On this edition of the show, we explore public radio history, specifically the origins of public radio in the United States, including the important role played by college and university-based stations. Josh Shepperd joins to talk about his new book, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting, which examines the intersections between the media reform movement, public broadcasting, educational technology and communications policy and research. Josh is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and is Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress.

Show Notes:

• Josh Shepperd’s website at University of Colorado Boulder
• Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress
• Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (affiliate link on Amazon)
• Association of College and University Broadcasting Stations (ACUBS) evolved into the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB)
• Unlocking the Airwaves collection of NAEB materials
• Robert McChesney’s book: Telcommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (affiliate link on Amazon)
• What is Low Power FM? (page on Radio Survivor)
• Podcast #333 – Low Power FM for Dummies (LPFM window opens Dec. 6, 2023)
• Prometheus Radio Project
• Common Frequency

Show Credits:

• This episode was produced by Jennifer Waits
• Hosted by Jennifer Waits, Eric Klein and Paul Riismandel
• Edited by Eric Klein

The post Podcast #336 – Educational Radio and the Beginnings of Public Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As the year and semester draws to a close, we get real on this week’s episode and talk about work, burnout, volunteer labor, and how podcasting is not immune to the everyday stressors and challenges that we are all feeling right about now! Two of our favorite scholars, Jennifer Lynn Stoever and Hannah McGregor, join us to lend their perspectives on the work of podcasting and sound studies. We touch on the often-under acknowledged labor behind this work, discuss ways to create personal boundaries around work expectations, and learn about the concept of “hope labor.” Jennifer Lynn Stoever is an Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, and the author of The Sonic Color Line. Hannah McGregor is Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University as well as co-director of the Amplify Podcast Network and co-creator of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast on the world of Harry Potter.

Show Notes:

• Jennifer Stoever’s website
• Sounding Out! is a scholarly publication and podcast focused on sound studies
• Jennifer Stoever’s book: The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening
• Hannah McGregor’s website
• Amplify Podcast Network
• Witch, Please podcast
• SpokenWeb Podcast
• Secret Feminist Agenda podcast
• Previous Radio Survivor episodes with Jennifer Stoever and Hannah McGregor
  • Podcast #132: Sounding Out on the Cultural Politics of Sound & Listening (Jennifer Stoever)
  • Podcast #275: Making Scholarly Podcasts Count (Hannah McGregor)
  • Podcast #284: SpokenWeb and Literary Sound (Hannah McGregor)
  • Podcast # 289: Celebrating Women in Sound (Jenny Stoever and Jennifer Hyland Wang)
• Digital Sound Studies book
• Not Sorry podcasting network
• Patreon
• Podcast #321: The Long Sordid History of Broadcast Indecency Enforcement
• Journal of Popular Music Studies
• Sounding Out! on Twitter
• Sounding Out! Podcast #63: The Sonic Landcapes of Unwelcome: Women of Color, Sonic Harassment, and Public Space
• Locatora Radio

The post Podcast #323 – Hope Labor, Burnout, and Balance: Getting Real about Podcasting appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On the show this week we explore a pivotal period for radio news in the 1930s and learn why the Lindbergh kidnapping changed everything. Travel back in time with us. It’s March 1932 and a horrible crime has just occurred, the kidnapping of the 20-month-old son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Imagine that you were living in the United States in 1932 and wanted to follow breaking news about this story. If it were 2021, the answer might be Twitter or the internet. But in the early 1930s, it was obviously a very different media landscape, largely consisting of print journalism, news reels, and radio. Our guest, Thomas Doherty joins us to provide historical context and shed light on radio’s role in the media frenzy surrounding the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and subsequent trial and why it was a turning point for how breaking news was covered. Thomas Doherty, Professor of American Studies at Brandeis, is the author of Little Lindy is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century.

Show Notes:

• Thomas Doherty faculty page at Brandeis University
• Little Lindy is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century
• Lindbergh Kidnapping (FBI website)
• Wikipedia entry for journalist and writer Adela Rogers St. Johns
• Women Film Pioneers Project article about Adela Rogers St. Johns
• Canon 35: Cameras, Courts and Confusion
• The March of Time radio program (Wikipedia)
• Testimony of Anne Morrow Lindberg
• 25 Years after O.J Simpson’s Chase, L.A. is Still Obsessed with Police Pursuits (New York Times)

The post Podcast #314 – Radio and the Lindbergh Kidnapping appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This week, we take a close look at the history of an influential Spanish language community radio station: KDNA. Located in Washington State, the station launched in 1979 and serves a rural community which includes farm workers and immigrants. Our guest, Monica De La Torre, is Assistant Professor at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and is the author of a forthcoming book about KDNA called Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley.

Show Notes:

• Monica De La Torre
• Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley
• Chicana Radio Activists and the Sounds of Chicana Feminisms on SoundingOut!
• Looking Back on the Lesser-known Histories of Chicano Public Radio on Current
• KDNA radio station
• Soul Rebel Radio on KPFK in Los Angeles
• Bilingual community radio station KBBF-FM in Santa Rosa, California
• KRAB Archive for Seattle community radio station KRAB-FM (1962-1984)
• Womxn Who Rock collective
• KRZA community radio station

Related Episodes:

• Podcast #260: Radio History on the Northern Border of Mexico with guest Sonia Robles (1930-1950)
• Podcast #184: Hidden Women’s Radio History in Uruguay with guest Christine Ehrick (Radio Femenina, founded in 1935)
• Podcast #134: The KRAB-FM Archives
• Podcast #72: Pete Tridish Celebrates an LPFM Success Story (KPCN-LP, run by Oregon’s farmworkers union)

The post Podcast #302 – Feminista Frequencies appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Renowned radio scholar Michele Hilmes is Professor Emerita, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been a long time proponent of the importance of studying radio and sound, which have often been neglected in the broader field of media studies. She joins us on the show to discuss radio studies, her call for new terminology surrounding audio works, and the growing interest in sound studies.

Show Notes:

• Michele Hilmes website at University of Wisconsin
• Michele Hilmes piece Soundwork: Something to Work With in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture
• Radio Preservation Task Force
• Podcast #135: Resurfacing Women’s Contributions in Podcasting History
• Podcast #167: Alternative Histories of Podcasting
• The Music Theory of TikTok Sea Shanties – A YouTube essay by Adam Neely
• Podcast #141: How Radio Isn’t Done According to Negativland’s Don Joyce and the archives of Over The Edge
• Have You Heard George’s Podcast?
• Eric realized during the editing process that the best example of the experimental sound documentary format he was struggling to name is probably The Kitchen Sisters.

The post Podcast #297 – Radio Studies and Soundwork appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On this week’s show we take a look at the ways that Native Americans used sound technology during radio’s earliest days and how that inspired and led to the flourishing Native media landscape, including tribal radio stations. Our guest, Josh Garrett-Davis, is Associate Curator at the Autry Museum and author of a recently completed dissertation: Resounding Voices: Native Americans and Sound Media, 1890-1970.

Show Notes:

• Josh Garrett-Davis website: http://www.joshgarrettdavis.com/
• Autry Museum of the American West website: https://theautry.org/
• Resounding Voices: Native Americans and Sound Media, 1890-1970: https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp018910jx50x
• The “Tribal Drum” of Radio: Gathering Together the Archive of American Indian Radio (piece on Sounding Out!) https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/02/19/the-tribal-drum-of-radio-gathering-together-the-archive-of-american-indian-radio/
• KILI radio, the voice of the Lakota Nation: http://www.kiliradio.org/
• KINI radio: https://www.kiniradio.com/
• Radio Free Alcatraz: https://pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb545701-bb545740
• Native American Activism on the Airwaves with the “Seeing Red” Radio Archive: https://historyhub.history.gov/community/american-indian-records/blog/2020/08/10/native-american-activism-on-the-airwaves-with-the-seeing-red-radio-archive
• More details about the “Indians for Indians Hour”: https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/IndiansForIndians.pdf
• Michael Keith’s book, Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America https://www.amazon.com/Signals-Air-Broadcasting-America-Society/dp/0275948765
• Podcast #221: The Intertwined History of the Radio and Recording Industries with guest Kyle Barnett: https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2019/11/26/podcast-221-the-intertwined-history-of-the-radio-and-recording-industries/
• Podcast #186: African-American Preachers on Wax with guest Lerone Martin https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2019/03/27/podcast-186-african-american-preachers-on-wax/
• Podcast #190: Radio Spectrum and Transmission Art with guest Amanda Dawn Christie https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2019/04/24/podcast-190-radio-spectrum-and-transmission-art/
• Podcast #122: The Popular Community Radio Movement in Argentina https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2017/12/26/podcast-122-popular-community-radio-movement-argentina/
• Native Voices over the Airwaves exhibition page at University Libraries at University of Oklahoma https://libraries.ou.edu/content/native-voices-over-airwaves-exhibition-recordings-available-nov-14
• Details about David Goren’s BBC documentary about community radio stations around the world, including one from the Navajo Nation: https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2021/02/15/listen-to-this-bbc-documentary-about-5-community-stations-around-the-world/
• Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295741826/network-sovereignty/
• Podcast #103 – The Popular Community Radio Movement in Argentina – https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2017/08/09/podcast-103-popular-community-radio-movement-argentina/

The post Podcast #286 – Native American Voices on the Air in the Early Days of Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Border radio is one of our favorite topics at Radio Survivor and on this week’s episode we dig into the history of radio broadcasting on the northern border of Mexico. Scholar Sonia Robles shares the stories of some of the lesser-known, small broadcasters whose histories are often overshadowed by the wild tales of higher power border blaster stations. Robles is the author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1930-1950 and Assistant Professor of History at University of Delaware.

Show Notes:

• Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1930-1950
• Podcast # 212 – Border Radio in North America
• DX Adventures at 1700
• Confirmations of 1700 (AM)
• Podcast #184 – Hidden Women’s Radio History in Uruguay
• Podcast #186 – African-American Preachers on Wax
• Podcast #252 – Exploring the Seeds of Public Radio in Educational Radio Archives
• Podcast #250 – Aimee Semple McPherson and the Early History of Radio Evangelists

The post Podcast #260 – Radio History on the Northern Border of Mexico appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This week, we explore the ancestor of public radio in the United States: educational radio. Our guest, Stephanie Sapienza, helps to bring educational radio archives to life through her work on the multi-institution “Unlocking the Airwaves” project. As Digital Humanities Archivist at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at University of Maryland, Sapienza is working with audio from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). She describes the breadth of materials in the collection and its role in public radio history and also shares more about her unique (and entertaining) presentation at the Orphan Film Symposium in which she reported on old time educational radio in an old time radio style.

Show Notes:

• Stephanie Sapienza’s website
• The Orphan’s Radio Hour
• Orphan Film Symposium
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
• Unlocking the Airwaves
• American Archive of Public Broadcasting
• Radio Preservation Task Force website at Library of Congress
• National Association of Educational Broadcasters collection at University of Maryland
• Podcast #192: Saving Radio History with The Radio Preservation Task Force episode with Josh Shepperd

The post Podcast # 252 – Exploring the Seeds of Public Radio in Educational Radio Archives appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Scholar Jocelyn Robinson says about one-third of Historically Black Colleges and Universities have radio stations. Her mission is to survey them and help preserve their histories and recorded legacies through the HBCU Radio Station Archival Survey Project, which she directs.

On this episode Robinson tells us about this project, and explains why it’s important to preserve this heritage. Her interest in radio was sparked at WYSO-FM in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a station founded by college students which won a grant to digitize and protect its archives which were maintained for decades almost by benign neglect. Robinson created a radio show for WYSO, pulling from this rich store of historical recordings, called “Rediscovered Radio.” The experience prompted her to widen the search to HBCUs.

In this we explore the reasons why relatively few college and university stations have active archival and preservation programs, how station licenses are “an institutional asset” and the cultural shift that has turned us all into documentarians.

Show Notes:

• WYSO’s Rediscovered Radio
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: Saving History at College Radio Stations, One Tape at a Time
• National Recording Preservation Foundation: National Recording Preservation Foundation Distributes $50,000 in 4 Grants for Audio Preservation
• Union College: Making waves: Race, radio and the legacy of Wendell King ‘24
• Black Perspectives: The Race to Preserve African American Radio

Feature image integrates image by @ingoshulz from Unsplash

The post Podcast #232 – Documenting & Preserving Radio at HBCUs appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On this week’s show, we take a trip back to the early 20th century to learn about the recording industry’s intertwined relationship with radio and music culture. Our guest is Kyle Barnett, Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University.

Barnett’s forthcoming book, Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry, looks at the early history of the recording industry in the United States. On the episode, Barnett shares tidbits from his research and reminds us of the complexity of the media landscape, calling for scholars to not neglect exploring how industries are interconnected. Along the way, we learn about phonograph parlors, the differences between public and private listening, and why some record labels asked their artists to stay off the radio.

Show Notes:

• Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry
• Kyle Barnett on Twitter
• Radio Survivor Podcast #186: African-American Preachers on Wax
• Radio Preservation Task Force

The post Podcast #221 – The Intertwined History of the Radio and Recording Industries appeared first on Radio Survivor.

DEADLINE EXTENDED

Radio Survivor is pleased to share an announcement from the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) of the Library of Congress about a call for papers for its forthcoming conference, “A Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal.” The event will be held October 22-24, 2020 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Presentation proposals are due by December 15, 2019. Read on for the full details from the RPTF:

A Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal

Conference Dates: Oct 22-24, 2020

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Proposal Deadline: Dec. 15, 2019

Call for Papers

The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) of the Library of Congress invites applications for papers, panels, moderated discussions and workshops for a conference marking the centenary of broadcasting in the United States.

We seek presentations by archivists, radio and television historians, artists, information scientists, journalists, sound studies scholars, broadcasters and others highlighting how preservation can help us complicate and rethink our understandings of the history of mass media at community, local, national and international levels. We particularly welcome participants who put archival resources to work today to enrich radio, television, podcasting, music, literature, journalism, public history, installation art and other creative practices. 

The conference will take place Oct. 22nd to 24th, 2020, at the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill, in Washington D.C. Registration is free for all presenters, moderators and respondents. 

Celebrating One Hundred Years of Broadcasting

In the United States, the radio industry began primarily as a form of wireless telegraphy used for point-to-point communication. After World War I, government licensing began for stations that were changing the medium by airing point-to-mass broadcast transmissions of music and voice. From the celebrated Election Day broadcasts of Westinghouse station KDKA on November 2, 1920 to similar services offered by hundreds of other stations from coast to coast, the industry paradigm shifted. The broadcasting model endures to the present, characterizing media systems from large commercial networks to public broadcasting, satellite radio and online streaming services, and RSS-based podcasting.

This conference marks the centenary of that paradigm shift and investigates radio’s century of constant renewal and rebirth over the course of the intervening century, during which various radio and radio-like practices have been invented and reinvented, forgotten and remembered, in settings across the United States. We want to highlight a century dotted with “new” sound practices in this restless medium, from the first non-English programs to the first broadcasts aimed at communities of color, from the first international shortwave transmissions to the first true crime podcasts, the first educational shows to the first radio-based art. Our conference underscores the role of preservation in documenting (and even driving) the process of renewing radio from generation to generation and from community to community.

Renewing Radio Heritage

This meeting also takes place at a moment in which media history is itself changing, thanks to a renaissance in radio and television preservation, which has created an archive that is more diverse and richer than ever before, conveying a sharper sense of how broadcast media helped Americans articulate understanding of nation, region, class, gender, race, sexuality and ability. That is thanks in part to the work of the Radio Preservation Task Force, which for five years has been pursuing projects and partnerships to change the very archive itself in a way that necessitates fresh thinking about many firsts—and seconds, and thirds— in conventional national and international narratives of radio history.

Created in 2014 in fulfillment of a radio preservation mandate in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Plan, the RPTF is charged with fostering collaborations between researchers and archivists to facilitate work on radio preservation, developing an online inventory of extant collections, promoting preservation of endangered radio collections, encouraging use of radio and sound archives in educational settings, and cultivating academic study of archival radio materials. It currently boasts a network of hundreds of scholars and archivists who share materials, fundraising, and best practices. The RPTF has also constructed a national database aggregating information on over 2,500 radio collections from coast to coast, and has encouraged and overseen several special issues and anthologies on radio history and preservation. It is currently developing pedagogical guides for classroom use and resources to assist with preservation of endangered radio materials. To advance its goals, the RPTF partners with over 40 local, national, and international academic, archiving, and media organizations. A full list of partner institutions is available on our conference site.  

Suggested Themes

This conference will focus on preservation’s historic and ongoing role in documenting and shaping new research from policy studies to sound studies, and new media practices from journalism to art. To that end, we seek panels, presentations and workshops whose ambit could include, but is not limited to:

• Highlighting a specific archive based on historic recordings that challenge assumptions about mass media history, the invention or reinvention of formats, or show outreach to new audiences.
• Offering best practices based on experience in preservation, from digitization and metadata to fair reuse, either on air or in arts settings.
• Exploring techniques for researching, processing or reusing the changing radio archive, such as how to use specialized methods from machine learning to deep listening.
• Examining communities whose stories have been lost but can now come to light as a result of the RPTF’s various initiatives and caucuses, especially communities of color, native communities, women’s radio history, LGBTQ histories, as well as among differently abled communities. 
• Examining how preservation can highlight radio’s historic and ongoing role in activism, especially at the regional, local and community level.
• Looking at international histories of radio, and at preservation practices outside the United States, particularly in Latin America and Europe, from which U.S. archivists might learn. 
• Focusing on long-arc narratives of radio history—the history of crime reporting, for instance, or civil rights radio—that stretch across the entirety of the “broadcast century” and whose history isn’t limited to one “tier” of radio, but rather can be studied in contexts from large networks to local radio and podcasts, and everywhere in between.
• Studying how preservation methods might be adapted for emerging forms of radio beyond traditional broadcasting platforms, particularly podcasting, as well as the study of broadcast platform elements themselves, from radio tower systems to RSS.
• Focusing on preserving recordings from arts and freeform stations, as well as exploring how the materials that RPTF projects have uncovered can be reused in contemporary art, journalism and research in the new golden era of podcasting and sound art more broadly.
• Providing practical advice for independent archivists, particularly when it comes to public history outreach, identifying possible funding and grant writing.

To Participate 

Proposal options include papers, pre-constituted panels, moderated discussions, and workshops. To submit a proposal, email abstracts and other materials specified below in a single document to radiotaskforce@gmail.com by December 15, 2019. For questions, please contact neil.verma@northwestern.edu.

Papers. Individual archivists, scholars or artists are invited to submit an abstract for a paper of about 20 to 30 minutes in length on our conference themes. Successful applications will be organized into panels by the steering committee. Applications should include: A brief biography; contact information for the applicant including any institutional affiliation; a 400-word abstract with a title; and five keywords.

Pre-constituted Panels. Pre-constituted panels should have 3-4 participants, plus a moderator and/or respondent. These panels will be based on the presentation of papers, with each speaker given 20 to 30 minutes to speak. Applications should include: A brief biography for each applicant; contact information for each applicant including any institutional affiliations; a 400-word abstract with a title for each paper; five keywords for each paper; a 400-word abstract explaining the goal and ambit of the panel.

Moderated Discussions. These events will differ from pre-constituted panels in that they do not require formal prepared remarks and will instead focus on discussion and exchange. Groups of 4-6 participants may apply, with each participant expected to speak for 5-10 minutes about a current project, archival recording, or issue. Applications should include: A brief biography for each applicant; contact information for each applicant including any institutional affiliations; a 400-word abstract explaining the goal and ambit of the panel; five keywords for the panel as a whole.

Workshops. For workshops on specific issues (e.g., digitization, grant writing, analysis tools, recording workshops), a single presenter or team leads discussion and has an open forum to field questions. Applications should include: A brief biography for the workshop leader(s); contact information including any institutional affiliations; a 400-word abstract explaining the goal and ambit of the workshop including any technical equipment that would be needed.

The Library of Congress RPTF Conference Steering Committee

RPTF 2020 Conference Chair:

Neil Verma, Northwestern University

NRPB Chair:

Christopher Sterling, George Washington University

Library of Congress:

Steve Leggett (NRPB)

Cary O’Dell (NRPB)

RPTF Director:

Josh Shepperd, Catholic University and Penn State University

RPTF Assistant Director:

Shawn VanCour, University of California, Los Angeles

Conference Committee Members:

Matt Barton, Library of Congress

Claudia Calhoun, Fairfield University

Inés Casillas, University of California, Santa Barbara

Susan Douglas, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Christine Ehrick, University of Louisville

Anna Friz, University of California, Santa Cruz

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, University of Texas, Austin

Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Bob Horton, Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Tom McEnaney, University of California, Berkeley

Julie-Beth Napolin, The New School

Stephanie Sapienza, University of Maryland

Jacob Smith, Northwestern University

Michael Socolow, University of Maine

Dave Walker, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

The post Call for Papers – ‘Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal’ Conference appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We celebrated International Women’s Day by recording a fascinating interview about women’s radio history with University of Louisville Professor of History Christine Ehrick.

Author of Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950, Ehrick schools us on the hidden history of a pioneering women’s radio station in Uruguay. Founded in 1935, Radio Femenina quickly became a hotbed for feminist and activist programming, beaming its signal from Montevideo and across the river into Argentina. Ehrick provides context for the station’s origins and discusses how it functioned during some tumultuous political periods in the region.

Our Patreon supporters get to hear more of our conversation with Ehrick in a special bonus episode. She shares more personal stories of a radio historian on the hunt for treasure in the official archives and on Ebay.

Show Notes

• Christine Ehrick website at University of Louisville
• Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950
• Radio Preservation Task Force
• Radio Femenina Wikipedia Entry
• Investigating some Contenders for the Oldest Women’s College Radio Station (Radio Survivor)
• Podcast #132 – Sounding out on the Cultural Politics of Sound & Listening (Jenny Stoever interview)
• Podcast #135 – Resurfacing Women’s Contributions in Podcasting History (Jennifer Wang interview)
• Podcast #178 – Irish Pirate Radio Archive
• Podcast #134 – The KRAB-FM Archives
• Podcast #158 – Surveying Community Radio’s Deep Archives (Laura Schnitker interview)
• Podcast #176 – Audio Fiction’s Very Long History of Innovation (Neil Verma interview)

The post Podcast #184 – Hidden Women’s Radio History in Uruguay appeared first on Radio Survivor.

From the “Classical Radio Era” to today’s hottest podcasts, we’re here for the love of radio drama and fictional sound-art. Our guest is Neil Verma, author of a book and teacher of classes on the subject, although as he tells us on today’s episode, the class became a lot more popular with students after he changed the name from “Radio Drama” to “Audio Drama.”

Radio Survivor is a listener-supported podcast.

We dedicate hours of time and effort for each weekly episode.

Help us sustain and grow this show by contributing as little as $1 every month. With four episodes every month, that’s just 25 cents for each one.

Make your monthly contribution at http://pateron.com/radiosurvivor.

Show Notes:

Theater of the Mind – Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama

Neil Verma essay on The Shadows

Some audio drama recommendations from this episode

The Classical Radio work of Norman Corwin

J.G Ballard’s Radio Plays on the BBC

The Shadows

Wolverine: The Long Night

The Truth

Homecoming

Classic Radio’s The Shadow

Nightvale and affiliated programs

Pacific Northwest Stories

Ars Paradoxica

Limetown

Deathscribe

Jennifer Waits’ article on Unshackled

Matthew Lasar writes about and speaks on the podcast about Mae West

The post Podcast #176 – Audio Fiction’s very long history of innovation appeared first on Radio Survivor.

How often do you think about how you listen? What assumptions do you make about a person’s voice, their pitch or accent? What sound is desirable, and what’s rejected as noise?

Prof. Jennifer Stoever thinks about these questions, a lot. And so do a growing number of scholars working in a field called Sound Studies. That’s the topic of the “Sounding Out” blog and podcast, which Prof. Stoever co-founded. She’s an associate professor of English at the University of Binghamton, and she’s our guest to discuss the cultural politics of sound and listening, and how these analyses apply to music, radio and podcasting.

Radio Survivor is a listener-supported podcast.

We dedicate hours of time and effort for each weekly episode.

Help us sustain and grow this show by contributing as little as $1 every month. With four episodes every month, that’s just 25 cents for each one.

Make your monthly contribution at http://pateron.com/radiosurvivor.

Show Notes:

• Sounding Out!
• Sounding Out Podcast #63: The Sonic Landscapes of Unwelcome: Women of Color, Sonic Harassment, and Public Space
• The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, by Jennifer Stoever
• Radio Preservation Task Force
• Sounding Out Podcast #65 on backstory of Sounding Out
• Binghamton Historical Soundwalk Project
• WHRW at Binghamtom University
• KUCR
• Sounding Out! Podcast #23: War of the Worlds Revisited

The post Podcast #132 – Sounding Out on the Cultural Politics of Sound & Listening appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“Podcasts are luring people into listening,” Jennifer Waits reports, quoting the esteemed radio scholar Susan Douglas, from her keynote address at the recent Radio Preservation Task Force conference in Washington DC. Jennifer also relays some important reasons for studying radio history shared at the conference, especially to help understand the present and plan for the future, and she fills us in about efforts to preserve the early history and recordings of podcasts, as well as women’s pivotal role in the medium.

Then we discuss Jennifer’s annual charting of the stations that will observe the Thanksgiving tradition of playing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” and a mysterious 1970s public access TV artifact depicting a pirate radio station that once broadcast from Paul’s Portland, OR neighborhood.

Show Notes

• Radio Preservation Task Force
• The Library of Congress Launches Radio Preservation Task Force
• Podcast #37: Preservation, Pirates and Radionomy
• Podcast #40: Radio Treasure Hunt
• College Radio Watch: Preserving College Radio’s History at the RPTF Conference
• Radio Preservation Task Force Announces Radio History Conference in DC in November
• Sounding Out!
• Sounding Out! Podcast Episode Guide
• Radio Atlas
• Alice’s Restaurant on the Radio (Radio Survivor archives)
• Alice’s Restaurant and more 2017 Thanksgiving Broadcasts
• Public Access TV Archive Documents 1970s Portland Pirate Radio

The post Podcast #117 – Soundwork: Preserving the Legacy of Radio, Podcasts (& Alice’s Restaurant) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Podcasting, as a form, is now more than a decade old. However, owing to its origin as a grassroots online medium with no centralizing agency or organization, finding and researching shows that are even just a few years old can be lesson in frustration. There are no physical assets for libraries and repositories to collect, and no central catalog. Even though iTunes has been indexing podcasts for most of this time, participation is up to the podcaster, and shows no longer in production can, and do disappear.

Coming to the rescue is a group of scholars and technologists from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, led by Prof. Jeremy Morris. The PodcastRE project is a growing database of over 150,000 individual episodes from over 1,000 different podcast feeds. You can search across show titles, episode titles and episode descriptions, and then stream the program audio if the show is still available online. Even if the audio is no longer hosted anywhere, having access to that metadata at least lets you know that a show existed, and may provide a lead to learning more.

Basic searches are available to anyone. Confirmed researchers at educational institutions can obtain original audio files for some podcasts that are no longer available on the web, provided that a research project qualifies for fair use access.

One way to think about PodcastRE is that it’s like an Internet Archive Wayback Machine for podcasts. The Wayback Machine crawls the web and archives pages by date so that future generations can find text and data that has since disappeared from the internet. Although the Internet Archive gladly hosts any podcast that a creator wants to upload, save for a brief period in 2005, the Wayback Machine automatically archives no actual podcast files. Moreover, podcasts are not so much a phenomenon of the web–they are distributed using something called an RSS file, which isn’t necessarily read by web browsers, though it is used by apps like iTunes and Stitcher, or websites that attempt to index podcasts.

That means there are likely dozens of podcasts that never had much of a web presence at all, utterly invisible to the Wayback Machine. Evidence of their existence are left to the podcast platforms that indexed them, if that happened at all.

Turning back the clock to reclaim an obscure show that might have only had a dozen or so episodes eleven years ago may be asking too much. But it is never too late to start to archive and index what is available and findable now.

Taking PodcastRE for a test drive, I started looking for a podcast that covers high fidelity audio. I’ve never been able to find such a show, and it’s a striking gap that I’ve mentioned before on our own podcast. Now, I did not turn up such a show (probably because it doesn’t exist), but I did find a podcast about vinyl records, “Sharing Needles with Friends,” that’s been around for 172 episodes–I’ll definitely be checking it out.

The post PodcastRE Podcast Search Engine Aims to Help Researchers appeared first on Radio Survivor.

When I began my graduate program at the University of Utah I was lucky enough to be the recipient of the Jay W. and Sharlene B. Glasmann Teaching Fellowship. Upon receiving the fellowship my responsibilities were two fold: 1) Teach Comm 1510 Radio Performance and Production and 2) Serve as graduate oversight for the university’s student-run radio station KUTE. My role was as an advisor; all decisions regarding policy and operations were up to students and other members of student media.

I had always been interested in technology and the nature of knowledge/creative work but I struggled to find a specific object of study. After reading some of my seminar papers my advisor told me that I should simply look under my own nose because much of what I was interested in and writing about was happening at KUTE. It was then that I began researching KUTE’s organizational policy, construction of creative workers, and where technology intersected. The following is a very condensed summary of my thesis titled College Radio: Managing the Creative Through Software, A Case Study. Enjoy. – Erik O’Brien

We shape technology and technology shapes us: this is the basic principle of mutual shaping. Marketing and design genies conjure the idea and mission of a piece of technology or software, and a lowly caged programmer types away until he or she can produce the user’s eventual product. Scholars like Mathew Fuller, Nicholas Carr, Shoshana Zuboff, Rob Gehl and many more have written on this topic area for years— spanning a wide range of real world situations where technology and society clash, from Facebook standardization, to mill workers, to search engines, to the smart home technology being forced down your throat by every commercial break on television.

Personally, I spent 2 years researching how the implementation of ENCO’s DAD (Digital Audio Delivery) radio automation software (something some of you may have some experience with) affected KUTE radio, the University of Utah’s now online-line only student radio station. I focused on how the software affected policy and organizational culture at the station. For many, automation may seem like a no-brainer route to a professional and better-educated college radio station, but I will make the case that it would be wise to examine and consider the possible unforeseen consequences before such implementation.

KUTE is a typical college radio station in that its cast and crew is comprised of student radio enthusiasts. There are those who desire to be professional radio broadcasters, but most are students from various disciplines who are looking to have a good time with managing their own music and talk shows. While the KUTE handbook offers the expected sanitized history of the station being a breeding ground for young professionals (which is true); it only takes a brief look at the station’s news article headlines to discover that it oftentimes ran itself like a stereotypical, student-run radio station— a bit edgy, free-spirited, experimental, and the cause of occasional controversy.

A Daily Utah Chronicle article once quoted a 2009 DJ saying “It’s almost a tradition that we get put on probation a few times a year.” While some of the insubordinate exploits of the station, and its subsequent probations, were obviously unacceptable and denounced by the management at my time with KUTE; it is clear that KUTE’s culture was one that would make most think of Cronauer from Good Morning Vietnam, Bull Dog from Frasier, and Madam Psychosis from the fictional WYYY.

Despite condemning the past behavior of DJs at the station, a student manager told me with regard to KUTE’s past, “That’s what gives KUTE its personality.” I won’t bore you with the almost century long history of the organization, but the gist is this: KUTE’s culture is one of free, creative experimentation for entertainers and community activists alike.

In 2013, KUTE, like so many other student run stations, began implementing DAD automation software in an attempt to give students a more professional skill set. The software looks more or less like a confusing version of iTunes built by the design team over at Fischer Price Kids. The software schedules music, ads, liners, auto rotations, and anything else a station wants to have played on a regular basis.

This software allows for stations to run without DJs, though I would argue this takes away the texture and substance from radio with a real person behind the wheel. Basically the software becomes the last gate keeper before the tunes hit your ears rather than it being the DJ. While the use of DAD brings a new skill set for DJs, it imparts the ideology and logic of the software upon the organization. At first DAD was simply used as a way to avoid dead air at KUTE. Eventually, though, management began to make use of its other features, such as scheduling clocks, to prioritize the implementation of ads over the show content of their DJs.

For some, this change was predictable. In his book Reverse Engineering Social Media Rob Gehl makes the case that the standardization of the web has led to its current dependence on advertising. With standardization, we allow for monetization, and now the same is happening with radio.

Due to its recently broken AM transmitter and a lack of funds for repair, KUTE decided to go all online forgoing the traditional FCC regulated community-driven model of most college stations. Though it was hotly debated and there was much disagreement; when management realized that there was an opportunity to insert ads into the software’s programming, new rules were created to guarantee that ads were being played at the top and bottom of every hour.

However, because the staff size was limited, it became a requirement to run all content and music through the DAD software as a means of ensuring that these ads were played. Although the argument can be made that understanding DAD is useful in the professional realm, for KUTE’s purposes, it was met by some unforeseen problems.

KUTE DJs Koffee and Koosh on the Witching Hour show. Photo: E. O’Brien

First, it required monitoring from management to make sure no one was circumventing the system and playing music via an auxiliary cord. Thus, formerly good DJs became deviants for using manual equipment improvisations. DJs often realized that certain songs and sound bites were needed on the fly which was difficult do when all music had to be uploaded to DAD before the show went on air. A DJ named Alan commented that he now experienced a constant “fear as a DJ,” forever wary that management might catch him breaking the new DAD policies which forbade DJs from using an auxiliary cord and thus on the fly music including students using virtual DJ programs to spin tunes via their own computers.

Further, what was supposed to ensure stability and standardization often led to the opposite with prerecorded shows not being aired and many other unexpected slips. In one example, our version of DAD was not equipped with the proper character package and made it exceedingly difficult for students to play Japanese and Korean music. Though this could be fixed by changing all of the meta data, students could not easily adjust their busy schedules, and what was supposed to be a fun college experience became a stressful chore.

Additionally, the standardization caused an incentive for marketing fixed music and talk formats. No longer could students do any kind of show at a time that was convenient for their class schedules, they had to do hip-hop on Tuesdays, all request at 11am, and talk at 2pm. Therefore, student DJs were being asked to fill predetermined shows at predetermined times rather than craft their own experiences. A running joke started by a staff member named Alexis was that “… our staff shirt this year should say ‘I have DADdy issues’ on the back.”

This is a very condensed summary of the changes that occurred at KUTE during the implementation of DAD automation. The purpose here is not to demonize automation software (specifically ENCO’s DAD) or ignore its helpful capabilities when used correctly. The story of a changing KUTE culture is as much about ads, professionalism, and management as it is about software. The cascading policy and technical changes at KUTE brought on by the implementation of new software serves as an example to others in a similar position.

What I learned during my time at KUTE is that organizations and management need to know where their values lie before implementing such a large change. What is more important to you? Professionalism or experimentation? Fixed shows or DJ autonomy and independence? Surveillance or trust? Your DJs or software and ads? Many of these values are not mutually exclusive but require an aware organization to realize when they come into conflict and how to resolve in a way that supports the organization’s core values. If you are thinking of implementing automation at your station, you should be asking yourself to what degree will we depend on this software and be vigilant of the unforeseen consequences.

Erik O’Brien

Erik O’Brien is the Radio Coordinator for the Utah Arts Alliance. When he is not combing through work email he spends his time in the Wasatch Mountains and working with Youth City, Salt Lake City’s Afterschool Youth Program.

The post How Automation Changed College Radio at KUTE appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We’re happy to return to the second part of our interview with radio scholar and radio artist Magz Hall. In the first part of the interview, Hall detailed the many ways in which we can understand radio, in both a contemporary and historical context, through the lens of radio art. She introduced us to a number of fascinating projects that she has been involved with and discussed the connection between her practice and community radio broadcasting.

In this second half, Hall picks up on these themes and takes us into the future by explaining how she imagines alternative trajectories for FM broadcasting. She ends our interview by pointing to some of the projects she is currently working on, including one which calls attention to the important environmental aspect of radio.

Radio Survivor: How is your work on radio art and new media technology influenced by media history?

Magz Hall: All my radio art work draws on media history, mainly radio histories. I have been drawn to researching the overlooked parts of that history and wanted to represent them in installation form. The history of radio arts is very fragmented and buried, so I had to dig deep and that’s how I found gems like du Vernet and many others discussed in my thesis.

Radio Survivor: Many of your radio installations are connected by a theme of imagining alternative futures for FM broadcasting. Would you care to expand on your vision for what some of these alternative futures might be? I’d be particularly curious to know if and how the regulation of FM broadcasting factors into any of your installations or projects.

Magz Hall: Numbers presents a scenario in which the numbers stations have moved to FM as a simultaneously conspicuous and covert communication tool of outlawed gangs, groups, agents, and political movements. As the internet becomes ever more heavily policed, Numbers considers how activists may re-appropriate communication technologies considered obsolete, challenging the boundaries of public and private space, the subject and the collective, as well as the boundaries between political and aesthetic practice.

A series of micro FM transmitters broadcasts through twelve radios encrypted messages taken from the tweets originating within the Occupy movement. Visitors to the gallery space were also invited to write encrypted messages for future broadcast using the code provided.

Numbers installation. Photo: Magz Hall

Part of a running theme throughout the Switch Off project will be to discuss the future of FM via its documented past, and Numbers connects with the long history of political activists embracing and experimenting with radio since its inception; from the Futurists’ La Radia (1933) to Free Radio stations across Europe such as the Italian Radio Alice (1970s), London’s Interference FM (1999), to Occupy’s Mayday Radio (2012) in New York.

The Occupy movement tweets struck me as highly radiophonic material for this work and wholly fitting for artistic dissemination as the movement reflected the subjective shifts engendered by new media in that: “[t]he assemblies have a power that is dispersed and decentralized, with proclamations of uncertain, ambiguous authorship.”

Numbers considers that, as the internet becomes ever more subject to surveillance and pre-emptive policing, activists may be forced to consider radical offline communications tactics, in this case the re-appropriation of terrestrial radio, making communication at once covert and highly visible: hidden in plain sight.

Regulation is complicit in all the works in terms of theme, content, and broadcast method as these were set up as imagined unsanctioned broadcasts on the FM spectrum. The actual installation works were broadcast and heard on conventional FM, DAB, and Internet radio. One action, Sound Train was illegally broadcast from a train. This action imagined how, in the future, we might all broadcast on the FM band from anywhere, for any distance, just as we do now with internet streaming.

The idea behind Babble Station continues with the theme of the possible futures of FM radio. In this case, the spectrum would be used for baby monitors. Radio promotes the semiotic aspects of the voice via the musicality of speech, a point of view drawn from the work of Rudolf Arnheim, who, in 1936, described radio as “developing to a further degree our feelings for the musical elements of speech and all sounds.” There is an innate communicative musicality to infants’ pre-speech utterances that I wanted to explore.

Infants’ sounds, like dead air, are not often broadcast, so a station that took this to an extreme, and was a hypothetical future of the medium, appealed to me as a playful way of examining these relationships. “Babbling” is universally defined by Mladen Dolar as the pre-symbolic use of the voice. As Dolar points out, “In fans” (as in infants) literally means “the one who cannot speak.” I liked the idea that this was a non-verbal broadcast, yet full of meaning.

Babble Station exhibit. Photo: Magz Hall

Radio Survivor: Finally, what else are you working on these days?

Magz Hall: I just finished a research residency at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) where I have produced a new sound installation, which is on exhibition there for the next year.

Tree Radio has transformed an oak tree at the Sculpture Park into a micro radio station. A transmitter embedded into the tree relays a fluctuating sound as the trees react to light, via sensors on the tree and probes in the tree (which also relay its water levels as electronic tones). Visitors at YSP can pick up the tree’s transmissions on their personal FM devices (such as phones with FM) if they are standing next to or near the tree.

This work addresses issues surrounding the rate that new digital technology often becomes out-of-date, as it uses 100-year-old tried and tested wireless technology. I have been working at the intersection between art and technology and this project takes forward my current interests.

Tree Radio. Photo: Magz Hall

I wanted to make people think about trees and the root of all wireless technology: radio, and how simple and green it can be to use: Wireless, free, and solar powered. The tree transmitter reveals the hidden facets of organic tree life using simple FM wireless technology.

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army’s Chief Signal Officer and incidentally the inventor of Muzak, back in 1919, described how “[all] trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.” He called this “talking through the trees.” He used trees as an antenna to pick up radio signals for the Army. I wanted to do the reverse and use trees to send out a signal as radio. I loved the idea of actually hearing the trees talk. This project allows one to hear the tree responding to light and water as sound.

New digital wireless communication today is often disguised as trees and this is a playful way of getting people to think about trees as transmitters and radio’s early military history. The other aim of the project was to connect people with radio technology and simple electronics. The project was kick-started by an Art for the Environment residency awarded by UAL, where I completed my PhD on radio art. For me, this is just phase one of this research project which I plan to develop further.

Tree Radio is currently exhibited at YSP until next year.

The post Radio Art and New Media in Radio Studies: An Interview with Magz Hall – Pt. 2 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy New Year and welcome to 2016! The Academic Series for Radio Survivor has been a little quiet over the past few months, but we have a lot of exciting posts planned for this academic term. We’re happy to be back with a two-part interview with Dr. Magz Hall, who is a sound and radio artist and a Senior Radio Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University.

In the first part of this two-part interview, Dr. Hall explains how her research is closely connected to a variety of experimental and artistic projects in the field of radio art. By engaging with radio as a flexible, fluid, and accessible medium, Dr. Hall highlights the ways in which radio can engage with communities and inspire cutting-edge research and arts-based practices.

Radio Survivor: Your doctoral research emphasizes the use of radio art in order to help us make sense of radio broadcasting in the context of new media technology. First, how would you describe radio art to someone who might not be familiar with the term or the practice?

Magz Hall: Radio art is best understood as a media art, one which is concerned with the interplay of the relationships between the radio broadcast and its reception. As Dan Lander has pointed out, radio artists often have a desire to reinvent the medium “through deconstruction and or reconstruction, the use of dangerous contents and a refusal to produce works that easily fit into the categories of sanctioned broadcast.”

Also, radio art addresses the medium’s specificity and works from that point. It’s a play between relationships inherit in the medium and, as Gregory Whitehead has written, a “play” in the broadest sense, one which “deals with the fundamental materials of radio, and the material of radio is not just amorphous sound. Radio is mostly a set of relationships, an intricate triangulation of listener, ‘player’ and system.”

Radio Art workshop. Photo: Magz Hall

Radio Survivor: A number of radio scholars are currently engaged with discussions of the changing nature of radio in the digital age. The fact that you’ve chosen to explore these issues through the lens of radio art is fascinating. What role does radio art play in the digital age and how can it help us to understand radio in this context?

Magz Hall: Radio is a very resilient medium which has constantly moved platforms. Radio artists have also embraced radio in all its receptive forms from AM to FM and online and by doing so, radio art as a practice re-configures and expands what is essentially an experimental art form. Radio art is constantly evolving and reflecting the myriad notions of radio and explores the form.

These days, almost all radio is digitally recorded and edited, so the heart of the production form is digital, albeit one that is still received by the majority of people via analogue means (in the UK interestingly). I am very interested in expanded radio practice and have produced works which cross the lines between analogue and digital reception.

My Switch Off project imagined who would be squatting analogue FM in the future. I produced ten works all of which were a form of post digital practice, where I embraced new and old media.

Radio Jam invited people to play analogue radios to do a live jam across the internet using radio as a performance, whereas Spiritual Radio asked people to hear the book as its own radio station (more on this below).

Radio Survivor: You’ve also been an advocate for community radio and its ability to use radio art in order to explore the limits of the medium. How does radio art advocate for the importance of community radio today?

Magz Hall: Community arts radio is something I have been passionate about since the late 1990s. I was inspired by community stations in Canada, USA, and Australia, which provided space for artists to experiment and share and make work with and for specific communities. Such projects led the way for UK community arts stations Resonance FM, which I helped set up, and Soundart Radio, Hive Radio and Radio Reverb.

In the UK there is still a distinct lack of arts experimentation on the majority of the 200-odd non-arts-based community stations, something Tamar Millen, via the Community Media Association, was trying to address when she ran the Modulate commissions to bring UK artists and arts organizations together with community stations to make new work.

I have also been running Radio Arts. It’s an artist-led arts group that promotes radio arts activity [editor: see our 2013 piece about some Radio Arts projects] . We commissioned fifteen artists to produce Dreamlands, a project that involves new radio art works funded by the Arts Council England and Kent County Council. These works were aired by twelve partner arts stations, including a mix of community, public, and online stations.

(*See the list of Dreamlands commissioned artists and stations that broadcast their works below).

Participants of our hands-on radio arts workshops, in all areas of radio art practice, have gone on to become sound artists, set up their own stations, and run radio arts projects. So this has proven to be a very successful way of engaging people and communities.

For instance, Phonic FM in Exeter commissioned artists to make works as part of a Rugby Stories series funded by the local council. The project came out after its station manager attended one of our radio arts workshops at the Turner Contemporary, which were set up to engage the wider public in radio arts.

Another workshop, Reclaim the Waves, worked with participants who were over the age of 60 at The Tate Britain this year. The workshop resulted in a month long participatory radio art installation, and one of the participants was commissioned to make new sound work about Thames Water as a result of this. So, sharing skills with the public and specific communities has been very fruitful.

Radio Arts Showcase Radios. Photo: Magz Hall

Radio Survivor: Your Spiritual Radio project is an excellent example of research creation, in which research is combined with practice. You have explained the project as a “book-radio,” one that must be accessed by finding the right frequency. When the listener discovers the right frequency, she or he will hear Spiritual Radio, a book published in 1925 which explains Archbishop FH du Vernet’s vision of radio technology. What drew you to this particular work and how does the physicality of the book work its way into your project?

Magz Hall: Thanks. I was inspired by the fire-and-brimstone preaching of South London Christian pirate radio stations and was drawn to Spiritual Radio (1925) after researching the book for an earlier project, Radio Mind, where I used parts of Archbishop Frederick du Vernet’s text on telepathic healing via the “law of divine vibration.” That project also drew on Russian Futurist painter and poet David Burliuk’s Manifesto, Radio-Style (1926), which pronounced the dawn of a “radio age.”

Magz Hall’s Spiritual Radio piece. Photo: Magz Hall

Radio Mind was a work that imagines religious radio. It connects a powerful utopian notion, potentiality evoked by reading between these two texts, both of which address radio as an emergent technology and retain uncanny parallels despite their radically divergent perspectives. Du Vernet’s writing on the telepathic power of radio was a point of departure from which to examine how religious imaginary has informed popular perceptions of emergent technology.

For the Switch Off series of works, I wanted to move away from just hearing the installations via headphones or speakers; all the works are heard via radios.

Spiritual Radio was commissioned for a project called unbinding the book, which allowed me to re-imagine what a book could be. In this case, I had the book hand-bound and I made it into a transmitter by hammering nails into the book, so I could build a transmitter and it could transmit the words. The book is a very tactile object which you want to touch, but can’t! You have to listen via a radio. I liked the playfulness of that. It was also a kind of literal death nail, or as the Times described it, a “hardback on life support.” I think that really sums up what the work was about; giving new life to the written form.

*Dreamlands commissioned artists were: Arturas Bumsteinas (LITH), Joaquim Cofreces (Argentina), Iris Garelfs (GER), Anna Friz (CAN), Louise Harris (UK), Olivia Humphreys (UK), Esther Johnson (UK), Langham Research Centre (UK), GX Jupiter Larson (US), Michael McHugh (UK), Carlo Patrao (PORT), Mikey Weinkove (UK), Joaquim Cofreces (Argentina), Gregory Whitehead (USA), Genetic Moo (UK), Magz Hall (UK).

Stations that broadcast Dreamlands: ABC National Radio Australia, RTE, BCB 106.5 (Bradford, UK), Phonic FM (Exeter, UK), Radio Reverb (UK), Radio Papesse (Italy), Sound Art Radio (Devon, UK), Resonance FM (London, UK), Borealis Festival (Norway), Radiophrenia 87.9 FM (CCA Gallery, Glasgow), Wave Farm WGXC 90.7 FM (US).

The post Radio Art and New Media in Radio Studies: An Interview with Magz Hall – Pt. 1 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

From July 5 to July 8, 2016 radio researchers and practitioners will gather in Utrecht, Netherlands for the next Radio Conference in a series of Transnational Radio Forums. This year’s conference has a special focus on the transnational nature of these meetings and the organizers have invited participants to emphasize the ways in which research crosses national borders.

A  number of themes have been highlighted in order to spark ideas for possible paper topics. These include: the relationship between radio and transnational public spheres; transnational perspectives on radio aesthetics; and questions about new forms of digital radio and archives.

Papers may focus on a number of issues and questions related to these themes. A few more specific areas suggested by the conference programming committee include: trans-border radio reception; public service media in a transnational context; new methods for transmitting across borders; transnational aspects of community radio; and teaching radio studies in transnational communities. Participants are also welcome to propose paper topics that combine individual and national perspectives, as well as papers that explore contemporary issues in radio research.

Proposals for individual papers should be 250 words in length and proposals for per-constituted panels should include a 200-word abstract that presents the panel topic, as well as the 250-word abstract of the individual paper presentations. A limited number of listening sessions will also be organized for this year’s conference. These panels should be devoted to presenting either complete or excerpted broadcasts or radio experiments which will then instigate discussion and conversation.

The deadline for submissions is Sunday, November 15, 2012 and they can be sent electronically to conference2016@transnationalradio.org. More information and conference updates can be found at http://transnationalradio.org/conference

This year’s conference will be hosted by the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University in collaboration with Transnational Radio Encounters and the MeCCSA Radio Studies Network. Previous Radio Conferences have been hosted in Luton (2013), Auckland (2011), and Toronto (2009).

The post The Radio Conference heads to Utrecht in 2016 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Over the past few months the Radio Preservation Task Force (now with a brand new website) has worked to expand its list of affiliate archives. A number of big organizations have also become recently affiliated with the RPTF, including NPR, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Prometheus Radio Project, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. As well, big steps have been made in the organization of a national conference on the preservation of radio history.

On February 25 – 27, the RPTF will host “Saving America’s Radio Heritage: Radio Preservation, Access, and Education” in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress and the University of Maryland. The conference will bring together research associates, affiliated archives, and members of the broader academic, archival, and general public to discuss the project’s progress and steps for the future.

Keynote speakers will include Paddy Scannell (University of Michigan), a renowned radio scholar and historian, and Sam Brylawski, the former Head of the Library of Congress’s Recorded Sound Division.

When the RPTF project was announced in October 2014, the national conference was noted as one of the key goals of the initiative. Alongside the accomplishment of building an organization of more than 130 media studies scholars, over 350 affiliate archives and radio producing organizations across the US and Canada, and a number of online partners who provide critical discussion and reflection on the project, the conference is a move in the right direction. It will offer participants the opportunity to meet face-to-face and discuss the project’s next steps. Workshops and panels aim to focus on issues of outreach, growth, and education.

Please keep your ears open for more updates as we near the dates of the conference!

The post Announcing the RPTF Conference: Saving America’s Radio Heritage appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Here at Radio Survivor we are committed to weekly coverage of low power FM radio, so we’re very pleased to feature an interview with Christina Dunbar-Hester for our Academic Series. Dr. Dunbar-Hester is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University and she recently published a fascinating book on media activism and low power radio. Her book, Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism (MIT Press, 2014), makes a strong case for the relevance and importance of local, community radio in the digital age.

Below, Christina explains her research process and her motivation for studying low power, local radio. She also elaborates on the relationship between “free radio” advocates and LPFM broadcasting, and raises compelling questions about how democratic spaces online might be inspired by low power broadcasting.

Radio Survivor: Your recent book, Low Power to the People, traces the activist movement that helped establish a framework for licensed LPFM stations. How did you initially come to be interested in researching low power radio broadcasting?

Christina Dunbar-Hester: When I was considering going back to graduate school in the late 1990s, there were a lot of heady claims swirling around about access to media technology as a main plank of a democratizing project. This was an era of high Internet hype in general, but I was particularly interested in the set of claims made by activists such as those in early Indymedia days about “being the media” and using media technologies counterbalance corporate and state power.

I hadn’t heard of low power radio or microradio at that point, but I knew I wanted to do research that engaged these issues, and also engaged the topic of “the Internet,” but without losing historical or cultural sensitivity to the fact that issues of power, voice, and expertise have a long prehistory; they don’t newly arise with the Internet, nor are Internet-based technologies the main way to redress power imbalance, of course.

So in about 2002-2003 when I heard about people advocating for low power broadcasting, who were not Luddites but were resisting being told to just “go on the Internet for your communication needs,” I thought that might be an interesting research project. I didn’t have a background in media activism, let alone microradio; I just thought that was a useful point of entry for these issues.

Radio Survivor: What is the state of LPFM broadcasting today in relation to the larger American broadcasting environment?

Christina Dunbar-Hester: LPFM is expanding right now due to the passage of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010; new stations that got licenses during that window are going on the air right now, so a lot of cities and towns are seeing new radio stations go on the air. And broadcasting is still going pretty strong: the most recent numbers I’ve seen are from 2013 and they report that more than 90% of Americans over age 12 listen to broadcast radio weekly, for at least a couple of hours per day.

But I might suggest that we step back and consider what is meant by the “broadcasting environment.” Broadcasting both refers to a set of social practices, and a set of institutions, technologies, and laws — what “broadcasting” is at any given moment occurs in how those things come together. When we talk about the broadcasting environment, do we mean just FM and AM transmissions? What about streaming? Or podcasts? Now a lot of people use smart phones to “listen to the radio”—but you’re doing this over your phone’s data plan, which is partly because your phone service provider (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) prefers that you pay them for that bandwidth. (This is in spite of the fact that a lot of mobile phones have been designed with the capacity to receive FM. The commercial broadcast lobby argues that turning on the FM receiver capacity in phones would make it easier for would-be listeners to tune in, without burning through their data.)

There are lots and lots of issues like this at any given moment, some more and some less visible to the public. How these issues play out rests on public knowledge, alliances that get formed between various social groups, corporate power, and the law (which is often playing catch-up with newer technologies, and interpreting new technologies in terms of precedents established around earlier technologies). I think we want to take an expansive view of the public interest across telecommunications platforms and assess that, as opposed to isolating broadcasting.

Radio Survivor: Given that alternative and community media organizations are often working with limited resources, financial and otherwise, researching them can often come with a set of challenges in terms of accessing research materials, such as archival documents. In exploring the history of this LPFM movement, particularly its pirate radio roots, what sort of resources did you use to tell this story and did you face any challenges in doing so?

Christina Dunbar-Hester: This is a great question. I had access to a good deal of microradio ephemera at various field sites and in the Prometheus archive. But it would have been a lot more challenging to do a project where broadcast content was central.

My book is primarily ethnographic, combining fieldwork and interviews. My main interest was what people were doing that I could observe, so the book captures as much of that as I could achieve; it looks at how activists promoted radio technology. I was able to get at some of the recent past with interviews, which included people who had done unlicensed microradio and had advocated for legal microradio/LPFM in Washington. I also had access to policy conversations, a lot of which were archived online (comments to the FCC and the like).

Radio Survivor: I would love to hear about the relationship between pirate radio and LPFM broadcasting. How did pirate radio broadcasting influence the LPFM movement and what sort of similarities and differences are there between these two types of radio?

Christina Dunbar-Hester: Well, “pirate” is kind of an overarching term that doesn’t necessarily connote any particular stance or affinity. Pirates have existed throughout the history of broadcasting for various reasons. But more narrowly, unlicensed microbroadcasters, some of whom called their transmissions “free radio,” were hugely influential for LPFM. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was no way for a small-scale broadcaster to obtain a license from the government, so a lot of folks took to the streets, by which I mean the airwaves, launching all these little stations as explicit electronic civil disobedience.

It’s obviously impossible to know how many of them there were, but there may have been around 1000 microradio stations in the mid-1990s. Two people with memorable stories, who were inspirational to other microradio broadcasters, were Mbanna Kantako in Springfield, IL in the late 1980s, and Stephen Dunifer in Berkeley, CA, in the 1990s. Dunifer had a high-profile court battle with the FCC when he refused to stop broadcasting, and the 9^th Circuit upheld his right to continue for a time. The members of Prometheus Radio Project in Philadelphia, who are the subject of my book, were inspired by the microbroadcasters to fight for legal access to the airwaves.

Radio Survivor: How is radio well-suited for media advocacy or for dealing with questions raised by media activists? Or is it? Could the medium be used more effectively to advance media advocacy both within and outside the academy?

Christina Dunbar-Hester: Radio, both historically and in the present, is a great point of entry into many points of contention in our present and future media landscape. (Though we don’t want to get so narrowly focused on any particular medium that we lose sight of the fact that the interesting questions cross media and platforms: e.g. who owns platforms, who is empowered to listen and to speak on them, etc.)

Symbolically, radio has some really vital lessons for media activism. LPFM, for example, exists in space on the spectrum, owned by the people, for noncommercial use by the people. Lots of spaces we treat like commons online are platforms and sites owned by corporate owners who see users as sources of revenue. The contrast is huge, and very meaningful. What would it look like to have a space online that is the equivalent of LPFM? How would that get built in terms of social and regulatory infrastructure, and what would it look like technically?

These are questions I get into with my students, who often grasp the idea of community media more generally through what we learn about the history of radio (including hams and LPFM; we don’t do much about CB in class), and it’s then a natural realization for them that social media platforms, even when they can occasionally have the feel of community media, are fundamentally not built to support the uses and values of public or community media.

The post Low Power Radio and Media Activism: An Interview with Christina Dunbar-Hester appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A few weeks ago, FlowTV published a special issue devoted to the Radio Preservation Task Force. The issue features articles on a range of topics in radio history. In the coming days, we will share a brief reflection of all the articles in the issue, but for now, we would like to share (or, rather, re-post) an article written by Josh Shepperd, the National Research Director for the project.

Shepperd connects the RPTF to its immense research potential. He emphasizes the ability for the project to locate histories that have yet to be told, particularly those that point to the use of radio for non-commercial purposes. The article advocates for the sharing of primary historical sources in order to facilitate a shift in Media Studies, one that makes space for media advocacy. His compelling and timely argument can be read in full below:

Primary Sources, Primary Sounds: The Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress

Josh Shepperd / Catholic University

(Originally posted on May 18, 2015)

Sound history is cultural history. And a giant part of our history has yet to be preserved, researched, or taught in our classrooms. Our omissions are disproportionately distributed among the local and the liminal, the pastoral and the public, and marginalized and minority experiences. Sound trails continue where paper trails end, and we have an opportunity to provide new insight into the cultural history of the U.S. thanks to recent innovations in sound preservation technology. The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) of the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) of the Library of Congress (LOC) is a growing 125-faculty member and 275-archive Digital Humanities initiative working to broaden the historical record by unearthing, mapping, and making available materials that that chronicle experiences neglected in existing historical accounts, such as minority, political, orientation, social advocacy, and educational groups. Perspectives and events that have remained unaddressed by the primary document record will receive new recognition by focusing preservation on the conversational and community building character of noncommercial and local radio history.

A historical marvel of nation-building, serialization, and aesthetic innovation, radio has also been utilized for multiple purposes beyond entertainment: from education, to a technology of opinion-formation, to a medium for political problem-solving. Much of the early history of the ether consists of distance learning broadcasts, public forums, and civic debates, and in addition to local theatrical and drive time programming the task force is concerned with making these important historical records accessible for the first time. To frame the project in historiographical terms, the RPTF is approaching radio history as a study of what the Birmingham school might call the genealogy of how strategies for circulation of discursive codes, as representations, became central to an expanded concept of the public sphere that included popular culture. If we accept the historiographical argument that content representations are also implementations of discursive, political, and industrial strategies, then radio might be viewed as a medium in which institutional and intellectual projects endeavored to communicate with and persuade community members about a specific perspective or initiative. In this way, radio history has the capacity to reveal the development and dissemination of cultural aspirations and viewpoints, and its consequent archive can be understood as a series of concurrent media advocacies that sought to define conditions of social attunement.

Beginning with these guiding historiographical tenets, many dominant debates that we associate with the academic study of media theory, audiences, and media industries suddenly propel radio into a central position of interest. For example Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor Adorno’s argument over how quantitative survey research of educational broadcasting might promote progressive goals is an ongoing debate between qualitative humanists and social scientists. Wilbur Schramm’s post-war construction of communication departments provided a stable home for educational broadcasting, early public policy analysis, and anti-fascist projects UNESCO and Voice of America. CBS president and Lazarsfeld protégé Frank Stanton built a huge production culture of writers, producers, and developers who defined radio as a civic medium for commercial practice. And in many ways, this paradoxical concept, commercialism as civic practice, is for better or worse the major successful media advocacy of the 20th century. Our memory of media history sometimes seems entirely inseparable from this logic of consumerism, to the extent that the discipline is overwhelmingly focused on affirmative or resistant reactions to what amounts to a very small sampling of the experience of media, as it has been facilitated by national and transnational entertainment.

Preservation activities are beginning to show us that a paradigm shift might be necessary within the discipline, one focused on a dramatically expanded notion of what media has meant, and how it has mattered. The expansion and new availability of primary sources will provide content for graduate researchers to write about previously hidden origin stories, genealogies, and struggles for diversity. It’s past due that a media advocacy take place within the discipline itself to promote new visibility for historically subaltern groups omitted or maligned by commercial mass media representations; an advocacy that would seek to reinterpret “media” history not only as the legacy of a robust and impressive entertainment-based infrastructure, but as an exegesis of how communications technology has been functionalized as a tool of discursive blocs. If radio is approached as a history of, for example, how civil rights groups have utilized communications for non-theatrical message circulation, we might re-orient our relationship to “old media” as a study of the sound of mediated social centers, as an apparatus whose practitioners sought not just a “target” audience, but purposive listeners.

The perceived historical record is primed to grow significantly over the next several years thanks to our mandate from the National Recording Preservation Board, NRPB Chair Sam Brylawski, and our large consortium of media researchers headed by Project Director and eminent historian Christopher Sterling. Digitization, education, and distribution initiatives will increase archival representation and access, and in truth we still don’t know what or how much we’ll turn up. But we do know that as the golden age of library science continues to streamline methods of preservation, that (without exaggeration) tens of thousands of historical statements will be introduced into circulation over the next 3-5 years.

As I write, the RPTF is conducting a second round of aggregation of participating archives. Our current participant consortium is impressive – besides the Library of Congress we will be working with the National Archives of the U.S. and Canada, Our Coordinating Archive – The Library of American Broadcasting, The Paley Center, Peabody Awards, Stanford Archives of Recording Sound, Syracuse Belfer Audio Archive, Newseum, and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, among many, many others (see a full list of affiliate archives here). But we believe that many of our most important finds will turn up in personal collections, radio station attics, library basements, and historical societies. Over the next 3-6 months the RPTF will be working to locate and nearly double archive participation to include these equally important repositories, culminating in a conference to discuss preliminary findings at the Library of Congress.

Besides archive aggregation, over the next 16 to 24 months the task force will commence multiple projects. Our first mandate is to develop a metadata interface so that educators, radio enthusiasts, and researchers might locate content specific recordings. Building from these forthcoming analytics, we plan to promote the preservation of radio’s cultural history through two major initiatives. The first will be to construct a letterhead board of curators, federal and state archives, and media historians to identify and pre-designate archival locations to receive endangered collections before they are discarded or incinerated. Our second major initiative is to promote digitization and access through the creation of content-based research caucuses comprised of archives and research specialists. Our caucuses will work together to identify the most significant newly unearthed recordings, and apply for preservation and digitization grants. As the task force works to address historical gaps and secure safe sites for historical materials, our caucuses will commence a national educational initiative with multiple digital projects, including the American Archives of Public Broadcasting, to provide content analyses, syllabi, and curated exhibits for newly circulating recordings. Looking ahead – 24 months and beyond – the RPTF hopes to work with copyright organizations to make selected sound digitizations available for educational fair use.

The post Sound History is Cultural History: Primary Documents and Progressive Radio Research appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Back in February, our Academic Series featured an interview with distinguished radio scholar Michele Hilmes. The interview touched on a variety of issues in Radio Studies, including the lost critical history of radio and the transnational production on sound media.

What I find to be so great about this interview is the way that Michele seamlessly discusses radio across time (both media history and new media) and across space (radio production across the Atlantic, for instance). The interview reflects Hilmes’ significant contribution to the field of radio studies and beyond.

As I type, Michele is completing her last semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her retirement has sparked a wealth of blog posts commending her work as a researcher, a mentor, and a colleague. You can find these entries over at Antenna, where the series appears to still be ongoing. Here is a brief sample of what has been touched on so far:

Kicking off the series, Bill Kirkpatrick emphasized Michele’s role in “giving voice” to the discipline of Radio Studies. He writes that a “major part of Hilmes’ importance has been her success in persuading Media and Cultural Studies to recognize the value of Radio Studies and Sound Studies in the face of its original indifference or even resistance.” Kirkpatrick adds that Michele “makes the case for radio scholarship along multiple axes: the interconnectedness of radio and film, the indebtedness of television practices and texts to radio’s precedents, the centrality of radio to questions of cultural politics and the public sphere, the transmedial problem of sound, and many more.” Michele’s contribution extends into writing a textbook for teaching Radio Studies, helping to establish conferences, journals, and in creating networks of radio researchers.

Speaking to Michele’s role as a colleague, Jonathan Gray insists that “Michele has been the most important person in the cultural life of Media and Cultural Studies (MCS) at UW-Madison.” Gray emphasizes that collegiality matters and that Michele’s work behind the scenes of the department has fostered an intellectual community of both junior and senior scholars.

For those who prefer to hear about Michele’s contributions, as opposed to read about them, Andrew Bottomley has written, produced, directed, and hosted a podcast about them (with co-production, editing, and sound mixing by Jeremy Morris). The podcast brings together a commendable list of people who have worked alongside Michele, as well as a number of Old Time Radio clips.

In Josh Shepperd’s first of two posts commemorating Michele’s conceptual and historical approaches to Media Studies, he points to her discursive analysis of residual history. Shepperd writes that Hilmes advocates a historiographical mandate that looks “at the ways that institutions are founded and evolve in relation to each other, deliberately choosing structures of organization novel from other institutions.”

Other posts include (but are not limited to) Jennifer Hyland Wang’s discussion of Michele’s work in amplifying the voices of women in Radio Studies, Norma Coates’ reflection on Michele as an academic advisor, and Danny Kimball’s nod to Michele’s contribution to new media history. Those with an interest in Radio Studies will find this Antenna series to offer fantastic insight into the field – its boundaries, its connections, and its practitioners. This is an immense commemoration for an individual who so richly deserves it.

The post Honoring Michele Hilmes’ Contribution to Radio Studies appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Scholars focused on college radio are a pretty tiny subset of the already small universe of radio scholars, so I am thrilled to see the publication of a student radio-themed issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture this week. Brian Fauteux shared the news yesterday on Radio Survivor and he and I also have vested interest, as we both authored articles for the publication.

Although I’ve written hundreds of pieces for Radio Survivor about college radio, that work is often overlooked by academics, who typically turn to books and peer reviewed journals when doing literature reviews. Similarly, academic publications are rarely read by the general public, because it can be difficult to find and access subscription-based journals.

For that reason, it’s nice to see that this particular publication is a “free access” issue that can be downloaded for free by anyone with an interest in radio studies. Of course there’s also a physical, paper version, which I’m eager to get, as it’s always nice to see one’s work in print.

I was pleased to see that the issue covered a wide range of topics within the field of college radio scholarship, including research delving into the role of college radio in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Poland, the United States, and Canada. A few articles looked at college radio as an “alternative” practice, and specifically discussed how programming decisions and music genres played into that. Finally, I was happy to have my article about the history of student radio at Haverford College included, as there is little published work about the very early days of college radio (I’m talking the 1920s) in the United States.

In his introduction to the issue, editor Salvatore Scifo writes,

With scholars usually tending to study three ‘types’ of radio, namely, public, commercial and community radio, student/college radio research has been overlooked despite being a common presences on American as well as British campuses: ‘this radio “type” is often ignored because college radio lacks influence in the mainstream media and is not seen as a site of community radio empowerment’ (Wallace 2008: 46). However, readers of this journal will be able to find evidence of the empowering potential of university and student radio as a form of community radio through the contributions to this issue.”

Going Commercial: Navigating student radio in a deregulated media marketplace (New Zealand’s Mode 96.1 FM)

It is one of seven student stations operating throughout New Zealand. Its distinction is that it runs not only as a form of instructional radio but also as a fully commercial enterprise. This makes it unusual not just locally but internationally. As we describe, a radio model of niche commercial programming that changes according to market opportunities is rare anywhere, let alone in student broadcasting. It is how this is accomplished year-to-year, which makes the station worthy of study.”

The post College Radio Watch: College Radio Scholarship Featured in Special Issue of Interactions appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A special journal edition devoted to college, student, and university radio has just been published by Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. Excitingly, the issue is open access and available to all readers.

This is also a special issue as it features original articles by Radio Survivor’s Jennifer Waits as well as by me. Given that many academic articles in radio studies can only be accessed through an institutional affiliation, this is a great opportunity for readers with a casual interest in the academic study of radio to learn about research in the field.

Articles can be downloaded, free of charge, by clicking on the ‘purchase PDF’ link of each article. Below is the issue’s table of contents and you can access the articles by following this link.

Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture – Special Student Radio Issue

Volume 6, Number 1, 1 March 2015

Table of Contents

Editorial
Salvatore Scifo

“Going commercial: Navigating student radio in a deregulated media marketplace”
Brendan Reilly and John Farnsworth

“Campus frequencies: ‘Alternativeness’ and Canadian campus radio”
Brian Fauteux

“‘College radio’: The development of a trope in US student broadcasting”
Nick Rubin

“From wireless experiments to streaming: The secret history and changing role of college radio at Haverford College 1923–2014”
Jennifer C. Waits

“The learning curve: Distinctive opportunities and challenges posed by university-based community radio stations”
Deborah Wilson David

“The history of student radio in Poland”
Urszula Doliwa

The post Free Access to Special Journal Edition on College Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

From March 25^th to the 29^th, the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference took place in Montreal, Quebec. The conference serves as a regular platform for the sharing of research in media studies and over the past few years, the presence of both radio and sound scholarship has been growing at an impressive rate.

This growth has been met with the establishment of Scholarly Interest Groups for both Sound and Radio Studies, which help to facilitate and sponsor topic-specific panels and to promote radio and sound research within the conference. As radio and sound research becomes a larger part of the annual conference, radio scholarship has been receiving more attention and coverage within the growing body of radio and sound researchers.

Antenna Blog, for instance, ran both a preview of radio-related research at the conference by Alex Russo, as well as a re-cap of the conference by Bill Kirkpatrick, which also comments on the state of the field within cinema and media studies. In Kirkpatrick’s review, he explains that at this year’s conference, he “felt a palpable confidence among radio scholars that hasn’t been there in years past.” A few of the key points that Kirkpatrick raises in reference to this year’s conference is that the number of radio-themed panels is growing, radio-related papers are increasingly included on mixed-media panels, and radio scholars are becoming more involved in larger disciplinary conversations.

These are very exciting findings which point to the fact that radio, as both a historical and contemporary research subject, poses numerous compelling questions for researchers. Take, for instance, the rise in a critical discourse and appreciation for podcasting. Additionally, online and streaming music services are continuously presenting new concerns and questions about new media industries and cultural labor, and the archiving of sound media is a daunting task that is receiving critical attention thanks to initiatives like the Radio Preservation Task Force. These recent development were all nicely reflected in the research shared throughout this year’s SCMS conference.

To give readers a sense of the range and scope of radio-related papers and panels featured at SCMS 2015, here are a few quick notes:

*This year’s conference featured a panel devoted entirely to the study of podcasting and one that explored the intermedial adaptations of War of the Worlds (a nice follow-up to the events of the 75^th anniversary of the broadcast in 2013).

*Two radio workshops took place during the conference. The first focused on radio production cultures and the second asked questions about whether or not radio studies can benefit from a canon of works to teach from and reference in academic writing – and, of course, what may or may not constitute a “canonical work.” Many concerns were raised about a radio canon, particularly due to the interdisciplinary nature of radio studies. Workshop attendees also discussed the various ways that radio is being taught and implemented in media studies courses.

*Saturday was particularly rich in radio studies, with about five radio and sound panels and a handful of radio papers on multi-media panels. Topics covered included: local and national radio in the “long 1960s,” gender and crossover programming in the 1940s and 1950s, and public service media in an age of digital media convergence.

*The Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group also held its annual meeting on Saturday, which featured a fascinating guest talk by Mira Burt-Wintonick, the producer of CBC’s WireTap. Her presentation discussed storytelling techniques at a time when listening practices vary widely in terms of the “closeness” of listening – between car speakers and headphones, for instance – and what this means for sound design. By crafting elaborate and detailed soundscapes, WireTap works to stand out from the many podcasts available to listeners. Sound design is also an avenue for creating emotional and intimate connections with listeners. Burt-Wintonick also discussed distribution methods and the different ways that the program is packaged for international distribution.

As I’ve been writing these posts and updates for the Radio Survivor Academic Series, I’ve been very pleased to see the field growing and to have so many updates to share – whether this is related to larger initiatives like the RPTF or a quick post that links to the work of other radio scholars. If this year’s SCMS conference is any indication, the next academic year should be a very prolific one for Radio Studies.

The post Radio Studies at SCMS 2015: A Brief Reflection appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Later this week, the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference kicks off in Montreal, Quebec. This year’s conference is loaded with sound and radio scholarship, which is a great indicator of the state of radio and sound studies in academia today!

Thankfully, our friends at Antenna and Sounding Out! have taken on the task of highlighting papers and panels with a specific focus on radio and sound. If you’re attending the conference and would like a run down of what is happening when and where, or if you are not attending, but would like to check in on what sort of topics are being discussed at this year’s conference, I recommend visiting the following links.

Over on Antenna, Alexander Russo previews panels, papers, and workshops with a specific focus on radio studies.

And on Sounding Out!, Alyxandra Vesey tells us about what’s happening in the larger field of sound studies at SCMS this year.

Take a look and if you’re attending this year’s conference, we hope to see you there.

The post Radio and Sound Studies at SCMS 2015 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

From time to time, the Radio Survivor Academic Series has been pointing to noteworthy articles and posts that have been shared by other excellent sound and audio related blogs and which are connected to the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF).

Recently, Sounding Out! has been featuring specific archival collections that are a focus of the RPTF. Last week, Derek Vaillant, a professor at the University of Michigan, informed us that a building holding the audio and video recordings of the Detroit-based WDTR-FM will be gutted and destroyed.

His post can be read in full over on Sounding Out! but I will share a brief excerpt below. I encourage readers to visit the site and read his post, since there are only a few months before this collection, and an important part of the soundscape of Detroit and a piece of radio history, could be lost forever.

Endangered archival materials, such as those at WDTR/WCRJ can be used to describe and assess the human, cultural, and institutional ties between national public broadcasting and local affiliates, public educators, students, teachers, and media producers and community organizations. They can speak to the battles for control over educational/community stations in the late twentieth century when suburban flight, deindustrialization, neglect, corruption, and failed local, state, and Federal policies allowed Detroit and other U.S. cities to enter a catastrophic state. I believe there may likely be aural materials of interest to teachers, historians, and public intellectuals seeking to understand the unraveling of postwar Detroit’s economic and social fabric, as well as the salutary role of public media within urban neighborhoods. Historical insights can be the spark for those seeking inspiration and ideas to reinvent vibrant U.S. cities of the future.”

The post Saving the Endangered Sounds of Detroit’s Radio History appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This week, we are pleased to bring you the second part of an interview with media historian John Durham Peters. Last week, part one of the interview touched on intriguing issues in radio studies such as questions about the future of radio and radio’s non-human element. This second post asks about communal listening practices (and their inscription on communication technologies), the relationship between radio and a sense of community, radio and the “mysterious voice from beyond,” and the task of researching media, and specifically, radio history. Peters offers an engaging and thought-provoking account of the ways in which media history informs and shapes our relationship with radio and communication today.

Radio Survivor: Last week, we began to talk about the relationship between humans and radio, stepping close to a discussion of the social aspect of radio. In regards to the sociability of media, I want to ask about loneliness. We can listen to radio using many different devices and technologies today — headphones, smartphones, laptop speakers, receivers in cars, satellite radio and television, and cable. Is listening becoming less of a communal practice and more of an isolated or lonely experience?

John Durham Peters: It is well known that when Sony first introduced the Walkman in 1984 it had two headphone jacks so that two people could listen at the same time. Sony feared that solitary listening would be considered rude and would feel lonely and isolating. How things have changed: private listening may still be rude, but it has become the rule. If you buy a cell phone today, the assumption is that it is yours alone. Even the grammar of the Verizon answering machine script lets you supply your name, but then automatically uses the singular verb “is not available.” It used to be that a family or household would share a landline number. The one body per handle rule also shows up in Facebook’s controversial real name policy.

Perhaps the online lack of authentication that comes with physical presence has inspired these hysterical disciplines—too many specters again. The disappearance of a shared communicative address also follows the demographic trend of increasing numbers of households composed of single people. In the heyday of the telegraph, you could send a “telegram” to someone at “general address, San Francisco,” but general address is relatively rare today. Radio long had an implicitly public dimension, a “for-anyone-as-someone” structure, as my colleague Paddy Scannell puts it.

My son will listen to the radio in the car—as long as he is the only one there. He finds it irritating to listen with another person. The fortuitous peculiarity of the system of broadcasting in the mid twentieth century—use of the public air—implied a public form of address, but this side-effect seems to be fading quickly with other modes of delivery. Each medium has its externalities, its unanticipated consequences, and delivery by wire or by private address loses that appeal to the public interest. (Of course neoliberal deregulation also played a part in removing the public interest!)

Radio Survivor: On a related note, what is radio’s relationship to “community” today?

John Durham Peters: There are certainly many vestigial aspects of radio that point to community, which I take to mean proximity or touch in some way. Call letters are a legacy that implies geography—nation and history. In Iowa City, where I live, we have the good fortune to have both WSUI and KSUI, whose names were given before the Mississippi River was defined as the divider between call letters starting with W and K. (SUI = State University of Iowa, the old name for the University of Iowa, also a legacy.)

But if that’s all we’ve got for community, it’s pretty flat compared to the old FCC requirement to ascertain local service. Radio remains probably the preeminent emergency communication system, with television. For tornadoes and severe weather, people in my part of the country still rely on radio and television. (This is perhaps one reason why the Minot, North Dakota, train derailment of 2002, which covered the city with a cloud of ammonia and poison gas but was not reported due to chain ownership, still plays such a mythical role in horror stories about media monopoly.)

Weather and other forms of danger are deeply local, and this means that media able to send a live signal with instant updates will remain in place for communal needs, though cell phones are competing with radio for this. (This point coincides with the argument of media events scholars, who suggest that the large-scale or national address that was once the broadcast norm at mid-century is today only revived in cases of emergency.) A car trip without a satellite radio can still give a sense of cultural geography in terms of station formats and accents. But it is interesting that radio remains unsurpassed for providing a sense of a mysterious voice from the beyond; in the TV series Lost, for instance, radio transmissions provided some of the spookiest material. Perhaps, like bells, radio already signals nevermore.

Radio Survivor: In Calendar, Clock, Tower, your chapter in Jeremy Stolow’s edited collection, Deus in Machina: Religion and Technology in Historical Perspective, we’re informed that time, space, and power are fundamental problems facing both old and new media. As I’ve been writing for this Academic Series for Radio Survivor, I’ve encountered a number of individuals who have pointed to some of the complexities facing the archiving of sound, whether that be a lack of institutional resources and support, or the fact that audio archives often require a wider variety of technologies to both store and access them.

We can certainly locate issues of time, space, and power in terms of our ability to access historical sound recordings. One of my goals with these interviews is to get a sense of what prominent media historians, such as yourself, think about a large archival project such as the Radio Preservation Task Force. As a consultant for the project, what do think a project like this can accomplish and what might its contribution be to the larger undertaking of uncovering media history?

John Durham Peters: I want to make two points. First, sound recording was relatively late in human technical history. Prehistoric humans were painting images on the walls of caves, but no one figured out how to record a sound for playback until the 1860s and 1870s (we can single out Edison, but many were involved). This means that a sound archive is a modern and quite marvelous thing. Media that record temporal processes like sounds require greater technical development than ones that record spatial processes like pictures.

Second, no era ever fully appreciates its own treasures. McLuhan pointed out that the more ubiquitous something is in a given moment the less likely it is to be preserved. One of my students, Perry Howell, wrote an excellent seminar paper about the brief use of milk cartons to advertise missing children, something that produced billions of exemplars, but his archival ambitions were repeatedly stymied. No one had preserved any of them, even though they live on in memory and campy jokes.

I can remember how excited some of my colleagues and I were in the early 1990s, if I remember rightly, about cassette tapes of the complete broadcast day of WJSV, recorded in 1939. For here we could find something no one had bothered to record—the flow and sequencing of an entire day’s radio broadcast in the late 1930s. In making an archive you never know what the future will value.

Stewart Brand, the futurist, once quipped upon the discovery of stone scriptures preserved in a Buddhist monastery in China that he would have rather had a carefully cataloged set of daily specimens of monk poop. This mischievous example of archival contrarianism makes the point that even though you can never archive everything, you always risk leaving out something that later generations will find the most precious.

I should add that I am highly skeptical of the digital fantasy that miniaturization will, in fact, enable us to preserve everything. It is true that digital databases are unprecedentedly massive, but no one has figured out how to create a long-term chain of custody for digital records. Already, floppy discs from the 1980s are almost utterly useless in a way that handwritten letters from the 1840s are not, or Dead Sea scrolls from 2000 years ago are not. Due to the constant outmoding of digital technology—according to Moore’s law, a single technological generation in computers is 18-24 months—we may have vast records now, but it is anyone’s guess if we will be able to read them in 25, 100, 250, or 1000 years.

I’d like to see archivists figure out formats that are rigorously durable and not subject to the marketing and fashion swings of digital technology. As media historians we need modes of archival durability for deep time. We know there are treasures in there, but we can’t know now what they are. Amid the digital bonanza of our moment, radio archivists and historians will have to be visionary about how to make these sounds still audible in decades, centuries, and—why not?—millennia.

Radio Survivor: Fascinating. Thanks, John!

The post Thinking through Radio History: An Interview with John Durham Peters – Pt. 2 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Once again, we are very excited to present an interview with a leading media historian for Radio Survivor’s Academic Series. John Durham Peters is a media and cultural historian and social theorist who is currently the A. Craig Baird Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also a consultant and participant with the Radio Preservation Task Force, an initiative that has been an ongoing focus of this series. He’s the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication and The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, which “reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media” and is forthcoming this year from The University of Chicago Press.

In this interview, Peters shares his expertise on a number of pressing issues in Radio Studies, including his thoughts on the likelihood of radio moving into new secondary functions as we head into the future, our persistent desire for shared listening experiences, and the need for archival durability. We’ve broken the interview down into two separate posts. This first section includes questions about the future of radio and radio’s non-human element. The second post, which will be shared next week, asks about communal listening, the relationship between radio and community, and the task of researching media history.

Radio Survivor: You delivered a fantastic plenary talk at the “What is Radio?” conference in Portland, Oregon in 2013. I truly enjoyed this conference because it was a rare opportunity for so many scholars, practitioners, and listeners to come together and talk about radio. Your talk, “Radio’s Nonhuman Penumbra” fell under the closing plenary category of “Radio’s Future.” In her review of the conference, and of your talk, Radio Survivor’s Jennifer Waits wrote that you described radio as “one of the most existential media” and as possessing “a wonderful non-human dimension.” Going back to both the title of the conference and of the plenary, how might we foresee the future of radio?

John Durham Peters: Radio is difficult to define. Indeed, “what is” questions are often philosophically difficult, no matter the topic. Because radio involves a live signal, which is dependent on natural conditions such as the electromagnetic spectrum, and operates in the acoustic, that is temporal, dimension it invokes existential questions in a way perhaps more intense than other media. (I love it that radio amateurs are avid followers of weather reports about the solar wind–there is a cosmic side to radio.)

To be fair, many media raise implicit larger questions: writing and photography have always been associated with death and the grave, and cinema has always been connected with life and motion (as the history of its various names, from bioscope to motion pictures, suggests). But because radio depends on a live transmission, a jumping of the spatial gap between two termini, and on sound, it always implies questions about touch, connection and vanishing. Sound, as Hegel famously said, exists by disappearing, and if sound did not disappear, it would pile up into an unintelligible soup of brown noise. Sound’s ability to be heard depends on its constant vanishing, its making room for what comes next. In this and other ways, the spectrum is full of specters.

This feature of sound has inspired a number of thinkers who see acoustics as a special domain of existential questions, perhaps most notably the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who, as an amateur musician and inveterate tinkerer with audio and computer hardware, saw sound media–radio holding a prominent place among them–as the most philosophically rich and aesthetically beautiful things that human beings (or the gods) had ever brought into being. Kittler’s unfinished magnum opus on music and mathematics–only two of a projected eight volumes were published in his lifetime–saw key acoustic innovations with the Greek alphabet, so he sketched a long history that is a nice backdrop for speculating on the future of radio.

One thing clear in media history is that old media never die, they just take on specialized functions. Even the telegraph didn’t exactly die; it just got absorbed into the Internet. If you look for an equivalent to radio before the twentieth century, one strong comparison is bells. Alain Corbin’s Village Bells on bells in the nineteenth-century French countryside is a book beloved among radio historians, and with good reason. Bells were the heart of communication systems in towns throughout Europe and North America. They were both civic and religious media. Bells proclaimed the time, summoned soldiers and worshippers, announced holidays, funerals, and weddings, as well as coming storms or dangers. They were at once herald, headline, weather report, siren, and status update. As bells were displaced by other sounders of community news, the one meaning they kept was a sacral one: the sound of deep time, death, and the echo of history. When they “gradually stopped being signs, portents, or talismans,” Corbin notes, bells were left with the role of “anchoring the gnawing sense of nevermore.” The eerie sense of days long gone we hear in bells today was not heard 300 years ago: a changing media ecology has changed the medium and message of bells.

I expect something similar with radio; indeed, we have already seen radio undergo big changes.  We should not expect radio’s obsolescence but rather the discovery of new, restricted, sacralized, secondary functions. Something like this already happened with the rise of formats in 1950s America.

Radio Survivor: Thinking about the non-human dimension of radio, I’m reminded of your work on the sociable aspects of communication, particularly during, as you’ve called it, the “twilight of broadcasting,” where “peer-to-peer communications occur via mediated devices as freely as they do via the flesh.” Would you say the non-human dimension of radio has changed in the twilight of broadcasting?

John Durham Peters: The article from which the phrase “twilight of broadcasting” comes considers the psychotic results when broadcast and interpersonal modes of address are confused. As many historians of radio have noted, it took a while for radio personae to hit upon the sociable, conversational formula of addressing not masses but individuals in the comfort of their homes.

It actually is remarkable that more listeners did not believe that performers were not their personal friends. But what protected listeners from that psychotic supposition was the knowledge that there were many other simultaneous co-listeners out there in a large imagined community. As live public address to the great audience invisible fades away in radio address we revert more and more, in many cases, to the constellation dreamed of in wireless telegraphy, of instantaneous one to one, almost telepathic communication, connected by a brain wave or material apparatus at a distance. (It is interesting that some of the earliest descriptions of schizophrenia treated it as radio waves.)

To be sure, there are still many situations of address to an unknown audience–indeed, that may be the basic fact of any kind of communication, even face to face. But with the fading of the society-defining ambition of broadcasting built into the daily and weekly programming schedule, the imagined co-listenership of radio is disappearing. If you listen to music on YouTube, you have to make do with the total number of hits–but you lack the sense of simultaneously fellowship with others in real time. I remain convinced that music sounds better when heard on radio than on individualized music services such as Pandora, just because you have the sense that it has the durable quality of something public, something real, not just a private phantasm that no one else is sharing. A child seeing something will point to it: one of our basic existential needs is to share our experiences. We seek validation to know we are not crazy, that this experience is more than spectral.

Radio Survivor: Thanks! We will pick up from here next week.

The post Thinking through Radio History: An Interview with John Durham Peters – Pt. 1 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

March is a busy month for deadlines for conference proposals and abstract or paper submissions for academic journals in the field of Radio Studies. Radio and Sound scholars may want to take a quick glance at the following opportunities for sharing your radio research (some of the deadlines are fast approaching!):

Publications:

A special edition of Feminist Media Histories will focus on Women and Soundwork. This issue will take a feminist approach to the history of soundwork and will explore the gendered dynamics of power that operate across sound media fields as a whole. Feminist scholarship in the fields of radio, recording, television, film and digital sound are welcome, particularly on topics that cross media and national borders. The issue may also include interviews, oral histories, and reprints of notable original documents. Interested contributors can find more information on the call and the submission process by checking out this post on Scoping UK Sound Studies.

As well a special edition of Creative Industries Journal is looking for papers in the area of Technologies and Recording Industries. The issue will seek to answer the following question: How have the introduction and adoption of new tools of production, distribution, promotion, or consumption facilitated changes in the creative and industrial practices surrounding popular music in a variety of global contexts? Possible topics may include: streaming services and music distribution, collecting practices, record stores, sound recordings and radio, and television and the recording industry. All submissions are due via email by March 6, 2015 and more information about potential topics and the submission process can be found HERE.

The Journal of Radio & Audio Media (JRAM) is looking for proposals for reviews of podcasts to accompany a symposium of articles on podcasting for the upcoming November 2015 issue. Reviews would be approximately 800-1,000 words each. If you’re interested in submitting a review proposal, contact the journal’s editorial assistant Honna Veerkamp at honnav[at]gmail.com.

Conferences:

The Charles Parker Day conference will take place on Friday March 27th. The event celebrates the Radio Feature in the past, present, and future, and will take place in Glasgow, Scotland at the Centre of Contemporary Arts. Tickets cost £30 (£20 for students) and are available from the CCA website. For further information about the Charles Parker Day including a list of speakers, visit the Charles Parker Trust website. There is also a March 2nd deadline for the Charles Parker Prize 2015 for the Best Student Radio Feature.

The 10th Art of Record Production Conference is scheduled for November 6th to 8th at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The conference committee is soliciting papers in the broad thematic areas of: Agency: Content Creators in Record Production; Multi-Polarities: Contextualizing the Art of Record Production; Education: Connecting Research to Practical Education; and, Ten Years On: The Art of Record Production. Paper proposals of 300 words are due on March 29th and any questions or correspondence can be directed to arp2015@easychair.org. For more details, head on over to the Art of Record Production website.

The post Upcoming Deadlines for Radio Studies Conferences and Publications appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As part of the Radio Survivor Academic Series, we share an interview with scholar and radio studies luminary Michele Hilmes. Hilmes is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leading scholar of radio and broadcasting.

She has published a wealth of books and articles on the subject, including Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922 to 1952 (1997) and Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (2006). Her “Rethinking Radio” essay from her edited collection, The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (2001), was a major source of inspiration for my work as a graduate student, when I first embarked on developing a research project. Taking my cue from her essay, I was inspired to uncover an under-examined aspect of radio and music history by looking at Canadian campus radio.

More recently, I had the opportunity to work with Michele and her colleagues at UW-Madison while carrying out a postdoctoral research project on satellite radio broadcasting and independent music. Michele has just returned from the University of Nottingham where she was a Fulbright Research Scholar exploring the history of British/American television co-production. I asked her a few questions about radio in the digital age, the importance of archiving audio, the lost critical history of radio, and the transnational production of sound media.

Radio Survivor: One aspect of your research and writing that really stands out is that you’ve made exceptional contributions to both the history of radio as well as to the study of radio in a new media context. Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era (Routledge 2013), a recent book you co-edited with Dr. Jason Loviglio, includes a number of excellent chapters on radio and sound in the digital age. Your chapter on the new materiality of radio, a chapter on MP3 blogs and freeform radio by Elena Razlogova, and one on listening practices in the digital age by Kate Lacey were ones I found particularly interesting. How has your historical understanding of radio shaped your writing on radio today?

Michele Hilmes: Recently I was talking to Emily Thompson, the well-known historian of technology at Princeton, and she said something very succinctly I had been thinking about for a while: the advent of digital access to media has “flattened out” their differences, which are rooted in their historical trajectories. Many young people who grew up in the digital era don’t distinguish between broadcast, webcast, and podcast sound — it’s all just streaming digital sound to them — and therefore the distinctions that shaped the forms and content they’re listening to are lost on them.

Things like formats, genres, and modes of expression become just individual producer choices, not the result of institutional struggles deeply rooted in our shared cultural history. So I see my job as always bringing an awareness of historical distinctions and the reasons for them into the discussion of new media — ultimately, it makes the experience of listening much richer and deeper

Radio Survivor: You’ve also been very active with issues of sound preservation, as a former director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research for instance, and you’re currently participating in the Radio Preservation Task Force. What are some of the major issues facing the preservation of media, particularly radio and sound media, and what steps can be taken in order to help save and store historic sound recordings?

Michele Hilmes: This a complex and important issue, and I am very grateful for initiatives like the Radio Preservation Task Force, as well as other ambitious archiving projects going on all over the world, for focusing the possibilities that digital media bring to neglected technologies and forms. One issue with radio and sound, to borrow a phrase from the archiving world, is that audio recordings are not “eye-readable” — unlike a photo or a film, they do not reveal information about their content or meaning to the naked eye.

You need special technology to unlock them, and a lot of that technology has receded into the distant past. And even if you locate that transcription disc player or that wire recorder or that reel-to-reel machine, sound must be experienced in its own time — you can’t skim — and unlike the print credits that appear at the end of films, vocal information about the production is often missing or hard to understand. Really, sound recordings are the archivist’s nightmare, and that’s why photography and film have had far more success in the preservation department. One important thing that digital media have brought to sound is a visual — eye-readable — key to their existence. This opens up all kinds of exciting possibilities, not just for preservation but for access and circulation

Radio Survivor: One of your recent articles for the Australian Journalism Review is titled “Radio’s Lost Critical History.” What distinguishes radio’s critical history from radio history more broadly speaking?

Michele Hilmes: I was referring to the neglect of radio and soundwork in media studies and scholarship generally until recent years, in two senses: first, the lack of the radio archive as mentioned above, cutting off our knowledge of historical development of the medium and its forms; and second, the lack of a tradition of radio criticism. For instance, a newspaper like The New York Times employs an armada of theater, music, book, dance, and film critics; even television (I speak ironically) gets critically reviewed in its pages every single day.

But where is the radio critic, the person who might be reviewing the enormous outburst of audio art that has sprung up over the last two decades? Occasionally we see a mention of a show like This American Life or A Prairie Home Companion, but there is no place — aside from a handful of online sites like this one — where soundwork is seriously discussed and put in a critical context that understands radio not as a “flattened,” unrooted individual expression but something that has a tradition and an aesthetic heritage.

You need a knowledge of the archive for that — where would film studies be if most of the films before 1940 were inaccessible and unknown? Where would the study of literature be if most books disappeared moments after their publication and could not be re-read or shared with others? But ’twas always thus — even in the 1940s serious audio artists complained that radio did not get the critical attention it deserved. As Fred Allen remarked, “Radio is the only medium that died before it was born.” But I think we’re on the verge of a revival.

Radio Survivor: Last year you completed a prestigious Fulbright Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham, where you studied Transatlantic television co-production. You’ve explained that there is a “transnational creative space created by the collaboration of British and American television producers over the last 50 years” and that this has created a transnational public that includes audiences from around the globe who share many cultural preferences and experiences. I know that most of your research focus during the fellowship was on television but I’m wondering if you uncovered any interesting findings pertaining to transnational sound cultures or radio practices, perhaps in regards to the BBC?

Michele Hilmes: Absolutely yes, the BBC and US radio broadcasters were positively and productively interlinked from the 20s through the 50s, and beyond. I’ve written about some of this in Network Nations — it truly is amazing that, with recording relatively rare and with broadcast transmission ranges limited, people at the BBC, NBC, and CBS knew each other, found ways to listen to each other’s work, and competed to innovate in all kinds of ways.

One particularly fruitful channel where this took place was the BBC’s North American Service — a shortwave segment of the BBC Overseas Service (now the World Service) aimed directly at the US and Canada, initiated just before WWII. It lasted until the mid 1960s, though scarcely anyone remembers it now. It broadcast British shows into North American airspace, where many of them were recorded and re-broadcast by US and Canadian stations. It also initiated productions in the US and Canada that also aired in Britain, and during the war years co-produced a variety of shows with US networks, like the amazing show Trans-Atlantic Call — it originated in London one week, New York the next, courtesy of the BBC and CBS.

Another example: Alan Lomax, the well-known folk song collector, was recruited by the BBC in the early 1950s to produce a series of programs in the UK, hugely influential in the British folk revival movement. His “ballad opera” ‘The Martins and the Coys” was commissioned by the BBC and produced in their North American studios in New York. We all know about the pirate ship broadcasters, beaming US hits into England from off the coast. And moving forward, the well-known BBC DJ John Peel got his start in the US, in both commercial and underground radio. I could go on, believe me.

Radio Survivor: Lastly, what radio programs or stations have you been listening to as of late?

Michele Hilmes: One station my husband and I particularly enjoy, thanks to the miracle of digital streaming, is a French station, FIP. It provides a fantastically eclectic mix of music, better even than the days of 60s freeform here, that can range from rock to folk to hip-hop to classical to electronica to jazz in a single half-hour, from around the world. I hear American music on FIP that I would never hear on American radio, as well as an incredible variety of other music. And no commercials.  Thanks, Radio France.

For people who like radio drama, don’t wait a minute before tuning in (again, digitally) to BBC Radio Four and Four Extra (digital only). They produce a mix of new original work and drama from radio’s golden age — including quite a bit of American drama — with some of the best actors in the world, people you’ve seen on screen and stage.

Closer to home — but what does that mean anymore? — I listen constantly to Wisconsin Public Radio, both networks, for the absolutely essential news programs but also for local discussion programs that cover important topics far better than newspapers or television. To The Best of Our Knowledge, a discussion program produced by WPR, was recently mentioned by the Guardian newspaper in the UK as one of the best shows available in podcast anywhere. On the Media is a great show from WNYC. And of course, I was drawn into Serial like everyone else.  How wonderful to experience today’s rich audio environment — richer than ever before, this historian would argue. That’s something else that a knowledge of history can often provide: an appreciation of the particularities of the present.

The post Today’s Rich Audio Environment: An Interview with Michele Hilmes appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy New Year and welcome back to the Radio Survivor Academic Series!

For this first post of 2015 I want to call attention to a recent online series on archives by members of the Radio Preservation Task Force and pass on some information about four upcoming conferences related to radio studies, that focus on radio and sound.

Radio Preservation Task Force Series on In Media Res

Last week, the Task Force was the focus of In Media Res, which is a site dedicated to experimenting with collaborative forms of online scholarship where writers curate and respond to a short visual clip. The weekly feature on RPTF had daily contributors curating under-researched topics at major broadcast archives.

Archives featured throughout the series include the University of Maryland’s Special Collections in Mass Media & Culture (SCMMC) and the Daniel del Solar collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As co-curators Josh Shepperd and Douglas Gomery note, the SCMMC is home to the Library of American Broadcasting and National Public Broadcasting collections, which hold over one hundred thousand audio tapes and CDs and hundreds of thousands of pages of primary documents. Dolores Ines Casillas, who curated the post on the Daniel de Solar collection, informs us that the collection includes over 3,000 items donated from del Solar’s estate, consisting of audiotapes, short films, and photographs. Daniel del Solar was a prolific Latino media activist who began his work at Berkeley, California’s KPFA.

The third post in the series, co-curated by Cary O’Dell and Christopher Sterling at the Library of Congress, includes a short clip of an interview with broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel from 1975, in which he tours his WFMT archive. O’Dell and Sterling explain that Terkel’s 15-minute chat with the author and activist James Baldwin “is of particular interest in that they have a thoughtful discussion about topics that are usually primed for controversy. And their exchange stands in stark contrast to the current state of talk radio, and, increasingly, all political discussion.”

Susan Brinson’s post on the Airman Broadcasts at the Tuskegee University Archives explains that its archivists do not have the time, resources, or support needed to process the hundreds of audio recordings they hold (a common concern amongst the archivists I spoke with in my work with the Task Force). This is a particularly worrisome situation as support for higher education recedes. Brinson points to the fact that the Tuskegee archives hold some of “the few moments in which the voices of significant Black Americans both were broadcast over radio and recorded,” and that the loss of this collection would be very significant. However, she is hopeful that the Task Force’s work with the archive will help call attention to the immense importance of this collection.

The final post in the series, curated by Michele Hilmes, profiles the Wisconsin Historical Society’s holdings of singer-songwriter Millard Lampell’s papers. Lampell’s work with the ballad opera, a variant of the radio feature, is part of a “fascinating ‘lost’ aspect” of U.S. radio history, according to Hilmes, because this is where folk music, radical politics, and the radio feature converge.

I encourage readers to visit this great feature over at In Media Res and to spend some time watching and listening to the short clips that accompany each writer’s response.

Also of note to radio scholars and those who are interested in the scholarly study of radio are two upcoming conferences.

Upcoming Conferences Related to Radio and Sound

The Midwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology is holding its annual conference from the 17th to the 19th of April, 2015 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference welcomes submissions from students, teachers, and independent scholars in a variety of fields including musicology, popular culture studies, and sound studies. Proposals are due on February 15th, 2015 and should include an abstract of 250 words. More information on submitting to the conference can be found on the conference’s website.

On Friday May 22nd, 2015, the Michigan Sound Conference will take place at the Detroit Public Library. The central question to be explored during the conference asks, “How has Michigan generally, and Detroit in particular, been a leader in the creation of the global modern soundscape?” The deadline for presentation and workshop proposals is Friday February 6th, 2015. Those interested are asked to submit a 250 word abstract plus a 100 word bio to Conference Chair Denise Dalphond. Contact information and application instructions can be found here. The event is free and open to the public.

“The Borders of Radio” conference has just announced its call for papers. It will take place on June 4th and 5th at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia. This international and interdisciplinary conference “examines both the physical and immaterial borders of radio, in the fields of geography, technology, economics, formats, history, sociology, languages, contents, art and literature.” Areas of interest for the conference include the “Creative Territories of Radio,” “Radio Classification and its Place in Society,” and “Transformations of Radio.” Submissions are due on February 23rd, 2015 and proposals of 400 words (in French, English, or Catalan) can be sent to colloqueradioperpignan@gmail.com. More information on the submission process and the conference can be accessed here.

Also in June is the International Association for Media and History conference, which will take place in Bloomington, Indiana this year. The conference theme is “Media and History Revisited” and papers on radio (as well as other media) that shed light on recent or longstanding historical topics are welcome. The submission deadlines has just been extended until March 1st, 2015 and more information can be found on the conference website.

The post In Media Res Features the Radio Preservation Task Force, Plus Some Upcoming Radio Studies Conferences appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy 2015! As we start the year, it’s a good time to reflect on the biggest radio stories of 2014 and also to make our predictions for 2015. Over the past few weeks we’ve shared our thoughts on the state of college radio, low power FM (LPFM), radio in academia, and podcasting in 2014, as well as some lists of our favorite radio moments of the year. Here’s our recap.

The most-read stories on Radio Survivor this year covered a wide range of topics, including Internet radio, jazz radio, Alice’s Restaurant, podcasting, Deezer, the Super Bowl on the radio and the Princeton Review list of popular college radio stations.

The top two stories of the year were My Chromecast is an Internet Radio and Thanksgiving 2014 Brings Another Chance to Hear Alice’s Restaurant. You can see how 2014 compared with other years (2011 was a doozy) by taking a look at our Year in Review archives.

Our reflections on 2014:

2014 – The Year in Podcasting

2014: The Year that College Radio Embraced LPFM

2014 – A Pivotal Year for LPFM

Radio Survivor Academic Series 2014 Year in Review

Plus some 2014 list-making:

10 Fascinating Things Spotted at College Radio Stations in 2014

Top 100 Composer Lists: And the Point is…?

Radio Survivor’s Top Podcasts of 2014

2014 Radio Survivor Holiday Gift Guides

And, finally, some predictions for 2015:

Opportunities Abound for Podcasting in 2015

The post Radio Survivor’s 2014 Year in Review appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Earlier this year I wrote my first post for Radio Survivor following the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference that took place in Seattle in March. In this initial post, I pointed to an increase of Sound Studies research at the conference and located within this field a vibrant cohort of radio researchers who are helping to make sense of the changes facing the radio industry today. Over the course of the year, there have been a number of exciting developments in the scholarly study of radio, including the establishment of the Radio Preservation Task Force.

The Task Force has helped inspire Radio Survivor’s Academic Series as many of its posts have featured findings from the project or have profiled Task Force researchers. As well, 2014 has seen the publication of exciting academic books on radio. Two that are currently on my shelf include Eric Weisbard’s Top 40 Democracy (an interview with the author was featured recently on Radio Survivor) and Christina Dunbar-Hester’s Low Power to the People (see Radio Survivor’s preview of the book).

My own work with the Task Force this year involved consulting university archives in Southwestern Ontario. In November, I wrote about some of my findings, including two digital/archival initiatives. York University in Toronto is home to the Mariposa Folk Foundation fonds, which includes radio broadcasts related to folk music for both Canadian and American audiences and some of this collection can be accessed online through the Celebrating Canadian Folk Music Project. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, there is an extensive collection of early Canadian educational radio holdings. This collection is currently featured online as an exhibit titled “90 Years of Queen’s Radio.”

The Academic Series also featured two interviews with members of the Radio Preservation Task Force. In late November, Kenneth Goldsmith shared his thoughts on archives, on issues of access to information in academia, and on the role of contemporary radio. Goldsmith stressed the importance of radio as a filter in an age of abundance. He explained:

Radio is still important because even though everything is available, you still need someone to show you what is what, the good from the bad. In other words, abundance means nothing without filtering, taste and aesthetic.”

More recently, Brian Gregory shared his work on educational radio broadcasting. Gregory discussed how he has integrated his academic research into his educational practice. Local radio broadcasting, according to Gregory, has great potential for meeting the goals of educators. Gregory said:

More voices need to be heard from educational stations that broadcast at the local level. This will benefit other educators who would like to use radio in their classrooms because they will be able to learn about new and innovative ways to use the medium, which, in turn, might inspire them to experiment with and develop their own ways to use radio for educational purposes.”

Although this Academic Series is a new initiative at Radio Survivor, the research and work featured throughout the series anticipates a strong 2015 for the study of radio. Looking forward, a conference at the Library of Congress is on the horizon for the Task Force, likely towards the end of next year.

Appropriately, given that my initial post for Radio Survivor followed this year’s SCMS conference, next year’s preliminary conference program draft for the meeting in Montreal has just been released. I’ve taken a quick glance at the program and it includes a number of panels and papers on radio and sound, including a panel on podcasting, one on War of the Worlds, another panel on North American public service media, one on local and national radio in the 1960s, a workshop on radio production cultures, and a workshop titled “The Problem of the Radio Canon.” This is just a brief overview, but there are many other panels and papers featuring radio as a subject.

Given the range of radio-related research featured at next year’s SCMS conference as well as the extensive preliminary findings of the Radio Preservation Task Force (an estimated 250,000 – 275,000 program transcriptions were reported in November), it’s safe to say that radio continues to be an active area for both new and established scholars. I’m extremely excited for what 2015 has in store.

The post Radio Survivor Academic Series 2014 Year in Review appeared first on Radio Survivor.

There are a number of radio and music scholars who write for both academic and non-academic audiences. Eric Weisbard is one example of that. In the 1990s, he made his living as a rock critic for publications such as Spin and the Village Voice and today he is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at University of Alabama. In his new book, Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music, Weisbard delves into the history of radio formats. Specifically, he argues that radio formats have ultimately created multiple, “parallel mainstreams.”

As is the case for many scholars who end up writing about music and radio, Weisbard has a college radio past (he was on the air for 5 years in the 1980s). And he occasionally dabbles in radio to this day. Last week, I spoke with Weisbard about not only his book, but also about his personal connection with radio. He told me that the book grew out of his dissertation and explained that he expanded on that work by taking a look at radio in the 2000s and by digging into the history of rock radio station WMMS in Cleveland. Weisbard admitted that he isn’t a radio scholar and said that his approach is very much informed by his education and work as a historian.

Jennifer Waits: Tell me about your experience in college radio and how that informed your research.

Eric Weisbard: My college radio station, WPRB in Princeton, was the place that got me interested in music and very much led me on the path to both studying it and writing about it professionally…And I would also say that the college radio perspective of wanting to kind of present a view of music that’s different from the mainstream, ended up informing all my writing. So even though this book is a celebration of mainstream music, in some ways it’s written to tell people that what they think about the mainstream is wrong. So, in that way it’s very much in the spirit of college radio.

Jennifer: When did you do your dissertation?

Eric: In the years after…rockism and poptimism emerged as debated topics…I started working on my dissertation in 2005. In a lot of ways this began as an attempt to put a history around concepts like rockism and poptimism, even though…I ended up deciding that actually thinking about formats and genres was a way to take that discussion some place new.

Jennifer: Did you do radio in graduate school?

Eric:  No. Having been in college radio and having an affinity for radio is one of the reasons why when I started this project, radio was something I used as a touchstone. But the truth is that I’m not a radio person by and large and I’m not a radio scholar by and large. I’m a former rock critic teaching American Studies with a PhD in History who’s very interested in how music intersects the culture as a whole. From my perspective, radio is the most essential way that happens.

Jennifer: In your book you talk about radio formats as “under theorized” and music genres as “highly theorized.” Could you explain that a little bit more?

Eric: Formats, which attempt to match a group of sounds to a group of people, are different than genres, which are much more about an ideal of what music can be about…There’s something different about saying “my main concern is that this music speaks to a group of people” than to say “my music has to sound a certain way.” In other words, you’re prioritizing your ability to connect with people over your ability to make a particular kind of musical statement…Even though the desire that informs formats is a commercial desire…sometimes music that uses format thinking rather than genre thinking ends up speaking for groups of people who get left out when division of music is a more idealist one. And that’s the provocative claim of the book.

Jennifer: What do you think some of the most compelling formats might be?

Eric: I think the formats have basically stayed the same since the 70s, with the exception of the expanded role for Spanish language radio…When the commercial center of radio shifted to FM in the 1970s, it was right at the moment that all of those late 60s social and cultural issues had put identity right at the forefront and so different groups of Americans used this new space, FM radio, to claim portions of the center for themselves…The big picture is a small group of formats, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, country, R&B, and since the late 1980s/1990s, Latin radio, those formats are the core formats of commercial radio…They each speak to different populations and groups of people who use them to hear stuff that wouldn’t be central otherwise and to have an experience of the culture in which who they are is defined as quintessentially normal.

Jennifer: Do you think freeform is a format?

Eric: Someone corrected me recently, because I’d always sort of thought that freeform was short for “free of format,” and he informed me that, no, freeform is a phrase that predates the format system. So it’s just a nice coincidence of language that you can hear freeform as meaning free of format. But what I think is that there’s no absolute rule for how different kinds of rock come across on radio. And, freeform, out of which, a lot of AOR evolved in the 1970s, out of which a certain amount of modern rock evolved in the 80s and 90s, out of which, I suspect, a certain amount of internet radio has evolved in the 2000s…Freeform remains this place of a kind of musical elitism that speaks to a certain section of the listening audience, but even more-so speaks to people who intend to be part of the creative class themselves…I now see it as very much connected to larger trends in American culture…being different from the mainstream…an expression of a certain kind of elite status. Is that cynical?

Jennifer: You devote one chapter to Cleveland rock radio station WMMS and all of its format changes over the years. Does the station hold special significance for you?

Eric: I knew I wanted to do a radio chapter and when I was thinking of how to bring rock more into this book…at some point I realized that WMMS was perfect for my purposes for a couple of reasons. One was, it was a midwestern station and I was really interested in how what had been seen as a collegiate thing/the rock of Woodstock had become by the 1970s, what’s often called blue collar rock, the rock of Bruce Springsteen, the rock of…Bob Seger, …the rock of any kind of sort of Heartland artist playing for a Heartland audience. And so I loved the idea of picking a midwestern radio station to follow this. And Cleveland, as the city of de-industrialization and rivaled only by maybe Detroit, was a great place to think about these things.

Then, the second amazing thing. It turned out that the program director of WMMS, John Gorman, who ran the station from 1973 to 1987 and then again for a couple of years in the 1990s,…had kept files of all his station memos for those many many years. He’d done his own memoirof the radio station on his own terms, based on those memos and since he was done, he was willing…[and] very generous to let me…just read through those memos and get a sense of the station from the inside.

Jennifer: What do you love about radio?

Eric: From the perspective of playing songs on the radio… last Friday night, for example, a friend who has a show on the NPR station here in Tuscaloosa, invited me to spin records for 2 hours. From that perspective, I love…playing anything you feel like, making connections and that’s the throwback to my college radio days. From the perspective of the person who wrote this book as he listens to radio still as almost a voyeur into other kinds of cultures, what I love about radio is that it makes the world normal…that it makes the world normal in five completely different ways simultaneously in virtually every place in America. That’s what I love about it.

The post Radio’s Top 40 Democracy: A Q&A with Author Eric Weisbard appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Brian Gregory currently works as an academic technologist at Pace University where he collaborates with faculty, students, staff, and the Pace community in order to implement educational technologies in ways that promote active and engaged learning. I recently asked Brian a few questions about his research in educational broadcasting and the ways in which he implements his research into his educational practice. His answers emphasize the importance of local radio broadcasting for enabling participation and communication within communities.

Brian received his doctorate in Communication and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in May 2013. During the 2013-2014 school year, Brian taught courses in the Communication Arts Department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY where he also chaired a committee to investigate the possibility of developing a student-run radio station. He is also a research associate for the Radio Preservation Task Force where he helps to coordinate the New Jersey and upstate New York regions.

In the short term, Brian would like to carve out some time to work on and publish some of the work that he discusses below. Down the road, he plans to begin working on a book-length manuscript that will examine the ways that radio, and other sound media, have been (and are being) used in education. In other words, a history of the educational uses of sound technologies.

Radio Survivor: Your work demonstrates a very strong commitment to exploring the educational uses of broadcasting and sound technologies. How did you first come to be interested in educational radio?

Brian Gregory: When I started thinking about what I would write my dissertation on, I was interested in the history of radio and sound technologies, and on how educational technologies have been (and could be) used to promote active, participatory learning. My dissertation sponsor, Robbie McClintock, had written extensively on the history and theories of active learning and suggested that I study the history of progressive education in the twentieth century.

I was introduced to John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems in a yearlong course co-taught by McClintock and Frank Moretti, who was also on my committee. This was a great course – we got to delve deeply into other foundational works including Weber, Bourdieu, Durkheim, Marcuse, Arendt, Benjamin, and many others. Frank and Robbie also suggested that I do more reading on the history of education, most notably The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education 1876-1957  by Lawrence Cremin (1964), whom they had both studied under at Columbia. I then began to seek out as many texts on educational history and educational technologies as I could find.

Radio Survivor: What sort of resources did you find and what archival sites did you consult? What have been some of your most interesting findings?

Brian Gregory: In terms of educational radio, I first became interested in an educational program broadcast on NBC from late 1920s – 1940s called the Music Appreciation Hour (MAH), which was hosted by Walter Damrosch and broadcast to American classrooms nationwide. I did much of my research on Walter Damrosch in the NBC papers at the Library of Congress and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in the Walter Damrosch collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Much of what I found about Damrosch, including articles, NBC Press materials, and letters written to him by students, focused on his personality. This got me thinking about Damrosch through the lens of Warren Susman’s culture of personality, which Michele Hilmes has written about with radio, and the idea that the educational impetus was on Damrosch as an entertaining public figure rather than on the educational uses of the program. This is not to say that his only purpose on air was to broadcast his personality.

There were many people, including Damrosch, who worked at radio stations, as well as educators, who were interested in using the MAH to teach the appreciation of music, but this seemed almost secondary to me. There were also some very interesting discussions on using the program to develop the aural faculties and emotional intelligence of students, but as I will explain below, these were realized and better implemented by progressive classroom teachers through local educational radio programming.

Next, I began to look at local educational radio and how it was envisioned and utilized by educators and the people who operated educational stations at universities. I did research on the Wisconsin and Ohio Schools of the Air, which were broadcast from WHA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and WLW at the Ohio State University, respectively.

I found that these local stations had different emphases and objectives than NBC. For the most part, they worked closely with educators and people in nearby communities to integrate educational programming in ways that met their instructional needs. This is where I came across some of the innovative and progressive uses of radio. For instance, Edgar Dale, a professor at OSU, wrote about audio-visual teaching methods. In a number of articles, Dale talked about the potential of the radio to stimulate the auditory senses of students. I also did research on the goals and uses of other sound technologies, specifically the player-piano and the phonograph, in American schools. I concluded my research around WWII, when funding for educational radio was cut.

Radio Survivor: When I was a doctoral student at Concordia University in Montreal, I was a research assistant on a project that was locating privately sponsored educational, instructional, and industrial films in Canada (The Canadian Educational, Sponsored, and Industrial Film Archive), given that so much scholarly attention had been paid to films publicly funded by the National Film Board of Canada. As a radio scholar who has some experience working with educational media, I would be very curious to hear more about the larger goals and aims of your research into educational broadcasting? What would you like readers of Radio Survivor to know about this important topic?

Brian Gregory: The purpose of my research on educational broadcasting has been to explore the ways that radio has been envisioned and utilized as an instructional tool that could promote active and engaged learning – sensory learning not learning through textbooks – something that many educational progressives in the early 20th century, including Dewey, espoused. I have also been influenced by the great work in Sound Studies and research on the creative ways that radio, sound technologies, and educational technologies in general, have been (and are currently being) used in schools (for example, see 1, 2, and 3).

Radio Survivor: What can the history of educational broadcasting tell us about the study of broadcasting today? Or, perhaps, about the radio industries today?

Brian Gregory: Researching educational radio, I have found that the goals of educators and people in local communities have greater potential to be realized by local radio stations, more than through the networks. The local stations seem to be more concerned with teachers’ instructional needs and want to help them to implement and tailor educational radio programs to meet the varied ways that students learn.

I tend to agree with Paddy Scannell, who has argued elsewhere, that local stations play an important role because they provide citizens with access and opportunities to listen to and participate in radio as well as help to challenge tendencies of “cultural standardization” (136).

More voices need to be heard from educational stations that broadcast at the local level. This will benefit other educators who would like to use radio in their classrooms because they will be able to learn about new and innovative ways to use the medium, which, in turn, might inspire them to experiment with and develop their own ways to use radio for educational purposes.

Radio Survivor: Lastly, is there anything else about your work that you’d like to share? What are you working on now?

Brian Gregory: I recently started a job as an Academic Technologist at Pace University. It’s great because I get to implement educational technologies, including synchronous learning tools (e.g. Blackboard Collaborate and Second Life), multimedia programs and platforms (podcasting and Kaltura, for example), and audience response systems (such as Poll Everywhere) in ways that promote active, engaged learning. I am really interested in developing my knowledge and expertise with these and other educational technologies at Pace.

The post Educational Radio: An Interview with Brian Gregory appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Lisa Hollenbach is a literary scholar interested in poetry broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1970s. In her recent post for Antenna Blog‘s Radio Preservation Task Force series  she describes her work as dealing with “several neglected cultural fronts at once, examining forms long declared dead” including poetry, radio, spoken word recording, and the Pacifica Radio network.”

Hollenbach shares her findings from the Special Collections reading room at the University of California, San Diego and she describes listening to tapes of radio broadcasts made by the poet Paul Blackburn, who produced a poetry show for the Pacifica station WBAI in New York City. Her post continues key themes of this Academic Series so far, namely the role of archival research to add a tangibility and materiality to our understanding of media history.

While listening to Blackburn’s tapes, Hollenbach describes the acoustic spaces that these tapes convey and their levels of mediation: “I can hear a typewriter in the background, and suddenly I’m placed in a room with dimensions. I wonder, though there’s no way to know, if he’s working on a poem.” She argues that the ability for Blackburn’s radio program to bring listeners to spaces where poetry was performed helped to introduce listeners to literary scene that was instrumental in the writing of the poems themselves.

You can read Hollenbach’s entire post titled “Poetry by Radio: Paul Blackburn and WBAI” on Antenna Blog.

The post Radio Poetry and the Archiving of Acoustic Space appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Many Radio Survivor readers are no doubt familiar with Kenneth Goldsmith’s work as the host of “Kenny G’s Hour of Pain” on the freeform radio station WFMU. Goldsmith hosted weekly radio programs at the station for fifteen years, from 1995 until 2010. In 2005 he commented on WFMU and its role as an experimental and freeform medium:

WFMU is an extraordinary place and as long as you don’t violate FCC codes, you are literally free to do what you want. I wanted to take advantage of this freedom to see how far I could take it. I’m still pushing the boundaries and with each passing year, I seem to discover yet more ways that radio can be experimental.”

Goldsmith is also an advocate for pushing the boundaries of knowledge distribution. His  “Uncreative Writing” course at the University of Pennsylvania forces students to “plagiarize, appropriate, and steal texts that they haven’t written and claim them as their own.”

He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, an online archive of avant-garde texts, images, and sounds, crafted in response to various legal and commercial limits to the distribution of intellectual property and creativity. Currently, Goldsmith is completing Capital, his rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade’s Project that is set in New York City (and he shares an excerpt about the sounds of New York City below). As a proponent of freedom in both the fields of broadcasting and archiving, Goldsmith makes a compelling case for open access and the significant role of curators in the digital age.

Radio Survivor: Hi Kenneth. Thank you very much for taking some time to answering some questions about archives and radio. I’ll begin by asking about the Radio Preservation Task Force, for which you are a listed as a participant for an upcoming conference at the Library of Congress (Fall 2015). A central aim of the RPTF is to produce an online and accessible finding aid that points to radio recordings and radio-related archival holdings. As well, a goal is to encourage the development of additional archival efforts such as digitization, online access, and metadata analytics. As a prominent advocate of the internet as a space that defines contemporary language and culture – “If it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist” – what might you say about the importance of digital archives or online archival finding aids?

Kenneth Goldsmith: If I am researching a subject, I will google it, even if it’s sitting on a shelf five feet away from me. If I can’t index it and if it isn’t portable, it doesn’t exist. Streaming media is not good enough; everything must be downloadable. The cloud is a farce, privatized and corporatized and capitalized, subject to political and capitalistic whims. Free is never free. Control your own servers. If you love something, download it. Use the cloud; abuse the cloud; but don’t trust it.

Radio Survivor: UbuWeb is a fantastic example of an open and online resource and archive of avant-garde poetic and visual art. And you’ve explained before, UbuWeb is not concerned about archiving or about the future but rather it’s about provocation and an invitation for “someone to actually come along and do it right.” What happens to our understanding of an archive when it moves from a physical place to an online space or from a physical document or analog recording to a digital file?

Goldsmith: The web is nothing more than amateurs; the inmates are running the asylum. Institutions, accreditation and the ensuing taxonomies are finished. Passion and whim rule; the best institutions are wunderkammers. All web institutions are false — but in turn are becoming the new institutions. Outside in / upside down.

Radio Survivor: Within higher education there is a lot of discussion and debate about free and open access to scholarly work. In fact, one Radio Survivor reader left a comment on my first post for this series, asking that any papers or work that I link to be open access since many readers do not have access through an academic institution. You’ve been called an archive activist by Dazed magazine (and one of their thirty favorite American curators). What is an archive activist?

Goldsmith: An archive activist is someone who does what they do without asking permission or securing funds. They simple do it — and then let the world deal with the fact that it is done. If we had to ask for permission, we wouldn’t exist.

Radio Survivor: What should be the mandate of archives and of academic research in terms of making research more accessible?

Goldsmith: Put everything online for free.

Radio Survivor: I would love to hear a bit about your contribution to WFMU, to online sound archives, and about your thoughts on the Radio Preservation Task Force. As I’m sure many readers are aware, WFMU hosts archived playlists, lists of artists that DJs such as yourself have played, and the station is a curator for the Free Music Archive. How might the internet continue to transform radio in productive ways?

Goldsmith: I’m not sure as I’m out of the radio game. Radio is still important because even though everything is available, you still need someone to show you what is what, the good from the bad. In other words, abundance means nothing without filtering, taste and aesthetic. UbuWeb is good for this as well. Although these artifacts can be found in numerous places on the web now, what differentiates Ubu or WFMU is the contextualization and passion that knowledgeable people bring to it.

Radio Survivor: You have served as a curator for The American Century Part II at the Whitney Museum of American Art and you’ve compiled a great list of contributions to the history of sound art in “Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art.” In what ways has radio contributed to sound art? Or, could radio play a more active role in sound art?

Goldsmith: Radio is distribution and distribution trumps content. So radio remains vital as such.

Radio Survivor: Finally, you’re working on Capital, a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project with New York City as the subject. I understand that you’ve been searching through libraries and second hand stores in order to conduct research for this project. Have you discovered any fragments that might tell us something about the role of sound or radio in mapping New York City?

Goldsmith: I have an entire chapter devoted to what NYC sounded like in the 20th century. Every time a sound is mentioned in literature, I grabbed it.

An excerpt:

The whistlings of the ferries. Roche, “Déja-Vu,” in Burning City, p. 404.

Ferry blasts shatter and break on the Wall Street skyscraper fronts. Berger, The Eight Million, p. 84.

From under the bridge tugboats moan in pain. Conrad, Art of the City, p. 239.

There are no steamship blasts but loud now are the hoarse piping of tugs, the yap of ferries with homeward-bound crowds. The WPA Guide to New York City, p. 51.

I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss. White, Here is New York, p. 22.

The post Archives, Access, and the Sounds of New York City: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A fantastic article was recently posted on Antenna Blog – a media and cultural studies blog operated by graduate students and faculty in Media & Cultural Studies at UW-Madison – that makes a number of strong claims about the need to study old media, including radio history. Its author, John McMurria, is an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego.

In his piece, “Why Care about Radio Broadcast History in the On-Demand Digital Age?“, McMurria argues:

Locating and making publicly accessible radio broadcasts and their supporting archival documents facilitates placing our media past within their particular material locations in place and time while mitigating the generalized understandings that radio broadcasting’s past was a ‘mass’ media of little variety, low quality and limited engagement.”

This article is a great fit for Radio Survivor’s Academic Series so we figured we would enthusiastically share the link. You can check it out over at Antenna Blog.

The post The Importance of Radio History in the On-Demand Digital Age appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Since my first post for the Radio Survivor Academic Series, the Radio Preservation Task Force has started to accumulate finding aids from regional archival collections. Just prior to the deadline for Research Associates to submit their finding aids to their Regional Directors, it was reported that approximately 250 archives and contacts had been aggregated, which surpassed the initial target goal of 200. In the East Region alone, an estimated 150,000 program transcriptions had been identified. The final tally of archives and findings will be circulated in December and posted to the new Radio History and Preservation Facebook group, of which I encourage readers to join.

These initial reports strongly suggest that the project will make a fantastic contribution to radio and media history and it will emphasize the importance of archives, libraries, and the hardworking people who maintain and uphold these collections.

During the final weeks of October I communicated regularly with a number of archivists in order to complete finding aids pertaining to their collections of radio and radio-related archival holdings. I was met with incredibly helpful and thorough accounts of local and educational radio histories in cities such as Kingston, Toronto, and London, Ontario. Through this process, however, I also discovered that many university archivists are short on time, resources, and support. I have been aware of some of the issues facing the National Archives in Canada through frequent reports in the press and through emails circulated on various listservs. Its challenges have included budget cuts, a freeze on purchasing acquisitions, and the elimination of interlibrary loans. One report from May 2012 cited a reduction of 20 percent of Library and Archives Canada’s workforce.

As I conversed with university archivists, it seems that in some cases at least, the issues are similar at the institutional level. Some archivists expressed that they were compiling a list of their radio archival holdings after work hours due to the regular demands of the work week. One archivist explained that it is typical of Canadian archives today to be operating with a very stretched budget and limited staff. Sound recordings were also often not as well cataloged or as organized as other holdings, unless there happened to be a particularly significant radio station or educational stream affiliated with the institution. I was told that many of the archival finding aids are spotty when it comes to describing sound recordings.

Historians, both in the academy and otherwise, rely on these materials and I feel that part of the goal of historical research is to stress the importance of archival collections of all scales and sizes. This is one reason in particular that I’m very hopeful for the RPTF project as it will help to locate and catalog sound recordings that perhaps have not yet been paired with a finding aid. In the coming weeks I’ll be speaking with a number of researchers and archivists affiliated with the project and I’ll be looking to get a sense of whether or not these issues are prevalent in other regions. To put this another way, to what extent is this an issue of government funding versus institutional funding and resources?

So, a huge thank you to all the archivists who devoted their time to provide me with completed finding aids. On that note, I’d like to briefly profile a few findings and initiatives that have caught my eye thus far.

A few highlights from the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University in Toronto (provided by Anna St. Onge, the archivist responsible for digital projects and outreach) include the Michael Posluns fonds, which consist of over 400 audio reels and over 200 audio cassettes of radio programs related to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit current events broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio.

York also houses the Margaret Norquay fonds. Margaret was the founding director of CJRT-FM’s Open College program, which involved courses that were offered over radio in 1971. Margaret also worked with schools in Thailand to improve their media communications and educational initiatives. This collection includes radio scripts, oral histories, and audio cassettes from her work with Open College and her project in Thailand. There are a number of folk music recordings in the Mariposa Folk Foundation fonds, including radio broadcasts related to folk music for both Canadian and American audiences. Some items from this collection have been digitized as part of York’s Celebrating Canadian Folk Music project.

Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario also holds an impressive collection of radio recordings. Queen’s has “one of the longest continuous histories in radio of any association in the world, besides the Marconi Companies.” The first demonstration of wireless telegraphy at the university was in 1902. Queen’s University Archives holds an extensive collection of records related to the university’s campus station, CFRC.

Public radio broadcasting from the campus began in the fall of 1922 on an experimental station 9BT and from 1923 onwards, on CFRC. Records include textual documents about the operation of the station and recordings of lectures, radio programs, and an oral history project about the radio station. Public Services Archivist Heather Home provided me with a completed finding aid as well as a number of documents providing additional information such as a list of technical artifacts like microphones and cables.

CFRC is currently featured as an online exhibit titled “90 Years of Queen’s Radio.” The exhibit “covers CFRC’s history from 1922 to today, with a focus on programming, equipment and photos from the early years.” It also includes a number of archival photos and audio clips that you can listen to as you explore the exhibit.

The online CFRC exhibit is a great example of what can result from combining radio archives with digital technology and the internet. It helps fill the need for early educational and local radio to maintain a presence within open and accessible online spaces.

The post Locating Radio History in Ontario, Canada appeared first on Radio Survivor.

A new book chronicles “the practices of an activist organization focused on LPFM” during the first low-power licensing window at the turn of the century. Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism is written by Christina Dunbar-Hester, a professor of Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, where she is also affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also a long-time friend of the low-power FM movement.

According to MIT Press,

Despite its origins as a pirate broadcasting collective, the group eventually shifted toward building and expanding regulatory access to new, licensed stations. These radio activists consciously cast radio as an alternative to digital utopianism, promoting an understanding of electronic media that emphasizes the local community rather than a global audience of Internet users.

In this study Dunbar-Hester examines how political beliefs are expressed though people’s engagement with technologies, and offers insights into media policy that are especially relevant as thousands of new LPFM stations go online.

I’ve read some of her earlier scholarship around LPFM and radio (some papers are available online via her website), so I am excited to read this fuller treatise.

The post New Book Chronicles LPFM Activism & Organizing appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The work of media history serves to not only enrich our understanding of the past and of the everyday use of communications technologies, but it also offers helpful methods and frameworks for making sense of new technological developments and new uses and practices. A number of scholars have tempered the revolutionary claims of newness that often accompany new media and new technologies, rightfully contributing historical context (A few book-length examples include Residual Media, Acland 2007; Rethinking Media Change, Thorburn and Jenkins, 2004; and Always Already New, Gitelman, 2006).

As radio continues to evolve and adapt in the digital age, the history of this medium and its uses remain an ever important field to consider. This new Radio Survivor Academic Series serves to profile and highlight historical research in Radio Studies and in related fields such as Media Studies, Cultural History, Media Theory, and Sound Studies. Contemporary studies of radio that are informed by history or historical methods will also find their way into this series.

I’ll be writing about my own research in radio history, but more importantly I’ll be profiling the work of other academics and practitioners who research and write about radio. I’ll be looking to share other radio-related information such as interviews, book and article reviews, and calls for conference and journal articles.

As well, this series will post updates from the Radio Preservation Task Force (Radio Survivor is an online partner), which is just about to hit a big deadline this November 1st when an international team of researchers will be reporting back on their initial radio and radio-related archival findings.

I have been in contact with a number of university archives in Toronto and Southwestern Ontario and have located some great archival holdings including reel-to-reel sound recordings of the first four International Teach-Ins held at Varsity Stadium at the University of Toronto in the 1960s (big thanks to Marnee Gamble at the University of Toronto Archives and Records for locating and providing me with the information for these recordings).

Topics of these Teach-Ins range from the Vietnam War (“Revolution and Response,” 1965) and “Religions and International Affairs” (1967). These programs were originally aired as three day programs by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and were produced by CJRT at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. I’ve started my search for archival materials with universities in order to find recordings that showcase the educational uses of radio and partnerships between educational institutions and broadcasters.

As this project progresses, I look forward to sharing many more archival sources that are found by our team of researchers and archivists. If you have any suggestions for this series or if you would like to direct my attention to something of interest within the larger topic of radio history, please be in touch.

The post Introducing the Radio Survivor Academic Series appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago, John Anderson shared with Radio Survivor readers some details about a Library of Congress initiative focused on the preservation of local radio history all over the country. As he mentioned, The Radio Preservation Task Force is now hard at work identifying radio collections in every corner of the United States.

Radio Survivor is excited to announce that we are an official online partner and will be providing regular updates about not only Radio Preservation Task Force activities, but will also be publishing guest posts from Task Force members. It’s long been a goal of mine to increase Radio Survivor’s coverage related to not only radio history, but also radio scholarship, so I’m thrilled about this partnership.

And, finally, I am also happy to announce that I have joined the Radio Preservation Task Force as a Research Associate. Through my participation, I hope to bring more attention to college radio’s rich history. To that end, if you are aware of college radio archives, collections, and artifacts, please get in touch (Jennifer AT Radio Survivor DOT com).

For our first Radio Preservation Project guest post, I’m pleased to share this update from Radio Preservation Task Force Director/Convener Christopher Sterling and Research Director Josh Shepperd. – Jennifer Waits, Radio Survivor Co-Founder and College Radio & Culture Editor

Post by Christopher Sterling and Josh Shepperd

Growing out of the National Recording Preservation Plan (NRPP) of the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB), the Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) is the Library of Congress’s first national radio history project.

The Radio Preservation Task Force (@radiotaskforce) was mandated by NRPB Chair Sam Brylawski in early 2014, and is directed by eminent broadcast historian and NRPB member Christopher Sterling, Associate Dean at George Washington University. Comprised of 100 media history faculty and the staff at the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland-College Park, the RPTF is currently aggregating participation from Affiliate Archives and assessing their collections. Radio shows that aired between 1925 and 1975 have been preserved in the form of “program transcriptions” – most often reel-to-reels or broadcasts pressed to vinyl. Thanks to previous work by the LoC, media libraries, and “Old Time Radio” (OTR) preservationists, the golden age of commercial radio is well represented at digital archives. The RPTF continues this work in application to local, regional, noncommercial, and under represented movements in broadcasting history.

Over the course of 2015 the RPTF will begin to analyze processed and unprocessed collections to create a national finding aid. Surveying the landscape of extant radio materials will require the application of metadata analytics to sound history, as well as the development of research caucuses comprised of faculty specialists and state university archivists. This work will culminate in an autumn radio history conference at the Library of Congress.

As we move closer to the conference, the RPTF will be airing features and series with our growing contingent of Online Partners beginning in November. Antenna will be running an ongoing series in which RPTF participants, graduate researchers, and radio practitioners will discuss historical and contemporary issues in radio studies. Over January and February Sounding Out! will air a short series on endangered radio collections, and In Media Res will run a week-long feature on radio archives. Next May, FlowTV will publish a special issue on historiographical and cultural questions facing radio researchers. Radio Survivor, a blog renowned for its ties to college radio, will post continued updates about the project. And we are delighted to name two preservation pioneers – Orphan Film Symposium and Ubuweb – as new partners.

Perpetually declared to be a dying medium, radio has continued to attract dedicated listeners and receive commercial and public support. We argue that the study of radio history is also a chronicle of cultural history in the United States. Radio historians have written about radio’s role during the progressive era, wartime propaganda, the origins of reception research, the struggle over the public sphere, program innovations in genre and journalism, and cultural tensions over gender and identity, among numerous other topics.

Yet so much of the cultural history of mass media remains inexplicably untapped, perhaps due to problems with availability and accessibility. Radio’s characteristic “liveness” has made it an integral tool for 20th century social movements, community building, civil rights, and local politics. Community and college programs have disseminated perspective, performance, and provided a medium for aesthetic experimentation. Educational and public stations have long aired (and hence preserved with their transcriptions) documentary evidence of national, regional, and local interviews, debates, curricula, and perspectives. Historical questions regarding the role of “old media” in social advocacy, cultural conflict, race, orientation, class, labor, and political uses of technology, are in many cases lying in wait to receive their first historical exegeses by media scholars. We hope that making radio materials widely accessible will help to encourage further interdisciplinary discourse about technology’s role in American history.

The RPTF is organized to encourage the preservation, research, and pedagogical application of media history through the implementation of five core initiatives, also listed at our Library of Congress site.

1. To support collaboration between faculty researchers and archivists toward the preservation of radio history
2. To develop an online inventory of extant American radio archival collections, focusing on recorded sound holdings, including research aids
3. To identify and save endangered collections
4. To develop pedagogical guides for utilizing radio and sound archives
5. To act as a clearing house to encourage and expand academic study on the cultural history of radio through the location of grants, the creation of research caucuses, and development of metadata on extant materials

This post originally appeared on Antenna and is reprinted with the permission of its authors.

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Radio Matters is a new feature on Radio Survivor in which guest authors will share their thoughts on the relevance of radio. In this inaugural post, scholar Brian Fauteux writes about the increasing scholarly interest in radio as he recaps the recent Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference – Jennifer Waits, College Radio & Culture Editor, Radio Survivor

Radio has developed alongside a number of significant changes in technology and culture, from recorded music to satellites. As such, its resiliency is a defining factor. Today, as digital technology, online connectivity and mobile devices reshape our media environment, we can locate innovative and effective ways to make sense of these changes in the scholarly study of radio. Radio is a rich site for exploring a number of contemporary issues within media and communication studies, including (but certainly not limited to): industries in transition, intermedia, online fan cultures, new music industries, digital listening practices, and connections between the local and the global.

This past March, at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group (SIG) sponsored and promoted a number of radio panels and presentations. The Radio Studies SIG was founded in 2012 after Bill Kirkpatrick, an Assistant Professor in Media Studies at Denison University, organized a meeting of radio scholars at the 2011 conference in Boston to discuss the group’s formation and to help strengthen the presence of radio scholarship at SCMS. Today, the SIG’s mission is to “increase the profile of humanities-based radio studies within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and to help make the SCMS conference and Cinema Journal more welcoming venues for scholarly work on radio.” The Radio Studies SIG also serves as platform for radio scholars to connect and coordinate panels for future SCMS conferences. This year’s conference saw an increase in the number of Sound Studies papers and panels, and as the larger field of sound research becomes increasingly prominent, the Radio Studies SIG provides an excellent means for highlighting the the important place of radio within sound culture.

The Radio Studies SIG sponsored a total of six panels at the Seattle conference, which included a range of paper topics from the place of Popular Music in NPR’s current affairs programming (by Christopher Cwynar, UW-Madison) to branded entertainment and early broadcasting (by Radio Studies SIG co-chair Cynthia Meyers, College of Mount Saint Vincent). My own paper was part of a panel organized and chaired by Jennifer Hyland Wang, which featured a range of papers dealing with the symbolic, cultural, and political dimensions of “place” in North American radio broadcasting.

I was initially drawn to the scholarly study of radio as a musician and music fan. My dissertation explored the development of Canadian campus radio broadcasting and the importance of campus stations within local music scenes. I found that the cultural and musical specificity of a city or town in which a campus station is located is a key factor that helps to shape its sound. Campus stations use a variety of platforms to circulate music and engage with listeners and artists, from promoting or programming live performances to digitizing cassette tapes from now-defunct bands and playing them on the air. The dynamic and experimental nature of radio is what drives my research as well as curiosity about the ongoing significance of local musical sites of production and performance in the digital age.

In addition to sponsoring panels, the Radio Studies SIG hosts an annual members meeting. Given the nature of my research, I was pleased to discover that this year’s meeting included a presentation by Seattle’s noncommercial music radio station, KEXP-FM. Station director Tom Mara and general manager Scott Bell shared KEXP’s plans for a new studio space based in Seattle’s downtown core. The station’s new home will function as a community gathering space and will help the station connect with music fans and artists in new and exciting ways. The gathering space will host live performances, classes, and lectures, and will also include a cafe, a record store, and a DJ booth that allows the public to watch live radio production. KEXP also hosts (and shares online via YouTube) numerous in-studio performances and the new facility comes with improved audio and video resources as well as an expanded audience viewing area. As well, artists on the road can take advantage of a green room with laundry facilities and showers. I found KEXP’s presentation to be inspiring and innovative, especially given my interest in the relationship between noncommercial radio and music.

KEXP’s new studio space reflects the importance of radio today as an industry that is very much active in the circulation of music, from live performances to digital video (especially in the noncommercial sector, as a recent Future of Music study illustrates). The presentation suggests that there are new ways for radio to expand into both public and online spaces and to connect with listeners and artists. In many ways KEXP’s presentation echoes the radio scholarship that was shared at the conference. Panels and papers dealt with topical issues such as the relationship between the local and the transnational in radio programming, the prominence of radio in cross-media branding, new methods for distributing music, and the place of public service broadcasting in the digital age. KEXP is a site that reflects all of these exciting transitions.

Radio is once again facing big changes in media and technology. The medium’s adaptability is inscribed in its history as a cultural technology. This is certainly an exciting time to be a radio practitioner and a radio scholar. As radio finds its place in the digital age, radio scholars are met with questions, some new and some old, which require a lot of thinking, creating, and writing in order to take full advantage of what the medium can be today.

Brian Fauteux is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently undertaking a research project that explores the circulation of popular music by satellite radio. Follow him on Twitter @brianfauteux

Radio Matters is a new, semi-regular feature on Radio Survivor in which a wide range of radio enthusiasts, critics, scholars, professionals and enthusiasts will share their perspectives about the current state of radio.

The post Radio Matters: A Renaissance in Radio Scholarship appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Right now I’m dwelling on college radio’s past, as I prepare my presentation for University of Maryland’s “Saving College Radio” Symposium in two weeks. In connection with an exhibit about the history of student radio station WMUC, this symposium will focus on the importance of (and challenges inherent in) archiving college radio’s history.

I’ve become increasingly interested in college radio history, largely because it’s often such a mystery. It wasn’t until after I graduated from college that I even became aware of my own college radio station’s lengthy history. Additionally, now that I’m out and about visiting college radio stations and writing about college radio news, I’m often encountering stations for which there’s no easy-to-find history. Many station staff members and volunteers aren’t even aware of the most basic facts, like when a station first launched.

Some schools and radio stations have undertaken impressive projects in which history is being archived and preserved. Tulane University station WTUL recently partnered with a digital archive specialist at the university’s library in order to begin digitizing material from the radio station’s past. That ongoing project is viewable in the WTUL Digital Archive.

Other stations, like WSOU at Seton Hall, regularly send materials to their school archivists in order to ensure that station ephemera is preserved. Many archivists are interested in preserving college radio history and can be quite helpful to both stations and researchers. When I was stumped about the history of student radio at City College of San Francisco, I contacted staff from the school’s Library Archives. They were incredibly helpful and directed me to various resources that proved to be invaluable (I even found press accounts of the station broadcasting news about JFK’s death). Thanks to their help, I spent many days in the Archives at City College, combing through vintage newspapers, catalogs, and files. The archivists also expressed interest in obtaining more materials from the student radio station, which made me realize that many stations may not even think about contacting their campus archivists.

I’ve even had some great success working with archivists from afar. My fascination with the early history of radio at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia finally led me to contact the school library for assistance. I couldn’t believe the amazing resources that their archivists were able to share with me. Even though I’m pretty good at tracking down hard-to-find information, the archivists there were able to point me to collections of student publications that I wasn’t able to find on my own.

My biggest college radio history project has been working on piecing together a more thorough documentation of the history of radio at my alma mater, Haverford College. Back when I started doing my research I felt a bit stymied since I live thousands of miles away from campus.  I remember obsessively reading through materials in the library during one of my reunion weekends. It felt like a race against time, as it wouldn’t have been humanly possible for me to make it through every box of materials. Thanks to digitization, I’ve been able to do some of my research remotely. I’ve gotten help scanning yearbooks and newspaper clippings and many incredible vintage photos are already part of the school’s digital archive. Additionally, now that I’ve published some articles about Haverford radio history, more and more alumni have been reaching out to me with stories and artifacts. By the way, Haverford just celebrated the 90th anniversary of the launch of its first student radio station WABQ last fall and there will be some special events to honor that during Alumni Weekend in late May.

Universities generally have an interest in preserving campus history and tales and artifacts from the early days of college radio help to paint a picture of student life across many different eras. I’d love to hear your stories about radio station history. If you are at a station, do you know its history? Has there been a concerted effort to document station history?

FCC Renewal News and LPFM Update:

Congratulations to all of the college radio stations who recently heard word from the FCC that their licenses have been renewed. Yesterday’s Daily Digest (PDF) lists a plethora of freshly renewed college radio station licenses in New England. In other FCC news, there has been a little bit of action of the LPFM front this week, which I covered in yesterday’s college radio-focused LPFM Watch. Additionally, the LPFM application for Manchester Community College (Manchester, CT) was reinstated today. More than 40 new college radio LPFM applications have been granted so far in this recent window.

Upcoming College Radio Events:

April 5-9: BEA2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Broadcast Education Association‘s annual convention and research symposium takes place in Las Vegas in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show.

April 11: Saving College Radio Symposium at University of Maryland, College Park. As mentioned above, this one-day conference will focus on the importance of archiving college radio materials and culture.

April 26: UCRN Conference at KCSB at University of California, Santa Barbara. The free day-long conference is open to all California college radio station participants.  In addition to panel discussions, a record/tape swap, station swag swap and a tour of both the station and its Special Collections digitization project, there will be a few live performances. Register by contacting KCSB’s General Manager by April 11th. The twice yearly UCRN conferences draw students and college radio volunteers from all over California.

May 31: “Turn On/Turn Off: 90 Years of Radio at Haverford” exhibit reception at Haverford College, Haverford, PA during Alumni Weekend.

June 1: “WABQ, WHAV, WHRC: 90+ Years of Student-Powered Radio at Haverford College” panel discussion at Haverford College, Haverford, PA during Alumni Weekend.

September 27: Columbia College Chicago Radio/Webcast Conference

October 21-25: CMJ Music Marathon in New York City

October 23-25: CBI’s National Student Electronic Media Convention in Seattle

November 15: IBS/Simmons College Radio/Webcasting Conference in Boston

December 6: IBS/Champs Radio/Webcasting Conference in Los Angeles

We cover the culture of college radio every Friday in our College Radio Survivor feature. If you have college radio news to share, please drop us a note at EDITORS at RADIOSURVIVOR dot COM.

The post College Radio Survivor: Archiving College Radio History, Upcoming Events, and LPFM Update appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I love learning about both radio history and international radio, so was pleased to see an analysis of the early history of Caribbean radio on the Sounding Out! blog this week. Part of a 4-part series focused on radio broadcasting in the Caribbean and South America, Alejandra Bronfman’s article, Radio de Accion: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories, examines the early days of radio in the Caribbean. Bronfman writes,

In the earliest years, radio competed for attention in Caribbean soundscapes full of talk and music rooted in the legacies of slavery. In Haiti, a US occupation (1915-1934) coincided with the development of wireless technology by the US military. Military officials understood the potential of wireless for communication among ships. When US marines landed in Port-au-Prince in 1915, they immediately landed a radio set as well. Although wireless linked the marines to their passing ships, it was not yet a cultural medium sustaining a connection to familiar songs and voices.

Bronfman also takes a look at radio as “a regional history” through additional examples of the early days of radio in Jamaica and Cuba. The series continues next Thursday on the Sounding Out! blog with another piece about radio in South America and the Caribbean.

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There’s been a lot of great energy in recent years surrounding the field of sound studies, in which scholars are increasingly looking at the importance of the auditory aspects of media culture. Within the world of sound studies, a growing group of radio scholars is working hard to ensure that an academic lens is focused on the myriad ways that radio touches society. This week’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Seattle (continuing through Sunday, March 23) is chock full of radio and podcasting-themed papers as well as a meet-up for academics with a scholarly interest in radio on Saturday at 9am. Bill Kirkpatrick put together a great list of all of the sound studies papers (nearly 150 of them!) at the conference for the Sounding Out blog. In analyzing the radio papers this year, Kirkpatrick writes,

Thematically, there remains a troubling ‘donut hole’ in radio scholarship that I hope more scholars will address:  we have lots of work on early radio (into the 1950s), and lots of work on contemporary radio and podcasting, but that leaves a half-century gap that doesn’t receive nearly enough scholarly attention.  In other words, radio studies is far from exhausted…

As I read through Kirkpatrick’s list of the radio and podcasting panels at this year’s SCMS conference, I saw plenty of intriguing papers. The wide range of topics include radio in 1970s China, early Japanese radio drama, Radio Islam, the “Mental Illness Happy Hour Podcast,” Caribbean radio, Black podcasters responses to the George Zimmerman verdict, Spanish language radio, the BBC 1930-1955, radio sponsorship and Jack Benny in the 1940s, radio westerns, independent music and satellite radio, public radio, Wisconsin radio, Internet radio, and more. I wish I was there to take it all in!

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I jealously watched from afar as details about all of the amazing radio-themed conference papers were revealed in advance of this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Chicago. Now there is plenty of time to plan ahead for the 2014 confab in Seattle. In fact, radio scholars are encouraged to submit paper and panel proposals before the August 30 deadline. The conference, which takes place March 19 through March 23, 2014 in Seattle, will explore a huge array of topics in cinema and media studies.

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies has a Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group, whose mission “is to increase the profile of humanities-based radio studies within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and to help make the SCMS conference and Cinema Journal more welcoming venues for scholarly work on radio.” Based on this year’s event, I would say the group has already succeeded in its mission.

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I am jealous that my Radio Survivor colleagues Jennifer and Matthew were both able to attend the What is Radio? conference this past weekend in Portland, OR, while I could not. Nevertheless, I am glad that they were able to represent, and am really pleased that this important conference took place.

For those of us who couldn’t make it, five journalism students at the University of Oregon recorded a series of short podcast interviews with some of the presenters and conference attendees. You can listen to Jeff Jacoby, Associate Professor of Audio and Radio at San Francisco State University, discuss “Radio Pedagogy in a Post-Radio Era,” or hear Monica De La Torre talk about “Women’s role in the first Spanish-language non-commercial station in the US.”

I know that the “What Is?” conference intends to take up a different topic each time out. But I hope that there is a follow up gathering for all the radio scholars and enthusiasts who made this conference possible.

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The University of Oregon’s What is Radio conference (#whatisradio) wrapped up on Saturday, with many interesting panels on the last day. One of the best was named “Web Radio: Say Goodbye to the Dial.” But a fascinating talk by Dr. Neil Washbourne from Leeds Metropolitan University convinced me that, given the case of WQXR in New York City, classical music radio lovers won’t be saying goodbye to the dial any time soon.

Washbourne’s presentation was titled “New York City’s Classical 105.9 WQXR-FM: the asymmetrical complementariness of its on-air and online worlds.” That means that while WQXR sees the relationship between its website and its on-air stream as symbiotic, it is an uneven partnership, primarily informed by the necessities of the on-air signal. “On-air motives and needs predominate” at QXR, the paper concludes.

Raised in New York City, I grew up with WQXR, a hallowed classical music station serving the area since 1936. The New York Times purchased the frequency in 1944, and put it up for sale during the economic crisis of 2009. New York Public Radio bought it and turned it into a public radio signal in October of that year.

Across the United States, classical radio already faced huge pressures, accelerated by the Great Recession. As KUSC’s Brenda Barnes told me in 2010, following the deregulation of radio in 1996, many classical radio operators saw an opportunity to sell their frequencies at far above market value.

“So they sold, and once you buy a big station in a big market for $100 million or $60 million or whatever, you can’t afford to run it as a classical station, because you can’t make enough money back to pay the debt load,” she explained. “That sort of triggered the end of commercial classical radio. And what’s been happening is a trend toward public radio kind of trying to fill that void.”

In that context, public WQXR deploys online features to smoothe out and supplement the on-air experience. To avoid annoying listeners with pledge drive pitches, staff urge listeners to pledge on the website, thus dodging the need to “interrupt your listening.” As a result, over half of subscribers pledged online in the October 2010 drive. This gave WQXR database details about them, allowing the station to “target future pledge activities and consider which geographical areas and social groups may be under-represented amongst subscribers.”

Dr. Neil Washbourne

“More broadly,” Washburne adds, “the fundamental aim of online supplementation of the station is to give listeners such a rich experience that they fear losing what the station offers and, thereby, feel increasingly obligated to pay.” This includes “Q2”—an online stream of more “adventurous” music from living classical composers.

“There is significant interaction between on-air and online output of WQXR (and Q2),” Washburne writes. “For example, some sections from the Q2 stream are put on air in WQXR late on Saturday nights—so a taster and to encourage listening across streams and, thereby, transform listener taste and knowledge.” The station streams live performances both on air and online sometimes, as in the “Trout Week” chamber music festival of 2011. Blogs encourage listeners to share information.

But: “In spite of these attempts to encourage listening to Q2, WQXR is still very much more listened to and engaged with than Q2,” he notes. This can be measured by the attention paid to various blogs. Washburne found four times as many blog discussions initiated on WQXR than on Q2, whose function he identifies as an “arena for the creative activity and job fulfillment of presenters [or as we would put here in the states, the deejays].”

This is the ‘asymmetricality’ of which Washburne speaks—a web presence in the service of an on air stream, a relationship “predominantly guided by the on-air presence and requirements to generate subscribing listeners out of listeners.” The paper concludes with this intriguing last sentence:

“Though currently the case is that on-air motives and needs predominate, the power of the productive, communicative and distributional resources of web radio open up all sorts of more utopian, imaginative possibilities for WQXR in the future in which its locatedness in New York City will form more a symbolic and cultural resource for otherwise delocated, national and translocal relations.”

I am conflicted by this conclusion. On one level, I want and am comforted by the idea of a continuous locally or regionally based analog presence for radio that remains the dominant identity. On the other hand, I want classical radio to become ever more adventurous, bold, and challenging. Ah, the choices posed by modernity . . .

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