Radio as a medium transformed the history of the twentieth century. It taught us to perceive information, space and relationships differently. It has shown us the force with which it can literally strike into public space, as well as the way in which it can shape the concept of intersubjective intimacy in a completely new manner. On the one hand, we have witnessed information manipulation or propaganda through radio; on the other hand, we learn to listen to distant sounds anew, in the perspective of close personal listening.
Since the 1920s, radio has gradually begun to reach out to artists across creative disciplines, giving rise to entirely new art forms with sound at their centre. Without radio, electroacoustic music or a wide range of text–sound creativity would probably not have emerged, and the notions of soundscape, radio art, radio play or sound film would probably be very different today.
One hundred years later, it is the global internet network that shapes our media reality. Yet the medium of radio never ceases to attract and provoke. One can even observe a kind of revival in the form of the incredibly popular podcast culture that, while not broadcast on the airwaves, thematises the broad richness of traditional radio creativity in an unprecedented way in new media, social and historical contexts.
Six articles in this thematic issue of Organised Sound attempt to show radio as a fundamental platform for sonic creativity. They bring insights into the media’s history and present, but also attempt to reflect on the particular creative strategies that are associated with radio as a medium of sound. The review of a new book at the end of this issue points out the very lively traces of radio art on the contemporary scene of media-based creativity. Four other articles are presented as off-topic contributions; however, most of the topics discussed can be seen as part of a broader context of technologically conditioned creativity amid a mediated soundscape.
Jean-Baptiste Masson in his article ‘On the Use of Field Recordings on Radio: A history of the beginnings’ enters the field of media archaeology. He relates the commonly used term soundscape to the practice of sound hunters, whose activities are intrinsically linked to the history of radio. The author traces how a form of listening to pure field recordings (soundscape) gradually established itself through documentary radio forms (talkative radio).
Sam Ridout also delves into history and attempts to show how the enormous social influence of radio as a key post-war medium helped shape the reception of the emerging genre of musique concrète. In his article ‘An Art of the Radio: Musique concrète and mass culture, 1941–1952’, the author also highlights Schaeffer’s sensitivity to the multiple connections between radio and cinema as two key media formats of the time.
Tomasz Misiak and Marcin Olejniczak attempt to answer the question of how radio can be understood from the perspective of a musical instrument. This problem has been dealt with by generations of creators and has been transformed in the same way as the relevance of radio within societies. In their article ‘Radio: An instrument in art – with reference to selected works by Polish artists’, the authors also reflect on the relationship between radio as a medium and the context of the post-war avant-garde. In the analytical part of their paper, they demonstrate how an instrumental approach to radio can be traced within Polish music of the 1970s.
Dana Papachristou’s article brings the rather paradoxical topic of ‘tangible radio’ into the context of the whole issue. In her article ‘Tangible Radio: Deaf studies and sound studies coalitions’, she documents a fascinating socio-cultural workshop in which the deaf community attempts to perceive sound reality and in turn create another one with the help of a specially designed vibration generator. In this experimental project, the format of the radio programme as a purely audio medium seems to be the most suitable for mediating mutual enrichment between the hearing and deaf communities.
The next article, my own contribution, looks back at two decades of the Czech radio programme Radioateliér, which has given rise to more than two hundred new sound works created by artists from around the world since 2003. The article ‘Radioatelier: Czech radio space for acoustic art 2003–2022’ not only describes the circumstances and motivations behind the creation of this programme in the Czech context at the turn of the millennium, but also reflects on the changing role of public radio as both media and political concepts.
The last of the thematic articles represents a certain vision for the future. ‘Weightless Infrastructures’ by Kristoffer Raasted attempts to critique the technological infrastructure of radio (satellite, data) transmission while looking for ways to conceptually unify the ephemerality of wireless communication with the materiality of physical listening to sound, not only from the ecological point of view.
The off-theme section begins with a contribution to music education in the lower grades. Jesús Tejada, Adolf Murillo and José Manuel Berenguer present a software interface Acouspaces that draws on the theory and practice of soundscape and allows children to create complex sound compositions using basic audio transformations. The authors present the software itself and the main educational visions associated with it.
Andrea Giomi’s research is positioned at the intersection of the interdisciplinary coexistence of sound performance and current cutting-edge technologies. In his article ‘A Phenomenological Approach to Wearable Technologies and Viscerality: From embodied interaction to bio-physical music performance’, he highlights the need for a greater sensitivity to the somatic aspects of musical performance whose technological reflection should be crucial for the future development of wearable technologies. Using the example of his own work, he demonstrates the importance of building a feedback loop between the activity of one’s own body and the real-time sonic response of a musical performance.
‘Towards Deconstructivist Music: Reconstruction paradoxes, neural networks, concatenative synthesis and automated orchestration in the creative process’ is another contribution focused on current topics of music technology discourse. Philon Nguyen and Eldad Tsabary present the notion of ‘reconstruction paradoxes’ and, against the background of deconstruction theory (Derrida), suggest a way to think about deconstructivist approaches in music composition using AI strategies.
The last article, ‘Spatiotemporal Networks in Ryoji Ikeda’s Electronic Music: Loop, variation and re-contextualisation of sound’ is an analytical probe into the work of Ryoji Ikeda. Marina Sudo focuses on Ikeda’s 2005 album Dataplex and attempts to identify the spatio-temporal interrelationships of Ikeda’s compositions. Sudo points to the rhizomatic nature of the compositional structure, which in the context of the album as a whole challenges musical memory and the perception of sound across multiple tracks.
The thematic issue concludes with the Gaby Hartel review of Radio Art Zone, a book edited by Sarah Washington that consists of over 30 texts, written by theorists and interdisciplinary artists from around the globe. Presenting valuable insights into the history of radio making and fascination with the medium, they express strong faith in radio as a crucial part of the current media reality.
