Key Concepts in Radio Studies

Hugh Chignell, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412935173, 9781412935166
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

?This innovative and clearly written handbook does exactly what it claims on the cover, providing students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in Radio Studies... Chignell writes about radio with an engaging mixture of scholarly detachment and private passion? - The Radio Journal

?There is a need for a straightforward, wide-ranging, and up-to-date introduction to ways to study radio and other new audio-based media. Hugh Chignell?s new book certainly fits the bill, and admirably takes the reader from initial ideas through to additional readings which explore the core issues in greater depth. It is crisply and engagingly written, draws upon a very good range of scholarship, and provides many useful contemporary examples... Students will find it an essential aid to their studies, and it may even go someway to ensuring that the study of radio is as important in the academy as its visual cousins? - Viewfinder

?This book is a useful starting point for radio students and staff, packed with citations and pithy comment from the author. It is a rich resource book for academic radio study at all levels? - Janey Gordon, University of Bedfordshire

The SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensible study aids and guides to comprehension.

Key Concepts in Radio Studies:

" Provides a comprehensive, easy-to-use introduction to the field

" Grounds theory with global examples

" Takes it further with recommended reading

" Covers the central ideas and practices from production and media studies

" Situates radio studies within its historical context and contemporary auditory culture

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Part I
Genres and
Production

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Acoustics

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Acoustics refers to the quality and nature of sound in a particular physical environment. It also refers more generally to sound and hearing as in ‘acoustic dislocation’.

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The word acoustics is used in two rather different ways in writing on radio. It has a specific technical meaning in radio production, which refers to either natural sound qualities of different locations or to their treatment. This use of the word acoustics is usually seen in discussion of radio drama. It is also used, however, in a much more general way to refer to sound production and hearing and especially in cultural or historical accounts of sound.

In radio production, and in particular on location, the sound quality of the environment is an important factor. This is partly determined by the reflective properties of surfaces and their distance from the microphone (Starkey, 2004a: 11). In reflective environments, sound bounces off hard surfaces to create an echo or ‘reverberation’ or ‘resonance’. Lobbies or toilets cause high levels of reverberation and so does a church or a hall where the greater space creates a slower echo. In drama production these effects are either achieved on location or are created artificially in the studio to add atmosphere to the drama. Acoustics allow the listener to ‘hear space’ or, to put it differently, ‘space is created acoustically’ (Shingler and Wieringa, 1998: 56). These sound qualities add something to the listener’s experience:

If the sounds are produced in a studio and all resonance is deadened then these sounds seem to occupy the same space as that of the listener, replicating the acoustic qualities of most people’s homes, where typically sounds are deadened by carpets, wallpaper, curtains and furniture. (Shingler and Wieringa, 1998: 56)

Here the acoustic deadening of the studio is used to enhance the intimacy of the listening experience and the simulation of co-presence between the presenter or DJ and the listener.

The other use of the word acoustic is found in cultural and historical accounts of listening. Emily Thompson’s (2004) history of sound and technology in the early 20th century is entitled The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in America, 1900–1933. The book is not directly concerned with radio but looks at the wider soundscape of modern America, its ‘aural landscape’. She comments on the way that in the noisy urban environment of the American city, acoustic technology was used in architecture and building materials to try to reduce the din of modern technology (trains, cars, gramophones). Gradually, ‘electroacoustic’ devices such as the telephone and the radio changed the listening experience and gave the listener greater control over what they heard. A feature of the new listening was that ‘sound was gradually dissociated from space’ (Thompson 2004: 2). So the telephone conversation separated the human voice from their location. Similarly, radio allowed voices, some of them from other countries, to speak into enthusiasts’ headphones.

Returning to the word ‘acoustic’ we can say that the acoustic experience has historically moved in the direction of both control over what is heard but also in the separation of sound and place. This is a point made not only by cultural historians but also in contemporary cultural accounts of audio consumption. Personalised audio players (such as the Walkman® or its replacement, the MP3 player) contribute to the acoustic experience in ways very similar to those described by Thompson:

… listening with headphones on is like a wonderful decoding instrument of the urban sonic environment. The walking listener uses it not only to protect himself from the sonic aggressions of the city but also to filter and enhance the events that give the place its meaning. (Thibaud, 2003: 330)

In this case the older technology of the Walkman® audio cassette player is used to screen out unwanted sound and replace it with selective listening, ‘the passer-by with headphones navigates through several worlds at once, the one in which he hears and the one in which he walks’ (Thibaud, 2003: 331). The acoustic dislocation of the listener from their physical place is also a feature of mobile phone use. Here the acoustic experience seems to lift the user out of the urban environment to other places, ‘I am no longer embedded in my immediate locality’ comments Caroline Bassett on her phone use, ‘today the city streets are full of virtual doorways, opening into other places’ (2003: 345).

The idea of acoustics and the related concept of the soundscape are particularly useful for an understanding of contemporary radio. They force us to connect radio to other modes and technologies of listening and to acknowledge both the historical and cultural influences on our sense of hearing.

FURTHER READING

Shingler and Wieringa provide a very useful introduction to this and related topics (1998: 54–61). Thompson’s (2004) history of American audio life is fascinating while Thibaud (2003) is a more contemporary account.

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Broadcast Talk

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Broadcast talk refers to talk on radio as a specific form of public broadcast speech.

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It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of talk on radio. In the same way that visual images (or pictures) are fundamental to film and television, so talk is often described as the ‘primary code’ of radio. This may even be true in music radio where the linking words of the DJ are of critical importance and make the output ‘radio’ rather than just a jukebox.

But what exactly is ‘talk’? Is it the same as language? In addition, what is ‘broadcast talk’? Is that the same essentially as ‘ordinary talk’, which just happens to be transmitted over the radio? The answer to the first question is clearly that language is a resource with its own rules, vocabulary and grammar that can be used in a number of different forms of ‘talk’. So the English language can be used in the formal context of the courtroom but this is quite different from the informality of talk in the playground or on the street. In the context of radio theory, ‘talk’ is used to refer to use of language (vocabulary and grammar) but also mode of address (including ‘direct address’ which uses ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘I’ and so on). It also includes the sound of someone talking, so accent, noise levels and the rapidity of speech are all included. But ‘broadcast talk’ is clearly different again from everyday conversational talk. What we hear on the radio in the exchanges between a presenter and someone phoning in, or in the chat of the DJ, or between co-presenters, has a number of largely hidden but distinct characteristics. What we hear sounds like everyday talk but is in fact quite different.

To begin with, broadcast talk (a term normally associated with the work of Paddy Scannell [1991]) is meant to be overheard. This is obvious in the direct address of the presenter or DJ who speaks directly to the listener, but it is also true of the talk we hear between the presenter and others involved in the programme, including listeners who have phoned in. Scannell used the term ‘double articulation’ to describe this characteristic of broadcast talk; there are two simultaneous forms of communication occurring, that between the presenter and the person they are talking to and also between this talk and the audience. So it sounds like ‘chat’ but it is chat that is designed for thousands of listeners to hear. There is an important tension here between what radio sounds like to the casual listener and a deeper reality. The reality is that the radio station and the presenter have, more or less, complete control or power over what is heard and said. As Scannell puts it, ‘the power of broadcasting, like that of any institution, lies in the way it can define the terms of social interaction in its own domain by pre-allocating social roles and statuses, and by controlling the content, style and duration of its events’ (1991: 2). This institutional authority is illustrated by the fact that so much of the apparently casual banter that we hear on radio is either scripted or rehearsed. First, jokes, asides, topics, exchanges may have been rehearsed beforehand and are written down in front of the presenter. Second, callers to phone-in programmes are always carefully screened and when they say what they are not supposed to say are quickly cut off.

Broadcast talk may be institutional and contrived but it must sound very different. In the case of the DJ or the phone-in host, quite an effort is necessary to sound spontaneous and everyday. Despite the size of the audience and the pre-planned nature of the talk, the presenter has to perform ‘being ordinary’ and their speech has to sound much more like everyday conversation than something being read. In Britain there is an interesting and well-documented history of the development of broadcast talk. The first Director of Talks in the BBC, Hilda Matheson, was one of the first to understand the importance of making scripted radio sound informal and spontaneous and not like a lecture (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991: 166). For some presenters the performance of ‘being ordinary’ and sounding spontaneous simply reflects their character, but the need to reproduce this consistently for several hours a week or even every day makes this much more of a performance than it might appear.

The ordinariness of talk on radio and the performance of being ordinary is related to another concept developed by Scannell, ‘co-presence’. The key to the success of a lot of contemporary radio is the sense communicated by the presenter or DJ that somehow (s)he and the listener exist in the same place at the same time. So when we switch on our radio in the morning and hear ‘it’s another beautiful day here in downtown Memphis’ (or wherever) we are being encouraged to feel a sense of ‘being with’ that presenter in the same place at the same time. The performance of being ordinary by the presenter adds to that sense of co-presence and shared experience and these are communicated largely (though not entirely) through broadcast talk. This sense of shared participation in everyday life is probably easier to achieve on radio than television because the presenter is not an objectified presence on a screen. A sense of co-presence is much more difficult to experience with the carefully made-up presenters of daytime television addressing us from their studio couch than it is with the disembodied voice of a well-known DJ.

Another related feature of broadcast talk that compliments its ordinariness and adds to that sense of co-presence is its ‘liveness’. Up until the middle part of the 20th century almost all radio was live. The listener knew that the words coming from the wireless receiver were being spoken at that very moment in time, usually by someone in a studio in front of a microphone. Although a lot of what we now hear on radio is pre-recorded, the ‘rhetoric of liveness’ is still dominant in radio (see the entry on Liveness). Arguably, one of radio’s great strengths, and one of the reasons why it survives in an age apparently dominated by visual media and forms of audio on demand such as the MP3 player or over the Internet, is its insistence on live communication. I say ‘insistence’ because the word ‘live’ is continually used by presenters to affirm this essential virtue; ‘coming to you live …’, ‘right here live on …’, and so on. In broadcast talk the liveness of radio is communicated in the spontaneity and immediacy of the talk. What we hear feels more live partly because the references made by presenters and DJs are to today’s events (nationally or locally) but also because the talk contains the ‘ums’ and ‘errs’ and pauses of unscripted and spontaneous speech.

If we examine an example of broadcast talk we can see the interplay of these different characteristics of radio. Karen Atkinson and Shaun Moores (2003) have analysed the phone-in programme Live and Direct, which was broadcast in the late 1990s on the British national commercial radio station Talk Radio (now called talkSPORT) and presented by Anna Raeburn. As they point out, the title of the programme captured that sense of liveness and immediacy. The programme encouraged callers to discuss personal problems with the well-known presenter in a programme genre typical of the ‘therapeutic advice-giving’ developed on US radio in the 1970s. Although Raeburn was giving advice she presented herself not as a therapist or expert but as an ordinary person, someone just like the caller, as this extract shows:

I don’t fix anything (1.0) you do (1.0) what we offer on freecall 0500 105839 is the chance to talk (2.0) to check out a range of options (.) to run the decision by somebody who has no vested interest in anything but you (.) telling often the uncomfortable truth as I see it (1.0) and I would just like to remind you at this stage that I’m human too (.) just as fallible just as vulnerable just as bashed about and world-weary as you are (.) so if you want to talk about something and you’re worried about it and you feel foolish and silly and small don’t bother (.) everyone else feels just as (laughing) foolish just as silly just as small (.) that’s the predicament (.) and if you’d like to join us that number once more is freecall 0500 105839. (Atkinson and Moores, 2003: 133 – The numbers in brackets indicate the length of a pause in seconds. (.) indicates a short pause)

The pauses, laughter and direct address all contribute to the liveness and apparent spontaneity of this talk. Anna Raeburn also portrays herself as just an ordinary person (‘I’m human too’) and in her use of ‘we’, ‘everyone else’ and ‘join us’ she fosters a powerful sense of co-presence with and among her listeners.

Talk on radio is of course extremely varied depending on genre, format, the target audience, the nature of the station or network, the time of day and so on. The presenter or whoever is talking will also influence broadcast talk depending on their cultural background. News, analysis, documentary, live sport, conversation and different types of music radio will all employ variations of talk. Andrew Tolson, for example, describes BBC Five Live, the news and sport network which, as its name suggests, foregrounds liveness (2006: 94). The emphasis on sport appeals to a working-class, male listener and the commentators and presenters speak with a rich variety of accents and dialects unusual for the BBC. In the Saturday post-match phone-in programme 606 all the characteristics of liveness, co-presence and ordinariness are evident as is the undisputed authority of the presenter. Tolson describes the use of ‘confrontation talk’ on 606 as the caller and host argue about football in a manner that perfectly (and deliberately) mimics two men in a pub.

The extraordinary variety of broadcast talk is captured by Susan Douglas (1999) in her account of American radio and culture. She describes listening to radio in 1978 in New York. On AM the talk radio host, Bob Grant is yelling ‘you creep! Get off the phone!’ and ‘you mealy-mouthed pompous oaf’, at callers to his late night show. Meanwhile on National Public Radio over on FM, Joe Frank is reminiscing about the experience of being a child, ‘when you’re a child, you’re so alive to experience. The world dazzles you, especially the world of living beings’ (Douglas, 1999: 284). Different though these examples are, in both cases, and in every case of broadcast talk, the words we hear serve to keep the listener tuned in by evoking spontaneity, ordinariness and co-presence.

FURTHER READING

Scannell’s (1991) short collection of articles is an obvious starting point. Tolson’s (2006) much more recent book on ‘media talk’ is very interesting and readable while Atkinson and Moores (2003) is a wonderful example of the analysis of radio talk (and much else besides).

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Comedy

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Comedy is a speech radio genre, which includes a wide variety of entert...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Genres and Production
• Part II Audiences and Reception
• Part III The Radio Industry
• Part IV Politics and the Public Sphere
• References