Radio's New Wave

Global Sound in the Digital Era

Jason Loviglio, Michele Hilmes, Jason Loviglio, Michele Hilmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136446306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Radio

Radio's New Wave explores the evolution of audio media and sound scholarship in the digital age. Extending and updating the focus of their widely acclaimed 2001 book The Radio Reader, Hilmes and Loviglio gather together innovative work by both established and rising scholars to explore the ways that radio has transformed in the digital environment. Contributors explore what sound looks like on screens, how digital listening moves us, new forms of sonic expression, radio's convergence with mobile media, and the creative activities of old and new audiences. Even radio's history has been altered by research made possible by digital and global convergence. Together, these twelve concise chapters chart the dissolution of radio's boundaries and its expansion to include a wide-ranging universe of sound, visuals, tactile interfaces, and cultural roles, as radio rides the digital wave into its second century.

SECTION I

The Digital Soundscape

1

LISTENING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Kate Lacey

Radio in the digital age is arguably becoming more prolific, more fragmented, more manipulable, more mobile, more global, more personal. It is carried on a wider range of platforms and is less differentiated from other media than it seemed to be in the analogue age. But through all these contradictory and complex changes, and across all the variety of formats, one of the key threads of continuity that sustains the definition of radio is the construction of a dispersed and privatized public through the act of listening. The act of listening itself, however, is rarely problematized. And yet listening, as a cultural practice, is also subject to change and re-definition. This means that we do not just listen differently in different times and places, but that the way in which listening is experienced, and how it is configured and valorized as an activity in the public sphere is historically contingent. Listening is not changed by media technologies, but it does change in relation to changing technological constellations. And so the question arises about how to make sense of the continuities and changes in listening as radio rides its latest wave.

When digital radio was first mooted as a commercial prospect in the 1990s, it was sold on the promise of “superior sound” and “compact disc clarity” that would provide a new and improved listening experience.¹ Digital signal processing would eliminate the static, hiss, pops, and fades associated with analogue radio. Another selling point was the possibility for “mere” sound to be accompanied by text or pictures. However, the dominant practice of listening to radio while doing other things—like driving or housework—ensured, as the editor of BBC digital radio, Steve Mulholland, put it in 1997, that “while the visual can underpin or embellish audio, it must never detract from it.”² Alongside claims for improved quality in transmission and enhanced delivery of information, came claims for increased quantity of provision. The digital delivery system would overcome the limitations of spectrum scarcity, and promised a “revolution” in access to the airwaves that would democratize them and see a rise in the diversity and creativity of radio programming, whether commercially or community orientated.³ The most recent developments in “hybrid radio” are still being promoted in similarly confident terms. The RadioDNS project, a collaboration across public service and commercial broadcasters and associations that was launched in 2010 to more closely connect broadcast radio and the internet, simply declares its open technology to be “enhancing the listener experience, and making radio better.”⁴

Promises of perfected sound and aspirations for a technologically re-invigorated democracy also accompanied the emergence of analogue recording and radio transmission into the public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and have tended to characterize each subsequent generation of hardware.⁵ The early market leader in delivering online radio streaming in the mid-1990s, for example, in calling itself “RealAudio,” put a marker down about the sound quality and realism of its transmissions,⁶ despite the fact that dial-up connections and limited bandwidth often meant poorer audio quality than on-air reception by most conventional measures. Meanwhile, reports of one of the earliest internet radio stations, reveling in a name that belied its expectations to make a global impact—“Radio Technology for Mankind”—emphasized the expectation that “the data stream” would provide immediate, indiscriminate, and perpetual access to public performances in political and cultural life:

[Performances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, speeches and debate from the floors of the House and Senate, broadcasts of luncheon speeches from the National Press Club, recordings of famous authors reading their works as well as the internet subscribers’ favorite radio talk show, “Geek of the Week.”⁷

Intriguingly, this ambitious list is remarkably similar to the one provided by Thomas Edison to the Scientific American in 1877, when forecasting the uses to which his newly invented phonograph could be put:

[F]or taking dictation, for taking testimony in court, for reporting speeches, for the reproduction of vocal music, for teaching languages […] for correspondence, for civil and military orders […] for the distribution of the songs of great singers, sermons and speeches, the words of great men and women.⁸

A similarly rich and ambitious menu was also widely predicted by the pioneers of the early radio industry. The Marconi Company, as just one example, was reported in 1922 to be hoping to popularize its “wireless telephone” in London by broadcasting “music, speeches and news of various kinds […] weather forecasts […] sermons by eminent ecclesiastics […] important electioneering speeches and […] fairy tales for the children to listen to when they are going to bed.”⁹

But more than just recording and redistributing public and creative events, the novelty of these first internet radio stations was seen to lie in a new level of interactivity, with listeners able “to retrieve biographical data about the speakers and send them comments by electronic mail.” In addition, all these online “broadcasts” could be “transmitted globally, stored, searched, and augmented with text and picture files. The station’s creator, Carl Malamud, hoped that this new, accessible archive would be a useful tool in holding those in public office to account: ”Imagine, they wouldn’t be able to say, ‘No, I never said that,’ because it’s all recorded.“¹⁰ Here at the very beginning of the internet radio revolution, we once again see familiar tropes from earlier rounds of technological innovation: the collapse of time and space through mediation, the dream of a universal archive reproducing and recalling lived experience in all its plenitude, the immediacy of face-to-face communication achieved through mediated form, the collapse of barriers to share in the central concerns of the life of the nation, the fantasy of a comprehensive surveillance system applied in the service of accountability and public scrutiny.

The persistence of all these hopes for true communion and community through communication is fascinating, but it would be a mistake to think that there is nothing new, or that there are not newly urgent questions that arise with each new incarnation of the debates.¹¹ By the same token, however, to get caught up in each new moment without a sense of what went before, is to run the risk of missing the bigger picture. Listening in the digital age needs to be understood in the context of an ongoing “re-sounding” of the public sphere that began with the revolutionary recording and radio technologies of the late nineteenth century.¹²

The recurrence of claims to realism in the transparency and “fidelity” of recording and transmission techniques going right back to the earliest days of phonography and wireless broadcasting, are symptomatic of a newly constituted listening public learning to have faith in the ability of these radical new forms of mediation to afford a reliable representation of and access to “the real.” The indiscriminacy of the microphone in picking up all sounds within its range, and the indiscriminacy of the radio transmitter in transgressing national and social boundaries produced new requirements on the listener to be discriminating in their listening, and to find new ways to accommodate listening practices and everyday routines to the new sonic landscape. The liveness and domestication of radio demanded a new sensibility that could recognize and accept the personalization of the institutional address as both intimate and impersonal in the same moment. In other words, a public mode of listening had to be learned and developed in private space. All these techniques of listening have long since been naturalized, but they are, nevertheless, techniques that had to be constructed and appropriated over time.

Certainly the first wave of audio technologies—the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and radio—did represent a radical transformation of the conditions of auditory perception, but centuries earlier it had been writing that was really the first media technology to enable the acoustic and temporal limits of public space to be extended; and the phonetic alphabet that was the first system of “recording” or at least representing, the sounds of speech. However, it was the widespread application of print technology in the modern era that allowed for the irresistible “de-auralisation” of public life.¹³ The constitution of the modern public sphere was achieved through the development of an “audience-oriented” subjectivity¹⁴ through the act of (mostly silent) reading, and the representation of the public back to itself as an imagined community, abstracted and disembodied. The authority and logic of the written word combined with the hegemony of “Cartesian perspectivalism”¹⁵ to privilege the eye over the ear, and to render the experience of mediated public life if not an entirely silent, at least a significantly muted, affair. Moreover, it represented a shift from the group-oriented intersubjectivity of the audience to the interiorized subjectivity of the individual reader.¹⁶

The possibility of recording and transmitting sound certainly accelerated the experience of time and space compression, afforded new forms of mediated interactivity, new kinds of data storage, new levels of mimetic realism. These new forms of representation and new communicative contexts developed in relation to new ways of listening, and enabled new ways of commodifying the act of listening. But, more significantly than any of this, the new sound media involved, gradually, but insistently, the accommodation of a listening public alongside, if not quite in place of, a reading public.

There is no public, in the modern sense, outside of representation. The modern public, forged in the age of print, had encountered itself through the disembodied and alphabeticized word.¹⁷ The restoration to the public realm of representation of the sounds of the human voice—with all its traces of embodied particularity, its emotional inflections, its intimate immediacy—therefore signaled a radical shift in terms of the access to, and experience of, public discourse. However, what this shift might mean for public life was bitterly contested. Although it is rarely acknowledged in this way, many of the debates through the twentieth century about whether these new “mass” media of communication were a force for democratization or for standardization and control hang on the extent to which listening was acknowledged as a critical activity like reading, or was associated simply with passive and uncritical reception.

The appropriation of the term “audience” rather than “public” in relation to audiovisual media is telling in this regard. “Audience,” with its etymological roots in the act of listening plain to see (though almost always overlooked) and carrying with...