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ep 34. diagnosis - West Park Park Bench Podcast | Otter.ai

ep 34. diagnosis - West Park Park Bench Podcast

Caron Lyon29min

Caron Lyon

00:05

Welcome to Episode 34, Episode 34 of the West Park Park Bench Podcast. A bit of a test today because we've got the roller with it's quite loud petrol engine moving backwards and forwards on the cricket pitches of West Park and there's quite a breeze passing through here so we're going to see how good this little foam buffer is.

Caron Lyon

00:49

Today's episode is diagnosis. Now we spend a lot of time asking Why What Where When How

Caron Lyon

01:08

We talk about what is wrong with the world. We talk about what isn't working. And we're all professional diagnostic diet diagnostician. Oh wow ... Dianne, I don't even know how to pronounce that word. There is a word. Yes, someone who makes diagnoses. And I think a lot of us are doing that all the time. I think this is as I was swimming backwards and forwards and thinking about what today's podcast is going to be...

Caron Lyon

01:58

There's things that have been going round in my head at the moment. I've been trying to reflect on the luxuries that I have. One of those luxuries is, I have time. I'm in a position where I am time rich, but cash poor. But I can work on the cash rich bit I think if I didn't have time, I would be so stressed that I wouldn't be able to enjoy the money that I have. So being able to diagnose my World I guess is is part of what I'm doing right now especially in this year of Balance of trying to move forward. And in last episode, I reached this point where I was reflecting on disposable income and that really resonated with me and I and I think this is why it's really good to be in a a flow state of accepting the world. Nothing magical happened last week, there was no miracle part of money that popped into my bank account or an opportunity that came past me that changed my world. It's all very small increments and I think diagnosing an issue and looking for solutions and then I think the thing that we're all very, very hard at and very that's very hard is effecting change.

Caron Lyon

03:44

You know, diagnosis is just the start. It's the recognition. It's the acknowledgement it's quantifying what is wrong. And once you've decided and you've identified what is wrong, actually that is not then the important issue. The important issue is how do you affect change. And that is really hard and being a person who says well, let's affect change doesn't make them a change maker. And I think this is what happens in in our entrepreneurial world, especially people I think recognise what I recognise. But by saying it by doing the repeated affirmations does not make it true. There's a lot of attitudes that I've heard of well fake it till you make it. And I just think every time I do something that I know is, is a faking. If I can't I just can't do it. I have to be the best version of me and unfortunately the best version of me does not include bits that are fake. And I think the problem with fake it till you make it is eventually you start to believe your own hype. I think this this cycle of diagnosis and a constantly active diagnostic routine of where you are what's going on. How are you affecting the world? How is the world affecting you? Recognising your mental health, how your mental well being affects others how it affects you. And that loop needs to be a pleasant cycle. (passers by set one!)

Caron Lyon

05:44

It's quite windy. If there is no noise in the background of this podcast, it's because I have found a fabulous new tool. I did a live stream last week for the Royal Historical Society. And it was the first time that they had done a hybrid event in an unfamiliar space that I wasn't actually in the venue for they had no equipment of their own and we kind of just let it happen. And video, brilliant. Audio problematic and this is always the thing with my small little kit that I take to places. I walk into a space... this is this is this is a stage management skill. Actually this is a stage management trait.

Caron Lyon

06:46

To walk into a space brand new and being able to diagnose and evaluate and resolve how to take that space and put the set that's in the back of your van into that space and accommodate the audience is a skill you kind of develop without really thinking, I mean yes, you do some pre work so you find you know where you're going and if people have been there before there'll be a ground plan. And if venue is good. There may even be a technical specification that might have a plan that tells you where the plugs are. If you go into a village hall you might even be able to find out where the power rings are because that can be really important to be able to put the load of the lighting that you take to a venue because you're taking something that's quite industrial and taking it into a very domestic space. And I suppose village halls and and to some extent small community and art centres are on on that line, maybe not centres as much. But being able to know that you can plug into a variety of sockets and know that you won't take the power down is a really good skill to have. And then diagnosis comes in at every step if for whatever reason you trip the power. Turning the power back on is only the first stage and if you turn the power back on, you haven't solved anything because the reason why it tripped is because you overloaded it somewhere. And it's either misbalance in the lights. So each light bulb as you probably realise has a wattage and those wattages had add up to how many volts and amps you are needing to be able to power those bulbs to give the wattage output. And there's a nifty little triangle that I learned at school in physics that I used quite a lot when I was working out, I've got this lighting rig and I need to make sure that when I plug it into a 13 amp socket, how many lights can I have how many of these can I have?

Caron Lyon

09:02

So being able to diagnose stuff is really important. And so we were in a venue or they were in a venue. We started off from the start the sound was not great, but it was fine. I could hear it okay, and I recorded it. My first point was to ask the venue to just get a recording on a mobile phone. Just set an audio app, record the audio, put it in a nice out of the way place near the speaker. We'll see what we get. So that was kind of my backup. The first 15 minutes were actually okay, they were YouTube bubble. The second 15 minutes started to degrade. Now I don't know why this is an even now because I wasn't on site and we've moved on in terms of diagnosing what that particular issue was no idea. I suspect there was a microphone open somewhere or a speaker that was closer to the microphone. And just over time the feedback just built up enough so that it started to echo into the speaker. That's what it sounded like. One of the solutions could possibly have been to have plugged in a pair of headphones so that that signal got taken away from from the space but I wasn't there. The way it was set up would have meant walking in front of the speaker so all that stuff wasn't possible. So the second 15 minutes. Not great on the edge of being acceptable for YouTube without any processing but the final 30 minutes oh my god. It was it was it was echo delay. Almost there was it was almost you could hear it twice. So it must have been coming from somewhere. Maybe it couldn't have been it might sometimes you got Oh has someone in the audience got them their mic on for the zoom. But it was in webinars so there was no mics to be open. The mics that were open. Were in the room were off. So it wasn't that possibly the sound coming out of their speakers. And their laptop might have been affecting it but they would have heard that and they tried to turn it off. Anyway. It got so bad that I had to God mic to the digital audience. We had 120 130 people on the live stream to say, terribly sorry. As you can hear we are having an audio issue. It isn't something we're going to be able to fix. I was quite honest at that point to say this is as good as it gets. I didn't say that but that's basically what I was saying. We're going to take the recording that we have taken from the audience in the venue because we kind of suspected this might happen. And we will put the slides and we'll go out. The other thing on top of this is that because of where the projector was, and the camera had been situated, it washed out the slides so we couldn't actually see the slides. And because I wasn't operating the slides, I didn't have a copy and the Zoom being remote access it's not something that I would have in that situation. But great behind the scenes backwards and forwards. I was sent the app. I was sent the slide deck, which was in PowerPoint, but I'm on a Mac and as soon as I opened it, it's formatting just went all over the place. So I had to save it out as a PDF and open it in the PDF reader and just share that and just scroll past then discovered that the slides I had been given was a lot bigger deck than the slide deck that the speaker was using. So the slides are mine were not what was on the screen. And I couldn't always see what was on the screen in the venue. So when I I was having to open up the thumbnails down the side I mean this is diagnosing output in real time. I was opening up the thumbnails at the side of the PDF which the audience would have been able to see but I had to make that decision and see if I could match up what was how far we gone. Pick that slide. Take someone else off and go back to that so they can see the slide. And in the chat after I'd made the announcement. Indeed people did. Hopefully saw the funny side of it. A lot of people stuck around. I mean, it's it stayed at over 100 for the entire session. The q&a was just a nightmare. I mean, you couldn't really hear anything. I mean, they did take questions from the zoom. But it really it wasn't audible by this point. So at the end, people even were there right at the end. I mean fantastic. But being able to diagnose something that's happening in real time isn't really feasible.

Caron Lyon

14:29

But that... coming back to the reason why I started talking about the royal historical lecture, I was having to then take my an audio track and see if I could process it and I discovered an app I know AI is doing all sorts of things at the moment chat GPT is massively talked about mid journey and Dali, AI is crazy crazy crazy right now. And for people who are wanting to play with it there's great stuff they can do. But there's stuff that I'm realising that I potentially can do because I find the right tool is like the same as anything. You know, it's one thing to know that AI is a thing, but it's another thing to actually have the tool do the thing that you want to do.

Caron Lyon

15:15

If you've listened to some previous podcasts, you'll know that I've use chap GPT to stimulate ideas and to output text that is written not from the point of view of dyslexic so that I can read it back and I can see that it kind of matches up with what I'm saying because sometimes I realised that I use sentences which are very much based on visual metaphor, that might not as a sentence make sense. I spend a lot of time not with other people. So a lot of the dialogue in my head when I say to a person after a while, all of a sudden it really doesn't make sense. I look back over these transcripts and some of the sentences don't make sense.

Caron Lyon

16:05

So there are loads and loads of tools and I'm really interested to find those tools that can augment what I do so that I can get further on so that I can earn some disposable income to be able to bring someone in to forward my project so that I can collaborate with them and not bring someone in because I need someone to do stuff I can't do. I want to bring people in to do the stuff that I could do. But I want to do a different task or it's a completely different skill set that I'm bringing in. And potentially they will have their own set of AI tools that will make them more efficient too fingers crossed, or we can explore those. And I discovered... and I've been working with it before if you listen, did you go just tell me what it is. The app is descript descriptive without the IVE on the end descript and I discovered this as an audio tool. When I was looking to do transcription so you can upload and you get three or four hours of transcription for free, which is great. And you can put a four hour video up if you wanted and transcribe that one of the problems with some of the free services is that you only get 20 minutes or you only get 500 megabytes, there's usually a barrier that they want you to use the paid version obviously descript I've been so impressed by. So descript when I first found it, putting audio it transcribes it. And the spooky thing I mean, this was just before I become crazy. The crazy thing about this is that if you say something incorrect so the examples that I've been seeing is that if you introduced a podcast and you said welcome to episode 34 which I have today, and actually it turns out that it's episode 33 or 35. By changing the text, it will use what it's learned from my voice and change what I say. Now that was before AI really hit four and that is kind of what started my oh my god, deep fake audio. We're screwed. Because using it this time the reason it used it this time was not for the transcription. It was for its AI processing of audio and it has a studio mode and with a click of a button at the file level.

Caron Lyon

18:49

It will process and take out the background noise now the audio track that I had I ran it through first didn't really do a great deal. I wasn't that impressed. Beginning was fine ending was shocking. And this is where I think being able to diagnose a situation especially when you are using tools and you are working at a level where you don't have constant team support and you don't have a particular tool you just have what you have and you've got to deliver an output the best you can and try to find these tools before you would have had to send it off to audio processing and have someone fiddle with it. You can usually rescue sound. Once it's degraded to far. You can't put stuff back in, but you can take stuff out. So if you've got a clever algorithm that has identified a really solid voice, there is no reason why it can't remove everything else. Likewise, if you've got a really good voice track, it can take that out quite seamlessly. Similar way we're seeing now in in AI photos where you can identify something in a photo and it will remove it some apps do it better than others some are pretty bad, but you can kind of clone and tidy up photos you know, before that technology was there. But this time I went through the audio track and I split it into three. It's a very different editing process in descript. So if you're gonna go and have a play with it, I'm sure there is a way of chopping up audio and doing what I did. But I believe you can only do stuff at a file level so I kind of didn't learn all the tools. I will be learning stuff about Descript. And I've been thinking about doing some video tutorials to show some of the tools that I use and that's a process that's quite hard. It's quite production intensive in terms of scripting and working out what it's going to do and then working out what to show on screen and then working out how you capture it. Mix it edit it and then upload it and there's a reason why one of my podcast is called Note to self with 'note' standing for no opportunity to edit. I like this free form. And I'm getting comfortable with free form, but I really do need to move back into doing something that takes a little bit more time. Because this site I have time don't have money, but if I spend too much time doing stuff that gives me no money, I still have no money. So it's tricky. It's a tricky balance.

Caron Lyon

21:30

It's a tricky balance.

Caron Lyon

21:32

So I split this track into three the first 15 minutes which had sensible audio superb. The second track it's okay. It's a lot better than it was. But the third one considering how bad it was. It's rescued I don't think it's YouTube usable, sadly. So I'm hoping that the raw track that was captured at venue will be sent to me and I can use the two to be able to produce something that I can run slides against. A little bit of the video to give you a bit of an insight to what was going on in the venue and then produce a YouTube video.

Caron Lyon

22:22

So those tools being able to understand what's what's wrong with that audio track, you know, having those diagnostic skills in media. It goes through everything.

Caron Lyon

22:37

So I didn't quite expect diagnosis to take me down that route. But I'm really pleased that it is something that I've reflected on today and I'd like to know if there are any words that you want to challenge me with.

Caron Lyon

23:01

I am going down to London this week I will be stealth streaming from the Houses of Commons, the House of Commons. I am then at leisure Thursday, Friday. Meeting artists Hallidonto on Friday. Also I'm going to be visiting the royal Historical Society to look at my kit so we're going to diagnose exactly what went wrong. I will see if I can get to the bottom of why the audio was so bad. I will be taking the equipment that they have. And I will be looking to augment their toolkit. Ultimately to provide them with a tech box that they can put it all in. They can put it under a desk and then someone wants to use it they can get it out they can check it it's all in their cables, bsolutely everything, Record do their stuff. And I may also introduce them to descript because absolutely brilliant. And then Saturday. It's Equity Conference. Sunday Monday is Equity Conference motions. And I'll be returning back on Monday fingers crossed to hit yoga, but I suspect the next reset is going to be this podcast next week. So am I going to make media in between?

Caron Lyon

24:39

I will put links to the audio tracks in the show notes, please have a look at those. I will also put a link to the original audio that I split into three and continue to look at the world I think I think the diagnosis is removing yourself emotionally from the situation and looking at the reality of a situation. What is happening. Who's involved. Am I part of it? Is me be involved with it causing the problem? Is the problem caused by technology? Working out what it is is going on.

Caron Lyon

25:35

It has to be the same with the world because and this will be the closer this world is not working right now. Going down to equity conference is is my collective diagnosis with my professional peers. I don't feel as massive as successful as they are and success is something that an perception of success. And merit is something that I need to pursue. Merit was almost today's but I'm not going to waste it I will save that for another time.

Caron Lyon

26:14

Things are not good right now. I think in terms of diagnosis and the way we are all trying to process the world around us diagnosing the climate, diagnosing society, diagnosing the health service, diagnosing work, commitments, diagnosing family, making sure that we know what is wrong so that we can make things right is a human it's a core of humanity almost. And I think as I was walking to make this podcast one of the things that I kind of recognised is that once you've made the diagnosis in medical terms, I thought I was going to be butchering so many medical analogies but that's not happened.

Caron Lyon

27:15

Once you've made a diagnosis and it's a commonly agreed diagnosis, we then enter diagnostic rhetoric that we're just going over the same thing over and over again. And we we need to come out of that which is where the change makers come in and and it's the one place that I feel that I can affect change. I go to the conference as a representative of a group of people. In this instance, I'm going to be a stage management committee rep. So I'll be representing the stage management community, but also as the beginning of the East Midlands branch I'm also going to be attending with regional core, which is the first time I will have ever done that. There's three representatives from the East Midlands. Who knows I may even be able to get them to podcast with me.

Caron Lyon

28:17

But we need to make change and the ultimate change makers apparently, and should be our politicians. And at the moment, the politicians are a breed of dirt that I can't even begin to diagnose. But when we need to, because they are the ones that are in power and diagnosing and then having the power to affect change, and then enabling those people who have power to affect change to actually do it and support them is kind of the role that those of us that are not in power, Have. All we have is our labour. All we have is our potential to support and that is where I shall leave it thank you so so much.

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