The Linguistics of 'YouTube Voice' | Hacker News Reader

The Linguistics of 'YouTube Voice'

theatlantic.com

83 pointsnmcfarl39 comments

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).

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.

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%.

Applying the Wadsworth constant often helps as well.

My favorite YouTube personalities were those who were more interested in the topic (usually play-throughs) than pandering to the new viewers and how great they are for clicking a video.

Though, I no longer even visit YouTube, so who cares what I think. :)

oh wow yeah, those awkward monologues about how great and supportive the viewers are are also very uncomfortable to watch.

Exactly, I just jump to the middle of any video from the Internet which is not a movie.

> I find the pacing and "bubbliness" exhausting, and the tone bordering on patronizing.

The description "intellectual used-car-salesman voice" mentioned in the article is spot on.

Deleted comment

All YouTube and TED speakers are intolerably condensecnding? What an absurdly obnoxious statement. The irony burns.

I blame ad revenue sharing, on-video links, and allowing links to outside content. Youtube's become a cesspool of spam and pandering garbage over the last few years. Enthusiastic amateurs eager to share useful or interesting material are buried under wanna-be Internet stars and ads masquerading as content (plus, you know, actual ads). I dread using the site now.

Sub Internet for YouTube, would your post suffer?

I actually consume a lot of content on YouTube that I think is very high quality, but I'm sure your criticisms are true for the most popular channels.

It's a hit-and-miss for me. Some I thoroughly enjoy, and others I can't stand for more than just a few seconds before I have to shut it down. Interestingly, this is a per-video thing for me. For example – I very much enjoyed the Vlogbrother's series on American history, but then there are others (like the fart video linked in the article) that I just can't stand.

Is this surprising to anyone? There are millions (tens of?) videos on youtube. Expecting all of the videos to conform to any individual's taste or even talking about "youtube videos" as if that's a canonical thing seems ludicrous to me.

Sure, I agree. My comment was in context of the "voice" as presented in the article, and how in some videos – from the same producers, no less – I find it enjoyable and in others I find it so annoying I can't continue watching regardless of other qualities such as whether or not the subject matter is interesting, production qualities, participants etc.

The first few episodes of My Drunk Kitchen have excellent comedic timing, but after that it turns into a specimen of the type in the article.

> 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.

One problem with replacing all the schwas with ə in spelling is it would break the visual relationship between related words. (I don't know if this problem outweighs the benefits that would be gained from otherwise easier-to-learn spelling.)

For example "atom" and "atomic" would be spelled "atəm" and "ətomic". If you're learning the language and you know "atəm" and then see the word "ətomic", you might not know it's related to "atəm".

The situation would be even worse if we decided to spell consonants phonetically. In American English the t in "atom" sounds very different than the t in "atomic". Suppose we introduce a letter ɾ (from IPA) to spell the sound of t in "atom". Then it's even less evident that "aɾəm" and "ətomic" are basically two forms of the same word.

I think it's interesting to consider language as evolving based on the competition of at least four different stakeholders: Writers, Readers, Speakers, and Listeners.

Usually something that seems stupid for one role happens to make things easier for another, like your atom example.

English orthography is so loosely connected to phonetics that that's not going to help things very much; it'll solve one small problem in the mapping of orthography to phonetics (until the next pronunciation drift), break the linkage between orthography and semantic relations that (in English as it is) is closer than the orthography to phonetics link, but still leave orthography only very loosely related to phonetics.

Why would that make things "better"?

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.

>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?

Not Dvorak, but right on the phone part.

I asume because "Explicit is better than implicit". Adding a new vowel would mean less ambiguity as to how a word is pronounced

Linguists do have a way of explicitly notating language, called IPA. However, just reading straight IPA can be exhausing. (dʒʌst ɹidɪŋ ai pi ɛi kæn bi ɛɡzɐstɪŋ). Not to mention, one's own accent comes through in the transcription. I remember in school i was confused by the utterance kœkəkœwlɐ which turned out to be "Coca-Cola" transcribed in a British accent (I'm from the US).

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.

I've honestly never seen the point of vlogs. YouTube is an audiovisual medium, and I'm only interested in watching a video if it has content that absolutely needs to be aural and/or visual. For example, Let's Plays and music videos. Both of them make for great YouTube videos.

But if you're just a talking head, I'm not interested. I'd rather read a blog post. I read faster than people talk, and I honestly don't have the patience to sit there and listen when I can read the same words in a written essay in half the time.

Partly I think it's an artifact of editing a long rambling speech into the final YouTube video. Sometimes if you cut out a sentence or a word, the result is a choppy transition. And despite what the article says, they really do have to compete for attention. There's a whole list of other videos people could be watching right there, so if they lose the audience's attention for a second, they might just leave.

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.

That's pretty common in any form of media:

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.

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.

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.

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

That was my first thought as well. My first real exposure to the common youtube style of presentation/monologue (extra emotive, exaggerated pronunciations and facial expressions, quick cuts to remove longer pauses) was in watching "The Show" every week.

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) uses this a lot and it is ever present in educational type YouTube channels.

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

Makes me feel instant boredom and close the page.

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

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