Listening for the Authentic Voice
University of Windsor address - March 20, 2002
This address was delivered at the University of Windsor. The script below has been edited for this posting. Included are streaming audio clips of the audio elements included with the original lecture.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you as part of the Media for a Change lecture series. I am especially happy to be here, and in many ways this represents a kind of homecoming for me. It was here in the Communications Department of the University of Windsor that I first learned about communication theories that would guide my work. In the television and radio studios, I first learned how to work the equipment that would be the tools of my art and craft. And above all, it was here in the broader Windsor community that I learned that it was possible to build community with the sense of social justice as a guiding principle.

Those influences have informed the work I have done over these past twenty years. I have always believed in the power of media to effect social change, and in recent years I’ve made the conscious choice to work in community based media, mostly in radio.

My work has taken me to a lot of different places in this country, and now, down to the United States. I’ve explored radio from many different angles and have heard a lot of different voices over that time. I’ve also done a lot of thinking about whose voices we hear on the radio, whose voices count and whose voice just don’t seem to count as much.

Hence the title of this presentation “Listening for the Authentic Voice” really asks the question is: Where is it?

So let’s begin with the question “What is Radio”? Listen to The Radio Rolled Me by Chris Brookes (website) This clip is an excerpt from a larger piece by Chris Brookes, a producer from St. Johns, Newfoundland, called “The Radio Rolled Me”. Chris is one of this country’s best documentary producers and works freelance, primarily for the CBC. He also has an impressive list of international broadcast credits and awards.

Some of the things that I’ve noticed -- the entire style of radio has changed. Newscasts are shorter, and don’t appear as often when you scan across the dial. The sentence structure has changed. “There has been an accident on the 401. Five people were rushed to hospital" would now be “An accident on the 401, five people rushed to hospital”. News stories sound more like headlines than stories.

Today, you hear a lot less informal banter from deejays and a lot fewer deejays. In this era of media consolidation, you will often hear the same radio program across several time zones. People in small market stations have been replaced by computers. And a lot of deejays are living in the computer too - their job is to come in and pre-record their breaks one after another. The computer then positions them before and after the appropriate songs. This creates a couple of jobs for computer programmers, but you can forget calling the station to find out what was just played. There’s nobody home.

If you listen to the soundscape that I created in 1982 you'll notice that one kind of radio is missing - Community radio. There were a very small handful of community radio stations on the air in 1982, but we were still at the beginning of the wave. One of the stations that I discovered at that time was Vancouver Co-op Radio. This was the beginning of a change in how I heard the world.

At that point in my life, my goal was to become a CBC staff producer. I did end up working for the CBC for the greater part of 13 years, but it was those early ideals, learned at Co-op Radio, that proved to be a major influence on my life. It was there that I learned that radio could become a tool of community empowerment and development, and that radio could do more than just inform and entertain.

Vancouver Co-op Radio was formed in the late 1970's and was one of the first community radio stations in Canada. In the words of Hildegard Westerkamp, one of the early pioneers of community radio:

“Most of Vancouver Co-operative Radio’s founding members desired closer interaction between radio makers and listeners. We wanted to do something that no other radio station was doing at that time - to involve the community in the making of radio so that the radio sound would embody the voice of the community. Any listener could also be a radio maker, who might then become an increasingly active listener because of his or her immediate involvement with the station”.

That excerpt was from an essay called “The Soundscape on Radio” from a book called Radio Rethink, written in the early 1990’s as a follow up to a radio art conference of the same name.

We will be returning to Hildegard’s work later in the presentation. She is still based in Vancouver and is a major voice in soundscape studies and audio art nationally and internationally.

For the past ten years I have focused all of my radio energies on community radio. I’ve now worked at five community and campus radio stations - I started here at CJAM in the mid seventies, before it was on the air, then moved on to Vancouver Co-op Radio. I managed CFMU at McMaster University for five and a half years. When my husband Barry Rueger got a job managing CKCU at Carleton, I turned back to independent production.

Two years ago, Barry was offered an amazing job as station manager at WMMT, a community radio station in the coalfields of Central Appalachia. It was an opportunity that was just too good to pass up.

I live down there most of the year, doing my own radio programs and developing projects for WMMT.

First I’d like to tell you more about WMMT, the station where I am based now. WMMT provides a graphic illustration of how community radio can be used for social change.

To understand the role the station plays in the community, it helps to know a bit about the community, the natural environment and the people who live there. Katie Dollarhide’s family has lived in Letcher County for many generations.

And this is but one of many social challenges in our area.

Others are:

• systemic poverty - one in five households do not have telephones because they can’t afford them
• 60,000 households in central Appalachia don’t have indoor plumbing.
• a very small percentage of the county has health insurance – some figures suggest a number as high as 20% lack health coverage
• the population in Letcher County, where the station is located has declined 25% in the past ten years. Jobs are scarce, coal doesn’t provide many jobs.

That’s why news, current affairs and issue oriented programming is one of the main missions of the station. Examples of some of the programs we do at WMMT include:

• The Coal Report - a short summary of news reports related to coal industry, with a particular emphasis on environmental and labour issues. The kind of news that the coal companies aren’t sending out in press releases.
• Health Issues - the station is about to begin a new program aimed at people with diabetes, one of the major health issues of the region. The focus of the program is to create better informed and more empowered patients. Keeping in mind that most of the people living in our broadcast area do not have any form of health insurance, health issues take on an added urgency that they don’t have in most areas in Canada.
• Prison Issues - the station is a major source of information and entertainment for people in the prisons in our broadcast range. There are about 5,000 maximum security prisoners in our broadcast range, mostly from urban areas as far away as Connecticut and New Mexico. Prisoners send letters to programmers, programmers often discuss conditions within prisons. The Christmas show is a highlight of our season - the families of prisoners are invited to call in on our 1-800 number to say Merry Christmas to their loved ones in prison. Because of the high cost of phone calls, some of the people in prison have not heard the voice of their family members in several years.
• Cincinnati/Appalachia - in December, we did a project to teach listening skills to students in a community school in inner city Cincinnati. The students were mostly under the ages of 22, and didn’t fit in to regular schools. Some of them were young offenders, others were single mothers. All of them were dealing with a horrific level of violence in their own lives. We are developing an exchange program between youth at our station and some of the youth we worked with in Cincinnati to develop radio programming about youth and violence in both rural and urban areas.

As you can see, the work that we do at the station goes far beyond what most people think radio does. WMMT is first and foremost a tool that the community can use to become more empowered and improve the standard of living within the region.

That is a big job.

But it’s also about fun, music, drama, poetry, art. Even the pop based music shows are an important part of the programming mix. And we also do a lot of locally originated music programming. Rich Kirby says you don’t have to just focus on news programming to make a political impact. Cultural programming is also political in its own way.

I’m going to segue into another type of work that I do. A lot of my work in recent years has been about creating artspace on radio. But before I get into talking about art and radio, I want to talk about art and community. Why is art important to the process of community building?

There is a perception among people involved in activist work that information is the way to encourage people to act for change. And of course, I do support this idea. But I also believe in the power of art for social change.

To explain the role which the arts can play in the life of the community, here is a quote from the Laidlaw Foundation, an Ontario based foundation which has initiated a program called “Take Part! Initiatives in Cultural Democracy". Laidlaw is a private foundation based in Toronto which funds efforts in community building.

“21st century conditions of globalization call on us to look within for alternatives and ways to feel whole, needed and active in a troubled world, and community arts make space for this to happen.

Although community arts processes are often difficult and challenging, they have the ability to transform individuals and communities; they can provide a vibrant source of mobilization and revitalization by bringing people together to work creatively towards common goals across social differences and traditional socio-economic barriers. The creative collective process puts the “unity” back in community, and the energy born of the imaginative process uplifts, unifies, invigorates and harmonizes. But it also challenges people, requiring them to examine power relations and preconceived notions about people, places and issues. In particular, cultural animation makes visible the invisible in society, legitimizing and giving voice to lives and dreams through collective expression”.

There are artists all over the world working for social change through theatre, music, poetry and dance. Community radio has a solid tradition of fostering social change through journalism and public affairs, but there are few artists working in community radio in art production. I think this has to do with how we have internalized mainstream radio conventions - we have stopped thinking of radio as anything but pre-produced music and news.

Radio stations should be doing more art.

My work right now is about reclaiming the airwaves for artspace. My reason for getting involved in radio in the first place had little to do with wanting to do news, current affairs, sports or music. Right from the time I first spoke into a microphone at CJAM, I was mostly interested in drama, locally produced music and concert broadcasts, and things like poetry. I’ve done a lot of other types of radio work which I have enjoyed, but it is wonderful to be back at that place again, exploring the whole idea of radio as artspace.

I believe that our airwaves must return to the spirit of the “Golden Age of Radio”, when radio was more than canned music, abrasive ads and news bites. Radio stations were dynamic cultural centres where new forms of sonic expression were created daily.

One hundred years after the invention of the medium, Radio still has unrealized potential as a place where art forms such as electronic literature, soundscape compositions, creative documentary, and drama can flourish. In the early days of radio, individual stations produced their own local cultural products, particularly live music broadcasts and radio drama. That has now changed, and radio is now more like a juke box for canned music, always produced by someone in a big city far away. Radio has become the vehicle for music as a commodity. All other types of art – drama and storytelling in particular, have virtually disappeared.

Radio must once again take its place as cultural producer, not merely a distribution arm for commodified culture, but as a genuine expression of the voice of the people. Real people, not the ones who are taught to hide their own human voice as a precondition for working in corporatized media empires.

Earlier, I referred to the work of Hildegard Westerkamp. I’m going to be returning to her work with a couple of brief pieces that she has composed. But first, an invitation to imagine radio a little differently than we’ve been taught:

“Imagine radio that, instead of numbing us to sounds, strengthens our imagination and creativity; instead of manipulating us into faster work and more purchasing, it inspires us to invent; instead of overloading us with irrelevant information and fatiguing us, it refreshes our acoustic sensitivity; instead of moving us to ignore thoughts and surroundings, it stimulates listening.; instead of broadcasting the same things over and over again, it does not repeat; instead of silencing us, it encourages us to sing or to speak, to make radio ourselves; instead of merely broadcasting at us, we listen through it”.

That quote by Hildegard Westerkamp was also from “The Soundscape on Radio” in the book “Radio Rethink”. Hildegard is a listener and a creator whose work has inspired sound creators for over twenty years.

Remember the radio sound study I did at the beginning called ReRF? Years later it became Winter Recall.

New forms of cultural expression on the radio - need for radio stations to become cultural centres, not just jukeboxes with a bit of rip and read news.

There are many examples of what community stations can do that commercial stations and the CBC won’t. They are places where new forms of sound can be developed - turntablism, new forms of music, new approaches to documentary etc. We have the freedom in community radio - that’s why it’s important.

What I found was a group of people who were working towards the same goal as I was - to provide that space on the air where people can talk to each other, dialogue about the conditions of their lives in their communities. And I found that, no matter what part of the world we are in, community radio is all about the same thing

That’s why I do what I do. I am proud to work in a little pocket of society where people still believe it is possible to make a difference. There’s no fame in community radio. To embrace community radio means you have to acknowledge that it’s not your job to speak to the whole country. Community radio is all about being small, and local, and unknown outside your community.

On the other hand, there’s no greater feeling in the world than when somebody comes up to you in the grocery store to tell you they liked something they heard on your show. One time a total stranger walked up to me at a meeting and said “are you still feelin’ homesick, honey?”. I realized that I was showing just a little bit more of myself on the air than conventional broadcast training tells us we should. It was really disarming at first to realize that I was letting that much of myself come through.

That’s the challenge for me in my art based work too - the challenge of putting aside notions of “objectivity” and speaking from one’s own soul. Conventional media discourages such things.

Still, community radio has its challenges. The majority of community stations in the world have been on the air for less than 20 years. We are still young. We need to grow.

But I think we’re growing. Here in Canada alone, I have seen an increase in the number of community groups wanting to start stations. In the 1980's, it was still considered a “fringe” thing to do. I am surprised at the number of “mainstream” organizations that are considering starting their own radio station.

As we speak, the Chair of the Board of the Canadian Society for Independent Radio Production is doing a presentation at a conference of the Quebec Farmers Association where they are discussing how to get more stations started in rural Quebec to serve English speaking farmers.

And just a couple of days ago, I found a website by a group in Northern BC who plan to start their own community station. Their reasons are well defined:

“On November 26th, 2001, The Jim Pattison Group/CKPG closed CKMK, ending a twenty five year tradition of local broadcasting in the Mackenzie area. Although CKMK was operating in the black, the plan was to increase profitability by shedding expenses while retaining advertising revenue. But the closure was effected without consultation with local government, advertisers, employees or listeners. This ‘fait accompli’ created a deep sense of disappointment and anger in the community. That reaction soon gave way to excitement with the realization that Mackenzie had been handed a golden opportunity. An opportunity to create a radio station tailored to the needs of the community rather than the corporate designs of the Jim Pattison Group.”

I am hearing about more and more communities thinking about going this direction. That’s because small communities no longer have radio stations that focus on their communities. They have repeater transmitters for satellite-delivered programming that originates at head office in Toronto. Like the coal and timber companies do in Kentucky, these radio conglomerates a’re strip-mining communities - only in this case it’s for advertising revenues which are taken out of the community instead of coal and timber. The result is the same - resources leave and don’t come back. These stations aren’t providing jobs, they aren’t providing the kind of service the community used to have from their “local” station.

And while I’m here, I would also like to put in a plug for your own radio station. CJAM is like any other community and campus radio station. It struggles to get by. It is under-resourced. In the era of “big is better” media, it is easy to dismiss it as being unimportant.

And CJAM is not just a Windsor resource. I have talked to people on the other side of the river who can’t get on the air with anything like it. CJAM has a signal strength that is almost impossible to get in any American city. So as it stands, the most powerful campus/community radio station in Detroit is in Windsor. That raises a number of interesting possibilities.

CJAM is a very valuable resource. I'm counting on you to use it, support it, and strengthen it.

Remember the phrase “the airwaves are public property”? Community radio is still about radio as public property.

Claim your airwaves and remember - YOUR voice counts too. Your REAL voice - not the one that conventional broadcasting says you have to “develop”. You don’t have to be Tarzan Dan. We deserve our place on the airwaves too. Demand the right to be yourself. In this day and age, being authentic and true to your own voice is a profound political act. And it’s the only way to change the world.

I’ve talked a lot about Co-op Radio in Vancouver ? I’d like to leave you with something to listen to ?- and while you’re listening, do some thinking about what YOU think radio can be.

Clip #12
Co-op Radio NDP Submission
(play until I give signal to fade

E-mail: fenner@magma.ca

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