Apple and Audio Drama
From a post on Modern Soundling
As a Mac user, the death of Steve Jobs is particularly cutting. Recent tributes focus on his technical innovations, on the computer interfaces and advancements that made his products particularly effective. And that's all true. But underlying his achievements is a fundamental dedication to two principles: organization and experience.
The things in our lives can be arranged in many different ways, and those ways have a significant impact on how we live our lives. The organization can make or break the experience. Not just the physical and mental tasks, but the physical and mental states that accompany those tasks. The culture Jobs created at Apple focused on the experience.
What is the audio drama experience?
If w…
The Blind Date Problem - Audio Drama and Cover Art
Judging audio plays by their covers.
from a post on Modern Soundling
I can judge a book by it's cover. You've probably done it, too. It can be a surprisingly accurate judgement. What we don't do often enough is judge radio plays the same way.
One of my passions is collecting vinyl records. Not for the sake of the vinyl, which, let me add, is not a superior medium for sound reproduction, despite what the hipsters say. I love the covers, the poster-sized photos and paintings, the fonts, the track lists, the worn spines, the tactile sensory experience. The covers of LPs suggest worlds that I want to immerse myself in, emotions I want to feel, messages I want to receive. They are invitations. Like the dust jackets and covers of books, album covers …
War of the Worlds is a Cheap Trick
From a post on Modern Soundling
Dear Americans – please stop talking about Orson Welles. At least in regards to radio drama. Don't get me wrong, I love the guy, there is no filmmaker I admire more, or have studied as deeply and obsessively as Orson Welles. But he was a filmmaker,not a radio dramatist. He called himself a filmmaker and wanted to be known as a filmmaker. He's certainly my favorite.
He seemed to recall his radio days with fondness, but it was not The War of the Worlds that he was most proud of, or The Shadow or The Mercury Theater of the Air. His radio career afforded him great success, and allowed him to launch a career in Hollywood. But radio was always a means to an end – a means to fund his experimental theater, a means to achiev…
Distributing Knowledge about Audio Drama
From a post on Modern Soundling: There is so much audio content out there, and it is so difficult to find out about it. There are several resources that help, but there's no one place to go for answers. Developing an understanding of the medium in terms of what's out there and who's doing it is fundamental to developing and maintaining an audience.
The BBC does not maintain, to my knowledge, a database about their radio output. If they do, it's not accessible to the public. Sure, there are listings on their web site, but these are confusing and far from comprehensive. Wikipedia has some information on radio plays, but most of the information we're talking about falls outside Wikipedia parameters, particularly with regards to notability. For…
Fandom, Media Distribution, and Doctor Who
From a post on Modern Soundling I recently returned from a Doctor Who convention. In addition to being fun, it was also instructive in terms of how fans of cultural content interact with each other and share their interests. There are useful parallels between Doctor Who, (the long running BBC scifi TV show) and radio drama.
Television used to be like radio. In the early 1960's, when Doctor Who premiered, video tape was extremely expensive. Programs were shot “live to tape,” for broadcast. After the episode aired, they were copied onto film to sell overseas and then erased. The tape stock was then reused. Because the BBC had no archive mandate in its charter, and because the concept of repeats, syndication, and home video did not exist, many…