99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-23- You Are Listening To + Radio Net

Episode Date: April 22, 2011

youarelistening.to appeared online on March 6, 2011 and I was hooked instantly. The combination of the police scanner and ambient music is an intriguing, and distinctly live, experience (unlike most of the time shifted audio I tend to consume). Its … Continue reading →

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My name is Eric Eberhart, and I'm the creator of the site. You are listening to Chicago, you are listening to New York, you are listening to Montreal, and you are listening to San Francisco. I'm at the 1125 Rally North, graduating North at 880, so I take up trucks with the tailgate down. There's a friendly dog in the back of the vehicle that has no lead or color of the phrase, the dog will fall out. Last year after the Giants One the World Series, I was out in the streets of San Francisco, checking out all the different celebrations going on. And when I got home, I was looking on Twitter and I saw a lot of people were posting links to what's happening in their neighborhood, people out lighting bonfires. and one thing that kept coming up was,

Hey, check out the San Francisco police radio on Soma FM. So I started listening to it. It was cool and got bored after a couple minutes and started putting on some of my music in the background. And something about that, there was like a synergy between the police scanner and like the music I was playing That really sounded cool and I wanted to find a way to share that with people. So that's where I came up with the idea for this site. And since it came online on March 6, 2011, I've spent what might be considered

an inordinate amount of time listening to, you are listening to. Some people think it's peaceful, some people think it's creepy, I think it's mesmerizing, and it's creepy. I think it's mesmerizing. And it's elegant, isn't it? Simplicity. So when you load the page, there's a little JavaScript file that pulls in an audio stream

from radioreference.com, they provide the police radio audio. A playlist from SoundCloud, which is a music sharing site, which has been screened by Everhart so that the playlist only has these dreamy ambient soundscapes that complement the police scanner audio. And it also loads the background image, which is coming from Flickr. Those are the three main parts and they're all coming from sites other than my own. And it's all legal and free and only possible because each of the companies provide simple web APIs.

Application programming interface that specifically promote this kind of sharing and mashing up. You can create something new that might not be what the creator intended. The design choice being made by these sites, the thing that you are listening to is exploiting, is a relinquishing of a little bit of the control of their data in order for that data to spread across the web in ways that they never could have imagined. In this way, outside and independent developers like Everhart can act as a kind of R&D department.

Radio reference and flicker and SoundCloud and the artists offering creative commons, wealthy free music on SoundCloud did not imagine this use of their content. But they do have an API. They just created a shareable architecture that taps into a remixing culture where new ideas can flourish.

Since the site is launched and it where gets around, it's been very popular. I've been contacted by lots and lots of artists from SoundCloud and they all want to be part of it. They all think it's cool and they're asking me can I have my music included on your site? Now they're not getting anything out of it. They're not getting paid. There's no royalties. There's nothing like that. But they are getting exposure. I think it, they're not getting paid, there's no royalties, there's nothing like that. But they are getting exposure, I think these are people who posted their music up there because they wanted to share it with people, and now they're finding they're sharing with a lot more people.

So it's kind of like a virtuous cycle, I guess, where I created something, I'm not looking for anything in return, the artists are getting something out of it, soundcloud and radio reference are getting something out of it because there are more people are becoming aware of their services. So really at zero cost to me or to the artists, we're all building something together that kind of enhances everyone's work. Designing for openness allows others to answer the questions that you don't have the answers to, but it's greatest power maybe that it allows others to answer the questions that you don't have the answers to. But it's great as power may be that it allows others to ask the questions that you haven't even thought to ask.

No, I don't have no five, I'm now 11th. Thank you. Say welcome. 99% invisible was produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. To find out more, and subscribe to the podcast, go to 99%indisible.org.

Hey guys, it's Roman Mars again and we're done with the radio portion of 99% of visible we're on to the podcast bonus content of the show that people seem to be pretty happy about so I'm going to try to keep doing this if I can. I had another question for Eric Everhart about future plans. And he brought up an old radio piece that I did. And so we're gonna listen to his answer about these sort of evolution and things he wants to do with you are listening to. Then he's gonna mention something very special to me

here at the end of this clip. So here you go. Moving forward, I'd like to find a way for people to be able to contribute to the site. Some experimenting with more APIs, more services online that allow people to share audio, post their thoughts and their writings about stuff. And then I want to find a way to be able to integrate those into the site, into the audio stream so that ultimately, maybe you can choose between police radio or maybe like the audio

equivalent of Twitter. What did you have for breakfast? What was the last thing that you watched on television before you went to bed? Because I think just all those things mashed together would create an even more interesting kind of mashup of experiences and sounds and textures. I was looking at your website,

and one of the things was the Sting RadioNet, which that kind of, I'm like, oh look, someone's already done this with different technology 20 years ago, but that kind of I'm like, oh look, someone's already done this with different technology 20 years ago But that's that kind of was right where I was aiming which was like be able to take people's little short snippets of speech and just throw it in there and see what happens So that thing you mentioned radio net, which is by Max new house I was obsessed with especially in about 2005 I was working for the

Third Coast International Audio Festival. I had a Track Max new house down and interviewed him about his various public engagement art projects on public radio that he did decades before. And so here's the piece I did for the program resound. And so the voice that you're going to hear is the host of resound Gwen Maxi. And then you're going to hear me talking. And you know, it's about what was that six years ago. So it's a little looser. It's a little, you know, it's not a perfect radio story, but you know, I was still learning. So anyway, I hope you enjoy it. And I'll join you at the other side of this piece. Basically, radio is a one-way medium.

We talk, you listen. Sure, there are public radio calling shows that are meant to sound live, but more often than not, they're highly edited and pre-produced. Listeners hate to hear that, but it's true. But there have been brief moments in the history of the medium where the airwaves really were a free for all and completely new forms of sound were born.

Max Newhouse makes sound works that are neither music nor events. He coined the term sound installation and has been the engine behind all sorts of new ways of thinking about and experiencing sound. Our producer Roman Mars tracked Newhouse down in Italy. Now Roman is responsible for the sound of resound, all the music, voices, odd sounds, and effects that you hear in between pieces, and that, I can tell you, is no small task. But when you actually hear Roman on the air talking, you know it's because he's become obsessed with something.

For the show I create these mixes, we sound clashes comprised of layered elements that relate to the themes of the program. And one of the elements in this mix, the one that you're hearing right now, is actually when I use a lot on lots of different shows. But to be able to hear it, we're gonna have to turn down some of this other stuff. So let's take down the transmissions from Saturn. I don't know if you recognize those,

those are transmissions from Saturn. And the Yankee Hotel Fox Travelman. And the music. That's the band Miwa, they roll. This, right there. That's Radio Net and for two hours this played on 200 National Public Radio affiliate stations in 1977 on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. It's a composition with 10,000 contributing musicians. It's a sound entity, really. But I'm going to head on myself.

RadioNet is part of a continuum of broadcast works by Max Newhouse, starting with a public supply one in 1966. I'm Max Newhouse. I work with sound as an artist. with a public supply one in 1966. I'm Max Newhouse. I work with sound as an artist and as an inventor sometimes even, I have done so for most of my adult life. So the last, let's see, almost 50 years. I was asked to do an interview, a radio interview, on WBAI in New York. And I thought rather than doing an interview, what I would try to do a work that would be for the radio.

This was in 1966. At that time there were no radio calling shows, so the idea of connecting the telephone network to the radio station which I wanted to do to make it two-way space out of the radio rather out of a radio broadcast rather than just a one-way one. Well, it's unheard of and it was difficult to do. In fact, the engineer was so sure that we would have so many bad words broadcast that he refused to consider the project except as an interview.

So he said in the end he would put the microphone in the studio for two hours and what I put into the microphone was up to me. So I got ten telephone lines installed into this WBAI studio and built a kind of root goldberg automatic answering system because they're in 1966 the Renault answering machine, Z-Think, which allowed me to from a homemade box, I'll make mixer control, pick up the phone and mix sounds which I put into an amplifier and put a loudspeaker

in front of his microphone and when it came to funny kind of party, that everybody wasn't seeing each other, everybody was listening to each other. And the way I describe it now is kind of a life, it was a wild, live sound collage, but people also hearing their own voices on the radio was, you know, a startling thing at that time. Not many people had paper quarters, so hearing your own voice was a revelation, you know. So it's quite exciting. Yes, I mean, it was raw and wild. In fact, it wasn't any swearing and WBA kept its lights. and WBA accepted slides. And... ...

... ... Here were a couple iterations of Max Newhouse's public supply, including a Peabody award-winning broadcast on WFMT in Chicago, where collars' voices activated special instruments, in addition to coming through clearly, so that what they were saying could actually be understood. And what do people say when they're given the opportunity addition to coming through clearly so that what they were saying could actually be understood.

And what do people say when they're given the opportunity to be on the air for the very first time? The answer is kind of the same high mom hand waving goofy sorts of things that they do when they're given the opportunity today. Banana man, banana man, are I like my banana. A few years later, a fairly new and compared to today, much more experimental NPR came calling and offered Max the opportunity to do the exact same thing, but on a nationwide scale, which brings us back to RadioNet. National Public Radio presents RadioNet, a live nationwide composition by Max Newhouse.

Radio Net is a piece of music. In this case, we'll be using the National Public Radio network to actually generate a piece of music from sounds, sound material, phoned in by anyone from anywhere. phoned in by anyone from anywhere. I think the most important thing for the listener to realize is that we're making a piece of music. And all one really has to do is listen with an open mind. NPR now invites you to become part of Radio Net. Dial any one of the following telephone numbers.

At that point, I was really fighting, you know, this idea that music could be made another way of this idea of really activating a lay public and inventing their own music. It was just, you know, it was from Mars. RadioNet sounds different from public supply for a number of reasons. New house took advantage of the NPR distribution system of the time called a round robin which connected all the 200 stations. And how this was normally used was that a station would feed a program to all the others by breaking into this round robin telephone line and sending it around the loop. So New House picked five cities, New York, Dallas, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, and subdivided the network into five loops each point having its own automatic mixer, which selected fractions of the sound that

were being fed in by the phone callers. So during the broadcast, the sound's phoned into each city, passed through itself mixer, and started looping. With each cross-country pass each sound made another layer overlapping itself at different pitches until it gradually died away. It was the activation of an entire continent into a sound transformation box that was literally 1500 miles wide by 3,000 miles long with five inz and outs emerging in Washington DC or Max Newhouse sad and mixed them all together controlling this five-headed animal so that it didn't spin off into a massive feedback loop

It was a fantastic moment. I mean to go from one station with with 20 mile radius to Transcontinental in 11 years. It was quite amazing, yes. So Max, what was NPR's take on this? Because it was live, so they'd never heard it before. I mean, I imagine their collective jaws were just on the floor. It was risky and they were really in shock after it was over.

They didn't want to do it again. They were really terrified. Mostly, in the beginning, they were, it's all these pieces terrorized, but because they're afraid there's going to be one minute of dead air. I mean, like this. How horrible. Thirty seconds, there it. There it panicked. I mean, this. How horrible. Thirty seconds there.

They're in panic. I mean, Renjoin is really quite beautiful in it. It's not hard to listen to it. But still two hours for them, of prime time, Sunday afternoon, on New Year's, the Sunday after New Year's, I think really put them in shock. But in a way, I think really put them in shock, but in a way I, you know,

I had them and they had me. They couldn't, and we were there for two hours, but there was no, there was no, nobody talking about a repeat performance in 1978. It was like, God, we lived through it, we're going to have to cover our asses somehow, but they were in shock and PR was in shock. Well, RadioNet was definitely a moment in time along the public's apply. But do you think there are bigger lessons for radio in these works? Certainly radio did take this idea and it shaped it to fit its, oh, the idea of a colon show now, even though it's on the other end of the spectrum, at least it's two-way and it's fairly instantaneous.

You know, if you put out a call for colors to call in, you get immediately what certain people who are willing to call in are thinking about, even though it's very controlled and moderated. And that, I think think is very positive. The irony to all this work is that at the time, Max Newhouse forbade these compositions from being recorded. And his idea was that they existed as entities that any listener should be able to modify what they're

hearing by contributing to the composition, something that couldn't happen if it was a music recording. He was very strict about this. No recording was to be made. And as best I can tell, not one engineer at WBAI, or WFMT, or National Public Radio, listened to him, which is the only reason why they're available to be heard today. Because you can violate a lot of rules, you can turn a one-way medium-like radio into a two-way communication device and synthesizer.

You can put people's voices on the air unmoderated and unfiltered, but under no circumstances can you stop a radio engineer from recording a sound. Our producer, Roman Mars, talking with sound artist Max Newhouse. The next evolution in Max Newhouse's broadcast work is called Oracle. That's AU RACLE. And it's sort of an online version of RadioNet, but it's 24 hours a day and anyone can play.

You can find a link on the resound page at thirdcoastfestival.org. So that's the story of RadioNet and Max Newhouse and Max died a couple years ago. I think he's just the greatest and so I'm really sad that he's gone. I'll have a link to Max Newhouse and Max died a couple of years ago. I think he's just the greatest. And so I'm really sad that he's gone. I'll have a link to Max Newhouse's website as well as the third coast international audio festival that I worked for for just over three years. And they're great.

And they have a program called ReSound that I helped work on for a long time. Their website is amazing and they're just a great group and if you want to stay on top of all the really amazing things in radio you should go to ThurkoseFestival.org. Alright, that's the story for this week. I'll talk to you next week. We hope lots of cool stuff. I guarantee it. Take care.