No description available.

This study examines talk-radio relations in advance of digitisation, testing the continuity of patterns of listener formation, to assess the accuracy of claims that 'interactivity' and individuated informational flows are demand-driven. Australian talk broadcasters are shown discursively creating a living 'thirdspace' or 'real virtuality' of transactional locations. Listener-caller participation arrays varying social orders across this imagined-yet-real terrain. Radio talk thus becomes a 'euphemised' form of social pre-dispositioning power, differentially locating power across communities. Four sets of talk-radio texts are examined in detail, using a socially contextualised form of linguistic analysis. Transcripts from 2UE's 'The Stan Zemanek Show' reveals an openly-gendered and more covertly classed discourse. The address to private rather than to public 'selves' in late-night sex-counselling talkback is examined. The study then examines programming from the community radio sector of volunteer-produced, local radio transmission. Finally, the study examines 'The prison show', a community radio music request and message programme for Aboriginal prisoners. The study concludes by suggesting that talk radio's role within cultural formation is complex in its articulations, but deeply implicated within the major cultural formational activities of contemporary consumer culture, on which are being modelled digital audio broadcasting's newly intensified flows of interactivity / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis argues that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s sound art program The Listening Room has been , both through broadcasting and related activities, a major factor in the life and growth of sound art in Australia. The thesis also argues that, internationally, The Listening Room is accepted as a leading member of the world sound art community by its contribution to the artistic development and wider recognition of the genre. In order to examine the influence of The Listening Room, interviews and case studies with Australian composers and overseas producers and observers are recounted and analysed. Finally, pertinent data from historical summaries, interviews and case studies are conflated to demonstrate the depth and significance of The Listening Room. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 601-626).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 139-142).

The 1980s and 1990s saw two major changes in the political economy of the media and the world economy at large: technological advancement and transfer and privatisation. There were significant shifts in media industries: newspapers, broadcasting, cinema and telecommunications when governments begun re-regulating their air waves so as to permit private satellite transmission via both encryption and free-to-air, in addition to public service and private channels. In most societies where these changes have taken place, public service broadcasting has been threatened by the rapid rise of commercial institutions, resulting in stiff competition for audiences. This study set out to determine the extent to which commercialisation, in the era of liberalisation and commercialisation of media services in Uganda, has affected Radio Uganda’s programming. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of investigation, I have established that while Radio Uganda still maintains certain public service principles and values, programming policy has increasingly been changed by commercial considerations. This is shown by the recent rise of commercial programmes and a fall in education and developmental programmes. Limitations of finance and other resources have compromised the roles and character of public service radio programming. The majority of programmes currently on Radio Uganda are evidently geared to attract advertisers rather than serve the public interest. The study recommends, among other measures, that the licence fee be developed as a source of revenue for Radio Uganda. Secondly, government should inject more funding into public service broadcasting institutions to supplement other sources of income, before granting them autonomy. Thirdly, while advertising and sponsorship brings in a considerable amount of revenue, it should not take a central place that undermines the listener’s interest in radio programming. The Broadcasting Council should therefore map out solid policies that will systematically guide Radio Uganda in its programming in the new order.

This thesis focuses on the problem of using text-to-speech (TTS) to synthesize speech with natural-sounding prosody. I propose a two-step process for approaching this problem. In the first step, I train text-based models to predict the locations of phrase boundaries and pitch accents in an utterance. Because these models use only text features, they can be used to predict the locations of prosodic events in novel utterances. In the second step, I incorporate these prosodic events into a text-to-speech pipeline in order to produce prosodically appropriate speech. I trained models for predicting phrase boundaries and pitch accents on utterances from a corpus of radio news data. I found that the strongest models used a large variety of features, including syntactic features, lexical features, word embeddings, and co-reference features. In particular, using a large variety of syntactic features improved performance on both tasks. These models also performed well when tested on a different corpus of news data. I then trained similar models on two conversational corpora: one a corpus of task-oriented dialogs and one a corpus of open-ended conversations. I again found that I could train strong models by using a wide variety of linguistic features, although performance dropped slightly in cross-corpus applications, and performance was very poor in cross-genre applications. For conversational speech, syntactic features continued to be helpful for both tasks. Additionally, word embedding features were particularly helpful in the conversational domain. Interestingly, while it is generally believed that given information (i.e., terms that have recently been referenced) is often de-accented, for all three corpora, I found that including co-reference features only slightly improved the pitch accent detection model. I then trained a TTS system on the same radio news corpus using Merlin, an open source DNN-based toolkit for TTS. As Merlin includes a linguistic feature extraction step before training, I added two additional features: one for phrase boundaries (distinguishing between sentence boundaries and mid-sentence phrase boundaries) and one for pitch accents. The locations of all breaks and accents for all test and training data were determined using the text-based prosody prediction models. I found that the pipeline using these new features produced speech that slightly outperformed the baseline on objective metrics such as mel-cepstral distortion (MCD) and was greatly preferred by listeners in a subjective listening test. Finally, I trained an end-to-end TTS system on data that included phrase boundaries. The model was trained on a corpus of read speech, with the locations of phrase boundaries predicted based on acoustic features, and tested on radio news stories, with phrase boundaries predicted using the text-based model. I found that including phrase boundaries lowered MCD between the synthesized speech and the original radio broadcast, as compared to the baseline, but the results of a listening test were inconclusive.

No description available.

O tema deste estudo é a concepção, a realização e a recepção dos programas educacionais radiofônicos irradiados entre 1935 e 1950, em especial, dos seguintes: Viagem através do Brasil, de autoria de Ariosto Espinheira e veiculado pela Rádio Jornal do Brasil, Tapete mágico da Tia Lúcia, elaborado por Ilka Labarthe, e Biblioteca do ar e Ouvindo e aprendendo, criados por Genolino Amado e irradiados, de início pela Rádio Mayrinck Veiga e posteriormente pela Rádio Nacional. Os autores destas programações eram rádioeducadores, oriundos da Rádio Escola Municipal (PRD5), e que conjugavam os preceitos educacionais ao formato dinâmico das atrações comerciais. O objetivo foi analisar não apenas a trajetória destes rádioeducadores, como também seus conceitos de educação por meio do rádio, suas táticas para a conquista do espaço na grade de programação das emissoras comerciais e as diferentes formas de recepção de suas produções. A elaboração de tal estudo exigiu a localização, classificação e interpretação de fontes escritas e orais tais como ofícios, livros, periódicos, cartas de ouvintes, scripts e gravações de programas, disponíveis no Museu da Imagem e do Som, na Casa de Rui Barbosa, na Academia Brasileira de Letras, na Associação Brasileira de Educação, na Biblioteca Nacional, na Sociedade Amigos da Rádio MEC, na Biblioteca Regional da Glória, no Arquivo Nacional e no Centro de Memória da Rádio Nacional. A pesquisa foi estruturada em cinco capítulos. No primeiro capítulo foi realizado o estudo das primeiras experiências de intelectuais brasileiros com a radiofonia e as disputas pela implemetação da educação por meio do rádio em nosso país. O segundo capítulo analisou o debate em torno do teor que era considerado educacional na programação das rádios, durante o processo de expansão comercial, ainda nos 1930; neste âmbito situaram-se as disputas, assim como as redes de sociabilidade construídas em torno da radiodifusão educativa, que foram promovidas pela Confederação Brasileira de Rádio, fundada em 1933, sob liderança de Elba Dias e Roquette-Pinto, assim como, e a criação, no ano seguinte, da Rádio Escola Municipal (PRD5). O terceiro capítulo aborda o conteúdo elaborado para irradiação da Biblioteca do ar, de Ouvindo e aprendendo, da Viagem através do Brasil, do Tapete mágico da Tia Lúcia . No quarto capítulo apresenta-se o estudo sobre as formas de realização destes programas. No quinto capítulo estuda-se os modos de recepção destas programações a partir de duas perspectivas: as condições técnicas e as interferências no cotidiano dos ouvintes. A presente pesquisa pretende não apenas contribuir com novas visões sobre a história da educação por meio do rádio, como também ampliar a compreensão sobre o papel dos rádioeducadores na história do rádio brasileiro. / This study is focused on the conception, performance and receipt of educational radio programs broadcasted within the period between 1935 and 1950, and particularly the following: Viagem através do Brasil, conceived by Ariosto Espinheira and broadcasted by Jornal do Brasil Radio, Tapete mágico da Tia Lúcia, created by Ilka Labarthe, and Biblioteca do ar and Ouvindo e aprendendo, created by Genolino Amado and initially broadcasted by Mayrinck Veiga Radio and, subsequently, by the National Radio. The authors of such programs were radio educators from Rádio Escola Municipal (PRD5), who combined educational principles to the dynamic format of commercial attractions. The purpose was not only to examine the career of these radio educators, but also their concepts on education through radio, their tactics to conquer space at the program scheduling of commercial broadcasting companies, as well as the several forms of receipt of their productions. Drafting such study required the location, classification and interpretation of both written and oral sources, such as official notices, books, journals, letters from listeners, scripts and programs records, which are available at the Museum of Image and Sound, at Rui Barbosas House, at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, at the Brazilian Association of Education, of the National Library, at the Society of Friends of the Ministry of Education and Cultures Radio, at the Regional Library of Glória, at the National Records, and at the Center of Memory of the National Radio. The research was structured in five chapters. The first one focused the study of the first experiences of Brazilian intellectuals with radiophony, as well as the disputes involving the implementation of education through radio throughout our country. The second chapter examined the discussions on the content of radio programs that was deemed as educational, during the process of commercial enhancement, still at the 30ths; within this context, we referred to the disputes, as well as to sociability nets built around the pedagogical broadcasting, which were promoted by the Brazilian Confederation of Radio, founded in 1933, under the leadership of Elba Dias and Roquette-Pinto; we also analyzed the foundation of Rádio Escola Municipal (PRD5), which occurred during the following year. The third chapter addresses the content prepared for broadcasting of Biblioteca do ar, Ouvindo e aprendendo, Viagem através do Brasil and Tapete mágico da Tia Lúcia. At the fourth chapter, we present a study of the ways of performance of such programs. At the fifth chapter, we studied the forms of receipt of said programs under two perspectives: the technical conditions and the ways of interference thereof at the listeners routine. This research is intended not only to contribute with new visions of history of education through radio, but also to improve the understanding on the role played by radio educators in the history of Brazilian radio.

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy