Ayinde Chong: Sounding Out!

            This pod cast explores idea of the “record store” and how the role it plays in society has changed as our values have changed. From the discussion of issues like childhood experience and seeking mentors and role models to how recording artists being challenged by changes in economic structuring of the music industry the listener is guided through interviews and commentary illustrating a chronological transformation.

             Chronologically we as the listener are firstly given an adequate back grounding on the history of the relationship dynamics between recording artist, record label, and record store, this is very important in the timeline for how things were to be laid out digitally making it much more challenging for record stores to maintain relationships with the record stores.

One of the more engaging features about the design of this particular pod cast was the use of recorded interviews on the subject, where people were able to voice their opinions, concerns, and express themselves. This was particularly effective when thinking about the experience or act of listening and the technology with which we use to do it. On the one hand, in many of the interviews people are describing experiences or anecdotes in which they experienced some sort of interaction (usually human interaction) that helped shape the way they listened or heard material they were interested in or exposed to in these record shops. On the other hand You as the listener are listening to a digital recording that to some extent shows how technology has already made the change they may be speaking of preventing. When speaking of their experiences going into a record shop one interviewee speaks of the clerks disgust with the Compact Disc and another interviewee speaks of how she was dissuaded from buying a record both experiences that will be lost with the disappearance of the record store.

Theoretically this cast is pulling from a vast nostalgic source of a sense of familiarity and commonplace and contextualizing it by foregrounding the importance of a music culture as sound sense. The cultural contexts are already there they are things we can relate too. Someone mentions having a “shop dog” the sense of “independent business” haven’t we all been there at one time or another at this point??

The production on this pod cast was very limiting in terms of the sonorous object as the segment consisted mainly of interviews however there were quite a few moments as with other radio labs where you could hear sonorous objects peek out from behind the vocals such as the wind chime on a doorbell ding or faint murmur of voices as they attempted to paint a picture of a somewhat more active space using audio.

The interviewing technique was incredible and the mastering was impeccably done on it. I was already thinking of using some sort of cacophony type work in my piece to help guide the listener through space and hearing this only made the possibilities that much more exciting!