The birth of noise in modern China: Radio, amateur engineering, and the sonic network

Abstract

This article argues that noise was born in modern China with the advent of radio and radio broadcasting. On the one hand, the media specificity of radio required that any radio listener must be an acoustic engineer to some extent, dealing with ‘noise current’, ‘tunable hum’, and ‘interference’, among other audible yet undecipherable electromagnetic signals before tuning into the desired radio program. This novel experience of listening as engineering gave rise to a new conceptualization of noise not merely as unpleasant sounds, but in terms of modern information technology. On the other hand, the affordable radio sets and the public-oriented radio broadcasting together constituted an unprecedented sonic network, one that was able to transmit heterogenous sounds from all over the world back home and at the same time deprived of any individual’s agency in deciding what to listen to. Living in this sonic network, one’s body had to function as if it were a radio set, exposed to overwhelming information streams and trying to tune into the useful while filtering out the noise. Radio noise therefore is symptomatic of the most fundamental dilemma that China was facing in an era of global modernity, national crisis, and information explosion.