However, your tip about the cadence of Kestenbaum’s voice has made this much easier– he totally still does it, and Adam Davidson doesn’t! So that makes them easier to tell apart.

Neat — my random pieces of knowledge are useful to someone! And it’s interesting how this little voice quirk helps you tell the two apart. Now if I could just find some way to tell Ira Glass and Adam apart…

But David and Alex sound quite similar

Sorry, should have said David and ADAM sound quite similar.

Planet Money has four regular hosts (in rotation– most days only two are on the air): Adam Davidson, David Kestenbaum, Laura Conaway, and Alex Blumberg. Alex has a distinctive voice (at least, it’s distinctive on Planet Money– when I hear him on This American Life I sometimes have trouble differentiating him from Ira Glass.) Laura has a distinctive voice– not just because she’s the woman, but she just has a fairly unusual voice. But David and Alex sound quite similar– they sound like they are men of similar age and background. I often have trouble remembering which one of them is speaking (especially when they host the show together– which they do relatively rarely).

However, your tip about the cadence of Kestenbaum’s voice has made this much easier– he totally still does it, and Adam Davidson doesn’t! So that makes them easier to tell apart.

The good news, perhaps: I’m also helping AAAS in training scientists to communicate clearly for public audiences. Slow work, but you are a good role model!

If they’d left in the bits of me reading from the script, I probably would’ve crawled into a cave and refused to come out.

Wow, Andy, what a story. Of course, how much might the outcome have been different if you’d known to expect a script, and were prepared?

This reminds me of my own “worst NPR” story. When I did that horse clone spot, Joe Palca was in charge of the full story for All Things Considered. But he was out of town when we needed to interview the scientist, who was in Italy. So, they let the intern do it. How fun, doing an overseas phoner interview? NOT! The researcher could speak english fine (though with a heavy accent), but he couldn’t drop the jargon. I’d ask him, “Could you tell me what you did?” and he’d start talking about all the embryos and how long they took to gestation. I could hear that I was getting no useable tape. I asked in as many ways as I could for him to explain it plainly, or asked for his reactions when the horse was born, anything. Nope. He wasn’t playing our game.

Joe Palca later asked me if he could use that piece of tape in his classes when he talked to journalism students about how hard it is to talk to scientists. [head in hands]

You can listen to that story here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1387175

Notice how few comments there are from the actual scientist.

Well written! We do the same with live presentations we give in class-rooms or at conferences! Helps to make eye contact with the audience and ‘have a conversation with them.’ the intonations then come out automatically.