Working Double Time On The Seduction Line

Even with songs that I’m a big fan of and listened to possibly thousands of times over the years, I can still discover out of the blue one day that I never heard specific lines of lyrics correctly. Take, for example, “You Shook Me All Night Long,” AC/DC’s biggest hit, and a track that is propelled at an even faster rate than most of their stuff.

The second verse starts “Working double time/On the seduction line.” At different points, I probably heard this in any number of ways, such as “Working double time/On the production line,” “Working double time/In the seduction room” or “Rocking double time/On the production line,” to name a few. [Also I’m sure I heard “Wanted no applause/Just another course” as “Wanted more applause/Just because” – right up until I actually read the lyrics to write this.]

I’m pretty exact in my listening to music and podcasts, I like to think, and I still mishear things like this example. So it caught my attention months ago when I heard that some avid podcast listeners will listen to shows at double speed to consume them more quickly. Doing this, I thought at the time, would make the familiar voices of favorite hosts sound too fast and distorted, so I never really tried it. Even some listeners who do this wouldn’t speed up shows that had more audio production value to tell fictional stories or to operate as audio documentaries, because the mood created by the audio is an important part of experiencing those shows.

Although podcast interview shows don’t have the extra dimension of dynamic music that can mask or confuse what the words are, I would wonder what I was losing or mishearing by listening to speech twice as quickly.

There are now apps to solve this problem, notably Overcast for Apple devices, that remove pauses from conversations without increasing the speed, to enable quicker consumption of a podcast without distorting the voices. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve been able to research these apps, but when I do, I’ll revisit this topic and give an opinion on whether they’re worthwhile.

Podcasts of the moment:

The Last Adopter, episode 1 “The Computer in the Driveway,” Sept. 22, 2017: This short mini-series (three episodes) is sponsored by CA Technologies, and features Lewis Black, taking a technophobe’s point of view, as counterpoint for speakers talking about technological innovations.

The Hidden Brain “You 2.0: Embrace The Chaos,” August 7, 2017: I’ve cited this show and its “You 2.0” series, once before (and probably will one more time, as I work through it). This episode’s guest, economist Tim Harford, relates how less than ideal conditions or live feedback from an audience, raised performances to a higher level – for jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, dealing with a broken piano that couldn’t be replaced in time for a show, and also for Martin Luther King Jr., in his “I Have A Dream” speech, some of which was improvised on the spot.