[ikrani]

On your “Words Can Do Anything” read, I think your pitch was a little too narrow for the first 18 seconds. Once you got to “Like the human rights activist-“, your pitch range seemed to widen slightly, and it makes you sound more invested in what you’re saying, more authoritative. You sounded like you wanted us to take this stuff seriously, lest we find ourselves in a similar situation. The emphases on “human”, “journalist”, and “thousands” saw a gradual rise in your peak pitch for each one, like talking about these injustices was subtly getting to you.

Prior to that, I was having trouble getting a fix on what mood you were trying to set. You were talking about positive stuff like birthdays and friends with a lack of investment, like someone reading a grocery list aloud. What you might consider is, if not widening the pitch range in the first part, perhaps moving the highs and lows a little higher, so there’s a slightly more noticeable rug-pull as you down-shift along the route of, “Friends, birthdays, human rights violations.”