I'm making a special effort this fall to record on the 60 meter shortwave broadcast band, home of low powered domestic broadcasters in tropical regions. This recording was made in Brooklyn, NY at 1002 UTC aka 6:02 am EDT during the brief dawn enhancement of reception. My receiving setup consists of the Winradio Excalibur SDR (software defined radio) and the Wellbrook ALA 1530+ loop.

Radio Tarma 4775 Khz Tarma, Peru (from sign-on to fadeout.)

If you tune around on a shortwave radio, you might stumble across a voice reciting an endless stream of numbers. Just numbers, all day, everyday. These so-called "numbers stations," say nothing about where they are transmitting from or who they are trying to reach, but they can be heard in Spanish, Thai, German, Russian, Chinese, and any number of other languages from around the world.
These mysterious shortwave transmissions caught the attention of producer David Goren when he was just a kid. His piece, Atencion! Seis Siete Tres Siete Cero: The Mystery of the Shortwave Numbers Stations, aired in 2000 as part of the series Lost and Found Sound.  In tuning into these weird little broadcasts, Goren joins a curious community that has been listening to numbers stations for decades, some suspecting that the stations are run by intelligence agencies sending encrypted messages to individual agents in the field.

99% Invisible-97- Numbers Stations

I’ve always viewed speech and language as forms of music.  There’s a certain lilt and intonation to speech that, often, makes it musical.  And there is nowhere that is more rich and diverse in this linguistic music than the Voice of America where, daily, you can hear all 43 languages being broadcast while roaming the hallways. 

This recording is an academic exercise I did for an independent study in multi-tack editing as part of my Ph.D. program at Capella University.  The beginning and ending are sound montages of some of the most musical voices I’ve heard at the VOA with the Intro coming from the famous VOA station I.D. sung a capella by Louis Armstrong on the Willis Conover show.  The ending is a multi-track variance on the standard “service cue,” which is played at the end of every VOA radio broadcast.  There is also some secret messages in Morse code, which, to me, is also musical in its own way. 

The middle is a piece that I had the opportunity to perform in college with the Phi Mu Alpha professional music fraternity chorus in concert at Ford Hall at Ithaca College under the baton of maestro Irwin Goldberg.  It is entitled the “Geographical Fugue.”

It was written in the 1920s by Ernst Toch in Berlin and uses a technique called “gesprech gesangen” or “singing speech.” Originally written for four-voice choir – soprano, alto, tenor and bass – it follows a strict fugal construction.  For this multi-track editing exercise, I recorded myself four times for each of the four vocal parts so there are “16 Rickys” singing or speaking these parts.

Sit back, pour a tall glass of bourbon – or, if you’re in a state where it’s legal, light up a joint – put on some headphones and enjoy the wackiness of my rendition of Ernst Toch’s “Geographical Fugue.” 


The "Geographical Fugue"

On of my favorite shortwave stations for music is All India Radio (AIR). Since their broadcasts originate on the other side of the planet (from my location), their signal bounces off the ionosphere many, many times before I ever hear it. I actually like the result of this; the static of space makes their already beautiful music sound even more textured, enhancing the distance of its source, and heightening the music’s sense of mystery and nostalgia. Hope you enjoy this song, clipped from a larger recording I posted here: 
http://swling.com/blog/2013/01/shortwave-radio-recordings-all-india-radio/

Listening to All India Radio on the shortwave

Soundtrack from my installation at Proteus Gowanus. http://www.proteusgowanus.org

Listening to All India Radio on the shortwave

Thomas Witherspoon

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