My Voice?

remembering there is a sound library of my voice.....

When I was pregnant with Violet in 2013, I was asked to travel up to a small town in northern California to record my voice for a sound library. At the time, I had already done plenty of session work, video games, film scores, random projects where my job was to provide a sound or a tone for someone else’s imagination to run with. But this was different. I was so nervous because my voice has limitations, but sometimes I can get some interesting bits out of it.

For days, I sang for hours and hours. We tried to capture everything…tones, textures, wisps of air, brittle edges, pure vowels. I pushed until I was hoarse, sometimes with Violet kicking from the inside, sometimes with nausea rolling over me.

The hotel they put me in was another story altogether: very haunted. So haunted that I couldn’t sleep unless every light in the room was blazing. One night was so frightening that I called my dad and my brothers and had them pray with me over the phone just so I could get through it. I’m not going to put it into detail because it was dark enough to scare me for life. But anyway…

At the time, I thought of it all as work…strange, exhausting, beautiful work. But today, I stumbled on the library again and discovered something I hadn’t expected: a whole playlist of songs people have created with my voice.

It’s surreal! These ghostly little pieces of me from that time, stitched into someone else’s music. Violet was there, too, in every note.. That is so cool to me!

Xiaotian Shi - Reveries Of Her (song using my sound library)

link to the sound library -

(I didn’t have anything to do with the design or look of it hahah)

Kind of funny timing as I’m trying to remember how to sing….