Mapping radio: Variations on the segmentation and analysis of Swedish broadcasting data

Abstract: This work aims to explore the relationship between sound archives and historiography, focusing on the Swedish case of mass media archiving from the 1970s. The study investigates the spectral distribution on Swedish public service radio before and after the introduction of commercial broadcasting, using computational methods. By analyzing 1,600 hours of radio data, the paper reveals a shift in the number of detected occurrences, with varying sonic sequences reflecting the broadcasting's overall structure.

The paper contributes to the understanding of historical radio data, offering preprocessing and segmentation methods for working with cultural audio data. It also emphasizes the methodological implications of combining dimension reduction and object classification approaches, demonstrating the value of using pretrained and untrained algorithms together for a comprehensive understanding of the local and fine-grained aspects of audio data. The evolution of P1 and P3's sonic identities may be influenced by commercialization and the concept of entropy, emphasizing the importance of content variation. Although the sample sizes are small, the findings show a correlation between object detection and dimension reduction, suggesting the potential for future research to explore these trends and their historical context further.

Key words: Radio Studies, Public Service Broadcasting, Audio Analysis, Media History