Radio is sky. It sings through the mouths of birds on their journeys who navigate by infrasound and listen to the aurora as the sound of the lightning.

Radio is terrestrial. It is in the rocks, in the earthquake prone and mountainous zones of Te Wai Pounamu the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand where the small birds called pīwauwau, or Rock wrens, speak a language that is almost too high for human hearing.

Migratory birds use magnetoreception, detecting the Earth’s magnetic field, as one of their tools to navigate on their long-distance journeys. With a frequency range of hearing considerably lower than human listening, certain species also orient through low-frequency infrasound, along coastline and oceanic landmarks that may serve as orientation beacons. ion and bird considers the links between this still indeterminate set of techniques within the embodied senses of birds, known since the nineteenth century and once mythicized as the “sixth sense,” and the sonic expression of bird songs and calls. In tuning in to less audible sky narratives and correspondences, it considers collaboration and communication with non-human species, intelligence beyond human perception, multispecies media histories, and radio as translation between worlds. As the VLF radio receiver converts the aurora's radio waves into a frequency audible to the human listener, and the crystal radio set harnesses tiny crystals of the minerals pyrite and galena within the simplest type of functional radio receiver, so may the navigational abilities of birds, emerging in part from magnetite-based receptors in beaks, or quantum sensing in avian eyes and ears, be understood to make audible a vibratory, embodied strata of forces that normally remains inaudible.

Using an expanded palette of electroacoustic and radiophonic instrumentation including bird-tracking telemetry systems used with migratory shorebirds on the Atlantic Flyway, and with an ear to more-than-human material histories of radio transmission, reception, and locality, ion and bird will tune into an aesthetic correspondence between bird vocalization and space weather, considering how the otherworldly chirps, crackles, and squeaks created by geomagnetic storms in the Earth’s ionosphere resemble the contact calls of migratory birds, and the phenomena referred to as the electromagnetic or auroral dawn chorus, sounds remarkably like birdsong. Mcintyre will be joined in-residence by her long-time partner and collaborator, film-maker and photographer Campbell Walker who will document the project in preparation for a standalone film.

Sally Ann McIntyre is an artist, writer, and expanded radio-maker from Aotearoa New Zealand/lutruwita Tasmania living in Naarm Melbourne. Her research-led practice has paid increasing attention to sites where ecological and cultural narratives (recorded/transmitted signals/empiricism/documentary/zoologic museum collections) meet unheard, unremembered, untranscribed, or untranslated aspects of geographies (bad reception/pseudoscience/silence/extinction/electromagnetism/noise). Often working critically with the sonic representation of environments, the one-way collecting drives of the practice of field recording, conceived as a form of technologized “voluntary memory,” meet a contrasting, liminal “involuntary memory” often gleaned from the practice of small-scale radio transmission as a form of two-way, site-receptive “fieldwork” and an associated focus on revealing the chaotic nature of the inaudible energy spectrum. McIntyre teaches at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and Deakin University in Media and Communications, Literary Studies and the Creative Arts.

Ion and bird: a test transmission for the Atlantic Flyway

Radio is sky. It sings through the mouths of birds on their journeys who navigate by infrasound and listen to the aurora as the sound of the lightning.

Radio is terrestrial. It is in the rocks, in the earthquake prone and mountainous zones of Te Wai Pounamu the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand where the small birds called pīwauwau, or Rock wrens, speak a language that is almost too high for human hearing.

Migratory birds use magnetoreception, detecting the Earth’s magnetic field, as one of their tools to navigate on their long-distance journeys. With a frequency range of hearing considerably lower than human listening, certain species also orient through low-frequency infrasound, along coastline and oceanic landmarks that may serve as orientation beacons. ion and bird considers the links between this still indeterminate set of techniques within the embodied senses of birds, known since the nineteenth century and once mythicized as the “sixth sense,” and the sonic expression of bird songs and calls. In tuning in to less audible sky narratives and correspondences, it considers collaboration and communication with non-human species, intelligence beyond human perception, multispecies media histories, and radio as translation between worlds. As the VLF radio receiver converts the aurora's radio waves into a frequency audible to the human listener, and the crystal radio set harnesses tiny crystals of the minerals pyrite and galena within the simplest type of functional radio receiver, so may the navigational abilities of birds, emerging in part from magnetite-based receptors in beaks, or quantum sensing in avian eyes and ears, be understood to make audible a vibratory, embodied strata of forces that normally remains inaudible.

Using an expanded palette of electroacoustic and radiophonic instrumentation including bird-tracking telemetry systems used with migratory shorebirds on the Atlantic Flyway, and with an ear to more-than-human material histories of radio transmission, reception, and locality, ion and bird will tune into an aesthetic correspondence between bird vocalization and space weather, considering how the otherworldly chirps, crackles, and squeaks created by geomagnetic storms in the Earth’s ionosphere resemble the contact calls of migratory birds, and the phenomena referred to as the electromagnetic or auroral dawn chorus, sounds remarkably like birdsong. Mcintyre will be joined in-residence by her long-time partner and collaborator, film-maker and photographer Campbell Walker who will document the project in preparation for a standalone film.

As Wave Farm's 2024 Radio Art Research Fellow, Austin T. Richey will contribute five new artists and works to the Broadcast Radio Art Archive. Richey's research will focus on artists who utilize new interfaces to develop an emergent soundscape or hide themselves within the sonic textures. The cohort will include Zimbabwean radio and sculpture artist Masimba Hwati, whose performances connect Shona ritual and contemporary diasporic African life, and Martin Freeman, a New York-based instrument maker who builds and leads workshops around solar-powered synthesis. Richey's interest in diasporic frequencies and environmental modulation developed from his own performance practice. Each Fellowship commences with a 10-day on-site residency. In addition to using this time on-site to inform his research, Richey will sound out Wave Farm through broadcast recordings of his own solar instruments, placed throughout the campus. These sounders will be complemented by a set of instruments—specifically built for his time at Wave Farm—that are only audible through EMF detectors.

Austin T. Richey is a musician, multimedia artist, and ethnomusicologist based in Detroit, Michigan, where he explores the resonances between diasporic African musical, dance, and visual arts and Detroit-specific genres such as Motown and techno. Richey’s current sonic practice reclaims public spaces through community-oriented DIY synthesizer-making workshops and site-specific, historically and environmentally informed sound installation. Through these workshops, Richey connects young sound makers to their environment via deep listening practices while teaching skills like electrical engineering, encouraging them to experiment with self-designed sonic expressions.

Richey has published original research in African Music, Opioid Aesthetics, and Sonic Signatures, has contributed research to the Public Broadcasting Service digital series Sound Field, and is currently turning his dissertation on experimental community music-making and griots in Detroit into a manuscript. His research is supported by the Frederick Douglass Institute, the Society for American Music, Humanities New York, the Knight Foundation, and the Presser Foundation. Collaborations include work with Sō Percussion, Bora Yoon, and extensive live sound installation and performance with Maritza Garibay as the duo Dominant Hand. He earned a Ph.D. from Eastman School of Music in 2023, is an instructor at Western Michigan University's Gilmore School of Music, and is the current Storyteller for Detroit Opera.

Voices_in_Transmission: _Immersive_Radio_Phantom_Words aims to expand on Diana Deutsch's psychoacoustic phenomenon "Phantom Words" incorporating spatiality, multi-channeling, diverse languages, voices, and syllables into the exploration. The primary goal is to create a comprehensive sound bank using recordings exclusively from local radio stations to investigate the radio's role in auditory perception and neurological responses in the creation of phantom words. The project will explore how radio samples, including background music and sound effects, contribute to the perception of phantom words. Additionally, the project will enhance spatiality by incorporating several radio receivers and examining the electro-acoustic chain's impact on perception. Raventós will be joined in-residence with her Acoustic Heritage Collective (https://acousticheritagecollective.org/) collaborator, Emilio Marx who will contribute as a sound producer and technician. Trained in acoustic engineering, with an interest in acoustic heritage, Marx frequently uses his theoretical background to implement technology that enhances spatial translations.

Anyone can contribute to the project by visiting wavefarm.org/phantom.

Ginebra Raventós is a poet and sound artist. Her field of research crosses the voice, word, collective unconscious, and psychoacoustics through sound, space, and the moving image. She investigates the possibilities of expanding the field of action of poetry beyond the word in the text. In her pieces, Raventós displays her poetic universe, where voice, action, sound, image, space, and text are intermingled in an indispensable whole. She also explores the idea of repetition and trance, that is, the alteration of consciousness understood as the displacement to a new mental space and perceptual world.

Voices_in_Transmission: _Immersive_Radio_Phantom_Words

Voices_in_Transmission: _Immersive_Radio_Phantom_Words aims to expand on Diana Deutsch's psychoacoustic phenomenon "Phantom Words" incorporating spatiality, multi-channeling, diverse languages, voices, and syllables into the exploration. The primary goal is to create a comprehensive sound bank using recordings exclusively from local radio stations to investigate the radio's role in auditory perception and neurological responses in the creation of phantom words. The project will explore how radio samples, including background music and sound effects, contribute to the perception of phantom words. Additionally, the project will enhance spatiality by incorporating several radio receivers and examining the electro-acoustic chain's impact on perception. Raventós will be joined in-residence with her Acoustic Heritage Collective collaborator, Emilio Marx who will contribute as a sound producer and technician. Trained in acoustic engineering, with an interest in acoustic heritage, Marx frequently uses his theoretical background to implement technology that enhances spatial translations.

Anyone can contribute to the project by visiting wavefarm.org/phantom.

The Arts Writing Fellow is a critic and/or curator who will produce an essay about selected Wave Farm artists-in-residence work, including artist interviews. In this newly established Fellowship opportunity, Preziosi will consider the work of past residents whose projects implicate questions of climate change and human responsibility through intimate studies of biodiverse habitats, weather forecasting, insects, and machines. Preziosi's essay will explore possibilities of transmission as translation–between image and sound, between human and non-human language—in order to create bridges between ourselves and our precarious environment.

Caroline Preziosi is a writer, artist, and educator in Baltimore, MD and Callicoon, NY. She works in language, photography, sound, and installation. She has a BA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and serves as a board member with ENGN Civic Creative Center, a 501(c)3 educational non-profit in NY.

TONE FIELD HORIZON is a performance-installation for the Wave Farm Art Park, as well as a simultaneous radio transmission mixed live from the various points that make up the field. The project uses the Art Park as a spatial instrument. Neumann will install five remote stations, each consisting of a loudspeaker and a microphone. He will use his software instrument Room Tone Generator [RTG] to generate finely tuned tonalities that blend into the nearfield environment. During a culminating public program, on-site audiences will experience the tones in the environment (RTG within an ecosystem) expanding spatiality. Listening gets a tonal anchor for focusing attention as the visitors move through the different acoustic arenas. As visitors walk around the Wave Farm Art Park they experience the shifting acoustic horizon in relation to how close or far they are from the various RTG speakers. The microphones will pick up the altered environment. For off-site radio audiences, all five feeds will be mixed together and output for stereo broadcast over WGXC 90.7-FM and wavefarm.org/listen. This tele-audience will experience a very different acoustic horizon, an all-at-once conglomerate from the different locations.

Daniel Neumann is a sound artist, organizer, and audio engineer. He holds a media art masters degree from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig where he studied electronic music composition. Neumann’s main area of focus is how sound interacts with space and how space and spatial perception can be shaped by sound. He works in hybrid installation-performance formats and understands sound as an intersubjective field enabled by audio procedures. Neumann’s work has been presented internationally at venues including: Zona Maco CDMX, TEA Tenerife, Sinne Helsinki, Pinacoteca Bellas Artes Manizales Colombia, Espacios Resonantes Santiago de Chile, Loop Barcelona; Sculpture Center, etc. He is represented by Fridman Gallery, New York. Curatorially Neumann runs CT::SWaM, an ongoing series presenting spatial sound works, now under the umbrella of the organization New Ear, for which Neumann serves as a founding Board Member. As an audio engineer, he has worked for Diamanda Galás, BlankForms, Time:Spans, MoMA PS1, Meredith Monk, Kevin Beasley, Phill Niblock, Ellen Reid, Missy Mazzoli, David Guetta, ACME, Alarm Will Sound, and more.