Sight Into Sound reads newspapers, magazines or custom books and manuals for the blind....
Mike Marshall sets up to do a recorded radio show called “Senior Notes” at Sight Into Sound on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023 in Houston. The organization started in 1968 as Taping for the Blind, a non-profit group that had trained volunteers read the newspaper each morning, with reel-to-reel tape recorders, it has ridden wave after wave of technological change.
Visitors to its website at sightintosound.org can hear its content live, or go to an archives page to listen to its shows any time. Sight Into Sound also does custom reading — send them a book, a magazine, a manual, even classroom material, and one of 80-plus volunteers will read it and generate a digital audio file, for free.
In fact, Sight Into Sound’s recordings show up in ways that not even Martinez nor executive director Kari Musgrove know about. For example, the station can be heard via Radio Garden, a free website and smartphone app that uses a Google Earth-style display to map radio stations all over the world. Zoom down to Houston on its onscreen globe, and you’ll find Sight Into Sound available to stream, among 32 other Houston stations. Neither Musgrove nor Martinez were aware it was available that way.
That changed in the late 1970s when Taping for the Blind got access to an FM frequency adjacent to that of public radio station KUHF. One of the benefits of the then-nascent FM radio was that stations had subcarrier frequencies, and Taping for the Blind’s content — both recorded and live — could be broadcast over KUHF’s sideband.
Eventually, the radios were discontinued as the use of smart speakers from Amazon, Google and Apple proliferated. Martinez said most people listen via the web or through smart speakers, where a simple voice command can bring up the Sight Into Sound stream. The service can still be heard on KUHT-TV’s Channel 8.5 on digital TVs.
The pandemic also ended some longstanding traditions. The live, two-hour, morning reading of the Houston Chronicle ended, replaced with a recorded version that doesn’t air until noon. Now, Bob Bartlett listens to the paper with his lunch rather than his morning coffee. Sight Into Sound is allowed to read copyrighted material under a section of the copyright law known as the Chafee Amendment.
“They told me I did a really good job,” Wolf said in his trademark baritone. “They said they needed someone to read the Chronicle live, twice a week, and could I do that? I said that would not be a problem.” Many of the volunteers spend time doing the custom reads, which are often books. Martinez said they occasionally get some unusual requests, ranging from textbooks to Sunday school material to erotica.
Musgrove said she’s not concerned that AI will replace her corps of readers, saying that the listeners can tell the difference.
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