Pitch Shifting

Honor Harger & Adam Hyde

"Everybody has their little peculiarities, as evidenced by the fact that some people actually like to listen to the radio!" 1
Radio is mutating. No longer trapped within small receiving units, and controlled by large broadcasting companies, the concept is multiplying and evolving into new hybrid forms - cellular radio, molecular radio, personalized radio, and in league with the giant telecommunications drift net that is the internet, net.radio. Net.radio, perhaps the younger sibling of the yet to materialize monster, webTV, has excited artists and advertising companies alike, bringing to the internet the oft promised era of live broadcasted sound, using a process often called "streaming". But what exactly is net.radio? Where did this term spring from? And who are the protagonists behind this phenomenon?

"Historically, radio has always been subjected to a relentless colonization with limiting definitions that we basically try to de-lyricise ourselves out of ..." 2

Though online radio could refer to many things, from corporate broadcasting to the obscurest of art experiments, the specific phrase net.radio implies a particular kind of online broadcasting located on the outer edges of the mainstream. Here in the internet ghetto, artists, activists, writers, and DJs have played with text, image and prerecorded sound since the advent of the web. This experimentation eventually gave rise to a synthesis of radio and sound art, DJing and web surfing, jamming and composing. As a cultural genre net.radio is elusive. Even the reference to its perceived parent, traditional radio, in the monicker seems somewhat misleading. Many online sound transmissions are almost like a deconstructed critique of the notion of radio: there’s speech, there’s audio, but most of the conventions which hold the doctrine of broadcasting together have been obliterated, subverted or skewed to the point where the internet is being used to conjure up a new [or at least recently unused] notion of broadcasting. The name itself, net.radio, is almost a joke, a glib nod, perhaps, to the parallel genre "net.art", which explores the technical underbelly of the web, and packages it as art.

Net.radio as a loosely defined movement initially became visible through the activities of a network of musicians, DJs and sound artists called Xchange <http://xchange.re-lab.net>. Initiated by Latvian media art collective, e-Lab, in 1997, Xchange began life as a website and a mailing list documenting the growing number of artists' groups experimenting with radio online. As the network matured it grew into one of the earliest international communities of artists, broadcasters and musicians working together online on audio projects. There are now approximately 200 organizations and individuals subscribed to the Xchange mailing list. Contributors include: Radio Ozone (Latvia), convex tv. (Germany), r a d i o q u a l i a (Australia), Backspace Radio (UK), Fakeshop (USA), radio irational (global), l'audible (Australia), Ministry of Experiment (Slovenia), Radio Lada (Italy), Pararadio (Hungary ), Radio Internationale Stadt (Germany), Interface (UK) , Radio TNC (France), FRO (Austria), Radio Helsinki (Austria), and many others.

The group's personality is informed by process based activities. Tools, such as live performance, audio streams of ebbs and skews, and regular netcasts, are vehicles which survey the region of sound online. The interface is a common piece of software: currently the Real Audio client. However, the protocols for streaming technology have expanded during the short lifetime of Xchange and many members are now experimenting with MP3, Quicktime, CUSeeMe, and Microsoft's WindowsMediaPlayer, and other tools,

As a geographically dispersed community, Xchange regularly participate in collaborative online activities, featuring simultaneous production of net.radio from globally dispersed nodes. Members of Xchange often meet online and perform as a group, sharing audio streams and source material in vibrant real-time performances. There's a humor in the assembled logic of these events; the conflux of audiometric images, buffering, the tick-tock of delays, the impatience of waiting. There is a strange kind of sense in the swimming stream; the encoded passengers; the road; the journey; the unexpected stops. Xchange has a collaborative knowledge; collected understandings; if you know this I’ll know that. Members continuously run into each other as they find they're all working on the same problem, looking up from their consoles and realizing they're looking into the bubble memory of someone else’s coding. On these occasions, through the idiosyncrasies of live broadcasting - the mistakes, the triumphs and the unexpected outcomes - a strong sense of cross-cultural connectedness is established.

Though Xchange may have popularised the term 'net.radio', the origins of online audio collaboration are much older. Strategies like those of Xchange share a genealogy with important telecommunications art projects of the past, which used telephones, telex machines and faxes, to create similar global linkages. Perhaps the best known of such undertakings is "The World in 24 Hours" <http://residence.aec.at/rax/24_HOURS/index.html> by Canadian artist, Robert Adrian X, produced in 1982. When one of the earliest large-scale online "global surveys" took place, it was fitting then, that it was authored by Viennese broadcast project, Kunstradio, with whom Adrian worked with very closely. The project, 'Horizontal Radio' <http://thing.at/orfkunstradio/HORRAD/horrad.html> took place from 22nd to the - 23rd of June, 1995, and involved over 20 radio stations world-wide, as well as active participation from network nodes in Athens, Belgrade, Berlin, Bologna, Bolzano, Budapest, Denver, Edmonton, Helsinki, Hobart, Innsbruck, Jerusalem, Linz, London, Madrid, Moscow, Naples, New York, Quebec City, Rome, San Marino, Sarajevo, Sydney, Stockholm and Vancouver. Curated by Gerfried Stocker and Heidi Grundmann, ‘Horizontal Radio’ in many ways created something of a standard, and perhaps even a blueprint, for online audio collaborations. Taking place in 1995 when the web was still embryonic, ‘Horizontal Radio’ proved that even with primitive sound software, such as the earliest version of Real Networks’, Real Player, a model of radio could be presented which broke down the traditional vertical hierarchy of clearly defined transmitters and receivers.

Much later, events such as LADA98: L'Arte dell'Ascolto, an Italian arts festival held in November 98, emulated the experiments of 1995, by creating an online forum for the audiometric fusion of a number of different locations, in this instance, Belgrade, Berlin, Graz, Jerusalem, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, Riga, Split, Vienna, Zagreb, and Adelaide. The festival combined art with scientific research, aiming to shed light on wireless communication, audio maps, and the scattered pebbles of radio chronology. In pleasant twist of fate, key collaborators in this project were Kunstradio, and many participants of the Xchange network, signaling perhaps the ever decreasing circles of the historical unfolding of radio.

Perhaps ironically, for a media concerned with online experimentation, some of the most crucial advancements in net.radio were catalyzed through meetings in physical sites. Brainstorming new projects, ideas and tools, at conferences, symposia and festivals became an important way in which Xchange and other audio artists, could develop the field. One early meeting took place at the Hybrid Media Workspace at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany (1997). Hybrid Media Workspace <http://www.icf.de/workspace/> was an open media studio designed to collect, select, connect, record, and distribute information and content. Hybrid WorkSpace was a "a temporary laboratory", and an early forum by which remote participants could directly access the developments and debates taking place at a physical festival, in this case, Documenta X. Within this framework, ‘Workspace Radio’ emerged, a broadcast project which aimed to provide a transmitted reflection of the diversity of activities and participants taking part in the project.

Following on from pioneering early meetings such as this, a group of artists and theorists in Berlin, perceived the need to create a forum which concentrated purely on the emerging field of net.radio. Thus in June 1998, in Net.Radio Days became the "first international meeting of experimental Internet-Radio-Projects". Organized by Berlin based net.radio project, convex.tv and theory group Mikro, Net.Radio Days <http://www.art- bag.net/trimmdich/anno.htm> created a forum for over 20 international net.radio groups to discuss their projects and the future possibilities of net.radio, as well as presenting the field to an outside audience through workshops, presentations and public discussions.

A month later, internet radio played a key role at the inaugural Art Servers Unlimited symposium in London, UK, 1 - 4 July, 1998. Art Servers Unlimited (ASU) examined innovative nodes of cultural activity on the net. Part of the Festival of Central European Culture, ASU <http://asu.sil.at/> addressed issues such as: who are the real creative forces on the internet? Will the increasing presence of e-commerce and info-shops threaten the existence of independent arts ventures? What can be done to support and sustain independent, non-commercial, artistic or experimental projects on the internet? One of the four panels dissecting these issues was "netcasting: Radio and TV on the net" <http://asu.sil.at/conf4.html>, which involved in-depth discussion about different ways in which artists and activists could claim a space in the increasingly corporatised domain of the internet. In a cultural celebration of the ability of net.radio to collapse geographical borders, ASU culminated with "Net.Radio Unlimited" a party and sound performance created by DJs, sound artists and net.radio stations from around the world.

Revolting Temporary Media Lab <http://www.yourserver.co.uk/revolting/> in Manchester, UK, held from the 15th of August to the 19th September, also provided a vibrant forum for internet broadcast and radio experiments. The laboratory was a series of changing presentations, exhibitions, workshops and events, presenting work by practitioners who maintain that "art can be critical, theory can be pragmatic and media activism might be a crucial catalyst for change".3 Within the month long frame of Revolting the relationship between the internet and radio was workshopped in a number of different ways, with live netcasting from the site, experiments with radio transmitters and cross-cultural collaborations. A workshop hosted by Gio D'Angelo from Backspace Radio in London dealt with "streaming media, interfaces, distribution channels and the ramifications of access, community, diversity, technology".

In September 1998, net.radio became the focus of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, by constituting a major presence at the OpenX presentation space. The Xchange network, having received an honorable mention by the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica, were invited to create a live audio environment at OpenX. The resulting project, The Acoustic Space <http://xchange.re-lab.net/56h/>, aimed to explore chaos and collaboration on-site and on-line. An open broadcasting studio in the physical space, and a virtual sound environment in cyberspace, created a two-tiered forum for around 30 on-site participants, and countless remote collaborators, to cooperate on sound productions. Xchange showed how "electronic environments can make acoustic spaces endlessly permeable, mobile and ubiquitous" and further illustrated how "the tactical use of networked electronic sound environments also allows the creation of personalized audio spaces, audiophonic anti-propaganda, and auditory neutralizers of the unquestioned acoustic spaces of coercion". 4

The Acoustic Space was a key moment in the development of net.radio as a new "art genre". net.radio practitioners used the opportunity of being present at a major festival of art and technology, to demonstrate the creative communications potential of this new broadcast format, and to create an awareness of artists' growing interest the structure of technological forms. Net.radio artists were working with the tools of broadcast themselves, asking how these tools were produced and controlled, and how artists could play a role in this process. At The Acoustic Space, projects such as Radio Internationale Stadt's Orang database, Irational's Radio90 Scheduler, and r a d i o q u a l i a's Frequency Clock model, were presented for the first time, demonstrating the Xchange network's growing fascination with the development of software mechanisms, content management systems and databases.

Radio International Stadt's Orang database <http://orang.orang.org/> is distributed database of audio content developed by Berlin based programmer, Thomax Kaullman. Physically sited in 4 locations, London, Berlin, Ljubljana and Riga, the Orang database collects and archives content by a large group of sonic practitioners, and presents the material on a fully searchable and catalogued online database. Currently archiving over 700 hours of audio content, Orang has become one of the most important content sites for experimental audio on the web.

The online scheduler developed for radio station, Radio90, in Banff, Canada by retired artist, Heath Bunting, was one of the first examples of FM radio being programmed using internet audio content. An opened ended system of radio broadcasting, Radio90 <http://www.irational.org/radio/radio90/> allowed users of the internet to programme the station, choosing their favorite net.radio programs to schedule for the FM station. The Radio90 Scheduler later gave rise to a new project, The World Service, <http://www.irational.org/radio/world_service> a project designed to provide bedroom broadcasters and cultural/community groups tools to effectively distribute their content around the globe on an equal footing with both state and corporate radio stations.

The Frequency Clock <http://www.radioqualia.va.com.au/freqclock> is an experimental online and on-air broadcast system involving the establishment of a network of FM transmitters placed in communities located around the world. This global FM network is connected to the internet. An automated web interface, allows net.radio programs broadcast over the FM network, as well as through existing online networks. It enables remote collaboration between the geographically dispersed participants; enables personal or collective audio timetables to be developed and broadcast; and enables a shared programming resource to be developed for cultural networks around the world.

After the success of the meeting at Ars Electronica the Xchange group continued to meet at forums such as Xchange Unlimited <http://xu.x- i.net/xu/> in Riga, Latvia, and at conferences such as Next Five Minutes 3 <http://www.n5m.org/n5m3> in Amsterdam in March 1999. Focused on tactical communications culture, Next Five Minutes 3 (N5M3) featured do-it-yourself media, and dissident art and electronic media activists from around the world. Recognizing that the culture of net.radio, and the emergence of the concept of net.tv, was becoming a major feature of the web, a core theme of N5M3 was streaming media. As a tactical conference N5M3 was interested in how the internet makes worldwide audiences a reality, and provides possibilities to circumvent local regulations. The Streaming Media panel at N5M3 asked how free can net.radio/tv be, and what obstacles can be expected? Streaming media organizations such as Freshet TV from Colorado, and Belgrade radio station, B92 discussed tactics and presented projects.

Immediately following the conclusion of N5M3, the war in Kosovo commenced, placing B92 and all independent media structures in Yugoslavia in critical danger. Having so recently explored issues such as how government interference and blockades can be prevented by using streaming media networking, at N5M3, the Amsterdam tactical media community responded to this crisis swiftly. HelpB92 <http://helpb92.xs4all.nl> was established the day NATO began bombing Yugoslavia. It aimed to assist Radio B92 in a range of different ways, including enlarging their capacity for streaming, by negotiating greater server access, meaning B92 could remain broadcasting even after their transmitter had been shut down by local authorities. HelpB92 also established the FreeB92 Player, a piece of software used for playing net.radio material about B92. This net.radio player shared much of the characteristic design displayed on the B92 website, appearing like an extension of the B92 entity. Hence even after their transmitter had been confiscated, their building closed, and their web server hijacked, B92 could retain an online presence through the tactical dispersal of this piece of software. B92 also established a series of online net.radio events known as Net.Aid. Events similar in strategy to the live link-ups perpetuated by the Xchange network, Net.Aid brought together a large number of international artists playing in support of B92.

At the same time other tactical support projects emerged to assist media in trouble in Yugoslavia. Using net.radio as a tactical tool to bring information in and out of the troubled region, Open Channels for Kosova was a conduit for reporters in the region to securely broadcast and publish journalistic reports. Journalists could call into an automated telephone messaging system at any time and leave sometimes moving and harrowing audio reports about the unfolding situation. Files were automated archived on a server and made publicly accessible as streaming media audio reports. Many of these reports were personal accounts of the flight of the Kosovars to refugee camps, and would not have been brought to the attention of the international public had it not been for the efforts of this small group. In another instance, Radio21 exiled from Pristina in Kosovo, took up residency in Skopje during the Kosovo conflict. The station continued to produce radio programs during the crisis, drawing on the tactical potential of internet audio streaming, to transmit their signal. Radio21 sent content via the internet to Radio Netherlands, who supported the station by rebroadcasting the audio via short-wave radio throughout Europe, encompassing states that were directly effected by the Kosovo conflict.

Radio then, has swerved away from the traditional models which it is known best for. The intervention of new technological forms is hybridizing the media, modulating the very definition of radio. Seemingly divergent manifestations of net.radio - playful artistic collaborations, the development of streaming tools, and the employment of net.radio as a tactical force - seem to share a common objective. They draw attention back to the form, the intention, the inherent, fundamental desire of the broadcaster, to communicate. This is perhaps best illustrated in the way that net.broadcasters often so curiously claim that the size of the audience is irrelevant to their practice. The point is not so much about numbers of listeners, but the often conversational process of broadcasting itself. The connection protocols, serial ports, blind dueling checkboxes, and click paths ultimately give way to the always latent potential of communication, and the occasional incidences of meaningful contact. Net.radio having twisted radio into new shapes and formats, has perhaps created a space for radio to continue to occupy in an increasingly crowed mediascape.

Footnotes:

1. Lester Bangs, "Horrible Noise", Village Voice, 30 September - 6 October 1981
2. Jay Mandeville, "Perceptual Gymnastics and the New Context of Radio Art: An Interview with Radio Artists Rev. Dwight Frizzel and Jay Mandeville,1995-1998", Soundsite 02
3. Quoted from "Revolting Temporary Media Laboratory" concept, online at <http://www.yourserver.co.uk/revolting/index2.html>
4. Quoted from "The Acoustic Space" concept, online at: <http://xchange.re-lab.net/56h/text.html>