This study examines the culture of Yiddish radio in the United States during radio's golden age. Ari Y. Kelman explores the dynamic relationships between an immigrant population and a mass medium and between audience and community. By focusing on voices previously excluded from radio histories, this treatment of non-English-language radio breaks new ground in the study of both American mass media and immigrant culture. Yiddish radio directly addressed the everyday lives of Jewish immigrants, while providing them with invaluable guidance as they struggled to become American. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, radio created a virtual place where Jewish immigrants could listen to voices like theirs and affirm the sound of their community as it evolved, particularly in light of World War II and the years that followed.

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop's performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York's African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.

Rebecca Front presents this two-part look back at Victoria Wood's stand-up and songs using her own archives and tapes - including never-before-heard material Victoria Wood was a comedian, actress and all-round national treasure. She wrote and starred in countless sketches, plays, musicals, films and sitcoms over four decades, winning numerous awards, and her work remains timeless to this day. With her perceptive observational humour, she made the everyday and mundane hilarious - but how did she do it? In this BBC Radio 4 documentary, Rebecca Front uses Victoria Wood's personal rehearsal recordings, rare live performances and behind-the-scenes footage to reveal some of her comedy tricks and techniques. We hear about her instinctive sense of rhythm, amazing rhyming ability and unerring knack for finding the perfect word to make a sentence sing, and learn how she honed her unique talent to become one of Britain's favourite funny women. With unprecedented access to Victoria's own boxes of battered cassette tapes, this programme is a shameless chance to hear some wonderful stand-up comedy, characters and songs, mixed with a look back at what made her so funny and so universally loved. Executive Producer: Geoff Posner Produced by David Tyler A Pozzitive production for BBC Radio 4.

Born out of interviews with the producers of some of the most popular and culturally significant podcasts to date (Welcome to Night Vale, Radiolab, Serial, The Black Tapes, We're Alive, The Heart, The Truth, Lore, Love + Radio, My Dad Wrote a Porno, and others) as well as interviews with executives at some of the most important podcasting institutions and entities (the BBC, Radiotopia, Gimlet Media, Audible.com, Edison Research, Libsyn and others), Podcasting documents a moment of revolutionary change in audio media. The fall of 2014 saw a new iOS from Apple with the first built-in "Podcasts" app, the runaway success of Serial, and podcasting moving out of its geeky ghetto into the cultural mainstream. The creative and cultural dynamism of this moment, which reverberates to this day, is the focus of Podcasting. Using case studies, close analytical listening, quantitative and qualitative analysis, production analysis, as well as audience research, it suggests what podcasting has to contribute to a host of larger media-and-society debates in such fields as: fandom, social media and audience construction; new media and journalistic ethics; intimacy, empathy and media relationships; cultural commitments to narrative and storytelling; the future of new media drama; youth media and the charge of narcissism; and more. Beyond describing what is unique about podcasting among other audio media, this book offers an entry into the new and evolving field of podcasting studies.

For the last 70 years, the guests of Woman's Hour have been entertaining listeners with their compelling combination of wit, warmth, insight and humour. Woman's Hour has interviewed many of the biggest female names from entertainment, politics, the arts and beyond. Words from Wise, Witty and Wonderful Women is a collection of quotes and extracts from 70 years of the Woman's Hour archive, featuring some of the most memorable guests to appear on the programme, from Doris Lessing to Nora Ephron, Hilary Clinton to J.K. Rowling, and Bette Davis to Meryl Streep. Charting the social and political revolution that has taken place in women's lives over the past 70 years, as well as the perennial aspects of female life, such as love, family, relationships, the workplace, sex, ageing, and food, this delightful book shares fascinating insights and sage advice from the wise and wonderful women that have graced the Woman's Hour airwaves over the decades.

In this book my father dies. I almost die.*** My showbiz career winds down. And yet everyone keeps telling me it's the funniest book I've ever written. If I'd known that's what the public wanted, I'd have cancelled Pets Win Prizes and just got sick sooner. Along the way this time we encounter, among others, David Bowie, Kanye West (I think), John Cleese, Peter O'Toole, and have several adventures in the Fourth Dimension. Oh, and I can reveal the Man With The Foulest Mouth In All Show Business. Plus assorted high-kicking hoopla and a whole lot of rather stark stuff about what it's like to be told you could be On The Way Out. *** (SPOILER ALERT: I don't actually die.)

This new revised and expanded edition of Reality Radio celebrates today's best audio documentary work by bringing together some of the most influential and innovative practitioners from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. With a new foreword and five new essays, this book takes stock of the transformations in radio documentary since the publication of the first edition: the ascendance of the podcast; greater cultural, racial, and topical variety; and the changing economics of radio itself. In twenty-four essays total, documentary artists tell--and demonstrate, through stories and transcripts--how they make radio the way they do, and why. Whether the contributors to the volume call themselves journalists, storytellers, or even audio artists--and although their essays are just as diverse in content and approach--all use sound to tell true stories, artfully. Contributors include Jad Abumrad, Daniel Alarcon, Jay Allison, damali ayo, John Biewen, Emily Botein, Chris Brookes, Scott Carrier, Katie Davis, Sherre DeLys, Ira Glass, Alan Hall, Dave Isay, Natalie Kestecher, Starlee Kine, The Kitchen Sisters, Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, Maria Martin, Karen Michel, Joe Richman, Dmae Roberts, Stephen Smith, Alix Spiegel, Sandy Tolan, and Glynn Washington.

The radio programme Desert Island Discs has run almost continuously since 1942, and represents a unique record of the changing place of music in British society. In 2011, recognising its iconic status, the BBC created an online archive that includes podcasts of all programmes from 1976 on, and many from earlier years. Based on this and extensive documentary evidence, Defining the Discographic Self: Desert Island Discs in Context for the first time brings together musicologists, sociologists, and media scholars in one volume. They reflect on the programme's significance, its position within the BBC and Britain's continually evolving media, and its relationship to other comparable programmes. Of particular interest are the meanings attributed to music in the programme by both castaways and interviewers, the ways in which music is invoked in the public presentation of self, the incorporation of music within personal narratives, and changes in musical tastes during the seven decades spanned by the programme. Scholarly chapters are complemented by former castaways' accounts of their appearances, which give fascinating insiders' views into how the programme is made and how its guests prepare for their involvement.

For more than four decades Jim Maxwell has called the cricket for the ABC. Since 1973 he has covered over 250 Test matches, including six tours to the West Indies, seven to the subcontinent, over fifty Ashes Tests and five World Cups. His distinctive voice, dryly understated humour and immense knowledge of the game have been part of the fabric of Australian cricket for forty years. In his long-awaited autobiography he reflects on his life and career in a book that is fascinating, warm, nostalgic and uniquely informed about the game he loves and has dedicated his career to.

From Archibald MacLeish to David Sedaris, radio storytelling has long borrowed from the world of literature, yet the narrative radio work of well-known writers and others is a story that has not been told before. And when the literary aspects of specific programs such as The War of the Worlds or Sorry, Wrong Number were considered, scrutiny was superficial. In Lost Sound, Jeff Porter examines the vital interplay between acoustic techniques and modernist practices in the growth of radio. Concentrating on the 1930s through the 1970s, but also speaking to the rising popularity of today's narrative broadcasts such as This American Life,Radiolab, Serial, and The Organicist, Porter's close readings of key radio programs show how writers adapted literary techniques to an acoustic medium with great effect. Addressing avant-garde sound poetry and experimental literature on the air, alongside industry policy and network economics, Porter identifies the ways radio challenged the conventional distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow cultural content to produce a dynamic popular culture.

In Writing Music for Commercials: Television, Radio, and New Media, professor, composer, arranger, and producer Michael Zager describes the process of composing and arranging music specifically for commercials across the growing variety of media formats. Writing music for commercials requires composers not only learn the craft of writing short-form compositions that can stand on their own, but also understand the advertising business. In this third edition of his original Writing Music for Television and Radio Commericals, Zager walks starting composers through the business and art of writing music that aims for a product's target audience and, when done well, hits its mark. Chapter by chapter, Zager covers a broad array of topics: how to approach and analyze commercials from a specifically musical perspective, the range of compositional techniques for underscoring and composing jingles, the standard expectations and techniques for arranging and orchestration, and finally the composing of music for radio commercials, corporate videos, infomercials, theatrical trailers, video games, Internet commercials, websites, and web series (webisodes). This third edition has been updated to include more in-depth analysis of the changing landscape of music writing for modern media, with critical information on composing not only for the Web but for mobile applications, from video-driven advertising in online newspapers to electronic greeting cards. Zager also includes new interviews with industry professionals, updated business information, the latest sound design concepts, and much more. Writing Music for Commercials: Television, Radio, and New Media features: *Easy-to-read chapters for beginning and intermediate music composition students *Over a hundred graphics and musical examples *Interviews with industry professionals *An assortment of assignments to train and test readers, preparing them for the world of writing music for various media *Online audio samples that illustrate the book's principles Writing Music for Commercials is designed not only for composers but for students and professionals at every level.

The long-awaited autobiography of entertainment icon Jerry Blavat, You Only Rock Once is the wildly entertaining and unfiltered story of the man whose career began at the age of 13 on the TV dance show Bandstand and became a music legend. Lifelong friendships with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra, a controversial relationship with Philadelphia Mafia boss Angelo Bruno that resulted in a decade-long FBI investigation, and much more colours this amazing journey from the early 60s through today. Now, some 50 years after his first radio gig, Blavat puts it all in perspective in this uniquely American tale of a little cockroach kid" borne out of the immigrant experience who lived the American Dream.