India.Arie teaching Public Radio

Have a listen to the song in the YouTube clip below. Its called Pearls, and it's from the new album by the American singer India.Arie. Listen to the lyrics. And tell me if you have ever heard an American pubic radio show tackle those sort of issues, in those ways.

It would be difficult, but not impossible, for a typical or famous public radio host, I think, to open a link or report like that, There is a woman in Somalia, scraping for pearls by the roadside. There is a force stronger than nature, keeps her will alive. 

Certainly some of what follows is not unknown to our medium and its formats.

But then:

And it hurts like brand new shoes.

Any public radio host would have to apologise in advance for perhaps offending his listeners – I don't think a female host would feel able to us that analogy at all, fearing or feeling too superficial, girly, urbane.

Yes, it brings it home to something everyone can associate with, but doesn't that mean it belittles her suffering? After all, she's off in Africa, her suffering must be far beyond just a new pair of shoes. 

Really?

She's dying to survive. 

For pearls. Now combined with the musical elements, I don't think it's immediately apparent how the message moves. The radio producer, knowing the need for it to be simple to be understood in one listening, will cut the story down. The message moves on from the staid image – a woman in Africa suffering – to a calm celebration of the survival. 

The brand new shoes are contrasting parallels for the pearls, of course. And the imagery is superb.  

As speech radio producers there's a lot we can learn from this song. 

Towards the end, there are some vocals not in English. This is where I think of the typical Africa story on public radio – narrator-heavy stuff, that, frankly, switches me off. Does India.Aries' African ancestry change that? As a listener, hearing it once, not sure either way.

Now my conventional musical vocabulary is limited – I'm comfortably limited to this radio-centric arc – so I know I may have missed some obvious progressions and interpretations. I've listened to the song a dozen or more times – but there are so few 4 minute radio pieces I've heard that often. On the other hand, my interpretation has changed a lot, while with the radio item, at least most of the meaning has to get you first time. Rarely will I listen to an item more than three times, and yes you catch different things each time. On occasion the impact is much less on the second listen, and that would mean a superb traditional radio item. That is not always the case, often as a shortfall in our skill, of course, but increasingly by design. It takes a lot of self-belief to think people will re-listen to a whole hour-long show on their iPod just to get your repeatable report, but I think the people who are conscious of it, are doing work worthy of it. 

I am leaving quite a few loose ends here: please comment!

Finally, if you're at all familiar with my blog or my listening, you'll know what show I have been itching to mention here, but out of self-discipline, I'll hold it in ;-)

How We Got Here (PRI) and Alison Des Forges

Four episodes in, I'm really enjoying How We Got Here, a podcast from PRI's The World. I've never heard The World – what stands out the most about it to me is how a studio manager in Bush House got excited telling how good the ISDN line to WGBH in Boston used to sound, and with so little delay. 

So all I know of the content of The World comes from this podcast, which I noticed when its producer Jeb Sharp mentioned it in her Twitter. And I follow her on Twitter because there, she follows my place of work, International Crisis Group. In this episode of the podcasts, those two worlds have slid into sync. 

How We Got Here, episode 4, is about the Cambodian genocide trials, and moves on to talk about Alison Des Forges, who did astonishing work for Human Rights Watch in Rwanda. I admit I had never heard of her before last week, but she was clearly well known and admired by my colleagues. 

In this podcast, an anthropologist called Susan Cook spoke of how Alison Des Forges, and of how media isn't enough to stop genocide, yet genocide must be documented. This matters to me, and it's why I've ended up, albeit briefly, in Crisis Group's Communications Unit.

The topics for the How We Got Here podcast have all hit the spot for me, and I have been promoting them around the office. If you are interested in these fields, or, to put it simply, if the title appeals to you, then subscribe to How We Got Here.

Finally, a note that I am not staff at Crisis Group, and what I write here is my own opinion, not Crisis Group's.

A poem about Ireland today

A slight change in direction this time, with poetry from a radio producer of yore. Kevin O'Connor is my uncle, and one of his docs came to mind as I was doing a fantasy job interview for Radio Lab in the parks south of Brussels at the weekend.

In the mid-90s he made a documentry about his late brother, which included his sister describing the childhood home something like this: Grand-da lived at the top of the house. I suppose you could say Grand-da was the the matriarch of the family.

I remember my mother asking him why he left that in, it was embarrassing (a show was the term used, I expect), and (as I remember it), he fudged the answer.

The RL context was as a way of illustrating humanity in a radio item. Especially in contrast to Hugh Manatee.

Moving on to the poem in question. Typos are the artist's own. And I admit I can only see reference to The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Let me know what more what I'm missing.

ODE TO A *ANKER

Well Seanie, you’re the Boyo
Built the Bank - and broke the Bank
Skipped away to nurse your wounds
which were all our dreams...

“ Each man kills the thing he loves”
As you’ve oft heard said
‘The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with sword...’

And some with hefty borrowings
Of many, many millions...
as Pensioners in public weep
for their lost shares of comforts

Well, Seanie, you’re the boyo
brought a country to its knees
Fitzpatrick of the silver locks
Put the rest of us in hock

So here’s to you, me boyo, Seanie
Did what no else could do
Built the bank and broke the bank
and flushed our savings down the loo....

Kevin 0’Connor

AudioDocumentary.org

Hat-tip to the Hearing Voices blog, on AudioDocumentary.org. I've never seen it before, but it looks good – like a more demanding version of Public Radio Redux. Basically, a collection or short reviews and pointers to good audio. 

It is all US stuff, as far as I can see, but it goes beyond just NPR and PRI, to include traditional media outlets that are not traditional audio outlets, plus some more. 

Nice links bar on the right too gives me a couple of new sites to check out. 

So far, thumbs up!

Dinky explanation of frequency effects.

Here's a nice (and seasonal) explanation, in pictures alone, of beat frequencies. 

Now maybe the same guy can answer my age-old question: Can you ever hear someone else's tinnitus? I admit the answer is most likely no…

A few months of freebasing

Let me outline my listening since about November:

In the build-up to the new series of Radio Lab last Autumn, I set up a recorder (Wiretap Pro) to save for me the Real Audio streams of older shows, when the "lab" meant a weekly experiment in radio from all over (in contrast to how it's nowgenerally taken as "this is a radio show about science". Anyhoo). I listened on my pocket recorder (Olympus LS-10 -- it can double as a mp3 player after all), on the commute to work, and listened to each episode of the new series twice.

And then it was all gone. Cold turkey.

Next I somehow or other discovered the unofficial podcast of Jonathan Goldstein's WireTap on CBC. I had about two years worth of episodes to listen to. So I did. They fitted very neatly into my commute -- that meant two episodes a day. I love it. And I think it started to show in my podcasts too... ;-)

And then... it was all gone too. I'm down to one a week. 

Twitter wanderings recently brought me to Ear Ideas, and a podcast in praise of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales (the stuff of my childhood), by none other than Stephen Fry. And so I have discovered Stephen Fry's Podgrams. And so I am freebasing again! There is thankfully a backlog, so this morning I listened to something about a year old. And it nearly had me punching the air for joy. Not much to say about the format -- it's just about noticeable. What matters, here as much as in Radio Lab and Wire Tap, is what is communicated. Which really is a pointless statement as that is what everyone does in radio anyway! Maybe though this is a pointer to the difference between an art and a craft. For sure, mixing the two can tie you up -- as it has done for me. As a trainer, I may well have unnerved people as much as other editors did me.

Am I out of the knots yet? Over the fear of people that stops you micing a situation right? Not quite. But if you fear people, you'll only occasionally make great radio. Does the thread follow out to all of art too?

Radio Today Obama splash page

How cool is this? The splash page on the front page of community station Radio Today in Johannesburg, South Africa.

From Blogger Pictures

I don't bloody believe it.

I mean, it always made sense: Kinder Eggs were from Switzerland, right? German name, but it's chocolate, and white and reddish-orange, so it's Swiss, naturally. But no, no, no. 

The Shocking Truth.

Transom's got its groove back

So the holiday season may leave slackers like me with less radio to write about, but not so the Radio Wisemen. 

On my journey back to the responsible world, from the padded (tinselled, stuffinged) world of Home, I used-up my year's worth of CBC WireTap unofficial podcasts. I have had to feed the habit with Jonathan Goldstein's Transom manifesto, which I never knew about before. It was linked from a fan blog that frankly makes this place seem anti-Radio Lab by comparison. 

So you've read it, and found the TAL piece with ease but not the Outfront one. And you move on to the Talk. 

See that first name at the top of Talk? And see who's the current Manifesto guest? And see who's comment appears top of the list there now? And the second? And now back to Jonathan Goldstein's Talk, and see the second name? 

On it goes. The great and the good and the rest of us reading and smiling warm-and-fuzzily.

Marantz replacing pooey PMD660

with an SD recorder, in a similar form factor but with the styling of the PMD620.

Officially.

Will keep an ear out for unofficially…

Here's hoping they  put actual pre-amps into this one… ;-)

Yellow Fluff

What a cracker of an episode. Jad-Robert back and forth, Oliver Sacks, linguistic sound effects, music, this show appealed to the devotee (um, like me).

The first time I listened was on a train – I don't think I've ever done that before, gone fresh to a episode of Radio Lab in a noisy world of sounds and headphones and inhibition. But my how it grabbed me. I used the pause button when faced with ticket collectors and opening doors (when you see a train at the weekend in Belgium, you don't let it leave without you). I reacted, giggling, smiling and shuddering like I had a bot worm in my scalp, in spite of what the late night Amsterdam and Antwerp crowd might have thought.

It felt like a final episode – until the end leapt up out of nowhere. It is the end of this series, but, it would seem, not the end of Radio Lab.

Somehow this this episode slipped my mind, which is silly cos it's unforgettable! I started the review weeks ago, but forgot to post it. And now it's all over. Sigh. 

Thank you and congratulations to the Radio Lab on an excellent season.

RTÉ Choice

I've been poking round RTÉ Choice, and I like it.

RTÉ Choice is a speech-based station on Ireland's limited DAB digital radio network.

The programming is a mix of RTÉ Radio one material (some is archive, some I can't be sure of), with some top NPR programmes including Morning Edition, Car Talk, and (wait for it now…) Radio Lab. It also includes the usual BBC rebroadcaster fare – World Today and the features strands – and some unexpected, but very welcome programmes: Hancock (which seems to be Hancock's Half Hour), and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

So they've done a decent deal with the BBC. Listeners in Ireland are more aware of the domestic programmes than the World Service ones. This mix of BBC stuff will be popular.

Moving across the pond, I admit I'm not sure I've ever listened to a whole edition of Car Talk, so I can't really comment.

Much of the other programming comes from WRN. I expect they've done some sort of deal to get a discount on the carriage of RTÉ's own programmes on WRN.

There are also some Deutsche Welle programmes in there – I don't know if that's as part of WRN or paid separately.

Finally, there are some parts of the schedule marked "RTÉ Choice". Some are just one minute, some longer. They bought one of my two pieces on PRX – the two minute one. 

Have a look at the a day's schedule.

It's available on DAB – which in Ireland, is in limbo, pressed right up against the pearly gates, but still, in limbo. It covers 44% of the population, leaving out cultural cities like Galway and Kilkenny. It's also available online. Probably not going onto Sky Digital I imagine, what with BBC Worldwide rights.

It's a tough time for most broadcasting (though I suspect we're better off than many businesses – more on that in an upcoming post), and I don't know if RTÉ Choice can quite pay for itself. It looks like it might, just about, break even.

The easiest way to get money from rebroadcasting is, unsurprisingly, often objectionable. Five years ago, when I worked at China Radio International, it was suggested that CRI would pay up to €10,000 a month for a good relay in Ireland. But not only were the programmes mostly poo, they were mostly propaganda too, and so might break the license of a European rebroadcaster. I guess the Luxemburgerers and Albanians don't mind.

RTÉ Choice has an online player, and maybe they could add some geo-coded advertising, for listeners using it e.g. as a time-shifted US public radio station.

I welcome RTÉ Choice. It has become one of my choices.

Diagnosis – Radio Lab

For some reason I didn't get to hear all of this episode in one sitting. I ended up downloading it and listening in chunks, to a slightly distorted and over-length version. 

 

The first half took a second listening. It worked very well on the second listen, and superbly on the third. The first time round it somehow didn't move quite right – the stories somehow didn't have enough followability – be it the right mix of liner content, presenter interaction, sense of direction in the listener, whatever. The flat presentation style of the pathology story has been switching me off of late. Ah, did I call it the pathology story? Coz that's not what it started as, it was pancreatic cancer, right? And the medical professional became the proxy for the ordinary, non-medical listener. On the first listen, it didn't seem to carry off the elegant twirl. Somehow. It maybe reflected the human-mess-ness that sparkles when Jad and Robert are on opposing sides of what a revelation means. 

That was rich in the second half, combined with the some other rocks of the show (familiar voices, wonder, highly effective FX, and brain scanners). In contrast to the top, it takes a very common condition – depression – without squeezing the raw spots – sensitive spots, yes; raw spots, no. And inside it there was a sub-story that itself twirled – Sudden Infant Death to radiation to poverty to… diagnosis. It worked.

Emanuel's story: Some would say this was a bit too NPR. Fair to both sides, yet steeped in the mainstream attitude towards disability. In the US, that understanding is far better than, for example, in China – if you want see me fume, do a story that says "只有一个词：勇敢". My mother was a remedial teacher, and I've worked with an autistic colleague who was, if not undiagnosed, at least never stated his condition. Add to that hypochondriac bonding with a BBC studio manager, and I feel autism is a part of my life. Emanuel's story gave me facts about the condition and its status in the US, not an insight into the condition. 

But this story did give me an insight – into Emanuel's life and his family. That was awesome. 

A final note, on the start. A fun tale of domestic damage, dispute, and deception. Kinda pushes a lot of buttons, for a lot of people. Not a winner to stop people switching off at the top… but maybe that's just me.

Winner

I've just noticed that My Father Takes a Vacation was recognised at the Prix Italia. Here's my review of the RTÉ version from yonks back.

From the Prix Italia website: 

RADIO DOCUMENTARY – SPECIAL PRIZE FOR EXTRAORDINARY 
ORIGINALITY 

SWEDEN – SUEDE SR 
MY FATHER TAKES A VACATION 
DIRECTOR: MARTIN JOHNSON PRODUCER: MAGNUS ARVIDSON 
SCRIPT: MARTIN JOHNSON 

This programme moves across landscapes drawn from postcards sent by a 
father who has abandoned his children. When the author was a teenager, his 
mother died of cancer and his father, unable or unwilling to shoulder the 
responsibility for three young children, left home to cycle through Ireland. 
Martin Johnson casts a cool eye on this story of unforgivable desertion as he 
retraces his father’s steps through Ireland. The jury was impressed by the 
restraint and the sophisticated dramaturgy of this piece which never collapses 
into sentimentality. They also commend the technical production of this very 
difficult quest into the past.

Tipping my hat to PRX's Remix Radio blog, this is a funderella and/or geekerama source of sounds.

Quote: 

These are some typical sounds we hear in our data recovery lab. If your hard drive makes noises like these and you are still able to access your files - backup immediately. If you no longer can see the drive please fill out our simple evaluation form to get a fast quote on our data recovery services.
To listen to the sound simply click on the play button(one at a time). It may take some time to load. Click on the drive manufacturer next to the sound button to learn more about common problems these drives experience.
If you want to use these sounds in your music (yes, we have received lots of requests already) - no problem, but please contact us first.

New Today FM website

Oooh the 21st century has arrived at Today FM! The old website was a stinker, but this new one is gorgeous. 

Reasonable audio access on the front page – it's mostly a pop music station so a lot of listen on demand (a la BBC WS) is a bit pointless. There's no social networking like Virgin/Absolute Radio – but this is whooole lot prettier than that. It has some videos too (which I have yet to look at as it's time to fall asleep to Mixtuur). 

Anyway, for the station they are, the first impression is of a humdinger of a site.

Radio Lab - Race

A classic.

Almost nostalgic, with the children of DNA letters, the whispered commentary of one host as another has an unexpected interaction with the missus, the runner, the structure with science and then more humanist or emotional or traditional feature at the end.

Some super music – in particular, the journey to the DNA lab with Nell Greenfieldboyce. Its story-telling application was also strong on the early stage of the Vitol drug history. It was loud (if you wish to say that kept a distance from a controversial guest, okay) – it was intriguing. It worked (for me at any rate. Wish I could be that good at music… well I will be, it'll just take time…) And having that archive audio, broadcast quality, and using it in the flow.

Tasty pauses.

The hints towards the mood of Obama America was there – it would be a crime if it wasn't – going from the opening cut to the interstitial chanting.

I've already posted it to my Facebook as: "Just released today, this is an instant classic Radio Lab. Someone stop me being so zealous. Actually, don't."

It's here... the YouTube for audio

Hasn't it been a little bit, just a little bit, of a bummer, how YouTube is there with all its video joy, and nothing like it has happened for audio? There was something attached to Archive.org that kinda got close (I think. Can harldy remember it).

Now though, I think we have a winner.
www.Huffduffer.com. The name helps -- it's a reference to radio direction findng, and sounds funny, so geeks and non-geeks are all in! It uses links to audio, so the bandwidth costs aren't prohibitive.

And you can just dive into the tags! Okay one suggestion there is to be able to chose to view tags alphabetically. Maaaybe even geographically.

Anyway, my Huffduff RSS feed is in the right hand side-bar. Send me yours if you like :)

CBC Radio This is Only a Test

Facebook event

One night only, a chance to see comic Nile Seguin in action as he hosts a new
show for CBC Radio called This Is Only A Test.This Friday we're taping the pilot
for a show that looks at the psychology of why we do what we do.Come on down,
get your laughter and applause recorded for radio, and find out the reasons
behind such human quirks as why we'll often take the "free" choice, rather than
the one that makes the most sense and how to improve your brain with a simple
off-the-shelf beverage. Honest.The show is all about better living through
psychology -for this show you can learn how to save money by understanding how
your brain works.For tickets to this event, just email testtickets@cbc.ca

That's been sent round to members of Definitley Not the Opera's Facebook group. Looks good!

Mixtuur

22:30, leaving a fun work dinner, on a Monday. Yes a Monday, and the Monday after a snowy, testosterone weekend has left you acnefied and aching. Out into the cold, and walking home through Brussels.

Newly repaired headphones are in the outer part of my backpack, so I can get that in my gloves. The Olympus that doubles as podcast player is buried in the main part – so why not go for the pocket radio. It's good to walk the streets in the cold flicking between the north African stations, the noise and reflections as an FM radio moves in the city, the Walter Benjamin thoughts as the Wildean prison appears to the left. 

And back round it goes to the bottom of the band, and 89.5, and… sound art. Now that catches me off guard! It was good, the real deal, and the presenter speaks suddenly and in Dutch. It's good. I recognise a piece – is it Gregory Whitehead? The only familiar name in the next stream (of Dutch) was John Cage. What a show, could it really be five nights a week? Cos it's so good I bet it's just one night a week. Up into the dark terrazzo apartment, switching to the big headphones, the bigger radio. 

Top of the hour… "jazz"…? Ah they've segued into the next show. Happily to sleep, and today, in the office, the facts.

It's called Mixtuur, and yes, it is five nights a week. Huzzah!