I just read an excellent article on RadioSurvivor – “Has Classical Music become a weapon against College Radio” By Matthew Lasar.

To boil it down: You know about the selling off of College Radio stations that’s been going on, yes? WRVU, KUSF, and KTRU just to name 3 prominent ones. It isn’t an entirely new battle, but it’s become more active as of late. As Lasar writes, sometimes these stations are getting sold into NPR affiliation or Classical Music stations. The argument for “real culture” and the scarcity of classical music on the airwaves is an easy one to make.

Lasar notes a WRVU alum bemoaning the impending “burbling” of classical music, as well as the (at least in my opinion) snooty response of a Jacob E. Goodman, of the New York Composers Circle, citing the cultural benefits of  stringed instruments that are played with bows instead of picks as being a great thing for the unwashed masses.

Tongue in cheek aside, as many responders noted, there was some good discussion in the comments. (RadioSurvivor appears to have just niche enough an audience that it doesn’t attract the usual mess that comment sections do). As many have said, classical music radio is in a rut as much as rock radio – it’s bland, watered down, and pandering. And it misses the fact that real American-made music is missing just as much – where are your local Jazz and Blues stations? Grouping college radio in with your local rock stations is just as offensive as claiming all classical music is boring, by the way. That’s what college radio is made to fight!

Reading this reminded me of…

This redesign is well worth it. I decided it was time for a change after it was pointed out to me that white text on black backgrounds is hard to read.  I had never really noticed before! (And this, my friends, is why I’m only an amateur designer).

Other things have come along with this redesign as well! Three new pieces are in my portfolio area! King of the World and The Yellow Wallpaper are new. Inconstant Moon is from a little over a year ago, but it was buried in my old site, and really, it’s one of my favorite works that I’ve done.

Other new items will be making their way here over the next few weeks as well! Stay tuned.

Good News Everyone!

I have some work that will be featured on Dave Armstrong’s Sounds Like Radio on WSIU. Dave’s show is a mix of the avant-garde, sound art, and an exploration of what radio can be. Pretty cool stuff. Anyhow, his next show – Sunday (the 18th) 3-5 AM, then again at 10-Midnight – is going to feature work from our Audio Arts Studio course. You’re going to hear some really cool things!

Off the top of my head: Computer-Created Music (From a pattern-analyzing AI), A Radio Drama of a classic Thai ghost story, A mashup of board games, and two sound art pieces looking at the evolution of sound from natural to mechanical.

There’s much more, of course, but I’m having trouble remembering at the moment. My own piece is a post-biological warfare radio drama told in three sections, each with a different narrative form.

So yes – please tune in to Dave’s show! 3-5AM or 10-Midnight CST on Sunday. It’s on WSIU here in Carbondale, at 91.9FM. Or, you can tune in to the streaming broadcast at WSIU.org – here’s an easy link.

Check out Dave’s blog at Startling Moniker. Or his other show on WDBX, It’s Too Damn Early.

In the next week or so, I’ll be updating my portfolio as well. Much better new material. Plus a site redesign, and some other new stuff on the way too.

>Note: Some of this content is recycled from posts that Eric Hirschi, current GM of WIDB, and I wrote for WIDB.net during our trip. You can find those posts here, here, and here.


What a weekend, I have to say. I knew my trip to Orlando was going to be essential for my research on College Radio management structures, and it was a really interesting preview of the stations that are going to be a part of my survey. I also met some really great people!

Probably the coolest thing is meeting the faces of people who you know through documents. I got to meet Charles Bailey, who did some interesting writing on what station managers felt would work best for college radio. I also met Jennifer Waits, who wrote a Master’s research paper on the Ethnography of her college radio station… she also now writes for Radio Survivor and maintains the blog Spinning Indie, which is a mishmash of indie/college radio/music history.  I also met several people who work at stations that I’ve heard about in the news lately… like the notable KUSF, KTRU, and WRVU, who all had their signals sold out from under them in the last year or so. Everybody’s working so hard, and I met a lot of admirable people. The CBI board are some really great people.

We also had a fairly interesting presentation by Skip Pizzi of the National Association of Broadcasters, about going between streaming and traditional radio. Streaming broadcasting is rapidly growing, but still is nowhere near the listenership levels and revenue of traditional radio. It’s partly due to the cost of listeners… it can cost…

>The SIUC AES Chapter hosted a discussion with Rupert Neve this past Thursday. I finally have some time to write about it now.

For his presentation, Mr. Neve discussed what generally has shaped his career and goals in the pro audio industry. For him, it seems quality has always been job one – for anybody who has worked with his gear, this is evident.

He told an interesting story which I will try to reproduce as accurately as I can.

Some time ago, one of his clients called in and said that one of his consoles just sounded terrible. Rupert went in to take a look. To analyze it, the client played a record through two signal chains. In one, the record went straight to the speaker. In the other, the player went through Neve’s console, and then to the speaker. At first, Neve didn’t hear the problem – to him, the signal chain with his console sounded better. But after repeated listening, he agreed with the client. There was something off about the sound in the console, but it was hard to quantify. Looking at the spectrum output, Neve determined that it had a spike of levels at around 50kHz. For anybody familiar with the human hearing range – this is about 30kHz higher pitch than anybody can truly hear.

It turned out that the channel in the console they were testing had a transformer that had been improperly terminated. Comparing it to other channels, they found that only a few had this problem. Rupert fixed the terminations on the Transformer, and the client immediately was happy, insisting that it sounded much better.

It was years later that Neve heard about some experiments conducted by Tsutomu Oohashi, who conducted a study on the…