Rhetorical Figures and the Digital Editing of Radio Speech

Abstract

In the age of authentically digital radio, traditional semiological approaches to radio speech may have outlived their usefulness. Such approaches cannot adequately describe the workings of today’s most ambitious radio producers, although they remain dominant in both the language of radio production practice and radio’s critical discourse. An alternative approach, more suited to radio’s digital present and future, is offered and investigated in this article. Rooted in the critical histories of rhetoric and poetics, this article profiles a radio constructed not as linear narrative but as a set of palimpsestual and polyvalent opportunities for interpretation. It borrows the notion of auricular figures from the early-modern courtier George Puttenham’s writing to help describe and analyse numerous permutations of the digital audio editing of radio speech found in the work of contemporary practitioners such as Christof Migone, Gregory Whitehead, John Oswald, Sherre DeLys, Antony Pitts, Bonnie Greer and Miguel Macias. Ultimately, this article proposes a new, open-ended taxonomy for the tropes of digital audio editing. This taxonomy expands our understanding both of the digital potentials for aural density and montage, and of how the digital audio edit activates a novel relationship with a radio audience.