I started my career in radio in the analog era of reel-to-reel tape. Editing was done by spooling the recording from one reel to another, cutting out the unwanted elements with a razor blade, and cello-taping the remaining tape back together. When I describe this procedure to my students at the New School they look at me as if I’d confessed to hunting my food with a club. The dominant DAW (digital audio work station) brand in the market, Pro Tools, even has a key stroke, B for “blade,” that pays homage to this era.

That old movie trope, “lost on the cutting room floor” was vividly represented by agonizing hunts for tiny slivers of tape that carried an “a” or “I”. In those early years, I had about as much technical knowledge as Betty Grable, but what I did have was a critical infrastructure.

I am a graduate of Cambridge University, where a system called “Practical Criticism,” created by I.A. Richards in the 1920s, was taught. The method assumed that the meaning of any text [and we may now read “text” as being any constructed medium of intentional communication] was inherent in that text. Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” does not require us to know that he had been a nurse in the American Civil War, or that he was probably homosexual; Virginia Woolf’s reshaping of English prose, in works such as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, was evident without the framework of the privileged Stephens family that shaped her or the Bohemian Bloomsbury culture that she helped to shape, or her own mental frailty. According to Richards’ method, all meaning would be yielded by acute attention to the thing itself.

Because of this training, I found myself able to appreciate a sonic construction way in advance of my understanding of how it was actually constructed. My introduction to complex works was New American Radio, produced by Helen Thorington and Regine Beyer in the 1980s. The public radio system was not especially hospitable to experimental work. NPR had just weathered a financial crisis, and local stations were wary of programming that might alienate their markets. So Thorington and Beyer were outliers, who distributed independently.

The programs in the series were created in a collaboration with performance artists, and resulted in a group of surreal experimental works that pushed the boundaries of sound and narrative well in advance of the digital era. The sophisticated sound work was not yet part of broadcast radio’s lingua franca, but my generation of producers were at least exposed to some of the possibilities inherent in the form. For example, Swan Lake, created with Jacki Apple, combines a film noir murder trope with the glitzy alluring language of high-end advertising. Multi-track production meant nothing to me, but I recognized the allure of layering sounds and creating simultaneous realities.

DMae Roberts’ brilliant memoir Mei Mei: A Daughter’s Song was another revelation (and the subject of a future piece for this journal.). This brave and award-winning work used the framework of classical Chinese opera to help tell the story of a woman unable to speak for herself.

Each of the three pieces I am considering in this essay was created by producers who also came of artistic age in the analog era. They also overlapped with public radio’s evolving narrative journalism form. But their poetics draw on much older conventions.

I can’t remember when I first hear Scott Carrier’s The Test. Possibly at a conference—he is a producer’s producer the way certain authors (Donald Barthelme comes to mind) have been designated writers’ writers. Or possibly I heard the piece on This American Life, which championed Carrier’s work and first aired “The Test” as part of a Carrier-centric program called The Friendly Man. It also includes some of that biographical detail the Cantabrigian in me doesn’t believe in: Carrier began his radio career in a manifest destiny meets lonesome cowboy sort of way after being impressed by some stories he heard on public radio. Here’s how This American Life put it in their introduction to The Friendly Man: And so one day he got himself a tape recorder and walked to the highway and stuck out his thumb and headed east to the headquarters of NPR News in Washington DC. And anybody who picked him up and gave him a ride, he interviewed. 

Carrier seems to be able to hear what people aren’t saying, and that’s part of the compelling nature of “The Test.” It describes a job he took in a period of some personal desperation, travelling through Utah interviewing schizophrenics on behalf of a research foundation. How do we know how emotionally scorching this was? Because of lines like this: “So I took the job and did the job, and my life will never be the same.” And one that has resonated since I first hear the piece over twenty years ago: “A person’s soul should be like an ocean, but a schizophrenic’s soul is like a pool of rain in a parking lot.” He uses the test’s formal language as a poetic trope.

Each interview begins with “the patient is…”. And half way through the piece the listener anticipates its inevitable end: Carrier, no longer clear about the distinction between himself and his subjects, takes the test. The candor, the emotional resonance of the piece, and its ability to place a detail (a slice of pizza that languishes on a living room floor) so that a whole scene springs up before us, makes “The Test” as much poem as personal narrative. Carrier says he’ll never be the same again. Neither will his listener.

They are less about their story, and more about the language in which the story is told—active, febrile and nuanced. We have to lean in, and they are gorgeous invitations to our headphone-defined age.

Gregory Whitehead, a protean audio artist and producer, had a kind of professional luminescence in the early days of American public radio, in part because he managed to circumvent general NPR’s timidity its early days—happy to celebrate artists as the subjects of the evolving public radio feature form (give us 4-7 minutes, we’ll give you the world) but leery of putting any kind of sound art on the air. Whitehead did this in part by creating his works abroad, in Australia, and France, and elsewhere, in broadcast environments that were more hospitable towards the experimental. He and Douglas Kahn also collaborated on one of the first volumes to view radio and audio works through an aesthetic and critical lens in the essay collection: Wireless Imagination.

And then there’s Whitehead’s own work: erudite, prankish, experimental in a literal sense—the act of listening is sometimes the experiment. His Ice Music asks “What if sounds could be frozen into ice cubes, then released upon their melting? Everyday movements and actions might become rich musical performances” (And to their credit, this did air on NPR’s All Things Considered). What happens to the “dead letters” in the post office, and how might they speak to us? And, my choice here, “The Pleasure of Ruins,” which revels in the physicality of that pesky analog tape I mentioned earlier. The piece is a kind of mash up of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Ezra Pound. The surface narration is some kind of glory-hunting quest for the riches of the past, but the progress of its characters is frequently interrupted by the sounds of the past itself, disturbed, violent, erotic, and by of a litany of the names of places where the past and present overlap—Constantinople, Bangor, Nineveh…Put on your pith helmet, and listen.

Contemporary modernism birthed a convention of constraint and economy—we see it in Tricia Brown’s task dances; in Marina Abramović’s many spare but daring scenarios; in Suzan Lori Parks’ Plays for the Plague Year. And, I think, in the implied challenge to evocation in Nate DiMeo’s podcast, The Memory Palace: His subjects are largely historical, and cannot be presented by way of archival audio.

Instead, DiMeo constructs—and I mean constructs—narrative recreations of the spaces and places he celebrates (or sometimes decries) so delicate and elaborate that they might be the verbal equivalents of “subtleties,” those elaborate sculptures made of sugar that adorned Elizabethan banquet tables. Another apt confectionary analogy is to a box of bon-bons, or chocolate truffles: you mean to listen to just one episode of The Memory Palace, but you can’t stop hitting play. Nevertheless, my hands-down favorite is “Dreamland.” For one thing, at four minutes, it’s a miracle of economy.

DiMeo trained at NPR, which perfected the four-to-seven minute feature form as a way to incorporate “the arts” into its crowded news-centric broadcast clock. And in “Dreamland,” a complete paradise is conjured up, celebrated, and destroyed. Dreamland was real: an early 20th-century amusement park on Coney Island that basically encapsulated the whole world. The novelist Alice Hoffman also found it compelling, making it the setting of the denouement of her novel The Museum of Extraordinary Things. But DiMeo wants you only to imagine this world that briefly, gloriously, was the world. Any description of it would have been dazzling (“and then the bulbs blinked on, lighting up the night in the largest amusement park in the world”) but what elevates this piece is a brilliant stoke of personalization.

Almost every sentence—describing everything from installations that brought the visitor into foreign countries; to animal acts; to a ward for premature babies that was both a freak show and a medical facility; to a nightly staged mock fire and daring rescues—begins with the word “You.” The listener is no longer an outsider from the polite world of public broadcasting, or podcasting, but a tired factory worker longing for relief. So when the mock fire one day turns into a real one, and Dreamland becomes the stuff of nightmares, we are there.

These works invite active listening, just as Practical Criticism rewards the reader with an enhanced appreciation of the text. They are less about their story, and more about the language in which the story is told—active, febrile and nuanced. We have to lean in, and they are gorgeous invitations to our headphone-defined age. All three establish a powerful connection between sonic poetics and narrative, demonstrating how carefully shaped audio—where language and sound intermingle—extends the form, and reshapes our own imaginations.