Hearing Voices- Audio, Web, Video, News
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Suppose they gave a Town Hall, and a Tea Party showed up. Excerpts for 2009 health care collective chaos…
Town Halls 2009
Note: While HV may not agree with the sentiments expressed, we do love lively freedom of expression.
Audio/Video Production: Barrett Golding
Music: Jeff Arntsen
Audio mix: Robin Wise
Video clips: ABC World News, WGNO- New Orleans, David William Hedrick, The Young Turks, Hot Air Pundit Kathy Castor, Hill Newspaper, YouTube. See playlist- Town Halls 2009 (videos).
Hearing Voices from NPR®
072 Predator: Hunter and Hunted
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-09-14 (Originally: 2009-10-14)
“Predator” (52:00 mp3):
For the opening of hunting season:
A teenage babysitter convinces his younger siblings he’s a werewolf… who’s going to kill them, produced by Hillary Frank (author of I Can’t Tell You) for This American Life.
Beatrice is a white toy poodle, a neighbor, and “the most evil entity, force, energy known to man. Death to humans is a mere plop of a pebble in the ocean that is the evil that you are Beatrice. Evil Beatrice the white poodle.”
Grizzly Bear 0:00-0:17
Harbor Seal 0:17-0:33
Dall’s Sheep 0:33-0:44
Timber Wolf 0:44-0:51
Moose 0:51-1:22
Cougar/Mountain Lion 1:22-1:26
Sea Lion 1:26-1:51
Porcupine 1:51-1:58
Bison 1:58-3:26
Ringtail/Rodent 3:26-3:41
Musk Ox 3:41-4:11
Columbia Black Tail Deer 4:11-4:37
Caribou 4:37-5:06
Coyote 5:06-5:25
Mountain Goat 5:25-5:48
Peccary 5:48-6:26
Mule Deer 6:26-6:58
From Sonic Scenery, an exhibit I worked on at the natural history museum in Los Angeles a couple years ago. Composers were invited to record music specifically to be heard in wings of the museum. The visitor wears a headset, which plays the compositions when triggered by remote signals in the galleries. Experimental duo Matmos took it all the way by making audio environments for each of the seventeen dioramas in the North American Mammals hall. The timechart (above) was intended to cue the visitor to move from one window to the next, but you can read along for a similar effect.
Artist statement:
In general, our work starts by taking an object, making sounds with that object, and working outward from those sounds in a free-associative manner, without a preconceived result or specifically targeted genre in mind.
In this case, we have had to reverse this process and have tried to think about the precise specifics of the North American Mammals hall and work to gather sounds that will evoke both the natural locale and the specific behaviors of the animals in the room. We decided to anchor our piece around the sounds of animals eating, breathing, and sniffing their environment, and to locate these noises of animal life against a backdrop of plateaulike drones generated with musical instruments associated with “Americana”: pedal steel, acoustic guitar, banjo, harmonica, and autoharp. Feeding peanut butter to a friend’s dog, we built up a basic library of mammalian lip-smacking, huffing, barking, whining, sniffling, and breathing noises, and combined this with a percussive battery of antler noises made by smacking deer antlers against each other and some softer rustling textures harvested by stroking and rubbing the pelt of a wolf.
The work is divided into miniature ‘cells,’ which stand in for the seventeen distinct dioramas/environments and animal species represented in the room, and this is split down the middle by a central section that corresponds to the large bison display at the far end of the room. Our work is intended to be a sound map of a walk through this room and is paced to coincide with a five-to-seven-minute counterclockwise walk through its contents
–Matmos
via futurechimp
“17 Species of North American Mammals” (2:22 excerpt) Matmos
LA’s The Natural History Museum commissioned original music compositions to accompany their 2006 exhibit Sonic Scenery: Music for Collections. Matmos’ music used the vocal sounds of North American mammals.
One of America’s oldest roadside attractions is the Linesville Spillway in northwest Pennsylvania. Tourists toss bread; carp amass at the spillway’s edges: The fish are so thick that mallard ducks hop, skip and jump on the fish’s backs to compete for a slice of bread. Original music by Tim Fite, part of LHP’s song/story series.
More music from the LHP story.
Writer (Amazon), hunter, angler, outdoorsman, Norman Strung demonstrates the shrill sound and thrill found in calling for elk. (Miss ya, Norm: “Labradors [are] lousy watchdogs. They usually bark when there is a stranger about, but it is an expression of unmitigated joy at the chance to meet somebody new, not a warning.” –Norman Strung)
Father Rupe LaRock and son Joe provide a hunter’s perspective of the annual deer breeding cycle. “You can just smell the heat and smell the rut right in the air.” Another of the Deer Stories , produced with Gregory Sharrow at the Vermont Folk Life Center.
Guns, guitars, guts, and wild game. Hunting wildlife and the wild life in the mountains of Payette National Forest. From the Chadwick’s Conservation Sound series. Audio by Micheal Scweppe.
A road trip along historic route 66 in New Mexico, exploring America’s past and present. Tour includes a Santa Fe cooking class, a hot air balloon ride above Albuquerque, Acoma tribal traditions, a mining museum in Grants and a historic hotel in Gallup. Aired on NPR All Things Considered; by producer Jake Warga, “Route 66 Postcard” (8:20 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.
Aired on NPR All Things Considered; by producer Jake Warga, “Norfolk Island” (5:04 mp3):
Here’s a sample pic from Jake’s Norfolk photo gallery:
Hearing Voices from NPR®
071 Vietnam Vets: Coming Home
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-03-02 (Originally: 2009-09-23)
“Vietnam Vets” (52:00 mp3):
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…
Listen : John Cage – in love with sound / silence -01
Transcript of the interview with John Cage in the film “Ecoute” (Listen) by Miroslav Sebestik:
[part 1]
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic, here on 6th avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things.I am completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me. We don’t see much difference between time and space. We don’t know where one begins and the other stops. So that most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of being in space. More…
Hearing Voices from NPR®
070 Shortcuts Thru 1969: From the Moon to Woodstock
Host: Peter Bochan of WBAI-FM
Airs week of: 2009-09-09
“Shortcuts Thru 1969 ” (52:00 mp3):
1969, the year in an hour, another in the Shortcuts series by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up:
From Woodstock to Altamont, Washington to Vietnam, Chappaquidick to Chicago with stops at Stonewall, Hyde Park, Shea Stadium, The Super Bowl, Memphis, Times Square, Sesame Street, and the Moon. Featuring commentary from John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Roman Polanski, Richard Nixon, JFK, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Burgess Meredith, Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Lang, “Topaz Caucasion”, Chip Monck, Dave Marsh, Joe Boyd, Rob Kirkpatrick, Carl Capotorto, Arlo Guthrie, Hugh Romney, Harry Reasoner, Nile Rogers, various FBI and police agents, The Black Panthers, The Weather Underground, The Zodiac Killer, Apollo 11 astronauts and many others.
Music from Hair, Midnight Cowboy, Sly and the Family Stone, The 5th Dimension, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, James Brown, David Bowie, The Who, Les McCann & Eddie Harris, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Blind Faith, Roy Budd, The Plastic Ono Band, The Jefferson Airplane, Arlo Guthrie, Canned Heat, The Beach Boys, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, Beautiful People, Jimi Hendrix, Procol Harum, Henry Mancini and The Stooges! More…
Our “Oddio Art” automated hyperactive audio-art generator features Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, and Ted Kennedy, with music by Joe Bass and Flash-yness from Eli 5 Stone.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
069 Pen to Paper: Charles Bowden & Isak Dinesen
Host: Scott Carrier of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-09-08 (Originally: 2009-08-26)
“Pen to Paper” (52:00 mp3):
Audio essays on authors:
Writer Charles Bowden reports from the US-Mexico border about the drug wars, the poverty, and the environment. His writing is harsh but unflinchingly accurate. Host Scott Carrier portrays Bowden in the words of the people he has written about.
NPR host Susan Stamberg revisits the world of Karen Blixen, aka, Isak Dinesen, when she lived in Kenya and wrote Out of Africa (produced for NPR by Larry Massett; mixed by Barrett Golding.)
Poet and wordshaker Alex Caldiero (The Sonosopher) ponders the writing and sounding of “That One” word, with music by Theta Naught.
Scott Carrier (Communication) and Alex Caldiero (Humanities/Philosophy) are professors at Utah Valley University in Orem. Go Wolverines!
The band The Gregory Brothers are turning newscasters, pundits and politicians into “unintentional” pop-singers by auto-tuning their spoken voices into sung melodies. Their “Auto-Tune the News” series are videos on YouTube and songs on Amie Street.
Michael and Evan Gregory tell us about artificially (art-officially?) interacting with the media’s talking heads. Aired on PRI Studio 360; by producer Barrett Golding, “Auto-Tuned News (edit)” (6:26 mp3):
S360 was a bit time-constrained, so couldn’t present the whole piece, including the G-Bros series Songified History (free d/l at Amie Street), w/ JFK, MLK, & Churchill. Here’s the full vers…
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Hearing Voices from NPR®
068 Jean Shepherd 2: A Voice in the Night
Host: Harry Shearer of Le Show
Airs week of: 2010-07-21 (Originally: 2009-08-19)
“Jean Shepherd 2” (52:00 mp3):
Shep rides again:
The final hour of a two-part tribute to radio raconteur Jean Shepherd. For info or to Comment, see Jean Shepherd, Part 1.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
067 Jean Shepherd 1: A Voice in the Night
Host: Harry Shearer of Le Show
Airs week of: 2010-07-14 (Originally: 2009-08-12)
“Jean Shepherd 1” (52:00 mp3):
Hour one in this two-part tribute to radio raconteur Jean Shepherd:
Jean Shepherd used words like a jazz musician uses notes, winding around a theme, playing with variations, sending fresh self-reflective storylines out into the night. Marshall McLuhan called Shepherd “the first radio novelist.” From 1956-1977 Shep spun his late night stories over WOR radio, New York City. PBS gave him a TV series, “Jean Shepherd’s America.” In 1983 he co-wrote and narrated the film version of his “A Christmas Story.”
Shep inspired a new generation of spoken narrative artists who tap into the American psyche. Among them was Harry Shearer (Le Show), who hosts this two part tribute to Jean Shepherd. Shearer interviews Shep’s co-workers, friends and fans, including Robert Krulwich, Joe Frank, Paul Krassner, and Jules Fieffer.
Thanks to Mr. Shearer, KCRW– Santa Monica (and Sarah Spitz), NPR, and Art Silverman for production support, and for allowing us to re-air this two-hour tribute. This is part one; part two is next week.
One time I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning. My radio was still on, and a man was talking about how you would try to explain the function of an amusement park to visitors from Venus. It was Jean Shepherd. He was on WOR from midnight to 5:30 every night, mixing childhood reminiscence with contemporary critiques, peppered with such characters as the man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the brand name of the refrigerator it came from and the year of manufacture. Shepherd would orchestrate his colorful tales with music ranging from “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues.”
–Paul Krassner (from “How the Realist popped America’s cherry“)
The Realist: series of Jean Shepherd essays, Radio Free America, issue #42, #44, #48, #50.
Jean Shepherd – The Great American Fourth of July – PART 1
HV goes on NPR Road Trips, the new 3 CD collection from the NPR Shop. We have two stories on National Park Adventures: Scott’s “Angel’s Landing- Zion” and my “Yellowstone Geyser Guy.
Skye’s “Papua New Guinea: Highlands Celebration” is on NPR Road Trips: Postcards From Around the Globe.
We also have a piece, “The Pledge,” on the older NPR CD, The Declaration in Sound.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
066 Desert Air: Audio from the Arid Regions
Host: Ben Adair of American Public Media
Airs week of: 2011-09-28 (Originally: 2009-08-05)
“Desert Air” (52:00 mp3):
Hot & dry stories and soundscapes (see Dave’s Deserts for photos from the American West):
Coyotes, owls, frogs and songbirds are part of Desert Solitudes, recorded by Bernie Krause and Ruth Happel in the Sonoran and Chihuauan deserts, part of New Mexico’s panhandle.
Host Ben Adair heads down to the ghost towns, Opera Houses, century-old abandoned mines, and billion-year old boulders along Death Valley’s “Mojave Road.”
Kraut-rockers Faust dial in “Long Distance Calls in the Desert,” from their album Rien.
The Quiet American (Aaron Ximm) sound-captures the forbidding warning signs rattling in a harsh wind and “Desert Sun” outside the nuclear Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas.
Back in the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found the Basin & Range, near Nevada”s “Battle Mountain,” beautiful, lonely, dreary, and full of sagebrush, solace and stories. And more Desert Solitudes.
Photos by David Matherly’s of deserts in the American West:
Hearing Voices from NPR®
065 Cowboy: Cheyenne Frontier Days
Host: Josh Darsa of NPR
Airs week of: 2010-07-28 (Originally: 2009-07-22)
“Cowboy” (52:00 mp3):
Host Josh Darsa of NPR spends nine days with rodeo riders in a rural Wyoming town:
This 1980 classic radio doc from the NPR archives visits Cheyenne Frontier Days, “The Daddy of ’em All.”
Along the way, Darsa digs into the the history of the “cowboy,” mixing in the experiences of Baylis John Fletcher on an 1879 cattle drive, herding 2000 longhorns from Texas to Wyoming (read by Paul Blakemore from the book Up the trail in ’79.
And underscoring it all is the wild-west symphonies of Aaron Copland.
Josh Darsa wrote and narrated. The technical director and recording engineer was John Widoff, assisted by Miles Smith, Dave Glasser and shop technician Bob Butcher.
“While we were at the rodeo, Josh Darsa wanted to record multiple vantage points of a single scene. For instance, I’d have a Nagra tape recorder on the roof of the grandstand and Miles Smith would have a Nagra in the chutes where the riders would bust out for their ride. Then we would have a free-running Nagra III on the rodeo announcer. We ran them in sync kinda like you would do in video with multiple cameras. This gave us three vantage points. During the show you hear the perspective change through cross fading which is a result of these different but simultaneous perspectives.
There must have been 70 hours or more of tape we shot out there in Cheyenne and every single thing got dubbed. What you heard in the halls of the old NPR were rodeo sounds coming from RC1. Constant horses, bulls, things crashing, just all kinds of things. I think it drove people nuts hearing this stuff up and down the halls.
This was the height of my career at NPR. It was a combination of everything… the music recording, the production sound recording, interviews… every single thing that I had ever done for this company all came together in this show. This was probably how Walt Disney felt when he made Mary Poppins. It was a dream come true for me to build something like this. ‘Cowboy’ is the kind of show you would listen to in a darkened movie theatre. The writing is spectacular.”
–John Widoff, “‘Cowboy,’ a Study in Radio Tale-Telling”
Read the entire interview.
More Josh Darsa at NPR.org: “An Italian Mosaic” (1978) | “Josh Darsa Obituary” by Alex Chadwick (2000)
“From the opening moments, “Cowboy” seizes the heart and soul of the listener for an extraordinary hour. Josh Darsa’s strong story vision and great writing, combined with John Widoff’s brilliantly clear and intimately warm recordings and mix, produced a radio experience that remains unequaled to this day. Listen to “Cowboy” and think about what went into it: planning, attention to detail, patience, and the faith and confidence that the highest standards are both achievable and worth all the work they require. A masterpiece that has endured for decades already, and surely will for many more.”
–Alex Chadwick, June 1998“This was the height of my career at NPR. It was a combination of everything… the music recording, the production sound recording, interviews… every single thing that I had ever done for this company all came together in this show. This was probably how Walt Disney felt when he made Mary Poppins. It was a dream come true for me to build something like this. ‘Cowboy’ is the kind of show you would listen to in a darkened movie theatre. The writing is spectacular.”
–John Widoff, May 1998
NPR.org: ‘Cowboy,’ a Study in Radio Tale-Telling
Hearing Voices episode: “Cowboy”
[The following liner notes are from the 1998 CD of “Cowboy,” Volume 1 in the NPR Engineering Master Series:]
In 1980, journalist-producer Josh Darsa, technical director and recording engineer John Widoff, assisted by Miles Smith, Dave Glasser and shop technician Bob Butcher, collaborated on Cowboy, a project that has become a classic of radio journalism. Cowboy was originally broadcast on October 4, 1980 on a series called The Mind’s Eye. In an interview with Mike Starling, Vice President of NPR Engineering, John Widoff describes their unique effort.
Mega Decks, Mega Mics, Mega Mix
JW: While we were at the rodeo, Josh Darsa wanted to record multiple vantage points of a single scene. For instance, I’d have a Nagra tape recorder on the roof of the grandstand and Miles Smith, a freelancer out of New York (currently Boston), would have a Nagra in the chutes where the riders would bust out for their ride. Then we would have a freeorunning Nagra III on the rodeo announcer. We ran them in sync kinda like you would do in video with multiple cameras. This gave us three different vantage points. During the show you hear the perspective change through cross fading which is a result of these different but simultaneous perspectives. More…
Hearing Voices from NPR®
064 Outer Space: Moon and Beyond
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2009-07-15 (Originally: -0-0)
“Outer Space” (52:00 mp3):
For the anniversary of the first Man on the Moon, July 20th 1969:
“Exploration” (3:25) is put to music by The Karminsky Experience from The Power Of Suggestion (2003).
In the early 1960’s, the United States was losing the Space Race. The first satellite in was the USSR’s Sputnik, 1957. The first human in space was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, April 1961. The next month President JFK made a Special Address to the US Congress (2:10), that started the program which landed us on the moon eight years later.
“President John Kennedy’s Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961”
“Zero G, and I Feel Fine” (6:01) transmissions are from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, with music by Jeff Artnsen of Racket Ship.
A women dreams of a visitor from the “Third Planet” (2:14) by Bisophere.
The “Last Man on the Moon” (2:41) are Apollo 17 astronauts Ronald Evans, Eugene Cernan, and Harrison Schmitt. They left the lunar surface December 1972. No one’s been back since. The music was by Jeff Arntsen.
A President has a distorted phone conversation with an underwater spaceman in “LBJ & the Helium Filled Astronaut” (7:21). Commander Scott Carpenter spent thirty days in the ocean at a depth of 200 feet as part of the Navy’s SeaLab project. This 1964 tape of helium speech comes to us from Larry Massett and Lost and Found Sound. More…