Going, Going...

November 14, 2012 4:11 PM

Auctioneers as hypnotists? (Hurry up, you could lose the bid...)
posted by Dr. Fetish (10 comments total)

If you like listening to auctioneers, check out the chants of (recently deceased) Elizabeth Clare Prophet — they might remind you of Balinese Monkey Chants. WFMU has a page with a few. For a quick taste, try this one (mp3) .
posted by benito.strauss at 4:35 PM on November 14, 2012 [4 favorites]

The Livestock Marketing Association has an auctioneer championship every year.

This page has mp3s of the winners from the past 40 years.

For your own good, please listen to some.
posted by Moistener at 5:01 PM on November 14, 2012 [4 favorites]

Auctioneers remind me of the way herders always seem to talk to their herds more than anything else-- so yes, hypnotic.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet was incredible; I wanted to listen to more of her stuff after I first heard her ~15 years ago, but I was afraid to.
posted by jamjam at 5:06 PM on November 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting the champions' page, moistener, they're amazing. There's a lot of them, so if people just want to check one out, I'll recommend the one from year 2004.

/I've got all those mp3s from when I downloaded them years ago, but I couldn't find that page.
posted by benito.strauss at 5:12 PM on November 14, 2012

They talk like that to hypnotize the bidders.

Call me a pedant but other than that flat assertion there is absolutely zero evidence or citations in that article.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:25 PM on November 14, 2012

those livestock guys, are they just trilling between the numbers, or are those supposed to be words?
posted by leotrotsky at 5:28 PM on November 14, 2012

They're words. As I understand it livestock auctioneers each develop a personal vocabulary of phrases to stitch the bids into a chant, but the chant does make sense.
posted by Songdog at 6:33 PM on November 14, 2012

You are now aware that most formulaic, repetitive speech patterns are designed to produce some level of trance mentality.
posted by clarknova at 6:35 PM on November 14, 2012

clarknova. Amen.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:06 PM on November 14, 2012

Moistener and benito.strauss, you have just made my mp3 playlist so weird. Shuffle will never be the same.
posted by Bugbread at 11:08 PM on November 15, 2012 [1 favorite]