Voice work

I'm a beginner, keen to find opportunities to practice doing things with my voice and to help to make more texts accessible as audio.

I have a queer relationship with my voice, due to post-puberty hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming speech therapy. I'd describe my voice as androgynous. It's important to me that voices like mine are heard more, to destigmatise traits that transgress the gender binary.

My accent is General Northern English, with a slight bias towards South Yorkshire. I enjoy adopting some RP qualities when it benefits the text, though I am unlikely to sound authentic to genuinely posh English people.

Volunteer reading at Librivox

Librivox is a beacon of what the internet can be at its best - volunteers making public domain texts accessible for free. If you've ever searched for a text and ended up listening to a reading of it on Youtube, chances are you've encountered a Librivox recording. You can see/hear all my Librivox contributions on my reader page.

Examples

'My Past is Mine', by Gerda Rhoads: Short science fiction story about a man who finds himself living in the wrong world (a situation somewhat familiar to me). Access full recording in Short Science Fiction Collection 109.

The Three Musketeers Dramatic Reading, part of Mousqueton: A lively reading of this small part, a servant just as vain as his master who tells some tall tales

The Machinery of the Mind, by Dion Fortune: A soporific reading which includes discussion of dreams and hypnosis, for one of Librivox's Insomnia Collections

Concluding chapter of Evolutionary Socialism, by Edouard Bernstein: Fiery arguments from 1909 about the possibility or necessity of revolution

I follow my personal interests when choosing what to read, but I don't always support the views that they represent - public domain works are usually old, and recorded literature tends to favour perspectives that benefitted from the sexist and colonial conditions of their time.