Poetry Videos

I watched the River Out of the Land of Darkness. Most impressed with your literary skill and dictation. Good job.

Thanks. But I can't really take any credit for the dictation part. I'm using ElevenLabs Generative AI Text to Speech to produce the reading voice. My own voice might be reasonably OK for poetry reading, but I couldn't get the last vestiges of a Finnish accent out of it if I tried.

Let's face it, you don't always have the focus and energy to read poems as pure text. And even if you do, adding the full audiovisual dimension can still enhance the experience. So I thought perhaps it would be good to have a thread where everyone can post links to videos that contain poetry read aloud, etc.

This will also solve my dilemma of wanting to post the poetry videos that I started to make without reviving every single one of my old poem threads. I plan to post them here in one thread. But just to emphasize, I don't intend this to become just a thread for my poems. Everyone can and shoud post whatever they want to share.

I'll start by posting two of my most recent poetry videos (older ones converted to video format).

Your poetry videos are awesome, Chris! Are there any free programs to change text to speech? I have been looking...

ElevenLabs (the one I use) is free for very limited usage (something like 1000 characters per day) even without registration. Then there's some fixed number of characters (perhaps 10000) that can be used with free registration. Also they give 30000 characters per month for a small monthly fee, and they currently have a "first month for $1" offer, so you can get quite far even by free and almost-free options.

Thank you! I did go to that site after you first mentioned it, but even with "free" limited use they ask for a credit card number, which I do not want to give for security reasons. I tried another but they recorded only maybe five secons LOL. And a third one creates a TTS audio, and I do not know what that is. I tried downloading it and playing it back and it was just noise .. Still, making something like these videos as you have done appeals to me, and I did quite a bit on that site that creates the TTS files, entering some of my poems, getting the punctuation just so, changing word spellings so the pronunciation would be to my liking etc... If I could go farther with some other program that is truly free and requires no registration, that would be awesome! Any other suggestions?

Another one again.

And another one. Had to switch to a different reader's voice for this one. The deep male voice would have sounded too odd here.

Here's a new one again.

Here's a new one again.

Let's face it, you don't always have the focus and energy to read poems as pure text. And even if you do, adding the full audiovisual dimension can still enhance the experience. So I thought perhaps it would be good to have a thread where everyone can post links to videos that contain poetry read aloud, etc.

This will also solve my dilemma of wanting to post the poetry videos that I started to make without reviving every single one of my old poem threads. I plan to post them here in one thread. But just to emphasize, I don't intend this to become just a thread for my poems. Everyone can and shoud post whatever they want to share.

I'll start by posting two of my most recent poetry videos (older ones converted to video format).