Media/culture journal issue on audio

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Podcast scholars are invited to consider submission to our special edition of M/C Journal (‘A Journal of Media and Culture’). Articles of up to 3000 words are welcome and creative work engaging with the theme will also be considered.

Sound is a physical phenomenon. It propagates as acoustic waves through space and time via physical media including solids, liquids, and gasses. Humans have spent much of our cultural history producing and replicating sounds. We might call the creation of sounds meant for human hearing by a closely related word: audio. And from audio spring the means of production, chief amongst them for the last 150 years being radio. Radio waves also occur naturally, although human culture tends toward their unnatural conjuring through our technologies.

Audio and radio content production and distribution have transformed in the face of the cultural, technological, and political development of the Internet. Like other media, broadcast radio has converged and submerged with digital technologies and global high-speed transmissions, now divorced from its physical, terrestrial, and local origins. Sitting at the crossroads of radio and participatory media is podcasting (Berry, “Podcasting”; Berry, “Will the IPod Kill the Radio Star?”), a medium through which individuals, groups, and organisations can create and distribute audio storytelling on the Internet. Industries, individuals, and communities continue to grapple with these technologies. The foremost podcast platforms seek to own the distribution channels of audio just as they and others have come to dominate text, video, and visual media online.

We invite submissions to this issue of M/C Journal that investigate and illuminate the transformation of audio in these recent decades. Authors are encouraged to explore responses, emergences, possibilities, and histories that might illuminate where audio content has come from, what it is now, and where it is going.

Possible topics for this issue include, but are not limited to:

  • Historical transformations in audio/radio/sound production and their role in the emerging systems
  • Case studies of podcast producers, industries, and audiences
  • The relationship between audio, radio, and sound
  • Local/global audio
  • Pedagogies of audio/radio/sound
  • Audio and politics
  • Audio platforms, emerging or established
  • Audiograms and audiographs
  • Sonic branding
  • Storytelling in audio formats
  • Career pathways and possibilities in modern audio environments

For information and submission details, please see https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/information/authors#audio