Call for Content: Crafted Audio, Narrative Podcasting and the Global South

We’re seeking contributions for a special edition of RadioDoc Review on audio documentary, narrative podcasting or crafted audio in the Global South

Cuts, fades and layers: Audio production interfaces and mental schemas for radiophonic storytelling

Audio journalists and documentary makers who use spatial audio talk about the need to think and work differently, planning sound scenes in 3 dimensions, avoiding usual techniques such as layering audio tracks or making frequent cuts (Wincott, Martin and Richards 2021). Object-based audio – newer technology being developed to make spatialised audio programmes – asks them to think about their work as composed of sound objects that will be distributed in space and time, rather than as a finished linear mix. As big broadcasters in France, Germany and the UK invest in rolling out spatial sound technology, spatial techniques seem to be challenging for many programme-makers, who continue to apply non-spatial format conventions: fading, layering, cutting and narrating, thus undermining spatiality and immersion of their work. In this presentation I explore the role production technology might play in these difficulties, by thinking of technological interfaces as metaphors that attempt to represent the nature of sound and of narrative, and also to represent the cognitive and production processes of programme-makers. The nature of material and virtual interfaces used to produce programmes facilitate and constrain ways we think about and produce our work (Galitz 2007; García-Crespo, Ramahí-García and García-Mirón, 2021). Modern editing software has processes designed into it that might not match the processes by which work is produced, as Duignan, Noble and Biddle (2010) found with music composers. Software uses a vocabulary of visual abstract representations of sound and process on a flat screen, including audio ‘tracks’, waveforms, cuts and fades, files, folders and so on. Some of these terms predate computer editing, and draw on tape and mixing desk technology, on typewriters and paper. How might they fail to capture spatial thinking and spatial production processes

Spatial Awareness: State of the art and future needs of spatial audio journalism

The best audio journalism is already utterly engrossing and immersive but tools to deliver a vivid sensation of three-dimensional space are increasingly available. Podcasts, interviews, documentaries and short features are all being made using immersive audio. Large broadcasters like Radio France Internationale (RFI) Radio France, the BBC and Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk are carrying out research and development. Research has been led by audio engineers and focuses on technical issues. There is therefore still a lack of research focusing on editorial and creative questions of importance for journalists and producers of narrative factual content. The field of immersive journalism meanwhile has concentrated on VR and 360 video, where there is of course a dominant visual component, interactivity and a very different production chain. The Spatial Audio Journalism project (2019-2020) interviewed 18 producers of immersive audio journalism in six countries, to generate understanding of key editorial, creative and professional practice issues for audio journalists using immersive audio. This report summarises the findings and makes recommendations for future research, development and training

Watery pasts and the constellation of the canal

Heritage trails are an important route into accessing the histories of waterways. They are a multifaceted tourist product, combining a series of complex environmental, economic and cultural policy objectives, and are increasingly used by communities and public agencies as a tool to encourage recreational use along linear corridors. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the use of heritage trails and the processes of heritigisation by thinking about the archival qualities of the canal. It reflects upon research carried out as part of the AHRC-funded ‘European Waterways Heritage’ project, which (through its UK case study) has produced a new 5km heritage trail for the Ashton Canal in Greater Manchester. The paper considers what happens during a process of historical reconstruction and rehabilitation of cultural heritage when a canal is found to be layered in the unspectacular – lacking any special, historical, technical or aesthetic attributes. Using Walter Benjamin’s (1999) concepts of the ‘flash’ and ‘constellation’, alongside cultural geographic readings of post-industrial atmospheres, we seek to think with the water and the surrounding built environment of the waterway in a way that suspends an “indexical imaginary” (van Wyck, 2010) and which encourages a deeper embodied engagement with our surroundings, its material and non-material properties, its happenings and incidence. The paper thus has implications for how we write and construct heritage trails, facilitate new user experiences, and deepen forms of public engagement about our watery pasts

When Carrots Become Posh: Untangling the Relationship Between 'Heritage' Foods and Social Distinction

There has been a growing discourse of 'heritage' foods over the past decade. It is a discourse that incorporates rarebreed meats, traditional cheeses, vegetables and fruit. Rejected by mainstream industrial production, they food that are framed as highly endangered. We are urged to buy, grow and eat these treasures of human civilisation or lose them forever. As with other kinds of 'alternative' food, enthusiasts claim they represent a means to resist corporate dominance of the food system - in the words of a Reclaim the Fields poster, they might help us 'beet the system'. But there is an increasingly uncomfortable tension between these 'alternative' claims, and the sight of so many heritage products for sale in supermarkets and in upmarket restaurants and gastro-pubs, not to mention their prominence in the lifestyle sections of broadsheet newspapers aimed squarely at a well-off, middle class audience. What makes heritage foods 'posh' and does it matter? This chapter teases out the ways that heritage foods reproduce social distinction. It argues that they do so not only due to being 'co-opted' by businesses (a kind of 'heritage patina' in the tradition of greenwashing), but in ways that are intrinsic to the project of heritage consumption itself

The allotment in the restaurant: the paradox of foodie austerity and changing food values

This chapter explores the apparently paradoxical phenomenon of foodie austerity in the British media. This is not 'austerity' defined as cuts to public services but it certainly resonates in the current climate of belt-tightening and fiscal prudence. Foodie austerity is part of a much wider movement born of dissatisfaction with modern food systems, which embraces the rediscovery and safeguarding of tradition and a turning away from mass production, from excess and convenience. Its proponents extol the simple pleasures of home-grown, home-cooked food and the rediscovery of homely dishes 'rustled up' from store cupboard ingredients and left-overs. There are claims it offers liberation from poverty and independence from corporations. But this study of lifestyle articles and readers' comments 'below the line' shows the same themes and assumptions underlying frugal foodyism are directed very differently between lifestyle tips for affluent readers, and the rather unforgiving advice aimed at the poor, in the comments section

Heritage in danger or mission accomplished? Diverging accounts of endangerment, conservation and 'heritage' vegetables in print and online

They are colourful and tasty. They are discarded by agri-business and free to swap and share. For these and many other reasons, the idea of 'heritage' vegetables has been mobilised by diverse groups in the UK in recent years, from lifestyle journalists to anti-poverty campaign groups, to critique and re-imagine contemporary food production systems. This article explores how various interest groups structure the story of 'heritage in danger' in two radically different ways with regards to the passage of time. Using a discourse theoretical approach, I explore how a range of institutions and campaign groups use a linear model of time to paint a picture of catastrophic loss of diversity, which threatens the future of humankind. Meanwhile a narrative model commonly employed by writers of lifestyle media texts suggests the time of loss has been superseded by a new golden age of consumer-driven abundance and taste. These different articulations are afforded by a distinct set of discursive resources and in turn produce and sustain certain relationships at the expense of others

Treasure in the vault: the guardianship of 'heritage' seeds, fruit and vegetables

Crop heritage is a growing global phenomenon whereby people conceive of change to agriculture in terms of loss, issuing calls to safeguard what remains for future generations. This article seeks to understand what it means to think about food and the politics of its production and consumption through the frame of 'heritage' by interrogating a prevalent metaphor of plants and seeds as 'treasure'. It argues the metaphor is more than decorative; it is strategic in producing certain conceptualisations of heritage value. While crop diversity is held to be important, and the great range of food plants a 'common heritage of humankind', the treasure metaphor is used in ways that impede the maintenance of that diversity, establishing seeds, plants and genes as precious materials best looked after by expert guardians in and secure 'vaults', 'banks' and walled gardens. Thus this particular conception of 'treasure' as a universal good actually plays an important role in legitimising and normalising the privatisation of crops heritage resources

Un bon voyage sonore:

This article interrogates claims made in the emerging discourse of immersive audio documentary that spatial sound is more real, allowing the listener to step into another space, and understand the world better. However my analysis shows makers are failing to make good on these claims. Use of the technical affordances of spatial audio is limited and producers enrol concepts of the real and of transportation in a colonial discourse of exploration and adventure, reproducing a disengaged mode of listening, while avoiding discomfort at all costs