Wider E ↵ ects of Perceptive Media

There was some discussion and enquiry about the nature of experiencing perceptive media in a social context.

“If you personalise it everyone has their own experience of it. You could talk about it...’what was your like?’ ...‘I had sun’...‘I had rain’. It takes that famil- iarity out which uses the social aspect of listening to something, a radio.”

Respondent 6, 25, London. There was further speculation about where perceptive media could take media experiences in the future.

“Could you join the information of 3 or 4 people listening together at the same time?”

Respondent 7, 47, London. “Yes, get 4 of my friends listening to personalised versions of The Archers, in ‘City Life’. It’s like a more advanced version of a podcast -a radio / social platform!”

Respondent 6, 25, London. These types of comments not only reflect that some of the participants accept perceptive media as a new format in broadcasting, they also provide indications of the types of per- ceptive media features they might like to experience in the future.

5.12.8 Social Listening

The launch of “Breaking Out” received considerable interest from mainstream technology

press [100] [101] [102] and as a result was talked about across social media channels. There

were 295 social media posts mentioning this perceptive media project, with 762 retweets or shares. The majority of the online conversation was not feedback, but were just posts sharing the link to the experiment. However, there were a small number of comments which did more than just share the experiment. These comments reflect those comments from the focus groups. For example, there were a number of comments that showed listeners

thought the experiment was ‘creepy’, shown in figure 5.20. There was a comment which

highlighted concerns about the use of personal data (shown in figure 5.21). There were

other comments about possible advertising applications (see figure 5.22) and the impact

Figure 5.20: Audience fears expressed on social media

Figure 5.21: Comments on social media about personal data usage

Figure 5.22: Comments on social media about advertising applications

5.13

Discussion and Summary

This chapter covers the creation and audience experience of “Breaking Out”. “Breaking Out” is an object-based radio drama which was created to help understand the impact of using audio objects to create personalised content experiences. The experience used the listener’s location and the content was adapted in response to that data. After listening to the drama 744 self-selected listeners filled in an online questionnaire. In addition three geographically separate focus groups were conducted. Listeners who heard a personalised version of the drama rated their enjoyment of the experience more highly that those who did not hear a personalised version. They also felt closer to the location, and liked the overall experience more than listeners to the non-personalised version. The personalisation also made listeners more likely to recommend such an experience to a friend.

None of the negative impacts on the audience experience were directly related to the use of audio objects, but were linked to traditional production techniques and not caused by the use of audio objects.

Aspects of the experience that listeners thought had a negative impact were aspects re- lating to the production as a whole, rather than its object-based nature. Specifically, the use of visual stimuli detracting from the audio experience and the audience perception that the main character was unsympathetic. These could have negatively impacted on the audiences engagement levels but would have had the same influence on the personalised and non-personalised versions.

While there are a small number of studies in the literature that demonstrate systems and

methods of location based storytelling [103] the research tends to demonstrate working

systems from a technical standpoint rather than trying to assess the technology’s impact on the audience experience. Other storytelling research that incorporates location into

narrative [104] tends to place the story onto the location, rather than placing the location

into the story. These location based experiments also tend to require the audiences to move around a specific location to navigate the narrative and the whole experience becomes more interactive and game-like, unlike the sit-back experience that “Breaking Out” provides. This study has shown how audio objects could be employed to create personalised audio experiences in the future. It has demonstrated that the ability to personalise content using object-based audio and that using location information can improve the audience experi- ence. The results suggest there is an audience benefit to providing personalised experiences such as this. The study also explored some of the creative and technical challenges involved

6

Discussion

6.1

Production

Radio production workflows have not changed significantly since broadcasting began in the

19th _{century. The biggest change in workflow was the move from analogue to digital as a}

production format which allowed non-linear editing using digital audio workstations, rather than splicing analogue tape to create edits. The studies in this thesis assess the impact of using audio objects as an output format on conventional digital production workflows.