“A Radio Programme about Radio,” 1974, by Howard Broomfield, is part 9 of the 10-part Soundscapes of Canada series produced by the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, directed by R. Murray Schafer.

Howard Broomfield was a member of the World Soundscape Project, an acoustic education and research group that composer R. Murray Schafer established at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. In 1974, Broomfield contributed to a series, directed by Schafer and broadcast through the CBC show Ideas, called Soundscapes of Canada. Across the ten parts of the series, World Soundscape Project members drew heavily on field recordings they had conducted around the country for programs that attuned listeners to different aspects of Canada’s sonic environments while reimagining the form and conventions of documentary broadcast. For the ninth program, Broomfield turned to radio itself as a facet of the acoustic ecologies the group studied. Using historical clips from 1930s radio dramas and interviews he conducted about people’s radio listening habits, among many other sources, Broomfield playfully traversed the mystery and mundanity of broadcast radio. The piece is at once an anthropological study and a critical intervention into radio as a major part of the mediated sound worlds people inhabit.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/2022, Andy Stuhl.

The Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive is an online resource and broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, which is syndicated to stations across the country through The Radio Art Hour. It aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM/Shortwave broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission. The archive is a product of Wave Farm's Radio Artist Fellowship.

Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and the Radio Art Fellowship program.