The Audio bites and the jingles
A jingle is a short sound bite typically used to identify the station to let the listener know what station they’re listening to. Akin to a real radio station (terrestrial) call signs. The first collection of jingles were audio bites of Warner Brothers Cartoon characters from famous cartoon shows. The jingles expanded to include movies, TV Shows and other fun and light bites from actors and musicians. The collection serves as a large list randomly chosen between the 3rd consecutive song during scheduled programming.
Jingles serve as a good breaker for music, and station identifier. If you’re looking for jingles, you can find wav files online in a wide variety of sources. Using Audacity, I trim/edit/paste and save the jingles in FLAC format. It’s fun to do too. Once you start, you’ll be hooked on making your own jingles.
As of this writing, Hawkwynd Radio has 126 active jingles randomly selected and played every 3rd song during scheduled programming.
Listener Jingles come of age
Hawkwynd Radio has a Google Voice phone number, 615-541-9327 which is shared on air frequently to encourage listeners to call and leave a voice message. It hasn’t been met with overwhelming success, regardless, we do still receive listener jingles, and add them to the jingle list.
One of the very first listener jingles was from my brother Greg, in Buffalo, NY.
The Google Voice line for Hawkwynd Radio is also for listeners to send text messages, directly requesting a song. It has expanded to become a great way to be in touch with the listeners directly during the show, making it an even more dynamic resource for interacting with the listeners.
The Birth of Virtual Announcers
I used to run a Macbook Pro with Apple OS and found a cool command line tool called “Say” that would take text and export it as an audio file with different voices. Excellent tool because you can control the pitch and speed, and the choice of voices is really extensive.
Moira Cumsalot is one of the very early computer-generated jingles, with a sexy sort of sassy feel.
Veluptuous Viki was also spawned in the early times, sultry and hot.
Dizzy Topless Naked Babe rounded out the three “hot virtual announcers” for the computer jingles.
Daniel was one of the very first of the virtual announcers to be launched in the Jingles list.
In addition to virtual announcers, I recorded several using my own voice in MIXX. .