kottke.org posts about audio
Before YouTube and Google Video came along, video on the web often suffered from taking too many cues from the production values of traditional media. Even in the early days of YouTube, a typical video made by someone for an audience was like a mini-movie: 15 seconds of titles, followed by 10 seconds of the actual content of the video, and then 10 seconds of closing credits. Eventually, many people came to realize that all that crap at the beginning and end was unecessary…it’s OK not to have a 40 second video if you only have 10 seconds of something to say. Ze Frank took this notion to the extreme; he often launches right into something at the beginning, eschews transitions, and he just stops at the end. If an episode of The Show is 2 minutes long, it’s because he has 2 minutes of something to say.
Podcasters have been slower to break out of the mold provided by talk radio. The playing of music before segments and as transitions between segments makes some sense on the radio, where it’s used in some cases to fill airtime. But for podcasts, there’s no need to fill airtime with anything but content. 30 seconds of music before the actual podcast begins is the audio equivalent of Flash splash pages on web sites. For instance, the Diggnation podcast has 10 seconds of ads and 30 seconds of theme music before the hosts start talking and even then it’s more than a minute before there’s any new information. It’s important to set expectations and the mood (also know as branding), but it’s possible to do that in a much more economical way — something more akin to the Windows startup sound + “hi this is [name] from [name of show] and let’s get started” — or at other times during the podcast.
Interestingly, when I was looking around for examples of this wasted airtime, the folks making the most economical use of the listener’s time in producing podcasts were from the mainstream media. That is, the people innovating on the form are not the same as those who are innovating on production. Perhaps in an attempt to seem more credible, native podcasters have embraced more traditional forms while those with experience producing audio content for other media are more free to tailor their content to the new medium.
The International Dialects of English Archive has a ton of mp3 files of people speaking English from all over the world. “All recordings are in English, are of native speakers, and you will find both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages.”
Audio versions of dozens of New Yorker articles. Perfect for the long morning commute (if I had a long morning commute). The same site also has audio versions of several other publications, including Wired, The Atlantic Monthly, and Scientific American. What a great resource. (via rw)
Update: Get them all at once, instructions here.
NPR report on The Elder Wisdom Circle, a group of seniors who use the combined wisdom of their ages to help people who write in with questions. What a nice idea. I love the response to the first letter…”if she really was serious about you, boy, oh boy, she would be running to the court to get a separation and divorce”. Here’s the EWC web site. (thx, jeff)
How do audiobook producers deal with things like footnotes, photos, interesting punctuation, and the like? “The voice manipulation, for which audiobook producer John Runnette used a ‘phone filter’ — a voice-through-the-receiver effect used in radio dramas — was an attempt to aurally convey Mr. Wallace’s discursive, densely footnoted prose.” Includes sample audio with examples. (thx, bill)
The story of the Hindenburg disaster. Amazingly, 2/3 of the zeppelin’s passengers survived the crash. Here’s an audio recording of the famous Herbert Morrison radio broadcast (“oh, the humanity”) of the disaster.
Since recording the walk signal sounds in Hong Kong, I’ve been a bit slack in documenting the sounds as I travel around Asia (because frankly the iPod is one more thing I don’t want to lug around with me all day). Stuff I’ve missed:
- Bangkok river taxis are manned by two people, the driver and the guy with the whistle. When the boat nears the dock, the whistle guy — who stands at the back of the long boat — sounds a short burst to signal to the driver to cut the engine. Then a few other bursts to help the driver back into the dock in such a way that a gentle reverse keeps the boat close enough to the dock so that passengers can get on and off. A final whistle signals that everyone is on/off and the driver can go. It’s a neat system, if a little ear-piercing if you’re standing near the back of the boat.
- The cover band at Saigon Saigon, the bar on the 9th floor of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. The woman was almost screeching during a rendition of Alanis Morissette’s You Learn. (Re: the bar…the view is awesome, but I thought the bar was really cheesy, which is unfortunate for such a great location.)
- When trucks back up here, they don’t annoyingly go “beep beep beep” like they do in the US. Instead, they play music; it’s like backing-up ring tones. The first one we heard played Happy Birthday, the rear of a delivery truck belted out It’s a Small World After All, and there was one yesterday afternoon that played some classical tune I couldn’t place.
In lieu of hearing any of those things, check out Quiet American’s field recordings from Vietnam. (via np)
The streets of Hong Kong can be a hectic place, but one of the first things you notice is that the pedestrian street crossing signals have a very clear audio signal (one would assume, for the blind and/or very nearsighted). Some American signals has audio as well, but very few, they’re not very loud, and they generally kind of lacking. Anyway, I made an audio recording of the signals (30 sec, 240 KB mp3). The sound is kind of blown out (it’s my first experiment with the iTalk) and the signal doesn’t sound that loud IRL, but you get the gist.
Tom Coates fills us in on the Annotatable Audio project he worked on at the BBC. Basically, you select a timed section of an audio file (music, newscast, etc.) and then you write a little something about it, Wikipedia-style.
Over on the Odeo blog, Ev talks about a potentially different type of podcasting, casual content creation:
But, personally, I’m much more of a casual content creator, especially in this realm. The other night, I sent a two-minute podcast to my girlfriend, who was out of town, and got a seven-second “podcast” back that I now keep on my iPod just because it makes me smile. I sent an “audio memo” to my team a while back for something that was much easier to say than type, and I think they actually listened.
A blogging analogue would be Instapundit or Boing Boing (published, broadcast) versus a private LiveJournal[1] (shared, narrowcast). It’s like making a phone call without the expectation of synchronous communication…it’s all voicemail. I thought about doing this the other day when I needed to respond to an email with a lengthy reply. In that particular instance, I ended up sending an email instead because it was the type of thing that might have been forwarded to someone else for comment and returned, etc. But I can see myself using audio like this in the future.
[1] Integrated podcasting tools within LiveJournal would be huge, methinks.
Frans de Waal on low frequency audio as a social instrument: “The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King. The clearest adjustment to King’s voice, indicating lack of confidence, came from former Vice President Dan Quayle.” (via mr)
An index of mp3s of old TV theme songs. Would-be DJs take note: a friend of mine was DJing a party back in college and he threw on the Knight Rider theme song and people went bonkers. (via rw)
Update: Sound America also has an extensive collection of TV themes in WAV format. (thx josh)
John Gruber has a great bullet-point roundup of the Apple announcements today…mostly stuff that you won’t hear about in the tech press. (If you’re living in a shack, Apple announced video iPods, new iTunes, downloadable TV programs, new iMacs, etc. today.)
IT Conversations will be streaming presentations from PopTech 2005 live…Windows Media Player required. :( From Etech to the AIGA Design Conference to Web Essentials 05, more and more conferences letting those of us who can’t attend listen in anyway.
The NY Times Magazine has launched The Funny Pages, their comics+ section. PDFs of the comics are available online…here’s the first Chris Ware strip. They’re also podcasting and the first episode is an interview with Ware by John Hodgman, assisted by organist and radio-man Jonathan Coulton.
How to record a podcast using GarageBand. Using GB like this is overkill, but there it is anyway.
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