
The Linguistics of 'YouTube Voice' - nmcfarl
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-linguistics-of-youtube-voice/418962/?single_page=true
======
baddox
That's an interesting analysis, although perhaps the most interesting thing to
me is that I can hardly sit through a minute of any of those YouTube voices
linked in the article. I find the pacing and "bubbliness" exhausting, and the
tone bordering on patronizing.

And yet I find some "Internet personalities" very interesting to listen to,
and they're mostly from podcasts. Dave Chen from slashfilmcast.com is a
favorite of mine (and yes, I miss Adam Quigley's voice). Many NPR shows (which
I listen to in podcast format) are obvious examples.

In fact, the voices really make or break podcasts for me. I never made it past
the first 15 minutes of Serial, because I just couldn't sit through the host's
voice (clearly this is not a common opinion).

~~~
asddubs
I feel the same way. If I'm looking for tutorials on youtube and someone goes
"heyyy what's up everybody, it's joshkiller44 here and today..." \- I just
turn it off.

~~~
maho
Have you tried a playback-speed of 1.5? (It's under "Settings -> Speed")

The "YouTube voice" works nicely at 1.5x speed, and in my experience, most of
the fluff becomes tolerable when it's shorter by 33%.

~~~
bubalus
Applying the Wadsworth constant often helps as well.

------
bane
> Overstressed vowels: A lot of the time, people are lazy about pronouncing
> certain vowels—they’re un-emphasized and neutral, and just sort of hang
> loosely in the middle of the mouth, making an “euh” sound, regardless of
> which vowel it actually is.

Here's a funny notion. Perhaps in modern American English (at least the
midwest accent), perhaps many of the vowels have _actually_ become schwas and
it's only the historic nature of the orthography that makes us think they
should be something else. There's no vowel that sounds like the schwa
naturally, but it's clearly a "missing" letter in the modern alphabet since
it's also the most common vowel sound in American English. So every other
vowel ends up being pronounceable as a schwa in various contexts.

Strangely, most people who use the schwa vowel regularly make a specific point
to pronounce other key marker vowels correctly in order to distinguish the
words, the rest of the vowels are unimportant to distinguish.

Imagine how much better English orthography would be if we could just use an
'ə' everyplace an unstressed vowel existed.

~~~
moron4hire
Why would that make things "better"?

~~~
bane
English overloads vowels to the point that almost any vowel or any cluster of
vowels can be pronounced like any other given certain contexts and there are
far more vowel sounds than there are letters to represent. E.g. Despite being
the most common vowel sound in the language, English has me symbol for schwa.
Better representational symbology better aligns pronunciation with orthography
and regularizes spelling.

~~~
vive-la-liberte
>English has me symbol for schwa.

I think you use Dvorak and mistyped "no" as "ne" and your phone auto-corrected
it to "me". Am I right?

~~~
bane
Not Dvorak, but right on the phone part.

------
IshKebab
The biggest think I've noticed is that many of these vlog-style youtube videos
are the video equivalent of the wall of text.

The edit out all of the silence between sentences, as if they've never heard
of full stops or paragraphs.

Perhaps their audience will get bored if they aren't continually being
bombarded by inanity.

~~~
jodrellblank
_Perhaps their audience will get bored if they aren 't continually being
bombarded by inanity._

Yes, it carries a hint of panicked "don't go away, I'm not pausing to breathe,
don't switch over, there's no pause, I'm a continual flow of fast information,
come back, come back".

It's different from the "what's up guys, blank here!" friends-with-audience
attitude.

~~~
CM30
That's pretty common in any form of media:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LullDestruction](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LullDestruction)

The unspoken 'rule' being that a lot of creators seem to think any silence for
more than five seconds is considered 'boring', so you end up with speaking
that sounds more like the speaker is a six year kid with AHDD after a sugar
rush and too much caffeine.

If you think it's bad in Youtube videos... well, it's even worse in a lot of
modern day cartoons.

------
tomstuart
I’m surprised that the article doesn’t mention Ze Frank, since he was the
originator of this style of speech in online videos, or at least very
influential in popularising it.

~~~
jodrellblank
It's very Michael from VSauce as well; like a newspaper article taking all the
call-out boxes with the attention grabbing quotes, and then ... deleting the
main article content and just having the call-out boxes, pictures and captions
squished together.

~~~
knughit
This is how kids/tweens TV has worked since before youtubers

------
ppyil
This is increasingly common all over YouTube, and I've been noticing at
university in presentations. The pauses seem unnatural and there is a lot of
emphasis in strange parts of sentences.

Although I enjoy the content, CGPGrey
([https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey](https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey))
uses this a lot and it is ever present in educational type YouTube channels.

------
abetusk
It'd be interesting to do the same analysis for NPR or Gimlet Media podcasts.

------
guard-of-terra
Makes me feel instant boredom and close the page.

(Most video makes me feel that, voice or not. Text is the king.)

