Sound Design in Radio/TV/Intermedia

We passed a lot of time talking about sound design in film, but we also talked about sound in radio, television and interactive media. First of all, let's remember that they all take their origins from "live" contexts and performances as circuses, music halls, theater, ceremonies, etc. - RADIO Radio started in the 1920s. Today, there are 2 models of services for the radio ; public (created by the state) and community (funded by donors, institutions, etc.) The main goal of radio, which did not really surprise me, is to create a continuous flow of sound in our everyday lives. It is also to deliver the audience to advertisers. Naive are the ones that think it is only to communicate us information about everything. Broadcasters pump up and compress the volume of the audio signal at the highest permissible levels, so it results in strong and attention-getting sound flow. The linear radio flow is modular, which means that it is superimposing different blocks of material like sports, news, weather, commercials, radio drama, music, phone-ins, magazines sequences, discussions, etc. Also, 5 forms (that we will see again in TV) of emphasis are used to solidify the sense of the flow continuity. These forms are ; sound address (explicit all the time except music, radio drama, documentaries), internal sound audience (live audience, applause, laugh, interviews), sound advance (chart countdowns, drum rolls), sound underlining (dramatic music on a dramatic drama, etc.) and sound labeling (sounds for before and after news, for traffic, weather, etc.). - TELEVISION It also aims to create a continuous flow, but with sounds AND images this time. It is supposed to keep the attention of the distracted viewers. As I said, it uses the same 5 forms of emphasis, but a sixth one is added ; sound completion (voices, effects, live performances, ...) Broadcasters, in TV too, pump up and compress the volume, but MOSTLY (and it is even more frustrating) for commercials, so that when they start, they attract the attention because the are louder. Music video can be related to television because it also mixes sounds and images. There are 4 different approaches used in music video : pure performance (continuing presence), pure narrative (images present the "story" of the lyrics), mixed performance-narrative (often use in hip hop) and abstract-experimental (images and sounds don't have an obvious relationship). - INTERACTIVE MEDIA, HERE WITH THE EXAMPLE OF VIDEO GAMES It is interesting to see how it draws on all the media. I find that we really can see the post-modernism in a video game, because it uses everything that has been created before and it mixes it all up. It has elements of viewing a film, it has the same continuing flow goal, it uses the narrative approach of a film, it relies, as in radio and TV, on a constant variety and on ongoing series of alternative or rotating actions. But video games creators need to think about a loooott of things. Because they are all computer-based, video games lead to preoccupations as memory preocuppations (RAM, live memory, memory budgets ...), rates preoccupations (sample rate, bit rate, loops), MIDI preoc., effects saving preoc., and details preoc.(in creating sound effects). This is a relly brief summary of what we learned about sound in radio, tv and interactive media, but it really helps me to have a good idea of what sound designers need to deal with.