ARCHIVE

This week "The Radio Art Hour" features the work of Nicolas Collins, born March 26, 1954 in New York City, a composer of mostly electronic music and former student of Alvin Lucier. He received a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University. Tune in for his "The Spark Heard 'Round the World" from the New American Radio archives (at wavefarm.org), and also for a 2014 interview with Collins about his "Pea Soup to Go" app. "The Spark Heard 'Round the World" is a sonic portrait of the world as revealed through electromagnetic phenomena. It is shaped out of the tremendous buzz, hum, and squawk of the international communications systems: commercial FM and AM, short-wave and long-wave transmissions, HAM and CB radio, public service bands, Morse code, telex and other coded signals. Later hear about "Pea Soup To Go," a free streaming audio web application that generates an ever-changing domestic sound art installation on any computer. Premiered in 1974, "Pea Soup" creates a self-stabilizing feedback network of microphones and speakers that tunes itself to the architectural acoustics of the space and responds to events—instrumental performances, ambient sounds, human movement, even air currents—with swooping flights of sound.