German Radio Station Research Articles

Приёмы манипулирования общественным мнением при освещении политических событий радиостанциями России и Германии

The research is devoted to the identification and study of methods of manipulating public opinion when covering political events by radio stations in Russia and Germany. Obtaining accurate and verified information about the events of reality is the constitutional right of every person, and the formation of an objective picture of the world and the explanation of the phenomena occurring is the most important function of the editorial office of each media. However, at present, the priority of the media is the formation (often imposition) of a certain public opinion that can distort the real situation both in the local and international context. 842 broadcasts of radio stations of different forms of ownership of Russia and Germany (three from each country) for the period from 17.01.2021 to 01.11.2022 were studied. On the example of four widely publicized Russian media events of a political nature, using the methods of content, plot-composition, lexico-stylistic and comparative analysis of radio broadcasts revealed the use of certain (even identical) manipulative techniques on both Russian and German radio stations. The leader in the regularity of the use of manipulative techniques was the state radio station “Vesti FM” (Russia) and “Deutschlandradio” (Germany), while correspondents of other radio stations studied by us presented information about events of interest to us on the air, as a rule, briefly, discreetly and only in a news format. The practice of regular use of manipulative techniques does not allow us to speak about the objective presentation of selected political media events by correspondents of some Russian and German radio stations. It seems that the current situation could contribute to the creation of an incomplete picture of the world among the audience of these radio stations. A conclusion has been reached that it is possible to minimize such cases only by continuing the activity of forming and developing a person’s critical thinking.

Live Electronics im/in the SWR Experimentalstudio ed. by Dániel Péter Biró et al.

Reviewed by: Live Electronics im/in the SWR Experimentalstudio ed. by Dániel Péter Biró et al. Jennifer Iverson Live Electronics im/in the SWR Experimentalstudio. Edited by Dániel Péter Biró, Jonathan Goldman, Detlef Heusinger, and Constanze Stratz. Hofheim am Taunus, Germany: Wolke, 2019. [390 p. ISBN 9783955930851 (paperback), €34.] Illustrations, charts, music. This dual-language volume, with essays in German and English, focuses on the works, composers, and technologies in use at the Südwestrundfunk (SWR; Southwest Broadcasting) studio from the 1970s to the present day. The editors’ introductions to the volume, which admirably situate readers historically, aesthetically, and technically, are translated into both languages. The subsequent nineteen essays are offered in the preferred language of the writer, with about 60 percent of the volume’s chapters in German and about 40 percent in English. The SWR studio often flies under the radar of scholars. Established in 1971, it followed the first wave (ca. 1950–60) of more famous postwar studios such as the GRM in Paris, the WDR in Cologne, the RAI in Milan, Columbia-Princeton in New York, the CLAEM in Buenos Aires, and the NHK in Japan. Like many of these earlier studios, it consolidated the institutional resources of government-funded radio. SWR studio was situated in the Southwest German Radio station in Freiburg im Breisgau, where the studio benefited from broadcast technology innovations as well as the connections to impresarios such as Heinrich Strobel and Otto Tomek. Some of the famous works composed at this studio include Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mantra (1970), Pierre Boulez’s explosante-fixe (1971), Luigi Nono’s Prometeo (1984), and Chaya Czernowin’s Shu Hai mitamen behatalat kidon (1998/2007). Though there has been relatively less scholarly attention on the SWR studio and its works, its specialty in producing live electronic music makes it an important site. This volume, correspondingly, is an important contribution that fills an existing gap in the literature. “Live electronic music” refers to works that use both a live performer and electronic sounds, either prere-corded fixed media or live-generated sounds. In many live-electronic scenarios, the performer improvises with electronic sounds in a live-action fashion, for instance tuning ring modulators, manipulating feedback, or live coding on stage. Given the SWR studio’s expertise in live electronics, the studio has been a pioneering site for hardware and software innovation, has maintained a knowledgeable staff of engineers and technicians, and has played host to several international visiting composers. Many of the essays focus on the technical capabilities and constraints of the studio’s machines at a given time. The technological focus is particularly welcome given that so many live electronic works intimately exploit particular technological affordances. Essays by Stefan Jena, Detlef Heusinger, and Reinhold Braig explain the function [End Page 57] of historical technologies in use, with particular emphasis on mixing, spatialization, and diffusion. Understanding the studio’s technological premises is crucial to understanding the compositional and aesthetic premises of these early works. Some authors focus on composer-specific analyses, often close readings of a single piece. These include contributions by Jürg Stenzl on Luigi Nono, Björn Gottstein on Brian Ferneyhough, Lydia Jeschke on Marc Andre, Daniel Ender on Georg Friedrich Haas, and Thomas Hummel on Emmanuel Nunes. Reading these composer-specific studies together with the technology essays provides a clearer understanding of how composers collaborated with machines and engineers in the studio to develop, revise, and realize their ideas. Sketch study is particularly important in Rudolf Frisius’s analysis of Karl-heinz Stockhausen’s Cosmic Pulses. The colored graphic scores and technology maps are enticing traces of a complex musico-engineering process. I especially enjoyed Martin Iddon’s philosophical, interpretive discussion of Chaya Czernowin’s acoustic and electronic music. Extending far beyond an analysis of a single piece, Iddon places Czernowin in a techno-feminist lineage. In this capacious essay, we have a chance to contemplate how her sound-worlds interface with the provocations of psychoanalysis and modernity broadly construed. The essays do not stop with historical figures and outdated technologies. The SWR studio continues to exist, to evolve, and to host composers, a point well reflected in the volume...

Моделирование аналитического интервью в эфире разговорного радио: на примере германской радиостанции «DeutschlandRadio»

The application of the modeling technique allowed to reveal the organization specifics of analytical interviews on the German radio station of the «DeutschlandRadio» of the talk format, which is based on: the level of competence of the interlocutor/interlocutors, confirmation of the status of the expert interlocutors, the predetermination of the functions and behavioral actions of the journalist, the openness of the analysis process and demonstration of logical reasoning with an emphasis on the causes and consequences of the analyzed phenomenon.

Medieval Literature on the Air: Johannes von Tepl’s Der Ackermann in Twentieth-Century Radio Adaptations

This essay explores the remediation of Johannes von Tepl’s Der Ackermann (ca. 1401) for radio. Since November 1924 at least thirty-one productions of von Tepl’s piece have been aired on various German radio stations. The reasons for the continued success of Der Ackermann in the medium of radio, particularly in the 1920s and after the Second World War, are twofold. In the context of the aesthetic debates in the 1920s on remediation, immediacy, and the appropriate form “word art” should take on the radio, von Tepl’s piece was considered the perfect radio play, or Hörspiel, paradoxically because of its un-play-like form: the focus on the word, the absence of plot, and its lack of scenic complexity. In addition, the radio adaptations of Der Ackermann served to embed this late medieval text in a culture of commemoration that was particularly vital in the 1920s and then again in the immediate post–Second World War years.

Was macht Radionachrichten verständlich(er)?

This study is part of the investigations concerning the listening comprehensibility of radio news that are carried out at the Seminar for Speech Sciences and Phonetics. The slowly spoken news of Deutsche Welle (a German radio station), which pose a special format of radio news, are the object of investigation. These news are produced to make easier the understanding of radio news for lear-ners of German on the levels B2 to C1. This paper examines, whether slowly spoken is to be equated with comprehensibly spoken. As a pilot study six news readings in original tempo and another six in a slow tempo were analysed. Text-linguistic, stylistic and journalistic features of the text were analysed, along with an auditory-phonetic analysis of the following features: pause duration, speech rate, number and interval of intermediate phrase boundaries and number and interval of accents. The slowly spoken news have specific characteristics: a great number of pauses (some of them stereotypical), decelerated articulation (mainly by high tension in articulating and emphatic lengthening) as well as very frequent, sometimes nonsensical accents. According to the perception of speech scientists, especially the increase in accent density and the nonsensical shortening of prosodic units tend to impair the comprehensibility of a reading. Apart from this, an improvement in comprehensibility is not only achieved by a reasonably slow speech rate but, among other things, by simplifying the text of the news.

,,He’d just keep blabbering on if they don’t stop him”

Radio listeners often recognize in a manner of seconds what station or, at least, what kind of format they have just tuned in. Presenters seem to play an important role in creating the typical sound, the so called channel identity of a station. But what do listeners actually regard as being typical in a station’s presentation so that they will recognize it among competing stations? How would they describe their impression? The project presented here aims to form a description profile for the typical presentation of a German radio station, using descriptions made by the listeners themselves. To achieve this, a survey method is used which combines the advantages of qualitative and quantitative research. Its core is a modified version of the Repertory Grid technique. 32 listeners of a German public youth radio station had been interviewed this way. Furthermore, a pilot study was made using the German stimuli with 6 Danish radio listeners. By comparing the German and the Danish interviews, remarkable similarities were found in the descriptions the participants used. This indicates that, apart from content and lexical choice, the sound of radio presentation is an important cue for listeners to differentiate presentation styles and that there might be a similar radio listening culture in Denmark and Germany. Some first results of these two studies will be presented here.

Preiswerte DCF77 Zeitnormale für verteilte Anwendungen

In this article we present a method to get much better time synchronisation with the German radio station DCF77 than usual time receivers can achieve. The signal of the radio station is coded in two ways. One is the amplitude modulation. The carrier amplitude is reduced once per second. This modulation is used by the standard time receivers for the radio station DCF77 to determine the exact start of the second. To synchronise measurements that are taken far apart, these systems are often not exact enough. By using the second code in the DCF signal, the phase modulation, it is possible to get a much better result. By using modern digital signal processing a receiver for the phase modulation can now be build cheaply. We present an experimental system that decodes the phase modulation by measuring the lengths of all carrier periods and correlating them with a signal synthesised in the receiver.

Two unusual east German radio stations

(1968). Two unusual east German radio stations. Journal of Broadcasting: Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 323-326.

Quantitative measurements at Washington on the signals from the German radio stations at Nauen and Eilvese

Quantitative measurements at Washington on the signals from the German radio stations at Nauen and Eilvese