radio | Chris Aldrich

Listened to From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices? from Fresh Air | NPR

Journalist Jessica Grose, linguistics professor Penny Eckert and speech pathologist Susan Sankin discuss upspeak, vocal fry and why women's voices are changing — and whether or not that's a problem.

Journalist Jessica Grose is no stranger to criticism of her voice. When she was co-hosting the Slate podcast, the DoubleX Gabfest, she would receive emails complaining about her "upspeak" — a tendency to raise her voice at the end of sentences.

Once an older man she was interviewing for an article in Businessweek told her that she sounded like his granddaughter. "That was the first moment I felt [my voice] was hurting my career beyond just irritating a couple listeners," Grose tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

–Originally bookmarked on December 18, 2019 at 09:53AM

Listened to Computers Judge What Makes The Perfect Radio Voice by Audie Cornish from All Things Considered | NPR

A few weeks ago, All Tech Considered asked the audience to send voice samples to analyze. Those samples were put through an algorithm to figure out what kind of voice would make an appealing radio host. NPR's Audie Cornish explains how this experiment turned out.

hat tip: What do authority and curiosity sound like on the radio? NPR has been expanding that palette from its founding | NiemanLab

Read What do authority and curiosity sound like on the radio? NPR has been expanding that palette from its founding by Jason Loviglio (Nieman Lab)

From nasal New York accents to vocal fry, NPR's anchors and reporters have long inflamed debates about whose voices should represent the nation — or just be heard by it.

WNYC Studios’ On The Media recently had a piece on the history, science, and engineering behind How Radio Makes Female Voices Sound “Shrill”.

This piece on NPR is a great example of how we’re still dealing with these engineering and social problems nearly a century on.

60db and audio discovery

Bookmarked 60db: Your World. Story by Story. (60dB)

60dB brings you today's best short-form audio stories – news, sports, entertainment, business and technology, all personalized for you.

I just ran across a recommendation for an audio discovery app via Mathew Ingram at the end of This Week in Google #389.

60db seems like the start of what could be an interesting podcast/audio discovery app/engine. It has the appearance of wanting to be like Nuzzel for the audio space based on their announcement, but isn’t quite there yet based on my quick look through their site. On first blush it doesn’t seem much better than Huffduffer and doesn’t have a follower model of any sort, but perhaps that could change. Folks watching the podcasting and audio discovery space should keep an eye on it though.

Sadly, at least for now, the app appears to focus on short form audio (3-8 minutes in length) from major media content producers who are already syndicating audio in podcast format. I haven’t used the iOS (no Android app yet) app, but the web interface allows one to pick from a list of about 20 broad category options (news, sports, politics, kids, etc.) to “customize” one’s feed.

Hopefully in the future it may build itself out a bit more like Nuzzel by requesting data from one’s Facebook or Twitter feeds to better customize an algorithmic feed for better general audio discovery. Maybe it will allow a follower model based on social graph for improved discovery. One might also like to see custom settings for podcast story length, so one could choose between short hit audio, which they currently have in abundance, and longer form stories for lengthier commute times.

For the moment however, they seem to have recreated a slightly better and more portable version of news radio for the internet/mobile crowd. Perhaps future iterations will reveal more?