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Title card for the upcoming submissions from courses AUD217 & AUD218

a student portfolio of audio mixing examples

If a country’s podcast scene could be described as a vibe, Pakistan’s would be “dude bro”; that is, politically and culturally right-leaning masculinist narrative. The format is simple: like The Joe Rogan Experience which has over 15 million subscribers and over three billion views in Pakistan, there’s a host and a guest. In addition to Rogan, other popular pods are The Pakistan Experience, Pakistonomy, Thought Behind Things, Talks that Matter, Mooroo, The Pivot, Junaid Akram’s Podcast. The conversations usually revolve around the guest’s life, their political views, the economy – whether Pakistan will default or not, will the IMF give another tranche for relief, will donor money bring in dollars and other burning subjects. There’s also How Does This Work, Misaal (a tech/start-up podcast), Policy Beats, Climate Mahaul (Pakistan’s first podcast on Climate Change), Dragon Road (exploring Pakistan’s relationship with China) and Mosiki which looks at music, freelancing, and other “fun” things. All this changed in December 2020 when the first episode of mine and Saba Imtiaz’s Notes on a Scandal – Pakistan’s first true-crime podcast – made its debut.

This article draws on my experience of engaging in diasporic digital media activism on the issue of child sexual abuse in Iran, which culminated in the production of the Price of Secrecy podcast. I introduce the method of Podcasting-as-Care as a method of activism that brings notions of feminist care, activism and listening in a close conversation framed through podcasting. Without resorting to a top-down vision of activism where a notion of listening, i.e. how the victims should be listened to, is prescribed and exemplified, the Price of Secrecy podcast becomes an experience of listening to how victims are failed to be listened to and what failure of listening sounds like.

Objectivity and neutrality have always been the reporting principles followed by journalists. The emergence of audio news presents reality in an invisible way, blurring the boundary between emotion and truth. Jump into the Rabbit Hole[1], as one of the few in-depth news podcasts in China, brings immersive stories to the audience with immersive production. These stories help the audience better understand the truth of the news and also cultivate the habit of listening to the news. This paper examines how interaction rituals in news podcasts are carried out using the benefits of podcast platforms in the context of audio journalism. It highlights the emotional labor and moral challenges encountered by producers during the process of sound writing (Kapchan, 2017), and aim to create emotional interaction with the audience on the podcast platform, fostering emotional energy between the producer and the audience. The author also discussed how the female perspective influenced the creation of the in-depth news podcast. [1] You can listen to this on Xiaoyuzhou: https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/podcast/6289d46e5cf4a5ad60ca08f8

With the progression of streaming services in recent years, the art form of animation has gained traction, continuing to develop into exceedingly creative forms through the work of talented artists. Animation has developed alongside the film industry, achieving great success in the process. This thesis will define animation and its place within visual effects, critically analyze categories of character design, theme, and story while demonstrating their relationship with animation, and contrast animation with live action films to understand its strengths and differentiations. The research concludes that animation has great benefits to offer the film industry and should be continued to be explored as a respected and viable form of artistic expression.

Past projects involving musical software have been completely virtual, while these software do well in entertainment and education, there is the question of whether these software are playable to the same extent as physical musical instruments. The software presented in this paper, "AR Jam", utilizes various software and hardware tools to form a networked mixed reality system for the users to play music on. The intention of this project is to seek new ways to explore more playable musical instruments in the digital world. The paper presents the software's implementation, challenges such as optimization problems of the synthesizer, and the proposal of new ways to improve various aspects of this system in the future.

In the article, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” (1991), Linda Williams defines as body genres the film genres that are based on stimulating certain physical reactions in the bodies of spectators. These are fear (horror), sexual arousal (pornography), and tears (melodrama). All three genres share, “an apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion. We feel manipulated,” by them. The bodies of whoever watches these films are involved in an “involuntary mimicry” of the body on the screen. During a talk at the 2016 Third Coast Conference, radio producer Eleanor McDowall inquired about the equivalent of body genres in audio storytelling (radio, podcast, and other forms of audio narratives). What are those sound works that engage the bodies of their listeners, not by merely talking about bodily reactions, but by actually provoking them?

Routledge’s new Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies is a follow up to its Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, published in 2000--precisely the moment when podcasting began to undermine radio’s audio hegemony. What if the transition from radio to podcasting is a paradigm shift, the new medium posing challenges different from radio, and closer to those faced by journalism, literature, and film? Siobhan McHugh's The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound represents a podcast-first, back to basics approach which approaches podcasting as a process, not a technology.

The Greatest Menace is an investigative podcast by Patrick Abboud and Simon Cunich which examines the history of Cooma Gaol, Australia’s experimental homosexual prison. The podcast explores a difficult and confronting piece of history, weaving together the past and the present as host Abboud attempts to uncover buried information about Cooma Gaol, the people incarcerated there and the people who operated it. This review explores the approaches taken by Abboud and Cunich to explore this history, mindful of the present-day impact that digging up these stories has on those involved. While investigating the prison’s past, Abboud interviews former prisoners, victims of police entrapment, family members of those who ran the prison, people in the town and the community and many others. The Greatest Menace reminds listeners that the process of interviewing and researching history are not neutral actions; they are actions that have the potential to open (and sometimes help heal) old wounds.

It’s unusual and welcome to see not one, but three, well-produced narrative podcasts made in the West about China. Hosted by female journalists with a Chinese background, all provide strong context on Chinese history and politics but focus essentially on an individual: The King of Kowloon (produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) memorialises an eccentric graffiti artist called Tsang Tsou-choi, his art seen in the context of Hong Kong’s shrinking democracy. Both The Prince (by The Economist) and How To Become A Dictator (by The Telegraph) zero in on Xi JinPing, President of the People’s Republic of China, their release coinciding with the fifth annual Communist Party Congress in October 2022. There are many ways to ruin a narrative podcast. Unlike chatcasts, technical quality matters: intimacy, that cherished currency of podcasting, starts with a close mic. The deployment of voice, actuality, music and archival sound in the service of story makes a big difference to how engaged listeners will be. Underpinning all of this are the script and narrative structure. The host should be relatable, as a human being and in connection to the podcast theme. The script also has to link, foreshadow and clarify the various story elements, while the narrative arc works at both a micro level, providing a satisfying journey within each episode, and a macro, whereby thorny details and bum steers are explored, eliminated or developed, and by the end of the series, finally resolved—or at least exhausted. This article is an in-depth critique of these three narrative podcasts, analysing aspects from production/structure and craft/sound design to editorial/research, hosting, script and storytelling.

A manifesto that provocatively argues for the rise of "Third Podcasting" patterned after Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's concept of "Third Cinema."

This article is an interview between RadioDoc Review Editor Neil Verma and Bill Siemering, founding Director of Programming at National Public Radio and lifelong proponent of public radio. Siemering and Verma discuss Siemering's role at the founding of NPR, his earlymcareer in Wisconsin, WHYY Philadelphia, WBFO and KCCM, as well as his enduring work in community radio development in Africa.

Lewis Raven Wallace was fired from Marketplace for questioning the mainstream media's conception of journalistic neutrality. He developed his critique in his 2019 book, The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, a podcast of the same name, and in several ancillary products. Wallace concludes that “objectivity is a false ideal that upholds the status quo”, and news judgement has less to do with objective criteria than with “who controls the narrative, whose narratives matter, and how the appearance of mattering is created in a society rife with entrenched inequality”.

In this audio documentary, Mexican cultural promoter and sound artist Abraham Chavelas recounts rescue activities in which he took part after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake rattled Mexico on 19 September 2017. Answering a call for help, Chavelas was assigned to a collapsed factory where an unknown number of undocumented Asian and Central American women working as seamstresses were trapped under the rubble. For two days, he aided rescue efforts by using a high-tech microphone to help determine whether or not there was life under piles of concrete, glass and debris. Chavelas used the audio he gathered before the Mexican Marines arrived and prevented untrained emergency workers like himself from helping. Subsequently he organised it to create a cathartic homage to the real heroes of the catastrophe: people, not government officials.

The Missing Cryptoqueen, produced for BBC Sounds by Jamie Bartlett and Georgia Catt, investigates the cryptocurrency scam fronted by Dr. Ruja Ignatova, self-described “cryptoqueen.” The series benefits from the engrossing complexity of a sprawling conspiracy: The podcasters travel across continents to find both the scammers and their victims, making important stops in the U.K., Germany, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Uganda. The series also benefits from its own breathless narration, which keeps listeners in the present-tense of the storytelling. This was an especially compelling series for the large audience who listened as the weekly episodes were released, as the series integrated new information as the investigation proceeded. Though the podcast does not, in the end, find the missing cryptoqueen, they do uncover the absorbing story of a destructive hoax.

This paper discusses recent developments in the Decibel ScorePlayer project, including the introduction of a canvas scoring mode, python ScorePlayer externals, and enhancements to the ScoreCreator application. Firstly, the canvas scoring mode of the Decibel ScorePlayer app allows for other applications, such as Max, to send drawing commands to the ScorePlayer via OSC. Several examples of implementations of generative and animated notation scores are discussed and evaluated. An object model has been developed allowing for the creation of hierarchies of drawn elements. The object model defines a framework of commands that can be used to create and control these objects, and supporting examples describe the way in which scores can be developed to take advantage of this new scoring mode. Secondly, a python scoreplayer - external library has been developed, defining two python classes: scorePlayerExternal that makes a connection to the iPad, opening a UDP listening socket and letting the iPad know which port to send its replies to, and scoreObject which is responsible for creating and drawing objects populated on the canvas display window of the Decibel ScorePlayer. It acts as a wrapper to the raw OSC commands so that programming can be done using object-oriented paradigms. Thirdly, the ScoreCreator, an application developed for Mac OSX for automating the process of making scores for the Decibel ScorePlayer, has been expanded allowing for the defining of a range of score types and functionalities.

Audio, specifically as researched by the film industry specialists, has physical and emotional effects on those exposed to it. These effects follow from manipulation of sound’s characteristics in specific and measurable ways. The responsibility of the Christian is to share the gospel with others and support the kingdom of God with his or her skills. In light of these truths, Christian audio specialists should have a thorough knowledge of the physio-emotional effects of audio. Further, they should not shy away from applying strategies from secular audio research to benefit local churches across the globe.

Consent – walk the walk, a geo-locative audio documentary walk in St. John’s, Canada, explores a 2017 sexual assault trial that led to days of protests in the Newfoundland city: an on-duty police officer is charged with sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman he drove home from the town’s nightclub precinct. Producers Chris Brookes and Emily Deming’s work of ‘landscape journalism’ was designed to highlight the tension between popular and legal understandings of the term ‘consent’ in sexual assaults. While the audio walk is a compelling place-based listening experience, Consent raises issues around the impact of dramatised re-enactment in the documentary field, and the role that sound design treatment can play, in affective influence over the audience’s response. To protect the identity of the assault victim, the producers were not permitted to use the court audio recordings, so they employed actors to perform the court transcripts. While the original trial acquitted the police officer, the Supreme Court of Canada in 2019 has ordered a re-trial on the grounds the trial judge erred in directing the jury. This article explores the design choices and the aesthetic, ethical and legal challenges faced by the audio walk’s producers in applying journalistic concepts of objectivity and balance.

In this issue, storytelling podcasts and audio works from the US, UK, Australia and Canada receive in-depth critiques from expert reviewers in Latin America, Australia and the UK. The subjectivity-objectivity spectrum is one focus, along with ethics and aesthetics.

Radio Revolten: 30 Days of Radio Art documents the Radio Revolten international radio art festival that took place took place during October 2016 in Halle, Germany. It is a densely rich book that explores aspects of radio beyond the format, beyond time schedules and beyond podcast ratings, while still aiming to build a sense of community. It is reviewed by internationally acclaimed Australian sound artist Colin Black.

Robyn Ravlich’s Skywriting - making radio waves is partly an extended dissertation on feature-making and radio art, and partly an autobiography of this acclaimed Australian audio feature maker from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is reviewed by Mike Ladd, poet, audio producer and an erstwhile ABC colleague.

The rise and success of podcasting introduced episodic storytelling in the world of non-fiction sound narrative. Delivering a story in different entries is very different from producing a one-off piece. What concrete implications does this have for the narrative? And what keeps an audience listening to a podcast, episode through episode? This article offers some answers to these questions via a case study of The Habitat, a 2018 podcast by the American network Gimlet.

Set on the streets of London, amidst the snarl of traffic and the clip of passers by, this work is a biographical sound portrait of two homeless people, Tara and George. It is a testament to the parlous state of homelessness in the UK today and is masterful in its execution. To this work, producer and host Audrey Gillan brings a quality of frank disclosure and decency. Relationships between producers and their subjects are contentious, due to an inherent power differential. Gillan neither portrays Tara and George as archetypes nor as helpless and needy. She knows she is the one working for the BBC, delivering ‘their’ story to us in its very skin and bones. Over time, Gillan’s obvious affection for these two mendicants comes through; as does her desire to resolve an insoluble situation that goes back many years. One of the principal strengths of the work is its framing of time. Over two years, we travel with Gillan and Tara and George, through freezing winters and searing summers, through illness and loss, disappearances, laughter and moments of great pain. Central to this is the relationship between George and Tara, “a love story—of sorts”. And just like many relationships that are further fuelled by substances and grief, the bond between George and Tara is complex and varied.

No Feeling is Final faces a two-fold “feelings frontier” in an age of extreme podcast intimacy and empathy: navigating (1) how to convey the kind of deeply personal “big feelings” that are still often seen as off-limits and (2) how to maintain a hyper-awareness about the listener’s feelings. Taking place almost entirely within her mind, No Feeling is Final is a six-part memoir show about host Honor Eastly’s experiences struggling with mental health and what one mental health professional diagnoses as “too many feelings – about four times as many as the average person”. The ongoing tension between creating resonance with the listener and triggering difficult feelings is managed through a piecemeal, metaphor-laden approach. It tries to avoid leaving the listener with unwanted feelings but, at the same time, leaves them with some unanswered questions.

True crime podcasts are a burgeoning genre. As journalists and storytellers, how do we balance the pursuit of justice and our responsibility to the victims with the demand to tell a gripping tale? As listeners, are we using the pain of others for our own entertainment? In the Dark podcast (Seasons 1 and 2) takes us beyond a vicarious fascination with true crime stories into a forensic and essential look at deep-rooted biases, corruption and systemic failures that prevent justice from being served. The first season (2016) investigates the 1989 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling In Minnesota. Season 2 (2018-19) investigates the case brought against Curtis Flowers, a black man from Mississippi who has been tried six times for shooting to death four people in a furniture store, and who has, for the last 20 years, been in solitary confinement on death row. Thorough investigative journalism is an expensive and time-consuming process. For Season I, host Madeleine Baran and her team spent nine months investigating the story. For Season 2, Baran and four team members spent a full year on the ground, actually moving to the small town in Mississippi where the murders occurred. Whilst there is never any guarantee that an in-depth investigation can bring about real change, it is that key element, unfettered time to pursue a story, that may bring results. One producer sifted through thousands of documents going back 26 years, to show that black jurors were six times more likely to be struck from a trial than white jurors. Stylistically, the spoken word is paramount in the series. The auditory power lies in the voices that we hear – the narrator, the families of the victims, and friends, the witnesses, static recordings of 911 calls – as well as those we don’t hear, the victim who’s been forever silenced. The use of additional sound is discreet – atmospheric recordings and beautifully composed and constructed music around clear, concise and descr

The podcast, Have You Heard George’s Podcast, is a true original. Made by George Mpanga, who goes by the stage name of George the Poet, it won five awards at the 2018 British Podcast Awards – in fiction and non-fiction categories. The son of Ugandan immigrants, George went to an elite state school in north London before taking a degree at Cambridge. The podcast takes on big themes - empowering George’s community, self-belief, crime, drugs, racism, inequality and international politics. Stylistically, the eight-part series is a mash-up: poetry, sketches, interviews, archive, music, performance and sometimes off-mike chat with his producer. It’s often difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t. This article analyses how the series achieves its force.

From the start, host and reporter Sarah Koenig presents the 2018 season of Serial as a corrective to the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand approach typical of earlier seasons and much of the work of This American Life, from which Serial spun off. In a thematic departure, Koenig sets out to tell the story of structures, rather than merely structure a story. The first character is a “cluster of concrete towers” in downtown Cleveland, called the Justice Center, a name we’ll quickly come to understand as ironic, if not Orwellian. Host Sarah Koenig describes the structure as “hideous but practical”. Koenig and company have built each episode to function like steps along a path, to provide a spatial sense of the Justice Center and a conceptual sense of the social universe in which its denizens reside. In addition to meticulous structuring, Koenig needs all her charm, all her storytelling prowess, and all the wry humour she can wring from the cases she investigates, because the story of the Cleveland Justice Center is an American horror story. It is a damning indictment of the toxic stew of white supremacy, class divides, a punitive philosophy of corrections, and bureaucratic malfeasance that makes it nearly impossible for justice to be served. In a set of several stories about individual cases that occasionally overlap, spill over into different episodes, and circle back through coincidences and thematic unities only to fracture again, Koenig and her colleague Emmanuel Dzotsi evoke a world of cascading injustices.