Phylis West Johnson, Ph.D., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL
Professor of Sound and New Media
Editor, Journal of Radio & Audio Media
Editor, Soundscape: Journal of Acoustic Ecology
Department of Radio, Television & Digital Media
by Jerry Vigil
Phylis Johnson is like many of us who are or have been radio Production Directors and DJs, having worked in the small markets and working her way up to the majors. But the similarities pretty much end there when you add things like “Ph.D.”, “Professor of Sound and New Media”, “Editor, Journal of Radio & Audio Media”, and “Editor, Soundscape: Journal of Acoustic Ecology” after her name. And not only is she a professor teaching radio production at Southern Illinois University, she’s also teaching in the virtual world, in the online game called Second Life, where she also works for a radio station and has her own show, in-world. That sounded like enough for an interesting interview, and that’s exactly what we got. Strap yourself in. We’re going a ride…
JV: How did you get into radio and what were some of the stops along the way to Southern Illinois University?
Phylis: I was in college studying journalism, and I really had no thought about doing radio. When I was going to college, I did a lot of things like babysitting and such. I did a lot of writing and a lot of freelance journalism. I needed to make some money. So I went and worked fast food for three and a half days at a Whataburger in Texas. After three and a half days, I was like, “I’m out of here. This is not what I’m going to do.” Then somebody came up to me and said, “You know, if you take this test, you can get a job at the campus radio station.” It was classical music, and back then -- this is probably’78 or ’79 – you still needed a license to work in radio.
So my friend and I read the book and studied for the test and drove up to Houston to get my FCC license. I got laryngitis because I was reading the book aloud as I studied it, aced the test, came back, and couldn’t go to work because I had laryngitis, but I still got the job. I was working in the beginning in classical, but I could never pronounce the names, and I didn’t really get into classical.
So within probably a few months I quit and walked into the local top 40 station, a college station, and a pretty big station now. I got a weekend slot doing news. First I was the assistant to the news director, but I became the news director when the guy decided to quit. So I started doing news for a while when I was in college, the basic radio kind of news, the police reports, find out what fires there were in the morning. I did split shifts while I was in college. But I kind of envied all the DJs. And my lifestyle at that point was such that there was no way that I wanted to be so structured.
So I graduated from college and went and applied to every freaking place that was out there — I mean all across the country. My air check was probably longer than normal. I created this massive production with this story and stuff, and I sent it to different places and landed a job in Louisiana at KLOU, an AM station in Lake Charles. I landed the job, met the morning guy, and we were talking and he said, “You got some commercials to do.” And I go, “I have to tell you the truth. I don’t know how to do a commercial.” So we went in there, and he taught me how to do a commercial.
I think I was with them for like six months, and then I crossed over with an invitation to go to the next station which is KBIU, and this was still in Lake Charles. I worked for them for six or eight months. I was in Louisiana for about a year in a half, and I decided to venture and applied to probably the most influential station in my career, believe it or not, which was in Brownsville-McAllen, Texas. It was a startup. It was KTEX FM 100. The guy who hired me was working with Wolfman Jack and his name was Sonny Laguna. So I walked into this station in Brownsville-McAllen, which is an interesting radio market because it’s radio market 76, except you would never know it because you’ve got like 1 million people, but they’re dispersed across the whole valley of South Texas. I did country music for the first time, and I really messed up on the names. I didn’t know anything about country music. I was originally raised in Long Island, and I was born in Boston, so I didn’t know who any of these people were. It reminded me of my days when I did classical music. But I learned, and I actually started doing a lot of different bits and comedy drop-ins and all these crazy different things in my shifts. But the most important thing that happened was the day I walked in and noticed that there were tons of commercials that weren’t done. It was this huge pile of production sheets. I said to the GM, “Doesn’t anyone do production around here?” He said, “Wow, you’re interested? Okay. You are now the Production Director.”
So I became the Production Director, and I was working on an 8-track. It was all state of the art equipment then. This is early’80s. I ended up doing tons and tons of production. It also helped me produce an afternoon radio show, doing a lot of skits and a lot of comedy. I was doing this crazy show, and every time the bosses would leave town, I would do these really crazy shows. And when they were in town, I’d be real conservative. They were always on the road. Then one day they caught my show when I thought they were out of town, and they go, “Wow, you should be doing this all the time.”
So I did, and I worked for them for a couple years then ended up applying to KILT in Houston, Texas and worked for the FM and AM country station. They said, “We like everything about you, but no comedy. Just do this pretty straight.” It was good money for doing four hours of work and no production and just basically just being like a liner DJ. That was the FM side, and that was really hard for me to do, so I ended up moving over to KILT-AM, which offered a lot more freedom. AM was still doing pretty good, especially in Houston at this time, still the ‘80s. I also did some jumping around in Houston and worked for KFMK, which was kind of classic hits at that time. We did lots of requests and lots of produced bits. I was working nights. I was pregnant again with my second kid, so that was just pretty wild having to do that, and I ended up switching a couple times in Houston. Houston was probably my biggest market. I worked for KMJQ, which was an urban format I worked until I got to KZFX. When I was in Houston at the end I was probably doing more continuity and production.
JV: Didn’t you do some programming along the way?
Phylis: Yes, I may have been Assistant PD at KVIU, and then I was Program Director when I left KTEX.
JV: Did I see WXTU in Philly on your bio?
Phylis: Yes. I mostly did a swing shift in Philly, because I was also teaching at Glassboro State College, which is now Rowan. And at the same time I was doing swing at WMGM in Atlantic City, and WAYZ in Atlantic City. And when I got here to Southern Illinois University, I was going up to St. Louis and doing my two to three shifts at WIL. When I was in Philadelphia, I was general manager of the university radio station while I was working in Philadelphia and while I was working in Atlantic City. In fact I had two different names. I was Phylis West at WXTU, and I was Dana Ford when I worked in Atlantic City. Believe it or not, I worked at multiple stations at the same time.
That’s pretty much the sum of it. I did a lot of production. I did a lot of air, and I did a lot of spec business on the side. Like when I was in Houston, I would make deals with the salespeople. If some new salesperson came in and wanted a spec commercial, if it would sell, I’d get $100. I was really entrepreneurial. I was the mother of two kids, married at the time, and it was just like whatever we had to do to pick up some extra cash. I was also doing voice work in Houston and Philadelphia for commercials.
JV: At some point, you decided, “I want to go to class at night,” and you got a Ph.D.
Phylis: While I was in Houston, I finished my master’s degree, because someone came up to me and said, “Would you like to teach some journalism courses part-time?” I said, “Yeah,” and then ended up getting into that and started teaching in Houston. So that was just something I did on the side like on Monday nights, and I actually never told anybody until the end that I had a master’s degree, because I figured they’d kick me out of radio. In fact, when I left in Houston the general manager says, “Why are you doing this? If you got a master’s degree, why are you in here with this craziness?”
So when I went to Philadelphia, it was to take the teaching job. They said, “We want to hire you to help us get students into Philadelphia radio.” And so you understand, I’m coming from market ten, but they want me to come work at the university, teach radio, but only on the condition I can get a job in Philadelphia so I can help place their students in Philadelphia. And I’m like, I don’t think they knew what they were asking, but I was up for the challenge.
Well, the people that I met in Brownsville-McAllen, the owners, they knew the guy in Philadelphia. So when I went for the interview, he said, “You used to work with Andy and Mike.” And I said, “Yeah,” and then he said, “Well, anybody who knows Andy and Mike is a friend of mine,” and he just threw me the keys and said, “You’re hired” -- the good old boys system at work! So I got hired in Philadelphia because of where I had worked in Brownsville-McAllen. So I was teaching at Glasgow State College and running the radio station and training kids to get into the biz. One of them is now the VP or president of a record label in Nashville. I got him his first internship there.
But my decision after working there for a couple years or so was, I had two kids, away from my parents, away from everybody, who were in Texas, still in College Station. So we kind of were headed back home by taking the Southern Illinois job. I only had a master’s degree, and they offered that they would consider my master’s degree and the years of experience as the equivalent of a Ph.D. so I could work at Southern Illinois University and start up their radio program.
So I came here then to do that, and over ten years, I finished my Ph.D. Even though I didn’t have to, I did it, just because my parents said, “You know, you’re there, education’s free. Get it. You won’t be sorry.” At first they really didn’t want me in radio because everybody in my family has a Ph.D., so I’m kind of the black sheep, but I loved radio. They could see me as a journalist, they could see me doing all that, but they couldn’t see me working in radio, but I loved it.
So I built the program from there, and in ’92, we got our first Digidesign system. We had to make a decision about what we wanted for software, and at the time, I wasn’t sure. I made a guess, because what I wanted to teach them wasn’t just radio. I decided, because we didn’t have tons of money, to replace all the old consoles and just basically use the Mackie boards or the Tascams -- get them the 1202s and 1204s and have them really learn audio engineering.
I had taken some audio engineering courses when I was in Jersey, by the way. I traded that for voice work. So I picked up some recording engineering skills. I wanted to use that side of that so that when someone did production, they wouldn’t be limited to radio production. They could really understand processing and effects and things like that, and really understand signal flow and things like that. So it wasn’t just a matter of being an operator of the board, but you really knew how to use the board.
JV: Has the course always been called Sound and New Media?
Phylis: Yes. Basically our department is radio, television, and digital media. What I wanted to do is I wanted students to learn more… because they don’t know if they’re just going to go into radio, and we didn’t know what was going to happen in the industry. So I wanted to make sure they understood the whole concept of sound, so they could take these skills and create fully, so they would be able to do mix to picture or make their own sound effects. I wanted them to be capable audio journalists, because journalism was changing, like the way National Public Radio and Public Radio in general was creating these stories with sounds. I wanted them to be proficient, to be able to story-tell and create soundscapes.
That’s why I have these two different journals that I’ve been involved in. One is called Soundscapes: A Journal of Acoustic Ecology -- the idea of the environment and the sound and everything around you, and that’s also not just rural, but urban soundscapes as well -- the whole art and science behind the idea of recording whatever’s around you, field recording, tons of field recording.
We kind of split it between studio and field recording. Students can go out and create their own sound effects. I encourage them to archive all their sounds into a portfolio so they don’t necessarily have to use the canned sound effects but can create their own.
JV: It sounds like you’re teaching more audio production than how to be a DJ or read the news…
Phylis: We have two public radio stations. We have the FM -- the classical and the eclectic -- and we also have WIDD, which has been around over 30 years or so as the college radio station. It’s on the internet -- and it has been cable -- but the internet radio station has a long legacy of alumni, and a lot of these students will get exposure to be able to be a DJ. Because I’m laid up with hip surgery right now, I’m going to be Skyping in my lectures, working with a teacher’s assistant who the students will work with at the radio station, and I’ll be critiquing their performances on air, but they’ll have to also produce things every week.
Basically, I’m heavy on the production side. Programming for me is a natural thing, because as a Production Director, I think you have to know programming. You have to understand audience and the ratings and all that, because you have to know who your target audience is. There’s no way in my life I could have ever separated the idea of what the programming of the station is, what the format is, and who my audience is, and not think that’s an important consideration. To me, it’s very much a function of both sales and programming. It was beat into my head, because you work at one place where production was affiliated with programming, and then another place, it was under sales. You basically get two bosses you always have to appease, which are the sales side and the programming side, and it’s important that you find the balance between the two.
So we do talk about format, and then they do understand the idea of hot clocks and formatting and niche formatting, and the difference between internet broadcasting and the traditional broadcasting and all that stuff. We’re classified under production, but more holistically, if you walk away, you’re going to know radio and sound. We have recording engineering kids who come in there, and we talk about what a concept album is. We talk about albums like The Wall, and how those sound effects help from one song to the other. It flows transitionally because of the sound that is woven in with the music, and we talk about how that’s an important element, whether you’re doing a radio show or mix to picture.
To me, that’s just as important on a radio show, and it’s just as important when you do your production, because anybody can do rip and read production. That’s going to happen. Some small station is going to make them do ten commercials a day, and obviously they’re not going to be creative in that. But what we’re shooting for is the high mark, so that when they get that opportunity to be creative, and when they’re putting their demo tapes together, they know what to shoot for.
And I always have them do a commercial. We do more than one, but they have to know how to do a commercial. Basically I want them to do it as kind of a two voice commercial. It doesn’t have to be a comedy, but it has to be situational, like a slice of life. We listen to a lot of award-winning spots like the Mercury awards and listen to what’s out there that’s really creative.
Another thing I teach them is how to do a concert promo. I say, “Most of you, when you graduate, you go to a radio station, the one thing they’ll never let you do right away is a concert promo.” But if you walk in with a portfolio of concert promos, and they’re really highly edited and put together well, you’re better off. So we do a lot of things with that, just the fundamentals of the daily life of a Production Director, what you’ll most likely have to do at a radio station.
JV: You’re also quite involved with Second Life, the online virtual world game. Tell us about that.
Phylis: I’m also a teacher in Second Life and bring my students in-world, inside Second Life. I’ve been doing this for about five years or more, and I got a grant recently, probably two years ago, to be able to create inside Second Life, to build in there, and one of the things that I built was this immersive sound environment where I take my students through these different layers. The furthest zone is this medieval layer, and it has all the sounds of woods and forests and stuff like that, medieval stuff. It has several levels, and it goes up to this one level which is sort of the sound history. I looked at the turn of the century from ragtime to Luigi Russolo of Art of Noise. It’s sort of like sharing this production person that started not knowing that much about my craft, and really kind of did some back end studying and really understood that I’m not just an audio producer. What is the rich history of audio? What is the rich history of sound, and what does it really mean culturally and scientifically? And so my kids study a little bit about physics, they study a little bit about the culture of sound, and understand music and how it integrates with sound.
And so we have this immersive environment where they go in and they can walk through this place. It goes across time, where you can meet Luigi Russolo, who basically banged on trash cans and flipped everybody out in the early 20th century, because he said, “This is the music of the Industrial Age,” all the way to John Cage or Brian Eno or Jimmy Hendrix. It brings these artists together for people to really understand stylistically what is sound and what makes sound. And then I have these tropical jungles and exploration sites where people can just listen and just follow along and really do some deep listening and think about sound.
JV: There’s also a radio station in Second Life that you’re involved with and actually have a show on. Tell us about that.
Phylis: It gets pretty competitive, but I work for a company called Best of Second Life Radio, which they call Best of SL, and it’s based on the magazine Best of Second Life. Best of SL magazine had its own radio station, and I guess they’re still kind of partnered with it, but they gave up all the management control and everything. It’s really the property of SL Live Radio now. That’s based out of the UK, and Best of Second Life was out of South America. Now I think it’s more home-based in the United States.
You see, I’m a virtual journalist. This gets just really weird. For five years, I’ve been doing lifestyle reporting. One of the things I got to do was an interview with Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran for a virtual magazine, for Best of Second Life magazine, and so he built a world inside Second Life, and in my avatar form, I met him in his avatar form, and we did a one-on-one interview over Skype. It has like the most readership in such and such and it’s just all over the place. I do that under the name Sonicity Fitzroy, which is my radio name. I have other avatar names, like Aurality, but they are all audio related names.
JV: And this is a game anybody can sign up for and get involved in, right?
Phylis: Yeah, anybody can play, and then they can do radio, and it’s big. For example, yesterday, I did my show and it ran a little bit longer, about two and a half hours, because there’s a band from Moberly, Missouri, outside of Columbia, Missouri, called The Follow. They just released their fourth or fifth album. I went ahead and played cuts from it. They had about 12 tracks, and I wove them into my other Second Life music. They’re a big deal, because they had a digital release party two days ago which drew about 100 people inside the game. And that’s 100 people that are your direct listeners.
You have to understand that you set up inside a virtual environment, and then you have signs, “Buy this Album” or “Here’s this Information”. It’s direct sales, so people can automatically buy that album and then download it, and listen to it. And what these guys do is — it’s three of them, one girl and two guys, and they’re like in their 30s or so and very, very talented, a rock band —they bring their whole band up as avatars, but they also usually stream from where they’re at live to let you see them as their real self as well as their avatar self, and you’re sitting at your computer imbedded inside this game.
JV: What’s your radio show called?
Phylis: It’s called Slow Bake, and I play only Second Life virtual musicians, people that are not signed. I also do that so I don’t have to worry about copyright and all that stuff.
JV: You are also the editor of the Journal of Radio and Audio Media. What is that?
Phylis: That’s from the Broadcast Education Association, which is affiliated with the National Association of Broadcasters. It’s a lot of academic stuff for professors across the world, maybe some practitioners, but probably mostly professors, for doing research in the area of radio in all its different forms. I was asked to come aboard. I had to go through an interview process. There’s like a new editor every three years and sometimes you can stay longer. It was founded as the Journal of Radio Studies by one of our alums from years ago, and so it’s kind of an honor for it to come back to our university. But it is affiliated with the Broadcast Education Association, which is the big organization that we all attend as educators. We do this more than we do the RAB and stuff. Every year we go out to Vegas. BEA is connected with NAB, so we’ll go to both of those shows.
This is mainly like all the research you’d have that’s out there and anything you can imagine about radio and audio, and I was asked to stay in the audio section because what they wanted was all the experience I’ve had in and beyond radio. I love radio, but to look at radio through a larger lens.
One of the reasons I got my Ph.D. is, being a radio person, or even just being a radio DJ, when you go to university, sometimes people look down at you. “Oh, you’re a radio DJ. You can just do this. Oh, we’ve got the professors over here, and we’ve got the scholars.” And to me, if you really understand and it’s a really good scholarship that’s happening, it should be usable. It should be able to be practical for other people, and it should just trickle through and help the whole industry, not just be something that is kind of lofty. So, that’s part of the goal is really to make it understandable.
One of the things that we do is we have reviews on podcasts and things like that — things in the industry — just kind of a mix, and it’s very international in its presentation. It’s not just about what’s going on in radio in America. It’s basically what’s happening across the world in terms of every imaginable thing from format to news styles to audience to whatever.
JV: It sounds like it would be valuable to programmers and managers of radio stations.
Phylis: I think so. But most managers of radio don’t really want to read 15 pages of something. They’d rather have it narrowed down into a column, and they can get that with the abstracts and things like that. I do think it would be very useful for them though.
JV: What advice would you give production people in radio right now to get more involved with sound design?
Phylis: I would just say to love everything about audio and sound. Don’t just focus on what’s out there in radio. I remember in Houston we would have these annual competitions or goodwill events where we would create radio dramas, and we would expand our skills because in the daily grind, you can lose your skills, and then creativity, because you’re locked up in that box doing the same thing over and over.
What can you do to be really creative and have fun and expand? And instead of getting excited about someone’s new sound effects library that’s out there, go out and get a field deck and learn how to do some field recording. I think you’ll impress people a lot more. Plus, it’ll open up more opportunities for you to expand and get out of the studio and do some field work.
I remember when I was listening to the great morning shows that were going on at the time when I was in Philadelphia; they had a lot of characters, and they would draw on these people from everywhere. If you’ve got a field recorder, everyone would know that you can go ahead and tape things and those things can become part of your show.
So to me, it’s not just what you do with commercial production, but it’s how you shape a whole show. Don’t just wear one hat. Really expand. I love everything about radio and sound. I’m pretty much a journalist, and I really appreciate the people that do the voiceover work and all those things, but I would say really just stretch yourself and what you do so you do a little bit more.
Every year, learn a little bit more than you ever thought you would. For me, that’s what it’s been like, because I didn’t know where I was going to go on any of this, but I was really eager to not be defined in this narrow category, which radio kept trying to do to me all the time. Like, you’re in news, you can’t be a DJ, you can’t do this. There were always rules. And it’s not necessarily you want to break the rules when you’re working for a company, but you want to look at different creative outlets where you can expand and learn, and if you don’t know recording engineering, learn it. You don’t have to produce music and stuff, but those principles may help you in being able to be a better producer.
JV: Your involvement with the Second Life Radio stations and just your past 20 years of teaching, what has it taught you about real life radio stations, something that you might pass on to real life programmers?
Phylis: To me, it’s all the same. An audience is an audience. Grand Theft Auto and Fallout have radio stations associated with them. Now, Fallout has more nostalgic music and stuff like that, but Grand Theft Auto has a whole bunch of radio. So here in a time when everybody would say, “Oh, radio is going away,” this game is capitalizing on its own radio stations, and these are a bunch of young people. To me, that gives me some pause for reflection about how radio is still here. And people want to be creative.
But to get to your question, I think some programmers should expand, if it’s not Second Life, to be on the lookout for different opportunities where they can go online and stretch out and tap into their audience in creative ways, because when someone is on the computer, it doesn’t matter whether they’re imbedded in the game or not, it’s all virtual. It’s all online.
A lot of people are thrown off by, “Oh, it’s Second Life. I’m going into this stupid, little game.” But if you’ve got a million people in there, and even if you get 100 of your listeners engaged, you’ve got 100 people talking at that particular site that you have direct contact with. I think any time I go to a remote, chances are maybe there’s 20, 30 people around at most -- I’ve done so many remotes. But here you’ve got like a remote, and you’re doing it online, and if you get 50 people there that are tuned into you, that’s 50 people that you can make contact with in a unique way.
I guess I’d say not to put the barriers up, but just be creative and think about the fact that this virtual realm is only beginning now. It’s only going to increase. Second Life is branching off, and there will be another world within another year or two — another Second Life — and we don’t know who is going to buy out Second Life, if that’s going to happen, or blah, blah, blah, but they’re not going away. This whole virtual reality is just another expansion, and this is where I put my academic hat on and quote Marshall McLuhan, where he talks about technology as being an extension of humanity. So everything a human wants to do… They wanted to fly so we have airplanes. We want to expand into these different dimensions and realities, and so people are doing that. That’s what’s happening. This is a way to extend your reach, and just create in funky ways. And what do you have to lose? There’s no money, really, involved for the most part. It’s pretty cheap, and you can probably get some of your interns or new staff to get involved or engaged. Look for these weird opportunities that are out there that can redefine a particular show or station, and don’t just be fearful.
I tell my daughter this -- she’s 17. I tell her that when I was working in Lake Charles, Louisiana, as an AM station, ‘KLU, we were the number one station. We were always number one. But when we went to the beach in Beaumont, which was close by, all the people would run there and act like they were listeners of the Zoom, the rock and roll station. But we knew everybody was tuned to us because of the ratings. But everybody thought it was uncool at that point to be listening to an AM station publicly. Privately, they were listening to us. But publicly, “No, I don’t listen to pop music and stuff.”
So I think it’s the same thing. People are really curious, and there are a lot of things where people say, “Well, I wouldn’t do that.”. But then again, when you look at what the best movies are, or the best music, the songs, the hits, it’s undeniable that people are curious, and they are doing these things. So just don’t be afraid to venture out and experiment with some of these things. To me, it’s a great training route. There are journalists that set up shop for training inside the virtual world where just imagine, you can interview people and do stories and stuff, and send your students out there to get some invaluable experience as journalists so you can get them to work in radio stations.
JV: When you tell me about the stations in Second Life, I think, why couldn’t a radio station, with enough funds, actually create a virtual game of its own, and it be all about the radio station and its personalities.
Phylis: They could. I was trying to get even our college radio station to…, but everybody thinks I’m just weird half the time when I do these things. But I do believe in them. I always say, somebody like me at my age thinks it’s valuable, because they tell me so, students, all the time. When I started, I was there with AM radio. There’s all these changes. There’s always going to be changes. And what you’re seeing now is a little taste of the future. Just think of the potential. Even if no one else is doing it, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t.
What I would love to do myself, and I just don’t have the time, I would love to syndicate my virtual musicians. I would love to be able to have this show that I do every Sunday be on a regular, established station and produce a syndicated show on Second Life musicians, and get people involved where they could show up, meet people, and so on. I just think it would be a cool thing to do. Now, how to make that happen, I just haven’t had the time to really put it together, but if it’s not me, it’s someone else — there are opportunities out there.
JV: Any parting words for our people in the radio production rooms before I let you go?
Phylis: Just be sure to come out of the studio every now and then and take a deep breath. [Laughs] Know that there is a world beyond the studio.
I have to say the one thing I remember the most is that everybody comes into the production studio to talk. I remember that when some of them would come in and talk about stuff, we would just turn on that on-air light and then no one could come in the room. I wish I could still do that in life -- you know, just push that button and everybody goes, “Oh, I can’t walk in there,” whatever you’re doing, even if you’re sleeping, “Oh, I can’t go in there, because the on-air light is on.”
Phylis is also an author. Her books include Machinima: The Art and Practice of Virtual Filmmaking, Second Life, Media, and the Other Society (Digital Formations), Queer Airwaves: The Story of Gay and Lesbian Broadcasting (Media, Communication, and Culture in America), and KJLH-FM and the Los Angeles Riots of 1992: Compton's Neighborhood Station in the Aftermath of the Rodney King..., all available on Amazon. Her page on the SIU site is here. And here’s the Sonicity Radio blog. Phylis welcomes your correspondence at