Digital Commons Network^™

Editorial: Transnational Audio Storytelling: Writing The Common Language Of Sound, Laura Romero, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Editorial on a special transnational issue of RadioDoc Review, curated by Dr Laura Romero and co-edited by A/Prof Siobhan McHugh. The issue features mainly sound-rich European works in languages other than English, critiqued by reviewers from four continents. It also showcases invited articles on mainstream podcasts, The Shadows (audio fiction) and Serial Season Three (crafted documentary) .

Failure As Liberation: A Critical Analysis Of Rilo Chmielorz’ Artistic Feature “Scheitern Ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme” (Failure Is. An Inventory), Ania Mauruschat

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a critical analysis, interpretation and assessment of the feature “Scheitern ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme”(2016), by the German artist Rilo Chmielorz,which explores failure as a taboo subject in neoliberal societies that worship the ideology of success and progress.

This study deconstructs this unique feature to its various parts and looks at the feature as a whole in terms of the concept of “polyphonic narration” that the Russian literature and art scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) derived from the poetics of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). It shows how the level of content (life stories of failure, experts …

Pillow, Talk: Kaitlin Prest’S The Shadows And The Elements Of Modern Audio Fiction, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a study of The Shadows (2018), a series produced by Kaitlin Prest and Phoebe Wang for CBC Podcasts. I situate the work in the framework of Prest’s career after her podcast The Heart, and argue that The Shadows crystallises a set of conventions about “audio fiction” that set it apart from “audio drama,” “radio features” and other similar forms, at least at this particular historical moment. These conventions include: the embrace of naive themes; a preference for retroversion or 'queer temporality'; a focus on body sound; multiplication in mixing and editing that comes across as a …

Prix Europa: The European Broadcasting Festival 2018 - Radio Documentary And Feature Trends, Forms And Topics., Natalia Kowalska

RadioDoc Review

This article surveys a range of European audio features and documentaries selected for the prestigious Prix Europa 2018. Works critiqued come from Italy, UK, France, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic. the Netherlands and Belgium. The winner was The Upside Down, made by Gianluca Stazi and Giuseppe Casu and produced by Radio Televisione Italiana, RAI Radio 3 and Tratti Documentari. The jury described it as a “timeless story about the dignity and spirituality of work. Patiently, it leads us deep into the recesses of the natural world and the human soul. We heard a real musical experience composed of natural sounds …

Listening To Our Inner Breath: The Acoustic Architecture Of Avec Le Vent (With The Wind), Laura Romero

RadioDoc Review

Avec Le Vent (With the Wind) is a radio art composition directed, edited and mixed by Jeanne Debarsy, about the story of exile and memories of three Armenian people living in Brussels and Paris. This review is an attempt to describe how the author breaks with verbal discourse to create an experience of transportation for listeners, through the musical use of layers of breaths coming from the characters and the sound effects caused by instruments of wind, such as the duduk, a potent symbol of Armenia. It is a poetic approach to the experience of uprooting and …

Moving, Belonging, And Sorrow In ‘A Very Different Time’ By Phil Smith, Silvia Viñas

RadioDoc Review

Phil Smith’s A Very Different Time weaves poetry, music, ambience and snapshots of stories in an audio piece about movement, nostalgia, change and sorrow. It includes the voices of people he met while living in Berlin: a West African refugee; a musician and academic from the United States; a Syrian refugee escaping war; an academic of Italian/German citizenship; and a German musician who moved from a small town to the city. To this stream of voices, Smith adds layers of music, different beats, street sounds, distortion, the ambience that recall the words – valleys, mountains, water and islands –and a …

Intimate Moments: Dispelling The Cancer Myth With Real Life - Summer Rain By Nanna Hauge Kristensen., Sophie Townsend

RadioDoc Review

Nanna Hauge Kristensen’s Summer Rain is a small piece in length and in scope. It is intimate, almost fragmentary. It is simply a story of a woman, who is a mother, and a daughter, and who has cancer; a woman undergoing treatment, and raising her child, and dealing with the ramifications of what cancer treatment means. An anthropologist by training, Kristensen’s observational, almost distanced approach style, allows us to glimpse her life, but also to feel it. There is something very empirical about what she’s doing in this piece, and she allows us no room to pretend that her cancer …

“Qualia”: The Subjective Qualities Of Sound As Experience Of The Self, Vanessa Ribeiro Rodrigues

RadioDoc Review

How do we construct the perception of the world and Others through sounds? How are we able to express the myriad of feelings inside ourselves into an intelligible structure in order to be understood? What is the amount of interference in the way we express those [translated] feelings? These are some of the subtle questions raised by “Qualia”, a five-episode radio feature by Spanish artist and performer Charo Calvo, aired in 2016 by ABC Radio National’s Soundproof show in Australia.

The name “Qualia” evokes the philosophical theory of an internal and subjective component of sense and mental perceptions, which are …

Editorial: How Women Are Reclaiming Their Power In The Podcast Sphere, Siobhán Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

This issue considers intimate stories, mostly by women - particularly germane in this era of #MeToo.

Mothers And Daughters In The Digital Private Era: Review Of “A Life Sentence: Victims, Offenders, Justice And My Mother” By Samantha Broun And Jay Allison And “Mariya” By Mariya Karimjee, Kaitlin Prest, And Mitra Kaboli., Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita

RadioDoc Review

The conditions of contemporary soundwork have sparked an extraordinary flowering of intimate storytelling, much of it told by women. Freed from the bonds of technology, scale, and forms of support and distribution that keep traditional radio relentlessly mainstream, the new “digital privacy” of the last fifteen years has allowed new kinds of stories to be told: or rather, has allowed some of the oldest stories in the world to finally be spoken aloud. In both “Mariya” and “A Life Sentence” sexual violence against women is portrayed in all its complexity, tragedy, and terrible familiarity.

In “A Life Sentence,” Samantha Broun …