Digital Commons Network^™

Editorial: Subjectivity And Objectivity In Storytelling Podcasts, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

In this issue, storytelling podcasts and audio works from the US, UK, Australia and Canada receive in-depth critiques from expert reviewers in Latin America, Australia and the UK. The subjectivity-objectivity spectrum is one focus, along with ethics and aesthetics.

Consent: Objectivity And The Aesthetics Of Re-Enactment In Locative Audio Journalism About A Sexual Assault Trial, Jeanti St Clair

RadioDoc Review

Consent – walk the walk, a geo-locative audio documentary walk in St. John’s, Canada, explores a 2017 sexual assault trial that led to days of protests in the Newfoundland city: an on-duty police officer is charged with sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman he drove home from the town’s nightclub precinct. Producers Chris Brookes and Emily Deming’s work of ‘landscape journalism’ was designed to highlight the tension between popular and legal understandings of the term ‘consent’ in sexual assaults. While the audio walk is a compelling place-based listening experience, Consent raises issues around the impact of dramatised re-enactment in the …

Radio Revolten: 30 Days Of Radio Art - Book Review, Colin Black

RadioDoc Review

Radio Revolten: 30 Days of Radio Art documents the Radio Revolten international radio art festival that took place took place during October 2016 in Halle, Germany. It is a densely rich book that explores aspects of radio beyond the format, beyond time schedules and beyond podcast ratings, while still aiming to build a sense of community. It is reviewed by internationally acclaimed Australian sound artist Colin Black.

Skywriting – Making Radio Waves By Robyn Ravlich: Book Review, Mike Ladd

RadioDoc Review

Robyn Ravlich’s Skywriting - making radio waves is partly an extended dissertation on feature-making and radio art, and partly an autobiography of this acclaimed Australian audio feature maker from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is reviewed by Mike Ladd, poet, audio producer and an erstwhile ABC colleague.

Video Game Audio Techniques Applied To Board Game Companion Applications, Jaydon Osborn

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Video games have been one of the most popular forms of entertainment since the turn of the 20th century. Starting in pinball machines that developed into arcade games and now lovingly into virtual reality, console, and handheld gaming systems, video games have become a normal factor in people's lives. It is no mystery why they are so popular; games not only give us a sense of accomplishment beyond what our physical and mental limits could achieve, but also evoke our imaginations by drawing us into a new world that is magical or something we would never have seen before. Think …

"Choir" By Pope.L At The Whitney, Matthew Sage

Faculty Research and Creative Activities Symposium

Pope.L is an acclaimed Chicago-based artist whose work with painting, performance, and installations has received much praise and increased attention. This October he installed Choir at the prestigious Whitney Museum in New York City; this new installation focuses on his continued exploration of water in gallery spaces. For Choir, a 1,000-gallon water tank that acts as a public fountain was installed at the gallery. The tank fills and drains over a roughly 40- minute span of time. NEIU part-time faculty member Matthew Sage (CMT department) was asked to create, design, and collaborate on sound components to accompany this installation. Sage …

In The Dark – Pushing The Boundaries Of True Crime, Sharon Davis

RadioDoc Review

True crime podcasts are a burgeoning genre. As journalists and storytellers, how do we balance the pursuit of justice and our responsibility to the victims with the demand to tell a gripping tale? As listeners, are we using the pain of others for our own entertainment? In the Dark podcast (Seasons 1 and 2) takes us beyond a vicarious fascination with true crime stories into a forensic and essential look at deep-rooted biases, corruption and systemic failures that prevent justice from being served.

The first season (2016) investigates the 1989 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling In …

The Feelings Frontier: A Review Of No Feeling Is Final, Britta Jorgensen

RadioDoc Review

No Feeling is Final faces a two-fold “feelings frontier” in an age of extreme podcast intimacy and empathy: navigating (1) how to convey the kind of deeply personal “big feelings” that are still often seen as off-limits and (2) how to maintain a hyper-awareness about the listener’s feelings. Taking place almost entirely within her mind, No Feeling is Final is a six-part memoir show about host Honor Eastly’s experiences struggling with mental health and what one mental health professional diagnoses as “too many feelings – about four times as many as the average person”. The ongoing tension between creating resonance …

Have You Heard George’S Podcast (It's A True Original), Hugh Levinson

RadioDoc Review

The podcast, Have You Heard George’s Podcast, is a true original. Made by George Mpanga, who goes by the stage name of George the Poet, it won five awards at the 2018 British Podcast Awards – in fiction and non-fiction categories. The son of Ugandan immigrants, George went to an elite state school in north London before taking a degree at Cambridge.

The podcast takes on big themes - empowering George’s community, self-belief, crime, drugs, racism, inequality and international politics. Stylistically, the eight-part series is a mash-up: poetry, sketches, interviews, archive, music, performance and sometimes off-mike chat with his …

Does Spotify Really Hurt Artists?, Daniel Witt

Marriott Student Review

For years, members of the music industry have debated whether music streaming services like Spotify help or hurt artists. This article explores the pros and cons of music streaming and argues that overall, Spotify and services like it are helping artists to achieve their career goals.

One Story, Told Week By Week: Episodic Podcast Storytelling And The Habitat, Charlotte De Beauvoir

RadioDoc Review

The rise and success of podcasting introduced episodic storytelling in the world of non-fiction sound narrative. Delivering a story in different entries is very different from producing a one-off piece. What concrete implications does this have for the narrative? And what keeps an audience listening to a podcast, episode through episode? This article offers some answers to these questions via a case study of The Habitat, a 2018 podcast by the American network Gimlet.

Down But Not Out: Tara And George And The Boundaries Of Subjectivity., Hamish Sewell

RadioDoc Review

Set on the streets of London, amidst the snarl of traffic and the clip of passers by, this work is a biographical sound portrait of two homeless people, Tara and George. It is a testament to the parlous state of homelessness in the UK today and is masterful in its execution.

To this work, producer and host Audrey Gillan brings a quality of frank disclosure and decency. Relationships between producers and their subjects are contentious, due to an inherent power differential. Gillan neither portrays Tara and George as archetypes nor as helpless and needy. She knows she is the one …

An Analysis Of Perceptual Masking Between Stems In Manually-Mixed Multitrack Audio Using A Cross-Analytic Loudness Model, Brian H. Cofer

Student Theses

In music production, there are many tools available to an audio engineer throughout the mixing process to bring a song to completion. Among the most common are level balancing, equalization (EQ), and compression. However, these tools still require the subjective judgments of human engineers to create the desired listening experience. While automated mixing algorithms have been increasingly studied, they have yet to match the skills of even an amateur mixing engineer, in major part, because the subjective mixing decisions of an engineer are difficult to replicate by automated systems. The following research was developed with the primary goal of objectively …

From Harmony To The Field, Steven E. Norton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This document expounds a brief history of Western musical art, from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty first, which traces the complete transformation of its expressive means and materials. Examined are the changes to Western music’s basic materials such as pitch system, timbral palette and formal architecture. We observe as these aspects are dismantled, supplanted by a dramatically expanded sonic palette and subsequently expanded ranges of expression and topical consideration. This brief historiography contextualizes my current working theories and methods for the construction and understanding of electroacoustic music, centered around the idea of The Field, which frames …

Industry Profile: Denny Stilwell, Mack Avenue Music Group President, Axel Tanner

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Insta-Promotion: Here’S Why (And How) You Should Be Using Instagram To Market Your Music, Jennifer Morrow

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

A Failure Of The Music Industry: The Frustration Of Women Of Color, Christina Estes-Wynne

Backstage Pass

Throughout the history of the music industry, women of color have not received the same recognition as their male counterparts because males have dominated the industry resulting in lack of female representation. Women have been oversexualized reducing their clout in their fields and the lack of acknowledgement of success, which discourages future generations of colored women from attempting to reach their highest potential.

Social Activism In The U.S. Music Industry, Joey A. Tan

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

The Trending Killer, Diana Ventura

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Big Business In The Music Business, Kortney Burton

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

The Music Industry Has A Mental Health Problem, Manny Manriquez

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Music And Politics: A Potent Combination To Commercial Success?, Veronica Martinez

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

What Is A Music Supervisor?, June Benoit

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Closing The Music Industry Gender Gap, Sami Fong

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Gender Inequality In The Music Industry, Issadora Tulalian

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

15 Seconds Of Fame, Graham Mclaren-Finelli

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Redemption: A Deep Dive Into The Magnum Opus That Saved Kanye’S Career, Graham D. Mclaren-Finelli

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: A Journey Inside The Creative Genius Of The Beatles, Kevin Sandri

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Meet Cody Simpson, Veronica Martinez

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Childish Gambino Says Goodbye, Diana Ventura

Backstage Pass

Childish Gambino ends his music career with his This Is America tour. In this review, we delve into how the audience reacts to his goodbye and how he is determined to give us his most spectacular farewell.