For this week’s workshop, we listened to a snippet of an episode on Radio Lab discussing sleep. What really took me by surprise was how it all sounded so seamless and fluid. I mean, there were some pauses here and there, but they were very brief, and everything still sounded so well put together.

It was interesting how everything was mixed together, that at times it was quite difficult to figure out whether the person they were interviewing was in the studio or not. You can definitely pick it out if you listen carefully to the spatial distance of each speaker. Obviously the hosts spoke with maximum clarity, whereas the professionals, though still sounded clear, you can tell that they were quite distant. And you can also tell that they weren’t sitting live with the hosts as the main host would abruptly cut off the person talking.

I also liked how the hosts spoke with a non-monotonous voice, particularly the man who spoke most of the time. As it was an audio piece, there were no supporting visual stimuli so the fact that they spoke casually and informally while discussing a topic in a scientific manner, listening to it was quite engaging and not that boring.

These are things that I’ll definitely keep in mind for our audio essay for our fourth project brief so to avoid having a boring podcast.