First Time Podacst

The making of podcast is a process quite different from what I imagined it would be. The kinds of problems and obstacles were not the kinds of problems I had expected.

The Interviews

Recording the interviews were, by all accounts, the easiest part which, in retrospect, was not that easy. Mechanically it sufficed to simply set up my computer in front of me and my interviewee, but conducting an interview was a completely foreign experience. I would walk in to a quiet room with my guest with a few topics written on a piece of paper to remind myself of directions to go if the conversation started to drag. What I noticed was that while the questions I wrote down seemed to flow very naturally in my mind, they did not seem to me to flow very naturally in the conversation. One aspect of interviews that I was trying to preserve was fidelity to the discourse itself. Obviously the context of conducting and interview is artificial, but so is the context of performing a play. I realized that what theatre and radio-style interviewing have in common however, is illusion. It is actually quite enough to take this constructed dialogue and have it simply appear to be natural. It is like a motor one starts by hand, no one thinks that it is unfair to benefit from the motor just because it took someone else to start it.

One of my great insecurities was, to continue the analogy of the motor was “starting the motor”. I had never conducted an interview before and I was certainly not very confident in my skills as an interviewer. The inspiration for my style was heavily influenced by the Public Radio International show “This American Life” hosted by Ira Glass, which is podcasted weekly. That being the case, I wanted to create an environment that was very casual which, in turn, had it’s own set of difficulties. As the interviewer/narrator I felt it was my job to give my audience a breather by interrupting the interview for a quick summary or personal reflection. I didn’t do this often, and it was not itself difficult. What was difficult was sounding casual with out sounding inarticulate. One word that will make or break the ability to be casual is “um”.

The “Um” Conundrum

I was surprised by what actually required the most amount of time on the back end of editing. In an attempt to sound very comfortable and I found that I tended to repeat myself and “um” quite a bit more than what sounded casual. So while I was editing away all of my pauses, stutters and um’s I realized what I was actually trying to do i.e., I was trying to make both my interviewee and myself sound intentional.

There would often be long pauses by both of us during an interview in order to think a thought through mid-sentence or to just wait and see if the that particular part of the conversation would go and further. I found when I removed that long pauses from the final recording I could make my interviewee and myself sound much more confident. The illusion here again is that both the person I interviewed and I will sound as if we had our thoughts organized quite well and had articulated them the first time through, yet we still remain in the constructed, casual, conversational context. Really what was added was a sense of continuity to both the questions and the answers in the interview. This seems very analogous to giving a speech in some regards. What I thought sounded best was to try to make it sound as if my interviewee had prepared something to say, when in fact it was more impromptu than not.

Even in post production the need to maintain an illusion was on the forefront of my mind. Many of the kinds of things we tolerate (if we notice them) in a live conversation are not the kinds of things that are tolerable for a radio audience. For example, one of my interviewees would often smack their lips before starting a new sentence. While I was conducting the interview I did not notice it at all. What I learned in post-production was that it sounded like punctuating sentences with hand claps, not at all the kind of thing that would be audibly acceptable to even a live audience. What is more, is that I did it too! As I was listening to my interviews for editing I found I spent a good deal of time simply removing auditory distractions.

Another sound related problem I ran into was that another of my interviewees inserted long pauses into their otherwise articulate answers. Again, while I was conducting the interview I never even noticed it. When I listened to it later it seemed like lifetimes of awkward silence in between question and answer. Some of the great fun I had making this podcast was eliminating small problems like this. Returning to the idea of an illusion, I was surprised how eliminating even a one second pause can turn a good sentence into a great sentence all because it sounds like they are saying very smart things off the top of their head.

Making the Internets Obey

One problem that I am continuing to have is to get an episode on the internet. If I can put the episode on my blog then I can get it to iTunes easily. For my blog I am using wordpress with a plugin called podcasting which makes syndication to iTunes very simple once the episode is uploaded. What wordpress needs to upload the episode is a URL to the server that I use where the episode is stored. The episode is on my server with the correct URL, yet wordpress can not seem to find it. As soon as this problems is resolved. The podcast will be available for subscription on iTunes.