• Question: Doesnt just listening to people get boring sometimes? Or do you love doing it? if you do then good for you :)

    Asked by helliexxx to Damien on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      No, not at all! You never know who you’re going to meet and what interesting stories they’re going to have to tell. One example of that is an old French man that I once interviewed. I did the interview only because he went to the same church as I did in France – I didn’t know anything about him. But he had been a French soldier in the Second World War, and it turned out that he had been there when the French Navy blew up their own ships in 1943 to stop the Germans getting them! It was a great story. And I feel strongly that these stories should be told and shouldn’t die out, because history dies with them.

      Also, when I’ve done the interview, I get to go away and do the science on the accent – I play it through a computer with a special program called Praat, which enables me to analyse the sound-waves and attach numbers to them, so that I can see what the scientific difference is between this accent and the others! If an interview is ever boring – not that that happens much! – then I console myself by thinking that the analysis will be interesting …

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