# Radio Q

Build your own D.I.Y Radio Station
(ArtScienceBengaluru/The Indian Sonic Research Organisation)

http://artscienceblr.org
http://theisro.org

The Radio Quarantine Station
http://radio.artscienceblr.org

**Dates: August 17 - September 04 2020**
**Timings: Mon,Wed,Fri 11.30 a.m -1 p.m**

**WHERE?**
Use this Link to join the classroom
http://classmeet.chiguru.tech/app/isr-rad-5c87


**About this workshop**

In the month of August you will run the Radio Quarantine Station.

Radio Quarantine ran during the first half of the lockdown in March 2020. During its brief existence, we interviewed scientists, artists, activists and historians, besides also running a regular program of music from around the world.
More information here: [ArtScienceBLR Radio Station](http://radio.artscienceblr.org/)

You will conceive programs, develop and run the radio station. Your responsibilities will include producing programs, interviewing guests and curating shows. You will learn and experience how to develop shows, produce content and execute the show.

You will need basic knowledge of Audio Software and Digital Audio Workstations.

There will also be Masterclasses by visiting experts.

**Resource People**

Umashankar Manthravadi
Savita VijayKumar
Dinesh T.B and Janastu ([e-mail])
Arun Kumar
Sudipto Sanyal(Radio Quarantine Kolkata)

### **PEOPLE**

* **Archit Joshua Balraj**
I am a Bangalore based digital filmaker and student at Srishti Institute. I make films exploring textural links between the visual and aural in my work.***~~<-----Put 10 lines here.
***~~
* **Lisha Thimmaiah**
Information Arts and Information Design Practices Major
I am from Bangalore
I like painting and sketching in my free time.

* **Tavishi Bhardwaj**
Creative and Applied Computation Major
I have moved around India since my dad is in the Airforce.I like sketching and playing around with code.

* **Sudhanshu Rai**
Industrial Design Student-Product Design
I am from Mumbai
I am a Photographer who has experience in working with the advertising industry and yes I like to document my travel a lot, and this is something which I'm missing during lockdown:)

* **Vipra Bhargava**
Creative and applied computation.
I'm from Delhi and i'm mostly intrested in story telling through Illustrations.

* **Stuti Sen**
I'm a third year Visual Communication student. I've always lived in Bangalore, and I love making illustrations.

* **Devansh Pawan**
Information Arts and Information Design Practices
Being an aspiring Information Designer, I have a strong passion for transforming information into meaningful stories, irrespective of its final form or medium. I am a curious person by nature and always up for learning new things.

* **Atharva Rane**
I am from Pune interested in Game designing and playing games. I also try 3d modelling and messing with music and audio production.

* **Kavinn Shanmugam**
I'm a 3rd year student of creative and applied computation but have equal interest and curiosity towards Visual Communication. I like to play with color palattes and minimalistic visual representation. I'm exicted to work on this apprenticeship.

* **Damini Yadav**
I am a Contemporary Art Practices Major
I am from Malawi
i dont have much of a background with tech and software so really new to it

* **Tanay Ashutosh Sathe**
Industrial product designer - in training
Currently starting third year
Quarantine rules apply

* **Swayam Dhupkar**
Visual Communication and Branding Student
From Delhi, currently living in Bengaluru

## SCHEDULE

### **RADIO Q DAY01 Monday 17/08/2020**

**Sudhansu Rai**

Today was a meet and greet session. Everybody got to know each other. We had a small little discussion about how each one of us was feeling. some of us were frustrated with the lockdown and others were happy and inspired.
Some insightful talks on How developing local awareness leads to real development of a society and what role Open Source softwares have in it. Making knowledge, services and products Affordable, Available an Accessible to masses the main goal of Open source softwares. We also understood how Radio is a great way of making technology and growing conciousness for it, accessible and affordable for the needy, cuz in the end everything uses Radio Waves as a medium of communication. Communication is the key to development.

### **RADIO Q DAY 02 Wednesday 19/08/2020**

**Link To the Podcast**
https://we.tl/t-CJq09n02jr

Interview with Mr. Umashankar Manthravadi.
Topics discussed included:
*<someone please fill out></someone>*

**Link To the Transcript**
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Svl9ZTM9e2Okus19qeJ6xkxvkE1-Bz88CuNWn-QHJ3k/edit?usp=sharing

**Hannoi Hannah**
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/opinion/hanoi-hannah-vietnam-propaganda.html

### **RADIO Q DAY 03 Monday 24/08/2020**

- Discuss first interview/broadcast
- Ideas discussion with Dinesh
- Ideas discussion with Sudipto
- Yashas mini Audacity workshop
-Please download Audacity for your respective Operating Systems.

### **RADIO Q DAY 04 Wednesday 26/08/2020**
- Discuss ideas in depth.
- Logistics of developing your first broadcast.
- Re-edit first master-class video.
- Yashas mini Audacity workshop.

### **RADIO Q DAY 05 Monday 30/08/2020**
- Discuss ideas in depth.
- Logistics of developing your first broadcast.

### **RADIO Q DAY 06 Wednesday 02/09/2020**
- Editors discuss broadcast
- Getting ready for final broadcast on Friday
- Editors and content creators discuss final program order and timings
- Yashas' shows how broadcast works
- Frontiers of Radio

## Thoughts on the Class and the Upcoming Podcast

**Archit Joshua Balraj**

The last two classes have been extremely informative. The talks from the faculty have been very illuminating regarding radio today and its history. In making the masterclass, I became more aware of pacing and content. I discovered pirate radio. I enjoyed learning the influence of blues to rock and roll and what is modern pop music today.

For our radio program I think we can broadcast music from local bands to improve exposure which is sorely lacking in all fm stations we tune in to today. I think we can promote students from srishti and other colleges who are singer/songwriters with live performance. I think this concept will attract listeners from a young collge crowd who to genrate a scene for that kind of sound.

**Stuti Sen**

I hadn’t previously considered radio as something particularly important. Growing up it was a source of entertainment in cars, a place to find new music; a comforting presence, if one taken for granted. It’s been interesting to find that everything since then that we have used to replace and improve it still comes from it; the Bluetooth connection I use to play music in cars now, podcasts and playlists on Spotify, literally everything with access to a wifi connection; its effects on education and culture as well are historical and awe-inspiring. So much can be done with radio, and so much has been. One of the most interesting things I learnt from one of our sessions is the fact that one can learn so much about the culture in different parts of the world by simply tuning into a radio frequency in their area (which is possibly made even easier now with online radio). It’s thrilling to imagine the connections created worldwide; stories, music and knowledge shared between strangers from strange places. It makes the rest of humanity feel a little more accessible, a little more relatable.

For the content for my radio show, I wanted to discuss various different mental health disorders- what they are, how they present themselves (and how differently they can present themselves), and misconceptions regarding them. Pretty frequently I find that movies and television shows use mental health disorders in their content, and tend to misrepresent them in order to create “horror” or “thriller” themes, with little to no regard for how people watching can tend to take it as true information. For someone who has to deal with a mental disorder, having to deal with people’s skewed expectations of it as well must be distressing. So additionally, I wanted to find content (movies, shows, music, etc.) that accurately represent and emulate what it is like to be a person suffering from a specific mental health disorder; and considering I wouldn’t be able to share the content because of licensing issues, I wanted to discuss what makes them appropriate and affective. It’s such a huge thing to feel represented and understood, and it can be a matter of great comfort and relief to learn that there are others out there like us, be it through stories or music.

**SUDHANSHU RAI**

Radio is something I've grown up with. I used to have a Philips Radio cum casette player which I used to like a lot and even after having a lot of advanced gadgets around me it has influenced my life since childhood. Being an early 20th century kid, I have grown up listening to stories of Jataka Tales and Panchatantra on my casette player to grooving on my favourite top international hits on my Radio. Even after having devices like a smartphone which has the whole world in it, Radio is something I miss a lot today. Listening to the voices and curated playlists of some iconic RJ's like Ameen Sayani on a low quality+static audio is something difficult to find in this generation of High Res Audio of Spotify app.
Now, adding to this, Radio is present in every device which has wireless medium of transmission. Radio has been more than just a peice of constantly eveolving technology. It was a status symbol, a symbol of auditory culture which has moved generations till it's value started reducing amongst its consumers. Radio has led to the development of several naotable products like I-Pod, Apple Music, Spotify and guess what we have forgotten Radio itself in this process of evolution over the years.

I would like to propose the idea of having a radio drama which will be based on the life of a Traditional Artisan from a community. A storyline which starts from his normal happy everyday life before lockdown, followed by a series of events during pandemic which has brought his/her life to an end where he/she is experiencing loss of everything.

**Atharva Rane**
My only connection to radio was the car radio and the one my parents would play in the morning. I never really used radio. But the story behind radio got me interested. I never knew setting wifi netwoks and teaching could be done in this manner.

For project I want to do something with audio editing. I am interested in audio production and have tried a little bit before so I want to learn more of that. I looked at repeer and tried it a little. I want to try and make a composition if not a fully proper song using sounds around me.

**Tanay Ashutosh Sathe**
Radio to me is bits of chatter with a whole heap of songs thrown into the mix. Usually tha stuff that the car's radio played while driving, unless it was replaced with some prerecorded songs. Now it is replaced with wi-fi and Bluetooth and data networks. Or what was taugth in physics class, and the tests with trick questions. And the nights I spent preparing for the finals, only to start forgetting the important bits in the equation.

My proposal is to have a radio program that broadcasts common everyday gossip. Nothing too political. Something that bored housewives depicted in storybooks would do to while away their time. Humans are social animals. Humans that lack interaction soon start to display mental and physical health problems. This is aimed at the people who suffer from a lack of human interaction, it will act like a balm that sooths the pain of loneliness and maybe even heal it.

**Tavishi Bhardwaj**

Initially when I read the brief I was quite confused as to why we were building our own radio. Because up to that point I had put off radio as something we listen to in our car sometimes but otherwise a dead technology. However over the course of these few classes I realised how radio wasn't really dead it just turned into everything around us. I also realised my privilege as to how the access to technology is limited in a country like India and radio manages to connect people at a local level. As i read some articles about it I found out how radio could also be used to impart education in marginalized and cut off areas , areas where internet couldn't reach. We even discussed the history of radio and how it went from being used to spread propaganda to just being able to hear signals from far far away, to how even music developed along with the radio.

ideas

one of the idea i had was to take one common topic during the quarantine for example food and then talk to someone we know and one underprivileged person and see the contrast in how they talk about the particular topic
for ex : food for us in quarantine might mean trying out new recipes but for an underprivileged person food might relate to shortage

another simple idea would be that as most people are sitting at home , they might like to be exposed to a new genre of music , so maybe a show where we talk about different genere of music the lead artists in those genres and play few hits , so it could range from kpop to rock and roll to bollywood

**Lisha Thimmaiah**

When I was initially given the brief on what the apprenticeship was about, I didn't really know what to expect cause I didn't know too much about radio and wasn't entirely aware of its relevance in today's times. I was open tp learning about it but my achilles heel is coding and software related things. But I am willing to learn and understand any new software that is being used during this apprenticeship. The classes so far have been incredibly informative, transporting me to a time where the radio played quite a predominant role in shaping the ideologies of young adults at the time for them to carry it on to the newer generations, much like Mr. Umashankar giving us these anacdotes from earlier times.

An idea I thought could work for a radio podcast would be talking about different cultures, and "culture" being a broad spectrum, we could narrow it down to eg, clothing, folktales, dieties that a community worships, any skills a community is known for that could be profitable in terms of upliftment, etc. Which would help understanding communities on a deeper level, and coming from a multilingual and multicultural country like India, it would benefit any listener.

**Vipra Bhargava**
when it comes to Radio,the only connection I have is when my parents used to play old Hindi movie songs on weekends when I was young and ofcourse in car while travelling but I never really paid much attention to it. But when I heard one of the mentors telling that it was the only and biggest sourse of education in the 50s and that it connected people on so many levels and how it changed during and after emergency, it just made me want to know more about it. I was convinced that nobody uses radio anymore, but it has just you know upgraded itself and it's still very much around.

For the project, I was thinking to have a show with music, like old Hindi music along with stories, basically behind the scene stories of the artists and all the things related to it.

**Swayam Dhupkar**
Like others, my idea of radio has always been about car music, interviews, movie and music reviews, and few short-stories (Nilesh Mishra<3). Radio interviews are a lot like recorded podcasts but they have a different feel to it, which is difficult for me to explain, but nonetheless it makes me wanna go ahead and create a small programme.

For that, I would like to invite guests and talk about the topic-‘Importance of building small communities based on little hobbies in today’s time’. I'll be collecting a set of interviews of people who have started their own groups or clubs in Srishti. The idea is to promote and acknowledge these groups, give an idea to the new batch about what all goes on in Srishti, how to manage these groups during lock-down/quarantine, and most of all encouraging others to start their own groups.

**Damini Yadav**
Coming from a small town Mzuzu, we used the radio quiet often, to listen to music, to listen to the news…etc even when travelling the radio was always on in the car journeys from one place to the other. A radio to me gives a sense to connections, as it gathers people around one object to sit and listen to the same things at the same time, it has much to do in the moment. I personally never knew how it functions, which is why I was open to learning about it. I have very little experience with coding and software, however as a contemporary art student, there is nothing more contemporary than making a radio with tech which is what triggers some interest from my end to this apprenticeship.

Regardless of my experiences with radio, the class has given me a lot of information on radios roll with propaganda and during a world crisis. I think understanding radios roll in a different time period (the past) from Umashankars talk really nurtured my understanding of it.

I was struggling to come to an idea, so I thought about having a story telling session of a few stories around India/ different countries of how people are dealing with quarantine and what they are going through or even some funny things they came across (quarantine Tales). We could talk to different age groups to kind of show the versatility that quarantine offers so this helps other people as well and becomes motivating or it would also help people feel like there are others who are going through similar things. The act of telling these story’s on the radio creates a sense of togetherness, allows us to connect to different people in different places.

## Projects and Current Status

**Archit Joshua

**Atharva Rane**
I have teamed up with Kavinn and Vipra. We are having an interview show where I am making the music and editing it.
I have collected samples of different everyday sounds. I have faced problem with some cleaning up the audio as it sounds low. I am editing it and if it does not happen well then I will re record the audio and edit it out.


## Resources from the sessions

**Resources**

[Radio Quarantine](http://radio.artscienceblr.org)

[Alternate Radio](https://www.alternativeradio.org)

http://acts-of-air.crisap.org/

http://blog.janastu.org/covid-19-campaign-namma-halli-radio/

https://www.namdu1radio.com

https://zeno.fm/radio-quarantine-kolkata/

**Podcasts**

99% Invisible - https://99percentinvisible.org/
Serial - https://serialpodcast.org/
RadioLab - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab
(Radiolab is a great resource for podcasts)

**Resources Software**

Audacity
https://www.audacityteam.org

Reaper
https://www.reaper.fm

Maaya
https://github.com/janastu/maaya

OBS
https://obsproject.com/welcome

**Internet Radio Stations for Music**

NTS
https://www.nts.live/

DUBLAB
https://www.dublab.com/

FIP PARIS
https://www.fip.fr/

Worldwidefm
https://worldwidefm.net

KEXP
https://www.kexp.org

**Academic Papers**

Using web radio as a pedagogical tool: skills development and collaborative learning

https://www.forskningsdatabasen.dk/en/catalog/2446891353

Radios in the Classroom: Curriculum Integration and Communication Skills. ERIC Digest.

https://www.ericdigests.org/1999-3/radios.htm

Interactive radio in the classroom: ten years of proven success

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12339975/

Learning through radio and television in the time of COVID-19

https://en.unesco.org/news/learning-through-radio-and-television-time-covid-19

**SOME MORE LINKS TO REFER**
Mistakes to Avoid on Air
https://spacial.com/mistakes-to-avoid-on-air/

Overview of different kinds of Radio programs
https://spacial.com/different-types-online-radio-programs/

**Workshops at ArtScienceBengaluru**

https://artscienceblr.org/index.php/open-workshop-building-community-wireless-networks/

*Radio Links*

https://www.namdu1radio.com/
http://radio.artscienceblr.org/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-UHf26pctv/

*Open Source Information*

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P6ZPBfVRi4QpU1yyoP2NBPEwqa1wxkh2wWOayzpA-lM/edit
https://blog.voidspace.xyz/why-do-i-free-software.html

Ram's email from Chiguru Tech: [e-mail]

*On Labour*

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/