Parallelbotany (my neighbor from back in northern Manhattan) wanted to know how to make voice recordings so that she could share her Oregonian with the tumblrverse.
I’m sure there are tons of voice recording softwares available. I always use PRAAT because you can record and edit sound files easily. Also, it’s free, so click through to download it (for either pc or mac).
To record a file you click “new” and start talking. To save click “write” and save the file as .wav. Open the file in iTunes and under “Advanced” you can convert it to .mp3. Then, it’s tumblr-ready. Easy peasy.
Funny I was using Praat today to record and analyze myself saying sentences with ”our” and “are”.
Someone replied to lolo’s post asking if there are any standardized texts to determine accent. Yes, please call Stella. Not that recording this passage will tell you anything in particular.
The best way I know to pin down your dialect is to go through Wikipedia and look at the features listed on each dialect page. Which sucks, because the features can be weird unsourced and obviously anecdotal things and because you probably need a linguist to explain some of the features in plain English. (Which I can do btw.)
