Recording: Then and Now - Part III

Right. Previously on "Then and Now": Show business (including VO) is a thing of the past, as I move on to "more reliable" work. Turn forward a handful of years, and I've been a cable TV installer (no, nothing like Jim Carrey at all), a pizza driver (now there's a big-time career!), and I'm now a staff support specialist in the U.S. Air Force. For those old enough, think "Radar" on M*A*S*H, except in a blue suit, not in Korea, and not under fire.

But remember I said things turn unexpectedly, right? So the unit where I happen to get assigned is at a headquarters base and does regular briefings for general staff, members of Congress, and so on. We have this briefing room with a rear-projection screen to show slides. The latest technology is a projector that is purpose-built to show slides created with a vector graphics package called Lotus Freelance. It was all extremely high-tech--much faster turnaround than sending orders to the base graphics shop to be turned into 35mm slides.

Anyway, the M.O. then was to have a briefer (usually a junior officer) memorize the briefing and present it to its intended audience. At one point, we decided to see if we could completely "can" a briefing, with the narrative recorded and somehow played in sync with the slides. The idea came up that, since we doing the slides in-house with a computer, maybe we could do the narration in similar fashion. And thus it fell to me to figure out how to record sound on a computer.

Sounds easy, right? As Bill Cosby famously said, "Riiiight." I started looking into sound cards--PCs then didn't just have sound built in. They had speakers, but those were pretty much good for a few R2-D2-esque bleeps and twitters--definitely not up to the task of handling actual recorded audio. So if you wanted to have sound, you had to go buy a sound card. And if you wanted to record sound, you had to make sure the card had the ability. After all, most of them just played sound for a particular purpose, such as speech synthesis and such--nobody really wanted to record and play back sound on a computer, did they? There was already professional equipment for that--no need to duplicate it on a computer.

Well, that was the wall we came up against in 1987-88. There wasn't a good solution available to record and play back sound on the PC. We had no way to know that 1988 would be the year that brought gaming into the computer sound world, and computer-based audio would begin to take off. And how!

Sounds like not much recording going on, but while we were hunting for sound solutions on the PC, we were also working on recording the briefings to tape, so we'd have the material when were ready for it--and that's how I wound up in front of the mic again. This was actually a big revelation for me, because it showed that there was a need for VO work outside of "show business". All of my voice work for many years would subsequently tap this market--corporate narrations, presentation VOs, and so on.

Oops--gotta get to Saturday chores. Part IV coming soon.