Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber

Notes on the Resonance Chamber

I struggled to land on a fitting metaphor for the radio systems I focus on here. Key to this chapter’s subject matter is how people physically and virtually move through these radio spaces in relation to one another and the spaces and sounds. First, artists, performers, and community radio participants meet (again, sometimes physically and often virtually) in spaces of performance connected to the radio station. As they come into contact, they inevitably impact each other to varying degrees, exchanging and/or creating ideas through musical, spoken, or otherwise sounded dialogue (writ broadly) which are always emergent from the various social circumstances that influence those making contact. Those ideas are then sonically mediated over airwaves to audiences which often include people at the radio station and indeed the very producers of those sounds. Ideas then shape the social settings in which they are generated or through which they emanate. Spatially dispersed, the station is both site and tool of this production of imaginaries.

Several models presented themselves as constructive possibilities. Many scholars of communications and expressive culture have worked with notions of an arena. Talking about popular music, Mark Mattern describes a communicative arena as one “in which meanings are created, shared, negotiated and changed and in which various individuals and groups appropriate music for different ends” (1998, 16). This is a useful possible framework for thinking about community radio, especially as Mattern clarifies that this model expands beyond direct musical involvement. Working in the field of crisis communication, a perspective apt in its own way for discussing community radio in 21^st century Indiana, Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen discuss Rhetorical Arena Theory (RAT). The rhetorical arena, as they define it, is “a social space that opens up when a crisis occurs, in which multiple voices communicate to, with, against, past, or about each other… across public and private spheres and across stakeholders and non-stakeholders” (2023, 171). Radio’s multivocality and ability to cross public and private spheres lines it up well with this arena. The arena, though, is an image tied into an event, often a competitive one, and one in which spectators and performers are separated, and so did not capture the semi-permeability of the community radio ideal.

Other possibilities similarly captured certain aspects of radio’s production of aural imaginaries while falling short in other ways. Artistic metaphors (canvas, collage, mosaic, tapestry) vividly depicted the potential for diverse elements to come together in unique and creative combinations but connoted a stasis that is the antithesis of radio as a medium. Terminology based in public spaces (agora, plaza, marketplace, crossroads, port) tended to lean toward competition and commerce. There were promising aquatic models (tidepool, lagoon, chain of lakes) that allowed for multidirectional movement and interconnectedness but were too literally organic to be appropriate for radio broadcasting. A good model would need to underscore accessibility, multivocality, creativity, and intent as factors in the production of radiophonic aural imaginaries.

The idea of a resonance chamber comes as close as any to this ideal. Using it as a model for rooms and built spaces, architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg defines the resonance chamber as “a transformer of foreign signals that translates and adapts them into receptible terms, as imposed by organic nature and culture” (2001, 12). I understand “foreign” here not as indicative of a division between local and extralocal, necessarily, but as referring to anything that comes from outside the resonance chamber, which, in the case of radio spaces, is everything but the air itself. The imposed terms he mentions, meanwhile, must emerge from social-spatial confluences, “organic nature and culture” coexisting as they always must in the chamber, its environs, and its audience—the radioscape.

A resonance chamber has inherently acoustic and spatial dimensions. Such a structure is not boundless. Instead, its parameters allow for intensified transmission from a sound source outward. Physical resonance chambers exist in the bodies of instruments, amplifying the vibrations of guitar strings or drumhead beats and sending them out to be heard. They are constructed within cathedrals and concert halls to better immerse their occupants in aural tides. Ear canals are resonance chambers, as are pharynxes: receivers and producers of sounds, respectively. Navarro Baldeweg explains that “what we perceive as sound after sound arranged in time is, in essence, collaboratively produced by the original source of the vibration, the translating instrument, and our hearing” (ibid.). This is a direct process in the cases of buildings and bodies. It can also be expanded to fit the dynamics of radio, in which the sources are participants of many kinds, the vibrations are still vibrations, the translating instruments are a range of social-spatial configurations of mediation, and the hearing is multisensory (but often hearing-centered) audience reception.

In many fields of art and scholarship, resonance and the resonance chamber make for rich metaphors that, when intertwined with its material aspects, produces a layered framework for productive analysis. Writing about archaeological approaches to sound studies, for example, Shannon Mattern discusses the need to attend “not only to the sound, but also to its resonance chamber; to both the signal and all the ambient noise through which it must pass” (2019, 225). By this, she means to underscore the importance of researching context as inseparably tangible and intangible. Architect Robert Horner’s Tidal Resonance Chamber on the shores of the Thea Foss Waterway in Tacoma, Washington, was built to amplify natural aspects of the soundscape while muffling the industrial. Horner writes that “to ‘Resonate’ brings forth the capacity to transfer between multiple energy levels and configurations” and that his chamber’s positioning against the built port and toward the tides “promotes the potential for users of the space to engage and ‘Resonate’ with the greater dynamics of place” (2010). Horner’s work takes the sonic environment (another possible -scape formation) into account as one tributary, along with other past experiences, to the sense of resonance that takes place within the user of the structure. The chamber in this case is both the Chamber and the witness reflecting within it.

Resonance is simultaneously spatial, vibrational/sonic, and affective. Brian Massumi writes about resonation as a process that “can be seen as converting distance, or extension, into intensity. It is a qualitative transformation of distance into an immediacy of self-relation” (2021, 15). One work I return to more than perhaps any other in thinking through space, sound, and sociality is Marié Abe’s Resonances of Chindon-ya (2018), which employs a specific perspective on resonance that encompasses much the same ideas. Abe takes hibiki, a polysemic Japanese word she translates as resonance, as not just a helpful comparison but as a central trope in her case studies. She writes:

Just as in the English translation, the term “resonance” in Japanese evokes a wide variety of meanings: a quality of sound, reverberating, deep, and full; a scientific concept of sympathetic vibration; the ability to evoke images, memories, and emotions; and the sense of space and time produced by lingering sounds. Much like the acoustic phenomenon in which a particular frequency activates a dormant object, which in turn produces sympathetic vibrations, chindon-ya’s performance is intended to move listeners through sound, inviting them into unexpected social encounters on the streets. To distill the insights of chindon-ya practitioners—who are themselves philosophers of sound, space, and sociality—I postulate hibiki as simultaneously acoustic and affective work of sounding that articulates latent socialities, the acoustic environment, and sedimented histories. Put another way, hibiki is a dynamic and indeterminate articulation of sound, space, time, and sociality; it is a way to think of these things together. (28-29)

There are features of chindon-ya that seem to be the opposite of their counterparts in practices of community radio, especially where space is concerned. Chindon-ya is a public street performance practice of commercial advertisement in which participants are visibly and audibly distinct from their intended audiences, who must be in physical proximity to them. Distinctly non-commercial community radio aims, at least in theory, to minimize the difference between broadcasters and audience even as they maintain a virtual separation in which they can theoretically be on opposite sides of the world. Acoustically, chindon-ya can resonate as mechanically mediated community radio often cannot. Its audiences’ proximity to its practitioners makes witnessing of the form virtually unavoidable for a time, while radio listeners can easily choose to stop listening to a given station. As I will attempt to show in this chapter and the next, there are nonetheless many throughlines between the two spheres. For the purposes of this chapter, I underscore resonance, which I find implicates similar affective effects of contact between people, sounds, and places in both Abe’s work and my experiences with community radio.

Evocative of sound and space as interacting forces, the resonance chamber model is well-suited to a discussion of how the sounds of community radio always produce aural imaginaries in context. Navarro Baldeweg writes of architecture as “a mirror in which we can see an awareness of our physical, organic presence in the world, and this awakens echoes that thrill and stir the emotions… occupying the gap between the all-embracing and the intimate” (2001, 12). Community radio works in much the same way. Used unreflexively, it can act as an echo chamber, insulating the producers of literal and figurative sound signals together and away from the outside world. When these same personnel take the station’s environs into account, though, their productions can become resonant with wider publics than those already involved with the station, changing shape in relation to contexts, producers, and listeners and in turn shaping the production of aural imaginaries.