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  • This Secret Charm of Numbers: The Clandestine Relationship between Shortwave Number Stations and Twentieth-Century Poetry
  • Geoffrey Hlibchuk (bio)

Mystery exists only in precise things.

Jean Cocteau

The Muses count.

Jack Spicer

Turn your radio to the microwave bands and listen there.

Christopher Dewdney

4.1.2008 Dead Voices on Air

There is a strange transmission currently broadcasting from 8,097 kHz of the shortwave band. A lifeless, mechanical voice emerges from the static and begins droning out a list of seemingly random numbers in Spanish. The rhythmic regularity and invariance in her pitch give the voice an eerie, almost otherworldly, quality. She reads a string of five numbers, pauses, then another five, pauses, and then continues reading in this fashion for forty some minutes. Then, ending with “final, final, final,” the female voice dissolves into crackling waves of static. But later, she will re-emerge on a different part of the band. She has been broadcasting in this manner, up to [End Page 181] eighteen hours a day, for forty-odd years. No one knows who she is, where she transmits from, nor what her numbers are for (to listen to a sample of one of these transmissions, click on “Atención,” cd track 441).

9.12.1921 The Birth of Shortwave Radio

In the shadow of today’s sophisticated internet technologies, shortwave radio might have a quaint air of obsolescence. But despite the ubiquity of cell phones, Wi-Fi, et al., the medium is active. A single sweep through the dial reveals a wide variety of transmissions: fire-and-brimstone evangelical preachers, tepid calypso music, a vast spectrum of foreign languages, and less readily identifiable audio events. Idiosyncratic as this variety may be, there is a stranger side to the shortwave band. Shortwave radio is an utterly bizarre world; its wavelengths are too short to be properly monitored and controlled by any government agency, and its low fidelity makes it of little use to commercial broadcasters. Hence, it proliferates with pirates, politically clandestine and propagandist broadcasters, and numerous other unsavoury users. What is more, the propagation of shortwave is notoriously unstable. Under some conditions, the waves are unable to travel any great lengths. But when they travel far, they do so by bouncing off Earth’s ionosphere and refracting down to a receiver, often traversing thousands of miles. This makes the transmitter virtually impossible to locate by normal methods of triangulation. Adding to shortwave radio’s mystique is its nocturnal clarity; due to solar interference, listening at night often leads to the clearest reception. In particular, cloudless winter nights give the most optimal conditions. Given these circumstances, perhaps it is not surprising that so many unidentifiable aural ghosts glide through these airwaves.

This spectral substrate of radio was well-known by its inventors even prior to the advent of shortwave. Guglielmo Marconi, for instance, believed that his early antennas were pulling in the voices of ghosts somewhere from outer space. Nikola Tesla similarly thought that his early radio receiver was picking up communications from distant alien life forms on Mars and Venus. Indeed, the radio itself was born of the nineteenth century’s fixation with spiritualism; both Marconi and Thomas Edison [End Page 182] pursued the idea that radio, with some modifications, could hear the dead speak (Banks 77).

Similarly, artists have imagined tuning into ghostly frequencies on the radio dial; Velimir Khlebnikov, referring to radio-wave propagation as “a spider web of lines in the air,” felt radio was a “great sorcerer and ensorceler” of the world (Khlebnikov 32), and F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s “La Radia” manifesto called for a “reception and amplification of vibrations emitted by living beings ... or dead spirits” (Marinetti 267). These and other supernatural descriptions attest to something like a schizophrenic economy inherent within radio. As Marshall McLuhan later wrote, radio is a sort of “tribal magic” (McLuhan 324), a device capable of mystically entrancing its listeners far and wide and propagating voices deep into the vacuum of space. If, following McLuhan, “radio is the extension of the central nervous system,” even “more than telephone or telegraph” (330), then the nerves it extends may be viewed as “schizophrenic” wires...

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