GHOST SPEAKERS

By Madeleine Kando
One of the more disorienting experiences in my life was when I first heard my own recorded voice. I heard myself as someone else hears me. And it was a total shocker. After that, I was never too thrilled to be asked to speak in public. There is really nothing wrong with my voice, mind you. I express myself well, good choice of words and all that, but it’s the tone of my voice. Like the color and pattern of a dress. It just doesn’t work sometimes. Which brings me to the real subject of this essay…I am a radio junkie. Mostly because I am so bored driving to work. Since I teach dance for a living I have enough music in my ears to last me a lifetime and that leaves talk radio as the only other option. Believe it or not, in a country of over 300 million people, there are not too many options out there in that category. Yes, you guessed it: I listen to NPR. Every so often I give other talk radio stations a half-hearted try, but somehow I always revert back to my home station. I am a creature of habit I guess.

As all self-respecting groupies I could identify NPR voices in one second flat. I have my favorites of course, Tom Ashbrook for instance, but I won’t bore you with those details. I just want to say that, in my humble opinion, we should introduce some kind of entrance exam to decide which voices we allow on talk radio. I mean, us poor listeners have to fill in the rest of the persona whose voice we are subjected to. We can be forgiving when we see a gorgeous blond on tv speak with a squeaky little voice but there are no visuals on radio, my friend. Only the damned voice! So it better be a good one.

You have ghost writers so why not have ghost speakers? I cannot tell you how many times I had to turn off the radio in the middle of an extremely fascinating discussion because the voice of the commentator was so annoying. The newscaster who has a chronic cold announcing that‘Doo beoble died yesderday id a gar accidend’. That really takes away from the severity of the announcement, don’t you think?

Or how about the voice that cannot say more than two words without interjecting an ‘uh’ in between. After a while no topic is important enough to go through that ordeal. It makes you want to strangle the speaker instead. I dread listening to news about judicial matters since the reporter on staff at NPR must be eating a lot of potatoes that get stuck in her throat. I am sitting there clutching my steering wheel, feverishly swallowing in the hope that it will make HER swallow, if only once, to clear that damned potato out of the way.

Other voices that should have failed the exam are the ‘I know a lot more than you’ voices, the ‘I better shout so you can hear me’ voices, and above all, the ‘mumblers'. Often people who call in fall in that category: ‘Yes, Tom, thanks for taking my call. I really think that.. mumble, mumble.. and besides you don’t have to .. mumble, mumble.. unless you.. mumble, mumble. Thank you, and I’ll take my answer off the air.’ Trying to decipher what they say is more stressful than being stuck in traffic.

On the other hand, there are certain radio voices that should be given an A plus. One of my favorite voices was the announcer on WGBH’s ‘morning pro musica’ program: Robert J. Lurtsema. You could tell he really liked classical music himself. His voice stroked his words like velvet gloves. With HIS voice he could have announced that the end of the world was here and it would have been a good thing.leave comment here