Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber Copy

Mapping the Radioscape

By 2004, WFHB had broadcast towers at Radio Ridge, in downtown Bloomington, in Nashville to the east, and in Ellettsville to the northwest. Figure 2.6 is a map of all four towers.

Figure 2.6: A map of each of WFHB’s four towers. Coordinate information provided by radio-locator.com. Interactive version at companion webpage.

Each tower expands the station’s terrestrial coverage area to reach more of the South-Central Indiana region beyond its largest city. All told, WFHB broadcasts to parts of six different counties through the radio spectrum. Figure 2.7 shows how a signal travels from the air room to the translators.

Figure 2.7: A diagram of signal transmission from the air room to listeners beyond Bloomington. Single arrows indicate direct transmission, while double arrows indicate indirect transmission (a receiver must intentionally pick up the signal). Public domain icons designed by Pixabay users mcmurryjulie and Mk_al.

Most of the programmers I spoke with for my fieldwork imagine that the people in this geographic area are their main audience, a notion borne out by direct experiences with listeners. “Once in a while, people say they recognize my voice if they’ve heard me,” said one (Interview 4). Another programmer noted having similar experiences but processing them with some skepticism. “Anytime anybody says that they recognize or listen to you or whatever, I always think they’re joking or [my spouse] told them to say that,” explained this latter programmer (Interview 6). “Or, you know, they’re a longtime WFHB listener, which is usually the case, and they do listen to everybody.” These, frequently, are the listeners who call in the most or interact with station and programmer internet and social media posts.

Still other participants enjoy the anonymity on-air work affords them even as they may be actively making contact with their listeners. “You’re probably gonna hear from your friends who listen,” said a third programmer, “but just outside of that, maybe the rest of the people don’t even know what you look like or know who you are. So it’s kind of nice to have a community here. It’s like, you actually see the people you’re DJing for” (Interview 13). To move through the community knowing that the people around you may well know your work even if you do not know them is something that energizes many programmers.

“It’s gotta be, like, 90% of people who are listening are living in Bloomington,” concluded one programmer answering the question of who comprises the WFHB community (Interview 19). “I mean, there’s Ellettsville, there’s Brown County, and I’m sure there’s people tuned in there. But just for the geographical location, I guess that kind of puts a cap on the size of the community. It also seems a little transient because it’s a transient town. It’s a community radio station in a transient town.” Some worried that the changeability of the Bloomington population might make it difficult to maintain a steady listenership.

Distance, though, has different implications in the digital age. In the early 2000s, WFHB launched a webstream, making it available for live listening from anywhere in the world with internet access. News and public affairs archives have long existed on the WFHB website for content produced at the station. While music programming cannot be archived indefinitely for licensing reasons, the station has partnered with outside services to archive all shows for two weeks after their initial air dates since 2015, helpful in facilitating listening across time differences. This opens up possibilities for distant contact that are exciting to many programmers. “We’ll get a spin in Toronto, in Amsterdam,” reported one (Interview 6), who explained that sometimes listeners reached out to tell him so via virtual channels of communication.

Many participants, especially students, have more friends and family outside of the geographic region than within it. When their work is on the air, it often solidifies connections between people in disparate locations. “If you think of DJs as nodes in networks,” said one fellow programmer, “there will be places where those networks overlap, but there are also ways in which those networks are connecting to places that are really peripherally related to WFHB, the [hypothetical] grandparents in Boca Raton who are not gonna listen to anything but [their hypothetical grandchild’s] radio program, you know… but they are listening, and they are part of the community because of that” (Interview 18). Many people I spoke with had similar ideas about their more distant listeners, often grounded in their own experiences. “My mom listens, my uncle listens, some of my aunts listen, and some of my other friends listen,” said a programmer who volunteered at WFHB while in a PhD program (Interview 3). “And I think that gives them a fuller sense of what I love and what I love to do… it’s always been known that, oh, [this programmer] really loves music, and is into it. But now it’s like, oh, no, [this programmer] has a radio show… the biggest thing is for my family and friends to see a bigger picture about what I’m passionate about.”

Another theme emerged as an interesting complement—or perhaps counter—to these comments on local and extralocal audiences. Some of the programmers I spoke with, recognizing how little we know about our listeners other than from the few who contact us directly, find the geographic ambiguity of WFHB’s listenership useful in that it gives them the freedom not to think too much about their audiences. “I really think of it as like, my [spouse] and I are listening,” said one (Interview 6). Another went further:

Once in a while, I’ll get a text from someone. Maybe every two or three shows, I get a text, and somebody will send me a thumbs up… I don’t expect that people have dropped everything to listen to my radio show. And so in some ways that takes the pressure off, because I’m not catering to an audience. I am just trying to start the week out with some good vibes, and if someone happens to hear it, then great… I don’t think I’m self-indulgent. But I’m not playing music for other people. Well, let me roll that back. Because I am, I am playing music for other people, and I do want them to appreciate it and find value in it. But I don’t go into it with that expectation that they will. If anything, I think people will put up with it, because it’s part of the patchwork of the radio station. And so even though someone listening may not like everything that I play, they appreciate it in this broader picture of, it’s music that they’ve never heard before, and there’s nothing like it on the dial. (Interview 26)

“On the dial” here is another geographic signifier, referring as it does to the dial of a radio receiver which can be tuned to pick up different radio frequencies which carry signals that are dependent on the receiver’s physical location. I interpret the above quote as a statement that there is nothing like the WFHB “patchwork” on the airwaves in the geographic area, where people are most likely to encounter the station, but it is nonetheless the case that the “culture of circulation” of WFHB is increasingly dispersed with each volunteer who joins or departs and thus shifts not only the station’s signals but the location of the metaphorical chamber in which they resonate. This dispersal alters the affective experience of listening to the WFHB webstream. I learned this firsthand while living outside of Indiana between May 2016 and August 2017. Listening while residing in another state or country, I recognized programmer voices and references to local music and places. When programmers discussed upcoming local events, though, knowing I would not be present shaped my listening experience. Pipa virtuoso Wu Man performed live in the WFHB studios ahead of a planned concert in March 2017, for example, while I was living in California. As I listened, I was both thrilled for the station and bitterly disappointed to not have the opportunity to host the session myself. In an inversion of this experience, my uncle, who lives in Scotland and has never visited Indiana, occasionally tunes in to the WFHB webstream when he knows I am hosting a show. His messages to me as he listens often include comments on the local weather forecasts I read every hour, which now constitute much of his knowledge of Bloomington. Degrees of distance are always part of the interpretive aspects of radiophonic sound signals’ resonant characteristics. They shape how a listener receives a given broadcast and what they learn from attending to it.

In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss two categories of specific case studies of synchronous broadcast events and seek to understand their potential contributions to aural imaginaries of localness in the listening area. First, I discuss day-to-day broadcast activities of the kind that once took place at Radio Ridge and now typically take place in the air room of the WFHB downtown headquarters. I focus on the work of one longtime volunteer, John Westhues, and analyze how his programming choices have sometimes reinforced and sometimes provided alternatives to certain mainstream aural imaginaries of Finland. I then examine some of the performances that WFHB airs live from studio spaces either in the same downtown building or at other locations in the listening area, but which are not open to general in-person audiences. Both offer insights into how radio can virtually challenge or reify the top-down geographies of an area through the production of aural imaginaries.