So as many of you know that follow me my main job is as a software developer and general tech gadget nerd. When I throw myself into anything I tend to go “all-in”. I also strive to always find good ways to leverage technology to solve real world problems. Lately, this has applied a lot to acting. As I strive to improve as an actor I wanted to reach a point where any script I was working on just flowed naturally for me. So in addition to the rehearsal mobile app I wrote I decided for my current film I was going to try auditory learning methods as well. If you are a person that learns through listening and you want to act this could be very helpful for you. In addition, if you are like me and learn things through various ways then this is still useful (you’ll have to try it to believe me though).

So the current feature that I am working on is a Christmas Film called Ivy & Mistletoe and it was a perfect one to try this new technique out on.  I’ll give you the cliff notes to what I did here first:

1. I grabbed all of the scenes from the script that had my character in them and copied the text from the script to the clipboard.
2. I pasted each scene one by one into a program called Line Buddy (any text-to-speech tool would work).  As a developer I could have written my own program for this but I found Line Buddy to work perfectly.
3. I formatted the script for Line Buddy and assigned each role a specific computerized voice that was pitch appropriate.
4. I then recorded the playing of the script using a program called Capto.
5. I then exported that movie to a .mov file and imported it into Filmora.
6. I downloaded royalty-free instrumental only background music from the web.
7. I added the background music to a separate track in Filmora to layer in the audio background noise.
8. I then exported that to another movie format (any will do).
9. Finally I converted that movie format to a .mp3 for playing in iTunes and my android MP3 player.

Okay, that sounds pretty terrible I know but it is certainly worth it.  The result gave me a way to constantly play something in the background while working, driving, exercising, or even sleeping.  The background music was set to a lower level than the text so it provided some noise cancellation without being overly distracting.  The music I picked was also Christmas music which further set the mood/tone for maximizing the auditory learning experience.

I obviously cannot use or share the script that we are actively in production on but I can provide you with a similar example.  If you think this is interesting let me know and I can kick around developing it into a more usable one-stop application.  Of course you can easily do all of this with a variety of available tools and a little bit of effort on your part.