Radio Waray Siday: The Making of Regional Aurality, Sense, and Affect

• Main Author: Tenasas, Maria Rocini
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2020
• Subjects: Orality, aurality, affect, soundscape, sound culture, Waray siday, secondary orality
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/theses-dissertations/443
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

An exploration of aurality, sense, and affect, this study is anchored in the hermeneutic phenomenological approach utilizing the interpretive and descriptive to explore and interpret the form and value of listening to the Waray siday on the radio. It brings together the form and lifeworld of the Waray siday as an indigenous poetic practice in the context of radio technology. I argue that the confluence of these two forms – poetry and radio – produces an unprecedented experience of sound, wherein sense or meaning making is mediated by the radio. To sound the meaning of the radio Waray siday is to enact the sound of the word. Namely, sound complements and makes meaning possible. Thus, the full effect of the Waray siday cannot be experienced until it is heard aloud, a phenomenon that is amplified by the broadcast technology – the radio. The first study of its kind in the Philippines, the dissertation is a methodological experimentation, one that draws on interdisciplinary tools to arrive at a fuller appreciation of Waray folk poetry and the transformation of oral experience in the region. On the one hand, I analyze how radionalization transforms the Waray siday as traditional oral poetry into a modernized, revitalized, and revolutionized poetry. On the other, the study exemplifies how siday on the radio shapes the Waray community socially, culturally, ideologically, and politically. This interdisciplinary study is relevant because it offers a robust understanding of how folk poetry, particularly the Waray siday, gains new life as it gets folded into the new possibilities of radio as a sound technology in the 21st century