edited by Sarah Washington (Music 781.544 Rad)
Commercial radio is just a little over 100 years old at this point — regular radio broadcasts started around 1919 worldwide, 1920 here in the US. Much like movies, which developed in the late 1800s, early radio could be a lot of things. After all, what is a new media format if not an opportunity to see what ends up being most appealing to audiences in the new format? So there were news broadcasts, radio plays, and broadcasts of music, both live performances and recordings (which were a fairly new form of technology themselves at the time, too).
Over time, just like other media
formats, radio has settled into a fairly predictable palette of programming
types. There is music, there is talk radio, there is news, and there’s some
sports broadcasting, but those are pretty much the dominant formats that every
station, commercial or nonprofit, has settled on. But other things remain
possible. The book Radio Art Zone, edited by Sarah Washington,
discusses some of these possibilities, and you can borrow it from the Polley
Music Library.
First, it should be mentioned that Radio Art Zone is part of a larger project of the
same name, and you can find the audio-associated elements of the projects
online at radioart.zone. In 2022, Radio Art Zone was an ambitious project that
involved the work of 100 artists, and was broadcast over 100 days on Radio AMA
in Luxembourg. The project was also simulcast through 16 partner stations all
over the world, with a total audience of 300,000 listeners. Each artist was asked
to produce 22 hours of programming, with the extra 2 hours a day reserved for
broadcasts of lunches in a variety of informal spaces. This book is a kind of
art-book extension of the project, featuring essays, interviews, art and
photographs that all discuss the potential and philosophical implications for
using the radio waves in unique ways.
There is a history of the radio
being used in other ways: John Cage composed several pieces that incorporated
sounds from radios, most notably his “Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2).
Other composers such as Jose Maceda composed pieces to be broadcast
incorporating different parts of the composition on different radio
frequencies, necessitating people to come together with their radios to hear
the full piece. And there is a whole category of sound art activity called
“radio art,” which uses the radio waves as a medium to broadcast all manner of
sounds to create new kinds of experiences. Many of these practices go back to
the early days of commercial radio broadcasts, and we have another book worth
reading if you want to delve into the history of this work. It’s called “Pieces
of Sound: German Experimental Radio” by Daniel Gilfillan, and it details tons
about the history of these concepts from the perspective of how things happened
in Germany. Radio Art Zone, though, is a fantastic overview of
the philosophy behind these kinds of works, as well as a survey of what kinds
of works are happening right now.
The book itself is a work of art,
utilizing lots of vellum paper pages to obscure or transform texts printed on
conventional paper. These pages remind me of the transitory, cloudy nature of
radio itself, turning a dial and getting fuzzy reception until you’ve found
just the right spot. And the essays found within ask all kinds of questions of
us as listeners, us as radio programmers, us as artists working with the medium
of radio. They address core elements that we can explore with the radio, such
as time, community, the voice, hyperfocus on particular sounds in their
disembodied radio wave states, experience, memory, education, poetry,
anonymity, storytelling, modes of communication. For me, the most important
takeaway from this book is that there is still so much left to explore and
think about within the boundaries of a technology that seems so old, relative
to the many high-tech mediums we’re surrounded by today. Many would suggest
that radio is already obsolete, in fact, while a book like this reminds us that
we have barely scratched the surface with what radio wave communication is
capable of. Even the things that seem certain to us about radio as a form of
communication are really not so settled. We think of it much like television in
that both seem to be one-way forms of media, for example, but the only reason
for that is the way that we’ve chosen to implement the management of radio
waves. For users of ham radio or walkie-talkies, for example, these are other
tech deployments of the same kind of technology, but used for two-way
communication. And there is microbroadcasting used for very small areas, such
as museum tours or old drive-in movie theatres. Then there is natural radio to
consider, signals produced in our ionosphere that were accidentally discovered
before the formal invention of radio. All of these concepts make one wonder
what remains to be done with radio waves — it seems that there are lots of
unexplored areas!
Where new technology is concerned,
radio may continue to play roles as well. Bluetooth, for example, is something
that we think of as a new technology for sound and data transfer on our latest
devices, but fundamentally it’s a low-power UHF radio broadcast that can be
used as 1-way or multiple-way modes of communication. Surely there will
continue to be elements of radio used within technology we haven’t dreamed of
yet, and books like this will help to keep us dreaming in the right directions.
And it seems likely that music will continue to grow and play unique roles in
our lives, too. Longitudinal waves and electromagnetic waves seem very
complimentary working together!
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Sound Art Revisited by Alan Licht.)
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
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