Right now I’m listening to a live Presidential press conference from the White House on NPR and I keep hearing a very distracting intermittent noise in the background, but I can’t figure out what it is.
Initially, I thought it was the sound of the photographers’ shutters and flash bulbs, but the noise just seemed too loud and frequent. Besides, this is 2015, who still uses flash bulbs or film?
The noise almost sounds exactly like an IBM Selectric Typewriter, but that’s an even more arcane tree to bark up. Is there a stenographer recording everything? Maybe it’s a reporter from the Amish Times hammering away on a wooden typewriter?
It’s thousands upon thousands of photos being taken with digital SLRs. No flash bulbs…just camera shutters, some of which are almost silent, some make a sort of flap-flap noise, some are clack-clack, and most of the photographers are using what’s called burst mode where they press the shutter button and the camera fires off three or five rapid shots. The net result is a perpetual background clatter.
The real fun was when he called out someone for letting their cell phone ring.
Well, that’s disappointingly mundane. At least I got to learned that the set designer in the theater of my mind probably needs to update the inventory in its props department.
Or maybe not. There’s a part of me that really enjoyed imagining it was a live on-site closed captioning system using a huge split-flap display. That is one ostentatious use of taxpayers’ dollars I would approve of.
That stylized teletype sound has been a standard meme associated with radio/TV news since forever, just as much as the candy-striped pole is the standard meme for barber shops. CBS News has used some variation of that for the last million years, and as far as I know, still does.
In the olden days, it was actual teletype sounds of a newsroom full of them. It eventually became a musical sound played by some kind of instruments, with a staccato beat and tempo and tones to resemble that. I think that successive versions over the years have become more and more stylized, sounding less and less like The Real Thing, but the vestigial Teletype sound is still (barely) recognizable there.
Is WINS radio a CBS affiliate?
(Pauses to click your link . . . )
Why, yes, surprise surprise! I see CBS mentioned a few times on their home page, so I guess that makes them a CBS affiliate. You are probably hearing that “fake teletype sound effects” at the beginnings of their top-of-the-hour CBS Network news broadcasts. In the San Francisco Bay Area, and for many miles around, it’s KCBS All-Commercials-With-Occasional-Scraps-of-News, and the fake TTY sounds we get are probably just the same ones you are hearing.
what we need in this great nation is Camera Control! All those automatics and semi-automatics are a national menace!