Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"Gulf Harbor Radio is a radio station that features weather conditions for ships offshore of New Zealand. The audio contains a lot of static along with hosts reading off weather reports. The static itself reminded me of the howling winds and roaring seas so I processed it to further accentuate that. Then I selected a section of the 30-minute recording that I preferred and used them as the backdrop to the piece. Then I took another clean version of the audio and cut out words and phrases to drop in between the music phrases after the musical part was completed. For the musical material, I composed a short melody that oscillates between major and minor and manipulated it many ways to create the themes. Lastly, I added the harmonic texture which mimics the sounds of wind and waves."

Composition by Janae Jean.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

"Two main considerations influenced my reimagining decisions. First, I wanted to respond to the grainy nature of the recording. I took a section of the radio air and looped it to create a melody. I felt that both the grain and the actual noise of radio fuzz acted as the heartbeat of the entire piece. Second, I responded to the relationship that exists between a speaker and listener, and how the transmission of an Emergency Action Message may influence someone sonically. This produced two results. The first result was a more dreamy, ambient sound that corresponds with the romanticized act of drifting, and where the EAM might appropriately take place. The second was a more tense, decelerated sound that may reflect an inner feeling of loneliness, or even panic if one’s message failed to be heard." 

Composition by Lucy Newton.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

"Our primary audio genre is composition of ambient soundscapes using a combination of digital computer software, analogue field recordings and electronic experimentation to produce acoustic sounds, textures and undulating tones - rather than the more traditional use of musical notes, scales and rhythms - which allows for a richer freedom of expression, resulting in generative soundscapes that can develop with complexity as a track evolves.

This track - Taajuuksia ja ääniä meaning "frequencies and tones" – is based on and uses samples from the reel-to-reel tape recording taken by a young Dan Robinson during the 1970s in the USA, using a rare Hammarlund HQ-180A/X shortwave receiver (the X version uses fixed crystal units in place of the clock). Dan had tuned into the other side of the world to receive the long distance "DX" radio station the Voice of Saudi Arabia which was testing a new powerful shortwave radio transmitter system. Inspired by many such shortwave transmissions, Dan would over the course of the next few decades forge a distinguished career as a foreign and domestic correspondent and Senior White House reporter for the Voice of America, himself reaching out across the world through shortwave and other communications media during 30 plus years of service to the US International Broadcasting Bureau.

Shortwave radio has many similarities with the creation of ambient drone generative soundscapes, such as the use of discrete frequencies, harmonics and heterodynes when using multiple phased sounds and signals; for example, the interference and static from the original track, usually the noises which are unwanted when listening to a radio, are very useful to use within ambient soundscapes, and many were sampled and used, for example the atmospheric “static crashes” and the hum at the start of the recording which was used to create the base layer bass tone. The addition of the halfaouine recreates a typical shortwave broadcast station "interval signal" which we processed using a phase distortion tools to mimic shortwave ionospheric fading and signal degradation.

And exactly as the original recording stated "our present transmission is experimental" - ours is too; and we would like to take this opportunity to thank Dan Robinson for his original recording and to all at Cities and Memory project for this opportunity to reimagine this fragment of shortwave radio history.

Mastered by Francis Gri at KSND (krysalisound.com/mastering)"

Composition by Arvik Torrenssen.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

"The original radio piece was dominated by static so I sampled some very short parts of this to make percussive sounds to form the rhythm track. Over this I added samples of some of the singing and the main spoken part: "this is the Nigerian Armed Forces Radio" which I edited slightly to make it fit in with the rhythm. The track I created was completely different from the music and rhythms featured on the radio station, which I liked. I didn't want to do an impression of Nigerian music."

Composition by Pete Allen.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

"When listening to the full 23 minutes of this recording, at first it seems very repetitive, a combination of tones, silence, station idents and test numbers. Where would it lead me?

As with many of my tracks there are elements of memory attached to them, often as starting points and the starting point for MachineStalk was the date - 1980. The uniformity of the recording, the repetition, somehow led me to think about technology in the eighties and especially the rise of the computer and home computing. Of course like many, it was the idea of computing that took off, not necessarily actually having one at home (something we all seem to take for granted now). There was a computer room at school which looked a bit like the ones in this article that I ended up reading - A brave new world: the 1980s home computer boom - HistoryExtra (https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/a-brave-new-world-the-1980s-home-computer-boom/ ) but on further research it was the images of the huge banks of computers, server rooms with few or no people, reel to reel tape machines and data that became the basis of this track. 

I took the whole of the sound recording and stripped it of silence, repeating this process several times, so that I ended up with hundreds of tiny soundfiles. I then took these tiny pieces of sound and rearranged, overlaid, overlapped and transposed them onto individual tracks. I only used the original soundfile #80 and used just basic processing which resulted in many machines chatting away, singing, music making, thinking...

In this age of personal computers, smartphones and the increasing development of AI, do machines talk to each other at night when there's no one there? Are they plotting? Stalking us? Too much science fiction reading and watching on my part maybe but in my piece the machines have a midnight slumber party, chatting away into the wee small hours."

Composition by Odette Johnson aka Museleon.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

ZMH286 Gulf Harbour Radio reporting weather and sailing conditions and communicating with yachts sailing in the South Pacific. Broadcast at 1915 UTC Monday to Saturday, from May to November. Transmitted from Whangaparaoa, New Zealand, kw unknown. In association with Yachts in Transit, http://www.yit.nz/gulf-harbour-radio. There are some deep fades during the transmission. 

Recorded by Lekiodx, courtesy of the Shortwave Radio Archive.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

Emergency Action Message (EAM) transmissions are associated with the High Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS). The HFGCS is a network of single sideband transmitters used by the United States Air Force to transmit encrypted messages to in-flight military aircraft, ground stations and in some cases, US Navy surface vessels. The purpose and format of the messages are subject to wide-ranging speculation, but are generally thought to be for directing nuclear-capable forces regarding the execution of specific attack options.

Recorded by John Lutz, courtesy of the Shortwave Radio Archive.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

Saudi Arabia obtained new transmitters in the 1970's and was widely heard with test transmissions before going on the air with full programming. This transmission was heard on a number of frequencies. Saudi Arabia is today, in 2014, still on the air on shortwave, one of the last of the Middle East countries still using this method of transmission.

Recorded by Dan Robinson, courtesy of the Shortwave Radio Archive.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

At 06:00 UTC this morning, I recorded one hour of the Nigerian Armed Forces Radio test on 13,775 kHz. This broadcast was transmitted from a 250 kW transmitter in Issoudun, France.

Hypothetically, this may have been the last test transmission of the NAFR as WRMI's announcement stated the test period would last only one week, beginning June 30th.

Recorded by Thomas Witherspoon, courtesy of the Shortwave Radio Archive.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave

NIST Radio Station WWVH as it sounded in the 1980s. To contrast with other recordings of the WWVH station ID, note that announcer Jane Barbe does not say (her now-famous) “Aloha!” at the end of this version.

This recording was found at WWVH in 2015 on an undated cassette labeled “JB on Old Audichron TCG” (which stands for Time Code Generator, the device which reconstructs and plays back Jane’s voice over the air). As such, the precise broadcast year is not known, but it is consistent with the voice and broadcast format of the 1980s, until the introduction of the short-lived digital voice in 1991.

Recorded by Myke Dodge Weiskopf, courtesy of the Shortwave Radio Archive.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave