Introduction to “Comparative Radios”

The introduction to “Comparative Radios” discusses the critical debates in new media studies as they pertain to radio studies in particular. These include the meaning of “mediation” and the ways in which radio, as transmission apparatus and broadcast medium, remediates—repackages, obsolesces, reinvents—audio aesthetics and sound production, including the aesthetics of the voice, recorded music, live performance, and other forms of older and other media such as theater, cinema, and the vast array of nature. With an ear to the question of radio's particularity and specificity (“What difference does radio make?”), and an acknowledgment of the emergence of the “acousmatic” as a key term within radio studies, the introduction outlines a tension within radio criticism between, on the one hand, a theoretical-aesthetic approach interested in the threshold and limits of radio as radical experiment in sound, and, on the other hand, a contextual-historical approach interested in radio as it takes place in specific times and places.