Interactive Radio

Despite prevailing program formats, broadcast radio is a medium in which an unprecedented level of communal participation can be combined with the public exposition of private sound worlds. Two of the author’s recent broadcast radio events are discussed here in detail: Concert on Bicycles (1983–1984), a program broadcast from a community radio station to an audience of cyclists who participated by riding en masse while listening to portable radios attached to their bicycles; and Talk-Back Piano (1991), an interactive radio broadcast during which members of the radio audience telephoned the radio station and used vocal and other sound to influence a live-to-air improvisation taking place on a computerised player-piano called a Disklavier.