Making Radio Talk

Abstract

This chapter considers emerging forms of radio speech developed for formats ranging from scheduled talks to professional announcing. Disrupting established styles of public speaking, radio offered rich subject matter for the new discipline of speech communication, which helped to formalize new rules favoring a well-modulated delivery with restrained, natural speech and careful control over rate, pitch, and enunciation. Three larger sets of cultural tensions impacted these emerging announcing practices: (1) tensions surrounding a standardized national speech movement and its implicit regional, gender, and class biases; (2) concerns over an emergent culture of personality that informed debates on desired degrees of formality and informality in radio speech; and (3) long-standing concerns over disembodied communication-at-a-distance exacerbated by radio’s severing of voices from speakers' physical bodies. Resulting efforts to discipline the radio voice spurred important shifts in period voice culture that resonated across fields from rhetoric and theater to film and phonograph entertainment.