Month: March 2024

With all transparency, radio is an artform I rarely encounter purposefully. I had a minor, youthful and wholly inherited relationship with radio comedy, Hancock’s Half Hour, confused by the BBC’s ripping audio from the television series and putting that on wax as a radio version. Is that radio? Despite the uniqueness in live broadcasting of the radio medium, like many art forms, delineating the boundaries between categories is not so easy.

As an adult, I first found out about Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth’s deaths organically via workplace radios as the news broke. Vividly, I remember BBC radio on a particular early morning in February 2022 as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine commenced. I remember the desolate, history-making solemnity that cyclical transmission ushered into the kitchen. A sense that the staff’s job to make the unthinkable a digestible, formalist presentation. That uncanny, suspended tension when broadcasting without significant new information that’s a signature of live radio.

I listened to Democracy Now!, who are rebroadcasted in the UK by Resonance FM, in particular a programme from titled ‘”I Died That Day in Parkland”: Shotline Uses AI-Generated Voices of Gun Victims to Call Congress’. Host Amy Goodman conducts an interview with Manuel Oliver, father of Joaquin Oliver, a student shot dead at age 17 during the Parkland high school shooting on February 14 2018.

The spotlighting of the human voice, is a core quality of the radio medium, and the human voice is given a distressing context in this story. Using AI to resurrect the dead is a dystopian, deeply disturbing concept, yet an extremely effective lobbying tool for change. The ability radio has to spotlight unusual cultural nexus points, unique moments in history that may otherwise be overlooked make the application of radio to stress the need for political action and change a crucial means of broadcasting true varied opinion and observation on current events.

Our piece for radio concerns itself with the darker aspects of human life, memorably, Arad’s sample collage is an absurdist scraping of foaming-at-the-mouth Rush Limbaugh cursing at a caller, and Democracy Now! makes very worthwhile liberal radio programming, there is an undeniable fascination with the inanity and blatant grifting of highly suspect conservative, libertarian to far-right agitators like Limbaugh. Current affairs, and the kernels of dark, disturbing absurdity are a central throughline in our piece, from hinting and gesturing towards it, to transparently sampling and referencing specific events and individuals.

After fielding feedback from Milo our tutor and our peers, it was clear to us that it was necessary to be more overt or arch in how we conveyed our narrative to the listener. However useful it was as a functional framework to help us create, it became immediately apparent that it was too opaquely drawn in that iteration of the draft.

A resolution we decided upon was narration, in keeping with the tone of the archival radio drama samples. In my writing and performance and processing of the narration passages, I drew particular inspiration from British Pathé news and documentary segments, as well as Leonard Nimoy’s “space, the final frontier…” opening monologue from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

The domestic, stolid, almost quaint narrative entry point of a kitchen proved extremely difficult to sonically render in a coherent fashion. I experimented with recording Foley of cabinets and dishes, a spoon stirring sugar into tea, and creaking doors and a gently ticking clock, in an attempt to capture the environment without words. To purely immerse the listener within the environment they may well already be listening within. However, despite these keynote sounds deriving from real kitchens, my own and the room tone from my girlfriend’s grandmother’s apartment in Korea, alone they were not enough to even suggest a kitchen environment. We had to lean further into transparency, even kitsch, to come close to successfully drawing the listener clearly into a kitchen in the radio medium. Sizzling bacon, could perhaps be another sound to include, or the toaster.

We agreed that guiding the audience’s focus and immersion through narration was a pragmatic way to centre the listener and prevent them from losing the narrative thread. I focussed my efforts on the final sequence set in space, because of its lack of keynote sounds and acousmatic nature, feeling that the kitchen scene as rendered was concrete enough for the listener to enter the space without

The way Nimoy’s voice has been treated is fascinating to me; it has a muffled, very close proximity effect, reflecting the suffocating acoustic dynamics within his makeshift naval coffin. Paired with this is a plate reverb or echo, adding a shimmering, cosmic colour. It’s as though he is talking through an interstellar cup and string telephone, an interesting contrast of muffled and expansive inspired my microphone and processing choices when recording the short section of narration leading into the final act of the piece.

I wrote the narration script in a florid, detailed style, drawing on Rod Sterling, H.P. Lovecraft and the mystery radio drama style:

‘Out in the expanse of space, someone, or something, listens at the crack in the door we breached. All of our minuscule, full-blooded voices teeming data on the solar winds. Like a great, celestial fly-fisherman, it, or they, attunes to the current, casting ringing electrons wide and reeling in our subatomic cacophonies. Learning about who these voices belong to.’

As stated by Crook (1999, pp. 162), ‘Radio’s fifth dimension of narrative communication, the listener’s imagination, is central to the cognitive, metaphysical and subconscious experience of the reader of written poetry and prose.’ In the purely sonic arena of radio, we have to be so much more gestural to convey the same density of information that the written word does. Enacting upon feedback and writing and performing this narration helps both imaginatively detail the world this story takes place within, while guiding the listener through a realm that was previously too obscure. In spite of that consideration, abstraction and experimentation also play a part in imaginatively shaping listener’s experiences. Balancing these concerns of clarity and abstraction will be a key challenge in successfully conveying our cosmic radiophonic narrative.

Bibliography:

Crook, T. (1999) Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Taylor & Francis Group. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=166120

By the end of the 1930’s, 28 million American households owned a radio, it became the new hearth, enjoying a rapt attention not seen today. Welles’ infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel ‘The War of the Worlds’ was a seminal moment in the history of radio drama. Intentionally breaking the traditional narrative structure and form of the original novel, the broadcast was framed as realistic, detailed news broadcasts taking place in the contemporary world, rather than the 1890’s Surrey of the original novel. So realistic, that it inspired widespread panic; the public believed the story.

The genius of the work lies in its playful and faithfully deceptive understanding of the form of radio in that era. Beginning with fabricated weather report and musical programs, designed to thread in and out so authentically and seamlessly with normal radio that the audience would find it nearly impossible to distinguish it from mundane broadcasting. The eerie unfolding of events that is intrinsic to The War of the Worlds suits the slow drip propagation of information that rolling news coverage provides.

I have a memory of listening to it on cassette when I was young, and having little to no impression of it. Reflecting on that apathy now, I think it’s deeper than child-me not being able to relate to old, tinny media; rather, listening with intention on cassette whenever you like is entirely antithetical to the surreptitious, near-hijacking conceit of the original broadcast. Even studying the artistry of its performers and musicians, is only experiencing half the point. One of the most thrilling aspects of radio is, if convincingly rendered, the potential to sow doubt in listener’s minds. That singularly hovering, dawning sense of discovery allows us to momentarily destabilise the bounds of our perceived reality. Welles’ drama is an early highlight of an exciting framing device more often found in found footage cinema, genre film and internet-based art: “Is this real?”

Comparison can be drawn between The War of the Worlds and Jean Shepherd’s I, Libertine hoax. In 1956, Shepherd, a radio host on New York’s WOR station, encouraged listeners to order the novel I, Libertine by Fredrick R. Ewing by the hundreds. The problem being, the book did not exist. Embittered by his 1 to 5:30 a.m. slot, Shepherd drew a delineation between the organised ‘Day People’ and the isolation of the ‘Night People’ and sought to prod the status quo, seeing the bestseller list-adhering bookstore clerk as the target for his hoax. Later in September, the book was written and published for a reader demand Shepherd had fostered as a prank.

In the radio field, the broadcaster has access to trusting ears; by the nature of the media’s constant presence, a passive, semi-attentive listening mode is formed. The audience perhaps subconsciously trusts the information broadcasted is vetted and programme formats sharply defined, despite the relative youth of the technology. The sneaky exploitation of the audience’s solid, pacified trust in the radio machine is a core thematic interest of our group project, especially within a science fiction context, and Orson Welles’ chimeric adaptation of The War of the Worlds provides much inspiration, straddling realism and heightened theatricality.

Bibliography:

Schwartz, B. A. (2015) The Infamous “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/infamous-war-worlds-radio-broadcast-was-magnificent-fluke-180955180/ (Accessed: 5 March 2024)

Wagoner, R. (2021) What really happened during Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast. Available at: https://www.dailynews.com/2021/10/26/what-really-happened-during-orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast/ (Accessed: 5 March 2024)

http://web.archive.org/web/20020427051336/flicklives.com/Articles/Wall_Street_Journel/8-1-56/8-1-56.jpg (2002) (Accessed: 20 March 2024)

On Friday the 1st of March we gathered in M113 to record the central call-in radio show segments of our radiophonic piece.

There were a number of key technical challenges in effectively and productively recording together. Initially we intended to include a room mic, to metatextually bring the listener into the real-world space of the radio studio, however our available interfaces only had two inputs. We then ran both the vocal track microphones, a Shure SM58 and Neumann TLM 103, into a Mackie mixer. Our Sennheiser condenser was creating piercing feedback, so we reconsidered and removed the room microphone; something we can always re-create with Foley processes afterwards. There were also gain and level settings to make, and creative decisions such as performing in an affected voice, or accent. We selected the Neumann TLM 103 as the host’s microphone for its clarity and professional quality, and the Shure SM58 as the caller’s, to allow us to functionally work with a little more abrasion, lending itself well to be later processed and edited as the caller’s phone signal.

Performing as the host in the Ohio train derailment conspiracy theorist segment, and as the alien caller in the following sequence, I had to experiment with and access different characters’ voices. A crucial aspect to emulate the natural, casually-evolving conversation of talk radio was to follow the detailed script while allowing for deliberate sloppiness and mistakes. The benefit of working from a script ensured an intentional backbone of our work, while freeing us to experiment with the material without losing focus or time.

Playing into the performative conventions of radio hosts and callers was a fun subject to explore, and spoke to the ease and creative rewards this particular collaboration has been in comparison with the previous project. Our efficiency in reaching common ground has proved fruitful in generating immediacy in both our idea-generating process and our acting upon that impetus.