Janaki Jitchotvisut

Midwestern US "Newscaster", East Asian ESL, authoritative English announcer

It all started, as so many things do, with college radio. I was clever, I was funny (or so my friends told me; maybe they were lying to save my feelings and I never knew), and I had very specific ideas about what kind of music I wanted to play. "Sure," the program director said. "Just as long as you play at least 5 songs off our rotation during your show." Since each show was 3 hours long, I thought this wouldn't be a problem at all. It wasn't. We were supposed to have a much broader reach as a station than we ended up actually having; our terrestrial signal wasn't very strong, but we had our station broadcasting live on the internet back in 1999, when this was a much newer and more exciting thing than it is now. The signal was patchy at best, but loyal friends and fans listened. I didn't always get it right, but I tried...and I had fun. And even when I didn't get it right (I was, after all, a college kid and responsible for my own material), people still told me I had a great voice. Throughout my life, I've also sung. As a child, I was involved in various choirs and music groups and courses; my grade school was fairly unique in that it had a very active early music program, so while other kids were wrestling with drum kits and clarinets, I was learning how to play a sackbut, a harpsichord, and how to sing in Latin and very archaic German. I've also always had an interest in languages, and have an ear for them. I took Spanish for many years, and can speak it fairly well (although I understand better than I speak). Pronunciation of Spanish writing is no problem, although my accent when speaking Spanish is probably more gringo tinged with Mexican than anything. I also began to study Japanese, and have been involved with a band in which I perform almost exclusively in Japanese as well. Most recently, in addition to band work, I've been producing Overcasts for a company called Overcast Media. If you're unfamiliar with the company and what they do, you might guess it's something like a Podcast, and you'd be partially right. They bill themselves as "DVD-style commentary for your favorite media." Another tagline of theirs is, "the audience is participating." Their software allows users to create commentary tracks (along with text pop-ups and hyperlinks to information online that a creator wants to share) for any digital video they wish. Then, when a viewer wants to watch someone's Overcast, they simply download the Overcast and their software will sync it up with the digital video already on the viewer's computer. It works with videos from Amazon Unbox, BitTorrent, and more digital media providers still to come; I believe it can also sync up with plain old DVDs if the viewer has a DVD-ROM drive in their computer. It's revolutionary stuff, and lately I've been doing a commentary series on Top Chef Chicago. As a lifelong Chicago native and personal chef who's been to culinary school, it seemed only natural. I also did an episode of Project Runway for them as well; you can check these out by going here: http://beta.overcastmedia.com/author_info.php?id_author=1137 and also here: http://beta.overcastmedia.com/overcast_info.php?id=318 Another thing of which I'm rather proud was working with Librivox, specifically recording a chapter of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Part of my training is listed above; I've had a lot of music training throughout grammar and high schools, and have continued independent study as well. I can read music. My media production experience has encompassed doing a college radio show for over a year for which I was solely responsible for its content, and for which I also read a predetermined number of news stories and weather from the AP wire every hour on the hour over any music bed I chose to use. I also took several audio engineering courses in college, although at the time we were still using reel-to-reel tape and doing manual cutting and splicing. Since that time, I've done some work with ProTools and Audacity for band-related and personal music projects, as well as some voice work such as the Overcasts mentioned above, and for Librivox. Various microphones including Shure SM-57s and 58s and several EVs, ProTools and a PC with a ton of space and power to operate it, various soundboards and effects processors with which to tweak inputs. I'm capable of reading written Spanish convincingly---provided you're not looking for a Catalan accent or something similar. Can also read and pronounce German with authority, and can read and speak Japanese with some level of demonstrable competence, although I am not a native speaker of it. I've been known to offer moral support and merch table-staffing services to the fine folks at Voices For,of which two of my bandmates are also members. In addition, I like to read aloud. A lot. It's lucky for me I have friends and family who like to hear me read aloud, or else I'm fairly certain this would get very old very quickly. :)