Listening Post: Radio time
While I preside at ncpr.org over a medium that delivers text and images just as well as or even better than it delivers audio–I’ve always been a little dismayed that only 4-5% of page views at the site result in someone playing the audio of the feature. And not just because audio storytelling is the heart of our business. Listening is a very different way to experience the world–in some ways, a better one.
This is not media nostalgia talking, but brain science. For example, it’s very possible to skim text and get a fair level of reading comprehension. Or to read the intro then skip to the conclusions to get some sense. But you can’t skim audio. It happens in real-time and in sequence. Take it out of order, or sample it–you’ve got not much. It is not amenable to multi-tasking. For example, I can watch the TV and respond to email at the same time, and do a fair job at both. But I can’t listen to the news on the radio, and carry on a conversation with my wife at the same time. I can either forget to stop at the store, or totally miss the science segment.
Also, the audio of the story carries much more information than, say, the transcript of the story. The text is 26 letters, 10 digits, plus punctuation marks. The voices convey a sense of personality, emotions, flag the importance of statements, give clues to the veracity of the speaker. Text is informative in its content, audio is informative in both form and content.
Take a minute, take a breath, slow down, and listen. Everything will make a little more sense.
Tags: listeningpost
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That’s because most of the audio I heard while listening to the news on the radio.
As a long time listener and NCPR member, as well as one whose only option is dial-up, anytime I’ve missed a program or want to revisit it, my ONLY option is the transcript version as audio on dial-up is impossible.
can’t listen at work- all listening/downloading is blocked.
At home? buffering… buffering… SLIC is coming!
This is totally provocative, Dale. It’s a subject about which I’m often perplexed by and stimulated by as well. I can understand you’d be dismayed, and for several reasons including, but maybe not most importantly, the fact this website has *so* much going on — it’s a lot of work to maintain; posting so many new things every day — getting stuff to roll in then out properly.
There is something about “news”… While I get all my news from radio (and at least half of that is from ncpr’s air) with sporadic visits to web zines, I do *not* visit ncpr.org for the news content. I visit the blogs and, occasionally, the arts listings/postings. Generally, what I don’t rss, I don’t see.
Let’s say I did follow the site’s news stories… I am very much a skimmer (I’d read the story that same way I read web zines), and would avoid the audio for the very reason you explicate: “…you can’t skim audio. It happens in real-time and in sequence.” While skimming, were I to find the story relevant to my interests, I’d drop into word-by-word reading, but I wouldn’t do the audio. I think part of the reason is that my computer soundcard at the time (and thus my aural consciousness) is likely to be engaged in listening to some radio stream via iTunes. Yes, I do, shamefully, have music (or maybe a podcast or in realtime of Radiolab, Spark, Tapestry, DNTO, TTBOMK, etc) going as quasi-background din, but stopping it to listen to a news spot would be an irritating interruption of an important din.
I guess it’s not din, then, is it.
-Bob
I echo Jill’s comment and I have a satellite connection, pay for premium bandwidth and still cannot get more than a minute of audio at a time. I keep trying.
I generally can read the entire item much faster than listening to the entire audio, and I am not distracted by ‘media production.’
It may be that some times the voices are important but I’ve heard the voices of the NPR/NCPR reporters so generally the only important voices might be those of people being interviewed, and many times that is not really all that important either.
OK so maybe some other sound is important, but mostly not. If it is a report about somebody singing, or some rare bird call, maybe. But sometimes the sound is just sound effects. Lets face it, the sound of things blowing up or crashing, machine gune fire, riots, race cars, heavy construction, emergencies with police/ fire/ ambulance sirens, thunderstorms, waves, thundering waterfalls, background noise from crowds, etc. is pretty much the same no matter what the specific event, so generally the sound could just be a canned sound effect. Doesn’t add any real information. Just like on TV news sometimes the images are important but a lot of time it is just talking heads and/or the images being shown could be any generic meeting or event, or are file footage or stills rather than actual live images, etc.
I listen to (or watch) the news to get news. I don’t need to be entertained with sounds and visuals and dramatic music in the background unless it really adds information.
Everything you wrote about the value of listening is absolutely true – however, for some of us “visual types”, audio input does not always work. For example, I cannot listen to audio books – I find myself looking around, day-dreaming, and the next thing I know I’m thinking about something else and have no idea of what I’ve been listening to. We’re the kids who don’t do well in school with a teacher that only gives verbal instruction! But I promise to try clicking on more of your audio reports.
I think that taking the time to slow down and listen, not only to audio reports but also to the sounds and voices around us is a very important part of our lives. Particularly ‘sounds’ those that impact our lives. I enjoy several audio reports every week, and listen to them during my breaks at work. Even though I am ‘connected’ to the audio device I sometimes become ‘disconnected’ with my surrounding, if but for a few brief moments. Ahh! That’s Nice!
I work in tv, but my love is radio. The forced march through visual stories (I’m talkin’ to you, Tarkovsky movies!) usually drives me crazy, but I can sit at length and listen to someone tell me things. It’s the *intimacy* I crave, and it’s closer, to me, to what a writer does than what a tv show does.
And I do a fair amount of listening off web sites, but only in this way: I listen to a bunch of stuff, or one long thing, and I set aside time to do it. What I don’t do is dip in and out of web audio most days; the natural bent of the web is to keep going, to find the next thing, and in that context, listening is a speed bump or something.
Scott A.
There are subtle infections present in the audio content that the printed text totally loses. This fact is why I’m such a passionate follower of NPR, where the cadence and subtlety, and maybe naturalness, of NPR anchors and reporters draw me in; whereas the noisy and hard, cold, impersonal, and detached chatter of commercial radio repels me. So I tend to enjoy the NPR *style* of presentation as a crucial part of the content. Style and content: inseparable.
Take an NPR news spot including a foreign language speaker: Before the translation voice-over starts, we get to hear the original speaker, and at times it seems like a lag of an entire sentence or even two. This allows us to get a sense of the mood of that person and a sense, even, of what kind of person they may be. Sometimes it’s even fun to note the accent to get an idea of what region within a country that person is from.
This is priceless.
–Bob.
…inflections
(not “infections” — much less communicable)