Scientists fail to find Pitch Variance in NPR Broadcast

This week, Nature published research that definitively concluded that NPR broadcasts are literally monotone. Acousticians from Clark University were investigating allegations that hosts weren’t actually speaking, but rather were filling an hour of airtime by humming into the microphone.

When The Freudian Slip approached Terry Gross, the host of Fresh Air, with this new evidence, she admitted that NPR had defaulted to this strategy in 2007.

"We found it difficult to fill our air time so we eventually decided this was an efficient way of solving that problem. Since people actually didn’t care about books on the private life of Bertold Brecht or analyses of the greater complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we decided to just let the sound of our voices lull our listeners to sleep.”

The scientists who published this research stated that the work was incredibly arduous. Eventually suffering from sleep deprivation, they had to take caffeine pills in order to not doze off during experiments.

Hosts like Gross have also been making money on the side with their humming exercises, teaching vocalists how to achieve perfect intonation while simultaneously maintaining proper breath support.

The one exception to this policy is Car Talk.

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