Sound, Space and Society

Rebel Radio

Kimberley Peters

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137576750
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137576767
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Offers a unique conceptualisation of radio in terms of sensory spatial experience

Breaks new ground in examining how sound is produced, consumed and contested through the medium of radio

Provides novel insight into current geographical concerns by means of an engaging and relevant case study

© The Author(s) 2018

Kimberley PetersSound, Space and SocietyGeographies of Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57676-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Audible Introductions: Space, Sound, Society

Kimberley Peters¹

(1)

Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

Abstract

Why examine the relations between sound, space and society, and why do so through the lens of rebel radio stations? This chapter sets the scene for the book, attending to the turn towards multi-sensory geographies, geographies of sound, music, and mediated geographies, before outlining the need to take radio seriously within such work. Notably, this chapter argues that current scholarship related to radio could push further through investigating how the very aesthetics of sound shape (and are shaped by) space, and society. The chapter closes by signposting the book to follow, with a brief overview of chapters.

Keywords

Multi-sensory geographiesNon-representational geographiesMediated geographiesSoundRadio

I discovered by listening to the radio that there was some fantastic imagery available… it wasn’t the kind of childhood where you’d all sit around reading books so suddenly I discovered that this little box [a transistor] created some fantastic pictures… I had this imagery about these guys on Radio Caroline so I got into the whole idea about hippies, album music, whatever—and it was just the most fantastic picture in my mind.

(Interview, Listener and Disc Jockey 1, June 2008)

End Abstract

Examining the effects of music on audiences in nineteenth century concert halls, musicologist and conductor Leon Botstein has argued that the rousing sounds of classical music scores created rich, detailed visual pictures for listeners in an age prior to the invention of moving image—the television, as a source of mediated entertainment. Music—or sound—he argued, ‘created an experience of the visual and emotional imagination that would not otherwise have existed’ (Botstein 1995, 588). The assembled sounds of instruments, reverberating within the acoustic space of the concert hall forged ‘an experience unique to … [the] properties’ of both sound and space (Botstein 1995, 588). For society at the time, mental pictures were evoked and replayed through sound, and through the spaces in which the organised sounds of music were heard. In short, sound, space, and image were tied together.

With the invention of the radio in the late 1800s (Lewis and Booth 1989) the imagination-inducing capacities of sound and music would be amplified as disembodied voices and noises emanated from wireless boxes (Sconce 2000). Much has been written on the impact of radio; of spoken word, audio plays, news readings, documentaries, advertisements, and music, to create ‘ways of seeing’ (Bolls and Lang 2003; see also Wissmann and Zimmerman 2010, 2015). As media scholars Bolls and Lang have noted, radio advertising has been a particularly powerful form of promoting given products, with listeners literally ‘seeing it on the radio’ (2003, 33). And, as the quote at the start of this chapter reveals, for listeners of the offshore pop pirate station Radio Caroline, the visual imagery made possible through listening , as opposed to directly seeing, could not be underestimated in the overall experience of engaging with sea-based illicit broadcasting. Through listening to Radio Caroline an image was conjured of the musical corsairs of the seas, an offshore community ready at the record decks to bring eager listeners on land the latest music, in often unconventional formats.¹

It is surprising, given the connections between image and sound, that vision as a standalone sense has been given priority in a number of academic disciplines, from geography to anthropology to ethnography, as a way of knowing and understanding the world (Stokes 1997). Yet this follows the perspective that vision is the most ‘dominant’ of the senses (Swanston and Wade 2013; Wissmann 2014). Even our language reveals a bias towards visual thinking where common descriptors such as ‘illustrate’, ‘demonstrate’, and ‘show’ all elude to the sense of sight. As Stokes has contended, ‘social experience insistently privileges the visual’ and, moreover, academic disciplines ‘unerringly continue to reproduce this fact’ (1997, 673). This can certainly be said of geography. Traditionally, geography has been a visual discipline (Driver 2003). From the formal beginnings of the subject as a modern discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, vision was central to collection of data (Guarín 2004). Alexander von Humboldt, one of the most influential figures in establishing geographical studies at the time, focused his work on the visual, on the ‘patterns underlying particular, observed phenomena’ (Peet 1998, 11), depicting these through elaborate diagrams and maps (Guarín 2004, 607). From these beginnings, a geographic discipline emerged that would rely heavily on images of the places geographic explorers travelled to and observed. Many of the images captured by subsequent geographers in the form of sketches, paintings, and photographs would then be shown to an audience back home in exhibitions and on lantern slides in concert halls and classrooms. Images were central to the production of geographical knowledge, providing a way of reproducing and representing the world ‘out there’ to an audience who couldn’t experience that world for themselves in a time before travel was accessible to all (Driver 2003).

And it seems that geographers have never lost the obsession with the visual. The discipline continues to draw heavily on visual images whereby students, teachers, and researchers use a variety of ‘visual technologies’ (Driver 2003, 227)—globes, maps, charts, images, photographs, and more recently film—as windows to the world. To provide an example, writing on urban space, Torsten Wissmann notes how the visual ‘dominates standard urban vocabulary of experience’ (2014, 1). Geographers then might be said to have an ‘enchantment with the visual’ (Driver 2003, 227). Yet with a turn to ‘sensuous geographies ’ (Rodaway 2002), alerted to ways of knowing beyond vision alone, there is now a wide appreciation that the full range of bodily senses are vital for understanding engagements between society and space. This book is part of the ongoing effort to take seriously senses other than vision in the social sciences, and in particular, within geography, through a focus on the spatialities of sound (see Revill 2016; Wissman 2014) . Yet this book is also about taking seriously the production and consumption of a specific kind of sound—that which is shared through the medium of radio. Whilst sound and ‘soundscapes’ (Smith 1997) have emerged as important foci for making sense of lived worlds—and whilst a wide range of work has emerged in relation to sound (paying attention to urban soundscapes; the politics of voice; the global–local relations of music; memory-making and sound; audio technologies and sound-recording—see Wissmann 2014; Kanngieser 2012; Connell and Gibson 2003; Butler 2006; Watson 2014 respectively)—radio has received far less attention in recent studies (see Bull 2004; Keough 2010; Pinkerton 2008a, b, 2018; Pinkerton and Dodds 2009; Weir 2014; Wilkinson 2015 for notable exceptions).

Yet radio is historically the most pervasive form of mass-media communication (Crisell 1997, 4), and it remains so today (Chignell 2009). With a shift not only towards geographies of the senses but also media and mediated geographies (see Adams et al. 2014) the radio has been sorely absent, with audio-visual communications—television and increasingly the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Audible Introductions: Space, Sound, Society
• 2. Contextualising Caroline: The Offshore Pirate
• 3. Offshore Outlaws: Intimate Geopolitics at Sea
• 4. Audio Atmospherics: Listening from Land
• 5. Broadcasting Borders: Controlling the Air
• 6. Sounding Out Conclusions
• Backmatter