Some thoughts on how radiophonic space emerged

by Sabine Breitsameter

Soundscape is a spatial concept. Its approach is holistic and is able to integrate even the most disparate elements. Talking about the soundscape of radio the prerequisite needed is to understand radio as a space. Although today many radio makers speak about the "space of radio" it is often not much more than a more or less metaphorical speaking. To conceive radio spatially is to a big extend dependent on the concept of radio itself.

Space behind the loudspeaker
At the beginning of this century radio had been invented as a path to transfer signs and messages. It did not even fill the room of the listener as he would be sitting his ear close to the detector. That there is a "space behind the loudspeaker": this idea emerged slowly through the experimentation of the early Radio Drama and Hörspiel. In using sounds aesthetically they were no more conceived as signals but as acoustically acting bodies, three-dimensional entities, acting in spaces and places. But under the political pressure of the 30s and 40s this more playful approach to radio aesthetics was overrun by the aim to bring information and propaganda across. - Later in the forties, the idea of space and 3-D had been taken very seriously by the inventors of Musique Concrete. Although the technical means for the adequate sensual representation of space in radio were not yet available, the idea of "radiophonic space" existed readily as an aesthetic concept by the end of that decade.

Virtual reality
It was the invention of stereophony in the late 60s which made space audible in a sensually convincing way, which culminated in the almost perfect Kunstkopf-Stereophonie - a concept which showed already in the early 70s that creating a "virtual reality" can - at least acoustically - easily be done. Even the tactile qualities of stored sound, and especially its spatial properties are so "real" that simulating spaces, bodies and movements is no problems for those recipients using the ear only.

Entering a soundscape
By this development it was no longer possible to describe radio as a path, as it was now and audible nearly 360 degree space. But this did not become part of the cultural strategies of today's radio as most of the medium still clings to its once genuine identity of being a path. Be it information or (mostly musical) entertainment: bringing something across is still the major task radio stations aim to fulfill. The alternative would be to open up a space for the listener which he could enter the same way as he enters a room or a landscape and where he could stay in, surrounded by what happens acoustically. This concept of course comes close to the idea of "soundscape". And it leaves behind the idea of radio as an "information machine".

A spatially conceived radio becomes a "machine of perception". It deals primarily with the aesthetic qualities of the medium and reflects it as a daily means of sensual experience. At this point the quarell rises: how to liberate the listener's perception instead of patronizing it through a radio which understands itself as a hearing aid, a prothese, which makes the audible simply and only sensational and by that commensurable.