Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture by Shawn VanCour (review)

The emergence of podcasting as a popular form of sound-based narrative has pushed media studies to address the form and content of aural representation. Although there are a wide variety of podcast aesthetics, the popular tend to be linked to either highly produced NPR-like long-form storytelling (e.g.,Serial, 2014–; S-Town, 2017) or the intimate and seemingly unrehearsed qualities of individuals in conversation (e.g., podcast hosts Joe Rogan or Marc Maron). Within a growing and valuable scholarly conversation about contemporary aural representational practices, connections between the present and the past are all too often given short shrift. For example, the appeal of attention-holding narratives (outgrowths of "driveway moments") and the perceived spontaneity and authenticity of liveness are long-established patterns of sonic signification. The story of how these elements came to represent radio's preferred aesthetic modes is outlined with great precision and depth in Shawn VanCour's tour de force Making Radio. His book demonstrates the value of historicization as media studies engages with the second century of what Michele Hilmes has called "sound work."¹ By taking insights from the field of media industry studies and demonstrating how contemporary techniques of audio production have a history, one that precedes their present application in sound media, Making Radio recommends itself to a variety of scholarly fields and subfields.

VanCour's book deftly blends the micro and the macro, the material and the theoretical, the historical and the contemporary. It structures these frames via several dyads, which I address in turn. VanCour adroitly chronicles the discursive contests involved in the creation of professional sound workers and the processes by which specific assumptions, techniques, and practices have been established as preferred and subsequently naturalized. Preceding sound film and other forms of electrical recording, he argues, radio practitioners developed professional techniques of aesthetic signification akin to a "language of sound." Some of these were radio specific; others were influential in other areas where technologies of sonic representation were being worked out, such as early sound film. Practitioners' "low level theorizing," to use John Thornton Caldwell's phrase, shaped larger debates about how aural representation would "work" across media.² Thus, VanCour's macrointervention places radio at the center of cross-industry debates that took place at the origins of the electric amplification of sound. VanCour's analysis builds from close reading of documents found during extensive archival research. It is also informed by a theoretical sophistication addressing epistemological claims about sonic signification. Drawing on a range of cultural theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Marcel Mauss, he historicizes the processes by which medium-specific claims about radio were articulated and reified and how they fit within broader strands of modern culture. Finally, this chronicle of the first decade of radio narrative echoes today as practitioners informed by similar goals, assumptions, and techniques forge new paths in long-form audio narrative.

The macro-micro structure is replicated in each chapter. VanCour starts by noting that the development of radio as a medium was pursued along two fronts, which he characterizes as the "what" and the "how" of broadcasting. The what involves "crafting orchestrated sonic flows and radiogenic programming genres."³ The how addresses the development of techniques that utilized then-emergent technologies of electrical sound reproduction.⁴ Chapter 1 examines the ways in which radio workers developed programming strategies that aligned with regulatory demands for live broadcasting and economic demands for an attentive audience. VanCour uses what he calls an "ecological" analogy to work around the long-standing dichotomies of structure and agency.⁵ The impermanence of radio's content stream and the inability to discipline audiences listening at home created an even greater need to engage listeners' capacities for attention. Federal regulations demonstrated a preference for live and "well-rounded" programming over recorded and niche-oriented programs.⁶ In response, radio...