The Ocean Has a Beat | Why Tides Happen

Here's your narration: 32.2 seconds, mono MP3 at 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz.

What it says

"Listen: every day, the coast keeps its own beat. The Moon pulls the ocean toward it. The Sun pulls too — far larger, but so far away that its tug is gentle. As the Earth turns, each shore passes through those two wide bulges of water, and the sea rises, then falls. Yet no two coasts match. A narrow bay funnels the tide high; a broad seafloor lets it spread and settle low. And now, a quiet exchange. 'You keep pulling me,' says the Earth. 'And you keep turning,' the Moon replies."

Measured on the finished file

• Length 32.23 s — inside your 30–40 s window. This is a second take at 0.9× pace; the first read came in at 29.4 s, just under the window.
• Fade-in 0.8 s, fade-out 1.2 s, both smooth, ending in true silence.
• Loudness −16.7 LUFS integrated with peaks at −1.9 dBFS: no clipping, and a steady level across the whole read.
• 10 short gaps of 0.23–0.63 s at regular points in the read, plus a 0.58 s tail where the fade-out ends the piece.

One limit: the automated transcript and voice check — the step that would confirm every word and its pronunciation — could not run; the analysis service returned an access error and I did not retry it. The text above is exactly what was sent to the voice, and the length, fades, levels and gap structure are verified from the audio samples themselves, but the spoken words were not machine-verified.