Unusual Uses for Digital Voice Recorders

Digital voice recorders boast many useful applications, but some out-of-the-box thinkers use them for things beyond dictation or recording meetings or lectures. There's a fun side to these practical devices, as you'll see in these unusual examples.

Create an Audio Diary
Don't have time to write long diary entries, or have illegible handwriting? Use a digital voice recorder to dictate audio diary entries on the go. You'll be able to download them to your computer and index them or burn them to CD or an external drive for long-term storage. With audio diaries, not only can you see your thoughts but you can actually hear your voice as you speak them, getting valuable inflections and emotion that you'd miss in writing. You can also use voice-recognition software to transcribe your recordings into written words.

Improve Your Singing
You can't hear yourself sing, but you can use a digital voice recorder to record your singing, and then play it back to hear whether you're right on pitch or need to make some vocal improvements. You can also use digital voice recorders to record music lessons and play them back at your convenience to review something the instructor said. You can even use a recorder to make an auditory record of your musical improvement, documenting early efforts and comparing your improvement over time. You should invest in a high-quality recorder for music, as some don't have the fidelity to reliably reproduce sounds outside of the vocal range.

If acting's your thing, you can use a recorder to learn your lines. Simply record your cues and leave enough time for your lines. Standup comics often use digital recorders to document their performances, which helps to save those spur-of-the-moment jokes and gauge how well the audience reacts to material.

Create Memories
You can record your children or grandchildren and transfer the files to your computer to save for future playback. You can use these audio files later to create touching montages or simply embarrass your erstwhile progeny; especially if you catch them singing. Using digital voice recorders to capture your young kids and grandkids as they grow up is a unique way to create precious memories.

Explore the Spirit World
With the increasing popularity of ghost-hunting television shows, the interest in paranormal investigation is growing. Paranormal investigators actually use digital voice recorders to capture evidence of otherworldly events. Whether capturing unexplainable auditory phenomena or the elusive Electronic Voice Phenomena, digital voice recorders preserve evidence that investigators can later analyze and use to validate the existence of paranormal activity.

Spice up a Halloween Party
Need to disguise your voice or want to create spooky sound clips? You can use digital voice recorders to record yourself saying something normally, and then download the audio files to your computer. From there, you can utilize voice-altering software to change the sound of your voice to create spooky sound clips or even make yourself sound like someone else entirely.