Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber

Radiophonic Aural Imaginaries

To understand how and to what ends radio systems produce aural imaginaries requires attention to the details of sound and context that inform the potential affective dimensions of a sonic encounter and their material and immaterial consequences. These are open to interpretation. The aural imaginary, writes Roshanak Kheshti, is “at times a place, a process, and a thing, it is titillating, melancholic, enraging, or humorous, our entry point into a collective fantasy… In the aural imaginary, fantasy, desire, and affect intersect with sound, capital, and the other” (2011, 711). Kheshti defines this concept in the process of critically examining the fraught music marketing and culture industry of world music, the workings of which intertwine with existing social narratives to produce imaginaries of otherness that exceed the objects and events that fall under this pseudogeneric marketing category. She, too, notes the difficulty, if not impossibility, of any solid interpretation. “Instead,” she writes, “what I am to examine is how [affective attachments] are structured and arrived at within the aural imaginary” (712). For Kheshti, this means examining fragments of world music discourse—online listener reviews, radio presentations, marketing materials—for what they reveal about listener and producer positionalities and, perhaps more importantly, the colonially-informed narratives of encounter they consciously or unconsciously mobilize in generating new imaginaries, invariably of the perceived other.

The WFHB listenership, like the world music audiences Kheshti theorizes, might be said to constitute a culture of circulation. “Performativity,” write Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “has been considered a quintessentially cultural phenomenon that is tied to the creation of meaning, whereas circulation and exchange have been seen as processes that transmit meanings, rather than constitutive acts in themselves” (2002, 192). Countering this, cultures of circulation “are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them” and participate in acts of interpretation and evaluation that are as productive and creative as those originating the circulating objects and practices (ibid.). Much like Kheshti’s consumers, though, radio publics are never completely knowable. My fellow programmers and I have at best fragmentary knowledge about who is listening to us at any given time (occasional calls to the station from strangers, worried text messages from my family members in California who catch my top-of-the-hour weather reports) and sometimes supplement this knowledge with beliefs based in our experiences of South-Central Indiana and sometimes with WFHB listeners we have known or encountered in the past. What, then, can we surmise about how imaginaries circulate through radio circuits when it is both so important and difficult to know who is participating in doing so?

Studies of radio have long contended with this question. Some information can be gleaned from considering first the active participants of a community radio project. In an ethnographic study of broadcasters and audience members of two community stations in Texas, Lei Guo finds that “the number of people who choose to join the ‘community conversation’ is rather small” (2017, 120), with a small set of producers reaching a narrow demographic in terms of actively engaged listeners. Noting that the aim of community radio is to foster a “perceived friendly and more intimate relationship between the programmers and listeners… rather than staging the ‘exotic other,’” she extrapolates that the foregrounding of certain voices aurally signals who is part of the community and who is not (122). In an especially telling example, Guo points to “the only LGBT radio program in town” as “having guests who are primarily White, well-educated, gay men—just like the two programmers” (119). This does not preclude the possibilities of a far broader listenership, but it does raise questions about the extent to which community radio operations reach beyond the reification of existing groups to fulfill their ideals of resonance among a more diverse listenership.

Radiophonic voice is not reducible to agency. In studies of difference-based radio programming, this becomes especially clear. Kristine Ringsager explores the relationships between voice, music, and place in studying the constitution and perpetuation of aural imaginaries on Danish Broadcasting Corporation program Verdensmusik, which broadcasts with the goal of “mediating unfamiliar sounds from unfamiliar contexts and… translating musical traditions and sounds” for the local Danish audience (2018, 347). Ringsager argues that Verdensmusik’s Soviet-Pakistani host, Sveta Rubin, brings to the show an audible extralocality through her “female migrant voice” and “unmistakable, if somewhat indefinable, accent” (357). The institution benefits from the cultural capital that Rubin’s voice provides as a break from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s typical, “standard” Danish-speaking presenters that reinforces the exotic imaginaries inherent to the world music format. Communications from and between executives at the station indicate that this is a deliberate choice.

To similar ends, Kira Kosnick writes about Berlin’s now-defunct Radio MultiKulti, which claimed “to ‘give a voice’ to immigrant minorities rather than just targeting them as an audience” (2012, 180). As an intern, Kosnick is assigned to solicit soundbites for German-language segments from young Berliners who are audibly foreign yet speak clear German, thus including only a tiny portion of the communities MultiKulti purports to serve. Other programs voiced in non-German languages or migrant-identified accents are typically written by German producers without migrant identities, Kosnick continues, writing that “to maintain that ethnic diversity can best be represented through 'foreign voices’ at Radio MultiKulti therefore means to reinforce rather than interrogate the process of ‘othering’ which turns all racialized ethnic minorities into people who have just crossed the border” (186). Radiophonic mediation situates these accented voices in the physical listening space of Berlin while tending to limit their place in that space to discussing issues from migrant community perspectives.

Like Ringsager and Kosnick, Barlow interrogates the idea of voice as representation in his historiography on Black radio, hearing in the radiophonic voice the potential for oppression or resistance. By situating Black radio in histories of American popular culture, he traces histories of the racialized voice from antebellum minstrelsy into the radio era. The degrading stereotypes perpetuated by programmers in blatant auditory blackface on shows like Amos ‘n’ Andy leads to Black programmers “masking” their voices to sound white on the air; post-World War II, white DJs begin to play Black popular music and “imitate the vernacular and speech patterns of the era’s leading African American DJs” (1999, 9) as Black DJs move away from radiophonic masking altogether, all examples that either effect or counter the concept of racial ventriloquy. These on-air shifts are inextricable from contextual social changes in politics and discourses of racialization nationwide.

While Ringsager, Kosnick, and Barlow examine the aural construction and radiophonic broadcasting of otherness, Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw asks how music and narrative in live radio performances contribute to imaginations of belonging and nationhood. She explores the spontaneous encounters of musicians and bands that take place on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program Fuse. Listening to musicians’ individual overviews and musical and otherwise vocal interactions, Draisey-Collishaw pinpoints two types of travel narratives. Transit narratives “emphasize the exoticism” of music produced by artists with extranational ties (2018, 330). Road narratives, in contrast, “leave space for complications, encounters and musician agency, exemplifying desirable qualities of modernity, mobility, and cosmopolitan openness” (332) and are “claimed by musicians… Transit narratives, in contrast, are ascribed” (336). This focus on agency parallels Ringsager’s and Kosnick’s concerns, but with a greater focus on narratively conveyed place than on vocal sonics. Music, though, is key to both the narratives and their mediation; genres associated with different geographical locations come into metaphorical dialogue as the musicians who perform them come into much more literal conversation that makes manifest the forces behind such performances. Narrative in Draisey-Collishaw’s work, then, consists of encounters of voice, place, music, and the mediation that frames them, all interconnected and constantly in the process of reshaping the radiophonic resonance chamber.

Countless permutations of space and sound take place under the aegis of WFHB, shaping and bouncing aural imaginaries not simply from programmers to audience but through the cultures of circulation comprising their shared (and, as always, difficult to define) community. I can neither enumerate each possibility nor make a useful generalization that would encompass them all. A more productive alternative is to broadly sketch the walls of the resonance chamber by thinking through the spaces I have encountered working at and with WFHB and some of the predominant types of sonic events that have taken place within them, using specific case studies as entry points to the subsystems of society-sound-space within the larger radioscape system. This approach does not aim to find the limits of the resonance chamber but instead pinpoints some of the key ‘frequencies’ that emerge within and from it.