Transom offers up a new work, about a man struggling with obesity, which perhaps stretches the definition of what is an "audio" production. I mean that only for the purposes of this site. They actually call it multimedia but the sound rich production and de-emphasized and choppy (but brilliant) animation and the piece's aurally innovative, sound-driven nature does make this piece an audio doc to me. Maybe. At any rate, that's really neither here nor there. It is really cool and it comes from Transom so, it gets posted.
Studio 360 brings the Barret Golding Story about the YouTube sensation "Auto Tune the News." Awesome!
UPDATE:Producer Barrett Golding posted the full piece on Hearing Voices -- longer than what aired on Studio 360. Click on "Auto Tune News" above for a link.
From the site: "explores a forgotten chapter in the history of South African music-the role of punk rock. Originally broadcast in the Czech Republic, the audio documentary Waking The Nation sketches out the fascinating and often overlooked story of punk rock, ska and post-punk music as it played out against the background of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa in the late '70s and 1980s."
In honor of 09/09/9 -- The longest Beatles song. Rumored to reveal John saying "turn me on dead man" when played backward. Here is a link to the backward track and some background from a website called beatlesnumber9.com. You be the judge.
A vintage doc about New York at the tail end of a now bygone era. The doc's sounds were recorded in time square in the early nineties - before Disney and Giuliani got to it, before 9-11, before the precipitous drop in crime, before the lawn chairs... An amazing, sound-rich doc about the religious zealots in the square.
Saltcast (the audio blog of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies) features a story about a producer doing a story about swingers - yep, those swingers. To use or not to use "graphic" audio...
Hearing Voices recently featured a piece from this series:
Mixing music, dialogue from soundtracks, press conferences, sound effects and other sources, shortcuts has presented a wide variety of themes over the past thirty years, including programs on growing up, growing old, going crazy, being afraid, alone, in love; shows on music, space, race and politics from Watergate to Whitewater, plus retrospectives featuring the major events of each passing year. Recorded and mixed digitally, shortcuts features no narration, it's message evolves from the careful juxtaposition of the various elements.
Fox hunting on horseback, with hounds, is alive in cold, wet Ireland. The Irish Times have produced this engaging audio slideshow on the Waterford Hunt.
A Radio New Zealand tale of motorcycles, romance, and reflexology. Plus ghosts.
The weekly documentary Spectrum profiles a woman who moved from a trailer in Australia and and her corporate job, to New Zealand and a life in alternative therapies.
An old sofa, and an upholsterer who is a powerlifting world champion. Mighty Mac won a Special Award at the Prix Europa in 2009. An engaging, endearing and vivid documentary, with strong accents.
Britain's most renowned natural sound recordist, Chris Watson, has been to Antarctica. In this enhanced podcast, he provides just enough details to set the scene – and then lets the sounds bring you there. Some of the most engrossing audio you'll hear.
A rich feature in the European tradition, blending vérité, drama, and music. A lake in the Norwegian mountains. Fish, family, friends, strangers. If the audio link above doesn't play for you, try here.
Elizabeth Hauke's documentary 'The Sound of Disease "examines the use of sound in the diagnosis of disease, and features the ground-breaking work of Prof Dan Lloyd, who converts the data in brain scans into music to identify otherwise 'invisible' diseases." Elizabeth Hauke is an independent radio presenter and producer of Short Science (www.shortscience.co.uk), a weekly science radio show and podcast. She also makes freelance packages and documentaries.
Local traditions about St Patrick abound in Ireland, and this RTÉ documentary looked at one, in 1981, with the first visit to a rocky island by humans for hundreds of years.
Who knew Vietnam is suddenly a player in the world coffee market? And who knew the coffee beans they grow are some of the most potent available? Roz Bluett from Australia's Radio National knew, and you will too as Roz takes us on this eye-opening java journey.
Michael Paul Mason is an author and radio producer. So he knew a good story when he pulled into St. Joseph, Mo. "I don't often see the word 'psychiatric' paired with 'museum,'" says Mason. But there it was: The Glore Psychiatric Museum. Michael takes us inside in this offbeat and deliciously creepy piece.
Sound Tourism maps places worth a visit because they sound so good. In this example, curator Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford, UK, introduces the great Stalacpipe Organ in Virgina, USA. By tapping stalactites with mallets, it claims to be the world's largest natural musical instrument.
Long before the Tea Party movement, the hills of West Virginia were echoing with a cultural clash over textbook content. This 2010 Peabody Award Winner comes from American Radio Works and was produced by Terry Kay and edited by Deborah George.
From the Pacific Radio From the Vault series. Audio from the very first Earth Day in New York 1970.
From the site:
"We’ll begin with Pete Seeger from the Main stage at Union Square in Manhattan, singing with Reverend Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick. Then, a WBAI reporter with a portable recorder will happen upon Allen Ginsberg sitting in a lotus position holding a daisy amongst the thousands of Earth Day participants… later, Ginsberg would address the masses from the stage, as would Margaret Meade and Odetta."
Pédilüv is a radio art programme, produced at Campus Radio in Paris. This episode, The Sound of Noise, has more English language content than usual, from a range of sources: The Global Theatre of the Air, Adam Boham, The Poo Lord, John Cage, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It's curious, and curiously engaging.
NPR's All Things Considered just turned 39. Hard to imagine but it's first day it featured a 24 minute documentary of a war protest. Click the link to listen.
Chicago writer Bill Hillman puts you in the middle of the every-man-for-himself chaos of Pamplona's running of the bulls. A recent winner in the Edward R. Murrow Awards for electronic journalism.
A sound rich journey down one of London's arterial roads, Caledonian Road, from The Guardian. Up The Cally is an engaging mix of local characters, narrator, music and sound. Plus it's available as a clickable map and audio slideshow.
In an exclusive interview with AudioDocumentary.org, the producer, Francesca Panetta tells how making the piece has affected her.
Sound Transit brings you wherever you wish to go – in sound. Click the aircraft, select the cities you'd like to visit, and the website gives you a choice of itineraries. They all cost the same (a few minutes of your time) but give you a choice of stopovers. Chose your route and the website will prepare a unique mp3 of field recordings from each place.
Danish features go North American – the Third Coast International Festival's Julie Shapiro guides a listening event in Denmark, with a selection of engaging radio from the USA and Canada.
Third Ear is a Danish features project, and this is their first instalment entirely in English, under the banner of Third Ear International.
A World War II veteran, Gerald Flower, recalls candidly and vividly his time as a tail-gunner. The facts and emotions of bombing raids, and of falling behind the German lines.
An enveloping tour of the largest inland body of water in the British Isles, Lough Neagh. Tom Lawrence guides you on his adventures around the lake, with a modest manner that allows the richness of the environment reach out and grab you by the ears. From Touch Radio.
A little insight into creating the sounds of transformers – those trucks and planes and whatnot that become robots. Close your eyes and it's like they're changing in front of you.
The artist Marcus Coates recorded the dawn chorus in English woodlands; he then slowed down the recordings, and filmed human singers perform the newly approachable songs in everyday English settings. Then, he speeded the footage back up again. The sound is extraordianary – and in this case, so is the video.
A man describes having a cochlear implant and hearing birdsong for the first time; another recalls the sounds of Britain during World War II. Two items in BBC Radio 4's take on citizen journalism, iPM.
A young man tells the story of another, his father, who upped and left his kids in Sweden while he travelled to Ireland. This documentary features two physical and emotional journeys, that will move probably anyone who's been a young man. The video is an English transcript of the bi-lingual original, while this longer all-English version was also produced.
The first in a series from “Hearing is Believing II,” the advanced summer workshop at The Duke Center for Documentary Studies. During the intensive course, budding audio artists receive personal guidance from seasoned radio documentary producers to craft and polish their piece. "Lost in the Mail" is by Samara Freemark, whose day job is at Radio Diaries.
Colour Matters is a series of seven programmes about… colours. It was broadcast in 2005 on RTÉ, in Ireland, and the colours are at times seen through the filters of domestic sports – along with many other European and universal views: artistic, psychological, emotional, physical, spiritual. And with some catchy songs chucked in for good value.
Seven snappy and catchy items that do what it says on the tin – why music matters, to the musical, the medical, the military, and the extraterrestrial.
Why Music Matters is produced by radio KEXP in Seattle, and the Association of Independents in Radio.
The people of Ireland's capital, Dublin, are mourning the loss of a sound. Broadcaster Olivia O'Leary doesn't say quite outright what it is, while author Joseph O'Connor paints a time-picture. And for context, this contributor discovers the same, mysterious, sound, 18 months before.
Music Planet is an eight hour series recorded in the field, hearing the music that ties people to their local traditions. Designed to accompany a landmark BBC TV series, episode one of Music Planet includes much recording in canoes, including a shark hunt. The musicians are interviewed and perform in context, rather than a studio or off CD. The result is engaging and vivid.
A road trip with no agenda leads to discovery and a peaceful ending. The last in a series from the Duke Center for Documentary Studies 2010 Summer Workshop.
Audio from Cairo, charting how the authorities have clamped down on the hundreds of thousands of people calling for political change. Linked in the title, a vivid Audioboo from a woman watching molotov cocktails being thrown at Tahrir Square (via Jan25Voices on Twitter); and here, recordings made over a few days by Heba Morayef, a local expert with Human Right's Watch.
Tropical Cyclone Yasi has hit Australia. The build-up was nerve-wracking, as could be heard on local radio ABC Brisbane – listen to them recovering in real-time here. Not long after it had passed, ABC News Radio interviewed this man in his home. It's a picture of Australia weathering the storm.
A short item that encompasses its message though all the sound, not just the speech. The text, here, likewise talks about audio (the production) and audio (the rhythm). The story is from a master tabla player.
Doctors in one Southern California town are making house calls on the homeless. Diane Bock joins healthcare pros who make the streets a little less mean for their patients.
An update on AudioDocumentary.Org's exclusive blogging of London's radio features shindig last week. Clocks & Clouds was great. The speakers were delightful, and so were their selections of audio. I came away with lots of good new places to look for interesting documentaries, and will be sharing those with you here over the next few weeks. To start us off, When An Angel Passes, a delicious montage of the passion for great radio, by some of its greatest practitioners, which premiered at the conference. Outside the scheduled sessions, producers paid and unpaid, students formal and informal mingled and learned from one another. It was also good to see staff from the BBC World Service, where hundreds of redundancies have been announced, escaping that worry for a day of positivity and encouragement.
Week in week out, Definitely Not the Opera on CBC Radio 1 engages with two hours of stories and music. This episode is particularly strong. It's all about… sound. Sound sound sound. And no music! You'll hear some familiar voices and names from AudioDocumentary.org entries too. The stories told vary from funny though to quite upsetting.
A living volcano, the edge of the American tectonic plate, a glacier, boiling mud, Sigur Ros, writers, painters, and Britain's finest natural sound recordist. Jules Verne's Volcano goes to Iceland with Chris Watson, a man who loves the sound of the place.
There's drama, humour, and bucket loads of awe, in the finest BBC radio feature of 2011 so far. Must-listen.
James Aldred is on a mission, in the jungles of Brazil, with a catapult. It's him, a tree, and a very big, very strong, very protective eagle. The result is an almost real-time adventure to install a TV camera in the eagle's nest. James and the Giant Eagle is a sound-rich, vivid and engaging BBC Radio 4 programme.
East London + former local power station = arts space, inevitably. The artistic creation on display in this particular one is breathtaking, in a gentle, philosophical way as captured in this piece. The space is dark and engrossing, as you'll hear. Adding to the paradoxes is the knowledge that the designer of the physical artwork is fashion designer Yohi Yamamoto. More information on the producer's page, here.
Forest to Desert is described best by the producer Sarah Boothroyd: 'An audio doodle about this phrase: "Humankind is preceded by forest, and followed by desert."' Great use of natural, found and sampled sound, composed together to clearly follow that brief. Produced for and featured in the Third Coast Festival's Short Docs Radio Ephemera Challenge in 2008.
Join the climb all the way up and back down Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro. Beyond the scenery, the human story is the porters: paid servants' wages for a priceless job, they remained cheerful and tireless throughout. This piece, by producer Will Rogers, is the first in a series of featured work from the Duke Center for Documentary Studies 2011 summer workshop, with thanks to program director John Biewen.
The Occupy movement has spread to London, where the nearest open lcoation to the stock exchange is in front of St Paul's Cathedral. Two clergymen have resigned over how the tents and protestors have been dealt with. It's being reported outside the mainstream media by the likes of student radio station SOAS Radio (Part 2 is here) and citizen journalists including The Shout (in multiple Audioboos).
Wax Equations is a gem from Resonance FM in London. Aleks Kolkowski uses some of the oldest recording technology, wax cylinders, to make new recordings of speech and music and crazy stuff today. He presents programmes of them on Resonance FM in London. These aren't available to listen to on-demand, so you can dive into the livestream for a serendipituous earfull of the programme, or you can admire the individual recordings and photos of their production on his own website, phonographies.
SR c is an outlet for experimental and creative radio, nestled in the heart of Sweden's public radio broadcaster, which is called Swedish Radio. The main site has an enormous amount of content, but also a link in the top left that asks for "Less Swedish, please!", which opens this new page – other languages, including English, Non-verbal, and, of course, Sound Carpets. There's much to enjoy here. Dive in.
Ham radio operators can build satellites, that can get thrown into orbit from the International Space Station. This item from Radia is more than a factual narration from NASA, it's a building of tension and wonder, a tie between humans on the ground and somehere out there.
Sending a radio producer out with the cops for a night may be a trope, but with good reason. In Night Visions, BBC Radio 4 sent a poet out with London's police helicopter for a night. Police, helicopters, London – the result is a delicious contrast with the TV broadcasts of the London riots last summer.
Britain's finest radio features production House, Falling Tree Productions, has started posting what audio they legally can, to their website. Falling Tree is frequently the source of beautiful, moving montages on the BBC. Dive into their player in a quiet moment. Listen to the current universal lead item, without knowing that the speaker is known as a musical poet from Wales.
People talk about silence on the radio – and it's surprisingly effective. Gordon Hempton is a nature sound recordist, behind the "One Square Inch of Silence" project. The spiritual aspect to Gordon's view of the great forests is very present, and adds to the reflective sense of the programme. There are also some more standalone field recordings on the programme webpage.
The BBC World Service has left its famous home, Bush House. For 70 odd years tourists would turn to snap photos of the imposing art deco builing that overseas was known as the home of the BBC. All the while, the the lease was ticking down…
The staff who work there hold the buildiong in great affection, as suggested by this short feature made oduring night shifts by a sound engineer there.
Audiodocumentary.org curator, contributor, co-editor Rich Halten has won an Edward R. Murrow award for his haunting documentary Splash (renamed for broadcast). This proves that Rich is just as talented at producing radio as he is at finding great stuff to share on AD. Congrats Rich!
