Transcripts For CSPAN3 Preservation Of Archival Audio 20160320

Are at startup mode at this point. Delightedy is to host todays session and sees this conference as an important step in the library punish mission of helping to preserve s cultural mission. Near members tell me the includes canada and that the far includes australia. Heards quite a standard there are around 100 organizations represented, with many more individual serving as Research Associates for this project. We at the library of congress are genuinely grateful for all the enthusiasm, planning, and the effort that has brought this about. That radio has played a vital role in the last 100 years of our history. There are more than 14,000 Radio Stations in the United States. Mid1920s until the 1950s, radio was the preeminent source for entertainment and news information. It was an irreplaceable part of our sociocultural heritage and a key part of our social memory. Many libraries and archives have recordings, but there have been few systematic efforts to collect commercial Radio Broadcasting and document and preserve the entire range of broadcast in public and private collection. Luckily, now there is an to preserve public radio and television. That still leaves the vast expanse of commercial and independent nonprofit radio that is found at the national and local levels. As you all know much better than i do, radio preservation presents unique challenges. The magnitude of the material produced and its ephemeral nature. So much was never captured, or if recorded, has disappeared due to neglect. Ownership of radio itself has changed frequently, especially following deregulation in the 1990s and preservation efforts have suffered. The library of congress released thatational sound bank produced several influential reports as well as a landmark study in 2010. One of the 80 or so recommendations found in the plan was a charge to establish a subcommittee to develop strategies and tools to collect and preserve radio broadcast content. It went on to say, and i quote, among the subcommittee pot first action should be the convening subcommittees first action should be the convening of a symposium. Are, and i hope this will be a productive day for all of you. Thank you very much for being here. [applause] true scannell as is often of people who have the desk in the building, jane will have to move on and do library things. Three people have been the primary players in putting this together. Room . H shepherd in the wave your hand again. [applause] i think the real name of this operation is joshs army. A lot of you are here because of josh. The majority of you are here for his effort in pulling together researchers from around the country and beginning to get the Radio Preservation Task force off the ground. The third person, and there are many others. Their acknowledgments are towards the end of the program. The third person who has been the program head, the program director, is michelle helms. I should note about michelle and josh and me. We all share a madison, wisconsin, background. [applause] josh and i both got our doctorates in madison, admittedly a few years apart. Michelle retired just last year, i think, and you had been there two decades . A little more. Has just retired, and i am talking with michelle because i need to learn about that retirement thing, which i have not done very well. I am at g. W. And taught for a period of five years. Thought i was retired and was asked by the dean to come back as an associate dean. Its about time to hang this up. This gets overdone. As you will see, over the coming two days we have put together a very eclectic program with a lot people coming from very. Ifferent parts of the industry where we are like and dont have enough people, though we tried, is more people from the commercial side of the business. We have lots of people in public broadcasting. Ray. That is great hurray. That is great and important. We dont have a look from the commercial side. A lot of that is deregulation, changing ownership of the station. The first thing the owner does when walking in the door is chuck the history because they cannot figure out how to monetize it. If we had been sitting in this room and doing what we are doing two decades ago, just before the 1996 telecommunication act, i think we would have had a better chance of finding things which sadly, since then, have disappeared. Let me turn this over to introduce our keynote speaker. The me turn this over to michelle. Michelle . [applause] michelle so nice to see the people in this room, because it has been a long process of bringing people together, emailing. I feel i have committed communicated with everyone in this room. I dont know what you look like. Thank you for being here. I want to say thanks so much to josh, whose efforts have pulled this conference together in so many ways. I think that chris tends to be modest about his own role and a competence. I have to say, and i am sure most of you know this, that talk about someone who wrote the bible on american broadcasting history. Stay tuned. How many of us have that on our shelves . Im sure the vast majority. Also bringing us here. I dont want to throw these words Like Washington insider around lightly, but you have certainly been here. [laughter] here you are heading up the task force. Am i allowed to Say Something about the National Recording Preservation Board and your new position as director . [applause] anyway, it is really a fortuitous coming together of so many things. I will introduce our speaker in a moment because i know we want to get to this, but thank all of you. This program is your effort. All the people who are on the task force, program committee, put together workshops, submitted papers, agreed to chair caucuses. Thank you all for doing this. I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of the next few days. What we were think when we were thinking about a keynote speaker at the conference, and we are delighted to have so many keynote speakers, we all agreed immediately that we could not think of a person we would rather invite to be our opening let me try that again, our opening keynote address speaker then professor paddy scannell. He was one of the pioneers of radio studies and media history. He is a great influence on my own work. In the early 90s when i was starting to write about american broadcasting history, i was looking for a model. Outas his book which came in 1991 which was a huge influence. This is the kind of history that i want to write. I want to say it is the kind of history that all of us here today would say it is why we are here. It is a book that said radio history or broadcasting history is not just about the march of networks, not just about business tightening, not just about technology, but its about the way that broadcasting has become integral and into the dna of our culture, our society, of our lives, everyday experience. It is what makes radio such an integral part of our cultural and why it has grown to be what it is. We are finally getting recognition that it is so preserved to be studying this that we are studying today. We are finally beginning to preserve it. I give patty complete credit for this whole thing. I really do. It was a wonderful book. I has done more, which will explain in a moment. Paddy scannell joined the department of communication at the university of michigan in 2006. He had alreadys went about he had already spent 30 years building one of the first undergraduate degree in media at the in the u. K. University of westminster, london. He is a Founding Editor of the journal of media, culture, and society which began publication in 1979 and is still going strong. His works not only include a social history of british broadcasting, but another one, broadcast talk. It is an edited volume that came out in the 1990s. It is a compilation of work. Radio, what is it . It is talk. What kind of talk . Very influential book. Another one, Radio Television and modern life in 1996, which theorized the way media is integrated into the structure of everyday life. Some people, having done all that, would be slowing down. In the early 2000s, patty announced that he was about to embark upon a trilogy of new works, three works that build upon each other, and by gosh, he has done it. The third is underway. The first volume came out 2007 was hailed as a magisterial overview of the development of thinking about the media from the 1930s to the present day. The second volume, television and the meaning of life, came out in 2014 and it has been called a brilliant and provocative look that enriches and deepens our understanding of the central role of broadcasting. The third volume has the provocative title, love and communication. I am ages the waiting for that one i am anxiously waiting for that would. Someone wrote a book called sex and television. What was it called . Sex and broadcasting. That is a catchy title. I think that love and communication maybe more so. Given his pioneering leadership in the field, there is no one better suited to open our conference this week and then paddy scannell. Please welcome him. [applause] prof. Scannell [laughter] thank you. Thank you very much, michelle, for that wonderful, if not slightly intimidating introduction. I am already beginning to feel that i am a hard act to follow. [laughter] all i can say, people, is i will give it a go. One of the things that i loved many years ago, when you get invited to do Something Like this, is always check the small print. I got an invitation about 30 years ago to give a keynote in italy at the invitation of the italian public broadcaster. A conferenceis about radio documentary. I said, yeah, i can do that. I did know something about radio documentary. There, andually got the evening before i was about to stand up to do what im about to do now, they said, you know, its about the shortform documentary, dont you . No, i didnt. And actually, id never even heard of shortform documentary. I thought it was going to be talking about what i do know about, the beginnings of what i think we would have to call longform documentary. This is a gathering from all over europe of people working in radio were particularly interested in a new, off on guard genre of 92nd documentary. [laughter] saying, iself am privileged to be talking to you about the shortform documentary and, im going to start with the longform documentary. [laughter] i went on from there. You may be wondering what that has to do with today. Into josh, you know, who along with michelle kindly invited me to come and do this, i bumped into him about 6 00 yesterday evening and i said, high, josh, we chatted a bit. I said, by the way, i am only talking for 20 minutes, or type . And he looks at me and says, no, no, youre talking for 45 minutes. I had again that sinking feeling. [laughter] check the small print. What i want to say, folks, is ift this, i had produced, you would like, a shortform talk only to discover that i was doing a longform talk. So if there are lots of pauses and meaningful silences [laughter] i hope you will forgive me. This, weod side of might finish a bit earlier than usual, which is not a characteristic feature of events like this. Mind, let me start. I assume that all of us i think i am speaking to, as it were, three audiences. Im talking to people interested archives,king in sound archives, i am talking to people working in radio and in the radio industry, and i am talking to colleagues like myself who have a long time radion for the study of broadcasting. As i see it, what i want to talk , hopefully are the things that unite us all. Mentioned that my third book is indeed going to be alled love and communication, and i am assuming that what all of us have in common is a love of radio. It always occurs to me to say, yes, i love radio, and it never occurs to me to say i love television. I found myself thinking about why that might be. I partially hope that in terms of what i have to say about radio, is that it might explain what it right mean to say, as i think we do, that we love radio. What it is about radio that has this distinctive and special quality. Our i want to talk about as itlated things that, were, bring us together at this occasion. As for the question of radio itself, i will try to address the question of what is radio as ,uch, and in relation to this the underlying question of the sound archive and the question of the recording of radio. Much of what i have to say is about what i am doing now, namely, talking. What you are doing now, namely, listening to me and hearing me. Start onike to reflecting on the intimate relationship on hearing and listening. They are not the same thing. We say things like it is not the same thing to say i hear the radio as it is to say i listen to the radio. It is not the same thing to say that i see the television and i watch television. They are different, but related things. When we say i hear the radio, i think what that means is in ordinary usage that i have come into the house and i realized that i left the radio on and i hear the radio as i come in. It is not the same as listening. Think, and what belies much of what i have to that what we listen to in radio is what people are saying. We listen to the content of their speech. What we hear and what you are hearing now as you are listening to what i am saying, what you are hearing is my voice. It is these two things that are intimately connected in the power of radio as a medium and the experience of listening. I will be exploring the relationship between hearing and listening in relation to radio itself. Then i want to reflect on, again, what it is that we hear when we listen to recordings of radio programs. I will also be speaking to, and michelle has suggested, historical radio. British and american. In what i think of as the classic, or the golden era of radio, before television came theg and displaced it as dominant, taken for granted medium in everyday life for whole populations as it was for the people of america and britain in the 1930s and the 1940s. It begins to be superseded by television in the postwar decade. So, my overall theme is what i shall be trying to reflect on, the gift of the archive and the , which of the gift invites us to think about that and given by and large and by virtue of its gift, is very largely taken for tonted by us when we listen voicesio and hear the thatspeak to us and also sing to us and for us. With the to start experience of listening to the radio. Im going to take as my beginning point the thought of ine radio listeners back 1942, here in the United States, and their experience of listening to a very famous american broadcaster, kate smith. Data for what i have to say from a book that i academic historians already broadcasting have read, Robert Martins classic mass persuasion, which was, as many of you will know, a study of the impact and effect of a marathon broadcast by kate smith, probably the most famous radio singer of her time in american broadcasting. Over the course of a very long day, she came to the microphone 16 hours orutes for listeners and to urge them to buy war bonds. She did it so successfully that at the end of the day, people bought war bonds to the tunes of 40 million, which was a staggering figure for that time. The question that perplexed murphy, the theologies from the Sociology Department of columbia university, one of whom found the bureau for radio research, what on earth was it about her that produced this magical effect . Im going to start with what listeners said about their experience of listening to kate smith and her broadcast. Here is what they said. This is a selection of quotations from the book. She was speaking straight to me. You would think she was a personal friend. I feel she is talking to me. It seems that she is sitting in your kitchen and talking to you, the way it would be with a friend. She is spontaneous. Her speech is not forced. It is natural. It makes me feel i am talking to my neighbor over the wash line. This in spite of the fact that what kate smith was saying was, in fact, scripted, and listeners new that they were listening to scripted talk. Other notes and accounts martin notes and accounts for this effect as cumulative. Through this day, there was reciprocal interplay from the audience, who not only responded to smith, but she was responding to the audience and modifying subsequent remarks as a result. O, and this is the key, martin notes, the usual scripted monologue became something of a conversation in spite of the fact it was scripted and in spite of the fact that listeners new this, and yet smith, as if she was speaking in her own voice, not as the mouth we the mouthpiece of others. Something, you know its what their agent has written down. With kate smith, she talks just what she thinks. Smithyword that captures s listeners was sincerity. This is in effect of not what she says nor whether it is scripted or not, but of how she says it. To her believe in the sincerity of what smith is saying because she sounds as if she believes in what she is saying in spite of the fact she is reading scripted words by others. A distinct and specific cause for their belief, and smiths genuine patriotism, voice asefer to her genuinely sincere. It is her speech. When she asked for anything, she gives it everything she has got. It is hard to explain. She says sincere. It is in her tone. No matter what she says, you sit there and listen. She talks as if she herself is going through all that. What she said, she really felt herself. You knew she wasnt just reading a script. This is the upshot of what the data disclosed that listeners believed in smith because they heard in her voice that she wast the words that she herself reading. They got on the phone and asked what she and did what she ofed them to do to the tune 40 million to the american war effort. I he had not read mass whenasion some years ago i was working on one of the books that michelle kindly mention in her introduction, Radio Television and modern life. In it, i had a chapter about a very famous british wartime ainger called zero and ver lynn. Vera lynn produced the same effect for british listeners for listeners. They heard her when she sang at the microphone as genuinely sincere, that she meant, as it were, which he was saying, the words that she saying in the same way that american listeners heard kate smith. As a singer, too, i might add, but on this particular occasion, as a speaker, they heard her as sincere. Vera lynn, her most Famous Program was called sincerely yours, vera lynn. It was a combination of vera lynn talking, scripted, reading scripted, but it was conversational, in a program in which she saying as, so to speak, the representative of all the girls back home speaking to broad inoys over a many parts of the world on the various fighting fronts at that in the second world war. Fact that the discipline of sociology did not exist in england at this time, so we have no sociological studies of the impact of this very famous british wartime broadcasters. We do have the responses of the daily press of the day, and they were unanimous. It is not only her fresh, young voice, but, there is no other word for it, it is her sincerity. Or again, it is not only be completely natural, unstudied quality of her seeing that reaches out to peoples hearts, there is no other word for it it is sincerity. I was intrigued by this. You could not explain this sudden outbreak of sincerity at the microphone in two Different Countries at exactly the the effects of some mysterious process of crosspollination across the atlantic. That ino the conclusion order to explain, first of all, sincerity as aof distinctive feature on radio and ,lso a deep appreciation of it that the way to understand it of that it was an effect technology. In truth, an effect of the microphone. I mentioned jack parador name now because i will be coming back to him, and i hope that does not put off at least half of my audience. [laughter] if not more. Quite the man that you think it is. It is not the dreaded author of matology, that we all found intolerable when it came out. Versionmuch later before his death in 2004. Inspirationerlying of what i am working towards. Fair warning at this point, or are freehate darad to leave at this moment. Have pragmatices functions that manage the scope and scale of their use. The microphone is a device for the amplification of sound and, as such, has implications for the social proxemics of the human voice and action. Already output is reducible to two basic categories use it and talk music and talk. The microphone has profound consequences for the way the human voice is deployed as it speaks or sings in front of it. Music is the easiest way of filling airtime. Present,start to the most of radio consists of music of one sort or another. In britain, in the very early broadcasting, when singers came into the radio studio to perform at the microphone, it was immediately discovered that they needed to stand six or eight feet away from the microphone because if they didnt, they would blast the eardrums of listeners and shortcircuit the equipment. Timeng in public at that required voices capable of ,illing a large auditorium whether in opera house or a music hall, without the use of any technology to amplify the sound produced by the singer. Theserofoundly aware of two funny little black things that are less than a foot away from my mouth as i speak. Along, all came performers in public, all singers, learn to pitch their voices loud and strong. These techniques developed over the course of the 19th century as the venues for performance, certainly of opera, grew larger. Larger auditoriums and much bigger orchestras, and learning to, as it were, to project your orchestra andull to a large opera house required a very special technique. The microphone transforms the proxemics, that is to say the social space in social relations , of singing. In the 1930s, singers at the microphone discovered that they could stand close to it and lower their voice and thereby produce a quite different experiential effect for listeners. Micnew technique of close singing was developed in the usa and britain at the same time. It was called crooning at the time. It was not a term of endearment on either side of the atlantic, and it was a style of sin ging that was, to begin with, controversial in britain and here in the United States. I think i want to say that what is true of the social relations of singing in public, as it were, were transformed by the microphone. There was much debate about whether or not a real singer would use a microphone to perform in public. If you think about miking up the performers at the met in new york, this would produce shock and horror all around. There was much objection. Two early singers who use the microphone, they did not have good voices. They had weak voices that needed the artificial support of the microphone rather than people realizing they are producing in it entirely different producing an entirely different kind of singing, a different relational experience between singer, song, and listener. It is also true of social relations in respect of public talk before radio came along. I ask myself the question, what was talk in public . Or inn the United States the United Kingdom . It seems to me that it largely herested of what we have a speaker and an audience in a defined public space. Public speakers, the three characteristics on russ that come to mind immediately are what im doing now, a lecture, or the sermon, or the political rally. These were the most familiar forms of Public Discourse in the early decades of the 20th century. In all of them, a public speaker addresses the crowd. Each has a distinctive performative rhetoric, a style of speaking that marketed as a lecture, as a sermon that marked it as a lecture, as a sermon, as a political harangue to abuse the opposition and rally the faithful, and we have plenty of examples of them right in this moment in this country. In all these cases, it is a onetomany form of address, when a public speaker im not speaking to you individually or personally now. I am addressing you as a mass. It is a form of mass communication. Transformed the notion of talk in public. The two allowed in personal ersonal voice of the speaker into the voice of someone speaking as a person and speaking to others as persons, too. This was the effect that produces the sincerity affect of the listeners to kate smith. They heard her as if she wasem speaking to him or herself personally. I have long thought that this is a very distinctive and peculiar form of communication. I wrote a paper with a hideously anyonetitle called for and someones structure some years ago. When everyone is listening to the radio or watching television knows that millions and millions of people are at the same time listening to what they are listening to or watching. Everybody knows this, and yet everybody hears it in their own situation, in their own if it speaks, as to me. It speaks to me as someone, and as the same time, i know that it speaks to everyone, someone, everyone as someone. Me that there are two kinds of what i want to call care structures in broadcasting. There is a technological care structure, and there is a production of care structure. The production care structure attends to the management of what it is that we hear as we listen to the radio. I would like to reflect on what it is and say a little bit more about what we hear in the human voice as it speaks at the microphone. You hear many things all at once. Age and sexs the of the speaker. It tells us where the speaker comes from. It tells us something of that social class. All, what we here in the voice as it speaks or sings is animus, the soul of another human being. In the animation of the human voice as its face, we hear the being of the speaker animated and brought to life. It is not in effect of what is being said, but of the way it is being said. It is the brain of the voice revealing how it is with us in our very being as we speak. Perhaps against the grain of what it is that we are saying, so that our voice may sound tired, edgy, happy, board, excited, and much more. What we are hearing in the voice is how the speaker in the very moment of the announce a rater annunciatery moment, the present moment. It is a moment of hearing and listening. Other inl talk to each noninstitutional, everyday setting, but the production of , but it involves a degree of production and management, whether scripted or unscripted. It is not a natural thing, talking into a studio. Radio was in a studio. In the studio, the anxieties of Live Performance are always presence. It is a scary thing, folks, doing what i am doing now, as any performer knows. Any performer experiences stage fright at the thought of standing up in front of a bunch of strangers who are staring at him or her, as you are looking at me right now [laughter] and far more famous performers than me have literally frozen at the thought of going on and doing it live on stage in the theater. It is interesting to google stage fright and see the names. The most famous actors and singers. Barbra streisand, for one, very famously froze in the middle of a Live Performance and could not do it for 20 or 30 years. Let me reflect on the terror that haunts Live Performance. It lies in the fact that if something goes wrong, there is no escape from it. It is immediately obvious and visible. You cannot hide it. It is not like writing. It is not like the movies, where you can endlessly retake the same shot, if you love it. I dont know if you have seen hail caesar , but it has some of, who ises more famous than George Clooney . Forgetting his lines and flubbing the shot up, and the other wonderful scene of , iting the cowboy to say isnt. By ralph fiennes. I digress. Digression is part of my business of filling in a little time. [laughter] had unaccountably not taken into account in my preparations for my performance. So, one of the key things that i have learned, and my most recent book, which is about doing it live. Live radio and television. Liveness innt of negatively are concerned with damage limitation. The is to say, anticipating possibility of technical failure on theformative mistakes hand,nd, and on the other there is crucially the positive commitment to, and i cant think of a better way of putting it, of bringing it to life. Radio and ofof television is not an effective the technology. The effect of the technology is immediacy. The effect of liveness is the brings the that event to life in such ways hopefully as to engage the attention and enthrall the audience for whom the Live Performance is being proposed. I mention this quite simply because one of the key things, i think emma in understanding the development of radio, certainly in the United Kingdom, was the gradual letting go of scripted talk at the microphone. I think it is true to say that just about everything that was broadcast by the bbc before world war ii was, in fact, scripted. This had two benefits. One, it gave the broadcasters total control of everything that was said at the microphone. It was a form of institutional control and, in fact, censorship. If they did not like what you are going to say. They were always scared that people might just go off script and Say Something they were supposed to. Negatively, it was a form of control. , it functionednd as a safety net for speakers and the manifest and manifold anxieties involved in speaking at this strange, inhuman thing here, the microphone. Let me begin to draw together the implication of these matters in relation now to the question of recording and the question of the archive and what it is that we hear when we have access to the data in the sound archive. To question is how to listen dataear the historical that the archive contains. All recording technologies are, one way or another, a collection of history. No recording technology, no history, for history is first and last a matter of record. It was a slightly haunting thought for me as an early historian of Radio Broadcasting that what i was doing was a kind of archaeology as much as a history, because there was no record of the output of the bbc at all in the 1920s because they did not have the recording equipment to, as they used to say in those days, to bottle programs. And so, i found myself, for instance, reconstructing the origins of radio news without ever knowing what, in fact, a single news broadcast sounded like. The first recording, to the best of my knowledge, in the bbc sound archives of a full radio infamous is from the september 1938, when neville chamberlain, the british prime minister, came back with a scrap of paper promising peace having negotiated a wholly bogus, as he thought, deal with hitler in munich. The question of technologies of recording is one that is deeply fascinating, and i know that iny of you are interested and knowledgeable of the history of sound recording. I obviously do not want to begin to get into that here. I do want to make one fundamental observation about the recording device, all recording devices. The key thing that i want to say oppositeed is not the of live. [laughter] my time is up, or my number is up, sorry. Ive got to take it. Always overwhelmed, jack darador always said, when i hear the voice of someone who is when i see a not, photograph or image of a dead person. I can be touched presently by the recorded speech of someone who is dead. Affected by a be voice beyond the grave. For darador, the recording of the voice is, in his own words, one of the most important phenomena of the 20th century. Presence theving possibility of being there a new that is without equal and without precedents. The defining or logical characteristic of the human voice as it speaks worse things it has to bes brought to life in ways that i yet to show, but talk dies in the announcement of its enunciation. How can it be known what is spoken . For you shall speak into the air. These are the famous words of history to the and the title of the book the history of the idea of speaking into the air, in which john takes as two. Aradigms of communication ofh of these two very terms two paradigms of communication is a paradigm of love. Medication as dialogue, in the example of socrates and the phaedrus, a conversation about love between socrates and a. Ounger male friend and the paradigm of communication as dissemination. Not as oneonone, reciprocal medication, communication as dissemination. This is the model for jesus practice as a teacher and as he thended it famously in parable of the seller, in which jesus prophesies a discourse on his message and as a teacher. The scary thing on his talk, and in the words early practitioners of radio, its impermanent. The ghastly impermanence of the early pioneerry in radio documentary in the u. K. Most perishable things. Without the redemptive power of technologies of sound recording. Death and resurrection, time and time again, whenever we play and archive. He sound of a the voices on records, i am open to your comments about this. Andi thought about this, the voices that we hear when we press the play button or not ghosts that return to haunt us. Again byked, derrida a seal of authenticity and a presence that no visual image could ever equal. Has reale says, presence. Those of you that are thinking about rheumatology about gr ammatology will be stunned to hear this. Someone who was about the metaphysics of presence. Resurrection from death is no longer a miracle that the people believe, nor as real presence, a metaphysical conceit to be deconstructed as the author of the younger author of g rammatology did. So i want to say that sound recordings are not a trace of the dead past, like a photograph, which is always as poignantly argued, a memento mori, a lifeless image trapped in the moment, which is banished forever. The photographic record haunts us. Cinema speeded up photography in 24 frames per second, was silent to begin with and needed music to animate the images to dispel light on them. The movies came to life when they became the talkies. Likewise, the television. It is sound, not vision that brings television to life for all of us. It would be absurd, a meaningless experience, to watch a game of soccer or football or anything you like on television with the visual on and the sound off. Thus, i think it is a basic mistake that television studies, as distinct from radio studies, ofd to fall into a thinking television as a visual medium. It isnt. Its not a visual medium like painting or photography, which are purely visual. Nor is it in any close way like cinema, which was in the first place, a purely visual medium with sound added later. In fact, television is the reverse of cinema. Television is, as we all know, the offspring of radio. It brings vision as added value to its parent medium of sound. Audiobefore vision, visual. Television without sound is meaningless. The power of television, derrida again, i will move to my conclusion with a line from Samuel Taylor coleridge, the last line of his beautiful conversation of poem my prison. He is imagining his friend, william wordsworth, and his sister dorothy, returning home from a walk in the countryside as dusk falls and as the rooks fly creaking overhead before they settle down in the trees for the night. The final line of the poem is no sound is dissident which tells of life. I simply cant agree with keith with keats that heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. These famous lines you know are urn. His ode to a grecian but in fact, the ode to a grecian urn might as well be called an ode to a photograph it is an ode to what we see, not what we hear. We need the ode to a nightingale for that. No hungry generation pressing it down. The voice i hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by emperors and clowns. Bbcs radio 4, that Great National talk Radio Station and National Treasure for the british middle classes, npr is over here recently read over a whole year, monday to friday, a tweet o the day just before the 6 00 morning news. In 90 seconds, a british bird was introduced by an expert starting with the legendary david envelope david nboroughh david atte talking about a kookaburra and the recording of its own. A tiny exquisite recorded moment of pure living sound. Item running out of time ia running out of time, i feel, and running out of words to capture. What i think is so new and que about sound archives they are proof that life itself can be archived. And this, i want to suggest, is the miraculous gift. Thank you very much. [applause] no sure, comments, questions, responses . I would be very grateful. [indiscernible] [chatter] hi. I can also speak loudly. Hello . Testing. You were talking about the power of television and film. [indiscernible] what i have to say doesnt speak to the death community. The deaf community. Im wondering if you have any sound quality as we go to preserve these, archivist or making choices of quantity over quality, given the size of our collection. What should we be thinking that we are sacrificing too much in trying to get a lot through . Are we losing some of that quality that you describe, what we hear, as opposed to what we listen to . That is a very interesting question. Question ofet the the technical quality of the sound, if i may. There are many things that are wonderful to listen to, where the actual quality of the recording itself is not that great. The question of what counts, if you like, or worth preserving that is a question that haunts any archival question. That ourthink that what we want is a record for future generations is that they will be able to hear what it was like for the people of the dead from the generations of the dead, what it was like spiritually for People Living like experienc ially. A sound archive is not going to be defined by the voices of the famous. By politicians or of academics or of purchased or of artists, intellectuals. Either much think quality i very much think the quality of any National Archive pendant on is going to be dependent on the archives containing the everyday experiences overall numbers overall members. Talk between two people, usually family members, sharing an experience. This is being archived in the National Archives. I very much think that a National Archive must have this kind of material, as it is bedrock. Thank you for your remarks today. In our era, when the definition of radio seems to be changing or challenged, i am curious to hear your sense of radio pandora, i heart radio, podcasts the proliferating number of Podcast Technology available. Many which call themselves radio. But traditional radio people argue that it is not. What you think radio is today . How would you define that, given all of the changes . You catch me on a stick here. Im going to answer as a brit than as an american. I think im going to speak to my experience of british radio. I hope this is an answer to your question. But i do think national Radio Broadcasting systems Radio Broadcasting is crucially important as distinct from all other ways of having access to radio content. What is distinctive about broadcasting, and i dont think it is properly understood. There is a hideous tendency to think that television is just about content. That is all people talk about, content. But in relation to radio and television broadcasting, what matters is that all broadcasting is live live and in real time, through the date, from day to day, all day, and every day. And it is only in this way, through the incremental, silent, endless repetition, the reiteration from day to day so that we wake up in the morning and we listened to morning edition, as i always do. And i come home every day here in the United States and i listened to on point. In the u. K. , when i am cooking a meal at 7 00, you bet i will have radio 4 on and listening to the archers. That is what every decent middleclass person does. [laughter] pullt for my punches, my punches, you see . It is about the embeddedness of a service that is adjusted to the structures and routines of everyday life itself. States and united , there are programs that are well loved that have been running and actual characters grow old and die at the same age as listeners grow old as well. So i hope that is something of an answer to what i think is of the enduring qualities of broadcasting as the most fundamental gift of the technologies of both radio and television. There is a lot of talk about the end of broadcasting. I dont see it myself anytime soon. Us trying toof preserve audio history, who come transcriptionch in bad shape, should we be making an effort to clean that up, to make it sound better than than medium it was actually on . [laughter] prof. Scannell that is a great question. This point i dont have an answer to it. But i would be very interested in sitting in on an opportunity to discover precisely that question. Possibleay or tomorrow. In the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, there were a lot of articles that talk about radio announcing. It said specifically the words you used. Is not so much what he said, but how he said it. About acle in 1927 broadcasters rollicking style. [indiscernible] she did a diction program on nbc during the late 1920s through the mid 1930s. Arthur godfrey. Back in the 30s, he said exactly even before the 1942 broadcast of kate smith. Minuter, kate did a 15 noontime talk program. Only about 10 of those programs existed, that is why it was not known. She had done 34 years worth of buting, not singing, talking to the radio audience. Prof. Scannell id appreciate what you are saying. That information. Is that theaying thing we now take for granted as the most natural thing, namely talk on radio, was something that had to be discovered. That people had to learn how to do it. But it is a specific kind of form. The most extraordinary thing is that talk literally is prehistoric until sound recording comes along. Writing is as old as recorded history. Talkow people talk, what sounded like, how people related to each other through speech we dont know until radio and television came along. Whicher the extent to radio and television has contributed to helping us all to learn to talk to each other in new kinds of ways. It used to be said of television that it kills talk. I cant think of a more idiotic to say about television. Radio and television gave everybody things to talk about outside and above their own thatience, in ways hitherto had been simply impossible. We have a question way in the back. Maybe we should follow up and have a chat. What you said you got me thinking when you insert the question about what radio is. It resonates with what you are saying about the realtime, and that living experience. On the other hand, what you emphasized about the immediacy and sincerity of the voice over the radio i feel like a Younger Generation is not experiencing that through the internet. Personally, i have a 19yearold. The follow and experience the same things of identification, connecting with this voice. I feel like a lot of her generation hasnt lost again, innell appreciate what you are saying. About theays feel radio do students listen to radio . No they dont. But as they get older, they will. Ive often thought that radio is a medium for grownups. But in a serious kind of way. Immediately replay what i just said. Talk radio means Something Different for me as a brit. For me, talk radio means radio and i realize it means a quite different kind of discourse very often over here. But what i think i want to say in relation to the question of authenticity, sincerity is that radio, in fact, and then later television, foregrounds all of these questions. We should always remember that authenticity is something that can be faked. There is such a thing as fake authenticity. And a lot of american advertising appeals to precisely some notion of the fake real. Students are very open to the questions of authenticity. For the students, all these questions are posed by the obvious fakeness in authenticity of everybody performing reality television. [applause] [chatter] i am a history buff. I enjoy seeing the fabric of our country and see how things work and how they are made. I love American History tv for american artifacts. It is a fantastic show. With American History tv, it gives you that prospective. On the cspan family. Each week, American History tvs american artifacts visits museums and historic places. Up next, a visit to philadelphias National Museum of American Jewish history for a tour of their core exhibition, tracing the history of the jewish people in america from 1654 to the present day. Trunk froma steamer a family that attempted to immigrate in 1939 on the ms st. 3937, a luxury ship with passengers from germany to cuba. Both most of these people were jewish and had visas to enter the u. S. At a later date. They were going to wait out the time period before that in cuba. When they arrived in havana, they realized that their landing permits were fraudulent, they had been sold to them by a corrupt government official. Only a few people were able to get off the boat in cuba. The Jewish Community in america scrambled to figure out how to get these 930 people rescued to america. Ultimately they were unable to do so because the quarter system was so strict. The quota system was so strict. The ship had to return to you to europe. Joseph who was on the ship with his wife, was part of the Passenger Committee that the captain of the ship, who was not jewish, organized in order to raise spirits of the passengers on their trip back to europe. People were terrified what would happen when they had to get off the ship again. This particular family made their way to america the halloween year. Off the shipught in great britain. The following year. In 1997, we got a call from an auction house. A friend of the museum. He had this steamer trunk that had been put on consignment. He was looking at it and noticed a sticker that said st. Louis on it. He knew about the journey of the st. Louis and called us. He asked us if we were interested in the trunk. He very generously purchased it from the consignor and donated it to the museum. Its now one of our really special artifacts here. By 1944, it was widely known that the holocaust was happening in europe. We were immersed in world war ii. What the government was doing to help the european jews. Wrote a long report after studying the subjects. They titled it on the does government in the murder of the jews. Morgan condensed this report, presented it to roosevelt. Several days later refugees were instituted few peoplet, very were able to come here. More went to england or other places. You can watch this and all other American History tv programs at cspan. Org history. As the director of military and Veterans Affairs in ohio, many veterans have come into my office to talk about who they want to vote for. It is your civic duty to get out and vote. Many things are at stake with this election, so do your research and vote for the candidate that best supports your causes. Hi, my name is todd. I am here supporting bernie sanders. He is one of the most important candidates right now. He is the most surprising alternative to a mainstream politician. He is the most progressive has has the most progressive ideas for the country. I would encourage everyone to go out and support burning, if possible. Support bernie, it possible. College tuition is important this year, as well as jobs. When college kids go to school, they know how to pay for it in afford it, as well as when they leave college, what their future is going to look like. Who is trying to bring jobs back into the u. S. As president of the college democrats, i feel those of the two biggest issues for an election cycle. I was going to vote for bernie sanders, but i ended up going for hillary because she seems more knowledgeable and has been in the political environment before. Shes met country leaders, she has been secretary of state. She has seen the inner workings of the white house and how the game goes. On lectures i