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Home Audio Episode 92: Polite Sociopaths

Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand|Audio

November 16, 2018

Episode 92: Polite Sociopaths

Jessica and Michael explore voice interfaces, from Apple CarPlay to HAL 9000, the talking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey voiced by Douglas Rain, who died shortly after this episode was recorded.

Jessica, who keeps leaving her phone in the car “because I’m doing so much texting I forget I don’t need a phone in my hand anymore,” says that sound design

used to be something that happened in the recording studio. It was about something that happened in the movies, It had to do with your experience as a listener, spectator, audience member in terms of what the auditory experience was.

This, I think is, something different, because this has to do with cognitive understanding of the brain, of expectation of patterns of behavior.

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By Michael Bierut & Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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