For this week we had a guest lecture from Dan Shepard who bases most of his work within radio and podcasts. Prior to the lecture we had to listen to two podcasts that Dan would ask us about in the lecture. One was a podcast about chopping and editing called ‘Cutting Up The Cut-Up’ where they focused on the works of people such as cassette boy amongst many others. This was my favourite of the two podcasts as I found it more amusing and also more engaging. The other podcast was about a train journey through Australia from Sydney to Perth which focused on a range of perspectives. The sonic environment was a lot more in depth than the previous podcast as it was trying to set a scene audibly through the use of fx, textures and other background sound.

 

Dan made a point of pointing out the difference between radio documentaries like ‘Cutting Up The Cut-Up’ and Radio Feature Programmes such as ‘Indian Pacific’ which was the name of the other podcast we listened to. He made a point of saying that features have a wider range of subject matters and generally when working on features you can be a bit more creative with what you do. As he spoke about the production process of the creating a radio feature I couldn’t help but think back of how I could incorporate elements of this into my own soundscape and how the both inter-related quite a bit. Dan led most of the lecture talking about how he produced the content for this feature programme and how he recorded 30 hours of content that went into it, and questions that came through his mind such as how he was going to convey the perspective of being on a train journey through radio.

 

Dan didn’t speak to much about the documentary, but did say that it was presenter led inside the studio, and the primary function of the documentary is to educate the listener.

 

Through this lecture I didn’t really learn much about radio that is useful to my project but, through Dan’s words on the Feature programme, I took a couple of idea’s about working with perspectives within my soundscape and how I can change them up and choose which perspective my listener is listening from at any one point.