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Afternoon todo list -
3pm: Listen to Radiolab’s season premiere about Choice live on WNYC or online.
4pm: After the show’s over, head on over to The Morning News for their inaugural TMN Talk, a live text chat with Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. The chat will begin here at 4pm.
This radio program made the rounds last week, but I finally got caught up this weekend so I’ll add my voice to the chorus urging you to listen to This American Life’s episode on the financial crisis, Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Paired with The Giant Pool of Money from back in May, this is an excellent overview of what’s going on in the financial markets right now. The hosts of the two shows are also doing a daily blog/podcast thing at Planet Money In addition, the last half of this week’s TAL concerns the political angle of the financial mess. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.
The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.
Another great-but-disturbing episode of This American Life: The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar.
Host Ira Glass plays the song “Mystery of the Dunbar’s Child” by Richard “Rabbit” Brown. It describes Bobby Dunbar’s disappearance and recovery and the trial of his kidnapper, all of which was front page news from 1912 to 1914. Almost a century after it happened, Bobby Dunbar’s granddaughter, Margaret Dunbar Cutright, was looking into her grandfather’s disappearance and found that the truth was actually more interesting than the legend. And a lot more troubling.
This one’s not as good as the switched at birth episode (which was amazing) but is still well worth a listen. (All this also reminds me a bit of Don Draper’s pre-Sterling Cooper life.)
I just finished listening to this amazing episode of This American Life about two babies who were switched at birth and didn’t find out FOR MORE THAN FORTY YEARS even though one of the mothers knew all along.
On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families. One of the mothers realized the mistake but chose to keep quiet. Until the day, more than 40 years later, when she decided to tell both daughters what happened. How the truth changed two families’ lives — and how it didn’t.
The worst part about the whole thing is that the mother that knew, Mrs. Miller, always treated her non-biological daughter differently, like she wasn’t really a full part of the family. The Millers sound like awful people.
I linked to Hands on a Hard Body yesterday. If you need a little extra prodding to watch it, check out the first segment of this old episode of This American Life.
We hear a long interview with Benny Perkins, who won the truck one year and was back the year they made their film to try to win again. He says a contest like this is not easy money. You slowly go crazy from sleep deprivation.
RealScoop’s software analyzes statements made by public figures in audio or video and plots the results on a scale of believability that runs from believable to highly questionable.
RealScoop uses advanced emotion-based voice analysis technology to rate the believability of people’s statements.
For instance, here’s Michael Vick apologizing for holding dog fights, Eliot Spitzer resigning the governorship of NY, and Bill Clinton’s infamous “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” statement. The Clinton audio and associated metering is really pretty good…it spikes in all the right places. (thx, john)
This a bit old but the dude that runs the stylish cameron i/o site (who is coincidentially named Cameron) built a trumpet-like bell for the iPhone out of a used toilet paper tube.
I wanted to listen to my music in the shower but the iPhone’s speaker would get lost in the noise from the shower. So I directed the iPhone’s audio straight towards me. Worked pretty well. Just ask my neighbors.
The recent discovery of a phonautogram by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville may be the earliest recording of sound in the world, predating that of Thomas Edison by almost 20 years.
Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”
Some cultures use whistling languages to communicate when regular speech becomes ineffective over large distances. From Wikipedia:
Whistled languages are normally found in locations with difficult mountainous terrain, slow or difficult communication, low population density and/or scattered settlements, and other isolating features such as shepherding and cultivation of hillsides. The main advantage of whistling speech is that it allows the speaker to cover much larger distances (typically 1 - 2 km but up to 5 km) than ordinary speech, without the strain (and lesser range) of shouting. The long range of whistling is enhanced by the terrain found in areas where whistled languages are used.
Here’s an mp3 of two men communicating via whistling. It sounds very much like R2-D2.
Quick hitter from Radiolab as a preview of the new season: composer David Lang talks about a piece of music he made for a morgue. Appropriate listening for the crappy rainy day here in NYC. Hopefully the weather will be better for Radiolab’s live premiere of their fourth season on Feb 21 at the Angelika.
Speaking of podcasts, The New Yorker has a couple of interesting ones on iTunes: readings from the Fiction section and from the weekly Comment essay in Talk of the Town.
New York Works is an audio portrait of a vanishing city. From a knife sharpener who still makes house calls to one of Brooklyn’s last commercial fisherman, New York Works tells the stories of those who keep the city’s past alive.
(thx, paolo)
I’ve gotten totally re-obsessed with Kathy Acker, the East Village writer who died in 1997. It started with this recording of Acker reading a poem [Warning: audio, 2 minutes, 28 seconds, and not really safe for work!] that was released in 1980 on the LP “Sugar, Alcohol & Meat” by Giorno Poetry Systems and recently digitized by UbuWeb. Her New York accent is one that has largely disappeared since; she sounds amazing. Then I found this, which is an incredibly long mp3, the first 3/4s of which is a Michael Brownstein reading. The end, though, is a monologue which then becomes a stageplay by Acker about a woman, her suicide, her grandmother, and her psychiatrist. It is absolutely not safe for work, what with its endless use of a certain word for ladyparts that goes over well in Scotland but not at all (yet!) in the U.S.
The Sound of Young America’s Jesse Thorn interviews Wendell Pierce and Andre Royo, who play The Bunk and Bubbles on The Wire. (thx, jesse)
Barnes & Noble’s Media section is filling out nicely with audio and video interviews, readings, and conversations with a wide range of interesting authors.
Radio interview with Felicia Pearson, who plays Snoop on The Wire. It’s apparent from the interview that she doesn’t so much act in The Wire as play herself. “I have patience.” (thx, adam)
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation? Someone did a bit of audio analysis and posted their findings as a video. (via avenues)
Ten incredible sound recordings, including those of a castrato (a man who was forcibly castrated so that he would retain his boyish soprano), the first recorded human voice from 1878, and the last 30 minutes of audio from the Jonestown Massacre.
Influential Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni listens to the sounds of Manhattan waking up in the morning. “The sheets of metal. A short clatter, like gunfire. A train passes, perhaps the elevated. A peal, prolonged, and then the siren, abrupt. Gone. The sounds change in a moment, they arise and die again immediately. The hum reasserts itself, advancing like a camouflaged army, approaches, closes in, on the alert, ready to take over completely.” The hum reasserts. I hear that one all the time as traffic ebbs and flows outside our apartment.
Speaking of George Saunders, KQED has audio of him reading a selection from The Braindead Megaphone.
These audio clips from the World Livestock Auctioneer Championships are fun to listen to. The newest ones have the best audio quality. (thx, mlarson)
FindSounds is a search engine for sounds. Here’s a collection of bee sounds. Bzzzz….
A friend of mine who works at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln emailed to let me know that they’ve posted both audio and video of a talk that Chris Ware gave at the school last week. If you’re short on time, the real meat of the video starts around 18:30 when Ware starts a slideshow that delves into his process. In addition to his series of Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker covers from last year, he also talks about some of his other work, including Rusty Brown and the strip he did for the NY Times Magazine.
Quick little article on Bernie Krause, who is compiling a database of animal sounds from habitats around the world. I heard Krause speak at the first Foo Camp and his was one of the most interesting talks I’ve heard at a conference. “Krause noticed that birds who settled in compromised habitats — logged-over second-growth forests, for instance — encountered unexpected vocal competitors from other species and found their mating songs masked. Warblers that failed to find unoccupied [audio] bandwidth failed to breed, Krause observed, eventually convincing him of the validity of his niche hypothesis, the contention that animals evolve to fill vocal niches to best be heard by potential mates.” (via tim o’reilly)
Reagrding the 70-hour unabridged War and Peace audiobook I posted about back in December, the Washington Post has a short profile of the audiobook’s reader, Neville Jason. “But if the world has ever been ready for nearly three straight days of recorded Tolstoy it’s ready now. A few years ago, publishers had to beg retailers to stock audiobooks longer than three CDs. Now, that’s considered an ear snack. Unabridged is king. And abridged isn’t just on the wane. It’s basically stigmatized.” (thx, mr. d)
Long audio interview with Michael Lewis by economist Russ Roberts on “the hidden economics of baseball and football”. “Michael Lewis talks about the economics of sports — the financial and decision-making side of baseball and football — using the insights from his bestselling books on baseball and football: Moneyball and The Blind Side. Along the way he discusses the implications of Moneyball for the movie business and other industries, the peculiar ways that Moneyball influenced the strategies of baseball teams, the corruption of college football, and the challenge and tragedy of kids who live on the streets with little education or prospects for success.”
Long but great NPR interview with Ed Burns, writer and producer of The Wire. We just finished season 4 last night and it took the stuffing right out of me. I haven’t been this depressed for months. (thx to the several people who recommended this)
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.
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