:Vocalo.org

 A  particularly awk interview yielded the clips I slapped together in the audio above.I'm really interested in verbal crutches --- mine seem to be "um," and "and," and "like," and the occasional "wow." Yep --- wow, and the word has made a more-than-occasional appearance lately. These crutch words are empty of meaning in themselves, for the most part, but serve as vital glue for our communication. It's interesting, and painful, to listen through interview tape because it reveals these verbal crutches that we filter out in ourselves and in others because of their meaninglessness. Yet, without them, we wouldn't be able to amble along semi-coherently, nor maintain the same speaking rhythms that individualize  our respective speaking patters.Over the past few weeks I started work on a longer project about these kind of "scraps." In a lot of cases these scraps -- the ticks, the pauses, the screwed-upped-ness of the telephone -- remind the interviewer of the interview situation in a much more accurate way than the raw transcription. And, in turn, gives the listener an intimate take on the audio collection. Ideally, too, it'd be a project that showed some personal progress towards walking without those crutches, so to speak. But we'll see.

A song, with pretty much no meaning or direction whatsoever!

Great isn't it?

Samie.