Austral Comunicación

AUCOM


Communication





Monograph on aural communication



Coordinators: María José Müller (Austral University) y María del Pilar Martínez-Costa (University of Navarra)



Call for papers for Vol. 11, Num. 2, 2022.

Deadline to send articles for evaluation: August 20, 2022.



The digital revolution has deeply transformed media. The technological, corporate, and professional convergence sparked by our digital context has led media down the path of increased diversification, opening new possibilities for communication languages.



Among these new linguistic possibilities, aural communication has acquired greater prominence thanks to podcasts, voice interfaces, and the current trend of social audio. Indeed, some authors are even calling this the “new golden age” of audio. Radio is now one hundred years old, podcasts will come of age in 2022, smart voice assistants continue settling into people’s homes. New and old models are coexisting and proving that audio has not gone out of style. On the contrary, brands and media outlets keep developing audio strategies, finding new ways to tell their stories.



Aural communication is an inherent part of communication between people. It can pave the way for the development of culture and society, and its simplicity, shareability, and accessibility allow it to rapidly adapt to a variety of complementary broadcast and consumption systems. Aural communication does not demand exclusive attention and opens up voice-enabled spaces for complicity. The advantages of sound as a communication language have allowed radio to last for a century. And these advantages also reinforce the importance of sound in the creation of new narratives and new relationships with the listening public and with brands.



Up until a decade ago, radio was the predominant model of aural communication. Since its beginnings, it has acted as a non-intrusive medium, connecting people together and forming close, emotional bonds with them; accompanying society and generating immediate, diverse, and cooperative conversations with the listening public.



These features have shaped radio for over one hundred years. And today, they are adapting to — and even growing in — new platforms, formats, and digital audio tools, which are surpassing the spatial-temporal barriers of what we understand as radio broadcasting. Asynchronous consumption has broken up the temporal linearity of content production and communication in traditional radio. We now enjoy the flexibility of on-demand and personalized consumption, not only in terms of content but also listening times and voice-activated searches.



This kind of flexible consumption is the great revolution being brought about by podcasts. These are digital audio products created for multiplatform, on-demand distribution. They allow for specialized contents and personalized listening schedules, thanks to the asynchronous production and consumption of self-concluding or serialized episodes. The existence of podcasts is forcing traditional radio to change its own production and distribution rhythms, beyond the continuity of its live programming. For radio stations, podcasts are an opportunity to expand their contents, strengthen their brands, and reach other audiences. And this applies not only to radio stations, but also other media outlets, platforms, and brands, all stepping in as new actors in the aural ecosystem.



Users are accompanying and even supporting these changes, adopting new modes of consumption. Through their active and flexible listening practices, audiences are becoming more selective as they face a broader menu of specific, atemporal contents. Traditional radio, podcasts, and other aural content producers now have the opportunity to find new listeners, analyze and understand their consumption patterns, and design contents that adapt to them.



Digital audio is becoming social, broadening its contents, but also introducing new kinds of conversations, fostering communities built by horizontal, implied, and expanded relationships. These advantages of aural communication are allowing audio to regain the spotlight and, in its diverse manifestations, position itself at the center of digital communication and interaction.



The success of aural communication is also an excellent opportunity for academic reflection and to study and investigate the significance of audio for communication as a whole, following these thematic throughlines:



● Traditional radio and its adaptation to new listening patterns.

● Radio as part of social change.

● Continuous programming models and on-demand audio.

● The popularity of podcasts.

● The audio strategies of traditional media.

● The new audiences of audio contents.

● The rise of aural narratives.

● The audio business and its new professional profiles.

● The new actors of the aural ecosystem.

● Smart technologies and voice interfaces.

● Streaming services and the audio business.

● Brands and their relationship to audio.

● Social media and social audio.

● Audio books and the rise of story-listening.