It always surprises me to hear professional news readers on the radio who don’t seem to know how to take a breath without audibly gasping. Judy Woodruff on PBS Newshour is very bad at this (she is on TV but I listen to the radio broadcast myself, which is just the audio track from the TV show). There was another one on today’s edition of PRI’s The World (broadcast on NPR radio stations), a young-sounding woman talking about a Sikh appearing on The Bachelorette this year, and her gasping was so audible it sounded like she was being periodically and regularly subjected to electric shock or something.
Don’t these folks get feedback about this? Aren’t there speech therapy methods for counteracting this? I know Judy Woodruff has been around for a long time, maybe this has only developed in the past few years, I don’t know. I find it very distracting, and I would think she would want to fix it, if she knew she was doing it. So what’s up with this?
Not sure what you are referring to, but I do know that how the microphone is placed on the person can make a huge difference. Put it in the wrong place, or use the wrong kind of microphone, and even the best trained vocalist can sound as though they are wheezing uncontrollably.
Where the microphone is positioned, how much the microphone is amplified to boost the voice’s volume, and dynamic range compression all factor into how much ambient sound (including breathing) all come out on the other end.
At an AM radio station I worked at in the 1970’s, the signal was so compressed that if the DJ stopped talking, you could actually hear the air conditioning get louder, as the equipment tried to compensate for silence.
I notice that on my computer at home, which just has these built in speakers in the monitor that don’t get loud. So I have the audio compression (aka “loudness equalization”) turned on (and an EQ set with all the frequencies at maximum. It is actually louder).
OK, but if you listen to Judy Woodruff, she’s fine when she is doing an interview where she only says one line at a time, but when she is reading news stories she seems to get ahead of herself and run out of breath - a lot.