This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Art making and criticism have focused mainly on the visual media. This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Taking the approach that there is no single entity that constitutes "radio," but rather a multitude of radios, the essays explore various aspects of its apparatus, practice, forms, and utopias. The approaches include historical, political, popular cultural, archeological, semiotic, and feminist. Topics include the formal properties of radiophony, the disembodiment of the radiophonic voice, aesthetic implications of psychopathology, gender differences in broadcast musical voices and in narrative radio, erotic fantasy, and radio as an electronic memento mori. The book includes a new piece by Allen Weiss on the origins of sound recording. Contributors John Corbett, Tony Dove, René Farabet, Richard Foreman, Rev. Dwight Frizzell, Mary Louise Hill, G. X. Jupitter-Larsen, Douglas Kahn, Terri Kapsalis, Alexandra L. M. Keller, Lou Mallozzi, Jay Mandeville, Christof Migone, Joe Milutis, Kaye Mortley, Mark S. Roberts, Susan Stone, Allen S. Weiss, Gregory Whitehead, David Williams, Ellen Zweig

A cultural history of German radio broascasting from the 1930s until the present day.

Ultra Sounds is the first study of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES), an early 'laboratory' for the production of electronic and electro-acoustic music, and the first of its kind in the Eastern Bloc. This well illustrated book features essays by leading musicologists and architectural, art and film historians, as well as interviews with engineers who worked in the Studio and transcripts of historic lectures and broadcasts by key figures in its history. It offers a comprehensive account of the Studio in the context of the revival of modernist experiment in post-Stalinist Poland in the 1960s.

An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity. Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism—and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might. Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises. An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world—and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.

By gathering both original essays and several newly translated documents into a single volume, editors Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead provide a close audition to some of the most telling and soundful moments in the "deaf century," including the fantastic acoustic scenarios projected through the writings of Raymond Roussel, the "gap music" of Marcel Duchamp, the varied sonic activities of the early Russian avant-garde and of French Surrealism, the language labyrinths constructed by the producers of New German Horspiel, and the cut-up ventriloquism of William S. Burroughs. Approaches in the essays vary from detailed historical reconstructions to more speculative theory, providing a rich chorus of challenges to the culturally entrenched "regime of the visual." Supporting documents include F.T. Marinetti's explosive manifesto on the aesthetics of Futurist radio and the full text of Antonin Artaud's blistering radio performance, To Have Done with the Judgment of God.

From Archibald MacLeish to David Sedaris, radio storytelling has long borrowed from the world of literature, yet the narrative radio work of well-known writers and others is a story that has not been told before. And when the literary aspects of specific programs such as The War of the Worlds or Sorry, Wrong Number were considered, scrutiny was superficial. In Lost Sound, Jeff Porter examines the vital interplay between acoustic techniques and modernist practices in the growth of radio. Concentrating on the 1930s through the 1970s, but also speaking to the rising popularity of today's narrative broadcasts such as This American Life, Radiolab, Serial, and The Organist, Porter's close readings of key radio programs show how writers adapted literary techniques to an acoustic medium with great effect. Addressing avant-garde sound poetry and experimental literature on the air, alongside industry policy and network economics, Porter identifies the ways radio challenged the conventional distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow cultural content to produce a dynamic popular culture.

Composer Michael Nyman's classic 1974 account of the postwar experimental tradition in music.