designing the Amplifon: A Locative sound Medium to supplement dAB radio

Radio has always had communicative concern for its listeners. It is characterized by personal address, live ness and acoustic moods that reach audiences in a variety of listening situations. Radio’s communicative concern should be available for all citizens, but in fact there is rather bad reception for DAB and FM in cities due to narrow streets and other physical interference, and in addition the prominent iPhone lacks both DABand FM-receivers. The design project reported here aims to increase sound media’s communicative concern in urban settings by 1) replacing one-way FM and DAB with two-way mobile data, 2) replacing loudspeakers with headphones, and 3) replacing the temporal news agenda with one that is locative. The article reports on the theoretical basis, design methods and empirical findings of the Amplifon prototype. radio, sound journalism, media design, communicative concern, locative media Nyre, Designing the Amplifon The Journal of Media Innovations 2.2 (2015) 59 bution for decades to come. Radio stations, local and community stations in particular, want to cultivate their established listenership on FM. There is little innovation inside this established sector of the radio industry. However, there has been much innovation from the outside. Radio started to become a legacy medium with the emergence of online music and talk providers in the 1990s. Streaming audio through modems and broadband from ca. 1993 has now become a widespread, if only supplementary, distribution platform for radio. Another significant contribution was file sharing from ca. 1994, with Napster, PirateBay and hard disks full of downloaded mp3-music. In the 2000s music services with rights management made digital audio consumption widespread to the extent that CD sales plummeted. Podcasting (ca. 2005) has in a short period of time become a remarkably well-established means of listening to recorded music and speech, audio books, sermons and more. There is a tendency for the content to be “educational” and typically made by public service broadcasters or big newspapers, but there is also a healthy flora of independent producers with innovative content. Headphones are the main interface for listening to the above-mentioned types of audio. Every day IntroductIon Radio was invented in steps from the late 1800s, and by 1925 most countries in the Western world had radio services with a national listenership and a public service oriented to information, entertainment and enlightenment (Nyre, 2008; Jauert & Lowe, 2005). The radio public convenes in the kitchen, the bathroom, the workplace and the car. Stations transmit talk, music, news and advertising, all of which is distributed one-way on technical platforms such as AM, FM and DAB. In the European radio industry the DAB platform has long been the preferred digital technology (O’Neill et.al., 2010). It replaces the analogue FM-signals with digital DAB-signals than can carry more channels, display textual information, and also provide higher sound quality for the listeners than FM, but which are otherwise essentially oneway like FM. The Norwegian government has decided to shut down the FM network in 2017, and presumably DAB radio stations will become the dominant form of listenership to radio in Norway from then on. The roll out of DAB is hotly debated in European countries, and in 2015 both Sweden and Denmark are hesitating to go forward with it. Many countries will continue to rely on FM distritens of thousands move through cities like Bergen, Oslo or Stockholm, listening to something in their headphones throughout the journey. Urban headphone listeners typically curate their audio content from a smartphone. SoundCloud (2007) and AudioBoom (2009) distribute such amateur productions as part of their service, and are contributing to an audio literacy that can be compared to the video literacy inspired by YouTube. Production and social sharing of audio files has become a hobby or a living for many people, and contributes to an increased audio literacy among the audiences. There are interesting new audio designs for the smartphone. The mobile app Capsule.FM (see http://early.capsule.fm/) presents live editorial content, read out by an artificial voice, combined with music accessed from your mobile phone. Alongside companies that explore editorial designs there are companies that produce software for targeted advertising to mobile audio players (e.g. Exaget at http://www.exaget.com). Here listeners’ user history and preferences are analysed to so that they will receive personalized advertising during ad breaks. Another strand of development is audio recognition and filtering applications like Soundhound (2009). They can analyse live sound with advanced algorithms, and recognize music artists, Nyre, Designing the Amplifon The Journal of Media Innovations 2.2 (2015) 60 melodies, bird calls, car engine brands and more. Alongside these innovations, there is a long-standing experimentation with speech recognition and artificial voices for mobile phones and increasingly smart watches. It seems clear that the audio media industry is quite versatile, and that there is a range of technical and cultural innovations that can be recombined and further explored with the aim of recreating radio’s communicative concern in a new technological setting. Legacy radio stands at risk of not having proper public concern for headphone listeners, and in this sense there is a design opportunity that should be explored. The research question is: Can radio’s personal address, liveness and acoustic moods be reconstructed in digital mobile networks for urban headphone listeners? The project name “Amplifon” refers to an ongoing research project in Bergen, Norway. The practical experimentation is conducted by 2nd year students in the new media bachelor programme, in the module called “Journalistic mobile applications” (Nyre, 2014b). The word suggests an amplification of phonemes; that is, a strengthening of the meaningful sounds of a society. We share the quirky Latin-Greek name “ampli-fon” with several other initiatives, and we cannot claim any rights to it. “Amplifon” is the name of a European hearing aid manufacturer with 5,700 specialist centres in over 20 countries (see http://www.amplifon. co.uk/), and “Ampli-phone” is the name of an acoustic loudspeaker for iphones produced in California, USA (see http://www.ampli-phone.com/ Welcome.html).