Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

2020, Continued

The pandemic was not contained within two weeks. IU classes remained remote for the rest of the semester; social distancing became part of the lexical mainstream. Only WFHB staff and occasionally board members entered the station’s physical facilities, one at a time and only when necessary. Most of the time, staff accessed station computers remotely. The sudden shift to constant automation brought with it a steep learning curve and new technical difficulties. Set playlists did not always trigger on schedule; on one occasion, the preset playlist for the Friday late-night metal show continued to loop into the next morning, undoubtedly a surprise for listeners expecting to hear the local nature shows and acoustic folk sounds of WFHB’s relatively gentle Saturday mornings.

Along with troubleshooting this new technology and maintaining as constant of an on-air presence as possible, WFHB’s staff spent much of their time seeking ways to reconnect volunteers to airwaves. By the end of March, programmers with access to digital music files were able to upload them to cloud storage for staff to import into MegaSeg so that the software could play volunteers’ picks at the times they would normally be on the air. At its best, this meant music shows that were mechanically slick, sonically clear, and yet tonally inconsistent. The automation software crossfaded songs into one another with precise and uniform timing but randomly shuffled them with no internal logic or cohesion. For the moment, the sounds of participation had shifted, democratization still present but mediated asynchronously, producing a mosaic of a soundscape.

Over the summer, the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County issued emergency grants to organizations including, among others, WFHB. The station’s staff and board of directors used these funds to purchase equipment that would allow willing and able volunteers to build makeshift home studios from which to broadcast remotely. These home studios[1] required participants to already have a computer, decent internet bandwidth, and reliable digital music sources,[2] while the station provided mixers, headsets, and virtual weekly tutorials on how to connect to a webstream feeding into WFHB’s broadcast system via MegaSeg. As more WFHB programmers began broadcasting from home throughout late summer and early fall, WFHB’s textures changed again. The airwaves were filled with false starts and stutters, white noise, dead air, and uneven volume: the sounds of learning new technologies in real time, of human programmers working in isolation to build their own outposts of the station and station personnel testing the limits of their plans. By the end of October, eight music shows had returned to some degree of live broadcasting through these remote means – just in time for a late fall fund drive.

In a typical year, during WFHB’s twice-yearly on-air fund drives, programmers talk more than usual, asking listeners to donate to support the station. Often, they bring other programmers into the studio with them to strike a conversational tone. After cancelling the planned spring 2020 fund drive, WFHB staff decided to hold an extended on-air fund drive in the fall with live broadcasting by two groups of programmers: those already set up to broadcast from home and select staff and board members who would broadcast from the studio itself. On-air guests for the in-studio programmers were limited to those who called in on the studio’s landline phone to maintain social distancing; as well, the in-studio programmers wore personal protective equipment while at the station, followed strict sanitization protocols in dealing with all air room surfaces, and followed a schedule that ensured there was a significant amount of time between live programmers being physically present in the station. Remote programmers were encouraged to simply pitch alone.

For my final project for Dr. Julianne Graper’s graduate seminar Sound Studies and Society, in which I was enrolled in the fall semester of 2020, I wanted to analyze in detail the narratives and sounds of the fund drive and theorize their implications. Using open-source audio recording and editing program Audacity, I recorded 35 live programs by nine different programmers from the WFHB webstream in October 2020, some remote and some in person, and listened to them carefully for common sonic themes.[3] Five main threads emerged for me, four of them based primarily in semantic details and expressing concerns of space and time: local identity, the return to the studio, remote broadcasting, and distant listening. Embedded throughout every program was a fifth theme of technological diversity, which I derived from the variety of sonic artifacts and textures present in the recordings and which overlapped each of the other themes. In the next sections, I detail some of the specifics of what I recorded that contributed to my naming of these themes.

[1] I will use the term “home studio” throughout this chapter to denote broadcasting spaces set up by individual programmers separate from the studio for remote programming; it is not necessarily the case that all of these studios were, strictly speaking, in programmers’ homes.

[2] The terms and conditions of streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal typically forbid broadcasting from their platforms through webstreams or radio waves. As well, the WFHB staff discourages streaming audio of any kind because of its reliance on a constant, high-quality internet connection that cannot always be guaranteed, especially when using personal devices with wireless internet connections.

[3] A montage of this audio is embedded in companion webpage.