Public Day

The first workshop day is our Public Day, taking place in the glamorous old GDR radio premises at Nalepastraße. We invite everyone who is interested in aesthetic questions and issues of culture and territoriality in the fields of radio studies, sound studies and radio art.

We will start with two introductory talks from the ranks of TRE. In their Individual Projects, Jacob Kreutzfeldt/Heidi Svømmekjær and Golo Föllmer concentrate on the intersections between radiophonic sound concepts and feelings of belonging evoked by radio. Their talks discuss historical and systematic perspectives on the relation between aesthetics and territoriality within radio research. Focussing on historical examples, Jacob Kreutzfeldt and Heidi Svømmekjær will talk about „The Sound of Brotherhood in the Radiophonis North“, giving us an idea how transnational cooperation in early radio programming was thought, and possibly succeeded in building bonds between publics of different nation states. Switching to an empirical approach on present day radio, Golo Föllmer, together with a group of Master students from University of Halle, will discuss the role of sound concepts in „Transnational Standards, National Identities and International Morning Shows“ on a recently recorded corpus of heavily formatted radio programmes from all around the world.

The second slot focuses on radio drama and radio feature as the two fields in radio production best researched regarding their aesthetics. Discussing the respective histories of British and German traditions, the British academic, writer and broadcaster David Hendy and the German radio drama reviewer and co-founder of the „Berliner Hörspiel Festival“ Jochen Meißner will lead a dialogue about »Radiophonies of Art, Place and Time«.

As the last theoretical contribution of the day, in her keynote „Accented Radio“ Katie Moylan will explain issues of marking national, social and cultural territories by means of details in speech styles.

To finish off this day, we are proud to present a performance programme of a special kind: right between radio art and radio research. „Formal Radio – reloaded“ will first present the original “Formal Radio”, produced in 1999 by Christian Berner and Frank Schültge, as ‘historical’ example of the ‘destillation’ of radiophonic sound concepts in a humorous and sound-sensitive way. „Formal Radio Extra Cheese“ is their own remake, commissioned by TRE, using material of radio stations from all over the world. It is finally, let´s say, commented by Gívan Béla performing a software system on the same audio material as used by Berner and Schültge in „Re-Rodia – mini cut-up procedures for automatic radio listener“, another commission by TRE. The sound artist Jonas Olesen and the radio producer Rasmus Cleve Christensen will introduce that session by playing a mix of milestones and lesser-known experiments in the transnational language of electro-acoustic radiobroadcast music. The focus will be primarily on historical danish radio-art, with an emphasis on the musical and sound-text experiment.

For hints how to find us there please check the flyer.

Internal Days/Research-Time

The two remaining days will be exclusive for TRE members and especially invited researchers and practitioners. These two days take place at Finnland Institut Berlin.

Friday will be dedicated to discussing different theoretical tools for systematic analysis on a wide spectrum of audio examples of radiophonic sound concepts. Finn Markwardt , experienced sound designer and teacher, will give insight into aspects of ‘Identity Management’ and ‘Broadcast Flow Design’ from his hands-on production experience. As theoretical counterpart, the hosts will sketch ‘auditory grammar’ and ‘auditory rhetoric’ as potential frameworks for systematic analysis. They will be supported by the sound engineer and designer Kiron Patka. Subsequently, the best part of the day will be dedicated to discussing in small groups the possibilities of practice-based and theoretical approaches to a range of prepared as well as brought-in examples of radio.

Saturday is reserved for discussions about the best ways of publishing and spreading results from TRE and the partners involved, amongst others in the Open Knowledge Base, the TRE Exhibition and the book publication scheduled for 2016.

Date:
October 23rd (starting 12:30) to October 25th (ending 14:00)

Places:
Public Day: Studio P4, Nalepastr. 18-50, Berlin
Thursday October 23rd, 12:30 – 22:00

Internal Days: Finnland Institut, Georgenstr. 24, 10117 Berlin
Friday October 24th, 10:00 – 18:00, afterwards dinner
Saturday October 25th, 10:00 – 14:00

The Workshop will feature presentations of DR Archive and TRE, specification of the agreement of collaboration reached between DR and TRE-researchers, and discussions of how the archive might facilitate each of the represented sub-projets in TRE. Furthermore the Nordvision secretariat will present the Nordic radio collaboration.

We look forward to this opportunity to share knowledge and ideas between archivists, broadcasters and researchers!

Christian Vogg (EBU) during his presentation

For the very first time TRE gathered all members of the project: Next to  the principal investigators and their researchers most of our academic contributors and all the associated partners were present during the days in Geneva. Both EBU’s head of radio, Christian Vogg, and project manager Mathias Coinchon gave presentations on the development of radio from public service broadcasting to public service media, sharing insights on recent technological developments in digital and hybrid radio plattforms as well as the international tendencies for public radio services. Together with representatives of EBU’s research department TRE discussed further possibilities for collaboration with the EBU as its archives and other sources may provide rewarding ressources for academic pursuits.

TRE’s Alexander Badenoch (left) and Per Jauert chaired the event.

Meetings with the entire project and Ars Acustica

Kate Lacey (University of Sussex)

One of the main missions of the workshop was to inform the extented “TRE-team” about the work of each project. So all individual projects were presented and discussed in detail. In addidtion to that, some of our associated partners presented some of their projects that are closely to TRE’s core ideas. Those included for example the Europeana Sounds project and also the BBC World Service’s archive, that has been made public with recordings of the last 45 years of the programme. Another highlight was the keynote given by Kate Lacey on “Listening Publics in a Transnational Context”, which will be available on our website soon as video on demand.

In addition to the regular workshop schedule (PDF), TRE and its partners met with EBU’S Ars Acustica group at Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) to present both its work and the planned TRE-platform, which will be an online tool to analyze audio files collaboratively. The platform is based on the CHAOS system, which was developped during the LARM-project that PI Jacob Kreutzfeldt helped co-ordinating. The rest of the shared evening was dedicated to talk and the performances of sound artists Kiko and Marold Langer-Philippsen.

Here are some impressions of the workshop:

The MOOC “Transnational Radio Stories” is meant to take the online learning (or eLearning) options one step further by bringing scientific competences from different countries and universities together. TRE will participate by presenting some of its research’s preliminary outcome, share theoretical concepts and methodological approaches.

The MOOC is set to be held in Summer / Autumn 2014. MOOCs in general are open to the public – so anybody interested might join us then. Also we are working on an agreement so that both BA/MA-students can receive credit points for their work.

In this panel PIs Peter Lewis and Caroline Mitchell presented their research approach for their TRE individual project on Community Radios in the UK. Alexander Badenoch shared his ideas and a prospect for working transnationally with digital archives. Also, a group of students from the University of Halle-Wittenberg, including our research assistant Tom Leonhardt, presented the outcome of a pre-study for TRE’s individual project 1. The contribution discussed their approach of “Identifying Key Criteria for Comparing Foreign Radio Programmes from the Listener’s Perspective”.

The other panels  addressed the conference’s main issues digitization and archival infrastructures – just to name a few – from different and promising angles.  As the whole conference was recorded, you should expect to find more material and information at the conference’s website. We’d like to recommend you to watch the four fascinating keynotes that are already online.

Per Jauert and Golo Föllmer, both Principal Investigators in TRE, visited Tampere in Finnland to hold talks on the history of radio in the light of Finnland’s 90-years-of-radio commemoration on November 1st 2013.

At the LARM Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, all Principal Investigators plus a number of Project Members and Contributors will attend several panels touching on the issues at stake in TRE, while a whole panel will be dedicated to Transnational Radio Encounters itself.

January 2014 will see the launch of TRE’s podcast series, reporting on topics, events and people involved in the research as well as the knowledge exchange practiced here.

March 2014 will for the first time bring all people involved in TRE together in one place: The headquarters of the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva, Switzerland. TRE will hold its first interdisciplinary workshop there, bringing scholars and practitioners together in order to discuss infrastructural changes evoked by the ongoing digitization of radio.

More details soon.