Metro voice update

My guess of 500 contest entries was insufficiently wild.

From early Friday:

[WVEC/AP] By Thursday, the agency already had received more than 550 audio tapes and CDs. But on Friday alone, 413 more poured in by the afternoon.

...So far, the judges like the sound of many of the tapes they've already listened to.

"They were pleasantly surprised that so many were so good," said Lisa Farbstein, another Metro spokeswoman.

Smith said some people were disqualified because they sent in their professional voiceover resume tapes, as opposed to reading the scripts Metro provided on its Web site. Others were scrapped because the person slurred their words, stuttered or mispronounced Grosvenor or L'Enfant Plaza.

They did throw in the hardest-to-say station names (Grosvenor, L'Enfant Plaza, Judiciary Square, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport). Good way to filter.

Then, from the end of the day Friday:

[WJLA/AP] The deadline has come and gone and here are the results. Metro got 1,259 entries for its announcement contest, with more than half of them arriving Friday.

Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein says from this morning through the 5 p.m. deadline, 682 CD's and tapes arrived at Metro's downtown offices.

Metro was hoping to narrow it down to ten finalists next week, but Farbstein says given the response, it might take a little longer.

Yeah, it might.

With that many entries, it will be hard enough to break into the top 100, let alone the top 10... At this point I would be happily stunned to make it. Ah well.

On WTOP's site they put up a collage of some entries (direct MP3 link); most of them sound pretty ordinary to me, but there are 1200+ others to beat.. oy.   Recording   1 comment(s)  

Half the drivers don't know how to say Grosvenor.
      ...posted by Andrew on January 25, 2006 1:11 PM

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