cityofsound

Cables

A seasonal offering. Purely by chance, I’d discovered this series of broadcast transcripts from Australia to England via Paris, dating from Christmas 1932 and describing a game of cricket. Not just any game, mind. They consist of the ‘cables’ from the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), covering the action in test matches in the infamous ‘bodyline’ series between England and Australia [more on bodyline at the State Library of New South Wales or at Wikipedia]

“Due to restrictions on commercial radio in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, radio stations were established on the continent to beam programs directly to the United Kingdom. The main station was situated in Paris. One of its advertisers was the Gillette Safety Razor Co. which sponsored reporting of the controversial 1932-33 cricket series played between Australia and England in Australia. These were the days before live radio and television broadcasts of international sporting events. Each day a reporter cabled very brief descriptions of play to Paris where they were transformed into full scripts which were then broadcast to the United Kingdom.”

The communications technology of the time attenuated the bandwidth available to the reporters to an almost unimaginable degree by today’s standards.

The reports are dispatched without punctuation and merely consists of two- or three-word phrases breathlessly running on after each other. But note how the action still comes through loud and clear nonetheless.

“Fine warm 50000 before toss wicket good larwood voce fastest making ball fly adopted leg theory attack virulent batsmen ultra cautious"

"bradman crudest stroke first ball bowes wild pull missed crowd bitterly disappointed england decided advantage 3/67 poor result perfect wicket fingleton 50 141 minutes grand defence riskless wearing down attack fielding admirable nothing given away”

“larwood resumed scoring slow hard toiling weather warming hundreds fainted in dense throng contest always interesting bowlers making batsmen earn every run none capable forcing scoring continually on defensive bowlers”

"one side unplaying cricket ruining game"

"oldfield struck head ball larwood staggered fell crowd hooting field crowded round after five minutes oldfield supported by woodfull walked off holding towel to head play resumed crowd still hooting"

You need a little knowledge of cricket to parse all of it - or to detect the layers of Imperial intrigue that underpin the bodyline story - but it’s fascinating to see how the technology affected communication to this extent. Although the radio broadcasts in England were subsequently altered to remove references to the bodyline controversy - the  cables mention "leg theory" rather than the "bodyline" that was reported in Australia - these raw transcripts of the cables are a supreme exercise in concision and compression. Here the content was compressed to fit the signal, and then expanded upon by broadcasters at the other end of the world. It's dependent on creative interpretation by humans, with the compressed signal only visible to the system, not the ultimate receivers.

It might also give us pause to consider how available bandwidth, politics, and business models always affects communication, and how much information might be lost in today's polynodal yet low-resolution transmissions via email and IM, Twitter and status updates, audio and video streaming and so on.

Either way, I love reading these cables. The language is crafted so perfectly, despite the constraints. They’re caught between poetry and machinery.

Some more excerpts below [all cables here]

RAIA Awards Special, and architecture on the radio

"Special" in that it's two weeks after everyone else has talked about the Royal Australian Institute of Architects annual awards [see last year's coverage] The headlines are these:

• Queensland rules. And Brisbane specifically confirms its reputation as site of the most interesting urban developments in Australia right now. Victoria/Melbourne a close second.
• Brisbane's Donovan Hill architects, recipients of six gongs, owned this year's awards. The State Library of Queensland, developed with Peddle Thorp, seems spectacularly successful. I  walked past a few months ago, and hope to visit properly at Christmas.
• Denton Corker Marshall's Civil Justice Centre in my old hometown of Manchester justly rewarded. It's been everywhere; I pointed at Stephen Bayley's review a while back.
• Southern Cross station in Melbourne, whose extraordinary satellite profile I mentioned here, winner of The RAIA Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design.
• Equally ubiquitous has been the coverage of Paul Morgan Architects' wonderful Cape Schanck House. More on this later - but check the house's defining feature, a giant steel 'raindrop' full of water suspended from the ceiling of the main living space, providing cooling in summer and wrapped up in winter.
• From the judges: "The jury recognised a generational shift in the architecture profession and award entries, with the emergence of a new wave of architects primarily focused and concerned with how buildings (both public and private) best fit within our cities, and within the public realm, rather than as singular objects. The projects are marked by research and intelligence, and represent new building models."
• Apparently there's been talk of ditching the 'Sustainable Architecture' category, given that it should be - and tends to be - a theme running through all the categories. This writer agrees with that - as noted before, it's just "the right way to do things", and not a special category.

Full line-up here in a rather dry presentation by the RAIA, with commentary here. And of course the press here has been full of it, so you can pick up the Nov/Dec issue of Architecture Australia magazine for more.

Rather than reproduce any more of the numerous pictures seen elsewhere, I thought I'd draw your attention to two excellent radio programmes who covered the awards in detail. Talking about architecture on the radio can't be that easy - but ABC Radio National's 'By Design' and Triple R's 'The Architects' both do it extraordinarily well. 'By Design' covers a wider remit of design and architecture, and is generally an excellent, open-minded show (how many weekly design and architecture shows are there on public or commercial radio in the world? I know Tokyo's J-Wave does one; the BBC certainly doesn't have a specialist show, despite its panoply of networks. There's Smart City, and obviously there are the new entrants via podcasting, such as Dwell, Planetizen, Arup etc. Any others?)

But Melbourne's community radio station Triple R is home to the world's best architecture show run by architects - OK, perhaps the world's only architecture show run by architects - 'The Architects', presented by Simon Knott and Stuart Harrison with Rory Hyde. It's a cracking show, in which serious topics around architecture, urbanism and the built environment are discussed with wit, insight and passion. For a discipline that can readily disappear up its own fundament at a moment's notice, it's refreshing to hear architecture and urbanism presented in such smart and accessible fashion, without pulling punches or dumbing down. I simply cannot recommend highly enough.

Returning to the awards, last week's edition of 'The Architects' featured Paul Morgan as the studio guest, and embarked upon a freewheeling discussion of his Cape Schanck house, the influence of films on his architecture, and more besides.

Equally, 'By Design' covered the magnificent Queensland State Library by Donovan Hill and Paul Morgan's Cape Schank house in consecutive shows, getting a guided tour of both by the architects. It's fascinating to hear how radio conveys the sense of these buildings rather well; hearing the acoustics shift from outside the Cape Schanck house, with its backdrop of insects and birds amidst the trees, to inside where Paul Morgan taps the hollow-sounding 'steel raindrop' a couple of times; or in the Library, hearing Timothy Hill lead the presenter from the interior of the library to the very Queensland inside:outside space of the Indigenous Knowledge Centre. Radio conveys it all remarkably well. Good architects with good ideas help too.

So in the spirit of Juhani Pallasmaa, lets eschew the images for some aural evocations of these fine spaces.

ABC Radio National: By Design: Queensland State Library
ABC Radio National: By Design: Cape Schanck House
* The 'By Design' podcasts might disappear offline shortly, so get them while they're hot.

Triple R: The Architects: Show 132: featuring Paul Morgan
Triple R: The Architects
The Architects podcast feed

Calling All Nations

Of course, for all the fine talk of gleaming modernity here, I can't resist nostalgia sometimes. So, regard this public information booklet on the BBC World Service, produced during WWII. Many varied publications were issued by government-backed stationers, aimed at explaining the war-time effort in all its palatable facets - such as these on military equipment - and a couple covered the work of the BBC in this context. It veers fairly close to propaganda at times, yet I find it fascinating as an example of mid-40s publishing and a telling artefact from the history of public service media.

The crisp typography, charts, and Abram Games-style cover are redolent of a professional and valued culture of communicative arts in everyday lives. The writing itself speaks volumes of British culture at that point. The empire is barely fading at all; still a meaningful global entity. The BBC's original role in shaping that is clear too, at this distance. This booklet attempts to describe a world brought together through broadcasting, littered with photographs of people around the globe, apparently connected by a common set of beliefs as well as a common platform. You can see the power in this message. It's been well-documented how the Other Side used the power of broadcast radio, so it's interesting to see these messages from the home front.

It's not without surreal aspects too. I love this picture below: DInkas listening to a radio in the Sudan. Clearly staged, and to what end? But amazing either way. They've hidden the generator. Actually, it looks like they, or enterprising BBC engineers, have tethered the radio to the cow. (Perhaps an early methane-powered prototype.)

It wasn't just the listening Sudanese; Scottish people were even allowed on-air, apparently, though perhaps only at Christmas.

This chart below is the piece-de-resistance for me. A beautifully painted infographic indicating transmissions across the globe; a Truly Great Britain floating above, as if some celestial body. It claims 200 million listeners at that point. An exaggeration? Perhaps not.

I've uploaded a higher-resolution set of selected pages from the booklet at Flickr. Enjoy.

Audio signatures for BBC radio networks

Interesting stuff from our R&D team - aka Tristan Ferne - automatically produced radio signatures for BBC radio networks, using the iTunes signature maker.

"I have a directory for each radio station on a particular day with an MP3 file for each programme and I run the application over this. Each random chunk is then cross-faded into the next one in the same order as the programmes were broadcast. This gives a 1-minute signature file per day per radio station, hopefully representing what went on that day..."

Laden with issues, editorial and technical, which Tristan explores further in his blog post. We're not quite sure how, or indeed if, to deploy them yet - though we do have a set of potential locations and functions in mind. Interesting either way.

Cookin/Relaxin: Radio signatures

Work: quick review of 2005

Please excuse a lengthy, self-indulgent post (unusual, huh) in which I take stock of the last year at work. Partly this is public thank you to the teams I work with at BBC Radio & Music Interactive; our own excellent Technology & Design team in particular (take a bow!), and the many teams around the organisation who support and enable our work. But this is also me using the blog as the proverbial 'outboard brain', the notebook-cum-scrapbook-cum-sketchpad with the web attached. So excuse the inward focus and switch channel if you like, but I figure some people might find the dispatches from the front line of the BBC interesting, given how little info actually makes it out of large organisations. So here's a (currently flu-ridden) design manager's view, as I see it from our third floor haven at Broadcasting House, overlooking the new building rising from the ground. The Technology & Design team I run is responsible for designing and building the BBC's interactive services around radio and music ...

Indistinguishable from magic

Lovely collection of quotations from the early days of radio, film and television in the New York Times helps contextualise today's hubris. Couple of examples:

Radio 1922: Bruce Bliven, in The New Republic:

"There will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly worldwide concerts; when all universities will be combined into one super-institution, conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloose; when, instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bedtime story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world; when every person will be instantly accessible day or night to all the bores he knows, and will know them all: when the last vestiges of privacy, solitude and contemplation will have vanished into limbo."

Television 1939: New York Times editorial:

"The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn't time for it. Therefore the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting."

New York Times: Confounding Machines: How the Future Looked

1 in 5 internet users also listening to radio

I'd quibble with McArthur's suggestion that consumers only use one medium at a time in 'other media' (though depends how you define "use" I suppose) but this (below) is a useful bit of backup research about layered media usage. Despite this report's focus on advertising, also backs up a lot of our thinking about combining public service radio and internet at the BBC.

"One in five online users are also listening to radio at any given time, according to research from the Internet Advertising Bureau and the Radio Advertising Bureau. The trade bodies for radio and online, which have previously competed for media marketshare, are announcing the results of their dual research into how people combine internet usage with radio listening. The IAB and the RAB buried the hatchet to produce this research, which works on the premise that people are increasingly listening to the radio while online. The project sets out to see when and where people combine the media, how they are used together and what the implications are for brands using this media partnership."

"Douglas McArthur, chief executive of the RAB, said: "With other media, the consumers only use one medium at a time. So we thought we would take a look into this seriously rather than just anecdotally and it's better than I'd imagined."

"Perhaps the most important finding for this joint project was the conclusion that a fifth of online users are also listening to radio at any given time. The research also reported that the two mediums provide complementary rational and emotional benefits and they significantly enhance brand interaction. And there were some worrying statistics for the TV industry; in an evaluation of share of media time for broadband users, 26% of time was spent listening to the radio, with 24% of time spent online. This compares with 36% for TV. The RAB and IAB will now take advantage of the increasing use of broadband to convince advertisers of the dual usage of their mediums."

"The profile of the user who combines radio and the web proved to be between the ages of 16-44 in the majority, with 24% male and 15% female."

Media Week: Users combine radio and web

On podcasting itself

Finally, a note on the great regeneration of the radio show that podcasting is enabling. This isn't the disaggregated, disintermediated world that many foresee as the future of music or radio in some kinda post-broadcast world - but rather an extrapolation of that which makes radio great. Character, serendipity, personality, variety and vitality, the individual voice. An explosion of intermediaries. These are the principles that broadcast radio in many non-US markets has been thriving on for years, and now more so than ever.

Oh please excuse a quick moan here. I'm getting right royally pissed off with people making pronouncements about 'radio in general' while referring only to the US market. This is another aspect of what's got Ben Hammersley's goat in The Curse of the Missing Clause. (The clause being 'in the US'.) And he's bloody right. It's particularly galling in the world of radio, where the disparity between the US market and the rest of the world (possible exception Japan) is so great. To be clear, radio elsewhere - particularly in the UK - is often thriving. Latest offender: someone who should know better quoted by something that should know better: "pop-culture expert" J.C. Herz quoted in The Economist.

"Traditional broadcast radio is a numbingly predictable heavy-rotation formula with too much blather and too many ads". The only reason people put up with it, she says, is the lack of alternatives."

Sigh. See above. In the US. Actually, even in the US there are many alternatives, as The Economist has the good grace to point out at the end of the article: "Over 35m American households—about half of those with broadband internet access—listen to online radio stations, according to Forrester, a technology consultancy. And some 7m Americans subscribe to ad-free satellite radio. Increasingly, satellite receivers are pre-installed in new cars, so that number should reach 20m by 2010, reckons Forrester. Its forecast for podcast listeners by 2010 is 12m American households. That estimate, however, was made before Apple stepped in."

You can only conclude that a good part of the excitement around podcasting is simply the American media re-discovering radio.

Still, I've every confidence that broadcast radio and podcasted radio will feed creatively off each other and positively reinvent what radio truly means. On the former, the UK iTunes Top 20 is littered with 'broadcast' radio, from our work at the BBC to Virgin Radio's Pete & Geoff - for the moment. On the latter, the very word itself might prove to be as malleable as that which it describes. As a noun, 'radio' has a little more flexibility in it than television, whose twisted greek/latin roots show. Radio will continue to evolve over time, as it always has. Think of content radiating ... Certainly, podcasts are so much like radio in form and content that I'd suggest they pose no great threat but an opportunity to keep on rethinking what radio means, over broadcast and non-broadcast distribution platforms ...

A favourite author Garrison Keillor recently weighed in on the subject of radio and I'm going to do yet another 'cityofsound-lengthy-quotation', just so you get the heady flavour of it. Keillor is admittedly of the 'nostalgia ain't what it used to be' school, but to me it's a great encapsulation of the essence and power of radio, and particularly public radio:

"I love the good-neighbor small-town radio of bake sales and Rotary meetings and Krazy Daze and livestock reports and Barb calling in to report that Pookie was found and thanks to everybody who was on the lookout for her. Good-neighbor radio used to be everywhere and was especially big in big cities--WGN in Chicago, WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul, WOR in New York, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis, KSL in Salt Lake City--where avuncular men chatted about fishing and home repair and other everyday things and Library Week was observed and there was live coverage of a tornado or a plane crash and on summer nights you heard the ball game. Meanwhile lawn mowers were sold and skin cream and dairy goods and flights to Acapulco ..."

"Clear Channel's brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair. ... After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you."

"The best of what you find on public radio is authentic experience. It has little to do with politics. The U.S. Marine just returned from Sudan with lots of firsthand impressions of the crisis there; the journalist just back from Fallujah, where he spent three months; a firsthand documentary about life aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis in the Middle East--that's what Edward R. Murrow did from London in 1940, and it's still golden today. It's the glorious past and it's the beautiful future. (Thanks to the internet, the stuff doesn't vanish into thin air. You can go to thislife.org and get the story of the Houston woman or the aircraft carrier documentary. You can find the Sudan and Fallujah interviews at whyy.org/freshair. More and more people are doing this. Nobody cares what Rush Limbaugh said two days ago; it's gone and forgotten, but the internet has become an enormous extension of radio.) That's why public radio is growing by leaps and bounds. It is hospitable to scholars of all stripes and to travelers who have returned from the vast, unimaginable world with stories to tell. Out here in the heartland, we live for visitors like those. We will make the demented uncle shut up so we can listen to somebody who actually knows something."

The challenge for professional radio, in a world of amateur voices, is indeed fascinating. I would suggest that there's a vast range of opportunity in making the professional public radio that Keillor describes - as well as commercial radio and the amateurs - but I'm mainly interested to discover what Keillor would make of podcasting, as it's exactly that kind of radio that those iPod listeners may be hearing. And he too may enjoy some of the voices he hears there. All these voices can coexist, as all these media forms aren't mutually exclusive - one tends not to destroy or even dominate the other (cf. McLuhan, or most history of technologised media thus far. In today's other news, vinyl sales in the UK this quarter are up 87.3% on last year. Seriously.)

As well as Keillor's desire to hear voices from within a few miles - and how great to think of the audio from a city being enriched in this way? Mapping podcasts to cities mmmm - an additional benefit of the podcast revolution is the wondrous ability to hear radio - local or national - from other countries. For instance, on this very matter, the wonderful Australian broadcaster ABC's Radio National had a show on the nature of radio. Or of course new variations on the 'college radio' which has been one of the few safe zones on the traditional US radio dial. These shows exhibit another basic tenet of good old music radio - an abiding passion for music engendering endless discussion thereof - so evident in podcasting.

To conclude, some actual shows to listen to (aside from the BBC's current offering): Picking up on that music radio point, a current favourite example is Tracks Up The Tree, straight outta Brooklyn and hosted from his living room by a certain 'Funtime Ben' and his various mates. It's a bit unremittingly indie - though does have the odd corking bootleg (e.g. 'Crazy In Love' laid perfectly over 'Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree', or Art Brut collided with 'My Sharona') - but perfectly captures someone larking around in front of a mic while cueing up music you won't hear any place else. Tellingly, in relation to the previous post, I discovered ... Up The Tree through Odeo and not through iTunes (it's not there). As Andrew Otwell notes, the iTunes podcast directory is not that hot on music podcasts - for obvious reasons. Andrew does also list a few good discoveries though: Momus radio [XML], On The Media and he discovers In Our Time. I'd add in Studio 360, which I've been wanting to follow properly for ages. While we're in this more professional radio space, but returning to new music, you might want to check out the excellent CBC Radio 3 podcast. Any more suggestions?

Podcasting in iTunes and Odeo

Lots of activity in the podcasting space at the moment, which hasn't gone un-noticed by the likes of The Economist, who describe the addition of podcasting support to iTunes thusly "Any confusion about the term or the process has not mattered much, because podcasting tended to be almost exclusively for the young, geeky or both. Last week, however, that changed." and "the iPod has finally staked its claim to a medium that already bears its name." [The Economist: Fiddly no longer]

Apple's integration of podcasting into iTunes will take podcasting to another level for sure. We're yet to calculate the impact on the BBC shows we have in there yet, but I expect at least a blip. It's a tightly-controlled offering, with the iTunes Music Store front-end repurposed for displaying podcasts which are vetted by Apple. This still provides a rich new set of content for many users, but it's a very 'industry' feel for sure. Many thousands others have commented on the iTunes podcast integration so I'll leave it for now, save a few words on the technicalities of the user experience. (There are many other real technical problems with iTunes' podcast implementation.)

From a content provider point-of-view, due to Apple's non-standard extensions, the BBC's shows don't look terribly good in the Top 10 (Author: Unknown), and we have to consider placing 'proprietary' code in our XML to solve that (though as will Odeo and many others). Further, the user experience within iTunes is a bit odd. In general, it's a seamless piece of work but those lack of seams can be a problem when trying to figure out why your podcast files won't appear as part of playlists where genre = 'Podcast'. It appears to be because Apple have chosen to treat them as different media altogether, somehow separated from the rest of your library (despite them being plain ol' mp3s) and closer to audiobooks. The latter has the advantage of enabling bookmark functionality, so shows resume playing where you left them previously, but is that worth the price for the fair bit of confusion this effectively invisible separation also enables? Having said that, a form of 'chapters' is also enabled - which should provide some interesting options for content providers interested in offering segmented shows. Also, the 'Keep all episodes | all unplayed episodes | Most recent | Last 5 etc.' functionality is great. So it's a pretty mixed-bag (more here - scroll past the bile). It might be enough to see off the challenge of Odeo, another high-profile entrant into the podcasting admin space yesterday.

Tom Coates has a good review of Odeo gestating so watch his site. We've been thinking about and then evaluating Odeo (thanks to Tom's efforts) at work for a few months now. It's a great piece of work for sure, and Tom's review will pick out all the salient points. The most interesting aspects for me, outside of the carefully executed user experience, is the 'Create' functionality - currently under-wraps but beautiful, believe me - and that it reinforces my thinking about distributed electronic programme guides (EPGs) and openness in general (cf. Designing for Hackability etc.). I'd guess that proprietary EPGs will be powerful beasts in the future (extrapolate Sky+, iTMS, MSN/Media Center, Napster etc), but that an equally powerful beast will be a distributed EPG, in which the Web - or more accurately IP-distributed communication between IP-enabled devices - will form a lattice of connections to media (including all the associated comments and interaction around shows cf. Social Life of a Broadcast). The web is the EPG.

And Odeo looks a fully-realised articulation of this approach at the moment - as long as the unsubscribe/subscribe buttons can be 'disengaged' from Odeo.com and placed on your own site, next to your podcast. In this way, Odeo's helpful tendrils reach out to the web and the edges blur between sites usefully, such that you can sub/unsub from podcasts in a truly distributed sense. You coalesce centrally from time to time, going to Odeo to administrate, but generally your action is distributed. All in all, it's got everything a 'Class of 2005' web-app should have, so congrats to Blogger-creator Ev Williams and Noah Glass et al.

The problem for Odeo is that all Apple need to do is follow suit on that aspect of the service - seamless distributed subscription - and they have a far more powerful play - true vertical integration from hardware to software, augmented by distributed input. You can imagine a small 'iPodcast' icon with associated code, distributed by Apple to podcasters to place on their site, which when performs the 'subscribe at a distance' functionality. They have a component of the 'transport' through to iTunes Music Store already figured out - having enabled the iTMS affiliate program, which links to particular tracks - this is simply an extension of that, messaging back and forth between your iTunes and the web. A more basic linkabilty would help too (though at least podcasts tend to have corresponding sites one can point at). Yet Apple tend to struggle with these aspects of informational product design, so let's see if they act upon the interesting Odeo approach.

Odeo have a richer, open model for finding new content - their 'EPG' is open to anyone to drop content into. Apple's storefront is far more controlled, and therefore 'legal' in the sense that the music industry will appreciate right now. I know why Apple have done the latter, and Odeo the former. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out. As ever, I expect no clear winners, simultaneous non-interoperable formats and interaction patterns, and nothing but bewildering complexity of experience and choice for the users :)

Over 600,000 mp3 downloads of BBC Radio 3's Beethoven programmes

I've kept quiet about this until now, amidst all the good pointers to it going on elsewhere, but I'm massively pleased to be able to point people to the press release we just issued around the public response to offering mp3 downloads of BBC Radio 3 programmes around Beethoven's first five symphonies.

"Live performances of Beethoven's first five symphonies, broadcast as part of The Beethoven Experience on BBC Radio 3, have amassed an incredible 657,399 download requests during a week long trial. The downloads – launched on 6 June - offered complete Radio 3 programmes containing live performances of the symphonies by the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. They were available free of charge and therefore not eligible for the Official UK Download or Top 40 Singles charts, although the public’s enthusiasm for the programmes is evident from the individual totals:

• Symphony 1 (6 to 13 June) - 164,662
• Symphony 2 (7 to 14 June) - 154,496
• Symphony 3 (6 to 13 June) - 89,318
• Symphony 4 (7 to 14 June) - 108,958
• Symphony 5 (7 to 14 June) - 139,905

"Roger Wright, Controller of Radio 3, said: "The response has been incredible and much bigger that we expected. "The success shows Beethoven's enduring appeal and we hope this will encourage new audiences to explore online classical music."

"Simon Nelson, Controller of BBC Radio & Music Interactive, said: "This trial was all about gauging listeners' appetite for downloads and the results are astonishing. We are hopeful that we have attracted people who wouldn't previously have explored much classical music, as well as inspiring others to embrace digital technology."

"Gianandrea Noseda added: "I'm thrilled that our performances have reached such a large, new audience and hope this trial will encourage more people to experience and enjoy orchestral music live in concert."

I can't tell you the amount of buzz this is generating right across the BBC. Lots of extremely interesting questions continue to be raised by the success of our trials - from distribution to commercial policy, from music strategies to on-demand radio, from marketing to navigation and so on - and we're feeding a lot of the learning and creative ideas right into the heart of the various bits of strategic and tactical BBC work going on at the moment. It's profoundly interesting for us, and I hope for some of you.

You'll have missed the first set of symphonies, but the remaining four will follow on from the 27th June, so keep your eyes peeled on Radio 3.

BBC Radio 3: Beethoven downloads
BBC Press Office: Beethoven downloads get more than 600,000 requests