This week Howard Broomfield's "A Radio Programme About Radio" from 1974 is featured. The work was 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. Website: http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html. 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. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/2022, Andy Stuhl.

Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Jess Speer, and Andy Stuhl. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.