Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

Radiophonic Aesthetics of Care

You’re still practically an amateur. Just dive in headfirst and we’ll be there to catch you.

—Matō Kanetsugu, Nami yo Kiitekure (Wave, Listen to Me!) chapter 20, “They Don’t Exist,” 2020

By the time WFHB’s 2020 fall fund drive began, Indiana had already reached the fifth and final stage of the governor’s “Back on Track Indiana” plan, reversing many of the policies in place restricting social contact due to COVID-19 and allowing most organizations to operate at full capacity even though it would still be several months before a vaccine was available to the general public (King 2021). As a radio station and therefore an essential service, WFHB could have reopened its facilities much earlier for in-person programming. Masks and sanitization could have been required; operations would have been simpler and more even. More extensive pre-recording might also have been a solution, one yielding more predictable sonic results. Why improvise?

The musicking philosophies of Harmolodics and música universal offer support for the generative possibilities of improvisation beyond simply the sum of sonic parts. They emphasize emergence as not only inherent but primary as an aspect of jazz and other improvisatory musicking practices. In the day-to-day practices of community radio, there is no shortage of case studies that illustrate how improvisation is always part of programming by “motivated, gifted amateurs.” Programmers regularly encounter situations that force them to alter the planned courses of their shows at a moment’s notice. A CD player might fail to load. A guest might arrive late. To learn to program live is to learn to improvise, to fill the space as quickly and smoothly as possible. During fund drives and other co-hosted shows, improvisation in the form of conversations can yield especially engaging programming that keeps listeners tuned in and willing to contribute financial support. When I tune in to co-hosts Nicki Seven and Chama on weekly music recap show Off the Charts, I know I will not only hear songs from the station’s most played albums of the week, but possibly Nicki recounting a recent dream to her unflappable cohost. These are moments of relation and experimentation that set WFHB apart from other broadcast outlets in the area in ways with and beyond programmers’ musical selections. In his 1997 interview with Derrida, Coleman explained that “in jazz, you can take a very old piece and do another version of it. What’s exciting is the melody that you bring to the present” (in Murphy 2004, 322). Even working with existing recordings, a radio programmer has this same ability as they introduce, contextualize, and play with music while their listeners witness.

From the more protracted improvisatory practices that WFHB implemented during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic emerges another overarching value: care. Yuriko Saito discusses care as offering “a site where the ethical and the aesthetic are integrated and deeply entrenched in the management of our daily life… a site of entanglement and border-crossing” (2022, 8). The aesthetics of an act shape and are shaped by the ethics in which it is grounded, and ethics of care, writes Saito, center on attentiveness, respect, and open-minded responsiveness in relationships with others. In the case of radio, in which listening and performing bodies are largely physically separate, connected mostly by a one-way channel of sonic communication, all relational acts, including acts of care, require certain sonically activated engagements of the imagination. Here, I also find Marié Abe’s concept of “imaginative empathy” useful. Abe writes about chindon-ya, public street performances in Japan in which practitioners outdoors cannot typically see or know their entire audience, who are often indoors. Setting her work against the backdrop of widespread social loneliness in urban spaces, a phenomenon that would intensify for many in the world during early COVID, Abe defines imaginative empathy as “an ability to imagine the sentiments of invisible listeners behind walls and to perform accordingly” (2018, 31). Driven by such empathy, these sonic encounters between listeners, performers, and other agents produce new and dynamic imaginaries of space. In the case of community radio, another mode in which performers are physically separated from their audience, these imaginaries exist in and in relation to the spatiotemporal contexts of the relevant broadcast area, as do the aesthetics of practices through which they are articulated.

Irregularities and improvisations on community radio do not automatically indicate care and empathy between broadcasters and listeners, of course. Still, the presence and liveness they signal matters, especially against a social backdrop of what many have analyzed as a lack of support and contradictory guidelines from higher levels of government during COVID-19. Each aesthetic shift on the WFHB airwaves during the early days of the pandemic was a relationally informed and experimental act of care. When live broadcasting became unethical from a perspective of care for personnel, the station became automated. When it became possible to ethically maintain care for personnel while also sounding imaginative empathy between programmers and audiences in the context of crisis, the station prioritized this aesthetically over uniformity. Every move was, in its way, an extended riff, the smallest sounds and longest silences all part of the musicking.

Distant listening and viewing of entertainment media was an important part of maintaining human connections for many people who maintained isolation during the early days of COVID-19 (and for other reasons, at other times). Homay King characterizes livestreamed virtual performances over Zoom video conferencing software as constituting a virtual commons. In writing about a drag show serving as a fundraiser for performers impacted by COVID-19, King that “the imperfections were what made [the show] feel intimate and present tense” (42). This holds true for me as a WFHB listener, though I recognize that not every other listener feels the same way. During the switch to automation and the various stumbles that came with transitions between practices and technologies, a few listeners were vocal about their dissatisfaction with the changes via social media comments and voicemails. More, though, expressed gratitude, or at least satisfaction. Surely more did not react at all, at least not in a way audible or legible to station personnel, and instead witnessed the station serving its everyday functions of aural transmission. Being present can signal care in moments of mundanity and moments of extraordinary improvisation alike on community radio. During the most uncertain times of the pandemic, WFHB did its best as a collective to find ways to maintain presence.