Evocations of the eerie: the acousmatic voice in Canadian radio drama

Abstract

ABSTRACT Radio is a medium that traffics first and foremost in disembodied voices. English Canadian radio drama has historically drawn upon the eeriness of the disembodied voice as an aesthetic object, and it has done so in an outsized fashion when compared with other national contexts. This trope of the disembodied or acousmatic voice draws upon a relationship to place defined by an experience of alienation and the conceits of settler colonialism. In radio, it expresses Canada’s unique relationship to technological mediation, given the central role of technology in major nation-building projects and the anxieties that stem from technologically-mediated economic and cultural imperialism from south of the border. The themes of excess, dislocation, and alienation associated with technological mediation and conveyed in the disembodied voice recur throughout nearly a century of CBC radio dramas. This paper attempts to make sense of this trope through Mark Fisher’s conception of “the eerie” as a distinct aesthetic form. It is a form that is shaped by the larger socio-cultural context within which it operates, but which also inheres with the potential to both reproduce and challenge those socio-cultural underpinnings.