Radio offers a temporal and ephemeral medium with which to create audio works. When I visited Graeme Miller’s LINKED, a sound walk using radio, I was taken by the unique ability of the radio to create place sound objects within a hidden layer pulsing underneath the city. With sound objects placed in different radio footprints, the radios created fragments of signal and interference noises that you were able to sort of compose yourself based on your location.

Editing radio audio allows a lot of room for detail. Here is a rough first sound edit for a short snippet of dramatised audio which I designed in class:

Radio is a powerful medium for communicating information which one may not be actively looking for; but as one dials through frequency channels they might hear a flicker of new information or a sound which piques their interest.

Radio in recent years has offered a lot of room for experimentation with binaurality. Many radio producers have been interested in using audio in immersive and experimental ways. This perhaps comes from the apparent limitations of the acousmatic, which in recent years has been extended and challenged with radio and sound artists offering new ways of listening. Complicite’s ‘The Dark is Rising’, for example, was a major cornerstone of binaural radio stretching the capacity of the medium of radio.