Macquarie University

Faculty Member, Media, Music and Cultural Studies

About

Currently convening and developing radio/audio courses in undergraduate and graduate media with the Media, Music & Cultural Studies Dept. Supervisor for Higher Degree students across a range of media subfields.

I am also an active researcher in this field and producer of documentary and performance audio works for electronic public media.

Current Major Research: I am in the process of writing and researching a book, which explores 'the documentary feature',  as form and idea in radio.

This study proposes a radical new assessment of radio, the documentary and the act of listening, in an age dominated by the image (in both critical discourses and media practice). Specifically it aims to chart the development post 1968 of a radio ‘new wave’, characterized by the extraordinary flourishing of the (international) feature or auteur documentary and related non-fiction forms, particularly in European public broadcasting.

Through a close examination of these uniquely radiophonic forms, this research challenges the critical and historical downplaying of radio as a site of rich cultural production and expressive exploration, especially after the introduction of mass television in the 1950s. Critically, through a series of essays, this study aims to engage directly with the key works, experiments and artists, writers, directors and producers in the field.  In doing so, I hope to elaborate a neglected but expressive field and provide a genealogy for what is perhaps the only truly international movement in the field of radio to date.

My study begins with an exploration of ‘cultural radio’ forms and radio documentary within a tradition of public broadcasting, and connects it to wider developments in (mainly film) media and the arts. Original research in a number of contexts takes us to the early broadcast experiments in feature making at the BBC, and to the use of original sound or ‘actuality’ recordings in a range of other countries. It also draws on the French music concrètist Pierre Schaeffer, and experiments in the radio studios of Berlin to Milan to Sydney to Zagreb. This book reflects upon listening in a range of radio contexts – the extraordinary sounds of the ‘Atelier de creation radiophonique’ in Paris (Radio France) – while imagining the potential ‘gift culture’ of a radio being remade for the future, brought to us through the enhanced ‘broadcast’ power of (audio) podcasting and 'streamed media': what I regard as a new and highly fertile ‘pod-ecology’.

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