Episodes

Renowned radio scholar Michele Hilmes is Professor Emerita, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been a long time proponent of the importance of studying radio and sound, which have often been neglected in the broader field of media studies. She joins us on the show to discuss radio studies, her call for new terminology surrounding audio works, and the growing interest in sound studies. Show Notes: Michele Hilmes website ...

Amanda Dawn Christie is an artist enamored with radios and radio waves. The Assistant Professor, Studio Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) joins us on the show to discuss her most recent transmission art project, Ghosts in the Airglow, in which she created work at the HAARP facility in Alaska. Christie also shares with us the backstory of how she starting working with radio and radio waves, describing her fascination with radio towers and shortwave and recounting her numerous radio...

This week, we are joined by the hosts of the podcast Rice and Shine. Led by four Seattle-area teenagers, the chat-style program provides a glimpse into the lives of 9th graders beginning high school from a distance during a pandemic. Rice and Shine is an incredible time capsule of the current school year, as hosts Lauren, Sophie, Ava and Grace talk pop culture, discuss the challenges of remote learning, address anti-Asian American violence during the COVID-19 outbreak, and share their experience...

The PIRATE Act was signed into law more than a year ago, but the rules governing increased fines for unlicensed broadcasting are about to go into effect on April 26. The Act is intended to give the FCC additional tools for tamping down pirate radio activity in hot beds like Boston and Brooklyn, NY, but there are reasons to be skeptical. Brooklyn-based writer, post-production mixer and field recordist David Goren joins to help us tease out the real-world implications. Goren is also the creator o...

What is radio art? What is transmission art? We discuss the experimental side of radio and artistic uses of radio transmissions on our show this week, looking at historical and contemporary examples. Artist and scholar Anna Friz joins us to chat about these concepts, sharing how her college/community radio past in Canada inspired her to immerse herself in the practice of sound art and radio art. Friz is Assistant Professor, Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz and also ...

What is sound art? And what do we know about its origin story? We explore this question and more with our guest this week, artist and educator Judy Dunaway. An adjunct professor in the History of Art Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Dunaway’s recent article, “The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition,” is a fascinating look at the history of sound art and highlights important contributions by female artists. In our wide-ranging discussion, we also hear about Dunaway’s ow...

A super hero comic is at the heart of The New Adventures of Super Indian, a forthcoming audio drama from Native Voices at the Autry. Our guests on the show include Super Indian’s creator, playwright and director, Arigon Starr (an enrolled member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma) and artistic director DeLanna Studi (an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation). Super Indian actually began as a radio serial in 2006 and was transformed into a full-blown comic by 2012. As Native Voices at the Autry ...

One of the biggest celebrities in Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century was Aimee Semple McPherson. She inspired scandalous headlines and fictional depictions, including the character Sister Molly on the Showtime series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and Sister Alice McKeegan on the 2020 HBO reboot of Perry Mason. Yet the story that is less frequently told is McPherson’s embrace of radio. She built her own powerful station, KFSG, in Los Angeles in the 1920s, which operated from the ...

In honor of Women’s History Month, this week’s episode focuses on women in sound. Our guests, Jennifer Hyland Wang and Jenny Stoever, return to the show to discuss sound studies, the cultural politics of listening, the history of women’s voices on the airwaves and on podcasts, as well as broader issues of representation. Jennifer Hyland Wang is an Adjunct Professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Jenny Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University and Co-Founder and Ed...

This week we share more evidence of how broadest radio is an important informational lifeline and human connection for so many people. As most of the country enters year two of the pandemic, we catch up again with Becky Meiers, General Manager of community radio station KCAW-FM in Sitka, Alaska. We last spoke with Becky at the end of March 2020, before any cases of COVID-19 had been diagnosed in this remote community, though she shared the station’s preparedness plan. KCAW serves a vital commun...

Jennifer, Eric and Paul join together to review what’s news as we kick off the month of March. Top of the list is an upcoming FCC radio license auction. Originally planned for April 2020, but delayed by the first coronavirus lockdowns, the auction will see 140 commercial radio construction permits up for bid. We discuss if this is a good opportunity for community organizations hoping to broadcast, and things to keep in mind when applying. A new Nielsen report shows that the podcast audience has...

On this week’s show we take a look at the ways that Native Americans used sound technology during radio’s earliest days and how that inspired and led to the flourishing Native media landscape, including tribal radio stations. Our guest, Josh Garrett-Davis, is Associate Curator at the Autry Museum and author of a recently completed dissertation: Resounding Voices: Native Americans and Sound Media, 1890-1970. Show Notes: Josh Garrett-Davis website: http://www.joshgarrettdavis.com/ Autry Museum of...

Nathan Moore is the General Manager at WTJU and the Staff Advisor of WXTJ at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is also the current President of the Board of the NFCB, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. We invited Nathan Moore onto the show to ask about running community and college radio stations at the start of the second year of the Pandemic. We talk about remote live broadcasting, training and recruiting new volunteers, and strengthening the mission of communi...

On this week’s show we learn about SpokenWeb, a Canadian project focused on the preservation of literary sound recordings. Partly inspired by the energetic poetry scene of the 1960s, SpokenWeb works to preserve recordings of these live events and also describe and share this material. Our guest, Hannah McGregor, leads the SpokenWeb Podcast Task Force and hosts the SpokenWeb podcast. She shares not only the back story about SpokenWeb, but also the breadth of material featured on its monthly podca...

On Radio Survivor we are interested in not only audio, but also its history as well as preservation efforts. Along those lines, we have done numerous episodes about archives. We additionally have a strong passion for student-produced media, like high school and college radio. On this episode, we discuss an interesting intersection of the two, as we focus on archives and student activism. Our guest, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, is the founder of Project STAND (Student Activism Now Documented) and is als...

What a difference a week makes. President Biden has appointed Jessica Rosenworcel as acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission, only the second time a woman has held the post. This signals the beginning of a new agenda at the Commission – though currently evenly split down party lines – and Prof. Christopher Terry from the University of Minnesota is here to help us read the tea leaves. But that doesn’t mean the legacy of the old FCC is gone yet. Just one day before the inauguration,...

There are a few stories we were watching closely at the end of 2020, and we wanted to bring listeners up to date. First up is Section 230, the law that provides a degree of immunity to online platforms – from social media to community radio stations – for consequences resulting from what their users might post or share on their platforms. Trump had urged its repeal, apparently to get back at big tech companies like Twitter, and installed a new FCC commissioner in December who is very supportive ...

Radio history is close to our hearts at Radio Survivor and on this week’s episode we explore the story of student radio in Australia. Our guest, Rafal Alumairy, is working on book about this little-told history. She shares with us details not only about the timeline of student radio in Australia, but also some intriguing intersections with pirate radio and commercial radio activities. Thanks to Radio Survivor friend Jose Fritz of Arcane Radio Trivia for alerting us to Rafal’s work! Show Notes:...

Zach Poff put a radio station inside a pond. Poff is a media artist, educator and maker-of-things, and he explains that project and talks about making art with radio technology and listening to sound art. This is a re-broadcast of our episode from April, 2018. Show Notes Zach Poff’s Pond Station is broadcasting live during the day-light hours from just below the surface of a pond. Soundcamp is a network of listening points at sunrise on International Dawn Chorus Day, 24 hours of live broadcas...

Radios in the trees, a transmitter in the pond, and a weather-driven synth. These are just some of what you’ll find on The Wave Farm, a 29-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley dedicated to radio and transmission arts. It’s anchored by community radio station WGXC, accompanied by a cornucopia of additional tiny terrestrial and internet stations. Jennifer Waits takes us on an auditory tour of the farm, along with a visit to the station’s Hudson, NY studio, where station manager and managing ...

Even though Trump is leaving the White House on January 19, he’s set up the FCC to carry on his idiosyncratic policy goals well into the Biden administration, especially if a Republican-led Senate resists the new president’s nomination for a new chairman. At the last minute, Trump decided not to renominate FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly because he dared to opine that the Federal Communications Commission should not be put in charge of regulating online speech – a position consistent with his...

Though there are many good reasons why one might not want to look back at the year that was, we still see some aspects worth noting. In particular, radio and podcasting proved to be resilient media, with broadcasters and podcasters rallying to meet the challenges of quarantines and social distancing brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic. This also brought on renewed interest in legal unlicensed Part 15 radio broadcasting, while the FCC authorized the first-ever terrestrial all-digital radio broadc...

Podcasting is increasingly being taken up by people in academia, for myriad reasons. Some professors are looking for ways to share their work, others use it as a research tool, some include it as part of their teaching practice, while others seek to include podcasting as an official part of their scholarly output. We dig into these ideas on this week’s show with our guest Hannah McGregor, Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University and co-director of Amplify Podcast Network. A p...

Poet Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb in 1996 as an online repository for obscure avant-garde art that, by virtue of having little commercial potential, was hard to find. Audio was an early component of the archive, owing to Kenneth’s interest in sound poetry, an even more obscure art form. Since then he’s served as the chief, and only, curator and proprietor of UbuWeb, which has become an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in underground and unpopular culture. Kenneth chronicled h...