Thanatophonics: From White Noise to Forensic Radio

The gesture of manually tuning a transistor has taken on the inevitable taste of nostalgic reenactment. In times of customized listening and interference-hobia, the transistor behaves like a living fossil, a piece of talking scrap, a sort of semi-dead mollusk. But quite probably this monster-like appearance will spare it from extinction. As for many other historicized inventions, survival implies entering into the slower market of selected fetishism, an inversion of technological values. Perhaps the old transistor likes becoming a perverse toy, as a return to a certain idea of itself, archaic and inexhaustible, finally detached from the urge of technical efficiency. A noise provider, distortion-friendly, which always remains one step ahead of the news.

In the relatively late date of 1993, radio-playwright and theorist Gregory Whitehead began one of his manifestos with the following account:

From my earliest radio experience listening to a small transistor throb beneath my pillow in the dead of night, I have been struck by radio's profoundly split identity. Into one ear plays the Happy Folk Band of RADIO UTOPIA, brainwaves and radiowaves mixed into a grand electromagnetic community. . . . Whilst into the other ear, a different band marches on, the Trigger Finger Crash Band of RADIO THANATOS, with its twisted carnage of countless broadcast aircraft rattling with great gusto, straight into oblivion.¹

The idea of a "schizophonic" radio is inseparable from a certain technical context where so-called white noise,² hiss, interference, and apophenic distortion neighbor clear spots of sound transparency and univocal broadcasting. The leisurely hand on the dial is responsible for the subtle oscillation between a place and a non-place, open and encrypted soundscapes, recognition and phantasm. In any case, noise and clarity don't exactly oppose since both entail contact, be it literal or perverse. We could even think that the leitmotiv of radio art has recurrently been the mutual contamination of these categories, according to an idea of spectrality, facelessness, and topological mystification that pervades the entire medium.

An academic legend still claims that the first wireless communication took place between two Mediterranean capes, over the same sea where the Sirens had already been throwing their deadly pre-radiophonic howls for ages, and where, from that moment on, a new form of electromagnetic fog took form. Historical records for radio broadcasting insist on focusing exclusively on the emitter's side, which is the safe one: a history of wireless communication made from the listening angle should go further back than 1890, rooting itself into that of telepathy and spiritualism. For, the listener prevails, and the use of the device is the device.

Although the crystal set was invented in 1901 by Jagadish Chandra Bose (who used a galena stone connected to a circuit as a receiver for Morse signals), we may suppose that only during World War I the practice of radio listening developed as we know it: a blind scanning of layers in search of voices. Only in 1927 did the observation of long-range propagation lead radio technicians to identify a phenomenon that was later described as "ionospheric ducting": a scrap of radio broadcasting, or a conversation from some walkie-talkie bridge, might travel thousands of miles through the electronic "ducts" that randomly form in the ionosphere. A child messing around with his five-dollar Hong Kong-made transistor in Kuala Lumpur might stumble upon a conversation between cops in the Netherlands, as much as a radio amateur in Greece would be able to tune into an Egyptian number station that, perhaps, no longer exists. And this is the point that we would rather emphasize: an abolition of time has to be added to the abolition of distance that radio operates. It is a topological jamming as much as a chronological one, an abolition by accumulation as much as it is by corruption. In all cases, one plus one (plus one plus one and so forth) is asymptotically equal to zero. Not knowing at all where this voice is and whether or not it comes from the world of the living is quite different and much more significant...