(72a) Production Notes

One of the challenges of doing this sort of thing non-professionally is that there’s no way to gather a bunch of people together at once. Many of the voice contributions come from people from other states. This makes it very hard to have to two characters say the same thing at the same time. When people are together they can sync up their timing and inflection instinctively. When they don’t even have a chance to hear each other it rarely sounds right. The tempo is too out of whack, or the stress is too dissimilar, or something.

I was actually pretty lucky in the previous episode where I got all three “um…”s to sync up. It helped that there’s not many ways to say “um”, Hannah said “um” several times, and Hermione submitted two takes. But generally the way I avoid this is by simply saying the repeated phrase in narration. It didn’t sound quite right with ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ in today’s episode, so I doubled Lavender’s line, offset it a bit, and changed the pitch so it sounded more like two different people.

It would be possible to coordinate multiple takes to get well-synced simultaneous lines, but it would be a fair bit more work for everyone involved. I don’t want to ask too much from my volunteers, and I need spare time to pursue my other interests as well, so I haven’t bothered yet. The work-around isn’t perfect, but it works well.

(71) Production Notes

IIRC, Eliezer once said that when he first heard of feminism, he was flabbergasted that a concept as basic as “women should be treated as equals” would need a special word to define it. This mirrors my own experience, and I think the confusion of the SPHEW witches captures that initial dumbfoundedness very well. I realize it’s a perk of male privilege to be that unaware of sexism, and no girl would’ve made it to her early tweens unaware that her gender is systematically treated worse. I consider myself a feminist nowadays, and the SPHEW arc has held a special place in my heart since it was first published, in part due to the culture shock of the witches as they learn how muggle women have been treated and how they’ve had to fight against it. It’s probably akin to the shock Harry felt when learning of the wizarding world’s medieval  political/judicial system, but this time we’re seeing it from the outside side.

(70) Production Notes

I mentioned before that initially I didn’t want to involve anyone else in the podcast project, because I knew it would span several years and I didn’t trust anyone else to stay committed to it that long. And that this was first overcome by my longtime friend Drake Walker volunteering, since I figured we’d be friends for a long time still and I could show up at his door and refuse to leave if I needed more lines badly enough. :) I still didn’t trust unknown people enough to ask for submissions in the podcast.

This changed when I received an email from Jocee Cotton. Attached was audio of EVERY SINGLE LINE by Daphne Greengrass. Completely unsolicited. Despite the first appearance of Daphne being months away, and the real meat of SPHEW being a year or so away. It took me by surprise and completely blew my mind. It had to take a fair amount of time to track down every Daphne line in the text and record them all, with no assurance that I’d be willing to do anything with it. And if that wasn’t stunning enough – they were actually good! This was entirely usable! The effort a stranger would put in for something like this with no expectation of anything in return or any idea if I’d even accept it really restored some of my faith in humanity. I opened up minor roles to submissions because of Jocee’s initiative, and received Tracey and Susan almost immediately. Since then more and more people have been lending their voices and (in James’s case) helping out by tracking down available lines (pdf). The world is a better place than I thought a year and a half ago. :)

(69) Production Notes

This was originally posted at Less Wrong in one of the HPMoR discussion threads, almost exactly one year ago. I had planned on pasting it here when I got to the SPHEW-formation chapter, and I’m still doing so. It’s interesting how I’ve changed over the past year… I would still have posted the same information if I’d written it today, but my wording would have been a bit different. I’ll comment further on the real-world SPHEW in next week’s notes.


Real World Effects of SPHEW

Raemon has written at moderate length about feminist issues in HPMoR. In fact, this post is credited by Eliezer as

High probability this comment had something to do with the surprise creation of SPHEW.

I don’t wish to speculate about these issues because I don’t feel I have the depth of knowledge needed to contribute meaningfully. However I do have a real life effect of SPHEW to report.

I produce the Methods of Rationality Podcast. For the most part it’s a solo project, but after receiving a few requests I’ve gotten comfortable enough with it that I’ve decided to integrate other voices as long as it doesn’t require much additional work from me. Meaning – just send me the audio file of you reading the lines and I’ll incorporate it if I can. I didn’t really expect much response from this approach, and for the most part I didn’t get one. Seems no one is really interested in doing Gregory Goyle’s lines. :)

With a notable exception. The girls of SPHEW. I received a complete reading of all of Daphne’s lines before I even announced I was willing to take other voices. It was one of the primary motivators for overturning my previous policy and saying I would accept others. Since then I also received all Tracey’s and the start of Susan’s with a commitment of a full reading. I’m still at least two months away from the first appearance of any of the SPHEW witches, and probably a full year away from their eventual official SPHEW adventures.

I believe SPHEW has indeed promoted heroism among witches in the real world. Regardless of what feminist themes may have been explored, it’s my opinion that SPHEW has had a positive real-world effect. :)

(68) Production Notes

I find myself conflicted about the message of today’s chapter. Not everyone can be a hero, and not simply in the “because they don’t have the ability” sense. Even if every single person had the potential to be an actual hero, logistically most people cannot be heroes. Heroes are dependent upon others to grow their food, produce their clothing, and build their shelter. Luke Skywalker needed the factory worker who bolted together his X-Wing. Without a vast support crew, he’s just a kid swinging around a lightsaber on his uncle’s farm. If everyone was a hero, society would collapse. Heroes are great because they direct all of our effort, which we have focused into them.

I realize self-actualization doesn’t necessarily mean becoming a hero. It can just mean “be the best damn sidekick or factory worker or accountant you can be!” It is a worthy goal, and it makes life sweet, and everyone should strive for it. But so much focus is put on “being the hero” in all the media we consume that it probably pushes far more people into attempted heroing than it should.

But looking over the whole of the Self-Actualization arc, I don’t think the message is “everyone must be a hero, or they are a failure”. Hermione, ultimately, remains a support character. She simply becomes a much better Hermione. Maybe the message really is “be the best you can at what you are”, and her focus of not being trapped in Harry’s shadow constrained my view of the situation. I tend to over-empathize with fictional characters.

(67) Production Notes

Yelling, shrieking, and so forth, is rather difficult to do. First there’s the fact that you don’t want to damage the ears of your listeners. And secondly there’s the technical aspects of the hardware – the microphone is rather sensitive.

When the microphone is set to comfortably pick up a normal talking voice from a foot away, suddenly switching to a shout will blow it out entirely, and the audio will sound like a garbled mess in play back. One possible solution is to back away from the microphone, but that changes the acoustics noticeably. More common is the “stage shout” where you try to pitch your voice like you’re shouting but without changing your volume. This is demonstrated by Daphne and Neville in this episode, and while it’s not ideal, it’s the only practical approach for the casual participant. (This is not to criticize, I don’t expect anyone to blow $100 on a mic just for a few lines. I’m immensely grateful to everyone that’s contributed voice work!)

The best solution I’ve found so far is to turn the gain way down during the loud bits, then turn it back up again when returning to normal speech. This allows you to get the tone and inflection of an actual yell while getting decent audio quality and also preserving the eardrums of listeners. It’s a bit of a hassle, and it requires a slightly more expensive set up, but it’s worth it. I didn’t do it for Draco’s “Somnium, curse you!” and “Luminos!”, as I hadn’t thought he’d be yelling loud enough to blowing out the mic, and you can tell. Harry’s “Stupify”s aren’t perfect, but they were quite a bit louder and don’t fuzz out as much.