The American Podcast Voice

https://i.imgur.com/ZVhvWog.png

xp dont make me take down the sign

I would pontificate upon the voices featured in podcasts qua podcasts but pretty much all of the podcasts I listen to are history podcasts presented by what I can only assume are well-read grad students whose oratorical skills are best described as 'existent'.

THE BAR IS GLASS

I talk sorta like this anyway. Never knew it until I was forced to watch video of myself teaching in grad school

I am so not surprised that treeship sounds like this tbh

I was disappointed when I figured it out. I was hoping I sounded tough, streetwise, with just a hint of my jersey roots. But alas

honestly, i probably sound more like a direct to consumer pharmaceutical ad than this post-Glass type

That’s a good one. Polished, elegant

And authoritative

I could only dream of sounding like a pharma advertisement

Polished glass eh

the years of having to record voice over for radio spots where the time duration had to be between 28-30 seconds or 56-60 seconds and the script was dictated by the people in sales such that sometimes we really were having to do the equivalent of rattling off all the potential side effects in as tightly enunciated a fashion as possible

basically, having to sing Bach and other German composers in choir was really good practice for radio voice over stuff

Like the terms and conditions at the end of a financials radio ad, basically?

A skill in itself

yes ... or car sales

Auctioneer-style rapid monotone should be the new voice of the 21st century. Flat, transactional, and traveling at the speed of information, not intonation

TH:

Narrator of a big budget investigative podcast pic.twitter.com/I25zlGzYSI
— cancela lansbury (@gossipbabies) September 26, 2019

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Sunday, February 21, 2021 7:24 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i knew what was coming and am still in tears laughing at this

flatness ... damn ... that was actually one of my problems in doing radio, because I was in New England and regionally there is a much flatter tonality to those accents than I have/had, so I was never the "most requested" person because I didn't sound like a native.

The chevy chase/dan ackroyd default pace

i actually used to edit dan ackroyd's voice overs for this series of radio promos the company I worked for produced. ... there was one month where he had a serious cold or allergies or something and it was really laborious

like, I don't know whether it's more unpleasant to have to listen to your own isolated slurpy mouth noises and sniffles while editing them all out ... or someone else's. The podcast people who leave in their slurpy mouth noises and sniffles and can't be bothered to edit them out ... this is like reason #1 I avoid podcasts.

That’s all some ppl are listening for

hahahahah

Misophonia crew turn elsewhere this is the wet mouth sound hour starring Slurpy Ted and Debbie Drool

this week on the wet mouth sound hour .... balls .... gargling ... what does it sound like when balls are _actually_ gargled?

Supercut of all the sniffles edited out that season as a subscriber only treat

My partner does a podcast and spends a LOT of time editing each episode afterward to ensure sniffs/clicks/pops/esses/ums are all smoothed out. It baffles me when people leave that shit in or put up a show that sounds like it was recorded on a boombox from 1982.

Americans love B's show, for some reason they go nuts for drawly australian accents and copious swears.

currently imagining a gimlet/npr podcast hosted by a sports radio knucklehead like mike francesa

lol

I edit a lot of the ums and awkward silences out of my podcast interviews, but not all of them — sometimes you want to preserve someone's thought-to-speech rhythm rather than doing the whole "get on with it" process. The thing I've realized by listening to almost 100 hours of myself talking to people is that I put a little extra sibilance in my esses, and I can't really get rid of it. I hope it's not too annoying, or at least less annoying than my conversational space-fillers ("yeah...yeah"), which I'm also editing out more often now.

I put a little extra sibilance in my esses, and I can't really get rid of it.

you actually can, and can make the edit sound natural, but it's a bit more time consuming and challenging than getting rid of slurps and sniffles, and maybe a little more challenging than a popped plosive, though, I can see why you would just leave it.

The solution I find is to place the mic directly inside the mouth, which is why they call the mouth nature's windscreen

I am so relieved to find this thread and to discover everyone else hates the faux-naif thing as much as I do.

Subgenres such as 'recap an entire tv series' can fit under one or more of these categories

Nothing annoys me more about this type of podcast than when guests come on who have never seen the show except for the one episode they will be recapping and they don't get it or ask a load of stupid questions. This was why I eventually stopped listening to the Gilmore Guys podcast. Well, that and the live episodes. I get that you have to make money, and having live episodes is a good way to do that, but do they have to be over an hour long? And not funny?

the only good podcast live episode was Hollywood Handbook at Comicon

I'm less bothered by the "faux-naif thing" than by the "faux off-the-cuff thing", where the presenters' banter is supposed to sound loose and extemporised and yet somehow comes across over-polished and pre-scripted

The "relentlessly gormless airhead who previously knew absolutely nothing" shtick is played out but I think it (originally) came from a good place, as a reaction to the smuggy punditry of the time

it can still be done well imo. like jad abumrad.

Live podcast episodes are a scourge

Idk, they're fun to GO to but not to listen to, is how I break it down to an extent.

I went to a few live tapings of Radio Dispatch, which doesn't happen anymore bc Molly got married & had kids and John now reports from idk where, but it would be a pretty small group and you could go out for drinks afterward with whoever was going, which was cool.

oh shit, i didn’t realize the american podcast voice was canceled https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/business/media/pj-vogt-reply-all.html

I tend to associate American podcast voice with varying degrees of mumbly California shift vowels and uptalk, though I guess there’s some vocal fry too for variety. My uncharitable cultural take is that it’s Americans with university educations who think of their way of speaking and world view as normal and correct. There’s a sort of presumption of “good” politics, that the past was a horrifying place but you and I, dear listener, are beyond that now. “Accent? I don’t even own an accent.”

Also, it has very little to do with what I hear on terrestrial American radio! It’s basically confined to some public radio shows and I guess college radio. Sports radio, right wing politics shouting, morning zoo, regular commercial music DJs, straight news programming—almost none of this is American podcast voice.

yeah, but there is the fact that some podcasts are actually public radio shows, or are hosted by people who have done public radio, or follow the public radio style, which is now the middle-brow professionally casual podcast style. Most podcasters don't actually employ this style afaict.

There possibly are a dozen or so podcasts that are not already radio shows, or produced by former public radio professionals, that model their voice on TAL/NPR. There are hundreds of thousands of American podcasts that don't; not using such a voice is a distinguishing factor of podcasts, rather than the reverse.

okay

The bar is open

Disagree that that is a distinguishing characteristic

Not taxonomically, sure. But measuring by weight.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/25/arts/podcast-voice-sound.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage