Tuning in to the Acoustic Commons: radio, waterways, and collective listening

Today at 14:30 (CET) we transmit Radio Otherwise's transmission/lecture/performance "Tuning in to the Acoustic Commons: radio, waterways, and collective listening" live from the Conference Time to Listen: Multispecies Creativity in Music and Sound at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

In contrast to field recording, live radio and audio streams resist closure: they unfold in real time, remaining bound to the temporalities and material conditions of the places from which they emanate. Listening becomes less about collecting or owning and more about sustaining attention. Collective listening is a premise of radio—even if collectivity is dispersed—rather than the individualised listening of on-demand media. This collectivity also emanates out of an understanding that the sonic environment is shared and collectively produced, inhabited, and perceived by human and more-than-human actors: what is also known as the acoustic commons. If creativity emerges from relation rather than authorship, then live audio streams—porous, durational, unrepeatable—may be one of its more honest forms.

Radio Otherwise will set up multiple microphones, hydrophones, antennas and receivers on the Spree near Plänterwald in Berlin, and transmit these signals live to the Academy of the Arts. Our contribution will blend listening to these inputs and infrastructures with reflections on previous durational transmission works that brought together parallels between waterways and electromagnetic transmission as infrastructures of flow—in terms of more-than-human agency, human access to and infiltration of these systems, as well as leakages and disturbances.

Radio Otherwise (Monaí de Paula Antunes, Kate Donovan, Niko de Paula Lefort) is an ongoing artistic research project that explores the plurality of experiences in radio-making through ecological thinking.