The Earth is constantly bombarded by solar radiation. When some wavelengths of this radiation encounter the thinnest, outermost reaches of the atmosphere, they knock electrons off of otherwise perfectly fine atoms, creating charged particles (ions). Because the atmosphere is so thin, the ions are fairly widely distributed and hang around for a while as charged particles before recombining with a particle of the opposite charge. So you get a soup of ions all around the Earth, very high up. It’s called the ionosphere.
Now, radio waves, like all electromagnetic radiation, propagate in a straight line, not around corners or curves. That generally means you can’t receive a radio signal from any transmitter that’s not in a line-of-sight relationships with your receiver. (Many radio waves can go through some kinds of stuff, like the walls of buildings, but you still need a straight line.) When you consider that we sit on the surface of a globe, you’ll see a problem: What do you do if you want to listen in to radio transmissions that are over the horizon of the Earth’s curving surface from where you’re located?
Here’s where the ionosphere comes to the rescue: It has an interesting feature that radio waves of certain frequencies have a hard tiome passing through the soup of charged particles; instead, they bounce off it, as if off a mirror. So some radio signals can travel out to the ionosphere and bounce back down to Earth (and sometimes bounce back again to the ionosphere and again back down to Earth), meaning they can travel over the horizon. This is how you can get AM radio stations from several states away, or shortwave transmissions from around the globe.
My dad got really into amateur radio when I was 11 or 12 and got me and my brother to get our licenses as well. We ended up with several really cool, old radios in our basement and a big, ugly antenna in the back yard. My license only let me communicate on the long-distance bands via Morse code, which I barely knew, so most of the time I’d just turn the dial and listen. Because of the way the ionosphere works, it’s best to listen at night if you want to hear stations that are far away (and the best time of night and best season of the year are different depending on where in the world you want to hear from). I spent hours at night wearing headphones and slowly turning a tuning dial, scanning for shortwave broadcasts. The most romantic ones, back in those Cold War days, were of course from behind the Iron Curtain: Radio Moscow’s English service had a clear signal, and you could find transmissions in all sorts of Slavic-sounding languages.
I also came across oddities: rapid beeps and clicks, long tones, disinterested-sounding readings of texts in foreign languages. I suspect some of what I listened to are what hobbyists call number stations: broadcasts of lists of numbers, strings of words, tones, even repetitive musical phrases that have no obvious purpose or audience. Many of them, it is said, are coded broadcasts meant for spies in the field.
Fast-forward many years. Jon Sykes, an electronic-music artist and monome user, decided to put together a compilation album of monome-based tracks that use samples from number stations, and he invited me to contribute. How could I turn him down? The album was released just last week on the Barcelona-based netlabel Public Spaces Lab and is available for free download here.
My track, “Calling All,” is an attempt to recreate a bit of the mystery I felt listening to those staticky voices in the dark. I recorded the track in two stages. The first stage uses several samples of different voices reading numbers in Russian. I assigned the samples to various rows of my monome using my favorite program, mlr, and created four channels of audio output, each to a speaker sitting at a different point of the compass around me. I set up a stereo-mic’d digital field recorder in the middle of the speaker array and played the voices for a bit, aiming for overlapping sections of clarity and confusion, like a crowded shortwave band.
For the second stage I used three samples of sine-wave scales or tone sequences, also recorded from number stations. I again assigned the samples to rows in mlr, this time manipulating the pitch by changing playback speed. I recorded an improvisation in two tracks using a few effects; the tonal improvisation was meant to convey something about the stillness of the night in which a spy might wait to hear a message from home and the glowing dials and vacuum tubes that mediate the communication. I mixed the two improvisations to a final form that pleased my ear, and there you go.
Another album of number station samples is The Conet Project.
Yes, maybe I should have mentioned that. The samples in my track, and probably most of the other tracks on the compilation, came from the Conet Project under a Free Music License. (Wilco fans may remember the lawsuit by Irdial Records against Wilco for using a Conet sample, a voice saying “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” without permission.)
Dave! Cool. Downloading the album right now and looking forward to it. I love it when people share their creative work here. Makes me want to make something, too. Then I sit for about 15 minutes, and the feeling passes.
I love how your track, Dave, is the longest on the compilation… The monome is still so confusing and fascinating to me–and the mystery only deepened when I actually got to see you play it.
Dave, your track is perfect for this spooky stormy day we’re having–I’ve played it twice and sunk into its haunt. Love it! and yes, love it even more after having the privilege of seeing you drive that monome.
Timo: I suffer from the same fleeting inspiration. We really should catch it and harness it. We’re in some artistically daunting company around here, though.
Thanks, guys. I am a bit embarrassed that my track is the longest on the album — I consciously tried to keep it short. I also recommend the other tracks on the compilation. They’re not all my thing, but some of them are really great.
Swells and Tim: Form a band! I’ll bet at least one of you owns a computer with a built-in mic.
OMG! You guys should totally form a band!! Seriously! Except, I’d be totally jealous. But I still think you should do it.
Dave, I love these recordings. It is interesting how haunting they all are. They do sound very 80′s cold war. It’s interesting how speech without music can create that effect. I especially love all the different textures that come out.
I also find your recording technique very interesting, the way you set up the four speakers in an array and then re-recorded the output. Having never seen a Monome in person, I’m curious about the inputs and outputs – are there several? Analog and digital?
J-man: The monome isn’t really an instrument; it’s just a controller that plugs into a computer. At an abstract level, when you press a button, it tells the computer you pressed that button; when the computer tells a light on the monome to light up, it lights up. What the button presses do, or what the lights indicate, depends entirely on the software you’re running. You can use a monome to control a computer animation, or a set of stage lights, or a robot, but most people use it to control musical software.
I see my monome as part of an instrument; the other parts of my instrument are my laptop, several pieces of software, an external audio interface, and a microphone or two. For this piece, since I was using prerecorded samples, the microphone wasn’t necessary. The audio interface has up to six channels out, so getting four channels out was just a matter of setting up the software in a slightly tricky way. I could just as well have sent a digital signal out to another computer or a digital recording device, assuming I had the right interface.
That probably doesn’t clear it up entirely, but maybe it’s a start.
We used to catch western radio-stations the same way and record music. We’d make tapes and circulate them among friends. They were full of static and hard to hear, but so awesome. Loved your track. Loved the creative process behind it. Loved the post, it gave me goose bumps.
“…an attempt to recreate a bit of the mystery I felt listening to those staticky voices in the dark.”
A lot of art I like, and the writing I want to do and never do, is this: an attempt to fish these ephemera out of the past. Those moments in the dark were just an un-pick-apartable state/experience to you back then, though maybe one day you thought “years from now, this will matter to me when I remember it” (I did, with certain things…winter evenings in Dallas…) But you’ll never get them back in that form. So you take some of the constituent parts, the global stuff from the cold war, some of your own Daveness, matured but surely still partly the same…It’s worth doing, and worth hearing. I’m gonna listen to it again, having read this.
[felt silly posting under my habitual nom de blogge, so I dropped it.]