No Soap Radio

No Soap Radio is an interactive poem written by Blake Leland. The original poem was written as a standard, linear text, in which individual stanzas represent stations being tuned in on a radio. During Spring, 1997, Sandra Beaudin and I worked together to create the interactive version of the poem, shown above.

The first step was to collect audio recordings of the individual stanzas. For this, several of our colleagues were roped in to read for the project, and their readings were recorded to DAT. Once the recordings were finished, they were digitized and edited to fit the poem. In some cases, effects were applied to the voices to make them sound as though they were talking over a phone line or playing back from an old wax cylinder.

Once the recordings were finished, Sandra turned her efforts toward creating the graphical interface while I built the underlying engine in Lingo for Director. The engine was designed to simulate a car radio by on-the-fly mixing static, tuning effects, and the digitized voices. As the radio dial is tuned closer to a simulated station, the static begins to fall off as the voices become louder and more clear. The opposite happens as the radio is tuned away from the station.

To account for the fact that the written poem only has limited-length stanzas for the different radio stations, the radio is programmed to automatically lose the station's signal as it reaches the end of a stanza. If the dial is not changed after several seconds, the station fades back in, playing the next stanza of the poem.