Thanks for having me!

July 15, 2018 7:33 AM

Thanks for having me!
I've listened to podcasts ever since it required hunting Podcast Pickle, and love meta shows which repurpose audio (the defunct Ask Mr Biggs comes to mind) so I spent a few hours trying out an idea I've had rattling around: I've spliced together all 2018 welcomes/thanks of guests on CBC:s Quirks and Quarks podcast into a 15 minute thing.

The track is embedded on the project link, but also available as mp3 here: link

I'd be curious to hear what folks who don't listen to Q&Q make of it – if anything – as well as those of you who are familiar with Bob McDonalds sanguine narration.

Role: Editor

posted by monocultured (7 comments total)

Oh man, I'm immediately grinning at this. I don't listen to Q&Q but I've listened to enough public radio and podcasts that the greeting/thanks ritual's absolutely familiar. Hearing it disembodied and clumped together is weird and delightful; it's a great concept, executed nicely. The way it ends up throwing a spotlight on every little variation and oddity in this or that bookend bit. The guy who paused; the woman with the stronger accent; the guy who crammed 50 words into his "thanks"; the time the host said "welcome to the show" instead of "welcome to Quirks and Quarks"; the woman who said thanks the exact same way at the start and the end; the time the host's voice was tired...

My brain wants to propose an alternate structure where it's a LIFO stack, with the last greeting being the first thanks, second to last greeting the second thank, the very first greeting the very last thanks, like some grand nested narrative. But in practice I'm not sure it would have the same sort of potency, so I think your edit here is the stronger; there's not enough time spent with any guest voice to really set up a memory to call back to five, ten, fifteen minutes later.
posted by cortex at 7:44 AM on July 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

I had to look up the LIFO stack idea - it's neat, but as you write the recall would be stretched a bit, and you'd lose the dynamic between when the guests are introduced and thanked (their voice-change during the interview).

I was toying with the idea of sorting individual words in the order they appear (if "hi" was the first, I'd sort all "hi"'s consecutively, then all "welcome", etc) but that's a ton of more work for making an unknown point. Another thing would be to see how consistent Bob is in his greatings – I imagine that his intonation is near identical in many of his greetings, so layering those might be fun (and not take that much time…)

I think there's a ton of interesting analysis you could do if you'd compare how different hosts welcome people of different gender, age, etc – Melvyn Bragg of In Our Times would be a great subject of such an analysis (how often does he interrupt or is interrupted by different guests split male/female) – but that's for someone with more patience and rigour than I have.
posted by monocultured at 8:08 AM on July 15, 2018

Oh, I love the layering-Bob idea, yeah. And doing a comparison between various different hosts in this salutation format is a great idea too.

As I think about it, I bet the better fit for LIFO hijinks would be television content; our ability to sort out a ton of visual information rapidly and store and classify at least little bits of it would probably make that kind of nesting easier to produce a response for. At the same time I wonder if there'd be as good of a source of really tight, really ritualized greetings like this in that context. Cable news, maybe? TV talk shows feel like they'd be too padded, with time for a guest-walk out and applause etc. Hmm!
posted by cortex at 8:13 AM on July 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've never listened to Q&Q but this is fun! Quite soothing.

Decades ago (!) I heard a track where they had edited together dozens of times when Larry King had greeted callers by the name of their city: Portland, hello. New Brunswick, hello. Philadelphia, hello, and on and on. I keep meaning to try to find it again - maybe it's time to ask.metafilter. Seems like it's gotta be negativland or affiliates, right?
posted by moonmilk at 5:55 AM on July 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

> Moonmilk - I'm sure ask.mefi would find it in an eye-blink. Negativeland would be a good start though.

Another take on the found stuff is No News Today which has appeared in different versions - I love the simplicity of the idea.
posted by monocultured at 5:03 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Do you know Language Removal Services? They perform the important service of removing all the words from speech, while leaving the breathing and lip smacking.

No News Today is great!
posted by moonmilk at 7:35 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

LRS truly are doing good works!
posted by monocultured at 12:48 PM on July 19, 2018