Radio that Listens

Abstract

The founding of Vancouver Co-operative Radio in the 1970s provided any interested citizen in this Canadian city with the opportunity to explore radio and its experimental, as well as creative potential. In this talk, I will trace how my personal experience of broadcasting Soundwalking— a weekly one-hour programme that took the listener into the soundscape of Vancouver and its surroundings — not only gave me valuable radio-making experience on many levels, but also changed my relationship to the city I lived in — a shift that happened for everyone with a radio programme at the station. Some insight will be given into the workings of Co-op Radio, its structure, decision-making processes, the notion of “participating listener”, and what it means to have the opportunity to “speak back” to the world through the medium of radio. Various creative/artistic possibilities for such radio making will be examined, e.g. “radical radio”, a concept coined by R. Murray Schafer, and in particular the idea of a radio listening through its microphones to the world: instead of merely broadcasting at us, we listen through i