How fast is too fast when it comes to podcast listening speed? For Medium’s OneZero, Steve Rousseau ventured to find out. In an experiment that “broke [his] brain,” Rousseau explores the phenomenon of ‘podfasters,’ who listen to their favorite shows at 1.5x and even 2x speed.
The article’s play-by-play descriptions of adapting to rapid-fire speech are entertaining, informative, and just might save you a headache. Uri Hasson, the director of a neuroscience lab at Princeton, had “found that word recognition drops about 40% when audio is played back twice as fast.”
Hasson informs Rousseau’s podcast acceleration trials, explaining the effects of speed listening up to 3x. “If you train yourself, you can really become really fast,” he acknowledges. “But you lose something in the depth of comprehension.”
National Book Award finalist Marlon James is a co-host of a podcast, out today, called Marlon and Jake Read Dead People. Peter Libbey of The New York Times spoke to James about how he “conjures lost and forgotten voices” in writing and now with the spoken word.
“In the audio series from Riverhead Books, James and Jake Morrissey, his editor, strive to breathe life into the literature of the past,” writes Libbey. “The podcast is an outgrowth, both hosts said, of discussions that they’ve been having for years.” James has said that he “write[s] to be read aloud.”
It’s a debate between friends and colleagues on works from authors as different Charles Dickens and as romance novelist Jackie Collins. “Too often the canon means ‘these books are untouchable and let’s talk about them in that way,’” James said in an interview. “People fought about ‘Moby-Dick’ in the 1800s. Why can’t we fight about it now?”
When reporter and podcaster Hunter Ingram begins a new season of Cape Fear Unearthed, one special piece of music takes center stage. The local history podcast is produced for StarNews, a Wilmington, NC publication in which Ingram shares the impact of a single waltz on his creative process.
“Ashokan Farewell” is part of the expansive soundtrack of Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary series “The Civil War.” The track evokes the power of the series in a way that inspires Ingram like no other. “It felt like I was drawing creative fuel from the spirit of the series and the intention behind it,” he writes.
“With that music in my ears, I wanted to create a storytelling vehicle for local history that could maybe, just maybe, capture someone’s attention like that docuseries captured mine,” Ingram explains. “I want to tell the Cape Fear’s history in a way that resonates, educates and thrills, so that people will take with them an excitement to seek out more history beyond the airwaves.”
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