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Live From the Formosa Tea House

Ever since it became possible — because of high-speed Internet and good audio tools — to “do radio on the web,” I’ve been itching to dust off my interest in radio and start recording. Today the dream was realized, with the recording of the first episode of Live From the Formosa Tea House.

Using Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes and The Gillmor Gang as inspirations, Dan, Steven and I gathered, as we do two or three times a week anyway, at the Formosa Tea House here in Charlottetown. Except this time we brought audio gear.

You can listen to the result, which I’ve encoded in a variety of ways, using the links here:

The AAC version will be especially useful if you have an iPod or use iTunes, as, at least in theory, these should “remember where you left off” if you take a break.

This isn’t a polished radio program — it’s sort of a combination of sticking a microphone on our lunch table, with the extra self-conciousness of the microphone making us each a little stiff. I don’t think we knew who we were talking to really — each other, “the Internet,” or the invisible folks at home.

I certainly learned a lot (or at least remembered a lot) about why radio is so hard to do well, why it’s so hard to achieve that balance of the formal and the informal and “sound natural.”

We’ll go back again next week, though, and give it another go. I’m sure Steven and Dan will comment on their blogs about how things went from their perspective.

Update: Steven has posted some photos (one, two, three) of our recording rig. We used a boundary mic, which because it was phantom powered, needed to run into a Shure mixing board, the output of which ran into a iMic that ran into my iBook. I used Sound Studio to record the programme to a 350MB AIFF file, and iTunes to generate the MP3 and the AAC.

Another Update: I’ve set up an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for the radio programs. Note: location for RSS feed updated May 31, 2005.

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FormosaTeaHouse-One.mp3
Wednesday, September 8, 2004 - 1:38pm
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Comments

Submitted by Peter Rukavina (not verified) on Wed, 2004-09-08 19:32.
A couple of notes: about 1/3 of the way through, I leaned on the mic cord for about 10 seconds, which created some static. Also, I think “Ian Williams and his wife Tessa” would more properly be rendered as “Ian Williams and Tessa Blake.”
Submitted by Adam Curry (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 02:32.
Are you planning on adding your program to an rss2.0 feed as enclosures? We need good feeds!!!
Submitted by Steven Garrity (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 04:47.
Adam: Yes, Peter has setup an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures: http://www.reinvented.net/rss/formosa.xml
Submitted by Ken (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 09:48.
Congratulations on your first show! I am downloading it now, and will comment later. Once again you have come up with a novel idea and executed it, and I commend you on that. This is the closest thing to new media I’ve encountered and I look forward to listening. Fresh!
Submitted by Ken (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 10:49.
Hmmm…it was like sitting alone at the table next to you, eavesdropping. Could you prepare a list of topics, or better yet allow your readerships to suggest topics. At the opening read the four or five topics you have chosen to discuss, then go at it. This might be more focused, and would allow some input from your readers. I found myself at times wanting to interject a comment. If you did broadcast live, would I be able to post feedback to your discussion? Maybe one of your group could monitor the comments as they rolled in, and also run the technical production. I enjoyed the background sounds, but not the static or the bumps. Get the mic off the table. Wear headset mics, and put them thru your mixer (it has four channels you said). And keep it up! Also, I look forward to some guests!
Submitted by Ken (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 10:51.
Three mics into your four channel mixer, and then use the fourth channel to feed a cell phone signal from a dialled in guest! I would love to join you by telephone for lunch one day…
Submitted by Ken (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 11:02.
One last thing, could you three get yourselves invited to lunch with interesting people like politicians, media personalities, and eclectic’s? Take it on the road. All three of you provide a good dynamic geek vibe, it just needs to resonate against something or someone. My last thought is to tell you that you are living a fantasy I have held for a long time to be a radio show host with unique style. Talent has held me back, so please let me live the dream thru y’all!
Submitted by Chris Corrigan (not verified) on Thu, 2004-09-09 12:44.
The static was an especially good tip of the hat to radio. Made me feel as if I wsa driving under power wires.
Submitted by Ann (not verified) on Fri, 2004-09-10 08:57.
To me, your radio station is all about process - the process by which the voices are transmitted, I mean. Having worked in radio for a number of years, I can tell you that most people don’t really care HOW they get the content…it’s the content that matters. So, having worked on the process, I think your next challenge would be to find some content. One of the exciting possibilities I see for this technology is giving voice to people who would not ordinarily have a voice or a mechanism to discuss their issues. Might be interesting to find some people who fit that bill and use your technology to enable that discussion. That would be revolutionary…otherwise, it’s just noise. Alebit interesting noise…but that’s because I know you.
Submitted by Peter Rukavina (not verified) on Fri, 2004-09-10 11:14.
As always, Ann, your radio nose is finely tuned and ever-helpful.
Submitted by Peter Rukavina (not verified) on Fri, 2004-09-10 11:15.
The other aspect of good radio, pointed out to me by Sharon at Deutsche Welle (and, in an earlier day, by Ann too), is that it is compressed reality. One must resist the urge to try to say everything about everything, and concentrate on extracting the essence.
Submitted by oliver (not verified) on Sat, 2004-09-11 08:58.
Another way to put Ann’s point might be to say you’ve produced “The Making of…” but not the “…”. Not to suggest for a moment that I agree with that old fangled stick in the mud.
Submitted by Alan (not verified) on Sat, 2004-09-11 10:32.
I think that Ann is describing one sort of audio but that those standards do not need to be your goal at all. If you listen to college radio, ham radio or citizen’s band as well as broadcast radio you’ll hear many different approaches. If you follow only those standards in considering this techical opportunity, would you not be doing the same thing as requiring a blogger to adopt the standards of a newspaper.
Submitted by oliver (not verified) on Sat, 2004-09-11 16:53.
A lot of bloggers, though, are only interesting to their friends. To the extent they make friends, I suspect that’s because a newcomer and the person with intermediate interest can skim and land on the particular sentence or paragraph that grabs them. These MP3s are black boxes of potentially unknown duration that you stand to wait an unknown amount of time to download and which you may know nothing more than title, author or brand. They also take us to a kind of search engine-less Web, in which we’re never going to land straight into just the exchange we’re looking for from the opposite side of the online universe, because there’s no way to search for the MP3-encoded sound signature for “Tobey Maguire” or whatever. I think if it ever happens that a big regular audience is listening to hours per month of these files it’s going to be because there authors have a lot of really dedicated friends they earned some other way or else they’ve built a reputation for producing sound files that are both from moment-to-moment and from day-to-day consistently more engaging than the word “blog” now brings to mind. I fear this implies standards and production values.
Submitted by Guan Yang (not verified) on Sat, 2004-10-23 18:33.
I’ve posted a comment about this show here: http://unicast.org/archives/001681.html
Submitted by Konstantinos (not verified) on Sat, 2005-01-29 19:26.
Peter, http://ruk.ca/rss/formosa.xml doesn’t seem to work. What’s wrong here?