TRANSMISSION ART ARCHIVE
Radio Net (part 1)
1977, 120:00 min.
Max Neuhaus
Max Neuhaus was classically trained as a percussionist; in the 1960s he experimented with forms of music and sound that the listener would discover in unexpected places. This included radio, and in 1966 Neuhaus created a piece on WBAI in New York called Public Supply. Created before the days of call-in radio, Public Supply invited people to phone in to several lines and make sounds live on air. Neuhaus did a live mix in the radio studio of these incoming calls. Neuhaus said, “It seems that what these works are really about is proposing to reinstate a kind of music which we have forgotten about and which is perhaps the original impulse for music...: not making a musical product to be listened to, but forming a dialogue, a dialogue without language, a sound dialogue.” In 1977, National Public Radio invited Max Neuhaus to do another experimental live broadcast, this time across the entire NPR network. 190 NPR affiliates across the US participated in the piece which was called Radio Net. Each station broadcast instructions for people to call in and whistle live on air. This time, rather than doing a live mix himself, Neuhaus had rigged up a complex automatic mixing system that created loops out of the incoming whistles, giving priority to the highest pitch sound at any given instant. Max Neuhaus’s Radio Net, in its entirety, is 2 hours long; The Wave Farm Radio Art Archive broadcast series includes part 1, which is about 70 minutes. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.