Siren FM was an interesting experience. I had never worked in radio, much less studied it back in the states. As I have talked about in an earlier essay, I found studying radio in a place where radio matters to be fascinating. While studying abroad in the UK, I found that it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talk about what was on BBC Radio Four the night before, similar to how conversation in America is dominated by the talk of what happened on the most recent episode of a TV Drama. The classes here taught me that radio has a very communal feel to it, that you can’t get anywhere else.
I should explain that the school I attend back home, Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM), has a radio station of its own. I couldn’t tell you what its radio frequency is, or what a majority of the programming is. The radio station is run by a handful of people. I did get to spend an evening there in which my friends and I played music for an hour. There appears to be room for more esoteric programming, as one of the students from Lincoln the year before put on a radio show in which they interspersed Nickelback lyrics in between Shakespeare sonnets (I regret not being able to hear this). It seems that while radio in the states can do just as many interesting things as radio in the UK, no one knows or seems to care about it. In a study done by Bridge Ratings, polling households in America showed “that overall, the entire sample is listening less [in 2010]…18 hours per week compared to 22 hours when this study was conducted in 2005.” (Rbr.com, 2015)
I would like to take a moment to talk about how myself and some of the other American exchange students felt a little handicapped by being tacked on halfway through the year. When we arrived we were given a quick rundown of the studios, their gear and how operate them. This didn’t take much longer than ten minutes. I don’t think a single one of us felt comfortable behind the desk, so none of us operated it for our teams. We definitely didn’t know too much about radio programming to be able to run our own show, so none of us took on a producer role. This left us either interviewing, being interviewed or producing content. Interviews and vox pops went about as well as expected. A student interview will always be a student interview no matter where the student is from, but I did feel I was at a disadvantage with the vox pops. I didn’t feel that I was the best candidate to go out and survey the population of Lincoln. Part of it is the fact that I’m not one to start conversations with strangers, and the other part was the fact that I’m in a place where I’m self-conscious about my voice and accent. There were a few times where I was turned down vox pops. The BBC Academy has this to say: “People won’t stop if you don’t look welcoming.” (Bbc.co.uk, 2015) Not to say that it would have been better if I were a girl with a more local accent, I just think there were several people on our team who were much more efficient at that sort of thing than I was (and that’s why none of my vox pops made it into the show).
Our topic was “Sound”. I thought it was a great topic because sound is one of my favorite things to talk about. I thought I knew a lot about it, going in. However, there was an awful lot in there that required some research. I learned about binaural sound and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), and discovered pockets of the internet surround those topics that I didn’t even know existed, ASMR especially. This really spoke to the strength of our topic, and it’s something I wish we could have fit in the show more, outside of one of my packages. ASMR videos on YouTube have gained tens of millions of views, the BBC took note: “Type the initials into the search box on YouTube and you’ll get 1.5 million results. Most direct you to the work of dozens of “ASMR artists”, making videos in their front rooms and back rooms, garden sheds and kitchens. And some of those videos are staggeringly popular.” (Higham, 2014)
Sound is extremely important to society, and we could have gone in so many different directions to explain this point. I’ll start with the most obvious example, which is music. I don’t think I need to cite any scholarly studies to tell you with complete certainty that everyone likes music in some form. A little more research would be required to tell you why everyone likes it, but that would be neither here nor there. Music is so popular that the industry itself is being busted wide open, to such and extent that it’s not hard to get music for free. On the topic of huge industries, think about film. How many silent films are there nowadays? Since introducing sound to film, we haven’t looked back once. Even before that silent film was accompanied by music, which bolsters my first argument. And finally the best consideration, made by BAFTA-winning guest lecturer and field recording guru Grant Bridgeman, is in the news on television. Imagine there’s a news brief in the Gaza Strip. There is a reporter, and in the background there is gunfire, yelling, and sirens. He or she is telling us about the situation, until everything shakes and the audio cuts out. There continues to be a television feed, but there is nothing accompanying it. The report is cut short, and the topic must be changed. Now imagine it the other way around. There is an explosion and the video disappears. You continue to hear the reporter say what just happened, that they are moving, and what they will be doing after that, etc. The story continues, and that’s because the story is in the sound and audio. Sound is important in different media because you can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears. We’re always receiving and reacting to input. In an interview with composer Neil Brand on the BBC, Brand says that “human beings are very good at interpreting sound. Right back to when our prehistoric selves will have heard a twig snap in a forest and thought ‘that’s it, I’m dead’. … We have a very deep understanding of what music [and sound] is doing, and it’s very physical.” (Stewart, 2013)
In many ways our topic could have easily gotten away from us. In some ways it almost did. I definitely feel that we didn’t do ASMR quite the justice it deserves. ASMR is less about the quiet sounds we create and more about the human, physical response to those sounds. “[ASMR] is described as a pleasurable and calming tingling sensation in the back of the head.” (Novella, 2012) I think we could have talked more about the hairs standing up on the backs of our necks and less about what we did to illicit those reactions. Overall I think the radio show would have benefitted from less emphasis on the “how” of it all and more on the “why”. The idea is that we identify with sound on an incredibly personal level, so why not structure our approach as intimately as we can? That way the listener would identify with the stories we were telling, as well as the sounds in the show.
In terms of the radio station itself, I would have liked to have known more about what was going on under the hood. Perhaps there was an exposition at the beginning of the school year that I missed, but I found myself being very curious about how the radio station was broadcasted out, how far it reached, how long the station had been running, and the like. Siren FM seemed like something that operated on its own and we slaves to its bidding, not the other way around. I wanted to find the beating heart of the operation, be it a computer with a Myriad-like program running everything, or a team of people whose one and only job was to keep the station up and running. Was Myriad actually just an application you download from the internet that operates as a glorified music player? That’s what I believed at first, but it seemed a lot more integrated than that. The same could be said for a lot of Siren. I think it might be nit-picking, but it would have been great to have gotten our hands dirty in the inner workings of Siren FM. That said, It could very well be that if I stuck around for the third year program I would be able to do just that.
When we were out getting content, it was really neat to see just how many people knew and regularly listened to Siren FM. This gets back to the UK vs. US radio comparison I’ve talked so much about, but it struck me so much that I’ll keep going on about it. University radio stations back home are relegated to students (read: monkeys) in the studio playing remixes of the Super Mario Brothers theme song on radio waves and giggle to each other as they play the Spanish version of a campaign ad for Obama’s reelection. Siren FM seemed to keep its shirt tucked in. There were shows that legitimately interested me, and the idea of the same show (Headspace) being ran by different people every week sounded really cool in a way that I think larger stations could benefit from doing something similar.
Truth be told, radio is a lot of work. I could say that I had a lot of classwork that was put in my lap from my radio class, but I realize that it was that way because of the nature of radio. The reality is that radio is all about content, but that content can’t be the same from week to week or day to day. It’s a never ending cycle of searching for interesting and relevant stories, recording them, producing them, airing them, and starting all over. The crazy part is that you can have several different stories in different stages of production at any one time, and that means you need to be nimble and able to switch between projects on the fly. As in other creative fields, and according to CreativeSkillset.org “working hours can be longer than the average 8 hour-day office job, especially as the project deadline approaches. You may also find yourself working anti-social hours, such as evenings, at night and on weekends.” (Creativeskillset.org, 2015) Metaphorically speaking, the radio classes were an exercise in juggling. You have to be able to find topics and produce them to the best of your ability, all while networking and communicating with group members and other collaborators. I think there’s a lot value in that, and not just in the radio sphere.
I learned a lot of things this semester, both about radio and through the medium. I can see why it does so well over here and continues to be relevant. Radio is sharing knowledge with everyone one. It’s kind of a romantic thing, at least from a somewhat utopian perspective. It’s collective in a way that not a lot of other media are. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about returning to the states and running the comparisons.
Bibliography
Bbc.co.uk, (2015). Tips: recording vox pops. [online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/production/article/art20130702112136311 [Accessed 17 Apr. 2015].
Creativeskillset.org, (2015). What’s it like to work in the Creative Industries?. [online] Available at: http://creativeskillset.org/who_we_help/young_creative_talent/career_navigator/career_resources/487_what_s_it_like_to_work_in_the_creative_industries [Accessed 17 Apr. 2015].
Higham, N. (2014). ASMR: The videos which claim to make their viewers ‘tingle’. [online] BBC News. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30412358 [Accessed 17 Apr. 2015].
Novella, S. (2012). NeuroLogica Blog » ASMR. [online] Theness.com. Available at: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/asmr/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2015].
Rbr.com, (2015). Bridge Ratings issues audio device TSL trends | Radio & Television Business Report. [online] Available at: http://rbr.com/bridge-ratings-issues-audio-device-tsl-trends/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2015].
Stewart, H. (2013). How film music manipulates emotions. [online] BBC Arts & Culture. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/0/24083243 [Accessed 17 Apr. 2015].