Wednesday, June 13, 2018
By:
I have never been outside of Eastern Massachusetts for more than a few weeks at a time, and I just graduated college, so this summer will be a new experience in a lot of ways. So far it’s going really well. My fellow interns are awesome, we’re living in unreasonably nice dorms, and DC’s hockey team just won their first championship in two decades (Go Caps!). Walking around the Capitals’ home stadium last week, in the middle of what turned out to be the winning game, was an incredible experience that I won’t soon forget.
As for my internship, I’m a science policy writer for the American Institute of Physics’ FYI newsletter. After meeting my coworkers and getting settled in, my first work assignment was to watch Congressional hearings – one on the future of the International Space Station, and a more mundane markup session for an appropriations (funding) bill – and take notes.
Congressional hearings are LONG. And most of what’s said doesn’t require particularly close attention. But you never know when someone might say something important. Fortunately, as I quickly discovered, Congressional livestreams come with hugely helpful time distortion options. At 2x speed, for example, you can still understand everything that somebody says, but it takes half the time for them to say it – a big advantage when sifting through multi-hour hearings.
All this is to say that I have spent a lot of time over the past few days watching politicians and witnesses at Congressional hearings talk at double speed. At double speed, everyone sounds kind of impatient, like they drank too much coffee, have somewhere better to be, and really, really just want to drill some point into your head before they leave. The effect is fascinating.
So is the reverse. Slightly slowed down (at 0.75 speed, say), a speaker sounds unusually dignified and deliberate, with the occasional slurred word. Crank the speed down more, to 0.5, and while the sound is clearly distorted, you are forced to really pay attention to every single word they say. 0.5 is useful for taking a direct quote. 0.25 speed is barely intelligible, so after brief experimentation I quickly abandoned it.
I had to directly quote Senator Ted Cruz quite a bit – he has strong opinions about the future of the International Space Station – so I spent several minutes watching him at half speed, really listening to every word he had to say.
At Congressional hearings, most people have voices carefully calibrated to sound authoritative. Significant time dilation, in either direction, completely breaks the effect. In a way, speeding up and slowing down a video makes it easier to pay attention to what’s being said, and not just how it’s being said.
Maybe I’ll start doing it more often.
Nathan Foster