Daily Dose of English 39
Microphones
Daily Dose of English 39
Intermediate
Hey everyone! My name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about microphones, or as they're often called, mics. Because microphones and mics are used all the time in our daily lives, and as a lot of these topics that I talk about, I think that's interesting. And so, let's get into it. First, a microphone or a mic is the way that we give sound to computers, essentially. Right now, I am talking into a microphone. It is in front of me about, let's say, four inches from my face, and it is transmitting the sound. It is taking the sound that I am saying, sending it through a cable and into my computer. My computer is then recording that sound as a binary, right, as ones and zeros inside the computer and saving that sound. And then I'll take that sound and give it to you to listen to. And then it is coming out of your speakers, whether they're really small speakers that are in your ears or they're big speakers in your car, they're coming out of your speakers into your ears as if I was sitting right next to you. And that's what makes microphones, I guess, so interesting is that they help us to reproduce sound and language. I'm not sitting next to you. You can't touch me. I'm here alone in my room, in my office, and yet you can hear me just fine. I'm also recording this episode far in advance, way before it's going to come out. And this microphone allows me to do that. There are tons and tons of microphones all around us. Every phone has one, really most computers nowadays have one so that you can be heard on video calls, but you can also buy them or find them and use them for other things. Actually, I currently have, if I count my phones and other devices, I have one, two, three, four, five, six microphones on my desk. That's a lot of different microphones. And actually there might be more because I don't know how many different microphones are in my computers or in my phones or tablets. And actually, I'm also noticing here I have AirPods in my hand. I have a pair of AirPods, and we'll talk about those in a second because those also have a lot of microphones. Anyways, I use a slightly nicer microphone. It's not that nice. It's not super expensive, but it is fairly nice, right? My voice sounds pretty good, I hope. I hope the audio quality is good for you. Um, and I spent, actually, I don't really remember. I got this microphone so long ago now, but I think it was a hundred bucks, maybe 120, um, which is not that expensive for microphones. You can get cheaper ones. You can get them for 20 bucks. Um, but they're not going to sound nearly as good. And some, uh, really expensive microphones cost thousands of dollars depending on what they're used for. Right. There's a lot of different kinds of microphones depending on how they listen to sound that are better for outdoor, indoor, big room, uh, recording a whole band. There's so many different kinds of microphones. Um, I also have a, a lapel mic is what we call it. Um, and your lapel is right at your collarbone, sort of at your neck. Um, and it's, it's for your clothes where you're, I guess really where your clothes sort of open to where your neck goes, right? That's sort of your lapel. I think it's mostly on the front. I've never heard of a lapel being at like the back of your body, but I guess that could be true. I don't really know. Anyways, a lapel mic is for when you clip a microphone to your lapel or to your shirt or whatever that is right there. And they're usually much smaller. And because they're meant to be used when somebody is walking around or they're talking somewhere where they don't really have enough space to have a big microphone. Because almost always, the bigger the microphone, the better the sound. That's not strictly true, right? Once you get past a certain size, it's not useful. But the really, really small ones are generally worse or they have to be more expensive to be better. And we'll get into the AirPods thing in a second. Um, I also have a recording device, which has some microphones on it. And this is what I use. If I ever need to record something when I'm out and about when I'm out in the city or not in my, uh, at my desk when I'm standing up, for example. Um, and it's just a little recorder that I put in my back pocket and it just saves the audio onto it, but it does have some microphones on the very top. Phones also have microphones because we need a way to make our voice go into the phone and then be transmitted into the air. And so a big part of phones is having that microphone or receiver. Originally, phones didn't actually do that. They didn't have microphones in the same way we have them now. They were more just receivers. And that sound was then transmitted via actual lines or cables in the ground, right? And that's why the transcontinental telephone was actually a big importance, right? People had to plug in a phone to a certain place so that you could talk to somebody all the way across the country. And that was huge. The same sort of went for radio when sound was transmitted across airwaves, not exactly in the same way as recording. However, nowadays we use digital sound and we record audio a lot of the time to then be transmitted. There's tricks and all sorts of things, but we do use microphones for the most part. and audio processing of some kind to turn that sound into something usable by computers. Like I said, there's some microphones in my phones that you use to talk, but then there's also some microphones in my AirPods because they have what's called noise canceling. Noise canceling is when sound is filtered out so that you don't hear it. That wasn't a very good explanation. So my AirPods, if I put them in, the other sound around me, I don't hear it. It's canceled out. It's hidden. I don't hear it like it's there, which is really, really useful if you're somewhere that's noisy or you're outside or somebody else is in the room and they're making noise that you don't want to hear. But that noise cancelling doesn't just work by blocking your ears. That's called passive noise cancelling and this is active noise cancelling. Which means that the AirPods are actually listening to the world around me. and then they are giving me the opposite sound into my ears to cancel it out. I'm not going to go into the physics of it because I don't really understand it that well, but I find it really interesting that in order to have good noise canceling, you actually have to have microphones to listen for what to cancel, which is really interesting. And so I think there's actually a whole bunch of little microphones on the AirPods, which is part of the reason they're so expensive, right? There's a lot of stuff inside these earbuds. We talked about the word earbuds a couple of weeks ago. And so yeah, those microphones are critical. Plus also if you are on a phone call or use your AirPods or your earbuds or whatever, they're going to want to talk to somebody. And so having air, um, microphones on them is useful for that purpose. Nowadays, there's also a bunch of smart devices which people talk to. I don't actually use them at all, but some people use things like, Hey Siri, or Okay Google. Oh, actually wait, my phone did just turn on. But I don't actually use them, but that requires a microphone as well to be heard, right? It needs to hear your voice somehow, and phones don't have ears, at least not yet. I mean, microphones are in a way, ears. Anyways, I think microphones are cool because they make this all possible. And you can do, I don't know, all this stuff with them, recording, making sound. It's just really interesting to me. They're used in absolutely every part of life nowadays because we find them so useful and sound is such a critical piece of being human in a lot of ways. We listen to things, language is immensely important. And so I'm very grateful that we have good microphones. Anyways, I'm going to leave it there for today. I think I've talked enough about microphones. I hope that you enjoyed this episode of the Daily Dose of English and I'll see you again tomorrow for, uh, oh yeah, another episode. See you then. Bye.
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