Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

Concerns of Space and Time

Establishing WFHB as part of the local community is something done immediately and constantly on each show in obvious but important verbal acts. Every hour begins with a federally mandated station ID, in which the on-air programmer announces the call letters and some information about the station’s reach. The most concise script is simply a recitation of the four largest cities in the frequency’s listening area: Bloomington, Bedford, Ellettsville, Nashville. Programmers then report the weather forecast for the next several days, another act toward establishing place when they announce, like board member and programmer Chuck Beckett during a Wednesday Morning Music Mix show, “a sunny day in the Hoosier State.” (“I’ve noticed that all the DJs who’ve had a chance to get in the studio and go live are really getting into reading the weather,” notes then-music director Jim Manion during one of his shifts.)

During pitch breaks, establishing WFHB’s localness often happens subtly as programmers remind their audiences of South-Central Indiana’s social networks. During a Monday Afternoon Music Mix show, Jim Manion brings fellow early WFHB visionary and professional audio engineer Mark Hood “into” the studio via landline phone. Hood talks about founding Echo Park Recording Studios at the same time as WFHB’s first broadcast and the first local Lotus World Music and Arts Festival, referring to WFHB as “a place to plant in Bloomington” for music from across the world. While hosting a Monday Morning Music Mix show, Jar invites Durand Jones, a Bloomington-based musician who stands out as one of the city’s most successful recent acts, to dial in as well. “Hey, Bloomington,” starts Jones, “I miss you!” Each reference is a reminder to the WFHB audience that WFHB is near them and the organizations, places, and atmospheric conditions that they know. Scattered though it may be, WFHB is still a local sonic presence.

Many of the fund drive pitches begin with a mention of the programmer’s immediate location, including those taking place within WFHB’s usual downtown facilities. “I am in here live in the studio this morning,” says Jar on the first live broadcast of the drive. That same day, Chuck Beckett introduces himself as “coming to you from the COVID-protocol-socially-distant studios of WFHB” for the first time in seven months. Later that week, Jim Manion calls fellow programmer Ol’ Dirty Bryce, who marvels that “it sounds good in the studio.”

References to remote broadcasting allow for even more nuanced operational knowledge. In-studio programmers use them as part of pitches underscoring WFHB’s continued vitality and work on behalf of the public; “we kind of pop up through various neighborhoods around Bloomington and South-Central Indiana,” says Jar. Board member Emily Jackson, or DJ EJ, similarly notes that “several DJs are broadcasting remotely so that you can hear us in our wonderful community.” Chuck Beckett comments, more pragmatically, that the station has “invested in a lot of technology… so that DJs can broadcast remotely from their home studios.” The references to remote broadcasting from said home studios help listeners to locate these DJs, if only in imagined, non-studio spaces. Some use geographic landmarks; longtime Dark End of the Street programmer Gus Travers is “on Radio Ridge North, high atop Pigeon Hill,” while Blue Monday host Jason Fickel is “broadcasting from the Lost Canyon Records Annex in the heart of historic Bloomington, Indiana.” Others make up names with no discernable relation to the landscape: spearheading the Beat Party, deejayspikes broadcasts from Studio Ohm; Tuesday Afternoon Mix and Old Changing Way programmer Cindy Beaulé plays music from Chez Beaulé.

The final theme is one I refer to as distant listening. Throughout this dissertation so far, the idea of distant listening has been implicit. I think of it as a counterpoint to cultural critiques of radio as disconnecting sound from space and place.[1] The idea of distant listening in fact relies on members of the audience consciously locating themselves and the broadcast sources as separate and connected. This is an unusual task for radio, in which distance is always part of the listening experience but not generally brought to the forefront of audience consciousness, as doing so alters the feeling of immediacy that comes from instantaneous sonic transmission across wide spaces. During the fall 2020 fund drive, messaging falling into the aforementioned themes of returning to the studio for some and programming remotely for others establishes specific spatial components. Distant listening emerges as a theme when programmers elaborate by verbally tracing technological and social broadcast trajectories. Listening to WFHB, Ol’ Dirty Bryce (still on the phone with Jim Manion) can “feel… community vibrating over the airwaves.” Jason Fickel notes that WFHB can be heard “all over the world” through “the miracle of radio.” Jar underscores flows moving in the opposite direction, commenting that WFHB is constantly “drawing in music from all over the world into a single radio stream.”

[1] I specifically discuss Theodor Adorno’s fears of the destruction of the aura and R. Murray Schafer’s rebuke of schizophonia in chapter four.