What you can see here is 2 different audio takes of the same speech. What I was doing was just reading an online article and then I played the previous track while recording it again. Its kind of funny, and strange, to see how some of the errors kept there, others were gone and some new appeared because my own voice was annoying me. It was sort of like watching someting evolving.
At the fith try I recorded without playing the previous try on the background. I think thats the better one, because after that I tried again speaking while hearing and it got slightly worse.
But you may be wondering why I was doing it that way if I wanted to improve the way I spoke. Listening to myself while speaking was annoying so how can that help me to do any better? Well, actually, there are really some useful things about speaking while you listen the previous take. First, I got to hear myself saying the same words in different ways a lot more times and in a way it was much funnier that just listening to myself. The second reason is that when you hear yourself there is a limit on the things you are able to remember to fix or improve for the next take, and that, anyways, takes memory, which is something I wasn't caring about.
But the actual reason because I started doing it that way is because I wanted the waveform to be syncronized, at least for a minimum, so I could compare them by hearing and looking at them together. Yes, that it, I was wondering if there would be something that I could see instead of hear. And sure there is something! Look:
The take above was the first one and the other below is the last. Just by looking at this I can see I was speaking much louder and a bit quicker. Quicker doesn't neccesarily means better, but I can still see the points where a sound ends and another starts, so I think it's not that bad to speak a bit faster.
Why this now?
The reason why I am trying to improve my english speaking now is because I plan to record some videos in the future and I don't feel quite comfortable on how do I sound. It's not just because of my spanish accent but also because I tend to loose focus on the pronuciation and forgot to keep articulating correctly, mixing the words as I would do speaking my native language.
And I plan to record some videos because I have been waiting (procrastinating?) to use videos to go further on my journey about monetizing my unfocused creativity in which I feel videos and speaking correctly are going to play an important role.
Fourth step in the habit building process
Yesterday was the last day of the third 21-day step toward building my habit that will help me go toward my vision. These steps are actually:
- Publish something everyday (It went from 1 May to 21 May)
- interesting ( I also reviewed my second 21 days)
- that involves my creativity or my creations (This is ending today)
- helping me to make a life out of it (this is what I need to figure out from now on)
So what happens on the 23rd of July (21 days from now)? Will my habit be completely built the way I want? You know what... I think I don't really care. I am getting more comfortable each day doing this and for me is a good thing having this habit to built forward momentum and avoiding me to drift away from my vision. So I will just evaluate that when the day comes. But, as I said, I feel that for this next step I am going to be using the spoken word for it to really start rolling.
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