Audio Stories Research Articles

Challenges in Internationalizing Radio Journalism Course Content

RMIT postgraduate students studying Broadcast Journalism: Radio were asked to create audio stories for a programme called ‘Global Leadership’ being aired by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation’s international broadcaster Radio Australia. The project was adopted because it fits with a university-wide push to ‘internationalize’ the curriculum in order to give students a ‘global passport to work beyond Australian shores’. The project prompted students to think outside their geographical boundaries and to address an Asia-Pacific-wide audience. This paper outlines the results of that experiment and the constraints, incentives and opportunities educators face in responding to calls to internationalize journalism education. It suggests a model for reporting across international borders which others could build on.

The Use of Choice-Based Distraction to Decrease the Distress of Children at the Dentist

ABSTRACT This research was conducted to examine whether choice-based distraction provides an effective means of reducing the distress of children undergoing routine dental treatment. Sixty children between the ages of 5–12 who required restorative dental treatment were assigned randomly to either a Control group or a Distraction group in which the participants were permitted to choose from a variety of music, soundtracks, and/or audio stories to listen to while undergoing dental treatment. They also could change selections during treatment. Direct observations of disruptive behavior provided measures of overall disruptiveness during treatment. The participants also provided self-reported ratings of approval and discomfort. There were no significant differences between the two study groups with respect to average disruptive behavior. However, the Distraction group had significantly fewer participants that would have been considered clinically “uncooperative” and twice as many participants that would be rated “very positive” by dentists. Because choice-based distraction is a relatively easy procedure to implement, it may provide health care professionals and parents alike with a valuable alternative means of reducing the distress of children who visit the dentist. Additional benefits and limitations are discussed.

Synthetic News Radio

This paper describes a system that uses speech recognition and clustered text news stories to automatically find story boundaries in an audio news broadcast and provides a semantic representation that can match audio news stories of similar content. This system creates a personal, synthetic newscast by extracting stories, based on user interests, from multiple hourly newscasts and then reassembling them into a single recording at the end of the day. Interaction is via graphical and telephone-based interfaces, with newscasts delivered over a local area network or to wireless audio pagers.