Radio Documentary Research Articles

Review - The Long Game: Aliya Soomro's Boxing Journey

The Long Game: Aliya Soomro's Boxing Journey" is a poignant and uplifting radio documentary that goes beyond the typical sports narrative. It offers an in-depth analysis of gender norms, societal obstacles, and human resilience, emphasizing the power of podcasting to promote distinct and marginalized voices.

Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was – Documenting Radio on the Radio

ABSTRACT During the mid-1990s, the Smithsonian Institution’s documentary series, Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, aired on hundreds of public radio stations nationwide. The series explored approximately 70 years of the history and socio-cultural impact of African Americans in radio – an ambitious and unprecedented undertaking. No previous radio documentary series had attempted to examine, so expansively, this influential subset of the broadcast industry. Given this author’s service as one of the producers of this historic series, this paper will provide an insider’s perspective on Black Radio’s creation and significance, and it will suggest that the series may serve as an inspirational roadmap for future media production and preservation efforts.

『DBS 리포트』 ｢민요의 고향｣을 통해 본 1970년대 중반 한국민요 전승 실태

This study examines the actual status of the transmission of folk songs in South Korea in the mid-1970s through DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang (Hometown of Folk Songs)" produced and broadcast by Dong-A Broadcasting System (DBS). DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang" was a radio documentary series that covered farming and fishing villages to report on folk song transmission. DBS produced and broadcast 15 episodes of DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang" in 1974 and 10 episodes in 1975. Although it did not cover all regions of the country, Gyeongsangnam-do, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Jeollanam-do, Jeollabuk-do, Gangwon-do, and Chungcheongbuk-do were included and the coverage was conducted at the village level. This program was significant in that it raised the public’s awareness of folk songs by covering and reporting in-depth on native folk songs rather than popular folk songs that were often heard through modern media, such as radio, TV, and LP at the time.
 DBS Report "Minyo-ui Gohyang" not only reported what kind of folk songs remained in the farming and fishing villages but also how the villagers were passing down folk songs and what these meant to them. This program covered a total of 18 villages. In 8 villages, folk songs were actively transmitted, while in the rest 10 villages, folk songs were found but not actively transmitted. The main cause of this was the changes in living conditions. In fishing villages, the opportunities to sing fishing labor songs disappeared with the decline of traditional fishing due to the development of fishing technology and changes in fishing grounds. Similarly, in rural areas, the opportunities to sing folk songs decreased due to the mechanization of farming, the use of herbicides, and the industrialization of the region. The spread of popular songs through the radio also diminished the transmission of folk songs. However, it is noteworthy that some villages underwent the same changes while the villagers worked together to preserve their folk songs. For them, folk songs were not only a means of relieving the boredom and exhaustion of labor and increasing the efficiency of work but also a source of vitality for living, art that enriched daily life, and valuable cultural heritage to be passed on to future generations.

The Radio of Cinema

Film Quarterly columnist Bilal Qureshi explores the radio origins of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, the first film to ever be nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, best animated feature, and best international feature film. Trained as a radio journalist who aspired to use sound to immerse the listener in images, Qureshi finds inspiration in Flee’s unique and extraordinary merging of radio and film. Relating the true story of an Afghan refugee’s arrival in Denmark after his escape from the Taliban’s first siege of Kabul in 1989, Flee began as a radio documentary compiled from conversations between Rasmussen and “Amin,” the alias chosen by his childhood friend to protect his privacy. Animators only began visualizing the story once the radio cut was locked. While there is a topical urgency that undoubtedly makes this film of migration, loss, and war “important,” there’s more: Flee is a master class in intimacy and immersion in the form of a radio film.

Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire

Remembering the Rising and the End of Empire Sara Dybris McQuaid (bio) Ireland is at a key moment of rethink. Between 2012 and 2022 Ireland is officially marking a "Decade of Centenaries" in which the country reflects on seminal events that led to the birth of the state. The Third Home Rule Bill passed in the British Parliament in 1912, effectively paving the way for Irish independence (albeit within the empire). After a tumultuous decade, 1922 saw the final establishment of the Irish Free State, with the island having been partitioned in 1921. The most significant single event in this decade was arguably the Easter Rising of 1916. At that point Ireland was still governed under the Union with Great Britain, and the constitutional path to Home Rule had been postponed because of the outbreak of World War I. In this context the Easter Rising was staged by a relatively small group of radicals who took over key buildings in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish republic. A short week of fighting with the British Army ensued, during which Dublin was completely devastated and the leaders of the Rising were imprisoned. The subsequent execution of the leaders outraged the public and rallied more widespread sympathy for a radical agenda. The historiographical agreement—to the extent it exists—has largely been that as a military maneuver, the Rising was a spectacular failure, but as a symbolic performance of blood sacrifice it was a roaring success.1 While the Rising itself failed to achieve its goals of a united, Gaelic, and socialist republic, historian Diarmaid Ferriter has argued that it came to be seen as the point from which all subsequent Irish history begins.2 [End Page 110] Prologue In 2016 the state marked the centenary of the Easter Rising, and in April of that year I brought a group of MA students on a fieldtrip to do participant observation of the commemorations in Dublin. Getting to an old friend's house out near Kilmainham Gaol (where the leaders of the rising were executed in 1916), I asked the taxi driver whether he was already tired of "remembering the Rising"; he said, "Not at all!" On the contrary, he had enjoyed it immensely, with so many new aspects of the Rising being explored. I asked him what he had been especially impressed by, and he said the RTÉ radio documentary An Easter Re-rising about a 1930 uprising in Chittagong in prepartition India (now Bangladesh) apparently modeled closely on the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland.3 I downloaded the radio program, which was made by Pranjali Bhave, an Indian woman who had lived in Ireland for ten years.4 The idea for this article began to take shape. While the Decade of Centenaries is about reaffirming and recharging (and to some extent critically reassessing) the national community, imperial and postcolonial relationships have also been pivotal points of renegotiation. One dimension of this is how commemorations are used to position Ireland in relation to the imperial experience, which it may be understood to be both part of and subjected to. Another emerging dimension relates to how commemorations are used to come to terms with other former colonial populations, now living in Ireland, and how they and the transnational, imperial pasts they represent are incorporated in local and national commemorations. At the same time certain forms of remembering, particularly those rehearsing antagonistic relations to Great Britain, have been submerged as a wide variety of other focuses have risen to the front of official remembrance. In this article I consider An Easter Re-rising in the context of these wider forms of remembrance, spurred by the Decade of Centenaries, to show how it at once brings a globalizing and transnational dimension to remembering the Easter Rising, while at the same time through a series of displacements reenables a narrative that has largely been eschewed in national commemorations. [End Page 111] Introduction Centenaries are occasions in which all remembrance is necessarily disembodied (since almost none of the people who lived the historical experience are still alive) and therefore must be reembodied by new generations and populations through their participation in memorializing and imagining the nation.5...

Opowieść rodzi się w dialogu — specyfika narracji w reportażu radiowym

The article is an attempt to discuss the specificity of the narrative in radio documentary. The documentary is treated as an artistic form of radio based on the character’s statement born during a meeting with a reporter, the documentary maker. The narrative is treated as an individual statement by the character, but also as a text of culture. Dialogue rules both perspectives. The relationship takes place between the character and the reporter, but also between subsequent elements of the audio material composed according to the author’s intention. We also discuss about the radio documentary being as a form of dialogue with the listener. The essence of the article is the proposed divisions of the radio reportage narrative, taking into account the narrative as a personal statement and as a text. The categorization was supported by examples from Polish radio documentaries. Theoretical considerations are based on studies on artistic radio genres, psychological narrative, narrative identity, and the philosophy of encounter. Radio documentary, which is emphasized by theoreticians and practitioners of the genre, is born out of a situation where there is a dialogical meeting between the author and the protagonist, and the verbalization of experiences during this meeting is a form of identity building. A look at radio documentary from a psychological perspective and the resulting classifications will indicate the importance of interdisciplinary research into audio artistic genres.

Impact of the Experience of Radio Documentary Production on the Aptitude of Program Producers

Impact of the Experience of Radio Documentary Production on the Aptitude of Program Producers

Saturn and Jupiter Revisited

I composed Saturn and Jupiter as part of my Master’s degree thesis at Wesleyan University in 2003. It is an electro-acoustic and soundscape composition that responds to Glenn Gould’s 1967 radio documentary, The Idea of North. I made the source recordings while on a week-long trip to Churchill, Manitoba, where I took the same train that Gould had taken some thirty years earlier. Saturn and Jupiter responds both to the ideas in Gould’s documentary in the form of interviews, and compositionally by imposing considerably more atmospheric space into the work. Where Gould’s documentary is noisy with talking – Gould famously pioneered a technique he called ‘contrapuntal radio’ where he layers multiple speaking voices simultaneously – the spoken components of my documentary are quite sparse. This new presentation commemorates the re-opening of the Winnipeg – Churchill train line after suffering massive flooding damage in 2017. In this version, listeners are invited to hear and view to the 32 movements in a customizable configuration. The interactive map allows users to select the movements, which are each named for a stop on the train line, and have them compiled into a playlist.

Editor’s Plaisance

Editor’s Plaisance

Introduction

Introduction

Engaging political histories of urban uprisings with young people: The Liverpool riots, 1981 and 2011

Based on a participatory research project which involved academics and young people at KCC Live, a community radio station in Merseyside, exploring the 1981 and 2011 riots in Liverpool, UK, this paper argues that co-produced research involving young people and radio provides an under-utilised avenue for research on historical and political geographies. Working together for a year in 2012–13, the academic and non-academic participants produced a radio documentary exploring how and why the 1981 riots in Liverpool occurred, and what we could learn from those historical events to help understand the more recent 2011 riots. Young people’s capacities to engage with past events that took place before they were born, in order to reflect on and understand the political present, are seldom explored in research. The research that this paper is based on therefore provides an original and significant contribution to debates on conducting research with young people, in particular developing approaches to thinking through how young people engage with, and make sense of, politics and political activity, especially disruptive or insurgent activities like riots/urban uprisings. As a result, the paper makes an important contribution to work being done on the political capacities of young people; collective histories and memories in young people’s understandings of politics, place, and space; and knowledges of urban uprisings. We argue that bringing children’s/youth geographies into dialogue with political and historical geographies such as those discussed here is a useful avenue for future research.

Reportaż radiowy a pejzaż dźwiękowy. Zarys problematyki

The article is an attempt to enter scientific reflection relating to radio reportage in the field of sound studies, especially in one of its original elements — the theory of soundscape created by Raymond Murray Schafer in the 1960s. It starts with the basic terminological solutions in the field of soundscape and the audial form of reportage, then juxtaposes them with each other and indicates the possibilities of their mutual penetration in both scientific and media fields. It presents the common features of a radio documentary and a soundscape, e.g. focus on reality, attention to sound, specific narration, the use of the oral history method etc. This paper also shows the difference between these two forms such as a greater level of creativity in the case of reportage in combination with the “raw” naturalness of the soundscape. It also highlights how the idea of acoustic ecology can use radio reportage to disseminate its assumptions. Finally, it postulates the inclusion of this audio genre as an element of the soundscape to a harmonious hi-fi space and considers as justified to set together the experiences of both the discussed phenomena on theoretical as well as practical grounds, and to continue the reflection as sketched out in this article.

Invisible Belfast: Flat ontologies and remediation of the post-conflict city

[in]visible belfast was a research-driven indie alternate reality game (ARG) that ran for 6 weeks during the spring of 2011 in Belfast and was subsequently adapted, 5 years later into a fictional documentary for BBC Radio 4. The ARG is a participatory and dispersed narrative, which the audience play through. The text expands outward across both physical and digital platforms to create a mystery for the players using everyday platforms. The ARG is a product of media convergence and at its heart transmedial, defined by its complexity and modes of participation. The fictional radio documentary which remediated the ARG into a more simple linear structure, but possibly a more complex narrative form, retells parts of the story for new audiences. The premise of [in]visible belfast – the game and later the documentary – is itself an adaptation of writer Ciaran Carson’s novel The Star Factory (1997): a postmodern adventure through the complex psychogeography of Belfast. A trail through the labyrinthine text, which paints the history of Belfast in poetic prose. This article will map the concept’s journey from novel to game to radio, contextualising its development within its political and urban landscape and charting the remediation of the narratives as they fold out across multiple media and complex story arches. The article will draw together ideas from previous publications on ARG, transmediality and complex textualities from the authors and reflect on the textual trajectories that the remediation of the narrative has taken from the original book, through the ARG, into the radio documentary. Building upon recent approaches from environmental philosopher Tim Morton and games theorist Ian Bogost, the authors argue that Belfast’s history propels medial adaptations of a particular kind, characterised by a ‘flat’ ontology of space and time and a sort of diffuse and dark urban experience for designers/producers and players/listeners.

Listening to self-chosen music regulates induced negative affect for both younger and older adults.

The current study evaluated the efficacy of self-chosen music listening for the function of affect regulation comparing effects in younger and older adults. Forty younger (18–30 years, M = 19.75, SD = 2.57, 14 males) and forty older (60–81 years, M = 68.48, SD = 6.07, 21 males) adults visited the laboratory and were randomised to either the intervention (10 minutes of listening to self-chosen music) or the active control condition (10 minutes of listening to an experimenter-chosen radio documentary). Negative affect (NA) was induced in all participants using a speech preparation and mental arithmetic task, followed by the intervention/control condition. Measures of self-reported affect were taken at baseline, post-induction and post-intervention. Controlling for baseline affect and reactivity to the NA induction, in comparison with the active control group the music listening group demonstrated greater reduction in NA. Supporting developmental theories of positive ageing, analyses also found significant main effects for age, with older adults experiencing greater reduction of NA than younger adults, regardless of condition. Results of the current study provide preliminary insights into the effects of self-chosen music on induced NA, however, additional experimental control conditions comparing self-chosen and experimenter-chosen music with self-chosen and experimenter-chosen active controls are needed to fully understand music listening effects for affect regulation.

Audio on the go: The effect of audio cues on memory in driving

An inability to recall details from an otherwise uneventful drive on a familiar route is a common experience to many. Whether this amnesia for everyday driving is because we don't actually form strong memories when we are driving on autopilot or whether this is because we simply can't find those memories when we try to later is an interesting question, not only for driving, but for memory and skilled performance more generally. The present study sought to determine whether recall could be aided by reinstating an auditory cue that was present during the drive. Twenty-five participants drove three 9 km routes on familiar roads and then were asked a series of questions about the details of the drives. Three auditory cues (music, radio documentary, or periodic verbal markers) and a visual cue were used as contextual stimuli during the drives and as post-drive recall cues. The music and verbal markers produced better recall than the radio documentary. Although proceduralised driving on a familiar road may make incidental details of the drive difficult to recall, those details are recoverable with a sufficiently robust recall cue.

Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art by Magdalene Redekop

Reviewed by: Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art by Magdalene Redekop Marlene Epp Magdalene Redekop, Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art. University of Manitoba Press, 2020. 380 pp. When one glances at the title of this book, one might understandably assume it is about Mennonite artists, or art about Mennonites. In fact, it is neither of these directly, although it touches on both. The title Making Believe is dynamic and questioning, pointing to Redekop's premise that the concepts "Mennonite" and "art" interact in a spielraum, a playing space for tricksters and clowns that challenge anyone who dares to pin down definitions of either notion. While Redekop says there is "no such thing as Mennonite art," (xiv–xv) her study nevertheless describes a renaissance or "flowering" of art by Mennonites that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. She quotes Andris Taskans who described this as a "Mennonite miracle" (3). Redekop's overall argument is, first, that the phenomenon of Mennonites and art responded to a "crisis of representation" and, second, that "cultural identity is dialogical" (xv). The question is less about what a particular art form tells us, or what the artist intended, but how it is represented as Mennonite. Further, [End Page 165] ideas about Mennonites and art, and the art itself, are formed in multiple spaces—"contact zones"—where insider and outsider meet and dialogue. The art forms highlighted in the study are music, visual art, and creative writing, with brief forays into photography, film, theatre, and dance, media that scholarship on Mennonites has rarely brought together for collective analysis. The Low German dialect itself, appearing as metaphor and story throughout the book, becomes an art form as well. The individuals she writes about are artists "who happen to be Mennonite" (xxv), not to be confused with the label "Mennonite artists." Yet many of the artists she references in detail or in passing have tangential relationships with a Mennonite ancestry. Most of her examples are at least originally from Manitoba, Redekop's home province, and have ancestry in the Dutch/ Russian Mennonite ethnic stream. The specific artists and works of art that Redekop chooses to analyze are intriguing. Some are very well known, while others are less so. Some are self-declared Mennonites, others are so-called "outsiders" creating works of art that represent Mennonites, while others exist in the liminal space between insider and outsider whether by choice or positioning. To her credit, Redekop does not fuss too much about defining her usage of the label Mennonite since she describes such a community as "a floating imaginary construct" (xvi). Her personal ambivalence about that identity helps to situate her as both critic and actor in her narrative. Following an extensive "On Beginnings" introductory section, in which Redekop posits theories about the historic roots of the "flowering" of Mennonite artforms, Making Believe has six chapters divided in two parts. Part 1, "Reframing Old Questions" explores the issue of representation using the diverse examples of Peter Power's photography of Old Order Mennonites, Glen Gould's radio documentary Quiet in the Land (and the choreography which followed), and the (in)famous feature film Stellet Licht by Carlos Reygadas. The latter stars well-known Canadian writer of Mennonite background Miriam Toews, whose work appears throughout Making Believe. Redekop discusses the role of nostalgia and anti-nostalgia in works by Paul Hiebert and John Weier, Redekop's choices revealing her own nostalgia for the Canadian prairie that pervades the book. Part 2, "Witnessing a New Phenomenon" begins with a survey of the "literary bumper crop" (165) of the Mennonite artistic renaissance. Of necessity, Redekop begins with author Rudy Wiebe, who is from Alberta, but then quickly focuses on the poetry, novels, and life writing published by and about Mennonites in Manitoba in the 1980s and 1990s. The abundance of poetry, in particular, challenged the "centuries-old dominance of [End Page 166] Mennonite historical and theological narratives" as well as "the literalism of fundamentalist thinking" (180). Poets become tricksters as they disassemble Mennonite identities. Chapters 5 and 6 focus primarily on music and visual art respectively. Musical representations include hymn singing, choral conducting, radio broadcasting, and composition. All of these...

Prix Europa: The European Broadcasting Festival 2018 - radio documentary and feature trends, forms and topics.

This article surveys a range of European audio features and documentaries selected for the prestigious Prix Europa 2018. Works critiqued come from Italy, UK, France, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic. the Netherlands and Belgium. The winner was The Upside Down, made by Gianluca Stazi and Giuseppe Casu and produced by Radio Televisione Italiana, RAI Radio 3 and Tratti Documentari. The jury described it as a “timeless story about the dignity and spirituality of work. Patiently, it leads us deep into the recesses of the natural world and the human soul. We heard a real musical experience composed of natural sounds and peoples’ memories, all told with great tenderness. The documentary turned our preconceptions of this typical social subject upside down with its sense of humanity and poetry. It was a big story from a hole in the mountain”.

Jackie Shane: It’s Just, “Yes Ma’am, No Ma’am”

Jackie ShaneIt’s Just, “Yes Ma’am, No Ma’am” Douglas Mcgowan (bio) Jackie Shane is not an easy person to interview. She was one of the greatest soul artists of the 1960s. (“The greatest singer who ever lived,” says Skippy White, dean of the Boston soul scene over the last half century or so.) Designated male at birth in Nashville in 1940, she openly began to identify as female as a preadolescent, and quickly established her own fluid identity, evolving into a no-nonsense, fuck-you-pay-me stage presence that remains shocking well over a half century later. It could not have been easy. As she says in the middle of her most famous recorded mid-song monologue, from “Money (That’s What I Want),” recorded at the Saphire Tavern in 1967, “It’s fatiguing being a Jackie Shane.” Throughout her career, Shane was likened to Little Richard, a comparison she dismisses with varying degrees of humor and disgust depending on her mood. In reality, her combination of raw vocal talent, wit, glamor, and overall mystique is without comparison. (“I wasn’t to have siblings. What could you bring forth after me?”) Shane found a career and relatively safe haven in Toronto. The acceptance she was shown there was a revelation, and Jackie considers the city home to this day. For a variety of reasons best summed up in the voluminous yet tantalizingly incomplete liner notes to the recent collection of her work, Any Other Way, Shane left the business in 1971. She settled first in Los Angeles with her mother, Jessie. They moved to Nashville in the late ’70s or early ’80s, and Shane has lived there since. (Jessie Shane passed in 1997.) Over the years, Jackie’s legend grew and rumors proliferated. Many said she was dead; some said she’d been murdered. All attempts by writers and fans to make contact were met with dismissal until shortly after the CBC ran a radio documentary by Elaine Banks entitled I Got Mine: The Story of Jackie Shane, in 2010. A British listener named Jeremy Pender heard the program and felt inspired to strike up a telephone friendship with Shane, whom he’d seen perform in Toronto in the late ’60s. I learned the gist of her story in 2013, and thanks to Pender managed to wrangle an introduction in early 2014. Although we’ve spoken on the phone at least weekly since then, I’ve still never met Jackie, and wonder if I ever will. When I arrived at her doorstep in the summer of 2016 with a contract on behalf of the Numero Group record label based in Chicago, she wouldn’t come to the door or window, and scolded me for the invasion of her privacy. (Revisiting my notes for this article, I’m reminded that I [End Page 30] found and returned a lost pair of her eyeglasses in the tall grass.) But she did sign, and this most challenging of projects, entitled Any Other Way after Jackie’s biggest hit, came to fruition in late 2017. Click for larger view View full resolution 1. any other way cover photo, ca. early 1970s. All photos courtesy of Numero Group. Jackie hates interviews but loves to talk. Apart from conversations leading to the liner notes, she has agreed to just seven interviews to date, starting with the New York Times, and most recently made her first radio appearance on Sveriges Radio (Sweden Public Radio)—after passing on an opportunity to speak with Terry Gross for Fresh Air. We decided that the easiest thing would be to look at and discuss photos from the liner notes. The following interview is condensed [End Page 31] and edited from approximately three hours of concentrated discussion, along with another four or so of digression, argument, pleading, and laughter. ________ Douglas Mcgowan: Let’s start with the cover of the album (fig. 1). As you know, we engaged in a little digital trickery here to move the poster down behind your head because it reads “Shayne” instead of “Shane” because we didn’t want to confuse people with that misspelling. Jackie Shane: It’s not a poster, it...

A reflection on practice-related research – the case of radio journalism

Abstract A reflection on conducting and articulating practice-related research, based on a reading of the article entitled ‘Radio journalism as research – a Ph.D. model’, by Mia Lindgren (2014) in The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 12:1&2, pp. 169–182. Lindgren’s case study was her Ph.D. thesis, ‘Journalism as research: Developing radio documentary theory from practice’ (2011), Murdoch University, Perth.

Entrevista com David King Dunaway: o documentário radiofônico

Durante o mes de maio de 2016, o MidiaSon e a ECA-USP receberam David King Dunaway, documentarista, historiador, biografo e professor de Ingles e Literatura na Universidade do Novo Mexico, para um curso de curta-duracao sobre a producao do documentario radiofonico. Com a conclusao da serie de aulas, convidamos o professor para uma conversa sobre seu trabalho como investigador de historia oral e, principalmente, a importância do documentario radiofonico. A entrevista foi organizada em tres partes: a primeira foca a carreira e algumas das producoes mais relevantes do professor; a segunda aborda o documentario radiofonico em suas especificidades, e em relacao a outros formatos, como o feature e o jornalismo cotidiano; e a terceira parte concentra-se nos assuntos como comunidades, ativismo por meio do radio e os espacos disponiveis para a producao radiofonica documental.