I’m a very particular listener: as a result of an old brain injury, I have trouble tracking multiple sounds at once. So a podcast with too many sound effects or background music can be really tiring for me to follow, if I can follow it at all; sometimes it just blends into noise (for example, some old episodes of Judge John Hodgman have background lounge music that make the audio unintelligible to me).
This week I’ve listened to:
-Revolutions podcast, a single narrator history deep dive. Mike Duncan presents his content in a very clear way, his voice is easy to follow, and the storytelling is compelling. The intro/outro music always makes me jump, but I like that the advertisements are read by the narrator so there is not a big intrusion or change of tone.
-Endless Thread: We Want Plates – a conversational, investigative approach. I had some minor difficulty following the plot when the hosts were walking with their mic, but that was balanced by in-studio recording that allowed me to follow the story. Some of their interviews were quieter than others, which meant I had to adjust my volume up and down; a good reminder to pay attention to levels across a whole episode.
-Stuff to Blow Your Mind – A good balance of host banter and interesting deep dives into science and pop culture. The ads, however, make the pod nearly unlistenable as their volume and tone are much more aggressive than the podcast itself.
This exercise has made me think about how much I value a consistent audio experience. If audio quality is too variable, or if the format changes too much between episodes, I tend not to stay subscribed. I don’t mind a lower quality audio if there is a single host, but when there are multiple voices, I want a better recording. There are podcasts that I really want to like because the content is great, but I can’t get past the use of sound effects or buzzy microphones. I wonder if I am a particularly choosy listener, or if this is a fairly common experience?
I love the observation of “consistence audio experience.” I’m neurodivergent and also have a TBI history, so lots of sensory sensitivities going on for me too.
I listened to a pod last night, and the speaker was British, and it was so soothing. It had me second guessing the quality of my own voice. 🙂
Even without an injury, I agree with you that sound effects are distracting and usually unwelcome. And levels fluctuating with different speakers or ads would usually make me find something else to listen to in my limited podcasting times.
I’m curious; what is your experience with computer-generated audio? I use a text to speech mobile app called Natural Reader to listen to a lot of blog posts and academic papers. I’m pursuing a collaboration with the author of a thesis I really liked to serialize her thesis as a podcast using Natural Reader’s mp3 export function. I would appreciate your thoughts on how this synthetic voice might affect people with special audio sensitivity.
I use computer-generated audio sometimes with academic papers as well. I’ve only used the built-in accessibility speak function on my Mac, so I can’t speak to the quality of dedicated apps. The regular pacing of print-to-speech I find really useful, but the unnatural intonations and strange emphases sometimes require extra focus to parse. I can manage it for short documents, but have not considered using it for longer documents. Serializing a thesis sounds like a really interesting project, and a way to balance accessibility and the difficulty of a longer text; do you find Natural Reader does okay with academic terms and jargon?
Thank you for your feedback, Claire. NR has a pronunciation editor, so you could customize the pronunciation of frequently-used jargon and even acronyms, but it does fairly well with English. Words in Indigenous languages sprinkled in an English-language paper are, of course, mangled. The new version includes options to skip URLs and text enclosed in parenthesis – such a relief to skip in-text citations. (And lest I start sounding like a commercial, I’ll add, now if only they would code something that recognizes footnotes.)
I purchased the upgrade for more natural sounding voices for the thesis project. I’m getting attached to them, although I found the free voices quite acceptable for my own use.