Listening In

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Douglas, Susan J. (1990) Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. New York: Random House.

Contents

Chapter 0: Introduction

See also, Barnouw, Erik (1966, 1970) History of Broadcasting in the United States. (ix)

A "romantic" book (6)

  • Radio intermingled with memory
  • On-going tension among ownership/possessive feelings, commercialization, and the possibilities taken and lost
  • Why are listeners so willing to forgive, forget the oligarchic, top-down control that seized radio in the 1920s?

Nostalgia rooted in the act of listening (7)

  • Can't understand radio without understanding hearing

How do we listen to radio?

  • How do we train ourselves? What do we learn?
  • How do we listen differently to different kinds of radio and in different contexts?
  • Re: Turkle's Second self and the relationships people maintain with their machines (10)

Historiographic challenges

  • "one of the spottiest, most ephemeral historical records in all of mass media" (9)
  • Few shows recorded
  • Stats, audience surveys woefully limited in scope and interest
    • Perhaps not yet equipped to ask the most pertinent questions?
  • Difficult to "remember properly", unlike image-centric media memories (9)

Radio: the most important electronic invention of the 20th c

  • Revolutionized "perceptual habits" (9)
  • Regarded as mattering little, despite being foundational
  • Effecting changes in understanding masculinity, femininity in the US

Chapter 1: The Zen of Listening

Beginning discussion of radio with investigation of listening

Imagined communities, Benedict Anderson

  • Notions of nationhood, citizenship, national boundaries, pride
  • Anderson credits newspaper
  • Dougles suggests radio does so on "new geographic, temporal, and cognitive levels" (24)
  • With radio, there is direct experience, shared temporality
    • In some respects, LESS imaginary than newspapers

Radio's unity was not simple nationhood

  • Strong local, independent stations
  • Listeners experience multiple identities - national, regional, local
    • Some in-step, some contrary to "official culture"

Radio's ties to nostalgia

  • Oldies go back to earliest music radio in the 1920s
  • "Old country" tracks for immigrants in 20s, 30s
  • Nostalgia for OLD nostalgia even!
  • Not just nostalgia for what was heard but how it was listened to

Listening to the radio

Underexamined

  • Taken for granted, mundane
  • But clearly complex and learned

Underarchived

  • Not possible to examine a single "text" from radio history
  • Inevitably tied to contexts, circumstances
    • Listening while working, driving, socializing

Hearing may be passive

  • Listening is always active

Pleasure in purely auditory stimulation

  • Freewheeling imagination (28)
  • Music, repetition (32-33)

Radio's place in modernity (29)

  • Futuristic: extending the sense of hearing across distance
  • Nostalgic: for orality in a pre-literacy era
    • Listening as communal, group activity
    • as opposed to isolated reading activity

Radio, aural stimulant for imagination

  • Listening in the dark
  • Drawing the world inward

Different kinds of listening

Informational Listening

  • News, talk
  • Debate
  • Music metadata

Dimensional Listening

  • Hearing a place
  • Music as well as reporting
  • Transportation via imagination

Associative Listening

  • Neurological associative networks
    • Concepts, images linked

Combinations of the 3 modes

Ham contact

  • Exploratory

Concentrated / distracted listening

  • Music appreciation
  • Music decoration

Listening to advertising

  • Arresting voices of authority

Radio mysteries

Pond, ripple, stone metaphor

  • But what IS the water? Ether

Radio waves on the electromagnetic spectrum

  • Beyond range of human sensory perception (37)
  • Radio is between perceived sound (1-15mHz) and percieved light (1gHz)
  • Why does AM travel farther?
    • Ground-wave propagation along curve of the earth
    • Sky-wave propagation reflecting off of ionosphere
    • FM travels straight out of antenna and into space
    • DXing in short/mediumwave (AM) greater possibility for long-distance "etherial communities"
    • On "silent nights", stations would stop broadcasting so listeners could try and tune faraway stations
  • Why does FM sound better?
    • Less prone to natural interference
    • 200kHz channel width
    • Better at penetrating solids

Chapter 2: The Ethereal World

Marconi's "wireless telegraph" a spiritual discovery

  • Press called it "magic" (41)
  • Akin to telepathy
  • Oliver Lodge's scandalous turn from physics to the supernatural via radio conversion
  • Connected to a "spiritualism craze" in the 20s

The Radio Trust

  • Major corporations owned the technology of radio
  • Federal Radio Commission (pre FCC) governed to protect them
  • Little discussion of the spiritual experiences of everyday users

Marconi and Lodge

Marconi

  • Italian inventor
  • Wireless telegraphy
  • Entrepreneur, determined to bring wireless to market
  • Violated Lodge's patent in his own demonstration of radio to US Patent Office

Lodge

  • Prominent physicist
  • Making connects to spiritual, occult
    • Published accounts of contact w/ dead son via seance
  • Discovered, along with Hertz, the electromagnetic properties on which radio is founded
  • Enabled tuning to diff frequencies
  • Observed and sympathized with the transcendence of hams
    • Different vibe from explicityl commercial interest of Marconi

Lee De Forest, Reginald Fessenden

  • Away from Morse code
  • Toward voices, music
  • Modifying, borrowing Marconi equipment
  • Integrating the vaccuum tube

Chapter 3: Exploratory Listening in the 1920s

Home radio hobbyists with crystal sets

  • Frustrating, mystical
  • Thrilling
  • Exploratory

Pre-regulation

  • Nothing "fixed"
    • Not frequencies, method, regulation, design
  • No standards for programming
  • No expectation of advertiser support

Three overlapping phases of 20s listening

Phase one: DXing

  • Tuning faraway stations
  • Listening via headphones
  • "Distance fiends" (58)

Phase two: Music Listening

  • Overlap w DXing because most stations played music

Phase three: Story Listening

  • Amos'n'Andy, 1929
  • Weekly programs
  • On-going stories, persistent characters

1900-1912 Early Ham

First radio audience

  • Also experimental broadcasters
  • Relegated by gov't to shortwaves
  • By 1910, largest group on the air (bigger than corps, mil)

Shortwave, 200m or less

  • Initially believed rather limited in application

Rascals playing practical jokes, interfering with Naval broadcasting

  • Navy tried to get them banned
  • Amateurs blamed for misinfo following Titanic

Radio Act of 1912

  • Required all amateurs to be licensed
  • Restricted to 200m wavelength (or less) and station power of 1kW or less

1912-1920 Ham

  • Growing population
  • Supporting comm for disaster relief
    • Improved public image

Banned from broadcasting for the duration of US engagement in WWI.

Hams return to air in 1920

Large numbers of licensed operators and smaller unlicensed stations

  • Many in big cities
  • Large immigrant, 1st gen citizen populations
  • Radio in this era reflected this diversity

Also a regressive conservatism

  • Nostalgia for supposed "gay nineties", pre-tech, pre-Harlem Renn, pre-Women's movement
  • Race riots
  • Religious fundamentalism

Strong opposites in the airwaves

  • Corporate control / anti-consumerism
  • Order / Freedom
  • Cultural conformity, uniformity / Subcultural rebellion, insolence

"Progression, technically, and bureaucratically [from etheric chaos to etheric order] but it ... favored rich and powerful broadcasters - the networks - over smaller, community-based stations with deeply loyal listenerships but inadequate resources or clout." (62)

Regulation, FCC 1927

On-going struggle over what radio would be

  • Regulation would impose order, conformity
  • Pursuit of profit

Hoover, then Sec of Commerce

  • Called together radio conferences
  • Attempting to assign frequencies (and timetables)

FRC/FCC set the band to 500-1500 kilocycles

  • Stations with most sophisticated, expensive transmitters (i.e. most $) got best freqs
  • Others forced to share freqs or broadcast only during certain times
  • Result: severe drop in educational broadcasting (low income)
  • Rationalization: audiences wanted "higher quality" programming

Why the radio boom in 1920s? (65)

  • Technical novelty
  • Thrill for hearing sounds, voices from afar
  • Hunger for entertainment
  • Desire to withdraw from public spaces

Men, boys navigating masculinity

  • Radio listening initially excluded women
  • 1910s, 20s crisis in masculinity. What is a "real man?" (66)
  • Old model of Victorian manliness in crisis
    • Sissy, stuffed shirt, terms of disrespect for this "overcivilized" man
  • Routinized, office work left little room for individual accomplishment
    • At same time, Boy Scouts and elsewhere demanded rugged individuals
  • Simultaneously they must fit in, be team players and stand out, be exceptional

Dedication required to participate

  • Difficult to assemble home kits
  • Little instruction printed, included
  • Increased value of mastery
  • Social, advice, support

DXing

Distance contact

  • Collecting stations
  • Waiting for Station IDs
  • Marking them on wall maps

Very active, engaged listening

DXers eventually out-numbered by people who wanted simpler, clear programming

  • DXing made more difficult as # of stations grew

Communal listening

  • Sharing a single loudspeaker
  • One listener narrating to a group elsewhere

Technical progress away from tinkering

  • (1924) E. Howard Armstrong, Superheterodyne/ superhet sets improved reception
  • Simplified, blackbox sets
  • Magazines move from tech articles to celeb articles
    • From the radio, to what's on the radio

Homogenization

Listeners accustomed to DXing frustrated

  • "chain stations will be the Czars of the Air" (1930) (79)
  • chain broadcasting, reflecing ill will toward chain stores

Support and affection for "home talent", local stations

  • People wanted faces to go with voices
    • Radio mags published headshots

Growing rift among DXing hams and BCLs (broadcast listeners)

  • boiled owls, hams up all night getting bags under their eyes (80)

Hams discover shortwave, long-distance

Relegated to 150-200m wavelength

  • Making late-night contacts with European operators
  • Radio waves don't travel straight like light
  • Bouncing off ionosphere

Exciting to scientific, ham community

  • Ignored, irrelevant to BCLs
  • BCLs blamed hams for interference

Hoover protect ham rights with

  • Radio Act of 1927

DXing largely dies out

  • FRC reduces number of stations that may broadcast at night
  • Well funded stations broadcasting at 50kW+
  • Not as many independent stations around the country with which to make contact

Advertisers and networks did not want the flitting, channel-surfing DX habits

  • They did not want "varied, regional, subcultural listening publics"
  • They wanted a "mass audience" (82)

Chapter 4: Tuning In to Jazz

Radio as "auditory turnstile between cultures" (98)

Music broadcasting

Appreciation

  • First exposure to a variety of music on a regular basis (83)
  • Radio made music a structuring part of everyday life
  • Common experience
    • Development of hits

Diversity

  • Radio brought AfAm musical styles into White homes earlier than could phonograph
  • High, low distinctions growing blurry (88)

Industry, rights

  • Phonograph industry undercut by radio
  • ASCAP imposing royalties, fees, 1923 (86)

Performance

  • In-studio performance preferred
  • Crooners taking advantage of tech limits

Broadcasting Black culture

  • Bringing slices of Black culture (especially music) into predominantly White areas
  • Black music essential component to white youthful rebellion
  • Black musicians forced to be "accommodationists" as well as "innovators and iconoclasts"

Jazz in the 20s

  • Hot jazz, New orleans
  • Sweet jazz, white bandleaders

Bessie Smith

  • Signed to Columbia 1923
  • Sold 6mil records in 6 yrs

White fear

  • Policy against "indecency" (sec 26, Radio Act of 1927)

White fascination

Crossover stars, challenges

  • Battling deep stereotypes of Black people
  • Deferential behavior
  • Development of the sound curbed by White expectations, mainstream/network needs
    • Non-network local stations broadcast unadulterated performances

Whites escape routinized industrial life with the music of Black alienation

Jazz at home

  • Dance music in your home
  • Dancing in your living room
  • Moving, using bodies differently at home

Jazz and Gender

  • Previously music and music appreciation was the domain of the feminine
  • Jazz (and jazz instrumentation) allowed for masculine participation

Chapter 5: Radio Comedy and Linguistic Slapstic

Radio comedy changed the way that American listeners used language

  • Alternately decorum and insubordination

Negotiating Power

  • Who can speak?
  • What can they say?

Comedy expresses (104)

  • barely articulated beliefs
  • fears
  • basic passions
  • the on-going contest between the infantile and the rational
    • nonsense
    • rationality returns only when we "get" the joke

Linguistic slapstick acknowledged the diveristy of American (123)

  • Antagonistic subgroups
  • Many deserving of ridicule
  • Suggested America on the rebound, vibrant, pliable, inventive, deviant
  • Revival from the bottom up

Prononciation homogenization

Initially, diversity

  • Tomayto, tomahto
  • Vase, Vayze, Vahs

Efforts to institutionalize certain pronunciations

  • BBC imposed single std for pronunciation, 1929
  • Site of othering/ norming
    • Accent becomes a sign of ignorance

Emergent compromise

  • Norm accent in news, talk, advertising
  • "Linguistic rebellion, anarchy" in comedy

New home for vaudeville

  • "A nation of wisecrackers" (104)

Power

  • Conventional signals of power
    • Proper address
  • Breaking these conventions indicates either refusal or ignorance of social norm

Drawing on multiple subversive traditions

  • Vaudeville
  • Minstrelsy, blackface
  • Burlesque
  • Jewish comedy

Amos 'n' Andy

  • Started in Aug 1929 just before the crash
  • Minstrelsy, blackface + Comic strip stories
  • First show which American listeners organized their lives around
  • Blatantly racist yet not alone in this regard
    • And white listeners may have identified in large part with AnA as "slightly exaggerated versions of themselves" (107)

Racial ventriloquism

  • White writers/performers used "racial ventriloquism" to put their own fears into the mouths of Black men
  • White fascination, appreciation for Black English vernacular speech (as performed by Whites)
  • AnA used to critique the finance industry and factors leading to the Depression
  • Needling, sending up masculine tropes, fears

Women on air

  • Women in AnA master conventional English to the dismay of their boys
  • Women elsewhere used flexibility of language to evade and screw over the men
  • Men in vocal drag perform as maddening female characters
  • Jane Ace, janeacisms, turning clichés on themselves
  • Gracie Allen

Joe Penner

  • Host of halfhour The Baker's Broadcast
  • Performing female, gay, child, idiot, eunuch characters
  • Developing catch-phrases

Wordplay

  • Ed Wynn
    • Getting laughs as an "emasculated clown" (113)
  • Puns pièce de résistance of radio humor (112)
  • Punch lines, repetition
  • Competitive dueling

Jack Benny

Another weekly show with devoted listeners, 1934

  • Very wealthy, mainly femme traits

"Rochester" played by Eddie Anderson

  • First Af Am actor with a regular character
  • Initially a total stereotype
  • Later he gets the best of Benny just like everyone else

Feud with Fred Allen

BEEF

Radio ventriloquism

  • Using the puppet to voice male "impudence, insolence, and rebellion"

Advertising

  • Initially separated from comedy by voice, authority
  • Later integrated into the performances

Chapter 6: The Invention of the Audience

Who is the audience?

  • Metaphysical question begat economic one with advertising (124)
  • Metrics, technologies for measuring, polling the audience

First ratings service, Archibald Crossley, 1929

  • Phone surveys

Paul Lazarsfeld

"Father of market research" (125)

  • Initiated the media effects line of thinking
  • Came to NYC to study social psychology
  • Jewish, Socialist, use Rockefeller grant to stay
  • Believed a moral/ethical continuity from Vienna worker studies to American consumer studies

Social science and American crisis

Americans in a cultural crisis of identity

  • How had "the human factor ... spoiled the American dream" (128)

Office of Radio Research (OFF)

Lazarsfeld hoped to raise money from corp clients and use it in aca research.

Cantril and Allport, Psychology of Radio, 1930s

  • Radio is a cultural and sensory phenomenon
  • Potentially revolutionary
  • "Enthusiasm, breathlessness" (131)
  • Emphasis on the auditory nature of radio, lack of visual information

Stanton, elec-engin and soc scientist

  • Build first audimeter as a grad student, 1920s
  • Later, the Stanton-Lazarsfeld program analyzer, a device for test audiences
  • Followed up by interviews, Herta Herzog

Radio and the Printed Page, 1940

  • RQ: Does radio, with it's high culture programming, uplift the masses?
    • Re: Adorno's cultural hierarchies
  • Finding contradictory, complex
  • Unfortunately, Lazarsfeld saw only his conclusion that it wasn't working at uplift
    • Missing some interesting correlations
    • Little attention to elites' behavior (did they spend as much time with "low" material?)
  • Herzog made qualitative inquiry (144)
    • Reveled in contradiction, fluidity
    • Audience centered
    • Overshadowed by Lazarsfeld's comparative fame, emphasis on quant

Professor Quiz

Chapter of Radio and the Printed Page

  • Only interviewed 11 people
  • But investigated the "multiple appeals" of quiz shows
    • Participatory
    • Participation in a public event from the privacy of the home (146)

Radio Research 1941

  • Record, phonograph sales increased as radio enabled more people to become music lovers
  • Suchman people introduced to "serious music" through radio couldn't properly "understand" it (151)
  • Duncan MacDougald The Popular Music Industry traced the life-cycle of a hit
    • Musical pleasure/profitability, musical quality/popularity are his opposites
    • People's preferences don't determine hits but industrial processes

Adorno, On Popular Music, Radio Symphony

"Pssimistic" theoretical approach, based on assumptions, speculation

  • Yet it colored or at least resonated with many social psychologists, market researchers
  • "Pseudo-individuation" of the "Culture Industry" (+Horkheimer)
  • "Stunting audience's ability to imagine or accept anything new" (153)
  • Symphonies are ruined by radio's technical limitation
    • Not able to properly "surround"

Non-English-language radio

Multi-sited study 1941

  • Arnheim, Bayne, and ORR
  • Music central to the immigrant media
  • Sentimental and nostalgia for the old country
  • Radio stations could also serve as community bulletin boards

Researchers worried that it prevented or slowed assimilation

Other market research methods

CAB (recall) and Hooper (coincidental calling)

  • Phone surveys when many homes with radios had no phones!
  • Non random samples
  • Rarely did both methods reach similar results

Nielsen audimeter

  • Audimeter detects turns of the dial
  • Weekly reporting
  • None of the qualitative, audience motivation interest of the ORR

Chapter 9: The Kids Take Over: Transistors, DJs, and Rock 'n' Roll

By 1954, Sarnoff's TV set was in 25mil/56% of US homes. Was radio dead?

As TV programming goes national, radio becomes more local

  • Number of AM stations nearly doubles between 48 and 60 (220)

New listening habits brought on by portable sets

  • Drive time
  • Traffic time
  • Listening in public, on the street, on the beach, in the park, etc.

Stations were programmed differently

  • Instead of switching up programs like a TV station
  • Now they stuck to one format for the entire day and night
  • Programs were produced in shorter chunks, 15-30 min max

Desegregation

Black voice, music heard on radio again in the 1950s

  • Site of political action
  • Teens preferred music increasingly written, performed by Black musicians

White DJs, performers, fans immitating Blacks

  • Agitating to older racist generation
  • Urbanization brought whites and blacks into close contact again
    • Anger, fear, hatred, curiosity

Radio a trading zone between two cultures

  • Revealing emptiness in white culture during blacklisting
  • Ambition among young African Americans

Lawrence Fly and the midcentury FCC

Determined that airwaves provide intellectual and ideological diversity (223)

  • Breaking up media monopolies; newspaper/radio corporations
  • Permitting more stations w/ smaller space between adjacents

Radio habits and industrial change after TV

  • Stations go independent from national chains
  • Narrowcasting style programming targets market segments
  • More individual listening, less communal listening

Transistor

  • Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley of Bell Labs, 1947
  • Replaces the vacuum tube using semiconductors
  • Enables portability, shrinks sets, more sturdy

Teens and Radio

Programming steering toward teen audiences

  • Anger, fear spreads among adults with articles about "transistor addicts" who can't stand silence (226)

Local stations, local talent, local hits

  • Symbiosis with smaller record companies

Seeking "alternative" path from middle-class Whiteness

  • Finding r'n'b, hipster radio

Caught between individuation, and belonging

  • Idiosyncratic interests among mass-cultural participation in hits, trends

Juvenile Delinquent hysteria

JDs

  • Motorcycles
  • Duck's ass (DA)
  • Vandal
  • Leather jackets

Middle-class fear of their sons getting involved in this.

White Teens Playing Black

Especially young men.

Coolness

Neither straight corporate cog, nor juvenile delinquent

  • "Cool"
  • "Soul"
  • "Feeling"

Sex appeal

Stereotypes of black masculinity opposing neutered white masculinity

Black hipster slang

In-group identity

  • Quick-mouthed
  • Undermining physical toughness

AM format

DJ mediated pop

  • Short songs, some storytelling, others descriptive
  • Lots of information about the artists, teh tracks

Listening was active, engaged

  • Emotional rollercoaster from one song to next

On-air advertising

  • Easily forgotten in romantic rememberings

Top 40

"Playing by the charts" (246)

  • Invented by Todd Storz, Gordon McLendon
    • Based on casual ethnographies of people playing the same tracks over and over on jukeboxes
    • KLIF 1190, Dallas, first station to have call signs as a jingle
  • Contrasting with diversity and lack of repetition on the looser programming by Freed and others
  • Yet also stranger contact among wider berth: Fats Domino, Connie Francis, Beach Boys (247)


Advent of the DJ

  • Mostly, but not all, white
  • Using slang, sound fx, records, voice to create an "alternate space", "secret society"
  • Verbal "identity marks", repeated catchphrases
  • Must have had an off-line presence (233)

DJ voice negotiating corporate and cultural spheres

  • Create in-group-ness
  • Monologue that feels like a dialogue
  • Addressing you "out there", rather than old school transporting people from home into another place
    • Alan Freed reading telegrams between listeners on the air, reporting on their locations

Initially a very open position, little management, 1950s

  • Also threatening to suburban middle-class who had moved out of the city to avoid miscegenation
  • Rebelled against encroaching micromanagement by top40 in 1958
  • But payola scandals killed any credibility until FM

DJ slang

African American DJs in the 1940s

  • Maurice "Hot Rod" Hulbert
  • Rufus "Bear Cat" Thomas
  • Jocko Henderson
  • Roots in segregated all-black Jubilee variety show for WWII troops

Rhyming, rapping style

  • Widely immitated by Whites

Accompanied rising stability and income among AfAms generally

  • First black-owned radio WVON, Voice of the Negro, Chicago, 1947

DJ totemism

Native American stereotyping, essentially American

  • Moondog, hounddog, Wolfman, etc
  • Mysticism
  • Wildness

African-Americans on the Radio

WDIA 1070AM, Memphis

  • 50,000W
  • Af-Am DJs playing primarily black artists
  • Used euphemisms like "sepia" and "brown" instead of "Black" and "Negro"

Establishing sense of community

  • Bulletin-board services
  • Live broadcasts from Negro league games, concerts
  • White and black audiences connecting

Whites imitating Black DJs, supporting Black artists

Red, Hot, and Blue, New Orleans

  • DJ Dewey Phillips, White in black cross-dress
  • Black artists, Black listeners
  • First of many such shows, leading up to Wolfman Jack

WJMR

  • No black on-air DJs
  • Hired a black professor to write scripts for the black DJs, choose the records

Unanswered questions

  • Did Blacks resent these impersonations?
  • Did White DJs help Black artists?
  • Was exposure to black culture through radio a factor in supporting civil rights in the 1960s?

Wolfman Jack

Born in Bobby Smith in NYC

  • DXing r'n'b stations all over the south and into Mexico!
  • XERF, 250,000W, in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico
    • Big Rockin' Daddy' from midnight on

Alan Freed

Cleveland, playing R'n'B records for mixed race audiences

  • Took credit for starting rock'n'roll, bringing black music to white kids
  • Became a lightning rod for controversy in the coming "culture wars" (246)

Through rock'n'roll dance parties

  • Explicitly integrated despite outside appearances of segregation
  • Freed kissed black singers on the cheek, hugged the men, shared drinks, cigarettes
  • Kids danced together on the floor

White anxiety about Rock'n'roll

Heightened as White artists started to act and sound Black

  • Jerry Lee Lewis
  • Elvis Presley

KKK, White Citizen's Councils, and other groups

  • Denounced integration
  • Cited rock'n'roll for integration, espcially interracial dating

Industrial problems

  • BMI, new publishing organization attracted younger (blacker) artists and paid them all equally
  • ASCAP used quizshow-fixing scandal to initiate payola scandal against BMI, 1959

ASCAP attempts to undermine rock radio

Hoping to restore a radio audience among middle-class White adults

  • This would bring greater plays to their catalog of older songs

Top 40 "reigned in" (252)

White artists replacing Black artists and Black-inspired artists in pop charts

  • Many innovators had died
  • Others enmeshed in scandal
  • Still others (Presley) at war

Also made space for new projects:

  • "Crossover" efforts like Motown
  • International, British Invasion, Beatlemania

Chapter 10: The FM Revolution

E. Howard Armstrong

Inventor of the superhet

  • Now wealthy
  • Employed by RCA

Invented Frequency Modulation (FM) radio between 1928-1933

  • Result of ten years of research
  • Higher fidelity
  • Higher frequency (VHF, 30-300mHz), less interference, less distance (<60mi)

Sarnoff at RCA abandoned FM in favor of TV

  • Armstrong believed this a conspiracy
  • Armstrong worked with other networks to build experimental stations (one was in WORCESTER set up by the YANKEE NETWORK)

FCC initially established FM band at 42-50Hz

  • In 1945, moved it to 88-108mHz to make room for TV (which used FM to transmit the audio.)
  • Armstrong and other FM advocates furious.
  • Pre-1945 receivers were obsolete
  • Major setback for FM
  • Legal battle led to Armstrong suicide

FM and the Hi-Fi craze

FCC ruled in 1962 that corps owning FM and AM could not simply rebroadcast.

  • Limited to 50% rebroadcasts (263)

Expensive receivers, limited programming

  • Primarily classical music fans, 1957 (263)

Audiophilia coined in Time

  • Hi-fi sound fanatics, fast-growing hobby
  • Very DIY
  • Distinctly masculine pasttime
  • Systems thinking, considering the connections of parts into a whole
  • Invigorated by development of Columbia's 33 1/3 LPs with 12,000cycles per sec fidelity
    • Existing commercial gear not up to the task of faithful reproduction

Wartime experiences fold into hi-fi hobby

  • Servicemen trained in electronics
  • Experiencing superior sound in Europe, especially UK
  • After the war, purchasing components from the gov't
  • Using elec skills to modify and improve designs

Technical tinkering, mastery

  • Endroute around concerns about the "effeminate" character of music appreciation

More highly educated, interested in "high culture" artifacts

  • In 1963, FM listening inversely correlated to TV viewing! (267)

FM authorized to broadcast in stereo in 1961 by FCC (267)

Free-form FM and the counter-culture

Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue

"Father" of free-form starting as top 40 DJ on SF's KYA

  • Along with Larry Miller on KMPX, San Francisco

Expat from AM DJing

  • Originally playing r'n'b in DC
  • Forced out of a job because of a payola scandal

Pitched KMPX with becoming the sound of the San Fran counter-culture

  • Uninterrupted "sets" or "sweeps" of 3-4 songs, occasionally 30 mins long!
  • Didn't talk over the intros or outros
  • Then play commercials in blocks, doubled up

Underground, progressive rock radio

New format in the KMPX mold

  • Adopted first at college stations
  • Fiercely devoted listeners among young men

DJs tried to sound mellow, chill, relaxed, personal

  • Explicitly opposite the AM DJ hepcat chatter which was now seen as corny, phony
  • Thinking hard about sequencing as an artful intervention
    • Considering tone, pitch, mood, theme

In fidelity listening, Male rock was prime

  • Persisting in the authorization of male music appreciation, expression
  • Even lyric writing!

FM and industry

By 1974, FM was 30%+ of all listening but only 14% of radio revenue

  • Mixed relationship to advertising
  • Execs considered free-form "hippie stations" that did not have enough of an audience for big investment

Appropriated freeform was playlisted like AM but proferred like freeform (chill DJs, etc.)

  • Even advertisements offered a countercultural vibe (277)
  • DJs called this "the format" and refer to "the rack" of recommended records

New formats:

  • Album-oriented rock
  • Oldies
  • Soft rock
  • Country/ Western
  • Introduction of automated systems that managed programming without a DJ
  • Difficult for new artists to get played (until MTV, sorta)

FM in the 80s and 90s

By 1980s, FM was dominant in the major cities: NY, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, LA

  • Freeform was largely missing from commercial sphere
  • Cassette decks at home and in the car enabled personal mixes (w/ Dolby's home recording, noise-reduction system.)
    • Less need for freeform DJs? Homage to freeform?
  • Loss of surprise as formats condensed


Chapter 12: Why Ham Radio Matters

Because hobbies are pursued during leisure hours, often in private, and seem nonproductive in terms of the larger economy, they often get short shrift in historical accounts of America's technological revolution. This is a mistake. By ignoring hobbies - from men tinkering with their Model T's to women working on their sewing machines - we miss the critical history of the rise and fall of technical literacy in the United States. (328-329)

Amateur "ham" radio culture

Hobby, subculture (329)

  • "Producing" engineers for industry, (and from) military
  • Citizen emergency response
    • Though msm coverage has abetted in years
    • Leading to hardening "nerd" stereotype
  • Culture of ham has influence on broadcast industries
    • Norms, language, mores
    • Close friendships, community

Origin of term "ham" (330)

  • Ham-fisted telegraph operators
  • Now means "amateur operator"

Ham language

  • Acronyms, short codes derived from telegraph era
  • "amateur's patois", distinguishes members from nonmembers (332)

Postwar boom

  • Surplus mil gear
  • Trained signal corps
  • Voyage of the Kon-Tiki
  • Interrelated with increased electronics professional opps

Hams and public service

Amateur's Code, 1928 (334)

  • Printed in ARRL Handbook
  • Compared to Boy Scout pledge
  • Emphasis on service, preparedness, fraternity, teaching, tolerance, science

Disaster relief

  • PA floods of 1936
    • BCLs with a "front-row seat" on shortwave (337)
    • Inspired broadcast corporations (NBC, CBS) to incorporate "eye-witness" field reports
  • New england hurricane 1938
    • Hams coordinate with Red Cross, Coast Guard to maintain comm during storm

Active, participatory listening

Listening like a Ham (330)

  • Active
  • Participatory

Demanded and cultivated a "commercial-free zone" on the spectrum

  • Some should remain "undeveloped wilderness"
  • Shortwaves 160m and lower remain "democratic", "unpredictable"
  • Corporate interests try to "snatch" spectrum from hams

Hams get to hear things you're not really supposed to hear (331)

  • Military
  • Physical

Contrast to isolation of telelvision (332)

Experimental relationship to wireless

Constant experimentation, tech discovery

  • Worldwide propagation
  • Bouncing off of ionosphere
  • Communicating with astronauts in space

Worldwide communication in pre-internet era

  • Direct comm between hams in eastern europ and n america during fall

Development of SSBSC (341)

Single-sideband supressed carrier transmission

  • Increased crowding of TV, mil, transportation uses
  • 1/3 freq width, 1/4 power usage of AM
  • Reveals emphasis on distance over sound quality

SSB solutions for mil, trans comm problems

  • Ground-to-air
  • Ground-to-ground
  • Less power, greater distance, more possible channels

Project OSCAR: Ham satellite (343)

Project OSCAR: Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio

  • Launched aboard Discoverer XXXVI, 12 Dec 1961
    • 40th anniv of first transatlantic shortwave test between US and Scotland
  • Continuous broadcast of 4 dots, 2 dots ("HI")

Ham lobbying, policy

Only hobby explicitly protected by federal law

  • Started lobbying in 1910
  • Protecting the amateur spectrum via a blend of "selflessness and self-interest" (333)

Spectrum auctions (344)

Deregulation in 1995

  • Mobile phone corporations seeking chunks of high freq spectrum
  • Departure in management of spectrum from "public space" conceptualized after Titanic disaster
    • No one "owned" spectrum, they licensed it

Hams and military

WWII

Selective service placed radio hobbyists in Signal Corps

  • 25,000 hams served
  • Ham implementation of SSB incorporated into mil comm in 1950s

Ham broadcasting banned during wartime

  • Post-war, ham blossomed via surplus mil equip

NASA relies on hams for radio comm between schoolkids and astronauts

Mysticism of "Contact"

Emphasis on time, temporality, over space

  • When contact is made, regardless of content, contact = copresence, intersubjectivity

"Inherent democracy" of contact (333)

  • Code obscures social status, income, age, appearance, etc
  • For some men, "a relief" (334)

Ham and masculinity (345)

Ham is a combination of

  • conventionally masculine traits: technical expertise, competition
  • conventionally feminine activities: cooperation, mutual support, communication/contact

Ham especially compelling to men who

  • "felt frozen out of the increasing bureaucratization of America, who have found the hierarchies of the workplace frustrating and humiliating."

Further Reading

  • Susan Smulyan
  • Bob McChesney
  • Duncan MacDougald The Popular Music Industry traced the life-cycle of a hit
  • Michele Hilmes Radio Voices
  • David Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 1950
  • C. Wright Mills, White Collar, 1953
  • Jim Ladd, Radio Waves

Connects to hacking, personal computing

  • (51) "[Hams] were the hackers of the early twentieth century ... "
  • (55) "As with the spread of home computing in the late 1980s and 1990s, ... "
  • CQ, seek you, ICQ
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