Radio Archive Research Articles

Radio, Exile, and Feminisms: Spanish Republican Women Writers in Buenos Aires

Abstract: In this article I explore how radio served as an important platform in the intellectual and feminist trajectories of Spanish Republican women writers living in exile in Argentina after its vast expansion as a form of mass media in the 1930s. Radio took off around the country at a particular moment for feminisms, when women were asserting their social and political rights and becoming more active in the public sphere. This moment coincided with the arrival of intellectuals exiled following the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and their incorporation into the cultural market. Through a study of writers María Teresa León’s (1903–1988) and María Martínez Sierra’s (1874–1974) participation in cultural activities on Radio El Mundo in 1942–1943 and Radio Nacional in 1959, respectively, I examine their relationship with the medium and how contact with this new communication technology led them to transform the kinds of cultural products they created in order to develop their feminist ideas through radio broadcasts. I argue that although this radio archive has received scant critical attention, recuperating and analyzing it allows us to complicate our view of the relationship that exiled women had with their host culture and to have a broader understanding of the Republican exile.

Radio Tehran and the 19 August 1953 Coup: A New Perspective

“By the time we had Radio Teheran we were in.” As in other coups d’état of the pre-Internet era, the national radio was an important element in the developments of August 1953 in Iran. According to Donald Wilber, “Radio Tehran was a most important target, for its capture not only sealed the success at the capital, but was effective in bringing the provincial cities quickly into line with the new government.” The capture of the radio headquarters in Tehran and the address made by General Fazlullah Zahedi from its microphones marked a turning point in the second, successful overthrow initiative. Yet the broadcasting of Radio Tehran on that and preceding days has received little attention in scholarly accounts of the coup. This is primarily due to the paucity of source material available. Studies published in Iran on the history of radio do not appear to have benefited from access to radio archives. Mervyn Roberts has made use of only one of two accessible repositories of Iranian radio content of the time, namely the American Foreign Broadcast Information Services (FBIS), to provide an insightful account of the period surrounding the August coup. Ali Rahnema provides an account of military maneuvers to capture the radio installations on 19 August and supplies a partially accurate list of the speakers who took turns proclaiming the downfall of Mosaddeq. He does not provide insight into the content of the radio transmissions nor their precise timing. Donald Wilber's famous internal CIA history of the coup broadly mentions salient moments in the 19 August broadcasts but presents inaccurate times for at least some of these. Another CIA internal study authored by Scott Koch makes extensive use of the agency's own monitoring of Radio Tehran but is available only in heavily redacted form.

Activating Displaced Radio Archives: The German ‘Loot Collection’ (Kořistní Fond) At Czech Radio

This paper examines the obstacles to studying and using displaced radio archives, taking as a case study a collection of historic recordings from Nazi Germany that is held at the Czech Radio archive in Prague. This so-called ‘Loot Collection’ (Kořistní fond) occupies an awkward position between established categories and is confronted simultaneously by the challenges common to historic sound archives, and those specific to collections which have been displaced from their point of origin. The paper shares some early analysis of the history and content of this collection, and argues for a transnational approach to ‘activate’ other overlooked archival collections whose history and relevance spreads across contemporary national borders.

Owens Valley Radio Observatory monitoring of LS I +61°303 completes three cycles of the super-orbital modulation

Context. The high-mass X-ray binary LS I +61°303 is composed of a Be-type star and a compact object in an eccentric orbit. The emission from this source is variable and periodic across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to very high-energy γ rays. The orbital period has been determined as P1 ≈ 26.5 d, and the source also features a super-orbital period with a value of Plong ≈ 4.6 years. Long-term monitoring of the binary by the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) at 15 GHz has now completed 13.8 years, which corresponds to three full cycles of the super-orbital period. This is exactly one long-term cycle more than in the previous publication about OVRO observations of this source. Aims. Our aim is to investigate the presence and the stability of periodic signals in the radio data and to test if they are in agreement with previous results. This will contribute to the understanding of the physical processes behind the non-thermal emission from this source. Methods. We performed a timing analysis of the OVRO radio light curve and made use of the generalized Lomb-Scargle periodogram. We also combined the OVRO data with the full archive of previous radio observations and computed the discrete autocorrelation function. Results. The most powerful features in the periodogram of the OVRO data are two peaks at P1 = 26.49 ± 0.05 d and P2 = 26.93 ± 0.05 d, which are well separated from each other and clearly stand out above the very low noise level. The previously detected long-term period is still present in these new radio data, and our measurement is Plong = 1698 ± 196 d. Dividing the OVRO data into three segments of equal length showed that the two periods, P1 and P2, are present in the periodogram of each of the consecutive long-term cycles. Our analysis of the full radio archive resulted in the detection of the same three periods, and the autocorrelation function showed a regular pattern, proving the continuity of the decades-spanning stability of the super-orbital modulation. In addition, we report a possible systematic modulation of the radio flux density with a timescale of approximately 40 years that has so far remained unnoticed. Conclusions. The physical model of a relativistic jet whose mass loading is modulated with the orbital period P1 and is precessing with the slightly larger period P2, giving rise to a beating with period Plong, had previously been able to reproduce the radio and gigaelectron volt emission from this source. The ongoing presence and the stability of the periodic signals imply that this model is still the most plausible explanation for the physical processes at work in this source.

Suitcase of Soundscapes: The London Transcription Service and the Packaging of Wartime Sounds for the BBC’s Global Radio Audience

The wartime work of the BBC is widely remembered, but the focus on the live broadcasting of news across Britain and occupied Europe which characterises most previous studies overlooks the extensive production of transcription recordings for both allied and neutral countries during the conflict. Transcription programmes, along with other neglected fields such as library music, have left more robust archival traces than the more celebrated and ‘ephemeral’ live programming, thereby challenging the continued centrality of ‘liveness’ to scholarly understandings of radio as a medium. This article looks at the programmes produced by the BBC’s London Transcription Service (LTS) through the case study of an unstudied collection of wartime discs which are preserved at the Czech Radio Archive in Prague. These programmes, produced by international teams for a truly global audience, offer further insights into the wartime ‘projection of Britain’ and show how the specificities of transcription were used to ensure audiences received an impression of Britain and the Allied cause that was carefully tailored to them.

Audio on Paper: The Merits and Pitfalls of the Dutch Digital Media Archive for Studying Transnational Entanglements during the Second World War

This paper traces the transnational entanglements in the Dutch digital media archive, with a focus on the propaganda battle between pro-Nazi and pro-Allied Dutch media during the Second World War. Reflecting on newspaper and radio source materials in the CLARIAH Media Suite, it points out significant differences in the availability of these two source collections. It argues that these imbalances can be explained by the historical context in which these sources were created as well as by archival policies after 1945. The main problem lies in the digitized radio archive which contains only a relatively small amount of audio and leaves out the enormous amount of documents, such as transcripts and monitoring reports. With our article, we ask for more attention for this form of ‘audio on paper’, which has previously been overlooked by scholars and archivists. In the conclusion we argue for the digitization of these source materials and inclusion in the Media Suite as a first step towards redrawing the borders of media archives, enabling a new research agenda aimed at studying transnational entanglements in war time propaganda.

A long-period radio transient active for three decades.

Several long-period radio transients have recently been discovered, with strongly polarized coherent radio pulses appearing on timescales between tens to thousands of seconds1,2. In some cases, the radio pulses have been interpreted as coming from rotating neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, known as magnetars; the origin of other, occasionally periodic and less-well-sampled radio transients is still debated3. Coherent periodic radio emission is usually explained by rotating dipolar magnetic fields and pair-production mechanisms, but such models do not easily predict radio emission from such slowly rotating neutron stars and maintain it for extended times. On the other hand, highly magnetic isolated white dwarfs would be expected to have long spin periodicities, but periodic coherent radio emission has not yet been directly detected from these sources. Here we report observations of a long-period (21 min) radio transient, which we have labelled GPM J1839-10. The pulses vary in brightness by two orders of magnitude, last between 30 and 300 s and have quasiperiodic substructure. The observations prompted a search of radio archives and we found that the source has been repeating since at least 1988. The archival data enabled constraint of the period derivative to <3.6 × 10-13 s s-1, which is at the very limit of any classical theoretical model that predicts dipolar radio emission from an isolated neutron star.

Review: Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley, by Monica De La Torre

Review: <i>Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley</i>, by Monica De La Torre

Collecting Silences

This article proposes a methodological approach to the analysis of large-scale radio archives. By collecting and measuring silences in broadcasting, the analysis explores stylistic differences within the Swedish media monopoly in the 1980s. This period marks the last decade of the Swedish public service monopoly and offers rigorous data on the development of mass media without deregulated economic competition. In 1993 Sweden became one of the last European countries to allow commercial radio, nevertheless, during the decade prior, competition was introduced from within the monopoly. At the time, Swedish radio featured several separate channels. This analysis focuses on the longstanding flagship channel P1, and its main competition, P3, which was considered a more youth-oriented alternative. Prior research has stressed the independent and different character of these two channels, subscribing to a depiction of a harmonically diversified media system. By analyzing the very audio data preserved from the broadcasting, it is possible to explore such stylistic divergences, as well as similarities, on a quantitative level. What unique features can be detected by studying the very signal, and are there homogenous tendencies beyond these differences? In order to approach this question, I propose a simple method: collecting silences. By means of basic signal processing, the amount of silence in broadcasting can be extracted and comparatively studied. Once data on the pauses and gaps in the broadcasting has been extracted, both the total amount and the number of occurrences can be analyzed. Moreover, the method can be applied both to the overall structure and on separate sections within the broadcasting, to achieve a more granular understanding. In doing this, it is possible to achieve new knowledge on the style and pace of broadcasting, and how these matters changed throughout the decade. The aim is both to render new insights into Swedish media history and to suggest new ways for digital humanities to integrate the vast potential of audio analysis.

The Traces of a Media War: Archives of Dutch Broadcasts from London during the Second World War

The project ‘<em>Mediaoorlog</em>’ (media war) pioneers a digital humanities approach to analyse propaganda discourses in Dutch-language media during the Second World War. The core database at our disposal is the CLARIAH Media Suite, which brings together relevant collections of digitised sources, including the audio archive of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. This contribution reflects on our first efforts to study Radio Oranje, the daily broadcast of the Dutch government-in-exile from London to the occupied Netherlands. It is argued that the current online radio archive from the Second World War has its limits and that it therefore is necessary to employ a hybrid methodology, drawing on material from various collections, both digital audio fragments and paper transcripts. The following pages will provide an analysis of how these two source materials relate to each other by showing how they came into being and how they were transferred from Great Britain to the Netherlands. The first part of this contribution contains a historic overview of Radio Oranje and the trajectory of its archival records. The second part of this paper explores how these sources have been used in the late twentieth century to shape Dutch public memory of wartime radio broadcasting from London.

The faces of the guitar in Poland up to 1981 in the context of the Polish Radio Archive records

The Polish Radio’s long-lasting broadcasting monopoly brought about the technological and later historical as well as political relegation of the guitar, in particular classical guitar, to a musical niche. The aim of the present study of a collection of recordings and programming documents stored at the Polish Radio Archive was to reveal the non-linear nature of the history of the popularisation of guitar music in Poland

Sounds like a broken record: preservation and access of audio-visual records at the South African broadcasting corporation radio

PurposeAudio-visual records produced by public broadcasters play a role in preserving the history, culture and language of a country. The records are used by broadcasters to repeat and support programmes on air. The formats that carry these records such as tapes and compact discs are fragile and have a short life span. This is compounded by evolving technologies and results in obsolete playback equipment, which can result in records not being accessible. This study aims to explore the preservation and access of audio-visual records at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) radio in Limpopo regional offices.Design/methodology/approachQualitative data were collected through interviews from purposively selected participants in three radio stations of the SABC in the Limpopo province which are Munghana Lonene FM, Phalaphala FM and Thobela FM. The interview data were augmented through participant observation.FindingsThe findings revealed that the SABC radio archive was preserving audio-visual records in obsolete formats such as long plays and cassettes, which also lacked playback equipment. These formats were not properly arranged and were kept in a storage area that was not monitored for decaying and security. It was further established that the radio stations were using IONA technology for retrieval of and access to records while the news division within the radio stations were relying on Electronic News Production System. As audio-visual materials were not catalogued, it proved difficult for users to access these records.Practical implicationsThis study adds value to the existing theoretical and conceptual issues that form the ongoing discourse on the preservation of and access to audio-visual records which are often neglected in the developing countries. The study also laid the groundwork for further investigation of the audio-visual records at broadcasting corporations. This is prompted by the findings which established that valuable information has been lost and continues to be lost due to poor management of audio-visual records. Therefore, a further study on migration of content from analogue to digital for the purpose of continuous preservation is recommended.Originality/valueThe study triangulated data collection tools including interviews and participant observation. The context was on the national broadcaster and the focus was on the preservation of and access to audio-visual records for the radio.

Using Radio Archives for Low-Resource Speech Recognition: Towards an Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Illiterate Users

For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In many countries, illiterate people tend to speak only low-resource languages, for which the datasets necessary for speech technology development are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of unsupervised speech representation learning on noisy radio broadcasting archives, which are abundant even in low-resource languages. We make three core contributions. First, we release two datasets to the research community. The first, West African Radio Corpus, contains 142 hours of audio in more than 10 languages with a labeled validation subset. The second, West African Virtual Assistant Speech Recognition Corpus, consists of 10K labeled audio clips in four languages. Next, we share West African wav2vec, a speech encoder trained on the noisy radio corpus, and compare it with the baseline Facebook speech encoder trained on six times more data of higher quality. We show that West African wav2vec performs similarly to the baseline on a multilingual speech recognition task, and significantly outperforms the baseline on a West African language identification task. Finally, we share the first-ever speech recognition models for Maninka, Pular and Susu, languages spoken by a combined 10 million people in over seven countries, including six where the majority of the adult population is illiterate. Our contributions offer a path forward for ethical AI research to serve the needs of those most disadvantaged by the digital divide.

Sound recordings from radio archives: the restoration of music in digits

A holistic historical and informational analysis was conducted in the scientific context of the synergy of two systems – sound recording and radio broadcasting. Methodological support of the study was based on the use of general scientific and special methods. Taking into account the experience of «BBC Radio 1» in creating a unique collection of sound recordings and areas of use of music collections as objects of archival storage, the features of recording music sessions in recording studios of radio stations are revealed. The main methods of restoration, restoration and digitization of stock music phonograms of radio broadcasting subjects are revealed. Find out which software products perform digitization tasks. The author concludes that the basis for the protection and storage of music collections of radio archives is the organization of a system of backup and duplication of data.

Can You Spare 5 Minutes? Cold War Women’s Radio on RIAS Berlin

Throughout the 1950s, the American propaganda radio station RIAS Berlin transformed women’s radio into an anti-communist medium designed to enlist German housewives into the Cold War. Based in West Berlin, RIAS—Radio in the American Sector—broadcast a full array of shows deep inside East Germany as part of the U.S. psychological war against communism. One of its key target audiences was German homemakers. Drawing upon scripts held in the German Radio Archives in Potsdam, Germany, this article analyzes the program Can You Spare 5 Minutes? (Haben Sie 5 Minuten Zeit?). It explores how RIAS inscribed the international contest between democracy and communism onto the domestic lives of women. The show built a sense of solidarity by treating typical “female” topics such as cosmetics, childcare, and recipes. In this way it forged a bond between its listeners that provided an opening for political messaging. Programs contrasted access to food, marriage rights, and educational policy in the rival Germanies to demonstrate the benefits of democracy and the need to resist the East German state. Women’s radio on RIAS, far from offering mere fluff, provided its female audience a political education.

The EXOD search for faint transients in XMM-Newton observations: Method and discovery of four extragalactic Type I X-ray bursters

Context. The observations carried out with XMM-Newton have produced a very extensive X-ray source catalogue in which the standard pipeline determines the variability of sufficiently bright sources through χ2 and fractional variability tests. Faint sources, however, are not automatically checked for variability, and this means that faint, short timescale transients are overlooked. From dedicated X-ray searches, as well as optical and radio archive searches, we know that some such dim sources can still be identified with high confidence. Aims. Our goal is to find new faint, fast transients in XMM-Newton EPIC-pn observations. To that end we created the EPIC-pn XMM-Newton outburst detector (EXOD) algorithm, which we run on the EPIC-pn full-frame data available in the 3XMM-DR8 catalogue. Methods. In EXOD, we computed the variability of the whole field of view by first binning in time the counts detected in each pixel of the detector. We next computed the difference between the median and maximal number of counts in each time bin and pixel to detect variability. We applied EXOD to 5751 observations in the full frame mode and compared the variability of the detected sources to the standard χ2 and Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) variability tests. Results. The algorithm is able to detect periodic and aperiodic variability, with both short and long flares. Of the sources detected by EXOD, 60−95% are also shown to be variable by the standard χ2 and KS tests. EXOD computes the variability over the entire field of view faster than the light curve generation takes for all the individual sources. We detect a total of 2961 X-ray variable sources. After removing the spurious detections, we obtain a net number of 2536 variable sources. Of these we investigate the nature of 35 sources with no previously confirmed classification. Amongst the new sources, we find stellar flares and AGNs, in addition to four extragalactic type I X-ray bursters that double the known neutron-star population in M 31. Conclusions. This algorithm is a powerful tool for the prompt detection of interesting variable sources in XMM-Newton observations. EXOD also detects fast transients that other variability tests would classify as non-variable due to their short duration and low number of counts. This is of increasing importance for the multi-messenger detection of transient sources. Finally, EXOD allows us to identify the nature of compact objects through their variability and to detect rare compact objects. We demonstrate this through the discovery of four extragalactic neutron-star low-mass X-ray binaries, doubling the number of known neutron stars in M 31.

The Studs Terkel Radio Archive: A Journey to Enhanced Usability for Audio

The Studs Terkel Radio Archive (STRA) currently provides digital access to approximately 2,000 of the 5,600 programs produced by Chicago radio personality, Studs Terkel, which were broadcast over station WFMT from 1952 to1997. These include interviews with hundreds of noteworthy historical figures and cover a wide range of local and national issues from racial equality to women’s rights. As part of its efforts to develop a digital platform that fosters deeper user engagement with these recordings, STRA has been using experimental speech-to-text software to create transcripts of the audio, which the archive uses not only for the enhancement of search functions, but also to support an interactive remix tool that allows users to edit, combine, and share radio interviews.

Perspectiva histórica y visión de futuro de los archivos de la radio de servicio público en México

El artículo ofrece la revisión histórica y perspectiva de futuro de los archivos de la radio pública en México resultado de investigación cualitativa basada en estudios de caso y el análisis de documentación de emisoras de servicio público. Se establece la tipología de radio pública y se identifican algunos de los más destacados archivos de la radio de servicio público con el propósito de presentar importantes colecciones radiofónicas con valor documental. Además, se da cuenta de iniciativas de preservación que se han emprendido en emisoras de radio de servicio público. Con ello, se ofrece el panorama del estado de preservación de las colecciones radiofónicas de la radio de servicio público en México y la situación de vulnerabilidad de este patrimonio.

Optical Transfer Technologies for Radio Transcription Discs

The bulk of recorded radio content prior to the introduction of magnetic tape in the late 1940s was made on lacquer transcription discs. These discs have proven highly unstable and are considered a top preservation priority in radio archives. While preservation reformatting via mechanical playback is ideal, when it comes to damaged or deteriorating discs, the risk of losing content and the amount of labor needed to perform one-to-one transfers is high. As an alternative, several optical scanning technologies have been developed. This article offers a comparative study of four existing optical transfer systems for discs: IRENE, Saphir, VisualAudio, and Endpoint Audio.

Systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia: activities of theater and radio station during the Soviet era

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia during the Soviet era in Bayan-Ölgiy Province, focusing on the music collection and preservation activities led by a theater and radio station. Bayan-Ölgiy is located far from Ulaanbaatar; adjacent to Kazakhstan, Xinjiang (China), and Russia. Using three–years participation observation, this study identified three activities in promoting the systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia: importing musical knowledge and technology from the Soviet Kazakh Republic (1950–1960s); establishing a radio station and audio archive following the Sino-Soviet split (1960s–1980s); collections of Kazakh music in Mongolia (1960s–1980s). These activities were driving forces for Kazakhs to claim their identity in the post-socialist period in Mongolia. Diener found that Kazakh culture in Mongolia was preserved thanks to the geographic isolation of Bayan-Ölgiy. However, this study clearly identifies international relations and Bayan-Ölgiy’s strategic location as drivers of systematization of Kazakh music in Mongolia.