Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

The Social Life of Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Anxieties about spatiotemporal qualities abound in literature on mechanically recorded and reproducible sounds from the early 20^th century onward. Many foundational critiques of the technologies involved such framed them as facilitating schisms between sound objects and performance contexts. For Walter Benjamin, the destruction of the “aura” of a piece of art, that is, of the unique and original time and place of a work’s creation/presentation/performance, by way of recording it for replay at another time and perhaps elsewhere had revolutionary potential in that “the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition” such that it reduces the possibility of mobilizing the object for purposes of hegemonic ritual (2016, 254). Radio, in particular, already suggested to Benjamin a powerful means of bridging gaps between the so-called masses and the power to communicate, although, as he noted in an unpublished piece written no later than 1931, this was not a potential fully realized:

The crucial failing of this institution has been to perpetuate the fundamental separation between practitioners and the public, a separation that is at odds with its technological basis. A child can see that it is in the spirit of radio to put as many people as possible in front of a microphone on every possible occasion; the public has to be turned into the witnesses of interviews and conversations in which now this person and now that one has the opportunity to make himself heard. (2008, 391)

His Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno drew on Benjamin’s idea of the aura and connected it directly to radio in his 1939 manuscript The Radio Voice. Driven from his homeland of Germany by Nazism and writing from exile in New York, Adorno believed the mechanical reproduction and dissemination of sound, in particular via radio, had dangerous and even fascist potentials:

The authenticity that [Benjamin] attributes to the original in the visual arts is characteristic of the live performance in music… And what Benjamin calls the “aura” of the original certainly constitutes an essential part of the live reproduction, no matter what forces are actually reflected by that aura… The phonograph record destroys the Now of the live performance and in a way its Here as well. Although the ubiquity of radio tends to preserve the Now, it is definitely hostile to the Here. (2009, 385)

Similarly anxious about changes in the relationships between sound, time, and place, composer R. Murray Schafer later coined the term schizophonia for “the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction,” admitting he did so “intending it to be a nervous word… to convey [a] sense of aberration and drama” (1994 [1977], 90-91). For Schafer, radio’s ability to broadcast sounds not only detached from their origins but subsequently restitched together in a “surrealistic soundscape” of montage was bizarre, irrational, contributing “more than anything else to the breakup of unified cultural systems and values” (94). Writing in the second half of the 20^th century, Schafer was more concerned about the capitalist intertwining of entertainment and profit in these broadcasts than the overt fascism Adorno discussed. For both, radio’s relationship to space and its power to reach mass audiences with minimal effort was fraught, to say the least. Decades later, in a time of increasing and instantaneous digital circulation of media, whether internet radio, podcasts, videos, or various social media posts, it is even easier to obscure sonic origin points. Producers can and do mislead audiences about their organizational affiliations and potential gains from the content they create (Sardarizadeh, Copeland, and Edgington 2025). Such phenomena seem to confirm Adorno’s and Schafer’s fears, to some extent.

Since Adorno and Schafer, many scholars in the broad fields of sound and media studies have added their own critical work to this body of literature on the political implications of mechanical musical reproduction technologies on the social life of sound and sound objects. I borrow the notion of “social life” here from Arjun Appadurai, whose edited volume The Social Life of Things argues that “commodities, like persons, have social lives” and explores “the circulation of commodities in social life… in different regimes of value in space and time” (2013, 3-4). The relationship between object and social life thus has a duality: an object, figured here as a commodity, has its own social life and acts within that of others. While the Marxist concept of commodity as something intended for exchange and exploitation does not always suit discussions of the circulation of sound, there are many situations, some of them radiophonic, in which sound certainly has been commodified, with mechanical recording and reproduction playing a major role in how this happens. Jonathan Sterne argues in his research into North American histories of sound technologies that “the possibility of sound reproduction reorients the practices of sound production; insofar as it is a possibility at all, reproduction precedes originality” (2003, 221). Reframing the relationship between sound, technology, and the producers of recordings as such does away entirely with the illusion that it is possible to record an objective reality and directly calls into question how different regimes of value influence production practices.

By the time I started working with archival materials at WFHB, the quality and content of any recorded material had already been determined by various forces, among them producers, intent, format, and the material effects of time. Some items would sound polished and premeditated, others completely spontaneous. Their textures often changed over the decades, sometimes along with changes in recording and editing technologies, sometimes because of the degradation of media formats, especially physical media. These were factors out of my control, and because of this perhaps even more important to attend to in analyzing and repurposing radiophonic archival materials for their impact on the knowledge produced through a given radio archive.

In thinking through the concept of a radio archive, I see three key systems at work in processes of knowledge production. First and broadest is the contextual system of the archival framework itself, second and most spatiotemporally bounded is the live broadcast event, and third and most spatiotemporally portable is the sound object/collection of sound objects. Each system shapes and is shaped by different regimes of value, to again recall Appadurai, with different relationships to space and time, all dimensions crucial to understand in thinking through the politics that guide this system. In my next section, I review some of the literature that has guided my thoughts on archives broadly, then introduce the archives I worked with through this tripartite framework of radiophonic archival systems.