SoundCloud Voices – a look back at the year
SoundCloud Voices is a weekly Community feature focusing on new spoken word creators found on SoundCloud. It might be a podcast, radio show, audio book, interview, audio messages, a poem, anything! Keep an eye out every Thursday for a new post.
It’s the end of year 2011, so what better way to wrap things up than a retrospective on some of the amazing people in the world of spoken word audio.
Firstly, it has been somewhat of a crazy year; we’ve had earthquakes, revolutions, protests and all manner of other things. A lot of these events have been captured with audio and shared on SoundCloud. Our very own Evan Tenenbaum, working in the San Francisco office, put together this brilliant montage, summarising some of these events from some audio creators on SoundCloud.
Comedy
There were however, some comical moments in 2011 as we saw comedians starting to use SoundCloud. Most notably we had funny man Russell Brand, using SoundCloud to promote his new book Booky Wook 2, Michael Legge and Tiernan Douieb audio blogging and even Richard Herring who has been reading out his daily blog using the iPhone app! We also headed down to Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August and set up a sound map allowing any comedian, venue, vistor and member of the SoundCloud community to contribute audio, check it out at SoundsofFringe.com.
Here’s one of Richard’s recent recordings.
Podcasts
There have been hundreds of fantastic podcasts cropping up on SoundCloud this year too. Starting the year off the brilliant football network Playback Media started using SoundCloud, as did Stanford’s E-Corner . As the year progressed we had the likes of MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, The New Yorker, Radiolab, British Comedy Guide, Mike and Tom Eat Snacks, BAFTA, Stack Exchange, European Football Show, 99% Invisible, Intelligence Squared, MBA Mondays, The Economist and so, so many more. Take a listen to the brilliant 99% Invisible below.
Journalism
2011 was the year we released our iPhone and Android app with the record button. With that came a whole new avenue of creators that maybe hadn’t thought of using the site before. SoundCloud for journalism has definitely developed over the last 12 months seeing the likes of the LA Times, Huffington Post, Global Voices, France 24, Democracy Now, Journalism News, The Daily Californian and independent journalists such as Sean Sullivan, Jim Colgan and Dan Patterson. Here’s some audio from Dan Patterson during Occupy Wall Street.
Radio Stations
There’s been a wide variety of radio stations using SoundCloud over the last year from the likes of XFM, NPR with Snap Judgment, NPR Interns, NPR Berlin, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and The Takeaway, PRI’s The World and America Abroad, KALW, BBC Radio 1, KCRW, KROQ, Children’s Radio Foundation, Big FM Chennai, 77 WABC, KQED, Deutsche Welle, SWR3, Resonance FM, Triple J and many more!
Take a listen to a piece by PRI’s The World on tsunami tourism in Indonesia.
Audio Books
Some fantastic publishing houses also began using SoundCloud this year, including Penguin, Faber and Harper Collins. Take a listen to an excerpt of the Jungle Book read by Tony Robinson.
So there you have it, a year in lists. Here’s to 2012. We leave you with a few words from Charlie Sheen.
Happy New Year!