With the prompt given for the preperation tasks having to “Turn on a Radio and Take Notes” and not currently having access to a radio of my own at the moment I decided to stretch the prompt a little to take some time to go through some London based radio broadcasts. taking notes on anything I found interesting.
My first choice of station was Smooth Radio, which I listened to for around 10 minutes, catching an ad break, a short news programme and some music. From what I noted, all of the speaking in the adverts and talking from the presenters have a homogenous tone of feign glee in their voice, which I found incredibly irritating and mildly hypnotic, as well as finding that there seems to be an aversion to leaving even a second of empty space, with each advert bleeding into the next rather than stopping and starting, which created a near delirious state of listening. On that line of thought, beyond the advertisements the need to have music be playing as a soundbed behind the voices is also another method to avoid any second of silence, and the sound ducking in and out when they talk is strangely tiring. The overall experience leading up to the actual music playing was insufferably dull and I found no joy in it, the music was not so good either.
My second choice of radio station was the Christian Radio station called Premier, which started with a plea for donations to play before connecting, before going to adverts which I found to be quite entertaining, they had the same kind of radio pacing and tone in how they would speak but they cared less about leaving gaps, and would have little patches of empty space between ads about whatever service they were offering (maybe it is more of an amateur or genuine approach than what Smooth was depending on if having no silence is benefitial). When the ads ended I noticed the host of the program had no sound bed which gave him speaking more of a serious demeanour dispite the same kind of radio voice forced demeanor as the last station. It seems I tuned in at a good time because he was repeating that “It’s going to be all over tomorrow, we just need 15 people to donate £100”, appealing to faith for donations stating “Will you be the first to donate £100? What you’re doing then is guiding more people to Jesus”. They then played a caller who talked about how much joy she got from being a patron to their radio show, with the host saying “she was fulfilling God’s plan for her and also for Premier” which I found funny. By the time the music started fading in (some kind of Christian Pop seemingly made to grift money from people with faith) I was ready to tune out, this excercise has given me a brief idea of what popular radio is structured as but it hasn’t instilled a lot of love for the format for me I must admit.
I liked this experience with the Christian Radio station though because of the seemingly purpouseful use of radio conventions to kind of decieve an audience that might be more perceptible to donating into doing so, elevating and dramatising his presence with a lack of sound bed and using the radio call in as a way to further instill the need to donate into an audience’s brain. I want to further explore how radio can be used to manipulate an audience and exploit the medium in a similar way.