Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

Technological Diversity

Transcribed into plain text, all of these narrative fragments are straightforward references to place that serve as “a reminder that we’re still here,” as Manion says during a Tuesday Afternoon Music Mix. They affirm the station’s continued live operations and the presence of human actors amid the drastic shift to automation: the relations have shifted in form, but they are nonetheless intact, and radio continues to emerge from them. When heard in their original form and context, they are more complex and more revealing of the experimentation that has taken place. In the pauses on either side of Jar’s introduction to his first show back in the studio is the clear silence of a controlled and minimally mediated environment, voice emerging simply from mouth to microphone. Ol’ Dirty Bryce’s voice as he talks to Jim Manion, meanwhile, comes through steadily over the studio’s landline phone, but is audibly filtered through this extra piece of technology. Rather than disconnect him from his surroundings, though, it places him: outside of the studio, yet within the technological network of the station. His dog’s audible bark as he talks further indicates that he is, indeed, somewhere real.

With each additional remote programmer, the unity in message becomes stronger and the sharp divergence in sound quality more evident. Though Gus Travers’ sound is fairly clear, it sounds as though his microphone is closer to his mouth than it would be in the studio, occasionally giving his voice a fuzzy quality. Jason Fickel’s audio is slightly lower quality, whether due to the bandwidth of his internet connection or other equipment specifics, and deejayspikes’ audio as he broadcasts from Studio Ohm sounds almost as low-fidelity as that of the in-studio landline. This spectrum of audio quality lends credence to the idea that these programmers are “popping up” in various neighborhoods and makes clear the technological distinctions between home studios and the central downtown facilities, which continue to broadcast the clearest sound. The organization of machines, perhaps slightly different for each broadcaster, alters the fidelity of every program, highlighting the individuality and originality of each situation, each technological network. Not every listener would have noticed each variation in sound quality. Some situations were dramatically low fidelity. Others might only have been noticeable to me as a scholar listening to these programs back-to-back. Even the subtlest of fidelity shifts nonetheless indicated the improvisational practices that were taking place. These varying technoscapes in conjunction with messages situating them inform their audience’s senses of place in perceiving different programs as unique and local in a way that has never been WFHB’s norm before the current experimental setups put together in response to the pandemic.

Technology-borne mistakes and artifacts add more textures. Under normal circumstances, few programmers use the air room phone. Those who try during fund drive have mixed success, with calls sometimes dropping or not correctly connecting to the broadcast. Manion sometimes fails to turn his microphone off when he finishes his break, and when he is still on the phone, his side of the conversation is audible over the music. Broadcasting from home presents even more potential problems as programmers lose track of their new control systems or pets invade the broadcasting space (“Oops,” says Gus Travers, “I’m struggling here because the cat’s decided to show up right now… ah, well…”) In the most dramatic technical issue of the fund drive recordings, the WFHB studio computer connecting programmer Jimi Quinn’s audio stream to the airwaves freezes in the middle of his Saturday morning show, resulting in 18 minutes of dead air. When he returns, he is fully transparent about the reasoning:

I do want to mention that many of you probably realized that we were off the air for a while and I want to give a shout out to our program manager who I’m sitting in for today, Jim Manion, who ran all the way from his house to reboot our computer in the studio to allow me to get back on the air here. Somehow that thing just froze up. It’s Halloween, it’s 2020, these things happen.

Other, less problematic artifacts from an operational standpoint are the pronounced hisses, white noise, and high-pitched whistling to be found in both episodes of Golden Age Radio hosted by veteran host Kathy Romy from her home. As is clear when I look at Audacity’s visual representation of her program, there is never a moment of true silence in her show, not by design but because there is such a wealth of background noise generated by some part of her technological network. Figure 3.5 is a screenshot of Audacity’s visual representation of approximately 1.5 seconds of an episode of Golden Age Radio broadcast from Romy’s home studio in fall 2020 and recorded from the webstream in stereo. The two rows represent distinct left (on top) and right (on bottom) channels. Each channel’s row is cut through with a black horizontal line marking time. The closer the blue waveform stays to the black line, the quieter the sound. The more vertical space the waveform fills, whether above or below the line, the greater the amplitude and the louder the sound. Sounds above the line have a positive polarity and sounds below the line have a negative polarity, aspects related to the levels of compression of the air at a given point. When played back, the audio represented in this image sounds at first like quiet static with a high-pitched looping whistle (visualized as the mostly flat but somewhat unevenly textured line) and then a dull click and shift in the whistle’s pitch (the peak, dip, and curves).

Figure 3.5: A screenshot of a small portion of a Golden Age Radio episode broadcast remotely and recorded from the webstream as visualized in the audio editing program Audacity.

This very small detail of the recording was barely perceptible to me when listening. I found it noteworthy only through the recording and analysis process, at which point I noticed almost this exact shape occurring each time Romy started a new track. she noted to her listeners that she was playing music from CDs, and it is possible that these contours were some artifact of whatever CD player she was using. (Ultimately, it was not to her detriment; over the course of the drive, Romy received more donations than most other programmers, and the fund drive made its overall $45,000 goal.)

Taken together, the aesthetics of these unexpected moments and others are indicative of the improvisational practices that emerge from community radio ethics of relation and experimentation, even when they are likely to be barely perceptible to listeners. Lexical and aural details reveal relational aspects of space, time, and community that emerge from experiments taken on in response to crisis. Dial tones, place names, varying levels of sound compression, and even the creaking of home furniture in conjunction with fund drive messaging emerge from actions emerging from a complex system actively adapting to a constantly changing situation through different levels of improvisation.