What is a Sonic ID?

A Sonic ID is a short clip of tape – normally 60 seconds in length – that both identifies the station and includes a short (mostly unnarrated) snippet of tape featuring interesting people, places, or sounds from the community. They’re a great way to simultaneously brand Radio Free Montclair, create a sense of shared identity among listeners, and capture the diversity that exists within the town!

Public radio station WCAI on Cape Cod originated Sonic IDs a number of years ago. You can read more about the concept and check out some of their examples here and here.

What We’re Looking For

We’re hoping to capture little slices of life profiling all sorts of people in Montclair. Think meter maids, ice cream truck drivers, archers at Brookdale park, or even the Zamboni operator at the ice rink. The quirkier the better. Or maybe it's just a totally ordinary person who's colorful in some way, has a unique personality, is a good talker, or has something interesting to say. Nearly everyone has some sort of story to tell if you ask them the right questions. For example:

• Tell me about the first time you did [this activity].

• What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you at your job?

• What’s something the average person might not know about [this thing that you’re doing]?

• Tell me your most memorable experience at work.

Remember the whole thing will only be like a minute, so it doesn't need to be a fully formed story.

In addition to stories, another thing that makes for good tape is passion. Try to get the people you interview to talk about things they're really knowledgeable about, topics that excite them, or subjects about which they have strong opinions. It doesn’t necessarily have to be anything profound or of consequence. For example, maybe you find someone in the Acme parking lot who gets all riled up about other customers who don’t return their shopping carts to the proper place. It might sound dumb, but if the person you’re recording is animated, they might say something we could use!

Examples

The general format is to start with the subject of the piece talking for a bit, to immediately draw listeners in and make them wonder who and what they’re hearing. After a few seconds, you as the reporter step in to identify them (and if relevant, where they are). Then at the end of the piece, the standard sign-off is, “You’re listening to Radio Free Montclair. This is what Montclair sounds like,” though that can sometimes change depending upon the content of the piece.

Here’s a good example from one of our volunteer reporters, Lucy Albright:

There's nothing particularly unique about a guy walking his dog in the park, but the reason this works well is because it makes listeners feel like they’re there, listening to him talk directly to them, and the sounds of his dog grunting also make it come alive. Plus, even though it's short, it has a nice story arc: we meet the guy and his dog at the beginning, we get to know them, and then he ends by saying they see the sun go down, which is a perfect end of the scene.

Here’s another great example from volunteer Max Böhnel:

Montclair is a community of 40,000 people, and there are so many different sorts of stories and experiences among its residents. I love how this Sonic ID captures a story and sound that is unique to this one individual, and really draws listeners into his world, just in the course of a minute!

While people simply talking or telling stories can work well, try to especially keep an ear out for recording opportunities where the sound is a central part of the story:

Best Practices

The key to making these Sonic IDs work is giving the listener the experience of actually being a participant in the conversation, or at least a fly on the wall. In order to best achieve that, you should try to edit them so the person speaking is the focus of the piece. Therefore, you should cut out all of your questions (and laughs, “uh huhs,” etc.), so the only times listeners would hear your voice are when you're identifying who or what they're listening to and then doing the station ID at the end.

Obviously, in order to make this work, you might need to coach your interviewees a bit to answer your questions in complete, self-contained sentences. For example, if you ask someone what their favorite color is, they shouldn’t say, “It’s blue,” but rather, “My favorite color is blue.”

The reason we suggest mostly cutting out yourself is because if someone hears you asking your questions on tape as part of the piece, it’s like they’re listening to a reporter doing a story on the radio. But if the only role you're serving is as the omniscient narrator, it's an entirely different listening experience. It’s more like, "I've just been dropped into this conversation, and this person is speaking directly to me," which is sort of the goal!

In terms of best practices, the other thing that’s important is to aim to make your Sonic ID exactly :60, to make it easy to schedule (if it’s off by even a few seconds, that unfortunately might complicated things). Occasionally, it might be a bit short, in which case you should make it exactly :45.

Other Possibilities

There are lots of ways to make a Sonic ID, so don’t think that yours necessarily needs to sound like the examples above. For example, sometimes you can mix in music:

While we normally end with the tagline, “This is what Montclair sounds like,” these last two stories weren’t technically about people who live in Montclair, so we switched it up a bit and instead said, “Record and send us your story at radiofreemontclair.org.”

Another way to do this is to ask people to recite lists of things, but not reveal what it’s a list of until the end. These examples come from WCAI:

We could even invite listeners to submit their own lists:

Radio is all about sound, so you could also approach Sonic IDs by recording an interesting sound from somewhere in town and simply playing it back, forcing people to listen closely to something they might never have noticed before or might normally overlook (and guess what it is):

Random snippets of audio from eavesdropping on conversations can also sometime work:

So those are a few approaches, and we’re open to other creative suggestions as well. We could always use more Sonic IDs to place in our schedule, so if you have any ideas, please drop us a line!