Learning to talk the talk

I’d always thought that I have a face made for radio and voice made for newspapers, so I stuck to newspapers. But these days, as a content consumer, my favorite long-form journalism is delivered by podcasts.

The apps on my Samsung phone go four screens deep, and the screens have sort of a hierarchy. The second screen has all my travel apps, from Delta to Uber to Amtrak, and the third has all my streaming video and radio apps.

But the first screen is home to The Elect, and prominent among them is the aptly named Podcast Addict. I walk about an hour a day, and it’s those walks that make me a podcast addict. I regularly listen to On the Media, Intercepted (The Intercept podcast), New Yorker Radio, Nerdcast (the Politico podcast), Freakonomics Radio, This American Life (sadly in decline these days) and – yes, I’ll confess – a whole dugout full of fantasy baseball podcasts.

So a large appeal of my Kent State multimedia class was learning some basic sound editing. In 2008, I made about eight videos that streamed from www.theday.com, both shooting them and editing them in Final Cut pro, so I have some vague memory about the parallel tracks for sound and video and editing in the B-roll. I was lucky to have the highly skilled, multi-award winning videographer Peter Huoppi at my side during the rough patches. But sound alone was something new.

I was wary of using my phone to make a podcast, so I decided to use the Koss headset I bought last year for a foray into the voice-to-text software Dragon. Dragon wanted high-quality input, and the Koss was on the recommended list, so why not for podcasts? For setting levels and timing the recording, I tried Audacity. How hard could it be?

The three hours later, two-minute podcast complete, I had my answer.

It took me about an hour to figure out that the spikes in levels that were creating pops on playback were because the microphone was too close to my mouth. In retrospect, of course that seemed obvious, by I was groping my way through Audacity in classic trial-and-error fashion.

Then, there was the whole issue of that voice made for newspapers … As brilliant and incisive as my mind maybe (post no comments on that, please!), both my typing and my speaking are as sloppy as a taco. We were asked to make our recording without editing, so that meant one take. For me to speak just one minute without tangling my tonsils is a feat. Two-plus minutes took two-plus hours.

But my appetite has been whetted, and I’m eager to dive deeper into Audacity and sound editing in general.

For two years, I churned out a music blog for The Day of New London, Conn., focusing on classical music and opera. You guessed it, not a lot of clicks attracted by “Alfred Schnittke” or “Johann Nepomuk Hummel,” but I persevered. Taking my cue from the New York Times, I made Spotify playlists to embed in the blogs. Now I’m intrigued if I can capture and mix in music selections (fully credited, mind you!) as fair use in a music podcast. 

Of course, it helps to have something clever to say …