The One With Les Étoiles

I definitely did not give a proper explanation of my recording project, because I have had a lot of questions about who is doing the singing... and there is no singing.

About two months ago, Casey got a job with a telescope company. Yes, telescope. They produce something like a “talking telescope.” Basically, you point your telescope to one of the pre-determined points in the night sky, push a button, and a pleasant voice tells you what you are looking at. Maybe even tells you a short story from Greek mythology about that particular constellation or star, or whatever.

All of the spoken parts are in English, and they are in the process of translating them into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Russian. The French had to be recorded this last weekend, because they are marketing the talking telescope in Costco Canada, and Costco Canada is not interested unless the French scripts are included. Casey was hired to translate the script into Spanish, and then record the Spanish, which should take place in the next week and a half. When he went in to talk to the executives about the job, he mentioned the possibility of using my “studio” to do the recording, and one of the execs had my Christmas CD, and was very excited that I might be able to do the job. It is exciting for me, too, because I can use my studio and make money doing it.

There were 400 separate files which had to be recorded and then meticulously named to match their English counterparts. This is what it sounded like (sorry if you can’t get this to work... I am having trouble with my mp3 hosting!):

I listened to that for about 22 hours. The 24-year-old guy who did the recording did almost 90% of the recordings in one take, and only once or twice required more than two. Pretty impressive. Et voilà… that is the whole story.