So, since I started writing at the beginning of January, I’ve been trying out lots of different ‘background’ radio.

In the past I used to listen to the birdsong on DAB, but it went off-air last year when Amazing Radio launched. I finally got round to trying out birdsongradio.com the other day and it’s a real disappointment.

They’re selling the recording as an mp3 and a CD, so I shouldn’t be surprised that the free streamed version is crap. But still, there’s nothing like having a peaceful outdoor scene interrupted by a woman telling you to “discover relaxation during your day” over and over again to make you want to punch someone, preferably that woman.

Dan got me started on Radio 3, which is great for working to at home, as long as you switch off before you get caught up in some bellyaching 2-hour German opera marathon. It’s not loud enough to block out other stuff happening in the office though.

Clare Teal is pretty good on iPlayer – I like big band music but rarely know the words, so the lyrics aren’t distracting. The problem is, it’s just one hour a week, so by the time you’ve dragged yourself away from Facebook, it’s practically time to put something else on.

My favourite background radio is easily Bobby Friction on the Asian Network. 12 hours a week of loud, inoffensive music, often in a language I can’t understand, with a DJ who doesn’t sound like an arse. Brilliant!

I’ve been itching to play you Walrus under ice, 1983, but it looks like you have to be in the library to access that particular clip. Still, for future reference, if you ever want to recreate the effect, it sounds exactly like someone beating a dustbin with a rolled up newspaper, while jumping up and down in a puddle.

Here’s another archive recording you might like instead.

In the 1920s, Daniel Jones (famous linguist) made a series of Linguaphone records aimed at learners of English as a second language. In this clip you’ll hear two voices discussing the wonders of the wireless. One is Arthur Lloyd James, who advised the BBC on spoken English and produced several booklets of Recommendations to Announcers during the 1930s. The other is JRR Tolkien (who bears responsibility for the dullest three hours I’ve ever spent in a cinema).

Stuff like this is the plunderphonist’s dream. Listen to more here.

Here’s a clip - or you can listen to the whole thing on iPlayer before Thursday night.

One of the benefits of being temporarily unemployed is having the time to recreate what my brain made of the Bishop of Southwark, the Right Reverend Tom Butler.

Dan Stowell, a computer scientist at Queen Mary University of London, demonstrates his research in which he digitally transforms the human voice in real-time to create weird musical instruments and interactive experiences.

Even those of you with no interest in science will want to play Dan’s spectrographic pop quiz. (Open the video and fast forward to 1:36.)

In 2002 there was a flurry of news items about Wes Butters, the 23 year old ‘unknown’ who had been taken on to present the Official Chart Show on Radio 1.

Some of the papers used the phrase “plucked from relative obscurity”, which, given that he already had a successful career in commercial local radio, seemed to mean only that he’d never previously presented an Official Chart Show on a national, publicly-funded broadcaster with the number one in its title.

It was with surprise that I realised it was the same Wes Butters who co-produced this week’s Twice Ken is Plenty: The Lost Script of Kenneth Williams on Radio 4. He admits in the Radio 4 Blog that, “While other teenagers in the nineties were mad for Oasis, I lay in my bedroom listening to cassette tapes of The Goons and Hancock’s Half Hour loaned from Manchester’s Central Library.”

I’d never had Wes Butters down as a radio comedy fan. I was more into Radio Active than The Goons, but it’s still exciting to discover someone else of my age who listened to speech radio as a teenager, and to see the career path that has led them down.

I remember This American Life being warm and witty and homely. Maybe I’m misremembering. We’re listening to episode 362: Got You Pegged and it’s not that special.

A museum assistant gets talking to a 21 year old graduate and thinks she’s a mentally disabled teenager who can’t read. The misunderstanding goes on and on - he’s reading out loud to her, she doesn’t know how to explain he’s got the wrong idea. The story builds up for a full eight minutes and then… they clear up the misunderstanding and apologise.

It feels quite an anti-climax. Eight minutes and they don’t even turn out to be long lost cousins?

The item about the Holocaust survivor is the last straw for Dan. “Of course, she’s dead now,” says the man on the radio. “Every single item in this programme has been bloody dreary!” Dan grumbles and stomps into the other room to listen to Radio 4. I think I might join him.

The current episode is eleven meditations on death. It’s not as scientific or funny as other Radiolabs, but some of the stories are exciting and disturbing in equal measure.

A woman is involved in a car accident and lies in hospital, apparently brain dead. Neuroscientists decide to try a new idea, just to see what happens. They tell the patient she’s going to have a brain scan and tell her to imagine she’s playing tennis – she doesn’t respond of course. They wheel her into the machine and, sure enough, when they tell her to play tennis, her brain activity suggests she’s thinking about playing tennis.

The implications are quite frightening. They don’t say what happened to the woman in the end.

Have a listen – the whole show is interesting, but this particular story starts at 17:47.

They even spelt my name right – bonus!

———————————————————————————————————

VOICES: Legacy of
language project lives on

by Philippa Law

Download clipping (jpeg, 399kb)

‘I’m quite shocked at the horrible things people find to say about each other,’ admitted Ann Thompson, PhD student at the University of Leeds. ‘The phrase ‘A face like a…’ is especially productive,’ she added with relish, before reeling off a list of unsavoury similes.

Thompson was speaking at a linguistics conference, presenting her analysis of the many words for ‘unattractive’ submitted by the public to the BBC Voices website.

The online survey of dialect and slang words attracted more than 30,000 submissions from the public. Thompson is now mapping the geographical distribution of some of those terms, such as ‘twag’, ‘dog’ and ‘nick off’ for ‘play truant’ and ‘kaylied’, ‘blootered’ and ‘stocious’ for ‘drunk’.

Her research is just part of the legacy of the Voices project, which was run by BBC Wales New Media. Voices presented a snapshot of the many ways we speak and culminated in a successful week of output about the languages, accents and dialects of the UK in August 2005.

From Radio Newcastle’s Fraudie to Geordie, to BBC Four’s Pronunciation Night, colleagues from all over the BBC helped put Voices on air.

Having worked on Voices, I was delighted to be invited to take part in the International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English in London in July, and over the moon to discover how well-regarded the project still is.

Our primary aim had been to create fantastic content for audiences, but the conference highlighted the enduring value of the Voices project, well beyond our original ambitions.

Academics and teachers were itching to point out that they still use the BBC Voices website regularly. Almost everyone in the room had a story to tell about how they were using Voices material to enthuse a new generation about language in the UK.

The project also has a personal legacy for me, as I’ve been inspired to leave the BBC to start a linguistics PhD of my own.

I’m going to research audience engagement with media in languages other than English. I’m looking for BBC departments to collaborate on the project. It’s an opportunity to ask in-depth questions about minority language broadcasting and gather concrete evidence about what works for our audiences.

If you produce content in another language – from Gaelic to British Sign Language – and would like to find out more about engaging your audience, email me.

A few years ago I had the notion that I was going to make a crazy radio documentary about ‘framing’ in emails – that is, chopping someone’s text up in order to reply to it in chunks. I wanted Original Message to have the rhythm of an ever-lengthening plain text conversation, with clips of linguist David Crystal repeating himself over and over and over.

It was a rubbish idea. Luckily, figuring out how to represent that structure in linear audio made my brain ache and I gave up.

I’d forgotten all about it until this morning when I watched Hyperland, an infinitely better documentary by Douglas Adams. In it, Adams dreams of a futuristic, non-linear computer world of multimedia content, with Tom Baker playing an obsequious MS paperclip character. All the buzzwords of 2009 are there – which is remarkable given that the film was made in 1990, before you or I had ever heard of the World Wide Web.