Forecast for Shipping

The piece Forecast for Shipping * examines material and spatial properties of radio transmission in BBC Radio 4's renown Shipping Forecast weather bulletin. The project employed five coordinated field recording teams following the course of a single signal over its expansive journey from Britain to mainland Europe. Recordings were taken from multiple auditory perspectives: from inside the radio studio in London's Broadcasting House; onboard a ship at sea; on-site at the transmitting antenna at Droitwich, and at its reception on transistor radios some 500 km away in three domestic settings. The work examines attractions among language, geography, radiation and precipitation, where transduced speech demarcates, occupies and territorializes dimensions of terrestrial space.

The voice of Diana Speed (BBC Radio 4's newsreader and continuity announcer), on a late-night December forecast, provides the source signal that is then plumbed by a variety of microphone types (acoustic microphones with various directivity, ultrasonic microphones, contact microphones and electromagnetic induction microphones) and reworked into a ten-channel spatial audio installation.

The piece Forecast for Shipping opens auditory perspectives into the inner (and outer) workings of BBC's Shipping Forecast accessing the polyphony of voices and material contexts in Britain's long-wave forecast transmissions. The following sounds, images, artifacts and reflections have been culled from the dense array of social, historical, environmental and material contexts encountered over the course of the research. This collection provides insight into the less tangible – yet latent – aspects participating in the forecast bulletin.

Contexts of the Shipping Forecast:

The Shipping Forecast maritime weather report is a fixture in the British psyche, cutting across generational and regional divides. It's past embodies the sentiment of an archipelago allied against threats from the sea. However, over the course of decades, listeners have diverted its original utility into diverse forms of social currency. Today there are more reliable, and technically advanced methods to receive maritime weather reports. Nevertheless it's the landlubbers and not the captains who insist it remain on-air. But this is not the first time this weather forecast has been caught in the draw of context. Arguably its very core structure and function reflect richness of contexts, material histories and shifting ontologies of weather and sound.

The forecast, issued by the Met Office and transmitted on BBC Radio 4 (four times daily) has a strict formal structure, limited to 370 words, read out in a rhythmic repetitious style, evocative of poetry. The arcane terminology coupled with numeric precision of facts and figures amplify the forecast's mystique. The closing late-night edition – an extended 12-minute nightly broadcast commencing at 00:48  – has a particularly devout following from nearly three generations of drowsy listeners for whom it functions as a kind of collective lullaby.

Taken as a 'site' rather than merely a programme, the Shipping Forecast enacts a telegraphic lineage predating radio, extending back to the mid 19^th century with the establishment of the Meteorological Office and the activities of Robert FitzRoy. Its genealogy ties into complex relations between communication, timekeeping, seafaring activities and weather of the English archipelago.

Circulating within the Shipping Forecast are material aspects of long-distance transmission, wireless communication, alert calls, maritime safety, atmospheric sensing, statistical modelling, environmental conductivity, wartime meteorology and navigation, architectural acoustics, as well as aspects of national identity, collective sleep, English domesticity, not to mention more general radiophonic modes of hearing and listening.

* Forecast for Shipping was an alternate moniker used by the BBC for the maritime forecast in the second half of the 1930's. Adopting the earlier moniker as the title of the piece aims to defamiliarize and historically contextualize the iconic bulletin.