Throwing the kitchen sink at audio archive

In January I wrote about building a ‘searchable news firehose’ – using new tech to instantly search hours of audio from the night of the US election and quickly assemble montages for the next morning’s Stories of Our Times.

Since then, we’ve used a similar approach working with audio from government press conferences on coronavirus – throwing all of it into Descript, allowing us to keyword search and instantly grab clips from over a hundred hours of audio. You can hear the results in our episode on whether a vaccine-resistant strain of Covid could emerge (we’d searched for every mention of ‘mutations’, ‘variants’ and ‘vaccine-resistance’ to piece together the changing messages from government between March and December 2020).

This speeds up the work we’d probably still try to do without those tools. But it’s worth thinking about whether entirely new approaches to archive-driven storytelling are now possible.

Reconstructing a stock crash

One day in February, stocks in the US retailer GameStop crashed back to earth after having been sent skyrocketing by the WallStreetBets forum on Reddit. Yes, some got rich on the way up; but others had lost their life savings on the way down. Ordinary people watched their money evaporate in real time. I was curious to know how that felt.

Then I noticed audio from the WallStreetBets group chat was being posted on YouTube in 12-hour chunks. It would be impossible to listen to it all, but if we could cross-reference the tape against the stock price on the day of the biggest crash, we could find the key moments and hear their reaction as the day unfolded.

And if we used our imaginations, we could find stories by transcribing and keyword searching the audio (in the end, about 16 hours of tape). Obvious search terms might be ‘lost everything’, ‘can’t afford’, or ‘to the moon’.

But remember, many of the participants were in their late teens or early twenties. So a less obvious search for ‘my mom’ located the story of a young man who said he’d sold his mum’s car to pour money into GameStop. A search for ‘fear’ found the wonderful moment an FDR quote was misattributed to Gandalf.

The result is the sound of the day the stock crashed, told by the people who lost thousands, as it happened.

The sequence is just three minutes as part of a larger episode, but it has made me think: which stories could we tell if we started with archive audio and worked from there? It’s not a new approach – Radio 4 has a long-running strand called Archive on 4 for this reason – but it does open up possibilities that until now would have been tremendously time consuming.