Eccentric Flower:201009/The Overrated Voice

1. I stumbled today across Danny O'Brien's comments on a podcast interview with himself and Dave Green about the late lamented NTK. Unfortunately, O'Brien's comments mostly amounted to "go listen to the podcast." I'm sure the interview is fascinating and, since I think NTK was brilliant and would love to hear more about the circumstances that led to its creation, I'm sorry I won't get to hear it. But the fact remains that it is a podcast of the spoken word, so it just ain't gonna happen.

Coincidentally, at the same time that I was following this link, Stephen Fry was flooding his Twitter feed with the answers to his in-Twitter interview. Since I didn't follow the interviewer's Twitter account, I only saw the answers, not the questions, some of which I read and were interesting, some of which I skipped.

The point here is that there are plenty of people who would find Fry's fifty-some tweets in the space of about a half hour far more obnoxious than listening to a podcast for the same half hour. I won't actually say those people are wrong, because de gustibus and all that, but I will say that I do not quite comprehend the alien premises from which they are ratiocinating.

2. I was informed yesterday evening about a death in the family (no, no, no one you need to be concerned about; an uncle I have never mentioned here), and for various reasons I've decided that I had probably better go down for the funeral. The funeral has not been scheduled yet. Now, with anyone else of my acquaintance I would leave an private electronic message of some form saying, "Please let me know as soon as you know when the funeral will be, because I've decided I'm coming and I need to make travel plans at the earliest time I possibly can," and they would read it and would later send me an email with the information and I could act accordingly.

But because the person I must ask about this is my mother, I will have to speak to her over the telephone, and it will be a difficult communication, and not just because this is a hard and emotionally fragile time for her. For example, there will be a discussion about my attendance. The primary reason I haven't asked my mother, "Do you want me to attend the funeral?" is that I know I can't get an honest answer from her (she'll tell me no even if the answer is yes), which is why I've had to make a unilateral decision to attend - and I don't particularly want to have that argument, nor does she need to have that argument at this time. She has enough to think about as is.

3. I just got out of a meeting where I'm reasonably sure I looked like a gibbering idiot - as I tend to do in meetings. I am consoled by the fact that my boss knows I'm not a gibbering idiot, but that doesn't help the fact that the two visitors probably came away thinking, "THAT is what they have for a developer? Those poor people."

Because, as I've said before and will say again: I do not talk well. Thoughts which I can make precise and usually well-organized (if not always succinct) on paper come out as a huge mess of dead ends and false starts when I actually have to discuss them verbally. Especially in technical discussions, where I tend to focus on direct facts of implementation (what do I have to do, where do I have to do it) and someone else is focusing on high-end details of architecture or design I don't give a rat's ass about (e.g. I don't have to know how it works if I'm not the person writing it, I just have to know what to put in my own code to cooperate with it), it always goes badly for me, and I always end up sounding like I don't understand either what they or I am talking about.

4. I remember when I first heard a recording of my voice. It was a recording I had made. This was when I learned, to my great shock, that my voice doesn't sound to other people the way it sounds to me when I am speaking. I've heard my recorded voice several times over the years since then and it never gets less heartbreaking.

Our voices resonate inside our heads when we talk and it alters their shapes. I have a deeper, steadier, less whiny, less nasal voice to myself than I do to you. I'm sorry to expose it to you, so I try not to talk unless I have to, and I'm sorry for me, so I try not to ever let my voice be recorded lest I one day inadvertently get exposed to it and have to face another of those shocks.

Unfortunately I do have the nerd tendency to go onto long spiels about a topic I'm interested in, whether the audience wants it or not, and though I've tried to eradicate this technique by force, I have never entirely succeeded. If I do ever subject you to one of those spiels, I apologize, and I want you to know I always feel very guilty about it afterward once I realize what I've done.

5. Several times in recent months Mel and I have pushed the limits of what can be done with written chat under high-performance conditions in an online game. There have been a number of times when I literally could not type "stop!" fast enough to keep her from walking into a trap or bad situation which I knew was there and she didn't. We have hesitantly discussed voice chat once or twice. It's not like it's anything particularly novel; in fact it is the norm. There are many guilds/groups/teams which simply won't let you do quests with them if you don't have voice chat, period, the end.

I have always dismissed these people as People Who Won't Read or who can't type fast enough, people whom usually I treat with utter contempt since I read faster than I hear and type faster than I talk, and don't understand why everyone else can't do it too.

But even I am forced to admit that when one is playing with someone who doesn't read chat as fast as I do, or is often more distracted by non-game things than I am, or who in general is not giving the game the obssessive control-freak total ADHD focus that I give it when I'm playing, sometimes you need the ability to be able to holler "STOP" or "NO, GO LEFT" or "NOW" in a way that not only has speed but also has the emphasis and distractiveness of audio. (Is "distractiveness" really a word, Sam? It is now, Max.)

However, it is not likely to happen. For one thing, I often listen to music when playing online, and I don't want to lose that. For another thing, I feel that voice communications are One Of The Things The Internet Is Not For and a bad use of bandwidth, and these games have high connectivity needs as is. I don't need the extra load on the pipeline while I'm playing. For a third thing (and this may be the main thing) talking aloud to my computer, even if I'm really talking aloud to a person somewhere else, makes me feel ridiculous. And with a game I wouldn't just be talking aloud; I'd be shouting aloud and so forth. No. Not even if there were no witnesses.

6. Written text is a random-access medium. That is, you do not have to start at the beginning and go through all the words in sequence. You can go arbitrarily to any point in the text and resume there. You can skim. You can peek at the end of the book and see how it comes out. I'm not saying these are good habits, but they are possible and sometimes necessary.

The spoken word, whether live or via recording, is sequential-access. You cannot skip ahead in any controlled fashion. You can fast-forward or rewind recorded audio, of course, but unless you have known time notations, you have no idea where you're going when you jump. And if the audio is happening live, you're stuck with it.

Written text is easier to resume when interrupted. When you find your place, you invisibly scan the preceding material for context; it gives you a sort of warm-up as you restart the narrative. With audio, if you pause it and come back an hour later, you'll be lucky if you can remember what the speaker was talking about, let alone what the first half of the interrupted sentence was. Or, if it's live audio, forget it; if you don't give it your undivided attention, it's gone. If you step out of the room, you missed something and you're not getting it back.

Written text is more portable, more easily viewed, more easily scanned/searched for context, and does not disrupt the environment of the people around you when you view it. Written text is superior to audio text in all respects but one, and unless you are a person with a truly beautiful or expressive voice (which is damned few of us, sadly), the intonation aspect is one I'll gladly sacrifice in exchange for the other benefits the written word offers.

7. The majority of the people in the world seem to do the math the other way around - at least how else do you explain the ascendancy of radio and television over books, of podcasts and YouTube clips over written interviews and web pages?

Oh, sure, there are things you can't do or show in a written medium - you can't have a transcript of a Warner Brothers cartoon, for example. There's music, for which there must always forever be an exception (sure, you can write music, but it misses all the fun; music is designed to be performed, not read). There's verbal comedy (that Monty Python skit I quoted a few entries back is meant to be heard and not read, because Cleese's voice is an important part of the humor). Plenty of things you must hear or watch in the world.

But, just for example, I have never yet seen a podcast or YouTube interview which couldn't have been replaced with a transcript of the same interview without losing any value - to me. Interviewers and interviewees might like to think that their voice and mannerisms and other visual/verbal information are crucial enough to the interview that it doesn't stand without them. My experience has been that they are almost always wrong.

8. I'd like to see chat software where three or four people could type at high speed simultaneously, each stream of type running down its own separate column of the screen. Furthermore there would be a constant scrolloff as time passed - text would move upscreen as the clock ticked, so eventually it would fall off the top of the screen whether you were actually typing new material or not. This way you could see when someone was pausing because there would be an equivalent blank space in the screen. Of course you'd need to have the ability to scroll back, so you could catch up with what had been said even if you'd stepped away for five minutes. Otherwise you'd just be replicating one of the faults of verbal conversation.

I would love this software. I suspect most of my friends would hate it passionately. I know at least one whom it would make absolutely crazy. I can hear her now, saying to me, "So you expect me to keep up with what's being displayed in four concurrent columns of text in real time? Are you insane?"

Not only am I not insane, I would be able to do something else, like play a game or listen to music, while keeping up with it - unlike verbal conversations which demand I give them my full attention. To me it would be a concise, compact, way of getting all the best parts of a conversation without any of the limitations and frustrations of verbal communication. The only sacrifice I concede one would be making is the screen real estate it would demand. (I'd have to play the game on another computer.)

I realize that to many or most of you, the paragraph above is the incomprehensible ranting of a dangerous lunatic. I wish I could understand this gap. I've known for years it exists, but I never have been able to figure out why. I know some of you can read fast. I know some of you can type fast. What I don't know is why you insist on being more comfortable with conversations held in spoken words, whereas I think spoken conversations are a badly-flawed format that we have the technology to move beyond, except you stubborn people won't do it.

9. Face-to-face interpersonal contact, actually being in the same room with other real live humans, is a vital part of one's existence. I agree. But I don't feel that fact is strongly connected to any of the discussion above.