Welcome to Soundville, a Sony audio performance project:
In March 2009 a small town in Iceland was filled with speakers. The Seydisfjordur village was turned into an extraordinary sound-system for a week. Sounds by Richard Fearless ( Death in Vegas ) Mum, Bob Dylan, Toumani Diabate, Roberto Goyeneche, Murcof, Federico Cabral, Guillemots, etc.
This film by Juan Cabral of London’s Fallon agency documents the town-turned-into-tunes:
This is NOT the Maroochydore High School (Queensland, Australia) phone menu message — as so many YouTubers insist; see Snopes. Nor was it from Pacific Palisades High School (CA USA) answering machine, which didn’t even have a phone menu sys when this message text was circulated via email in 2002.
But it is damn funny, “School Phone Menu” (1:15 mp3):
Captain Cook gave Norfolk Island its first tourist slogan when he spotted it in 1774: “Jewell of the Pacific”. In 1825 it became “Hell on Earth,” the most feared of England’s penal colonies in Australia, designed as, “a place of the extremist punishment short of death.” Later, it was given to the decedents of the Mutiny on the Bounty to settle. Now, the tourism slogan is: “Norfolk Island… be surprised” — and the island has become completely dependent on tourism.
Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.
—”Katie and Diane: The Wrong Questions” Columbia Journalism Review
Recordings, remembrances, poetry, and PTSD from some of those who fought America’s longest war:
The sounds of Saigon, 1972: in combat, on the radio, in the streets, were recorded by Claude Johner for the Folkways recording Good Morning, Vietnam (liner notes 4M pdf).
Doug Peacock, former Green Beret medic, deals with the PTSD of vets, including himself (interviewed by Scott Carrier). Peacock wrote the book Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War And Wilderness.
Rich Kepler’s war experiences were bottled up and about to burst, until he released them in his poetry (producer: Larry Massett).
An oral history of African-American Vietnam vets, based on the book Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War: An Oral History by Wallace Terry; produced for radio by Katie Davis.
by Jay Kernis 2006-12-19 (Presentation to NPR Stations)
It’s an exciting time to be in public radio — as we all try to figure out how we will become public media.
For more than a year now, under the New Realities banner, the public radio community has been talking about everything from how to use new technology to share stories from the past and present — to creating a new business model to fund public radio — to articulating our mission in a media world that offers so many choices. A new world where the biggest challenge is just getting the attention of the audience.
Here’s one provocative statement from these discussions — a challenge — that really got me thinking:
“NPR has found its distinctive SOUND.
It is now time for NPR to find its true voice.”
–Quote from an NPR reporter (February 2006)
To me, that reporter was saying: it is time for us to discover what we truly want to become.
Because if we fail to do so, audiences will go elsewhere. If we fail to do so, we will be prey to the others who will define us. The others who call us “liberal” or “effete” or “boring.”
The statement by the reporter differentiates between our sound and our voice. I’m going to talk about both for a few moments.
To help us find our true voice, I asked NPR News to make a few what I called “tweaks” — SIX OF THEM actually — most of them involving the issues we’ve been discussing for years. Decades, actually.
First, I told them that when people tune to an NPR program, I want them to hear reports and interviews and essays that inform them, of course, and that ask them to question preconceived notions — but that’s not all.
I want the air to SING. I want programming that carries listeners to new places — intellectually and emotionally; programming that awakens you, that keeps you in your car to hear the ending, and that makes you want to tell a friend about what you heard. That makes you want to tune in again and again. Programming that soars — and sings.
But, the six areas I want us to pay a lot of attention to — right now — are: More…
Michael Massing, in the The New York Review of Books, has a numbers-packed eval of the newsprint biz, “A New Horizon for the News.” Among the insights:
Last year, circulation dropped on average by 4.6 percent.… Yet amid all this gloom, statistics from the Internet suggest that interest in news has rarely been greater. According to one survey, Internet users in 2008 spent fifty-three minutes a week reading newspapers online, up from forty-one minutes in 2007. And the traffic at the top fifty news Web sites increased by 27 percent. While this growth cut across all age groups, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found, “it was fueled in particular by young people.”…
According to one study, of all the time readers spend with a newspaper, 96 percent of it is spent on print editions and barely more than 3 percent on the Web. Similarly, of the $38.5 billion spent on newspaper ads in 2008, just $3 billion was spent on the Web. With numbers like these, print is not going away anytime soon.…
How could the financial fortunes of a $50 billion–plus industry decline so swiftly while its product remains so prized? The most immediate explanation is the collapse of what has long been the industry’s economic base: advertising. The traditional three staples of newspaper advertising—automotive, employment, and real estate—have all drastically declined, thanks to Craigslist, eBay, the travails of Detroit, and the consolidation of department stores (resulting in fewer retail ad pages). Meanwhile, the steady expansion of space on the Internet has caused online ad rates to crash, and these are not expected to recover even when the economy as a whole does.
The fall-off in ad revenues has been compounded by another phenomenon that newspaper executives would rather not discuss: their own greed. The relentless stress placed on acquisition and consolidation, which dominated the industry for decades, helped drain money out of newsrooms and into the pockets of shareholders. It also shifted the locus of decision-making from locally based citizens to distant corporate boards. Most harmful of all, efforts to build large media conglomerates have saddled newspaper companies with astounding levels of debt, much of it taken on to buy other newspaper companies.
And, at the end, a salute to NPR:
To date, the funding of nonprofit journalism has been led by the Knight Foundation, with added support from Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.… When it comes to cultivating such sources, everyone looks to one organization for guidance: NPR. At a time when not only newspapers but also commercial broadcasters are struggling, NPR has thrived.
“People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer: ‘We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!'”
—Product designer Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), interviewed by Design Glut.
The New Year starts tonight at sunset — Jewish days begin at sundown. Welcome to 5770, the first day of Tishri: Rosh Hashanah. So knock off work, sound the shofar, shuffle off to shul, and wish all: L’shanah tovah (“for a good year”; candle lighting times for your area).
Rosh Hashanah is “the day of judgment” (Yom ha-Din) and “the day of remembrance” (Yom ha-Zikkaron). And, ‘course, according to Kabbalah, the year 5770 will affect the rectification of the Sefirot of Keter of Hod of Hod of Yesod — but you know that, right?
So get ready, folks, cuz in 10 days we got us a Yom Kippur coming, the Day of Atonement, and the big guy’s gonna do some writin’ in the book, signed, “sealed”, delivered.
y’hi ratzon mil’fanekha Adonai eloheinu vei’lohei avoteinu
May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors
sh’t’chadeish aleinu shanah tovah um’tukah.
that you renew for us a good and sweet year.
President Obama: Warm Wishes for Rosh Hashana
And some equal-time for our fellow Semitic friends:
Global water and air volume: Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of water on Earth (left) and of air in the Earth’s atmosphere (right) shown as spheres (blue and pink). The spheres show how finite water and air supplies are. The water sphere measures 1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometres across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense. Half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometres of the atmosphere. Image by Dr Adam Nieman.
On our new Didya Know page, we’re breaking down the stats & sources from the popular fact-filled “Did You Know” videos, along w/ updates and errata — lotsa the latter. In fact we’ve found so many errors, the page has become less “Did You Know?” and more “how do we figure out what we know?”
Here’s a YouTube playlist with two versions of “Did you Know?” and two parodies:
“Glenda Sutton is a camel jockey.” She trains, rides and races the critters. Photographer Tim Bonham is mixing a radio story for us on Glenda, based on his superb photo-audio slideshow, “The Boulia Camel Races,” in his multimedia collection.
According to some estimates there are upwards of a million feral camels roaming the Australian outback. Some end up as meat, some are culled in a seemingly futile attempt to keep their numbers down, some ruin sacred aboriginal watering holes by drowning in them. A select few end up in the outback town of Boulia, Queensland to run in the most important camel race in Australia. Glenda Sutton is a camel jockey and talked to me about the nature of camels and what it’s like to hurtle down the racecourse on the back of one.
—Tim Bonham
Reading One Art, a huge collection of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s letters. I notice this, written
from Key West in l938:
“I have a little Victor record player that attaches to the radio. It is quite good; and a lot of records I got from Sears, Roebuck… the Negro ones are the best: “That Bonus Done Gone Through,” “Riding to Your Funeral in a Ford V-8″… but it is almost impossible to find anything about who is composing them. (They appear all over the South within three days of any major news event, it seems.)”
Sounds like an early version of twitter. I’ve never heard of this before, have you?
Captain Cook gave Norfolk Island its first tourist slogan when he spotted it in 1774: “Jewell of the Pacific”. In 1825 it became “Hell on Earth,” the most feared of England’s penal colonies in Australia, designed as, “a place of the extremist punishment short of death.” Later, it was given to the decedents of the Mutiny on the Bounty to settle. Now, the tourism slogan is: “Norfolk Island… be surprised” — and the island has become completely dependent on tourism.
From CJR, another 
3am in a Colstrip MT motel, most of the way thru a 6pak of 
“People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer: ‘We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!'”
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