Introduction

Listening Frames

In 2026, I conducted an interview for WFHB with Amir Amiri, an expert santur player born in Iran but based in Canada since 1996. He discussed with me how migrating to a new musical context had impacted his musicking practices. “We do listen through the framework of our culture,” he said, adding that listening in a new context, for him, “became about looking to the future with feet in the present or the past” (WFHB 2026b). The frameworks that inform my listening will become abundantly clear throughout this dissertation.

I first encountered the radio while growing up in San Francisco, near what is arguably the birthplace of the U.S. community radio movement (as I discuss further in chapter one). At home, we tuned in regularly to the local NPR (National Public Radio) member station KQED to listen to specific weekend programs. When my mother drove us around the city, especially after her car’s tape deck broke in the late 1990s, we listened to Motown-forward oldies station KFRC and “classical” music station KDFC. As I grew up, I began listening to pop hits stations on my radio-capable Walkman and with my friend on the CD player/radio in her room. In my late teenage years, I branched out to adult album alternative station KFOG and dance music station KNGY. Each of these stations expanded my musical knowledge significantly, as well as my understanding of what sounds were viable on commercial stations in my home area.

In my young adult years, I became more aware of the San Francisco Bay Area’s experimental radio scene. My father and our family friends were fans of eclectic college station KUSF, known for its deep investments in “underground” music scenes including early punk rock and heavy metal. KUSF was licensed to the University of San Francisco (USF) from 1963 until 2011, at which time its frequency was unceremoniously sold for reportedly $3.75 million to the University of Southern California against the wishes of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and without informing the volunteer staff until the sale had been all but finalized (Hartlaub 2011). In contrast, KPFA, one of the best known and oldest community stations in the United States, has operated continuously since 1949. I became acquainted with KPFA through my bandmates in my father’s experimental music/free jazz projects. Based across the Bay from me in Berkeley, I could not pick up the KPFA signal where I grew up on the far west side of the city, many steep hills away from the transmitter. In the flatter industrial spaces of the city’s east side where our rehearsal space was, however, KPFA came through fairly clearly on my bandmates’ car radios.

The minutiae of the San Francisco radioscape are not crucial to understand in reading this dissertation, but they are always present in my analysis. These details connect me directly to my family, my communities, and my senses of space and place. They are key to my cultural framework, in Amir’s words, as are my father’s musical projects and my mother’s routes through the city: the past in which I plant my feet and look (and listen) forward to the future. In this dissertation, I invoke significantly my father’s philosophies on creativity and San Francisco Bay Area-based figures with community radio ties. These are things I cannot separate from my relationship to community radio or my listening practices more broadly. Whether I mention them or not, they inform this work, parts of my own internal complex adaptive system.