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Where is the listener?: Changing conceptions of the audience in immersive radio and podcasting
Get PDFPodcasts and radio are made for an ‘audience’. Or a ‘listener’. In VR we tend to talk about the ‘user’. The words reflect constructions of the role of that other who consumes our media. The concept of the ‘audience’ speaks of the mass broadcast age: collective, public, live, and always listening from outside. ‘Listener’ has always co-existed, suggesting an intimate address to the individual, more appropriate for certain times of day perhaps, and for on-demand listening. ‘User’ draws our attention to the new technology that must be operated, and perhaps implies interactivity.
As new media technologies are adopted, they present opportunities and trigger anxieties over the role of the listener/audience, and the kind of listening that is desirable. This is seen in strategies by current affairs podcasters to create a sense of live co-audiencing (Euritt, 2019) without broadcast.
Immersive, also called 3D or spatial audio is one such technology in increasing use in recent years and the focus of engineering research, but has received very little critical media studies attention. In conventional audio news, documentaries and features, whether broadcast or on-demand, the listener is disembodied and external to the sound scene, all-hearing but never themselves perceived. In a 3D sound scene, events happen around them, challenging producers to think about their placement and their role.
This paper is based on analysis of programmes that use immersive or 3D audio, their promotional materials and interviews with programme makers who use immersive audio in the UK, France, USA, Australia and Qatar. It examines industry discourses of the immersive listener and of immersive listening, including aspirations for enhanced empathy, attention and sense of adventure, but anxieties too over discomfort that can arise from eavesdropping or adopting an ‘unnatural’ position. These anxieties can lead producers of immersive audio to see certain techniques as ‘failed’ (Wincott, Martin and Richards 2021).
I argue before production and editorial norms are established in immersive audio, these fears, successes and ‘mistakes’ can tell us something interesting about changing ideas of the audience and listening to audio journalism and how technological change shifts these ideas. There are opportunities to deliberately harness discomfort, to play with distance and closeness, that could enrich factual storytelling in sound
Human-centred design research during the pandemic: Using an online survey to inform personas of women at risk of hip fracture
No full textHip protectors can reduce the risk of fracture, but long-term adoption of these products is low because they’re uncomfortable, they don’t look good, and they’re difficult to use. Social distancing rules cut short planned focus groups, so an online survey was developed to understand attitudes toward current hip protectors. The survey responses have, in turn, helped to inform a series of Personas. Personas are imaginary characters that represent different user archetypes based on real people who have engaged with the research practice. They help to focus design development by becoming a lens through which design concepts can be evaluated. Although the pandemic disrupted people-facing research, the use of survey data provided a greater breadth of voices to inform the personas than focus groups alone
The Art School Dance Goes On Forever
Get PDFBook review of No Machos Or Pop Stars. When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk, Gavin Butt (290pp, Duke University Press
Fragrant Bypass
Get PDFA prose poem offering an optimistic view of future architectural and revolutionary possibilities
Alien Soundscapes
Get PDFA review of Red Exposure, Chrome (Futurismo remastered reissue 2022) and conttextual band histor
an untitled review of Tempo. Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry, ed. Luca Paci (Parthian)
Get PDFPoetry anthology revie
Trans- States: The Art of Deception
Get PDFtrans- prefix meaning: across, beyond, through, on the other side of, to go beyond
state: a condition or way of being that exists at a particular time
An unabashed play on words, a ‘trans- state’ is, among other things, a coincidentia oppositorum. An alchemical wedding that defines the fixed place, where boundaries are actively transgressed.
Trans- States conferences are each themed upon a Major Arcana Tarot card. The first was The Hanged Man and focused on boundary-crossing, liminality, and the queering of normativity. The second was The Tower, which broadened its scope to include the shock and awe of revelatory and paradigm-shifting occultural experiences, the impact and implications of anti-structure, of alterations in consciousness, and of the revolutionary aspects of paranormality.
The theme of this conference is The Magician card. The contemporary Tarot Magus is an adept of the mystical arts, but the forebearers of this image are even more firmly rooted in the mercurial archetype of the Trickster. Master of stage(d) magic, sleight of hand, spectacle, and misdirection; everything they do is for show—the Magician is nothing without their spellbound audience. Juggler, gamester, huckster, provocateur, and virtuoso performer, The Magician occupies the streets and avenues, the highways and byways, the thoroughfares and village squares. Places of commerce and community, of trade and treachery, of discovery and deception. Quick-witted, unfathomably dexterous and expertly skilled, The Magician appears to perform the impossible and produce the hitherto unimaginable: making space for the virtual to emerge within the bustling midst of the everyday.
The Art of Deception is the art of technē. It is the art, skill, craft, and means by which practice brings about accomplishments that are quite simply—beyond belief.
This transdisciplinary conference and art exhibition will explore the complex interrelationships between contemporary occulture, deception, persuasion, trickery, manipulation, communication, mastery, craftiness, sleight of hand, commerce, technē, technology, and techgnosis