I need your voice – many of you know of my Crowdsourced Psalms Project to produce a Digital Psalter. Now I need urgently to make this Sonnet by the wonderful Malcolm Guite:
Palm Sunday by Malcom Guite
Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,
The seething holy city of my heart,
The saviour comes. But will I welcome him?
Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;
They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,
And think the battle won. Too soon they’ll find
The challenge, the reversal he is bringing
Changes their tune. I know what lies behind
The surface flourish that so quickly fades;
Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,
The hardness of the heart, its barricades,
And at the core, the dreadful emptiness
Of a perverted temple. Jesus come
Break my resistance and make me your home.
If you can help me (it will take slightly less than 2 mins), then please do the following:
Instructions
- If you have a phone like an iPhone or an Android, there is usually an app to record your voice – often called “Voice Memo” or some thing similar. I use a free Android App called ASR which can be installed for free from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nll.asr If you have better recording equipment, then even better, but I have found that most smartphones are good enough nowadays. You can configure it to record at quite a good quality: I would suggest 192k in MP3 or MP4 format if that means anything to you. If not, just record it as it comes and I will do spooky mysterious things with it with electronics.
- iPhones will record in the very nice .M4a format. This is fine, but please try and set it to the highest quality you can.
- Read (nicely and in the highest possible quality) the above reading. Click here to jump to the optimum settings in ASR…
- After recording select “Share” (or similar) and email it to me at fr.simonrundell@gmail.com
- It would be really helpful if you named the file with your name. This will help me collate them.
- I will cut it up with all the others and make these into the reading using the multiplicity of voices, accents, genders etc.
- Can you tell others and ask them to do it for me please so I get lots and lots of voices.
Thank you.