Collision Signals and Secrecy
Saturday, 11 June 2005
Tod Dockstader
Often is only when technology functions in an imperfect or imprecise manner that it truly begins to reveal itself. Tuning an old radio dial puts you in touch with the space between the stations, a mysterious zone of harmonies and distortions that existed and functioned according to a strange and distinct logic. “A lot of really funny things would happen, You know two stations would get off-frequency and their signals would start colliding, so you’d hear something like a demented carousel or a pipe organ gone badly wrong. The old tube radios were very imprecise, so you’d have atmospherics that would come into the frequency. Sometimes it was like cosmic breathing or something�
So reads a paragraph from this months (always excellent) WIRE magazine – ‘Radio Activity’ an article on, and interview with Tod Dockstader. Bemused and enthralled by short wave radio, Dockstader used his sound engineering skills working on cartoons (he did the sound for Gerald Mc Boing Boing!) to produce some incredible music pieces with short wave radio samples at their heart.
As I result of the article I’ve been lead to explore Dockstaders music. ‘Telemetry’ is awesome. The sheer range of sound and frequency is amazing, cutting through the speakers at times like a chainsaw lazerbeam. ‘Apocalypse’ trips into a shortwave psychosis, a trip through planatery space-time via the conduit of alien wave transmissions.
All this talk of short wave fascination reminded me of when I was a kid and used to tape record selections of short wave broadcasts. It reminds me of exactly those kinds of interference patterns of wow and flutter you could de-tune into and the feeling of being somewhere in outerspace.
It also brings me to Numbers Stations, covert spy code broadcasts or illicit communications? – strange mantras of number sequences read by female operands you’d hear in short-wave territory that have been broadcast for more than 40 years. There are many websites covering Number Stations on the web so head for your nearest search field.
‘For decades, short-wave listeners have been hearing stations that do nothing but read blocks of numbers, usually using a woman’s voice, in a variety of languages and on innumerable different frequencies. All available evidence indicates that some of these transmissions may be somehow connected to espionage activities. These are the numbers stations, the most enduring mystery on the short-wave bands.’
Atencion 04499 (rpt) Message to 245
04499 150 (rpt five times) 150 blocks will follow
45892 05157 Message
final final End of message (sometimes three finals)
The Conet Project is a four CD set of numbers station recordings from the past 20 years released in 1997 by the ingenious Irdial Discs.
‘When a spy is sent out on a mission, she goes into her target country, gets a job, and sits quietly so no one notices her. Every day, she tunes into a pre defined frequency with a radio that she innocently bought at a local shop, and then…it starts. Depending on who her bosses are, the transmission will start with a piece of music. Examples of this music are, “The Swedish Rhapsody” played on a glockenspiel, or “Magnetic Fields” by Jean Michel Jarre, or some Alpine Yodeling music, or an English country folk tune, like “The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The more bizarre stations will start with a series of avant-garde tones.
Then, either a man or woman’s or child’s voice will start to deliver the message. The Swedish Rhapsody station uses a German girls voice. She counts from one to ten several times before delivering her text. The Lincolnshire poacher station uses a British aristocrats voice. There are stations that use what can only be described as an “erotic” voice to deliver the messages.’
Another specialty within Short wave listening is “DXing,” in which the goal is to receive faint, distant, and otherwise hard-to-hear stations. DXing on short wave is like panning for gold; DXers patiently work through noise, interference, and fading to hear a low powered station deep in the Amazonian basin of Brazil or somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago.
The problem with digital radio stations of course – are that there are no collision signals! You’re stuck with the unchangeable lattice of 1 and 0’s – no tuning, no random signals and no spaces between stations.
But… there are still some interesting digital radio stations of a generative kind:-
Rand()% is a generative radio station. All audio is generated by algorithmic software applications and programs written by sound artists and programmers.
