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A new audio play called “Phantom Power: A Brief History Of The Ghost In Our Machines” will be performed live online during the AES Fall 2020 Show to celebrate the 100 anniversary of commercial radio broadcasting in the U.S.

All those cryptic buzzes and beeps your engineer has been hearing over the years may be coming from a mysterious source.

Maybe it’s the “Phantom Power.”

That’s the amusing scenario being proposed by an audio play called “Phantom Power: A Brief History of the Ghost in Our Machines,” which will be performed live online on Oct. 29 during the AES Fall 2020 Show. Group-produced by the HEAR Now Festival, Soundbooth Theater and SueMedia Productions, this original audio play was created to celebrate Radio@100, the 100th anniversary of commercial radio broadcasting in the U.S.

[Read: AES Show to Look at Podcast Studios]

The backstory: Exactly 100 years ago — on Nov. 2, 1920 — an audio engineer was trying to get the very first commercial broadcast on air. Somehow, his work ended up pulling him into the machine itself and he found himself trapped forever in the radio waves. This engineer, nicknamed Phantom Power, spends the next 100 years fighting off the ghosts that live in the machines — and all those cryptic buzzes and beeps — and trying to get free.

When the play’s story begins, it’s the year 2020. It’s Halloween. And strange things are beginning to happen at the fictional radio station WDMB.

The ghostly hero, Phantom Power, begins to make his presence known at WDMB. A few days shy of the 100th anniversary of commercial radio broadcasting, the ghosts that live in the machines — that only Phantom Power can defeat — begin to appear. The morning show team at WDMB, who have since March 2020 been quarantining together at the studios while continuing to broadcast, begin to reminisce. They ruminate about broadcast history and previous technology, and in doing so acknowledge all the accomplishments that have come before them — of the engineers, DJs and producers that have curated and cared for radio over the last 100 years.

The idea for this production came about when producer Sue Zizza of SueMedia Productions was asked by AES Broadcast Chair David Bialik to create a special event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of commercial radio. Zizza has been producing special educational and performance events for the AES Broadcast Track, which has been a staple at the AES annual convention, since 1997.

After an email exchange with Ralph Scott, the public relations chair for the HEAR Now Festival, the team brought in audio playwright Butch D’Ambrosio to create a play that looks back on commercial radio’s rich history. This is familiar territory for D’Ambrosio” At last year’s AES show, D’Ambrosio wrote “An Intimate Evening with Tesla and Twain,” an audio performance about Nicola Tesla and Mark Twain.

This year’s production differs from other live audio productions in part because it creates the impression that the audience is together in the same room, Zizza said. “Working with Soundbooth Theater has made this production feel as if we are together in the theater or studio,” she said. “This past June, when HEAR Now went virtual and took the festival completely online, we found that Soundbooth had been experimenting with live performance and had found ways to minimize latency issues that can defeat many ‘zoom performance’ events.”

Jeff Hays

The production features cast members Jeff Hays, founder of Soundbooth Theater, as well as actors Gary Francis Furlong, Annie Ellicott and Laurie Catherine Winkel. Soundbooth’s Ahmed Mahmoud will be engineering the live performance using a variety of software including StreamYard and Steam Deck. David Shinn of SueMedia Productions is the event’s technical director, who will ensure the performance’s web stream will be accessible to AES attendees. HEAR Now intern Rory Stevenson has created the prerecorded sound effects.

By honoring radio’s past, Zizza said, today’s radio professionals can be a better shepherd in the future.

“We should appreciate those who came before, their inventions, and the time they invested to give us the ability to reach each other over the airwaves,” she said. “If we continue to honor the past, we will get to create the future and the next 100 years of broadcasting, wherever that leads.”

Those interested in listening in to “Phantom Power” can register for the AES event here.

 

The post Watch Out! The “Phantom Power” Is Coming this Halloween Season appeared first on Radio World.

In this document, the Commission eliminates the radio duplication rule, which restricts the duplication of programming on commonly owned stations operating in the same geographic area, for both AM and FM stations to reflect technological and marketplace changes since the current version of the rule was adopted in 1992. This approach will strike an appropriate balance between fostering our public interest goals of promoting competition and diversity and affording broadcast radio licensees greater flexibility to address issues of local concern in a timely fashion, facilitate digital broadcasting by AM stations, and ultimately allow stations to improve service to their communities.

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Latitude Media, LLC enters into Consent Decree to Resolve Political File Investigation

Forum Communications, Inc. enters into Consent Decree to Resolve Political File Investigation

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A rescue mission unfolded on the afternoon of Oct. 20 as three maintenance workers ended up trapped high up on a television tower in the Elsanor/Rosinton, Ala.,  area. It unfortunately ended tragically, with the death of one of the workers, according to the Baldwin County Sheriff department.

According to WPMI(TV), the local NBC affiliate, the workers had climbed the tower, which houses the antenna for WJTC television and a local radio station, to repair a guy cable as part of an ongoing maintenance project. Witnesses on the ground reported that at about 1,300 feet debris may have struck one of the individuals, with the other two locking in place.

Two of the workers were able to be rescued and sustained nonlife-threatening injuries. The other worker unfortunately died before being brought down.

The maintenance workers were from a company in Texas. No names have been released.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the incident.

For more information, read coverage on myNBC15.com.

The post Alabama TV Tower Accident Results in One Death, Two Rescues appeared first on Radio World.

For the first time in the last six years — since Edison Research study began tracking audio consumption as part of its Share of Ear measurement efforts — podcasting’s share of all audio listening has hit a new all-time high.

The findings were revealed at the Podcast Movement virtual conference in a keynote address by Edison Research Senior Vice President Tom Webster. The latest findings show that the share of time that Americans age 13 and older spend with podcasts as a percentage of all their audio listening has tripled to 6%, up from 2%, in 2014.

[Read: Listening Is Shifting Back to the Car]

“Podcasting has become the greatest companion medium,” Webster said. “Not only can you take it with you while you do other things, but we also see people turning to podcasts for a sense of community and connection during a very stressful time.”

The growth in podcast listening has been steady according to Edison’s research over the last six years. In the Share of Ear report released in Q3 of 2018, podcasts had risen one percentage point over the previous four years to 3%. That report revealed that large chunks of listening time were allocated to other channels like YouTube (11%), streaming audio (14%) and AM/FM radio (46%). In the two years since the 2018 report, listening levels for podcasts has risen another three points.

The Share of Ear Report looks at how the average American divides their listening time among the listening platforms — including AM/FM radio, streaming music, owned music, satellite radio and podcasts — and looks at where and through which devices consumers listen to audio.

 

The post Share of Listening to Podcasting Hits All-Time High appeared first on Radio World.

Ken Webb

Editor: I have been a subscriber to your magazine for awhile now and I particularly like the articles and your relevancy. For example your Aug. 19 issue “WWV/WWVH Stand Ready to Fight Global Chaos.” The article mentioned the “mass solar ejections” from the sun.

I was particularly interested in this article because in the late 1960s and early 1970s a “sun-storm” began its peak interference with shortwave communications in the worse way. I remember I could hardly hear WWV with my shortwave receiver.

This activity by the sun discouraged me because I couldn’t hear with my home-built equipment. I no longer found it fun to “work” the 80-, 75-, 40-, 20-, 15- and 10-meter amateur radio frequencies with code or voice.

That was disappointing because at 12 years old I became a ham radio operator (WA2BQM), related here in Newsday a few years ago.

I left off my amateur radio world still with a love for radio and electronics but managed to have a great career as a New York radio personality on major stations in the New York Tri-State area. In 1982 I produced, from my home studio, a weekly international radio syndicated show, “Jazz From the City.” Since 2005 I have held down the morning show on SiriusXM, Channel 49, “Soultown,” 6 a.m.–12 noon Monday–Friday.

I was able to pursue this path because of the technical training I received in my young days as a little 13-year-old ham radio operator. Please read the article and see who took the time with a neighbor’s son to teach this little guy to pursue his life-long love — radio.

I also appreciated the Sept. 2 issue of RW featuring black engineers Tobias Poole, David Antoine and Ben Hill. I too have “pulled many a cable,” “wired and soldered many a wire,” “built many a radio and TV studio and antennas” (including my home studio) so I well-relate to the many challenges that they overcame and still maintained a built-in love for their work.

The post Letter: Sun Storm Influences appeared first on Radio World.

The author of this commentary is media solutions account manager of ENCO Systems Inc.

Artificial intelligence and radio have a long and fruitful road ahead.

We all know AI is used to detect faces in photos and videos — and it’s really excellent at understanding natural language too. Not just the words being said — but who’s saying them, and so much more.

An area we’ve seen dramatic improvements in from AI is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), with real-time accuracies now higher than ever attainable before. With products like ENCO’s enCaption (tailored for the radio industry), true speaker independence is achieved, with an on-premises solution that’s fast and reliable.

ENCO’s been crafting ASR products since 2006, and radio automation software for even longer — the marriage of the two is a powerful tool radio stations can use to mine their voice content (live and recorded), to better monetize, repurpose and create.

We even offer solutions whereby you can navigate audio recordings by viewing their captioned words on a screen, enabling you to click on them to navigate through the recording. Say goodbye to laborious and inefficient audio scrubbing!

Indeed, ASR is the key entry point to so many additional methods of analyzing, reporting and even understanding the spoken word.

This is excerpted from “AI Comes to Radio.” Read the free ebook by clicking the image.

ENCO’s enCaption-based ASR and radio tools allow you to deliver the spoken word to your listeners as live text to websites, searchable logs and transcripts, video captions (open and closed), and even captions delivered to car radio head units and streaming endpoints.

The same ASR text can help your producers and writers gain a treasure trove of additional data to work with, to help find nuggets of information hidden deep within their interviews.

Smart AI can help indicate who’s talking and for how long, or even the meaning of what’s being discussed, and where the topic is going.

Interesting things start to happen when you have such voluminous amounts of data. For your ad sales or underwriting teams, an AI can automatically determine where the Live Reads took place, and dump that to an audio clip (and text copy) for later review and sharing.

How about a computer-generated summary of an entire interview, in a single paragraph? AI can help with that, too.

The intimacy of radio suggests AI can never replace humans on the air, since the power of radio and voice needs far more than simple intelligence to be compelling.

But AI’s not just for autonomous vehicles and facial recognition — because when combined with well-designed software focused on the specific workflows of news and talk radio, it becomes an essential tool to aid your creative teams in making sense of your growing content, and gain greater value from it.

This is just the beginning.

The post ASR Is a Key Entry Point for AI appeared first on Radio World.

Congratulations to our colleague Mark Persons for receiving the John H. Battison Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Broadcast Engineers! His latest article is about lightning damage and is featured on page 8.

Also: Best of Show at IBC winners … Laurence Harrison of the World DAB UX Group on the growing role of metadata … Benjamin Lardinoit of On-Hertz on advantages of software-defined infrastructure … and a look at technical gear behind KDKA’s famous first broadcast.

Read it online here.

Prefer to do your reading offline? No problem! Simply click on the digital edition, go to the left corner and choose the download button to get a PDF version.

Connected Car

Audi AG Launches Hybrid Radio in U.S. and Canada

Christian Winter wrote his master thesis in 2012 about hybrid radio, so he knows a little about the topic. He explains and updates what we need to know about it as its uptake is spreading.

Audio Gear

TZ Audio Stellar X2 Microphone Shines

This petite cardioid condenser retails for $199.99. Frank Verderosa found its performance remarkable.

Also in this issue:

• Zoom as a Research and Promo Tool
• Metadata: Keeping Radio Strong in the Car
• The Advantages of Software-Defined Infrastructure

 

The post Inside the October 14 Issue of Radio World appeared first on Radio World.

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FCC Releases Agenda for ACDDE, Internet Association and Media Bureau Virtual Tech Supplier Diversity Opportunity Showcase to Provide Financial, Tech, and Procurement Information and Resources for Small, Diverse Businesses