English Listening Lounge - Our Recordings

ELL English Listening Lounge
Home Passages Studying Study Guide Choosing a Passage Domains of English Some Theory Our Recordings Transcription System Our Site System Requirements Site Overview What's New General Info FAQ Contact Us Help	Our Recordings
	Our Aim is Authenticity We want to make recordings that have all the characteristics of real, authentic English speech. English just as it is spoken in the real world. When you practice listening comprehension on our site, we want you to listen to the English you would hear in America or England. How We Make Our Recordings We make our recordings by talking to ordinary people. We go to people's homes, or somewhere else, we sit down with them and we ask them to talk about their lives, and what interests them. After a while, speakers become relaxed, and start talking in a natural manner. In this way, we get very realistic language. Background Noise Most places are a little noisy. Background noise is everywhere: birds sing, children laugh, radios play music, airplanes fly overhead, fridges hum, and people walk and talk. That's why professional recordings are made in quiet studios. We do not use a studio, we talk to people in natural situations. We try very hard to keep background noise as low as possible. But it is there. If you listen carefully you will hear some background noise on some recordings. It should not be a problem, just ignore it. Sound Quality We make our recordings with good quality digital audio equipment. We use a studio quality microphone, and a digital tape recorder. We then process the recordings using sophisticated sound editing software. We take out some things, like coughs, long silences and irrelevant comments, but we leave in all the characteristics of natural speech. Audio files are huge (1 minute of CD quality stereo requires 10 MB of data storage). In order to stream audio files over the internet, we must compress them. It is for this reason that we use Flash Streaming Audio. Of course, this results in a loss of sound quality. We do everything we can to provide good quality sound, but some recordings are better than others. Please contact us if you have any problems with sound quality. We would like to know. Characteristics of Our Passages Our passages have the characteristics of natural, authentic, English speech. They are fast, untidy, filled with hesitations and errors, and use a lot of colloquial language. Thus, our passages: are pretty fast the words are not carefully pronounced there are pauses, and hesitations there are mistakes, including grammar mistakes speakers change their mind, or repair what they have said speakers repeat themselves ideas are often disorganized speakers use slang or nonstandard expressions speakers assume that listeners will use inferences to figure out what they mean the way of speaking differs from one speaker to another speaker and on top of all this, there may be some background noise. Happy Listening!
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