Radio—Listening Musically, Being Haunted

In her book “High Static, Dead Lines; Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter,” Kristen Gallerneaux gives an anecdote of being “haunted” by audio media. She describes being awake at night as a child, roaming the house alone, and trying out a 45 RPM record she had discovered, accidentally playing it back at 33 ⅓ RPM. The resulting sound was “demonic” and terrifying on its own, and coupled with her young age, solitude, the late hour, and the element of surprise, this moment became a much deeper experience than a simple playback error might seem. Using this experience as a springboard, Gallerneaux calls on us to “allow our media to haunt us,” and finds these moments of haunting to be “crucial” to understanding sonic media.

By “haunting,” Gallerneaux seems to refer to ways in which irregularities, errors, and other such features allow emotional responses to attach themselves to sonic media and thus deepen our experience of the media. Like Gallerneaux, I find that these intensified emotional experiences give me a deeper understanding and appreciation of the medium—not just the sounds, but the underlying means of conveying them. Today I'm going to talk about this experience of being “haunted” by shortwave radio signals, and how I bring that experience into composing music.

WebSDR—Shortwave Radio Listening from the Netherlands

Around 5 years ago, I stumbled across the Wide-band WebSDR ^[1] at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. The gear behind this site receives the entire shortwave band (~3–30 MHz) as heard from the Netherlands, and visitors can tune to any portion of it using their web browsers. The cold, alien tones of the many data signals (clock synchronization, pagers, modems, and more) were unlike anything I'd heard before discovering the site. Many voice signals sound otherworldly as well—shrouded in noise, filtered to a narrow band, and often automated to read data such as weather information for pilots. These sounds had a strong emotional impact on me, and when I hear a sound with such an impact, I immediately start thinking about how to use the sound in music.

One particular emotional impact is the awareness that the sounds I'm hearing are at a vast distance, both from me to the receiver in the Netherlands, and often from the receiver to the signals. In the shortwave band, “skywave” or “skip” propagation occurs. Radio waves at those frequencies bounce off the ionosphere, traveling much further than the distance to the horizon. Using my own receiver ^[2] which I acquired shortly after discovering this site, I once heard a station in Japan from my home in upstate New York. When I listen, I feel deeply aware of the vast gulf between me and the signal, and in the interference the signal has gathered on its way to me, this gulf is present in the sound in a very tangible way.

As I scan through the shortwave bands, I notice feelings of loneliness and the sense of being in a wide-open space as I ponder the vast distances involved. I feel as if I'm hearing something that wasn't meant for my ears. And the crackles, the rushing, ringing sound of the narrow filter on the sound, and the buzz of machines communicating sends a chill down my spine, much like I truly am being haunted. As soon as I heard these sounds, I knew I had to connect this to my composition somehow. Because shortwave radio signals aren't what we would normally think of as “musical,” this requires some consideration of how to incorporate the sounds.

Telecommunications Sounds in Music

In order to illustrate how we might hear radio sounds as “musical” and compose with them, I'll discuss some compositions (both others' and my own) that incorporate radio signals.

John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) is one classic example. The piece is written for 24 performers playing 12 radios as musical instruments. For each radio, one performer controls tuning between stations, and another controls loudness and tone color. Cage composed the piece using chance procedures from the I Ching or “Book of Changes”—a classic Chinese divination manual. In addition to the composition process, the performance also involves elements of chance—the sounds coming out of the radio are anything on the airwaves that day, including talk, music, and white noise. I'm including several different recording links here to show the variety of ways this composition can sound.

In Silence: Lectures and Writings, ^[3] Cage writes about the result of using chance procedures in Imaginary Landscape No. 4:

It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of
which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and “traditions” of the art.

In other words, the composer's tastes and preferences are informed by experience of previous music, and if they write based on those preferences, the composition will be informed by previous works. Cage saw removing preference from the equation as a way to create music that was completely new and that broke with tradition. The removal of taste is in contrast to my own work, which is strongly influenced by preference—I use the sounds because I enjoy them—but as an early example of of composing with radio sounds, I feel it's useful to include.

Anna Friz's You are far from us (2006–2008) uses 4 FM transmitters and 60–100 small receivers suspended in the air in a darkened gallery. The receivers are tuned to one of the four transmitters, and the transmitters are tuned so their signals overlap. As a result of this overlap, the receivers

twitter and oscillate with sounds created by the interactions between transmitters, receivers, and audience members. As people walk among the radios, their bodies also cause sudden eruptions of static and signal.

The sounds of two stations overlapping, or of driving so that a bridge, building, or other object comes between the listener and station are familiar, but usually undesirable. As Cathy van Eck describes in Between Air and Electricity, ^[4] audiences have long been in the habit of listening through the noise of recordings (or in this case, broadcasts), meaning that these interference noises often fall below the level of perception. By composing these noises into the music, Friz pulls them from outside our perception into the category of “musical” sounds.

My Own Work

In creating one of the samples I used in Outlive everything you know, I took a similar approach to Anna Friz in using radio interference. I played a loop of sampled piano/synth through a cheap FM transmitter meant to connect to a car radio, and walked around my house, finding the points where adjacent radio stations start to interfere as my signal becomes fainter or obstructed. The recording sounds like this:

At 1:20 and 5:09 in the recording below, I process that sample in two different ways. At 1:20, the sampler (controlled by a MIDI keyboard) loops short snippets of the sample, adding clicks to the beginning of each loop and making the result sound like a skipping CD. At 5:09, I use granular synthesis, chopping the sample into small “grains” that smoothly overlap. This transforms each chord into a sustained, shimmering sound that still contains some of the character of the radio interference. In contrast with Anna Friz's composition, the radio interference-laden chords are a starting place for further processing in my piece.

Finally, as I wrote in a blog post, my piece If this reaches you for flute, clarinet, and MIDI keyboard incorporates a number of radio signals. The keyboard is connected to a computer running Max/MSP, which allows the upper part of the keyboard to play electric piano sounds, and the lower octave or so to play radio samples, one to a key. These samples include pagers, trunking control channels, clock synchronization signals, and home weather sensors, among other data signals, as well as emergency and aviation voice channels.

By having these samples assigned to keys on a keyboard, I can quickly toggle between them. Since the data signals include pitched components, the rapid switching between these samples sounds almost like a melody.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges I've run into in using this material is the small pool of sounds. With If this reaches you, I already covered a significant portion of the available sound palette, and after four subsequent pieces, I'm starting to feel at a loss as to how to go forward.

I've found that the way data is encoded in a signal has much more impact on the resulting sound than the exact data itself. As a result, each individual transmission of (for example) a pager sounds quite similar. Since there are only so many ways used to encode data into radio signals (especially when restricted to the signals audible from either my house or the University of Twente), at a certain point, it becomes difficult not to repeat myself when composing using these sounds. However, I do still love them for the ways they create a strong, haunting emotive reaction, and want to use them.

Another challenge is time. The act of scanning through the radio spectrum (as in Cage's Imaginary Landscape, No. 4) is relatively slow, and slower still if I wait for anything specific to happen. While I enjoy the Cage piece, in my own work I prefer to have things more “event-dense”—rather than slow, spacious exploration of a sound, I like to write more rhythmic energy and more variety in a given time span. This means that when I write, I'm often trying to compress the “vibe” or “feeling” of a session of shortwave listening into a much different time frame while still keeping the essence of the “vibe” and the way emotional reactions can attach to the sounds. It's a skill I'm still working to refine.

Final Notes

That's all for today! I want to extend thanks to Tracy Durnell, a friend from the IndieWeb community. She kindly offered to edit people's blog posts this month and provided some very helpful feedback on a draft of this post.

I've also been interested in writing about electronic music and sound design from the angle of aesthetics and experience—my previous posts on electronic music have tended toward technical rather than aesthetic discussions. I plan to write more like this in the near future. I hope to see you then!