Exploring a comfortable pace (speed) of your speaking voice...
- Due Mar 6, 2024 by 11:59pm
- Points 100
- Submitting a discussion post
Note: This was written in response to a post by Sajda, but I am making it an assignment for everyone. It emerged from my noticing that I needed to alter the speed of the playback on some of your speeches, some slower, some faster. Let's make this an exploratory assignment.
Yes, I did need to slow down your speech to 0.75 speed! However, I needed to speed up another student to 1.25 speed! I hope that students will gradually each find their "1.0" speed, which seems to be the right pace for most people.
It would be cool to find a way to time speeches of US Presidents. We could actually do this, by taking the State of the Union speeches, which should all be available on C-SPAN.ORG, and getting the transcript, and using the MS Word automatic word counter to count how many words there are, and coordinating that amount of text with a certain time period of the speech (for example, 1 minute). That would give the amount of words per minute. You could then take your own speech, which you gave spontaneously, and use the Canvas Studio CC generator to generate Closed Captions from your speech. You can download the CC and edit the downloaded file, eliminating the time stamps and the gaps between the text sections, and then also run it through MS Word to get a word count, and coordinate that with a particular length of time of your speech, set at 1.0...
That would give you a nice basis of comparison. I could actually make this an assignment to everyone, which is a good idea, after listening to student speeches and noticing this variability in the pace of speeches from student to student.
I hate to use my least favorite president as an example, and perhaps it was the contrast between his reading of a speech from a teleprompter, as compared with his ex promto speeches which impressed me, and perhaps Biden's speaking style is so much less impressive, but here it is. A lot of even the harshest critics of Trump seemed to be optimistic for his presidency as the result of his first State of the Union address. But let's just technically look at the pace of the speech, in the technical ways I've suggested above, and see what we discover. It's easy to find other State of the Union speeches in c-span.org, along with the transcripts.