Show HN: 4164 Horse_ebooks tweets read by 17 Festival speakers

1 point

3 years ago

Horse_ebooks 2010-2013 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_ebooks ) was an early Twitter account operated by Russian webmaster Alexei Kouznetsov who operated a network of such accounts to message and broadcast affiliate-seeded links for 'ClickBank'. The accounts did not engage in predatory behavior and stayed under Twitter's RADAR. To draw traffic from Internet searches Kouznetsov curated a database of text snippets culled from other sources. These were not conversations or statements, they were often fragments, at times passionate but never obscene. Always short and every 2 hours on average. Lacking in context, often surreal.

Horse_ebooks became a phenomenon of the non-sequitir and had as many as 200,000 followers, and has inspired performance art as a Zeitgeist of modern times.

I wanted to create more of a Horse_ebooks 'seminar' than an audiobook, and CMU Festival offered 17 diverse useable voices. Perl scripts selected from a shuffled list of speakers at random, and a second pass with command line 'ecasound' assigned one of 5 stereo field positions to them. A batch for correcting EQ of one voice, and concatenation with ffmpeg. Final EQ and room acoustics in Audacity. The reading is 4h 11m. A list in order read is here: https://archive.org/download/horse-ebooks-audiobook/Horse_eb...