Tag Archives: microphone

What I learned working for a Christian college radio station #1: speaking into a microphone in an empty room

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I worked at WETN 88.1 FM, Wheaton College’s radio station, for all four years as an undergraduate and for several years later as a faculty member. This is the start to a non-consecutive series of posts regarding the valuable lessons I learned while doing this. #1:

You are alone in a radio studio. You sit down in front of the mixing board and computer display. Various audio equipment surrounds you. You put on headphones, press a button to turn on the microphone, push the fader up, and start speaking.

This is a common occurrence in a radio studio but it is an odd situation compared to most of life. Typically when you start talking there is a visible audience. You are talking to a friend or a family member or to a coworker. They can see you and you can see them.

One of the first things I learned as a first-year student in college at the college radio station was to talk into a microphone with an audience in mind but no one in front of you. No immediate reactions from people or a visible audience. You can hear yourself in your headphones but that is about it. You just have to keep going until your segment is over.

What does one say in such a situation? Can you carry on a conversation with yourself? Can you imagine who might be listening? It took time to feel comfortable doing this, to have a sense of what you could feel comfortable saying and how long it might take. Even if many people have experiences talking to themselves in their heads or out loud, it is a different experience doing it into a microphone for public consumption.

And it is a skill that I think has served me well. In comparison, such an experience makes talking in front of people look more attractive. They react. They are not imaginary. You get quick feedback regarding how what you are saying is landing. There might be opportunities for dialogue. If you can keep a conversation going with yourself, having material to work with in conversation often provides better opportunities.

I do not know how many hours I ended up talking by myself into a microphone. I did spend a lot of solo time in a basement on-air studio or recording for on-air and creating ads and promos in a recording studio. The on-air studio had a few methods for interacting with the outside world – a phone line that could also be placed on-air, the computer (AOL Instant Messenger and email in my early days), and the campus “Blanchard Cam” that showed outside conditions in front of our main building. A lot of time to figure out how to be comfortable with that microphone.

I also had enjoyable radio experiences with conversation partners. I co-hosted a talk show one academic year and we regularly invited guests for conversation. I read news on our morning show and had more off-the-cuff interactions with multiple hosts. I did play-by-play of football and soccer games with partners. Radio was not only a solitary experience but learning to talk alone was critical to the experience and for other areas of life.

New data collection tool: the ever-on smartphone microphone

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One company is using the microphone in smartphones to figure out what people are watching on TV:

TV news was abuzz Thursday morning after Variety reported on a presentation by Alan Wurtzel, a president at NBCUniversal, who said that streaming shows weren’t cutting into broadcast television viewership to the degree that much of the press seems to believe. Mr. Wurtzel used numbers that estimated viewership using data gathered by mobile devices that listened to what people were watching and extrapolating viewership across the country…

The company behind the technology is called Symphony Advanced Media. The Observer spoke to its CEO Charles Buchwalter, about how it works, via phone. “Our entire focus is to add insights and perspectives on an entire new paradigm around how consumers are consuming media across  platforms,” he told the Observer…

Symphony asks those who opt in to load Symphony-branded apps onto their personal devices, apps that use microphones to listen to what’s going on in the background. With technology from Gracenote, the app can hear the show playing and identify it using its unique sound signature (the same way Shazam identifies a song playing over someone else’s speakers). Doing it that way allows the company to gather data on viewing of sites like Netflix and Hulu, whether the companies like it or not. (Netflix likes data)

It uses specific marketing to recruit “media insiders” into its system, who then download its app (there’s no way for consumers to get it without going through this process). In exchange, it pays consumers $5 in gift cards (and up) per month, depending on the number of devices he or she authorizes.

The undertone of this reporting is that there are privacy concerns lurking around the corner. Like the video camera now built into most laptops, tablets, and smartphones that might be turned on by nefarious people, most of these devices also have microphones that could be utilized by others.

Yet, as noted here, there is potential to gather data through opt-in programs. Imagine a mix between survey and ethnographic data where an opt-in program can get an audio sense of where the user is. Or record conversations to examine both content and interaction patterns. Or to look at the noise levels people are surrounded by. Or to simply capture voice responses to survey questions that might allow respondents to provide more details (because they are able to interact with the question more as well as because their voice patterns might also provide insights).