RADIO, LISTENING CULTURES, LIVENESS
A brief description of the ideas I am using to understand ‘radio’, and 'listening communities'. (this was submitted as part of another project, but is helpful as a foundation to where my work is coming from... http://longlegsrunning.blogspot.com/)
Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without the knowledge about how media work as environments. [As infrastructures]
Marshall McLaren (1964)
This writing tries to trace the ambiguous relationship between the transmitter and the receiver. These terms can be understood as both the humans involved at either end of the process of a broadcast, and the means of that process taking place- I use the MacLauren quote with the understanding that 'change' is inherent in existance, whether we are considering the past, imagining the future, or experiencing the present.
Media are not fixed natural objects; they have no natural edges. They are constructed complexes of habits, beliefs and procedures embedded in elaborate cultural codes of communication. The history of media is never more or less than the history of their uses, which leads us away from them to the social practices and conflict they illuminate. Carolyn Marvin (1988)
Marvin is saying here that a radio may not be understood the same way in different cultures-, education as to the possible uses of a media and methods of application vary.
Essentially, when we talk radio, we are speaking about a device that converts sound waves (via a microphone) into electromagnetic signal- radio waves-, and broadcasts them through the atmosphere, where they can be received by another radio device, which will decode them, and convert the message back into sound through speakers.
This is not to refute Marvin’s' “not fixed natural objects” argument, but to add to it- the natural edges she is referring to are those of usage, not the physical object itself. A photograph has no use as a sound recording, but a photo might be of a concert or inspire a composition, or the creation of a radio transmitter of receiver- or a sound work might be made for radio from the performance of tearing a photo into a hundred pieces. A radio might not be a photograph, but the differences are explorable, and can generate material for both medias. Medias influence each other, and their uses are not constrained so much by their natural limits so much as the codes of use we learn within our social structures.
The medium of radio consists of 4 interconnected technologies at its simplest configuration- there needs to be, according to Nils Lyre, in Sound Media, an interface, platforms, signal carrier, and machinery. The Interface is the point of contact between humans and technology, designed usually to be visually perceived, and handled and operated by the hands, the mouth the ears, The interface is used to translate sound or other input into signals. Then there are Platforms: meaning devices that control storage or transmission of a signal. FM signals are broadcast and received by radios with a FM platform. - the publishing and distribution of radio into the public domain can take place over terrestrial, satellite, mobile networks or the internet platforms.
You must also have Signal carrier: which is by definition transportable- the signal carrier is the mode of actual contact between separate platforms- signal carriers for sound can be electromagnetic waves through the air or through land line wires, or recordings stored on
revolving discs or other tangible containers.
His last essential is Machinery- interfaces, platforms and signal carriers all rely on electricity powering automated functions of the media in stable and inconspicuous way- batteries or mains electricity, solar panels etc, are the silent partners of production, without which nothing could be made. Machinery is also how he terms the boxes that contain hardware.
Allen S. Weiss (2001) writes in his introduction to Experimental sound and Radio:
There is no single entity that constitutes radio- rather there exists a multitude of radios. Radiophony is a heterogeneous domain, on the levels of its apparatus, its practice, its forms, its utopias. If we can agree on the basic components and reliability of our technology, and the basic knowledge of its operation, (and the openedness of its potential) we can begin to consider kinds of use. This is double sided use- the users who are producers at the point of transmission, and also the user as audience at the point of reception.
(for example, the intricacies of a studio based composition can be easily lost through the play out of a low quality sound system at the point of reception. These audio significances that might be mislaid, tie into a reception that also carry the possibility of a multitude of extra information and influences that cannot be controlled by the transmitter. We have to consider the activities of the artist/producer as separate from that of the receiver, just because the two are operating independently, even if the situations are reliant- radio is not radio unless it is broadcast, and a receiver must have something to tune to, but there any necessary partnership ends...
Acoustic space, in Explorations in Communication Edmund carpenter and Marshall McLuhan,(1970)
Auditory space has no point of favored focus. Its a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. Its not pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. This is the nature of sound, but I see there are many mediated environments- technological, designed or random, not least natural, situations in which we encounter sound or to which we apply sound.
Below are listed the commonest situations of radio encounters - each one of these listening environments is a context that brings a different angle of attention to our perception of what we hear.
In the home environment radios tend to have a dedicated set position- not as central to the living room as the bureau sized sets in the 30's- more often than not, in the kitchen, as a radio alarm on the bed side table, as part of a stack stereo system in the lounge. Home environments are often negotiated space- and the listening preferences of several people have to coexist in one space.
The vehicle environment, aimed at by drive time slot shows, offers a non-adjustable built-in set up- the car is a small enclosure, with little resonance, though equipment can be to high specifications. The driver decides the show/artist, and controls the volume and direction of movement. Signals are passed through as the vehicle moves into and out of reception areas.
Earphone environment is generally through not explicitly, the mobile phone or other personal listening device such as the mp3 player. Being wearable, it is thus highly transportable, and fully controllable- this is known as a 'mediated listening environment' as all external sounds can displaced by the chosen material at the will of the listener, so failing to influence the listening event, but also the more naturalistic and faithful to the original broadcast the material will be.
In public arena environments, listening is often a shared experience- such as the organized social settings of cafe, concert halls, pubs, clubs, hair dressers, and gyms, where listeners cannot influence volume or program choice. Radio stations sometimes do radio roadshows, and some radioartists make interactive shows in public situations.
Outdoors environment radio is radiation of sound from the environment to the listener unspecifically. It may be welcome or maybe regarded as noise pollution- your neighbors' radio heard through badly insulated walls, or from stereos down on the basketball courts in the park for example.
The situation or environment of hearing of radio cannot be predicted, but is just as essential to contextualizing community radio as the situation of transmittance and the desires of the broadcaster. With mainstream broadcasting, the studio is a closed vessel, and the listeners are understood as passive consumers.But-
the same work can be heard-
In inferno city, back of a taxi, traffic beep, late already
In a cool garden beside a lake, birds and wind in the trees, spacious
In the third from the end garage, power tool and engine tune, whistling along
On the back of a slow bus in the rain, windscreen wiper drumming weather, tinny interloper
Off side at a kick about in the afternoon, laughter and sweat in your ears
As someone wakes, chasing away sleep, the restart programme kicking in
As someone drifts into sleep, volume down low, whispering dream narratives
In a fast car in the sun, the volume turned up high, windows wound right down
In a family car sandwiched between 'I spy', squabbles, crisp packet crunch
To keep the dog company in a empty flat
To scare away a possible burglar
To remind the lonely the sound of a voice
Over the washing up
Over the internet
Over heard through someone else’s’ wall
In a office, or on the factory work bench, marking time in a line, a span of sound
Ephemeral but filling space with tangible material
only as long
as it continues
We can see the language first used to describe radio ( for example personal reports, Futurist radio manifestos and radio set magazine advertisements) expressing over and over again a sense of wonder at a marvelous thing, a miracle of modern science. Their magic has not vanished. It has simply been absorbed, matter of factly, into the fabric of ordinary life. Scannel (1996) How come? Not through an exhaustive experimental use- but by a homogenization of the radio product generally received.
On dashboards, bedside tables, and kitchen counters, or in a sport-model headset, late twentieth century radio seems little more than a glorified time-keeper, weather monitor, exercise pacer and commercial bulletin board. Adelaide Morris (1998)
Contributing to Moirris' realist/ depressing general summery of radio's current position in most homes, we see programming as much as the 'radio receiver' having been designed to be as easy to use/consumed as possible, to make both attractive to the widest market possible-devicess becoming more disposable and simple to use (digital radio nowimplementingg a new radio platform but a lower quality of sound), audiences are forecast, and tailored programs are mass produced for this mass audience by corporations interested.
How do people listen to radio?
Barthes (1985) , suggests the posture of listening is an attitude of decoding what is obscure, blurred, or mute, in order to make available to consciousness the 'underside' of meaning.
There are several authorities in our country- companies that run studies trying to understand habits of listeners (usually sponsored by and with a focus on ways to improve the audience numbers / revenue generated by commercial broadcasting companies):
Over a billion hours a week of radio listening take place in the UK. The vast majority of those hours take place in the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the car and on the move...The internet and digital television have taken radio listening on to new devices and into new parts of the home or office where traditionally other activities, such as television watching or silent work, dominated. Abramsky J 2003
Felix Guattari (1978) saw the development of radio taking two directions(this translates into contents of programming as well) :
*towards hyper-concentrated systems controlled by the apparatus of state, of monopolies, of big political machines with the aim of shaping opinion and of adapting attitudes and unconscious schemas of the population to dominant norms;
*towards miniaturized systems that create the possibility of a collective appropriation of the media, that provide real means of communication, not only to the “great masses”, but also to minorities to marginalized and deviant groups of all kinds. (P85, Popular Free Radio,)
I am interested, as a marginalized deviant, in the second type of radio- which naturally takes nothing for granted, and exercises itself not in maintaining set ideas of how a media must function for optimal successs, but openly experiments at ways in which to break with the general habitus by its programming as well as its socialfunction. The creation and maintenance of audience moods are considered the primary task in radio and recording- the public tastes and mood dimensions are the functionary social link between listeners and producers- a questionable working model when much mass radio, in my opinion, reinforces stereotyping and negative attitudes.
Radio listening is still a secondary activity - at any one time listeners spend 1% of their time listening to the radio as a main activity” (i.e. doing nothing else). Broadcasters [that took part in this Ofcom study] acknowledge that, Radio continues to play an important role in people’s lives, acting as company or as background to other events. Andrea Millwood Hargreave, (2000)
(I note the many many voluntary hours involved in production of community radio work- and also note the high quality of attention that can be focused on listening whilst carrying out other tasks- a advantage to radio that 70% of responders gave to my survey. It seems to me cliche that radio is background or 'secondar'y, though clearly it might be at times, since people can pay close attention while doing something else.)
Davidson (1997), suggests The voice cannot generate information by itself; it is only the conduit for ideological messages that precede articulation. Articulating obscure ideas or the imagination tends to be the domain of art and community radio, whereas re-articulating and reinforcing messages of consumerist culture appears to be the domain of mass media.
Modern radio uses can be seen to influence by what they might exclude as well as what they might bring to attention:
The portability of radio would create a new sonic backdrop at beaches, stores and in our cars. Under such circumstances, radio squeezed out the audibility of incoming tides, seagulls, and the rush of wind, and redefined concepts of solitude. Johnson P. & Needham J, (2005). Listening to radio can be considered the framing of attention -John Cage and other artists have made work that consider the issue of the mediated sonic environment and 'sound/ music as a filler' by composing situations of listening that introduce the listener to becoming mindful of their surrounding soundscape.
Hildegard Westerkamp,field recordist, suggest how radio can be used to reinstate the real world in a listeners' experience:
Ideally, when we listen to radio, we are listening to a listening medium. Radio listens through its microphones to the world, to human voices, to the environment.(1994)
Davidson, in (1997) 'Technologies of Presence', argues that “technologies of presence will always offer a hybrid voice- a voice in a machine- that cannot speak entirely for itself, even though it posits self-presence as its ground.”
I see ideas around liveness are full of contention-
* live from site news, live discussion, scripted, but presented as 'reality'
* radio as a dialogue medium – Australian Bush School radio, real-time conversations
* radio contortionisms- art work inviting the listener to place themselves in the work as a aspect of a feedback loop....it does not hold to a event in 'real' time- but posits itself as live every time it is broadcast
Joe Milutis (1996) sums it up most succinctly in his essay Radiophonic Ontologies and the Avantgarde:
In the one ear we have the post-structuralist scenario in which meaning progresses noisily, without stable referent, as one cannot double or replicate another in intent, force, meaning, or effect. Yet, in the other ear, in its struggle to re channel loss, the art of radiophony attempts to circulate back to some original, predictable, even replicable source in the living human body, even though this circuit is formed by chance operations in an illusory referential system.
Each radioartist who works with radio as a material over sound must have considered this at some point in their broadcast journey. Broadcast exists in place and time and as time must progress- sound, ephemeral, liminal, cannot be replicated.
Especially when we consider radio as a device of 'company', a media that doesn't demand full attention, necessarily even of the sense of hearing, (unless one specifically used the controlled environment of earphones, or has the volume up LOUD AS CAN BE) the sounds of life in time filter into the broadcast- mixing in as a diagetic backtrack to the proposed foregrounded noise-in-transmission.) Radio art can use techniques to subvert this- the phenomenon of dead air, for instance, will strike fear in the radioproducer's [or listener's] heart, not because it may signify a deficiency in production technique or continuity, but because it allows authority to fall away. (Schafer R.M, 1977)
For Artaud,(1938) an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives […] all words, once spoken are dead. This statement is interesting when applied to the more recent use of recordings that are repeated, loop work or sampling.
Nick Couldrey (2004) argues that liveness is not a natural category but a constructed term. It is a category whose use naturalizes the general idea that, through the media, we achieve a shared attention to the 'realities' that matter to us as a society. He is referring to news programs particularly, suggesting the device of the witness-who-is-everywhere currency of in-company underpins the broadcasts' essentialist credential- as if a the liveness of the transmission gives the broadcast a authority that can be trusted- an essentual to the idea of media as a pure informational relay ...
Irving Goffman (1981) writes of the speaker/presentor being construed as 'the animator', the sounding body from which the noises come,the 'author'- the agent who puts together, composes or scripts the sounds that are uttered, and the 'principal' the party to whose position, stand or belief the words attest. (here we find the abhored 'radio voice' and standardization of communications).This is the model of direct interpersonal speech, and its' hijacking for use within 'straight media' is questionable in the extreme.This use of authenticity as authority can be used as a simple device to involve the attention of the Listener (who is as much a constructed category as Goffmans' Speaker model- who can suppose the complication of positions at the point of reception?) and hold it whilst suggest ideals that might not be as innocent as first suspected.(I question media that if not offering anything of value 'bubble gum for mind' is in part a deflective device- passivity is encouraged in the form of a world view [media as a window] that sees as change and development in the hands of 'profesionals', those with the knowledge and authority to address the masses- there is too much at stake to accept this disbalance with out critism.)
Walter Benjamin (1936) argues that the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many copies reproduction substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. This suggests reproduced art, becomes detached from control, independent of given meaning, and made to carry itself. Radio illuminates Benjamin's argument that reproduction- in this case, the broadcasting of a sound event - opens a work out beyond the predictable definitions of the work and allows unexpected readings.
Joe Milutis writes in Radio Ontologies, of artists using radio for its qualities of a “echnology that creates a highly contested space where space is contested, and that provides a context in which stages and scripts may liberate themselves form context itself.
Radio is a paradox. THE MOST PERSONAL OF SITUATIONS RECIVING THE PUBLIC TRANSMISSION, and at times-THE MOST PERSONAL OF TRANSMISSIONS RECIVED IN THE MOST PUBLIC OF SITUATIONS
And I love it love it love it.
Artaud,Antonin. (1958),, Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York, Grove Press. p75
Benjamin,Walter (1936) Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Radiotext(e) ed. Neil Strauss. 1993 Columbia University: New York
Couldry, Nick (2004). The Productive 'Consumer' and the Dispersed 'Citizen'.
International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1): 21-32.
Goffman, Irving (1981) Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia p226
Davidson, Micheal. (1997) Ghostlier demarcations: modern poetry and the material word University of California Press : London p119
Guattari, Felix, (1979), Popular Free Radio, in Radiotext(e), 1993 ed. Neil Strauss, Columbia University: New York p85
hooks, bell. (1994) Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge,.
Johnson, P., & Needham, J. (2004). Mediated Music and Meditation in Modernity: Radio Pop and Train Whistles in Public and Private Spaces. Soundscape Journal, 5 (2) (Fall/Winter)
Mathieu, W.A. (1994). The Musical Life. Shambhala: USA. p. 223.
Walter Benjamin, Art in The Age of Reproduction, in
Marvin, Carolyn (1988). When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press: Oxford
McLuhan,Marshall (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , (reprint 1995): Routledge: London
McLuhan, Marshall and Carpenter, Edmund. (1970) Acoustic space, in Explorations in Communication, Jonathan Cape:London. P67
Milutis, Joe. (1996). Radiophonic ontologies and the avantgarde. TDR: The Drama Review 40, no. 3: New York p63–79.
Morris, Adelaide, (1998) Sound States Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies , University of North Carolina Press: USA
Nick Couldry, (2004) ”Liveness,”Reality”, and the Mediated Habitus form Television the the Mobile Phone', Comunication Review, 7:353-61
Nyre, Lars (2008),Sound Media, Routledge; London
Scannel, Paddy,1996 Radio, Television, and Modern Life: a Phenomenological Approach, Blackwell: London
Schafer R.M, (1977), ‘The electric revolution’ The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the tuning of the world, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont. Page 91
Soja, E.W.(1989) Post-modern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso p4
Weiss, Allen S. (2001), introduction Experimental sound and Radio: A TDR Book, originally published as a special issue of the Drama Review (Vol. 40,no. 3, Fall 1996)
Westerkamp H, (1994) ‘The Soundscape on Radio’, in Radio Rethink, ed. Augaitis D & Lander D, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, page 89
An interview with Pierre Schaeffer - pioneer of Musique Concrète by Tim Hodgkinson, (1986) from ReR Quarterly magazine, volume 2, number 1, 1987 (viewed at http://www.timhodgkinson.co.uk/schaeffer.pdf 13/11/10)
Abramsky J (2003) The future of digital radio in Europe (viewed at
