Saturday, February the 25th, 2006

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Hooting Yard on the Air : The Podcasts

If you have been reading this website with due care, you will know that I broadcast a weekly half hour show on ResonanceFM, London's finest radio station. The show goes out live, which means that my reading is sometimes accompanied by banging, crashing, and buzzing noises, or interrupted by me having a choking fit, or by other disturbances. That seems to me far more exciting than a rehearsed, cleaned-up recording. You will also know, particularly if you are a pod person, that the archive of past shows is being made available in the form of podcasts, which you can have sent to your computer before transferring to your pod.

Here is a link to the Resonance home page, and here is one to the podcast page.

Anyway, I thought it might interest you to know how the podcasts are created. Many people think that it is simply a case of taking the archived recording of a show and making it available as an mp3 file. Would that it were so simple! The truth is that in order for the original live broadcast to be made podcastable, a number of extremely delicate and complicated operations need to be carried out. And that is why, about once a month, I am summoned at dead of night to the gleaming high-tech skyscraper wherein lurks ResonanceFM's podcasting maestro.

The first time I went there, it took me about an hour to find him, for the skyscraper is enormous and wholly lacking in informative signage. What signs there are are either baffling or redundant. I do not know why this is so, and I have never had the courage to ask. I have learned to accept that the front desk in the lobby is labelled, simply, The Front Desk In The Lobby, and that the person sitting at the desk wears a badge reading The Person Sitting At The Front Desk In The Lobby. This person has not been authorised to answer any questions whatsoever, so when, on this first night-time visit, I asked “Where will I find the podcasting maestro?”, I may as well have been shouting into the wind, as indeed I was, for the lobby acts as both lobby and experimental wind tunnel. Apparently, sound recordings are made of the wind in preparation for one of the podcasting maestro's planned podcasts, tentatively titled “Wind In A Wind Tunnel”.

Now I was used to the more homespun atmosphere of the station's main studio and was somewhat unnerved by the grandiosity of my surroundings. I took a chance, however, walked past the person sitting at the front desk in the lobby (who was immersed in reading a battered copy of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism by Cornelius Cardew), took the lift up—hitting a floor number at random—and skittered off down the corridor I found myself in. There were numerous doors along this corridor, all marked Door. There was also, I noticed, an overpowering smell of guinea pig, though I saw no guinea pigs, and have seen none on my subsequent visits. I pushed open doors at random, and peeked into each room, hoping to discover the Resonance podcast maestro, but all I found were bales of fusewire, discarded yoghurt cartons, and toy crustaceans made of plasticine. There was a lobster that took my fancy, but it was high up on a shelf and I have an aversion to teetering on step-ladders.

I think I checked every room on that floor before getting back into the lift and choosing another level, again at random. This one was different. It had no corridor, just a vast open plan area—with a sign, of course, reading A Vast Open Plan Area—empty except for a small patch of ectoplasm.

I said that it took me about an hour wandering the skyscraper to find the podcast maestro, but in truth he found me. I was stumbling fretfully around what seemed like the umpteenth floor when I heard a loud electronic crackling noise, and then a disembodied voice.

“Podcast maestro to Frank Key! Podcast maestro to Frank Key! Floor 96, Rectangle Zone!” it called, so that is where I went.

The podcast maestro was sitting at a console from which occasional puffs of vapour jetted up to the ceiling and slowly dispersed. He was wearing a metal hat and taking ravenous bites from a toffee apple.

“Glad you could make it,” he said, “You'd better put on these mittens,” and he tossed a pair of mittens to me. They were woven from a material I was unable to identify, and I worried for a moment that I might suffer an allergic reaction, for in the past I have had allergic reactions to mittens woven from unfamiliar materials. On this occasion, however, all was well.

The podcast maestro, with a great deal of effort, pulled a big lever on his console, to no apparent purpose.

“Now,” he said, “It is nearly three o' clock in the morning. At precisely two minutes past, we will begin effecting the transfer of one of your past shows into podcastable format. It should take about an hour. You will need to attune the flimflam and steady the rattling. Just watch me, you'll soon get the idea.”

And do you know what? He was right. I did, and by four o' clock we had a complete recording of Hooting Yard On the Air all ready for podcasting. Since then, I have been back to the skyscraper regularly, whenever I get the summons on my metal tapping machine. I would not say that I have become friends with the podcast maestro exactly, for there is something formidable about him, emphasised by his metal hat, but we do engage in affable banter as the clock ticks towards 3.02 a.m. After that, of course, we are silent, concentrated, utterly involved in our task. And I hope that the pod people among you, when you listen to each new podcast, are also silent, concentrated, and utterly involved, borne away from the dull cares of your day into the realms of instructive and sensible prose.