I’ve found myself reflecting on the lack of audio in audio podcasts a lot this past week, because I was one of the lucky people who attended the sold-out Resonate Podcast Festival in Richmond, Virginia. On the first day of the conference, I crammed myself into an already overflowing room to listen to NYU Professor Ellen Horne’s talk, “Sound is Physical.”
If you were also in that room, I was the awkward person standing on the right side at the very front. I swear, I thought other people were going to fill in the space and stand behind me. I was wrong. So wrong... Anywho…for those who aren’t familiar with Ellen, she was a producer at Radiolab for 12 years, and she also executive produced Admissible, which is a podcast I really enjoyed and have talked about in this newsletter.
Ellen is a bad ass – in the best possible way.
The point of Ellen’s talk was to show – beyond a shadow of doubt – that remote interviews are ruining our industry.
And let me just say…she nailed it.
I didn’t take a lot of notes or any actual photos – because of the aforementioned standing in the front like a total dork problem. But basically, Ellen believes that we have gotten entirely too comfortable with remote interviews.
Yes they’re quicker and faster. And totally cheaper. But they also hold the interview subject at a distance. Removed emotionally. Totally sterile.
For Ellen, they just don’t sound
real.
And in some ways, Ellen is right. Something is missing when people don’t share the same physical space. Resonate reminded me of that every time I hugged a colleague I hadn’t seen for years or met a dear friend in person for the first time.
But I would suggest that there’s another thing that all of these remote interviews have done to cause damage to our industry.
They’ve made us really, really lazy when it comes time to record field sound.
Far too often these days, I hear interviews that were recorded in person that don’t sound at all more “real” or “intimate” than interviews recorded online.
We seem to have collectively forgotten about decent mic placement, how to record room tone, and what to do when something interrupts the recording.
And to make matters worse, we seem to be almost exclusively using a bunch of really old and tired audio cliches to signal to the listener that we’ve actually gone somewhere.
Cliches like…
- Ringing a doorbell or knocking on a door.
- Opening a door.
- Greeting someone on the other side of a door.
- Closing a door. (Especially a car door.)
- A car engine turning on.
- A car engine turning off.
- A GPS giving directions.
- Really, any sounds from the inside of a car as it goes from place A to place B.
- Two people chatting about nothing while walking across leaves or gravel.
- Someone remarking on the comfort of a chair or sofa.
Look. I get it. I have done all of these things. They’re cliches for a reason. They’re the easiest way to prove that we’ve actually left our sterile little recording closets.
But…on the rare occasions when we’ve actually spent the money to BE somewhere, why aren’t we taking better advantage of it?
Back in the day, I used to do all sorts of crazy things with my microphone while reporting on “sports” for NPR. (Sports is in air quotes for reasons that will soon become clear.)
I strapped my microphone to a random stranger’s chest and sent it into battle at a re-enactor’s medieval war.
I sent it down a toboggan chute at the World Toboggan Championships.
I duck taped it to my bike frame while I went on a bike tour of urban farms.
But as I started doing more stories that were narrative – that is, based on chronology that was often set in the past – I found those recordings to be less and less useful.
Often, in fact, there would be a complete disconnect between the story I was telling and the audio that was available.
Case in point: I used to always counsel my reporters to record their interviews near the field of play. So, if they were talking to a basketball player, I’d tell them to grab a bench in the bleachers and record the interview over the sound of practice.
But after our show switched to a narrative format, one reporter called me with a dilemma. She was interviewing a hockey coach and had been given the option to record at a hockey rink.
The problem was – she was interviewing the hockey coach about surviving the Route 91 Harvest music festival. Hockey sounds in the background of that particular interview wouldn’t make any sense.
The reporter ended up recording in a quiet room, which was totally the right call. But after hearing Ellen call us all to task, I wonder if there was a third option? Something we missed?
As one of my fellow Resonate attendees pointed out, sometimes it’s easier to open up when you’re not staring at someone face to face.
Like the kid who won’t talk to his parents until he’s sitting in the back seat of the car on the way home from school.
So how can we replicate that? While also getting good audio? And without falling back on some of those cliches I mentioned earlier…
Ellen’s suggestion: Lay down on the grass with your guest and look up at the sky.
Here are some of mine.
- Go for a walk – But instead of pointing the microphone at your guest’s feet to capture the crunching of the leaves, point the mic at their mouth and ask them to tell you their story.
- Go for a hike – Especially if your story is about hiking! (I see you, How Wild.)
- Go for a drive – Turn off that stupid GPS and let your guest navigate.
Bonus: All of these things are better if you’re actually retracing the steps of the story. So don’t just take a drive. Take a drive to a place where something important happened!
- Look through a scrapbook or a photo album – Ask questions. React. Be real.
- Prepare a beverage – Coffee, tea, a fancy cocktail. I’m not gonna judge.
- Prepare a meal – Food is a love language. But it also tells you all sorts of things about someone’s background, their culture, their priorities.
- Observe a repetitive task – When I worked in sports, it might have been watching a hockey player tape up their stick. But other professions do these kinds of things, too. Actors put on makeup. Nurses organize supplies. Farmers stack bales of hay.
- Find the thing that makes noise!! One of my favorite days in the field was spent running through the inside of Hoover Dam in Nevada, looking for things that were loud. In the end, I probably only used a few seconds of a turbine spinning. But if I had it to do all over again, I would make the search for audio a part of my story.
Look, there are all sorts of things we can do in the field, other than just recording the sound of doorbells ringing or doors opening and closing. So…let’s start doing them!!
And then, in all deference to Ellen, let’s be real.
Budgets are tight. Time is limited. Travel might not always be possible.
And there are still some really good reasons why you might want (or need) to do most of your interviews remotely.
So I’m gonna lay out the other challenge Ellen put to those of us crammed in that little room at Resonate.
How do we make our remote interviews sound more real?How do we connect through the computer screen? How do we merge the best in person recording techniques with our real need to record remotely?
I have a few ideas. But I’m hoping you’ll write in with some more.
Idea #1: Watch and react. One of the fabulous things about remote interviews is that you can isolate your audio sources. So you can watch your guest’s favorite TV show together – pausing to talk about why it changed something about how they see the world. Or you can watch the TikTok that alerted them to a grand conspiracy – real or imagined. Or the home video they haven’t seen in decades. Or..really, anything vaguely related to the story.
Idea #2: Get physical. Just because you’re not in the same room as someone doesn’t mean that you can’t look through a photo album together. And if you see something interesting in the background of your guest’s video shot, you can ask them to bring it towards the camera and show it to you. Or if energy is flagging, you can invite your guest to stand up with you and do some gentle stretches. (And yes, you need to do them too! The whole point is to recreate the feeling of doing something physical together.)
Idea #3: Ditch the video. Look, one of the things that I love about video chat technology is being able to see my guests. Look them in the eye. Get a sense of their style. Their body language. How they feel in their skin.
I feel like there’s a benefit for the guests as well. I put a lot of effort into showing them that I’m warm and welcoming and really paying attention to what they’re saying.
But sometimes it’s better to turn off the video and connect voice to voice.
So, consider front loading the interview. Put everything that requires video is at the beginning. And then, consider turning off your camera and suggesting that they turn off theirs as well.
If you'd like, to make this a bit less awkward, you can blame the technology. I’ll sometimes say that we should turn off the video so that there’s more bandwidth for audio. Which is often a good idea, especially if the connection is not super strong. But sometimes I'll say it just because I get the sense that the visuals are making the guest nervous.
If we have to record interviews remotely -- and I think we often do -- let's do everything we can to make them better.
It's a small problem. And it's not gonna fix all the bigger, scarier problems we're all dealing with right now.
But it's something we can control. And right now, I feel like I gotta control the controllables, ya know what I mean?
