I love audio. And I want you to love audio, too. But I’m not sure you can, because of this habit you’ve got. I know you’re busy, and you have a lot on your plate, and there are so many shows to keep up with, but you need to stop listening to podcasts sped up to 1.5x. You need to open yourself up to love.
Stop listening to podcasts at 1.5x
Open yourself up to love
Radio — like film, music, TV, theater, and dance — is a temporal art. It relies on the passage of time to play with anticipation, tension, and release. A good radio producer knows how long a thought will linger in a listener’s consciousness, and either grants her that time, or purposely denies it. A conversation between two hosts is riddled with pregnant pauses and interruptions designed to head off miscommunications. We’re used to these patterns, and a good podcast is paced to play into them. Why, then, should we mess with that balance in the name of efficiency?
There are a few ways podcast apps go about speeding programs up. The most common is simply to run the audio at faster-than-normal speeds, often 1.5x. Thankfully, this process doesn’t tend to affect the pitch of the material. At best, it forces our brains to work in overdrive; worst, it destroys the art of timing.
Take this clip from This American Life’s “Retraction” episode. Ira Glass confronts performance artist Mike Daisey about fabricating portions of his supposedly autobiographical show.
That’s one massive pregnant pause, and it says so much more than anything either man could verbalize. Here’s the same exchange, at 1.5x.
Consider the world around you
The difference is subtle, yes. On the scale of the show, the proportions and timing stay the same, and you get the point: there was a long pause there. But here’s the problem: the world around you, the world you’re driving in, or walking around, continues to move at 1x. Your body and mind are still perceiving time the way they always have, and now that this podcast has been sped up, that agonizing gap just isn’t quite uncomfortable enough to make you lean into the steering wheel and wonder who will break the silence first.
If you use the app Overcast, you’re probably familiar with its SmartSpeed feature. In theory, this is a more forgiving way of speeding up podcasts. The app looks for silences, and shortens those gaps in order to make up time without affecting the rate of speech. It certainly sounds more natural than simply speeding up a show wholesale, but check out what it does to that Mike Daisey clip:
That uncomfortable silence is way shorter. And the scary thing is that if you had turned on SmartSpeed at the global app level, you’d never know what you’re missing. The app also lets you use SmartSpeed with an additional speed multiplier. Here’s that clip at 1.5x with SmartSpeed.
I don’t fault the app’s developer, Marco Arment, for creating this feature. In 2015, if you make a podcast app, it’s basically expected that there’s some sort of fast playback built into it, and SmartSpeed is, without a doubt, a more natural way of doing that. But an alarming number of my colleagues and friends (whom I thought should know better) listen to podcasts at warp speed. There’s something curious and terrible happening here.
We're at the dawn of a new Golden Age of radio
It’s been said that we’re at the dawn of a new Golden Age of audio, and I tend to agree. Serial very well may have done to podcasts what The Sopranos did for serial television. It was narrative, deep, and presented by an expert storyteller. It used audio — which you’ll recall is a temporal art — to its full potential, much like, say, Orson Welles did in 1938.
Verge Video: Welcome to the Golden Age of podcasting (Top Shelf, Season 3)
So what would The War of the Worlds sound like to today’s commuter in a hurry?
Yikes, what a mess. There’s no tension, no pacing, no anticipation. Sure, you know academically what’s happening there, but you don’t feel it. And that was the whole purpose of The War of the Worlds; its urgency and real-life feel is essential to its success. And in this age of podcasting, shows are relying more and more on the artistry of storytelling for their success.
As a podcast producer, the popularity of speed ramping has started affecting how I think of production. Should hosts speak more slowly to counteract it? Should I lean on a music bed to trick SmartSpeed into keeping the pace unaltered? As these features become more popular, they could hold back experimentation in audio.
Consider what the artist intended and why
In film and music, there’s a lot of talk about "what the artist intended." It tends to be overblown, but there’s some consideration here. This Reddit thread is shocked to find that TBS is speeding up Seinfeld by 7.5%. In the very same thread, people nonchalantly defend listening to podcasts sped up by 50%. How is this different?
1.5x is the motion smoothing of audio. It distorts a producer’s intention, and if it becomes too widespread, producers no longer have control over the quality of their shows. At normal speed, Serial’s theme, for example, sets a plodding, curious tone.
At 1.5x, it turns into this jaunty hip-hop tune:
At the end of the day, though, I guess I just hold onto some romantic ideas about radio. It’s an incredibly intimate medium; I feel like I personally know the hosts of my favorite shows. They talk to me at moments in my life when I’m not particularly engaged. I’m walking to the subway, doing the dishes, or loading the dryer, and my friends are weaving intricate, paced stories for me. Why would I want to rush that or use podcasts as a quick utilitarian dump of information? Don’t I have enough of those during my day? Isn’t that the whole appeal of audio?
Maybe, at the end of the day, all you’ll really get from audio is that raw information dump. Maybe you won’t fall in the love with the art in podcasts. But by listening at 1.5x, you’re starting with a handicap. You don’t love your favorite movie because you watched it out of the corner of your eye, listening just for the important details. Give real time a chance.
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