Holes in the Head: A Theatre for Radio Operations

Holes in the Head A Theatrefor Radio Operations Gregory Whitehead THE HUMAN porus acousticus is not just another hole in the body; it's a hole in the head, a hole that permits sound waves to pass first through the tympanum, wind through a tricky labyrinth into the brain, and finally migrate as residual electric impulses throughout the body. While it has become a commonplace to talk about sound as the medium of the imagination (a gray area), the ear also opens a path for acoustic vibrations to travel through the spine and skeleton. Sound, then, is actually a material for the whole body conducted through nerves and bones by way of a hole in the head. The sound of spoken language is a special case because it draws into play another organ that depends on vibrating flesh, an intricate system of delicate vocal folds tuned to the frequency of its own vibrations even when following a prescription. Oral litany: we know that the voice has body, and when we speak face-to-face, we see that it is connected to another body, the rest of the body, and that body has a name. You can put your finger on it, and when its vocal body performs it either leaves you speechless or it leaves you cold. Radiowaves turn up the juice on the oral/vocal body due mostly to the misplaced and unnameable identity of radiophonic space. Radiophonic space defines a nobody synapse between (at least) two nervous systems. Jumping the gap requires a high voltage jolt that permits the electronic release of the voice, allowing each utterance to vibrate with all others, parole in liberta. Or, as fully autonomous radiobodies are shocked out of their skins, they can finally come into their own. 85 Sentenced to death by electrocution, it should come as no surprise that the radiobody is chronically plagued by headaches, brain damage, and a plain bad case of nerves. But while all acts of transmission may shock bodies out of their brains, dead language still lives on air, making the wellholed afterthought of the radiobody a critical question for radio art. What is it made of, and what does it want? Leaks Successive generations of technology do not so much displace as digest each other. Marinetti understood this very well, and urged his Futurist comrades to cook the books so as to facilitate digestion. Churning through several generations of media, such digestion is never complete: dissect a radio, and you will find the remains of a book; dissect the book, and you will find the remains of a larynx; dissect the larynx, and you will find the skeletal trace of a twitching finger, lighting a match and sending a telegram; take the prints from the finger, and there you will rediscover the origins of radio. All the above stages of digestion do produce one thing in commongas leaks, from one hole or another. What we usually classify as interference is in fact the direct acoustic representation of leaking gas, the potentially explosive product of radiophonic digestion. This gas, a natural product of the radio body digesting itself (time decay through weak signal processing ), is a key material for radio art, and is best stored in glass bottles with cork stoppers. Example: In 1984, 1 conducted an interview with a retired businessman named Steven V N. Powelson for inclusion within my radio docufiction Dead Letters. Powelson's ambition for the remaining years of his life was to become the first individual ever to recite by memory the entire Iliad in the original Greek. A curious ambition, given the status of the Iliadas a consensual transcription of group performance most probably enacted over several nights; now it would be recited by one individual in a booklearned dead language, through a single rapid fire endurance monologue. The idea only makes sense if you read backwards in time. Even more curious was his motive, to achieve immortality by attaching myself to a poem that is itself immortal. By having the whole text written into his own body at once, Powelson believed (and I suppose still believes) that he could essentially become one with the body of the text. But...