The way radio is listened to by a mass audience has changed dramatically over the last 100 or so years. From its invention in the early 20th Century and the early use of crystal sets to its rapid development over the century and into the beginning of the 21st Century radio has come a long way.
Crucial to this development has been the way people now listen to radio.
Ways to Listen to Radio
The technology developed by the radio industry and radio manufacturers over 100 years has enabled the radio listener to be able to choose from a number of platforms to listen to their favourite radio stations. From the beginning of radio’s development as an industry manufacturers produced radio sets for the technology available at the time and this included using frequencies:
- Short Wave
- Long Wave
- And AM & FM
With the introduction of digital broadcasting in the mid 1990’s, the scope of technology and rapid development of audio platforms available to carry radio programming now include:
- DAB Radio
- Digital TV
- Broadband
- The Web
- Personal MP3 players
- Mobile Phones
- Satellite Radio
Considering radio as a medium has been broadcasting to a mass listenership for over 100 years, it’s pertinent to consider the whether this rapid development has any effect on the way the radio is produced as an audio source. Should the sound engineer and producers take into account the effect the available and changing platforms, especially in the last decade, might have on their work?
The Use of Sound Effects in Producing Radio Programmes
Leaving aside technological expertise, understanding electrical and computer engineering and the electronic know-how each individual sound operative might feel they need to have, the one skill anyone producing sound needs more than any other, is a good pair of ears. The one ingredient in the toy box of tools radio has is sound effects. This enables it to produce great images in the minds of its listeners. The differing types of sound effects can be categorised as:
- Atmospheres – constant underlying sounds to suggest a place or a time period e.g.: airport terminal, or street with horses and carriages
- Spot effects – as the name suggests these are individual sounds e.g.: a car horn, lion roar etc
- Computer generated effects – technology can be often be used to great effect to simulate all kinds of sounds from submarines to bird calls
- Comic effects – particular sounds associated with humour, clown car, horn honk, spring boing etc
- Human effects – normal and emotional sounds humans make from crying to laughter, sneezing to vomiting are all still called sound effects
Very often radio scriptwriters will use sound effects, as well as music and voices as inspiration and starting point for the scripts they are about to write.
Writing Radio Scripts using Sound Effects
It is often also a helpful suggestion to give the listener some clue, however small, as the sound effects they are listening to and what they should be thinking. There’s an old radio adage that a running tap to the scriptwriter can also be heard as someone relieving themselves in a bucket unless the writer writes the script well. So phrases like:
- SFX Carriages on Cobbled Streets - could be accompanied by a voice over intro as: “1749 Edinburgh was a noisy, dirty, overcrowded city, the smells of which could be felt 20 miles to the south.
- SFX Airport Terminal – the script may introduced by a narrator saying, “La Guardia Airport, your introduction to New York.”
SFX or FX is the common abbreviation for sound effects and the multitude of sounds, as many as there are in the wider world, can be obtained from a number of sources.
- Sound Effects Cds released by commercial music companies, the BBC, and a whole host of independents
- Specialist Suppliers – one of the most unusual are Steam Train enthusiasts
- The Internet – the web has thrown up an array of sound effects supplies both free and paid-for
- Live recording – many good sound producers record their own effects, or build up their libraries from sounds the can access themselves with their own equipment.
Listen to the Radio Output
There is one simple way to judge the impact of technology of your work as a sound engineer or a producer and there is no better way. Recording and mixing sound effects, with music and speech (and of course silence) and listening to the playback in the sound proofed and artificial world of a recording is a necessary and often enjoyable process.
Some engineers always listen to their final mix through a small low quality speaker But if you really want to hear what your listeners hear, the way they do, take some time to listen to your work live on-air and through as many audio platforms as you can. You’ll soon find out what works and what doesn’t.
Dan McCurdy - Dan McCurdy is a freelance writer producer creative and lecturer. Dan is one of the UK's most experienced radio writers and producers. ...
Join the Conversation