Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber

A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.

   Cartography is another name for stories told by winners.

   For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.

—Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees, 2021

Radioscape Routes

On July 4, 2024, I went with Jar out to Radio Ridge, the colloquial term for the area where the station’s main transmitting tower is located. Nominally part of Bloomington, Radio Ridge is 11 miles south of town, roughly a 24-minute drive from the courthouse at the center of town, down winding roads past limestone quarries and stretches of open space. For its first year, staff and volunteers programmed all their shows at a cement shack next to the 390-foot-tall tower. Inaccessible by Bloomington’s public transit system and surrounded by tall grass, it was not an ideal location for broadcasting. “I was grossed out by the spiders and the flies and the ‘bro-dudeness’ of it,” noted one cisgender female programmer (Interview 16), who only agreed to join the station after it moved from Radio Ridge. Said another:

I will tell you that Radio Ridge in August is beautiful. There was one year that I put on a 26-minute Alice Coltrane piece and went out and watched the Perseid meteors. Dark sky back then. It was darker than it is now. It was a blockhouse with an outhouse. And we had a spider and a mouse that hung out with us and you only saw the people who were there before you and came in after you. I mean, we had other interactions elsewhere, but at the station, it was a blockhouse the size of [the current station’s] front lobby with a transmitter at one end and a board at the other… being downtown was a lot easier, especially in the middle of the winter. (Interview 24)

Fondly as this programmer (also self-identified as a cisgender woman) remembered Radio Ridge, she also recognized its spatial limitations in terms of sociality and safety.

Figures 2.1-2.4: Pictures from my visit to Radio Ridge, July 4, 2024. Clockwise from top left: 2.1: The transmitter as seen from the nearest road. 2.2: Solar panels installed in 2023. 2.3: A serviceable but uncomfortable broadcast setup. 2.4: A 1993 written record of the station’s operators.

It is still possible to broadcast from the shack, though most personnel never need to go to Radio Ridge for that or any other reason. My trip there in 2024 was my first visit after almost 13 years with the station, and one I could not have made without access to a driver, in this case Jar. While he troubleshooted faulty equipment, I walked around the area, capturing the ambient soundscape with my field recorder and taking interior and exterior pictures (Figures 2.1-2.4).[1] Listening back, the sonic range is still striking. Outside is quiet; the constant hum of insects serves as a reminder of the summer heat and humidity. These and occasional distant bird calls are disturbed only rarely by passing cars and Jar’s voice (“watch out for holes!”). As soon as I move into the shack, layers of mechanical whirring overtake the soundscape. This is the constant motion of all the hardware keeping the station on the air all day, every day. As a broadcast location, it’s no more ideal sonically than it is socially and spatially.

When the station moved downtown, it was into Monroe County’s historic first firehouse, located one block from the aforementioned courthouse in the John Waldron Arts Center. It is not only accessible but physically secure, with bulletproof glass in the windows and a structure meant to withstand the storms and tornadoes increasingly common in the region. The firehouse was the station’s intended home early on; the founding members selected the call letters WFHB to stand for “We’re Fire House Broadcasting.” Over the years, many longtime members told me, WFHB has expanded to fill more and more of the firehouse. Its downtown headquarters now comprises a front lobby, an on-air room, two production rooms, a music library, an audio editing room, four staff offices, and a utility closet. Figure 2.5 shows a diagram based on an original floor plan that hangs on WFHB’s bulletin board.

Figure 2.5: A diagram of the WFHB floor plan based on an early sketch. Interactive version at companion webpage.

These two nodes—Radio Ridge and the Firehouse—are critical spaces in the WFHB radioscape. They are not the only locations, though, that make up the station’s spatial constellation. Performances and other events are often livestreamed from or recorded at various venues in the area, not only in Bloomington but also in nearby towns like Nashville, Indiana, to the east. WFHB-organized or -sponsored events might also take place in other establishments in South-Central Indiana or even out in public streets. Further distributed are places where listening might happen: homes, cars, restaurants, offices. In the following chapters, I explore different ways people use sound to activate these networks of spaces and what these combinations of radiophonic sounds, spaces, and their social contexts do in terms of shaping aural imaginaries of localness/community. This chapter uses the resonance chamber as a model particularly for discussing synchronous virtual listening experiences, i.e. ones in which there is assumed to be a significant gap in distance between listener and broadcaster but not one in time.

[1] Audio embedded in companion webpage.