Task 3: Voice to Text
This is the story of how I discovered my love of escape rooms by celebrating a friend’s birthday about ten years ago. I used Speechnotes and a Blue Yeti microphone for this dictation.
Back when I was in grade 10 a very good friend of mine from school invited me to come celebrate his birthday with him by doing what was called an escape room at the time I had no idea what those words meant although I had some idea based on the word Escape we arrived together and there were a few other people in attendance who would be doing this escape room with us my friend’s cousins Uncle father and a few of our mutual friends were there and all of us would be going in together I remember standing in a pitch dark room with the game master explaining the story to us I don’t remember all the details but I believe it had something to do with some kind of zombie invasion and we were hiding in a military base and had to find our way out the back so the zombies couldn’t get us I am very likely wrong and trying to remember that story but it was something along those lines I remember this escape room had multiple rooms in it so there would be a few puzzles in the first room and then once you solved enough of them you could unlock the second room and you could go back and forth but there wasn’t really any connection and there were no puzzles that required us to go between the rooms but it did add to the immersion one thing I remember in particular was this one puzzle where we needed to get a clue but to get the clue we had to count a certain amount of objects in the room for example one of the digits to the code would correspond to how many hidden Band-Aids can you the room and the reason I remember this moment is because it really killed the immersion for me personally we went from solving puzzles to finding hidden objects and of course at the time with this being my first escape room I thought is this really what all Escape rooms are like but we we went through anyways I don’t believe we ended up finishing the escape room because of some of those hidden objects that were actually very difficult to find but ironically enough after that moment and all the way until now I have never lost my love for escape rooms and I will be always be grateful for my friend who invited me because otherwise I would never have discovered my love for escape rooms ever since that day which I think was almost 10 years ago I have done over 20 maybe closer to 30 escape rooms with various family members and friends and I have really enjoyed it actually it is a birthday tradition of mine to do a different escape room every year however one big worry I have is that the escape room business is dying in Vancouver some of the Escape rooms I did in the past have permanently closed down which is very unfortunate because I think it’s such a unique opportunity to get to go into a handcrafted set with well thought out puzzles in mind and depending on the theme that you pick it really feels like you’re a scientist trying to find a cure for a virus or you’re a spy in a museum trying to get some hidden artifact and I feel like it’s very hard to have that immersion in real life often we find ourselves watching movies and playing video games for those experiences and virtual reality or augmented reality I guess is the closest we’ve gotten to Total immersion in other fictional or nonfictional worlds however Escape rooms put you right into the room and you just go and I think there’s something so much fun about that I can’t wait to do more
Text Analysis:
The biggest visual difference between this text and a written or typed text was the missing punctuation. Without any commas, periods, or question marks, the recollection of my first escape room transformed into the longest run-on sentence I had ever uttered. Throughout the dictation there were some words that were capitalized, seemingly at random, such as “Escape,” “Uncle,” and “Total.” However, the proper nouns “Vancouver” and “Band-Aids” were properly classified as such and capitalized. Almost every word I said was properly transcribed – there was one instance where I was describing a search for hidden Band-Aids in a room for a code, but the words “find in” were missing so the sentence became “how many hidden Band-Aids can you the room.” There was also a case of the word “we” occurring consecutively, but this was because I repeated it while in thought, so this was therefore not a mistake.
The lack of punctuation creates a huge issue as it removes any evidence of how my thoughts are organized. Readers are not able to easily visualize when one idea ends and another begins. Another consequence is that my story is stripped of all emotion, reducing questions into statements and, ultimately, my words clumped into a wall of text that resembles the ramblings of a graduate student.
If this were scripted instead, there would have been a more decisive choice in my words much like how I am deciding on what words to use right now. I could have chosen a direction for the story to go in and defined a clear ending point. There would be no missing or unnecessarily repeated words. Perhaps I could even have described the feeling of why puzzle solving resonates with me so deeply. But at the end of the day, as long as the method in which the text is captured and produced remains the same, the wall of text will persevere despite having a script. The punctuation will continue to be undetected by the speech dictation software.
When we read something, we insert our own “voice” in place of the author’s. We fill in the context that text alone cannot provide – intonation, cadence, emphasis, and so much more. We read in a way that sounds right to us but may sound different to someone else. Written stories have the benefit of time, while oral storytelling occurs in the moment. Authors can spend weeks, months, or even years producing a written work but we will never know of or see every draft and revision. Only the final products with their permanent, unchanging words are revealed to us.
Oral storytelling at its core, devoid of any writing, is an art all on its own and is indescribable to us as members of a literate culture surrounded by literacy. As mentioned in Walter Ong’s book, Orality and Literacy, if we were to hear a story delivered by someone from a primary oral society, our brains would immediately convert the sounds to text so we could make sense of it. However, telling a story without words is prone to minor changes as it is passed from generation to generation, much like the game Telephone – though perhaps the focus of oral storytelling is not so much on the details, but the experience.
