This Secret Charm of Numbers: The Clandestine Relationship between Shortwave Number Stations and Twentieth-Century Poetry

Abstract

Mystery exists only in precise things. Jean Cocteau The Muses count. Jack Spicer Turn your to the microwave bands and listen there. Christopher Dewdney 4.1.2008 Dead Voices on Air There is strange transmission currently broadcasting from 8,099 kHz of the shortwave band. A lifeless, mechanical voice emerges from the static and begins droning out list of seemingly random numbers in Spanish. The rhythmic regularity and invariance in her pitch give the voice an eerie, almost otherworldly, quality. She reads string of five numbers, pauses, then another five, pauses, and then continues reading in this fashion for forty some minutes. Then, ending with final, the female voice dissolves into crackling waves of static. But later, she will re-emerge on different part of the band. She has been broadcasting in this manner, up to eighteen hours day, for forty-odd years. No one knows who she is, where she transmits from, nor what her numbers are for (to listen to sample of one of these transmissions, click on Atencion, CD track 44 (1)). 9.12.1921 The Birth of Shortwave Radio In the shadow of today's sophisticated internet technologies, shortwave might have quaint air of obsolescence But despite the ubiquity of cell phones, Wi-Pi, et al., the medium is active A single sweep through the dial reveals wide variety of transmissions: fire-and-brimstone evangelical preachers, tepid calypso music, vast spectrum of foreign languages, and less readily identifiable audio events. Idiosyncratic as this variety may be, there is stranger side to the shortwave band. Shortwave is an utterly bizarre world; its wavelengths are too short to be properly monitored and controlled by any government agency, and its low fidelity makes it of little use to commercial broadcasters. Hence, it proliferates with pirates, politically clandestine and propagandist broadcasters, and numerous other unsavoury users. What is more, the propagation of shortwave is notoriously unstable. Under some conditions, the waves are unable to travel any lengths. But when they travel far, they do so by bouncing off Earth's ionosphere and refracting down to receiver, often traversing thousands of miles. This makes the transmitter virtually impossible to locate by normal methods of triangulation. Adding to shortwave radio's mystique is its nocturnal clarity; due to solar interference, listening at night often leads to the clearest reception. In particular, cloudless winter nights give the most optimal conditions. Given these circumstances, perhaps it is not surprising that so many unidentifiable aural ghosts glide through these airwaves. This spectral substrate of was well-known by its inventors even prior to the advent of shortwave Guglielmo Marconi, for instance, believed that his early antennas were pulling in the voices of ghosts some where from outer space. Nikola Tesla similarly thought that his early receiver was picking up communications from distant alien life forms on Mars and Venus. Indeed, the itself was born of the nineteenth century's fixation with spiritualism; both Marconi and Thomas Edison pursued the idea that radio, with some modifications, could hear the dead speak (Banks 99). Similarly, artists have imagined tuning into ghostly frequencies on the dial; Velimir Khlebnikov, referring to radio-wave propagation as a spider web of lines in the air, felt was great sorcerer and ensorceler of the world (Khlebnikov 32), and ET. Marinetti and Pino Masnata's La Radia manifesto called for reception and amplification of vibrations emitted by living beings ... or dead spirits (Marinetti 269). These and other supernatural descriptions attest to something like economy inherent within radio. As Marshall McLuhan later wrote, is sort of tribal magic (McLuhan 324), device capable of mystically entrancing its listeners far and wide and propagating voices deep into the vacuum of space If, following McLuhan, radio is the extension of the central nervous system, even more than telephone or telegraph (330), then the nerves it extends may be viewed as schizophrenic wires that reach distances beyond reason. …