I'm Phoebe Judge...

...this is criminal

As a (weird) celebration of the Criminal podcast’s 200th episode, I recorded every Phoebe Judge introduction and collated them into more than eight continuous minutes of intros:

If you had the time and inclination to listen to all eight of those minutes, you may notice two subtle transitions from beginning to end. The first happens early on: she drops the “and”, going from “I’m Phoebe Judge, and this is Criminal” to “I’m Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal”. The second is a change in intonation. She goes from a downward intonation of “I’m Phoebe Judge” to an upward intonation. She never says the word “and” with an upward intonation, so below are the three variations.

Downward intonation with “and” (said 8 times):

Downward intonation, no “and” (said 59 times):

Upward intonation, no “and” (said 127 times):

She says her last “and” by episode 12, and transitions to the upward intonation between episodes 55 and 68. Her speed varies from the blistering intro on episode 28 (1.8 seconds) to the intro on episode 115 that’s nearly twice as long (3.3 seconds). With an average speed of 2.5 seconds, her “Criminal” introductions are 21% shorter than her “Love” introductions, which have an average speed of 3.2 seconds. While at first it may seem that her intros are getting longer (Figure 1), it’s only because the fraction of upward intonations have increased.

On average, intros with an upward intonation are 0.31 seconds longer, whereas intros with no “and” are 0.08 seconds shorter. In fact, the intros (within each intonation type) have gotten slightly shorter over time.

Another interesting piece to this is where the intro can be found in the episode. While episode lengths have been increasing (Figure 2):

The location of the intro has stayed relatively steady (Figure 3):

One eye-catching intro was on episode 172 (Roselle and Michael, a This is Love episode) about a dog’s bravery on 9/11 and the intro ends at 9:11…coincidence?