Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber

Unmapping the Radioscape

In an article on WFHB in local Bloomington publication Bloom Magazine published just before the station celebrated its 25^th anniversary, general manager Jar Turner is quoted as saying, “I want [WFHB] to put Bloomington on the map… I want people to know the heartbeat of Bloomington by tuning in” (Burch 2017). The suggestion that Bloomington, a place very literally already on any given top-down map, still needs to be put on a figurative map, and that community radio might put it there, is a social-sonic-spatial claim that complicates the idea of Bloomington as a singular and static place. Further characterizing radio as constituting the town’s “heartbeat” emphasizes the emergent and semi-organic character of the station’s soundscape. “In music,” writes Navarro Baldeweg, “an initial vibration, a wave on the air, is collected and treated, filtered, channeled and amplified through a resonance chamber, so that its effects reach our ears as a distinct and differentiated sensation” (2001, 12). Certainly, the opt-in nature of radio limits the amplification and the extent to which WFHB can function as a heartbeat. Even so, the resonance chamber is there. Programmers and producers treat and filter the vibrations they collect and bring to the airwaves by framing them in ways that at times affirm and at times counter dominant notions of place.

Through acts of everyday programming and live studio sessions, WFHB programmers facilitate the production of distinct and differentiated counter-cartographies. They pulse over the air and across space, putting Bloomington on the map as a construct too alive to be bound by strict borders. Bloomington on WFHB is not shaped simply by inherently recurring echoes between like minds uninterested in change. Dynamic resonance comes from the production of alternative aural imaginaries that are both new to listeners but with which they can nonetheless connect.

Even if the incremental speed and mostly geographically limited scope of WFHB’s broadcast practices do not suggest a radical process at hand, this direction—toward resonance, away from echo—is increasingly revolutionary in comparison to the broader social framework of belonging and closed localness in which Bloomington exists. The 2016 Lotus Festival and corresponding Lotus Live sessions took place less than two months before the election of Donald Trump to his first presidential term. “America First” had already resurfaced in the U.S. popular lexicon as the theme of his campaign, though the specific ramifications remained to be seen. Much has been said and written about the role of social media and internet algorithms in this election and the continued polarization of global society and politics in general. “The internet’s islands keep getting more segregated and sound proofed,” wrote Mostafa M. El-Bermawy in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Our digital social existence has turned into a huge echo chamber, where we mostly discuss similar views with like-minded peers and miserably fail to penetrate other social bubbles that are often misled by fear and xenophobia.” The fiscal benefits to advertisers of increasing the precision of algorithmic targeting instead of focusing on broadening users’ access to media make it hard to imagine this phenomenon lessening in a capitalist economy.

Community radio is not an antidote to this. The people who choose to participate in organizations like WFHB as listeners, donors, or programmers are actively selecting a media model that believes in presenting an alternative to prevailing hegemonies. While outreach to new listeners takes place constantly, often by word of mouth or public events, it is often relatively small in scale. There is, though, more room in a community media system for new aural inroads and interpretations. “There are no limited objects,” writes Navarro Baldeweg, “but rather matter and energies entwined in complex knots, extensions of some of whose threads reach our bodies through our senses” (2001, 11). Performances like those of Westhues, Dawuni, and so many other programmers and artists articulating counter-cartographic narratives on the air are examples of these knots, reaching listener bodies and encouraging open and dynamic imaginaries of community. Though they emerge from spaces that are mapped—Radio Ridge, the Firehouse, downtown Bloomington—they make clear how unclear such static senses of place and border truly are.