Unfiltered Thoughts

2022.01.30 – 0395 – When We Pause
When we use a pauseNot all pauses are created equal. We use them to help both the reader and the listener in many different ways.
Pauses – together with intonation - aid understanding Pauses should be at speech-natural places within a script, rather than appearing at random within it. But you don’t pause at every comma or after every phrase. The commas are there in the main to help you and not to dictate to you and to break whenever you reach one will give you a stop-start, choppy delivery.
And of course, a comma doesn’t indicate the length of a pause. Some reads require a millisecond, others a full beat.
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2022.01.29 – 0394 – Don’t Fear The Silence  “Pauses strengthen the voice. They also render thoughts more clear-cut by separating them.”Rhetorica ad Herennium - the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, dating from the late 80s BC  Broadcasters can fear silence. We want to have a wall of sound on air – music and talking, or music and talking. It causes some people to talk, without ‘saying anything’, verbal diarrhoea just to keep the volume meter waggling on the studio desk.
Silence doesn’t mean ‘nothing’. It is an important communication tool which can mean as much as ‘something’. Constructive silence can be confident and comfortable, and create conversation. Destructive silence can be defensive and discourage discussion.
Silences can be golden, or leaden.
They can give us space to breath literally - and for the audience, metaphorically, letting significance sink in.
Pauses possibly produce powerful performances, from increasing tension to enhancing jokes.
But they can also be slow, boring, pregnant … or dead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2022.01.28 – 0393 – Pauses: An Introduction PAUSESThe huge majority of this book is about noise and sound. From how words are written to how they are uttered … their volume, intensity, pitch and pace. But now we’re going to look at what’s missing. Literally. The silence. The bits between the words. The change of pace that’s a reduction to a complete standstill: the pause. Pauses are hugely important and effective, and they go hand-in-hand with ‘pace’. They are perhaps the least-used vocal tool and are sometimes as important as the words either side of them. "Silence is also speech."West African proverb Don’t be afraid of silence. As we will see, it’s a hugely effective device to aid understanding. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2022.01.27 – 0392 - How Fast Can We Speak… and Listen?
How Fast Can We Speak?“In just 600 milliseconds, the human brain can think of a word, apply the rules of grammar to it and send it to the mouth to be spoken.”  
How Fast can We Listen?The average rate of speech for an American is about 125 words per minute; the human brain can process about twice that speed (“the average adult can readily comprehend spoken audio at 2X speed or at a compression rate of 50%. This roughly corresponds to 275 words per minute” ) or even more (“people speak out loud at an average of 150 words per minute, while our brains internally yammer along at 400 words per minute”)  
So given that humans can process spoken dialogue nearly twice as fast as humans can speak it, listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed makes sense.
A problem seems to be training our brain to recognise unfamiliar speech patterns: “word recognition drops about 40% when audio is played back twice as fast” says Uri Hasson a Princeton neuroscientist.  
And listening fast can also reduce the effort that went into producing the podcast: although I listen some roundtable and interview podcasts at 2x, I wouldn’t do the same to the great 20k Hertz podcast because of its production values which’d be lost to me if I listen at speed.
If you ‘listen fast’ you have heard the podcast, but have you ‘felt’ it? You’ve consumed it, but have you comprehended it? 
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2022.01.27 – 0392 - How Fast Can We Speak… and Listen?
How Fast Can We Speak?“In just 600 milliseconds, the human brain can think of a word, apply the rules of grammar to it and send it to the mouth to be spoken.”  
How Fast can We Listen?The average rate of speech for an American is about 125 words per minute; the human brain can process about twice that speed (“the average adult can readily comprehend spoken audio at 2X speed or at a compression rate of 50%. This roughly corresponds to 275 words per minute” ) or even more (“people speak out loud at an average of 150 words per minute, while our brains internally yammer along at 400 words per minute”)  
So given that humans can process spoken dialogue nearly twice as fast as humans can speak it, listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed makes sense.
A problem seems to be training our brain to recognise unfamiliar speech patterns: “word recognition drops about 40% when audio is played back twice as fast” says Uri Hasson a Princeton neuroscientist.  
And listening fast can also reduce the effort that went into producing the podcast: although I listen some roundtable and interview podcasts at 2x, I wouldn’t do the same to the great 20k Hertz podcast because of its production values which’d be lost to me if I listen at speed.
If you ‘listen fast’ you have heard the podcast, but have you ‘felt’ it? You’ve consumed it, but have you comprehended it? 
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2022.01.26 – 0391 - Backtiming 2 Of course, the duration of a song or a report is known in advance, but there are variables such as live interviews (especially with non-professional guests who may talk in in half-sentences or whole paragraphs!). At the end of a show, presenters may adlib to fill time, or a buffer item such as a weather report is included, which can often be extended or cut short depending on an over- or under-run. On radio, presenters can often dip a song to get to a news bulletin. In both situations, a ‘backtimed’ bed is very useful to give the impression of slick and professional completeness. This is where a piece of music which naturally ‘ends’ rather than ‘fades out’, is initially played off-air and only introduced to the audience as a filler to the end of the show. For example, if a programme is due to end at one second before the start of the next hour, and a ‘backtime bed’ is two minutes long, then it can be played (off air at first) from 57 minutes and 59 seconds into the current hour. The producer/presenter is then aware that should they need to, they can bring the music up at any point, safe in the knowledge that they don’t have to verbally fill for time as the music will do it for them. They know that the music will end right on time, in a way that speaking to time (finishing a story or script or a sentence, to the second) is rather more difficult to do. Of course, YouTube videos and podcasts are pretty much open-ended – although that causes its own issues of a lack of self-editing (or actual post-recording editing) and presenter-indulgent shows which are more chaff than wheat.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Backtiming Some stations or programmes hand back to a network (possibly automatically) at a certain time. As this has to be ‘to the second’ there may be silence (‘dead air’) if a presenter ends too early, or a ‘crash out’ if their output is taken over mid-way through a sentence or story. So, each script is timed at the average speaking rate of three words per second. With this figure, the presenter or producer calculates the time they need to have started reading the script by, if they are to finish on time. That calculation is the ‘backtime’. Additionally, you can annotate your page with any markers that indicate by which time you need to have started a certain sentence or paragraph by (obviously this is tricky to do if reading from a screen…) If a script is written in a ‘pyramid style’, (that is with the most important information first and least important last), then it may be that you can mark it to clearly show each sentence and ‘cut from the bottom’ – simply read until you reach a natural place to stop as your time runs out. Over time you be able to fluently adlib around some content (such as the weather, which doesn’t need to be read word-for-word), so you can talk to time. Or sight reading and having an eye on the clock to see how long you have left in which to complete the read. Such presentation skills come with a lot of experience, and will require you to, if necessary, quicken or slow your pace as you go, to fill the time available. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2022.01.24 – S2024 – 0389 - How To Talk To Time
A sense of timing can be developed in the same way as an experienced driver can tell the speed of a car as it passes, or while they’re in it, and with experience you will be able to slightly adjust your reading rate ‘speedometer’ (or a ‘read-ometer’!) to say, shave a second or two off a script:·        Taking shorter breaths – or longer ones (that can be edited out) that will allow you take fewer breaths over the duration of the script·        Slightly increasing the intonation may give you the licence to speak slightly faster·        Contracting words and pauses – but be careful not to gabble. Making the words fit a longer duration is not always as simple as slowing down:·        Pauses can be a bit longer and micro-pauses can perhaps be added after key words or phrases.·        Words may be drawn out a little. But you can’t just read. Each. Word. Followed. By. A. Pause. You still have to have flow and maintain a meaning with what you’re reading. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2022.01.23 – S2023 – 0388 - Talking To Time
One of the skills of a broadcaster is being able to talk to just the required length of time to ‘hit a junction’ (for example, a news bulletin or commercial break), up to the vocals in a song introduction or before a ‘music bed’[1] runs out.
Similarly, a commercial voice over artist must be able to talk to time, to fit the approved copy into the time allowed for that commercial, while keeping correct characterisation, inflection, phrasing and pausing and so on. In a script that is a minute or two long that may be less of a problem than trying to hit 29 seconds with a script that has 39 seconds worth of words in it!
If you or a director tries to cram too many words into not enough seconds, the listener just hears a “wall of sound”.  OK, the scriptwriter may want to put everything in a script – whether it’s a news one or a commercial, and it’s tough to know what to leave out - but a script which has room for the copy (and the reader!) to breathe, and place the correct inflection and pauses, is more effective.
[1] A music bed is an instrumental piece of music, used either as a theme to introduce an item or as a mechanic to get from one feature to another without the presenter speaking ‘dry’ with no music and therefore no momentum. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2022.01.22 – S2022 – 0387 - Rehearsing Your Read-SpeedRehearsing Your Read-SpeedEver seen the rehearsal rooms from the tv shows “Strictly Come Dancing” or “Dancing With The Stars”? You will have seen, or can imagine, how the pros show the celebs the steps: slow to start, then get fast. And it’s like that with learning a new instrument, a new song, heck even reading itself … and now with script-reading: start slow, practice getting your tongue around the words, a phrase at a time. Practice potential stumbling blocks and then gradually speed up as your confidence and ‘mouth memory’ improves. Speed MatchingIf you want someone to speed up talking, then you speed up talking to them. Naturally they will try and ‘voice match’… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.