What is Shakespeare Audio’s?
It’s a long story. English is not my native language (I am dutch) and when I started studying english I had to read Shakespeare.
Shakespeare may be a crime to read for native speakers, so just imagine what it is for someone not born into the english language.
I decided to start listening and reading at the same time. As a musican and sound editor I also like playing with sound recordings a lot and so I ended up recording Shakespeare plays and editing them into scenes. This gradually grew into a database of which you can see pictures on this page (just click to view larger size).
I managed to put this database and all it’s soundfiles to a CD-Rom meant for listening and reading with a laptop. Later on the harddisks become bigger and from then on the whole database could simply be copied to a harddisk and if needed be edited with own data.
The CD-Rom is history now and no longer available but all the data of that CD (MP3’s and text of scenes) is used online for these pages. Hopefully these audio’s and their texts will help you too to grasp some understanding of these plays and it´s difficult language.
I tried several ways to put these pages and soundfiles online but always had problems with the navigation. It is not a simple task to do a menu to navigate yourself through some 1000 pages and hundreds of MP3 recording.
But I think I may have found a way with this blog. The MP3 sound quality is not hifi as you may hear (all soundfiles were heavily compressed to make them as small as possible for database use on a laptop many years ago) but they may be a nice help for understanding what these Shakespeare characters are saying.
Happy Shakespeare to you!! – Johnny
