasted. This is no big deal because you can edit them with Audacity, an excellent free program that is available in Catalan.

5. Publish your audios online
Save each chapter or section individually in 128 Kbps mono MP3 format and/or mono Ogg Vorbis format. You must also name and number the documents, publishing them on LibriVox if they are copyright-free or on Wikipedia if the work is licensed under Creative Commons, or wherever else you like. Before doing this, however, listen to them all the way through to check that there are no silences, repetitions, interruptions, etc.

6. Publish the work on LibriVox if you can:
We suggest publishing your audio reading on LibriVox for international visibility.

7. Finally… tell everyone about it!
One of the best moments will be sharing your recording with everyone. Tweet the link mentioning @donantsdeveu and we will spread it on the social networks of the partner entities.

And remember: if you need someone to join forces with or just to lend a hand, ask! If you need to, publish a tweet mentioning @donantsdeveu or the partner entities.

Related news:

• The UOC launches its “Voice Donors” campaign in celebration of the feast day of Sant Jordi [21/04/2021]