Psycho Proustians discussion

The timing is great! Just yesterday, some of us were discussing the possibility of creating a LARA version, to support people who want to read the original text but aren't that confident in French. We were thinking of starting with Un amour de Swann.

Psycho enough?

Ha, sounds like a good idea, Manny. All I can say is that Proust should be read in the original if at all possible. Keep us updated! ...but why not start with the beginning of Du Côté de Chez Swann ? ;)
Are you cherry-picking the juicy bits?

The reasoning was that many people find Combray boring (it is indeed very slow), and we should kick off with something that's got a clear story and is more or less self-contained.

But yes, there's also a good argument for starting at the beginning...

Manny wrote: "The reasoning was that many people find Combray boring (it is indeed very slow), and we should kick off with something that's got a clear story and is more or less self-contained.

But yes, there's..."
Traveller, thank you for inviting me to your group! That's interesting about Combray, Manny, and I did not realise that. It's my favourite; but then, I can see how people may find it dull. It lacks the sexy intrigues that come later, and also is less amusing in many ways.

Well, I'm also a fan of Combray! But alas, I think we're in the minority.

I'll see if we can produce a basic LARA version of chapter 1 - we can do audio quickly using a TTS engine. I'm curious to find out what Proust sounds like when read by a machine :)

T.D. wrote: .Traveller, thank you for inviting me to your group! "
Hi TD, it's very good to be engaging with you again after my long absence from GR. Great to see you here!

Okay, I have a first rough version of Combray, "Overture". It's posted here, access using Chrome or Firefox. IMHO the TTS voice works surprisingly well.

No translations yet, but they are easy to add if anyone feels like doing a few hours of cutting and pasting from the Gutenberg edition of Moncrieff...

Thank you, Traveller, and it is lovely to have you back. Manny, I do not know what LARA is but am going to have a look. This sounds interesting!

Manny wrote: "Okay, I have a first rough version of Combray, "Overture". It's posted here, access using Chrome or Firefox. IMHO the TTS voice works surprisingly well.

No translations yet, but they are easy to a..."

Hi Manny, hey, that's fantastic! I love that the words are so clearly enunciated that even I, as a beginner, can make out every word she says. It's also a bit slower than how Parisians rattle off their sentences, so that it's easy to follow. I think it's brilliant. So are you selling this LARA? I'd like to have one! (Though I'm a bit poor atmo.)

Thank you Traveller! LARA is a free open source project run by and for people who love to read literature in other languages. The TTS engine we've used for the voice is ReadSpeaker, I will pass on your kind remarks to them :)

Manny wrote: "Thank you Traveller! LARA is a free open source project run by and for people who love to read literature in other languages. The TTS engine we've used for the voice is ReadSpeaker, I will pass on ..."

That's good news, thank you, Manny! I have used other TTS software before, but this is a really nice one because it doesn't seem to sound as robotic as some of them can tend to be.

There's been a lot of progress in TTS technology the last few years. If you look at the LARA examples page you'll find links to several texts where we have both a TTS version and a human-recorded version - for French we have Le petit prince and Le bonheur. I'd be curious to hear whether you prefer the machines or the people! Not everyone agrees here :)

T.D. wrote: "Manny wrote: "The reasoning was that many people find Combray boring (it is indeed very slow), and we should kick off with something that's got a clear story and is more or less self-contained.

Bu..."

Tina, I am very pleased to see that you have joined. I told Traveller that I'd hope you'd join, but I worried that you might have had your share of Proust after having just read him at length. Welcome, welcome, I look forward to reading your comments!

Count me among those who do not find the Combray section boring. I myself had a "what the heck is going on here?" reaction the first time I read through it. Now that I'm re-reading it so many years later, and knowing what comes later, I can see all the amazing things Proust is doing, among them, showing how a French provincial will go to Paris and back. So anyone feeling frustrated by the beginning: it's a natural reaction. But stick with it, glean what hints from Proust you can as you go along, and you will definitely be rewarded by the end.

Manny, Welcome, and many, many thanks for bringing the LARA recordings to our group. It's an outstanding addition, and I will definitely be using it while reading the French along with the Scott Moncrieff translation - an education in itself. I agree with Traveller, the reading, the individual words, are easy to grasp.

Well, then, I guess it's time to side the Grateful Dead on my morning walks and bring along this lovely AI French person ("unit"?) instead lol.

Thank you Stephen, really happy to hear you like it! It's interesting that the TTS voice works so nicely with this text. In our experience, the great weakness of TTS voices is that they don't express affect well. I had not thought about this before in so many words, but Proust is naturally quite affectless. The narrator almost always seems to see the world at one remove - even when he experiences strong emotions, he describes them in an analytical way.

We'll do some more LARA Proust :)

That's very interesting what you say about affect. In a way, the LARA Proust is more about conveying the information of the novel, and in French, as opposed to us having the *story* read to us, with rhythm, emphases, voice modulation, etc. How to really convey Proust's voice though, because - like you said - it's mainly a detached voice: analytical, philosophical, reflective? No matter for me, because I'll be listening to it for the reinforcement in French of the written text - mainly for listening comprehension practice - as much as for the Proust.

Ha, I was hoping you were going to add more LARA Proust. I was going to request it, but I didn't want to come off sounding like I had just assigned you a ridiculous amount of homework lol. Thanks man, I really appreciate your work on this.

Yes, I'm doing the same as Stephen. My two problems with French at the moment, is that I still struggle with certain tenses. I was sort of still fine when it was still simple present tense, simple past tense, and simple future tense, but now my lessons have started incorporating continuous and "complex" (conditional, subjunctive, imperfect) tenses, and I'm feeling myself a bit confused between all these different possibilities. Like Stephen, I know from personal experience that reading a language is one of the best ways to get on top of the grammar. So for me, it's not so much about the vocab, which is of course also important but about the darn grammar especially if I myself have to construct a sentence.

So far so good. My second problem is that the French speak very fast and they kind of smear their words, which makes it harder for an unpracticed ear to figure out where a word begins and ends in the spoken language. So of course it figures to follow a spoken narrative with it's text equivalent.

Anyway, so I managed to find a French version read by a human - and guess what? I find it harder to follow the human version because of that exact thing that the French do - the smearing of the words. You can find the audio I mentioned here: https://archive.org/details/DuCtDeChe...

Stephen, you have an advantage here, because you were speaking French as a tiny tot. I hate you! :(

..so.. I think you have created a monster, Manny! We are now going to nag you for more LARA! But didn't you mention we can do it ourselves by copying and pasting?

(Well, at least I'm starting to think a bit more like a French person- on rereading my post, I see that I completely inadvertently used a reflexive in saying: "I'm feeling myself confused". Peut-être a good sign? ) :P

We will add more TTS-voice LARA Proust soon, it's easy!

Chadi and Someone are thinking of recording human-voice LARA material as well, perhaps starting with Un amour de Swann. If you want to hear them live, we just released Huis clos , where they play Estelle and Inès respectively.

I have posted an improved LARA version of Combray, as before here. We now have the full text, i.e. chapters I and II, with ReadSpeaker TTS audio. I've also added audio for the individual words. Click on any word, and you should both hear it and get a concordance on the right-hand side showing examples of where the word occurs in Combray. You need to use Chrome or Firefox.

I haven't had time to listen to it yet, but my guess is that chapter II, where there's a lot of dialogue, will not work as well in TTS as chapter I did.

In principle it's easy to include translations, but that requires several hours of copying and pasting from the online Moncrieff text. I won't have time to do it this week, but if anyone wants to assist it takes ten minutes to learn the technique... I can set things up!

Manny wrote: "I have posted an improved LARA version of Combray, as before here. We now have the full text, i.e. chapters I and II, with ReadSpeaker TTS audio. I've also added audio for the individual words. Cli..."

Thanks for this, Manny. That machine voice is quite hypnotic—it suits the text very well.

It works much better than I expected it to :)