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056 - AAA2017 - Sadeghsamimi
80 Plays7 years ago
Paper: "Everyone Tells me how they hate the sound of their own voice": The ethics of editing in podcasts, Sadeghsamimi
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcasts and Anthropology
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Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. This is the recording of a paper presented at the 116th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. on December 1st, 2017. The session was entitled, Podcasts and Anthropology, Exploring Approaches to Multimodal Research and Communications, and was organized and chaired by Anushin Sedeghasamy and Kyle Olson, both of the University of Pennsylvania.
00:00:29
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This
Ethical Considerations in Podcast Editing
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paper was presented by Nushin Setagasamy of the University of Pennsylvania and was entitled, Everyone tells me how they hate the sound of their own voice, the ethics of editing in podcasts.
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The interview is a critical locus in anthropological research as a primary site in very engaging conversations with our interlocutors and research participants. The interview is also the basic unit of much work in podcasting and certainly is the core of our project, anthropological airwaves. In the course of learning to produce podcasts, our attention was drawn repeatedly to certain features of the interview during
00:01:14
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pre-production, production, and post-production. Among these features that particularly stood out to us was voice. The expectations and framings are on different voices in podcasts and how this impacted our editing practices. As we learned how to record interviews, edit footage, and mixed podcast episodes around interviews, we began to see this issue of voice as one of the openings to broader questions about multimodal research and anthropology.
00:01:45
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In our paper today, I will discuss three main topics. First, the figure of the radio voice that we noticed in our interviews. Second, the impact that expectations around different voices had on how we tended to edit footage.
Voice Perceptions in Editing
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And third, how the lessons we learned about voices and editing led us to consider the relationship between podcasts and anthropology.
00:02:11
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While the interview can be broken down into a variety of different social and technical components and processes, such as location and participants, roles and framing, or microphones and recorders, not to mention a speech and content, here we focus on just one of these aspects of the interview data voice.
00:02:36
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We were tipped off to the importance of voice, first by Durani and colleagues' 2015 article in Visual Anthropology on Serial and Seriality. But then, by the repeated comment we heard from our collaborators and interviewees, that when something like this, you know, I really hate the sound of my own voice.
Idealized Voice Standards in Media
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Hearing this statement on multiple occasions raised many questions for us.
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We wanted to know why do people hate the son of their own voice? To what are they comparing themselves? And we got the impression from our interviewers and interviewees that their reactions to their own voices on tape, so to speak, was based on more than just vanity.
00:03:27
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Sure enough, we were asked, what do you mean by that? People would just tell us, my voice doesn't sound like one you would hear on radio, or my voice doesn't sound like a podcast voice. In retrospect, it is perhaps unsurprising that
00:03:45
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When confronted with the prospect of being broadcasted, people would size up their own voices recorded with non-professional grade audio equipment in comparison to vocal figures that they associate with the radio or with podcasts. So we try to figure out why voice matters. Of course, there are many voices on the radio and even more on the podcasts.
00:04:12
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But people clearly had a sense of a figure, or at the very least, some combination of stylized vocal traits that they had, they have heard and associate with distinct podcast genres. But where did these perceptions come from?
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Lara Currator has written about how the perception of this voice figure is shaped by the lived experience of having listened to radio and podcasts. Where this speech one hears is conditioned by a number of factors. She calls these factors technologies of voice.
Technologies of Voice in Public Radio
00:04:50
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That is in her words, quote, nexus of practices, discourses, and machines, end of quote, including the vocal training of professional media producers, the historically conditioned tastes of a variety of audiences, as well as by differential access to the means to produce FM and AM and satellite radio broadcasts.
00:05:17
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One outcome of these conditioning factors, for example, is that public radio voices and their vocal aesthetics both are and are heard as stereotypically white as discussed on the podcast code switch.
00:05:32
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While there's a lot to unpack with that, one of the significant takeaways from CodeSwitch's work on the radio voice is that these figures and their features are neither hegemonic nor singular. With the rising popularity of podcasts, not only different kinds of voices can take root and spread, but we should also deliberately amplify different voices to better reach a range of publics and listenerships.
00:06:02
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But back to our question, what was it that our collaborators were comparing themselves to in their statements about their own voices? Given our format and people's expectations of what that should sound like, it appeared that the vocal figure in question was what Teddy Wayne called in an October 2015 New York Times piece
00:06:29
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the NPR voice. This voice, which is immediately recognizable to many of us, is a set of highly stylized verbal mannerisms and vocal aesthetics characterized by a feeling of conversational intimacy, informality of tone and cadence, and most notably, particular intonation patterns and the use of fillers and pauses for dramatic effect.
NPR Voice: Impact on Editing and Self-Perception
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That is, this vocal figure is more out of glass than, for example, Walter Cronkite. When argues that the prevalence of the NPR voice
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and podcasts is at least partly because of two factors. On the one hand, the sheer popularity of NPR programs and podcast apps, especially This American Life, but on the other, the rapid expansion of people's ability
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to undertake production of podcasts and their reliance upon genre conventions to bridge the gap between their own vocal skills and those of trained professionals. This point is important because this particular figure of the radio voice, the NPR voice, was not just
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impacting our collaborators' perceptions of their own radio-mediated personas. It also shaped our editorial practices as we learned to work with audio, especially early on.
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When we first started out, we engaged in what might be called aggressive cuts. We removed lengthy pauses, filler words, stutters, and anything we considered distracting for our listeners.
Editing Ethics: Clarity vs. Manipulation
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At the time, we perceived these speech fragments as interfering with our audience's ability to follow and understand what these speakers were saying.
00:08:36
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One might interpret this editorial practice as us doing what any interviewer would do when rendering the conversations with an interviewee for a given audience. Like, for example, when the tagline of a transcript informs you, the content below has been widely edited for length and clarity.
00:08:57
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It is important, however, that the pauses, fillers, and starters we removed were not necessarily calculated or scripted vocal stylizations on the part of our collaborators, but rather were features
00:09:11
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professors and students in conversation with each other as they work through complex problems and questions thinking aloud. Another way to see this editorial practice is as a manipulation of speech to more closely conform with the aesthetics and cadence of what we projected to be our audience's expectation of how voices should sound on a podcast.
00:09:37
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This got us thinking about our editorial practice vis-a-vis the question of cosmetic stylization. What is the boundary between editing for clarity and manipulating people's speech with aggressive cuts? Should we as editors choose not to tamper with voices? Is it impossible for us to avoid it entirely, or is it
00:10:00
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Perhaps not, but what are our ethical and professional responsibilities in presenting people's voices on a podcast and why is that important? This issue of voice stylization and the questions it raised about our editorial practices served as an opening for us to think about podcasting in and about anthropology.
00:10:31
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Here we were inspired by Corinne Friedman's essay about what makes a film anthropological, including that film's relation to discipline itself and its norms, as well as its engagement with anthropological subjects and its deployment of the discipline's genre conventions.
Ethnographic Elements in Podcasts
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Following from this, we ask, what makes a podcast anthropological? Is an anthropological podcast a podcast about anthropology
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or is it a podcast done in an anthropological fashion? Is it a podcast made by anthropologists or in collaboration with anthropologists? Is it a podcast that is made about topics anthropologists study or made in collaboration with people from groups that have been the subject of anthropological research? These genres of anthropology are being made into podcasts currently
00:11:24
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and what could be done in the future. As one example, following Durrani and colleagues, we view serialized ethnography as one potentially promising mode for anthropological podcasting. But this immediately raises the same line of questioning as above. What makes a podcast ethnographic?
00:11:48
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Here we were guided by Carol McGranahan's essay, What Makes Something Ethnographic, which among other things pointed us to
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Sherry Ordner's definition of ethnography as a theory, a method, material object, and a position in the world. Ethnographic podcasts already exist to a certain degree as material objects, exemplified by blockbuster hits such as Serial and Estau. These programs could be described as semi-ethnographic, even though they stem more from the traditions of investigative journalism than from anthropology. Anyway.
00:12:28
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These podcasts that came out of this American life have some ethnographic components for sure, even if they sometimes lack the genre of ethnographic reflexivity. Sorry.
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lacked a degree of ethnographic reflexivity when it comes to the politics of representation that we expect, especially in the case of a stone. Representation in this sense, both in terms of how we actually depict people's voices and what social groups that these voices themselves represent.
00:13:01
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But back to our previous question, ethnography is just a way of doing anthropology. It's just one of the ways of doing anthropology. Not all anthropologists do ethnography. And we don't want to say that anthropological podcasting should necessarily be ethnographic.
Voice as an Anthropological Medium
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However, considering what that podcast and ethnography have in common in terms of being interview-based, driven by narrative, and the ability to be serialized, we feel that there is some space to explore and experiment with, which is the overlaps between these different modes.
00:13:42
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borrowing again from Sherry Ortner and Carol McRanahan. Ethnography attempts to understand another life. Ethnography attempts to understand another life world using the self, as much of it as possible, as the instrument of knowing. Could voice also be a similar kind of instrument of understanding and knowing? In other words,
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voice as a medium for sustained ethnographic and anthropological investigation. Given this, podcasts seems like a viable medium for both doing and presenting ethnographic work as Dorani and colleagues predicted. In conclusion,
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or
Serialized Ethnography in Podcasts
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to recap in our experience of recording and editing interviews for our talk show podcast whose first season focused on multimodal anthropology and engaged scholarship. We were occluding to the impact of the NPR voice on our collaborators' perceptions of themselves and on our editorial practices. This led us to ask what our anthropological responsibilities are as editors
00:15:00
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representing people's voices in this format. Out of this question of ethics, we started to think about what makes a podcast anthropological or even ethnographic.
00:15:12
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We're still figuring out what potential serialized podcast has to offer ethnography and vice versa. And what we have found so far is that the conventions and audience expectations of these genres overlap in some ways and that each could benefit from each other. We're going to hear more. We already heard from you, Ariel, but we mentioned that, of course, we're going to
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We've already heard from Ariel about relationships between journalism and anthropology, of course. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.