Speed Up Your Hearing

You surf the internet with your eyes, ears and fingers. Eyes and fingers often work together, but ears are mostly used just for music. Podcasting and audio books change that, by putting ears to work while we drive, fly, walk, exercise and study. Entertainment is mostly why we listen, but it can also help digest the awesome amount of information you can find.

You must overcome three bottlenecks to boost ear-put: sorting, listening speed and batch processing. Sorting is what you do when you look for certain books, magazines, journals and newspapers at your favourite places, then check the table of contents to zero in on what's most interesting. Spoken books and pod or netcasts equal those written sources and you search for them on the net the same way as written material, but you subscribe to netcasts using an aggregator of which there are many. Most are compared here: These automate the collecting process and some can remove older material to prevent file duplication. A small number of duplicates can still slip through, but a second screening with a duplicate remover takes care of that.

Listening tools are scarce, unlike visual tools that create web pages, apply various visual effects and promote interactivity. Listening is like a movie and the speed of both can be adjusted. You've been exposed to much more slow-mo and fast-mo on the visual side than Chip-and-Dale songs on the audio side. Still, many players, including the iPhone, other smart phones, iPad, iRiver and some Samsung devices, have settings or apps that speed up playback. Perhaps this is a concession to handicapped users. A drawback is that most of these portable players and smart phones don't adjust pitch to remove Chip or Dale. One interesting exception is the latest free digital playback device for the blind and handicapped provided by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS). Of course you have to be qualified.

You should know that automatic pitch control does exist, just not on portable players. The Windows Media Player is the gold standard in this area. A right click on a running file in the Media Player brings up a menu with Enhancements that opens another menu with speed control that does automatically correct and does this easily up to twice the normal speed. Some new flash players do this, too.

You can speed up audio and visual files using Windows Media Player, but can't put it on portable players or smart phones. However, Audacity can process audio file so they play faster and are smaller sized to take up less space. The result is then put it on your portable player. How to do this, shown below, comes from kristarella.com.

“For this exercise I used the change speed, change pitch and amplify effects.

“To start, I opened the mp3 file in Audacity. In the above image I’ve already selected the part of the file that I wanted by dragging the mouse across it, and removed the rest with the trim outside selection button.
 

“To change the speed you need to select the whole file (represented as wav peaks) and go to Effect > Change Speed…. That will give you a window (as shown in the image). I dragged the blue cursor up so that I was changing the speed by about 50%. I find that to be a reasonable increase while still being able to understand the words. You could play with the speed to see how fast your file needs to go."

“If you play back your file as is, you’ll find it fairly difficult to understand because of the chipmunk element, it also sounds pretty funny. Go to Effect > Change Pitch…. Drag the blue cursor like for the speed, but this time take it down about 30%. I find with a 50% increase in speed, a 30% decrease in pitch makes the speaker sounds fairly normal."

“It can also be handy to use Effect > Amplify to make the file a bit louder; some lecturers are softly spoken.”

You can process single files using Audacity, but not batches. Right now only commercial batch processors are available to do this. If you download seventy or eighty files each week, a commercial batch processor may be your only convenient solution.

Why even do this? Well, it means you can listen to a sixteen-hour book in eight. If you commute twenty hours a week, you can listen to forty hours of lectures. Recorded radio programs can be shrunk in size and more quickly reviewed. Many audio files discuss the mountain of new knowledge created each year. In the biomedical field alone over 100,000 papers are produced annually in the United States. Some of these netcasts provide summaries while others include in-depth discussions by experts. The more you can process the more productive and informed you'll be. The concept was important enough that Brigham Young University considered producing videocasts of lectures that could be played back at higher speeds (http://www.enounce.com/docs/BYUPaper020319.pdf). However, that was some years back and the single effort hasn't been followed-up.

Speed listening is not more popular for the same reason as speed reading, because of the effort. Yet speed listening is much easier to apply. You just need to focus or concentrate more on what's said. In fact, speeding up speech can make a subject more interesting. We can easily listen to speech at 250 words a minute, but public speech is often quite slow, about 150 words a minute. Listening speeds up to 500 words a minute are possible, but audio quality, accents and clarity of speech (enunciation) make a difference as does the quality of processing.

If you lack sources, a number of rss URL's are listed below. To start with try listening to episode 22 of This Week in Parasitism. The Naked Scientists based in Britain offers a nice weekly collection of news gathered from that area. The Australian Broadcasting Network offers podcasts about technology oriented towards that part of the world. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp and the BBC also offer podcasts which include new developments in all areas, but don't allow you to specialize in one area, such as medicine or computers. Futures in Biotech has produced some terrific interviews in that area. Netcasts from Mike Tech Show deals mostly with maintenance and troubleshooting computers and their systems. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute produces podcasts and videocasts about advancing technology. Econtalk deals with economics and will change your belief that it's dry and boring with outstanding interviews about developments and history. Two other sources with outstanding products are Sound Investing and RadioLab. And, they are all free!

Resource rss links:

This article was contributed by virginiajim. Registered members can contact the author with any comments or suggestions they might have by clicking here.