Please log in.
Before you can vote, you need to register. Please log in or create an account.
Culture: Radio
Screaming, laughing, weeping radio station   (+4)  [vote for, against]
Radio station which only broadcasts laughter, crying, screaming, burping, farting...

A radio station with neither music nor speech, which broadcasts programmes consisting only of non-verbal noises made by people. Half an hour of laughter instead of comedy, an hour of screaming instead of horror and so on. The listener goes through various phases while listening, and is for example first amused by the laughter, then irritated, then mocked and finally terrified. You turn the radio on in the middle of the night when one can't sleep to be greeted by seemingly endless shrieks of terror, or trying to soothe a baby to find that instead of music, one has tuned into the screaming baby marathon.

Other programmes include constant coughing, farting, sneezing, burping and so on, and dramas involving stories told through non-verbal sounds only, such as creaking doors, birdsong, other sound effects and human noises.
-- nineteenthly, Jul 24 2011

Birdsong proves popular on radio http://www.telegrap...pular-on-radio.html
[Wrongfellow, Jul 24 2011]

The BBC is said to have broadcasted one show which had sound effects alone and no dialogue at all.

In the early days of stereo broadcasts, if I recall what I had read about it rightly.
-- neelandan, Jul 24 2011


[Neelandan], yes, they did it quite recently too but it didn't appeal to me at the time.

Oh no, not a capella or however it's written.
-- nineteenthly, Jul 24 2011


[+] Screaming baby marathon (isn't that a band?) would be useful for heavy sleepers with clock- radio alarm-clocks.

Betcha a station which broadcast nothing but laughter would do better than placebo as a treatment for depression. Then, insurance companies would require it be tried before agreeing to pay for conventional (pharmaceutical) antidepressants. As a result, millions of depressed patients would be subjected to the canned laughter. Mwahahaha.
-- mouseposture, Jul 24 2011


//birdsong//

This was baked in the UK about fifteen years or so ago. It began as a test transmission for a new FM station, but it soon acquired a following of its own.

<link>
-- Wrongfellow, Jul 24 2011


Giggling babies would be a hit.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jul 24 2011


I once heard a restored (wax!) phonograph recording of a man having a conversation on the telephone. It was about 7 minutes long, and you could only hear his end. It was labeled and produced for sale; apparently, in the early years of audio recording, people would listen to just about anything just for the novel of hearing it come out of the speaker.
-- Alterother, Jul 24 2011


More recently, birdsong was used on a DAB channel before the real channel content appeared. I understand there was also an aquarium TV channel which was originally planned to be an SF channel.

[Mouseposture], i don't think that would happen. I think laughter would move through infectious and irritating to sinister and insane.
-- nineteenthly, Jul 24 2011


[ninteenthly] Sinister and malevolent, yes.

I was making a rather obscure point about the distortion of clinical trial design by profit motives. Formerly, most of the guilt attached to the pharmaceutical companies, but lately the insurance companies have been getting in on the act.

Theoretically, good things come from competition between greedy, amoral economic actors. But it's hard for the toad beneath the harrow to remember that.
-- mouseposture, Jul 24 2011


It does make me wonder about the use of audio tracks to change people's moods in a less contentious way than subliminal suggestion.
-- nineteenthly, Jul 24 2011


[19] that is well crisped in the use and anal ysis of advertisement soundtracks.
-- pocmloc, Jul 24 2011


Not with informed consent.
-- nineteenthly, Jul 24 2011


Consent is granted by choosing not to press the off button.
-- pocmloc, Jul 24 2011


//Not with informed consent.// So far, audiences at concerts and recitals aren't required to sign informed consent documents, although, if music isn't an audio track to change people's moods then what is?

That gives me an idea for an SF short story set in a libertarian dystopia (in the manner of "Jigsaw Man"). In this society, the one, overriding value is the individual's personal liberty; you can die in the gutter, build a plutonium bomb in your garage -- and no one will interfere. The only crime is to interfere with someone else's liberty -- or break a contract. Society is organized solely by contracts -- almost no law, except the enforcement of those. But in one respect, the law is much stricter than we're accustomed to: anything which interferes with someone's perfect free will, in deciding what contracts to enter into, is dealt with very, very strictly. Wearing a short skirt to a negotiation would be severely punished (although prostitution would not). The protagonist is tried, and found guilty of public busking without obtaining informed consent from passers by, whose mood might be altered by the music.
-- mouseposture, Jul 24 2011


Yes, i like that. I have thought about writing a story about contracts before. I think that could be done. My thing is about promises being the only law, the breaking of which is punishable by death.
-- nineteenthly, Jul 25 2011


Tonight, our Creepy Heavy Breathing special continues.
-- RayfordSteele, Jul 25 2011



random, halfbakery