I was researching ways to create my own audiobook of PAST LIFE JOURNEYING and BookBaby pitched me a solution utilizing artificial intelligence for under $600! (It would cost thousands to have a voice actor read the book.) They referred me to a company called Speechki whose website doesn’t work with Apple’s Safari. It couldn’t load the AI reader samples, not giving me confidence in their technology.
But I was inspired by reading D. W. Pasulka’s Encounters which I’ve been anticipating since her American Cosmic came out in 2018. Pasulka is a professor in religious studies from UNC Wilmington who shook up the UFO community when she applied her scholarly background to the UFO/UAP phenomenon. Pasulka narrates her new book, which is refreshing after hearing the narrator mispronounce words and names in the previous book.
Pasulka is referring to the oral transmission of knowledge that she encountered in her religious studies and again in the UFO field:
…some of the scientists I’d interviewed for my previous research indicated that much of UFO data is transmitted through an oral tradition and not written down. Tyler had referenced a term that he indicated was in use among the circles of scientists in which he was involved, “pencil’s up.” It meant that none of the information should be written. This was to preserve its secrecy, but also to maintain the data in the bodies and minds of those who received it, instead of in a computer or phone.*
Pasulka, D. W.. Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I wondered if this quote from a pseudonymous contributor in chapter 7, “Simone,” may have been the motivator to read her own book:
Simone also spoke to me about writing and speaking. She preferred the latter because she said that sound and voices hold a lot more information than writing. She also said that some people’s voices work cryptographically. ‘Your voice unlocks certain information, not dissimilar to how we replicate cryptographic multisignature permissions.’
(I had to look up cryptographic multisignatures: “Multisig, also called multisignature, is the requirement for a transaction to have two or more signatures before it can be executed. Multisig provides more security than single-signature transactions.”
And according to Wikipedia, cryptography is: “Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages.)
Suffice it to say that the human voice, especially that of the author, carries information that a narrator can not convey. It makes me wonder how we will be processing auditory information in the future when tech companies use AI to cut costs and all spoken word audio can be artificially created.
*Pasulka, D. W.. Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.