More About Bleeps Than You Ever Wanted To Know

The Podcast Life is a newsletter by Deanna Chapman that helps you create a great podcast.

This week’s episode!

My good friend Mike Comite, who I previously interviewed for the newsletter, joined me to discuss his job as Senior Mixer over at This American Life. It’s always a blast talking with Mike and if you’ve ever wanted to know what goes into making an episode of This American Life sound the way that it does, now you can find out! Watch via YouTube below or on your audio platform of choice here.

Bonus content!

Just for the newsletter, Mike dished on the one thing that people might not think about when it comes to broadcasting over radio.

Deanna Chapman: So, what's your favorite segment that you've mixed for This American Life? 

Mike Comite: I am so lucky to mix so many producers’ work on this show. Everybody I get to work with is a joy, the contributors, too. But when I get to mix a David Kestenbaum story, I just like the way he talks. And this is not a hot take, everybody at the show is always gushing about David… the way he reads, the way he writes, and the way he tells stories.

“Snail in the Coffin” was one of David's stories, about this snail that was going extinct, and these scientists trying to save it. And David wrote about it really beautifully.That's one of the best scoring moments I've had in the show.

Deanna: Great. What’s one thing that people might not think about when it comes to being a radio show? 

Mike: The swears. When you have that many listeners on a show—that is, a broadcast show going over the airwaves— the FCC is monitoring those airwaves. The greatest pressure, besides meeting the deadline, is making sure that your swear words are bleeped.

We have a very specific protocol as far as making sure that happens. That protocol is: always be bleeped. You never close out of a Pro Tools session unless everything is bleeped. That way, if somebody next week has to go in and rebounce the story, because we have to update it or something like that, they don't accidentally put an fbomb in there.

Just to illustrate why that is important: Every swear word that is aired on a radio station can cost that radio station, if it's heard, I think it's $100,000, maybe $120,000. (Editor’s note: This article details the fines as of 2021.)

And that doesn't cost This American Life money—immediately at least—but it would cost any station that has that happen to them.

And [they might say] “Well, why would we pay to carry This American Life as a program if they're going to cost us this much money?” That's where it becomes an issue. I do believe it has to be a human watchdog listening to the broadcast, that calls up the FCC or somebody and is just like, “hey, I heard an f-bomb at this time, at this radio station.”And then that radio station will get a fine. 

The things that have to be bleeped are very, very strange sometimes. Like when it comes to urine, the rule of thumb is you can say “piss off,” but you can't have “piss on.” If there's actual urine and it conjures up an image, you have to bleep it. But if you're just like, “I'm pissed off,” the word piss is totally fine. 

Deanna: Fascinating. 

Mike: “Ass” is okay, but “asshole” is not. The “hole” has to be bleeped, the “ass” does not. It's a really weird system, weirdly puritanical, and not fun. But that's the system I have to operate under. I pray someday it gets changed..

But until then, I'm bleeping at1,000 hertz, negative 6 dB. 

Deanna: I was gonna ask you on the technical side, what does bleeping something involve? Do you just delete the part of the audio that needs to be bleeped and you just put that signal where that was instead? Or do you lower the volume of the word and the signal covers it? I've tried bleeping a couple things and I have done a very poor job of it. 

Mike: So the actual procedure is, you would just do a break, like edit points, around the swear.If it's the f-word, you can't get away with a kuh at the end of it. You have to make sure that the fff and the kuh are totally gone. Otherwise, it's still suggestive. So, you basically bracket the swear off in its entirety, and you mute it. And we have another line called “bleep,”usually grouped with the tracking so they don't get out of line.

For the longest time we had a folder on our server that was just the bleep tone, and then people would just drag it in. But then I actually looked at it, and it was 1333 hertz, or some odd bleep tone that is just not typical.I showed the staff how to use the signal generator in Pro Tools, which is just one of the Audio Suites, and you can generate any tone you want. A thousand hertz, I think is the standard bleep tone. So, we just generate a bleep, you place it on the bleep line underneath, and you just leave it bleeped.

The only time you un-bleep is when you're making the podcast version of the show. We bounce what's called a patch. And that patch is just the one second of the story that contains that swear word. You bounce that little thing out, you bring it over to the bleeped story, and you put that patch in.

We never want a [full] version of a story to contain a bleep, ever. 

That way we can't grab a story bounce that has a swear word in it and accidentally put it in the radio version. 

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