Recently Ithaca Audio was asked to produce a theme for the Journalism.co.uk podcast. Journalism.co.uk is the UK’s largest online community of journalists and delivers world renowned coverage of the rapidly changing media industry.
The theme needed to be memorable, short enough not to distract from the main content of the podcast and also reflect the nature of the news content (no News at Ten epic orchestration here).
Journalism.co.uk Podcast Theme by Ithaca Audio
Common to most news programs is a bed of music running underneith the headlines. This helps to seperate the section from the main conentent of the news and give it a little more weight.
A bed was composed and produced extending on the musical ideas from the short theme above. The aim here was to keep the momentum of the headlines going but without distracting from the words. The main energy of the music is therefore in the lower frequencies and the speech frequencies are deliberately kept very simple with a sustained Fender Rhodes sequence padding out the sound:
Journalism.co.uk Podcast Bed by Ithaca Audio
You can hear it in action over at http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/category/podcast/
Research
As with all projects, extensive research was undertaken prior to the composition and production of the theme. This bought up some interesting points about the changing roll of music in news broadcasts.
Take this ITN theme for example, composed by John Malcolm it ran as the main inroductory music for all ITN news bulletins from 1955 into the 1970′s:
This light, playful piece is in stark contrast to the gravitas of news themes to follow. The ITN News at Ten theme is an iconic example of a style of music that has become synonymous with broadcast news:
Horn sections using strong intervals such as fifths and octaves are extremely common in news themes. From the middle ages horns have been used to indicate announcements and the starting of events etc. Modern news themes use these associations to good effect. The main melody of all these themes are played by horn sections:
The most famous of these themes must be NBC’s “The Mission” composed by John Williams. Here is an interesting insight into the piece and it’s re-recording twenty years after it’s initial composition:
Podcasts
Music for news in a podcast form tends to be far less dramatic and can be broad ranging in style. This is arguably due the broadcast nature of a podcast, it is downloaded by an individual so is more of a personal experience than a national news broadcast which is simultaniously viewed by millions. A fanfare to an audience of one just doesn’t feel appropriate.
There are some great, wide ranging examples of music composed for news in a podcast format including:
The Business from The Guardian
The Week Ahead from the Economist
World Update Morning Commute from The BBC
It will be interesting to see if the varying styles of music used for podcasts and other online news broadcasts converge into an accepted style over time as TV news broadcast themes have done.