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Music: Beach House: Devotion (2008).

Writing energies have been focused to roving in other pastures, both academic. One of them is writing about presentation aids in the public speaking situation. Here?s a small snippet of what I?ve been working on the past week . . . but you don?t get much. Tease? Yes.

Sensation Station: Aiding the Eyes and Ears

In keeping with the norms of radio broadcasts, many early television shows in the United States featured the sound of live audiences reacting to the actors on a stage or in a studio. Live audiences, however, were unpredictable and often laughed inconsistently at a joke or gag?or, worse, not at all. In the 1950s, CBS sound engineer Charles ?Charley? Douglas decided to remedy the problem with the invention of the ?Laff Box,? a machine that housed looped recordings (audio tapes) of audiences laughing. During a television filming, if the audience did not laugh at the right moment Douglas would augment or ?sweeten? the show by punching keys on his ?Laff Box,? much like one would an organ (which happened to look like a large, mutated typewriter). By the 1960s, Douglas had helped to transform television comedies almost completely with his ?canned laughter,? enhancing the television experience for audiences watching from their living rooms to this day.

For those who can hear, the interesting thing about canned laughter is that most of us don?t notice it. Once you are used to hearing it, canned laughter on a television show is relatively unobtrusive, and yet, the laughs add information to what you?re watching. In the public speaking situation, ?presentation aids? are designed to work similarly. Typically, a speaker uses presentational aids to help ?sweeten? the experience of audiences during a speech, but hopefully in a manner that is not too conspicuous or detracts from the speaker and her speech.
By showing your audience objects, images, texts, and graphs, as well as playing sounds or music, you can make your speech lively and help to encourage understanding and comprehension. In this chapter we discuss all the elements you can draw upon to aid and enhance a speech, including the now ubiquitous use of ?slideware? or presentation software programs, such as Apple?s Keynote, Microsoft?s PowerPoint, and that Internet-based Prezi. Along the way, we?ll also discuss the general rules preparing and presenting visual and audio aids, taking care to note how aids can ?go wrong.? The key to using presentational aids is to remember that they are aids and are used to assist your speaking.

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