Transcription of Vox Pops

Vox pops (short for vox populi, Latin for voice of the people) are not interviews as such but short recordings asking a variety of different people one question, or just a few short questions requiring short answers. They may be carried out in order to get public opinions for market research, radio or television items or promotional videos.

Transcription of vox pops may be necessary for a number of reasons. It is very helpful to have a transcript of your work to help you edit it for broadcasting, and if it is research that’s going to be used in a documentary or similar then it useful to have a written version so that it can be easily analysed e.g. 'one in three people said ...' It’s obviously vital for market research so that a full and in depth analysis can be carried out.

If you have a long stream of vox pops on one recording then a transcriptionist experienced in working with these should be able to offer you a time-stamp option. This helps you quickly find the relevant point in the recording from looking at the transcript. A time-stamp indicates the time in the recording every so-many minutes e.g. if you have a five-minute time-stamp the transcript will put a marker in at 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes etc.

A word of advice here. Some recording equipment comes with a facility that puts in a bleep every so-many minutes, in order to help the transcriptionist put in the time stamps. Don’t use it! Every time the player puts in a bleep it obscures what’s being said. An experienced transcriptionist with the relevant equipment can put in time stamps without this, and you will then get all the material you have recorded actually transcribed!

What you want on your recording will depend very much on why you’re doing it. If you are recording for TV or radio then although you clearly don’t want traffic noise drowning out your interviewees’ voices, you do want it to be clear that they are shot ‘on location’. However, from a transcription point of view that’s less than ideal, as in order to be able to catch all the words that people are saying, the less background noise there is the happier your transcriptionist will be! If you require transcription of your vox pops, one option might be to record the vox pops themselves with a noise cancelling microphone, which is designed to reduce the effects of ambient noise, while a colleague records the ambient noise on another microphone. You can then use the recording from the noise cancelling microphone to send to your transcriptionist and mix the two sound recordings for your broadcast. Alternatively if you’re a wiz with sound editing software you may be able to reduce the ambient noise and save as a different version, which can then be used to transcribe from. However, this is often less successful as the ambient noise is frequently in the same range as human speech, which means if you cut out one the other goes too!