Selection . . . from The Sound and the Story

by Thomas Looker

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(Posted January 1996: The first chapter of the book.)


Open

National Public Radio at Rest

Studio 7 -- 2:00 AM

In the beginning, silence. And darkness, though not the primordial kind. Small colored lights glimmer through a velvet blackness. The lights illuminate only themselves. Like stars around a new moon, their muted glow suggests the presence of other shapes: the bulk of tape machines, speakers, and audio consoles; the graceful outlines of hanging microphones; the mottled texture of soft, enveloping walls. A large pane of glass looms through the darkness, cutting an opening in one of the walls. You stare through the dark window into another layer of blackness, ambiguously defined by a smaller collection of colored lights. As you look from the sleeping control room into the sleeping studio beyond, the surface of the glass window acts like a prism, echoing the pin-points of light in each room -- refracting and distorting. Three or four red lights seem to be drifting, disconnected, in space; two rows of amber lights line up at impossible angles to each other. It's difficult to make sense of the patterns, to tell which lights are where -- but the disorientation is peaceful, a starlit phantasmagoria. Not even the small digital timing clock, which seems to float in the middle of the darkest part of the studio, disturbs the reverie. Its static display adds to the cave-like mood: the crimson digits glow silently, perpetually..."00:00:00."

The darkness of the control room and the studio is given palpable shape by the cloying softness of the sound-proofed walls, whose presence you can feel on your face, against the back of your neck... The sensation is almost like swimming a few feet below water -- or perhaps crouching at the back of a dark closet. When the studios are filled with people, you barely notice the deadness of the sounds around you. But when you stand here in silence, in darkness, your whole body responds to the absorptive atmosphere, the unnatural lack of echo. You feel enveloped, protected, isolated -- but also nourished. For in the warmly glowing electronic equipment around you reposes extraordinary potential. In a few hours, these dull, mechanical shapes will be called upon to record, mold, and transmit a startling amount of information (sounds and words) to a surprisingly large audience (measured in the millions). These "radio programs" will inform, enlighten and entertain. The most ambitious of them will attempt to spread what the poets refer to as "truth and beauty," be it in the form of journalism, musical performance, or, (on rare occasions, these days) spoken-word drama.

In the dark electronic womb of NPR are gathered the creativities of sound and speech: this potential flows as much within every piece of circuitry as through the elaborate physical shell which is built up around the machinery. This fecund environment presents radio producers and reporters with an extraordinary wealth of possibility. In these sleeping studios lives the stuff from which are made the dreams of sound magicians, aural reporters, auditory adventurers, oral story tellers...

The control room and the studio are equally immersed in darkness when the overhead lights are turned off and the doors are locked. But the two rooms are not equally quiet. The studio rests in a silence which is absolute -- dizzying. Not even the air-conditioner makes a sound. The stillness in the control room is less profound. Solid-state electronic equipment contains few mechanical parts and so though the amplifiers, preamplifiers, and various sound-shaping equipment remain on throughout the night, they do not generate any sound that humans can hear. (It's worth remembering that this equipment is not absolutely "quiet," however. The electrons and other quantum phenomena whizzing through their circuits give off many other emissions aside from audible sound waves -- that limited part of the electro-magnetic spectrum which our simplistic ears can "hear." These other waves would register on appropriate tuned oscilloscopes...sometimes as smooth waves, sometimes as jagged spikes which can be called static -- or "noise." So one creature's noise is another creature's silence.)

But the main work-horse machines in the control room -- the tape recorders -- are not so discrete, so voiceless, as the fully transistorized equipment. Magnetic sound devices marry the brains of electronic circuitry with the muscle and sinew of motors, wheels, and drive pulleys so that miles and miles of recording tape can be pulled past the appropriate electronic sensors and feed the preamps and amps the electronic information which makes them have something to do and to say. If the sophisticated electronic circuitry in the control room looks always forward to the smoothly-expansive future of super-conducting transistors and turbo-charged computer chips, the tape machines look backwards towards the clunky mechanical wonders of the nineteenth century. To the extent that radio stations are still dependent on tape and tape recorders, they employ an industrial technology and retain some of the atmosphere of a mechanized factory. And just as some factories run twenty-four hours shifts, so does all the recording and transmitting equipment at NPR remain constantly on, even when the human technicians have left for home. Here is an irony of radio work, more draconian than anything imagined by Karl Marx: electronic equipment of all kinds suffers so much stress and strain, so much trauma, when electricity first runs through it and "wakes it up," that engineers have decided it's best to leave the machines on all the time. Even the motors in professional tape recorders are built with this principal in mind: they last longer if they never stop turning -- if they never are allowed to sleep. So it is that in an otherwise deserted radio studio, a grinding, low-level hum shapes the stillness...adds an aural texture to the silence.

Your ears can become accustomed to layers of quiet, just as your eyes can adjust to levels blackness, and if you listen closely to the darkened control room, you can distinguish subtle differences in hums. It turns out that different kinds of tape recorder whir with different voices. The newest, biggest, machines, the large Studer reel-to-reel tape recorders -- the machines that record and play full hour and half-hour programs -- purr almost noiselessly. Their well-oiled, well-heeled motors and transports demonstrate their advanced technology, and perhaps also their European pedigree (Studers are made in Germany). The smaller cassette machines -- from Japan -- contain proportionately smaller and quieter motors. You have to put your ear right up to them to hear their subtle whine. The noisiest tape players are, technologically-speaking, the most regressive equipment in the room. The American-made tape cartridge machines -- cousins to the eight-track-stereo cartridges which enjoyed a brief popularity in automobiles thirty years ago -- produce a distinct, unending rumble, which sounds like a subterranean heart-beat. "Tape carts" perform a limited, yet vital function in radio production these days. Small plastic boxes, four inches wide, six inches long, and about an inch thick, tape cartridges contain a continuous loop of recording tape, from five seconds to five minutes long. The genius of the tape cart is that you can instantly go to a short piece of music or a brief report or announcement, without having to waste time searching for the start of the piece: the cart is always "cued up" at the beginning of its run of tape. Yet the sound fidelity of the tape cart is not very good -- the technology has changed very little over the decades -- and the newest electronic technology, digitally recorded tape cassettes, is already beginning to replace the analogue cartridge machines. DAT tape is as easy to cue up as the venerable cart -- and its sound quality equals, and even surpasses, that of analogue reel to reel machines, like the Studers.

As the tape cartridges groan into the silence of the darkened control room, you may well imagine that they are complaining against their imminent obsolesce... mourning the end of the mechanical age and protesting the juggernaut of the deathly silent digital technology. For it must be said that the ancient rumble of the clunky, old carts does add to the powerful atmosphere of stillness and expectation in the darkened control room. It gives voice to the silence, reminding visitors to look to the shadows around them....for "Here there be dragons."


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Last revision: February 18th, 1997