Sunday, January 22, 2006

First Student Show Recorded!--But You Can't Hear It--Yet.




On Thursday, January 19th, Visual Arts/Media Design major James Larkin successfully recorded not one but two one-hour shows in Studio A. It was a great moment to hear the first student show. This is the first student created programming for our new radio station. We are very proud to have reached this milestone. Thank you and congratulations to Mr. Larkin. That's the good news.

Mr. Larkin's show sounds great--but you can't hear it--yet. The bad news is that Mr. Larkin did not have radio-edits of all of the songs he played. So now he is spending the weekend editing out all the obscenities with Adobe Audition. He will have to reverse the curse words so that they play backward, otherwise his show cannot be webcast.

What's the lesson here? Don't bring songs with obscenities. It is too much work to edit them all out. If a song has curses in it the chances are that it will still be inappropriate even if you edit out the offending syllables.

We are an educational station, a college station, and we have a certain standard of programming to uphold. We don't need to be prudish, but if the song has obscenities, homophobic slurs, racist or misogynistic lyrics, leave it at home.

Angry songs, sad songs, critical songs are fine, but we need to recognize that there is a difference between freedom of speech and gratuitous obscenity. Think before you webcast.

Does the material have "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific" value? (AKA the "SLAPS" test) If it does then the occasional obscenity may be permissible if and only if the work, taken as a whole, has serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.


James Larkin making a smooth transition from CD1 to CD2

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