Category: Text fragments

“Tuesday, north wind, 20 to 25 knots, deminishing to around 20 knots in the afternoon”

A weather forecast read by a text-to-speech system. It is a recording from 2014; it is interesting to hear what the quality was like back then.

“Ehm, how many countries have you travelled over the years?”
“Ehm.. let’s just say, ehm, I don’t even own a passport. I’ve never had issues, Steve.”
“So you’ve not travelled overseas?”
“No. No need to. No need to.”
“What about broadening of the horizon, Mark?”
“Well, I’ve done Perth, I’ve done…”
“No, overseas, I mean.”
“Oh, I’ve been overseas, yeah, many a time to Tasmania.”
“To another country.”
“Well, I thought Tasmania was another country back in the day.”
“That’s a little hurtful to great Tasmanians.”
“I lived there for four and a half years.”
“Great spot. But what I’m trying to get to, you’ve never been to the United States, you’ve not been to the UK, not been to Europe, not been to Southeast Asia. Really, you’ve not investigated what’s it like on the other side of the proverbial fence.”
“No, it doesn’t float my boat.”

An excerpt from an interview with an Australian man on 6PR – Perth 882AM. According to the interviewer, you have to look beyond the horizon.
But that doesn’t float his boat.

“The rivers of West Jutland are clear and lively.
They cut through the landscape like silver ribbons.
Especially in spring, the waters come alive.
The Skjern river is a gathering place of migrating seatrout.
But it is not only the large fish that bring joy here.
Anglers walk narrow paths along the river banks.
They cast their line, and wait for the familiar pull on the rod.
Even the smaller streams hide young trout and brown trout.
For those who love finesse, fly-fishing in these colorful waters is an adventure of its own.
A fishing license is required.”

Just a bit of tourist information from a radio station called Charlie Tourist (Sydvest) about fishing in the Skjern River in Denmark. It was simply one of those nice “life is beautiful, we’re all happy” kind of segments—even though I personally find fishing a rather sadistic and murderous pastime. I had actually saved the background music under the working title “muzak.” Perfectly adequate, yet utterly forgettable.

“Here we have like, eh, more people in prison in this country than any other country in the world. We don’t have more population than any other country in the world, but we do have more people in prison than any other country in the world. Something is completely wrong with that scenario.”

Yeah. How about that.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day
To seek our pale enchanted gold

“De Engelse schrijver J.R.R. Tolkien heeft sy krities-bekroonde boek The Hobbit vrygestel, en toe ons later moes die fliek sien van The Hobbit. Ek het dit vreeslik geniet.”

A brief phrase on a South African radio station. As a Dutch speaker, I can understand South African to a very limited extent, but over the years, the two languages ​​have diverged significantly. I needed AI to make sense of it. The African lady says: “(Today, September 21st, it is exactly 89 years ago today that…) the English writer J.R.R. Tolkien published his book The Hobbit. And when I watched the movie later, I really enjoyed it.”

The Hobbit .. I wasn’t interested in it at all… Ek het dit nogal vervelig gevind.

“Data”
“Risks”
“Canonicalization”
“Normalization”

Getting technical for a moment….

This is an excerpt from a security course I had to take. Recorded with a mobile phone in front of the headset speaker. It is all very interesting and all, but I had saved it under the name ‘sleep-inducing text’. And now it finally comes in handy.

An older piece from 2015, without any great pretensions. I wanted to create a kind of chaos by constantly layering new sounds. And with a number of ladies discussing over each other added to that, you end up with something like this..

“Something happened to my computer, that they told me could never happen, it can not happen, because it’s saveing to the harddrive at the main office, and something happened, and I worked on this in March and April, and when I went back to work on it two weeks ago, 18,000 of my 25,000 words had disappeared, and was nowhere on the harddrive, nowhere on the computer, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. I got myself so upset, oh, I was so aggravated. So frustrated. Well, then, everybody that I got near I had to tell them my story, just like I just told it to you. And everybody that would call I tell them, and everybody that came over I told them, anyone that drove in a car anywhere I told them. And then my husband preached me a short Joyce Meyer sermon. And he simply said: ‘I think you’ve talked about it enough’”

This is a piece from a story by Joyce Meyer, and it feels wrong in several ways. So the wise (and obvious) words of her husband are suddenly Her words? And they are so good that she wants to preach about them, which is also a way to retell her computer story, which means she contradicts herself again! Confusing!

(I also made a version with samples from the text, hence two audio files.)

“I think it’s so difficult to please, and where is the line, where it is sort of stop online I guess. Ehm, so here is a track from a band who, eh, the name fits quite well really, because that, this is a threat online, I thought you get regularly online, the binder could virals and this is a track called Magic Happens”

To be honest I can’t make head or tail of this, I don’t even know if I wrote the text out correctly. This was, ehm, so dfifficult.

“Was ist den da überhaupt drin?”

(In German) What’s actually in it? And something in Polish I think, no idea what he says, but the melodic sound of the sentence fits nicely into the sound loop.