Radio Relations. Policies and aesthetics of the medium

2014

In the process of globalization, the regional public radio has an immediate and remote impact in training the public opinion, in identifying the expectations of the audience. Social dynamics and cultural identity become the markers of an increasingly persuasive media discourse. The history of a regional radio (Radio Romania Regional) with emphasis on Radio România Oltenia Craiova is both an argument of the "increase and decrease" of the media impact on the market as well as an eloquent case in this social dynamic. The case study diachronically and synchronically presents the audience value in the area, the regional radio consumer profile and it propounds solutions to ensure the primacy on the broadcasting market. The target is a return to the cultural value of the regional radio while considering it a brand of the region. The essential role of regional radio is to contribute to the preservation of cultural identity in the context of globalization, therefore identifying the area and "the voice" of regional media.

Palgrave, 2012

Radio remains one of the most popular mediums through which people experience music.Yet there have only been a few studies examining the dynamic effects of radio on music. In this innovative study of community radio, Charles Fairchild uses a novel combination of critical analysis, interdisciplinary theory and ethnographic writing to compare commercial and community radio institutions and practices. By situating community radio in the dominant context of consumerism, Fairchild shows how people can create democratic discourses by speaking through other people’s music. He argues that the social relations produced by playing music on the radio, and the inherent ambiguity of music itself, hold the potential for cultural democracy. The book shows how community radio’s aesthetic practices accord with the ideals of an open and equitable public sphere, contributing to civil society and a potentially democratic aesthetics in which the ‘old medium’ of radio holds profound lessons for ‘new media’.

Continuum, 1992

While he enjoys sessions behind the microphone from time to time, Senator Richardson won't be giving up his day job. 'You can't do this too often-there's a line you cross when you stop being a serious politician and getting into the realms of being frivolous, and I can't do that,' he said. (Cameron 5) Chesterfield is merely the nation's cigarette, but the radio is the voice of the nation. (Adorno and Horkheimer 377) Language is sought in its most authentic state: in the spoken word-the word that is dried up and frozen into immobility by writing. A whole mystique is being born: that of the verb, of the pure poetic flash that disappears without trace, leaving nothing behind it but a vibration suspended in the air for but one brief moment. (Foucault 286) Some people leave the radio tap running all the time, and are only vaguely conscious of what is coming out of it. (Miller 183) The field of writing on radio is neither large nor worthy. As an object for behavioural research panics, it was quickly overtaken by the advent of cinema and television. As an object of textual analysis, it was less easily recuperated archivally than more visual fields. As a casual part of everyday life, it was held to occupy less real attention than, for example, the newspaper. But radio training manuals, audiological research and governmental policy documents are now being supplemented by a literature deriving its force from textual studies, although exegetical and historical work is still sparse. As the everyday becomes a category of contestation and valorisation in cultural theory, so Eco's use of the 'radio that is turned on but not tuned' as a model example of phatic communication may even offer providential investigation at a node of cultural criticism that formerly seemed to be devoid of significant signification (164). At the same time, the medium is expanding its audience reach, and its availability as a means of production. Australians, for example, spend more time listening to the radio each week than they do watching television, and have more options for becoming actively involved in what it broadcasts. In its different forms, radio both 'speaks to the public' and 'lets the public speak' (Potts 172). It

When studying audiovisual sources, sound is everywhere. It is an essential aspect of media, of media products and their consumption. When watching films, news, soap operas or commercials, voices, tunes and melodies are guiding the audience and directing its attention to the content. While listening to music broadcasts, live concerts or music recordings, audibility and sound invite appropriation and consumption. The sensory regime exchanges visual and sonic information.

2009

A major cultural agent A sector of the music industries Tim Wall, analyzing the political economy of the internet music radio, observes that although music and profit maximization are two central aspects of contemporary radio, they are neglected. I would like to focus precisely on at least one of those neglected aspects: the music. As Antoine Hennion and Cécile Méadel (1986) have pointed out, radio is the medium par excellence. I think that it is not an exaggeration to add that it is a medium par excellence especially for the musical culture. Considering the history of the medium, regardless of its form as a public service, a business, a propaganda system, or some hybrid (Malm & Wallis, 1992), it is not very difficult to confirm its importance for the musical culture. Either as a major player in the local music life-as in the Greek case until the elimination of the state monopoly and that of Great Britain-or through its symbiotic relation with the other major player in the music life of the twentieth century, the recording industry, radio is nowadays more engaged in the workings of the musical culture than ever. In Greece, most of the approximately 1,300 radio stations are music stations and as several researchers have noted (Tacchi, 2000; Menduni, 2007), the fact that the radio set vanishes in the dashboard of a car, in the alarm clock, in the mobile phone etc., rather reinforces its power in everyday life. It also makes more difficult to establish its cultural significance. In the economics of culture and the arts, however, as well as in the economics of the recording industry and in the sociology of music, radio is considered a sector of the music industries (Fig. 1). * Sociologist, lecturer in the School of Journalism and Mass Media Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). His research interests are focused on the fields of the sociology of the arts and culture, sociology of music and sociology of education. He has participated in many international and local conferences and has published several papers (

Media, Culture & Society, 2016

Mediatization has become a key concept for understanding the relations between media and other cultural and social fields. Contributing to the discussions related to the concept of mediatization, this article discusses how practices of radio and music(al life) influence each other. We follow Deacon’s and Stanyer’s advice to supplement the concept of mediatization with ‘a series of additional concepts at lower levels of abstraction’ and suggest, in this respect, the notion of heterogeneous milieus of music–radio. Hereby, we turn away from the all-encompassing perspectives related to the concept of mediatization where media as such seem to be ascribed agency. Instead, we consider historical accounts of music–radio in order to address the complex non-linearity of concrete processes of mediatization as they take place in the multiple meetings between a decentred notion of radio and musical life.

Radiophonics is the practice of creative sound studio production originally intended for broadcast. In 'The Field of Cultural Production', Pierre Bourdieu introduces several terms for the analysis of cultural practice: habitus, agent, field, strategy, trajectory, symbolic, and cultural capital. These concepts enable a radical contextualization of the internal analysis of the formation of creative works; making it possible to relate 'the space of works' to that between the positions held by their cultural producers in their respective fields. Cultural Production is the site of struggles between the sub-fields of 'restricted production' and that of 'large–scale production' which structure the field according to a hierarchy of relative autonomy or subordination to the Field of Power (the economic and political sphere). Towards the autonomous pole, there lies a relatively freer creative space for the cultural producer. I will apply Bourdieu's approach to the field of Radiophonic Production as practised within public broadcasting in an attempt to examine the creative space available to radiophonic producers; and how in the necessary struggle within the broader cultural field between the claims of creative autonomy and mass media production radiophonic producers are able to resist the Field of Power in the so-called 'culture wars'.