Shortwave collective describe themselves as “an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.” They teach people all over the world how to make their own low budget, no power radios called open-wave receivers.

The collective met at Soundcamp, an annual event at Stave Hill Ecological Park in London connecting sound and nature, and involving deep listening to that particular environment across a day and a night on International Dawn Chorus Day.

The group (invited by CRiSAP researcher Hannah Kemp-Welch) were interested in working with other women, within a male-dominated field of radio broadcasting. “Radio’s history is the extended expression of dominance. Military dominance, political dominance, commercial dominance and cultural dominance.” (Phantom Power, Hagood)

They write on their website:

“Radio-making is always collective.
It involves doing, undoing, redoing, trial and error.
Experimentation and failure are integral to the process. 
Radio is everywhere, and we can listen to it broadly all at once, not just frequency by frequency. 
We can make radios that receive plural signals and resist the clear channel. 
Radio is nowhere, until it can be heard.
We can make radios that resist, and radios that do not receive or transmit signal, yet are not broken.
Radio is everywhere, it isn’t asking to be heard.
Radio waves are timeless, organic, physical. Radio waves travel through our bodies, they fill the universe.
The signals and messages that we perceive within radio are dependent on our position, the weather, a state of material being, and a state of mind. 
Our hands can be the antennas to the intangible electromagnetic waves.
Radio is relation.“

I am really inspired by the Shortwave Collective’s thinking around radio as a practice, beyond radio as a “kind of stuff”. The practice of radio involves failure, experimentation and vulnerability. Open-wave receivers can tune into multiple radio waves at once, including non-human waves like lightning. It is more than a process of tuning into a single frequency of a commercial radio station, multiple broadcasts from a wide range of frequencies are received simultaneously.

References:
Hagood, Mack. (2022) Phantom Power:  Radio as Art and Activism: Feminist Radio, Community, and DIY Technology w/ Shortwave Collective [Podcast]. 2 October. Available at: https://www.mackhagood.com/podcast/shortwave/ (Accessed: 4 May 2026).

Shifting Soundscapes is a radio piece created by Alice Boyd, tracing the sound recordings of legendary field recordist Martyn Stewart.

Alice followed in Martyn’s footsteps, going to the same locations that Martyn recorded in 50 years ago to see how the sounds of these environments have changed over the last 50 years. We hear in these soundscapes how our soundscapes of change as a result of social activity. We hear a marked difference in the volume and diversity of birdsong, traffic and human activity.

“Sound is a barometer for the health of the planet” – Martyn Stewart

Alice’s project is a testament to listening and audio as a way to ground ourselves in the natural world which we call home.

The radio becomes a space within itself, within which we have a moment of pause to consider our relationship to sound, the natural world, and creates a moment of pause, calm and reflection. It helps us to slow down, pause, and reflect.

It is a reflection on the unique nature of sound to help us “time travel”, to immediately bring us into relation with our environments and reflect on how they are changing.

You can see an insight into Alice’s process here:

Alice brings a sense of hope, by telling real stories of successful conservation efforts to bring back species of birds, like the Bittern, which has been brought back from the brink of extinction over the past 30 years.

She reflects on how she hopes there are more stories like the Bittern, but that she can see things going in another direction. Nature is a place of joy, and is what sustains us. If we allow our current patterns to continue, we will continue to destroy our only home. In another 50 years, what will we hear? The thought is urgent, and reminds us that we can’t continue along our current path.

It served as inspiration for what I wanted to do with this radio art project, telling real stories about the environment (rivers, more specifically in the case of my project) and using sound to reflect on how we have listened to them, how we are listening to them and how we can listen to them better in the future.

References:

Shifting Soundscapes (2024) BBC Radio 4, 7 July, 19:15. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0020xm2 (Accessed: 23 April 2026).

When designing sound in theatre, radio, film – atmos and ambience is the core part of the sonic world we create. Whether naturalistic (realistic) or stylised (abstract and heightened), the design choices that go into creating the atmos of a scene help determine its mood and story.

In the example I put together which you can have a listen to above, I complimented the dialogue from Macbeth with the sound of wind (atmosphere), bells (stylistic), and music/drone textures (stylistic/ambience). It contributes to the feeling of the scene, but is less like a score and more like a sonic bed, or a room in which the text can happen. If I wanted it to be more naturalistic, I could include more naturalistic sound effects.

This is my style of sound design, which is somewhere between sound and music and is not naturalistic and is more abstract, helping to place us in the psychological world of the characters or feel what the pulse/heart of the story is. I like to find what the heart of the story is, and weave that through everything the audience hears.

Sarah Angliss talked in her CRiSAP Guest Lecture about how in a sound design that she did for ‘The Hairy Ape’ she took the sounds of gorillas, and turned them into the sounds of boat engines, to subconsciously add a layer of storytelling and a sense of foreboding. This was something I really resonated with. Sound can add so many subconscious and psychological layers of nuance and depth to a story, and Sarah’s example perfectly chimed with my own philosophies as a sound designer. She is not just communicating the space of the boat with naturalistic sound effects, but using a dramaturgical idea to drive this forward and tie it in with a design language.

In this particular example, the audience’s ears are trained to associate the atmosphere of the boat with the sounds of the gorillas, tuning the audience’s ears to a particular design language. It means that we hear the atmosphere of the boat, but feel something different – affecting our sensory experience across a variety of modalities: creating a sense of anticipation and telling its own story.

How can sound be used to not just support story, but to tell story itself?

We often think of sound design for theatre and film as simply underscoring and complimenting what is happening on stage or screen, but I think its much more interesting to think about how sound could be telling its own story alongside the primary text perhaps juxtaposing, expanding or adding new meaning or emotion to existing elements of the story.

Ophelia Deroy also talks about cross-modal correspondences. When sitting in a theatre, or watching a film – sound can tap into an audience’s perception across a number of sensory experiences.

“Research shows how sound design taps into our deep, natural communicative instincts. The sound of an object tells us what it is and imbues it with meaning and emotion” Sarah Angliss. “Sound effects in theatre or films… are not just mere sounds… they contribute meaning” Ophelia Deroy (Knock Knock)

Deroy’s research and expertise speaks to how sound design imbues object with meaning and emotion, and how sound can shift, add layers to and make more complex an action, object or emotion on stage, screen or within the acousmatic dimension.

For example, a telephone ring could be designed to be high pitched, fast and alarming, creating a sense of tension, pace and anticipation; as opposed to a low-pitched, dulcet and slow ringing which would create a more relaxed feeling. This is the same object and event, but the sound attributes a different meaning, feeling and sensory experience. We would be signalled to expect a different message on the phone. The audience would also likely physically have an increased or decreased heart rate depending on which sound was chosen.

This shows how much sound influences our perception of storytelling, and is storytelling within itself.

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Sound is often also deprioritised, the aural dimension being the last thing people often think of when approaching visual forms of storytelling. I would argue that even in the world of radio, audio drama and podcasts – people pay more attention to the indicative content of the script, interview or dialogue than the qualities of the sound itself.

Sound can also sometimes abstract time in interesting ways. Since storytelling is very time-based, and sound exists quite differently in time, sound for stage can add a different temporal element to storytelling. It does this in ways that other design elements can’t. It stretches across time and can even potentially disrupt colonial stories which exist on the basis of colonial time.

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In conclusion, I think people often take for granted how much sound influences our perception of actions and events, but sound imbues the world and the worlds we create with so many different meanings, feelings and stories. We would all be remiss to not start really listening, and to consider sound more seriously.

Foley is the creation of new sound effects which do not exist yet in a sample or sound effects library.

We created our foley sound effects through recording ourselves with a range of microphones, including a Shure SM58 and two Neumann KM184 stereo-paired microphones. These are both cardioid microphones, which are well-suited to foley as they create a focused area of recording to help isolate the sounds we’re trying to record. The way we created the sound effects was by using objects in the Foley Studio as well as our voices/bodies to create sounds of screams, of fire, and of a watermelon being destroyed and then eaten.

When I have done foley before, it has been much lower budget – and much more laborious. It was for a theatre show, an adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes novel. Although theatre is very different from radio as it has a lot of other information other than sound – for this particular show this process of Foley was slightly more similar to radio as I had to create abstracted soundscapes without corresponding action on stage to tell us what was happening. This meant that, like in radio, the sound effects had to be heightened – more similar to what we imagine something sounds like rather than what it actually does. In radio, this is true for almost everything – as we are dealing with an imposed lack of visual gestural content than we would otherwise have in theatre and film.

There are also many example of live foley, wherein “The Foley Artist has to be highly responsive to the performance being foleyed, and is often interesting to watch in itself, as the sound being created is often at odds to what is being used to create it. This was one of its qualities that we wanted to explore in front of the audience.” (Gareth Fry). A recent example of a live foley artist has been Ruth Sullivan (a prominent Foley artist) who recently performed live foley in Melanie Wilson’s sound-lead performance piece ‘Cow | Deer’ which uses only live Foley and field recordings to evoke the lives of two animals: the cow and the deer. This is an example of foley as a unique art form in its own right, which is something that will hopefully be given more attention and resource within sound arts in coming years.

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.

Aside from and beyond this commercial realm of radio, The Shortwave Collective  is an international feminist group considering the electromagnetic spectrum as artistic material.

So, there are a lot of things we can do with radio! Radio is essentially a collection of stuff and can include: atmos, sfx and foley, voice, noise and feedback, telecommunications, vox pop, archival material, drama, field recordings, song, music, quotation and much more.

With this wide a variety of audio material, there is really no limit to what we can do with radio. Radio is an extended gesture of the body, extending beyond itself and into the electromagnetic field.