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.

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.

transmitter2ears is a live performance/installation with two parabolic speakers, binaural microphones, radio transmission and a synthesizer. Together they form an audio-feedback loop, open to the sounds of the environment. A performer/musician equipped with binaural microphones, is interacting with the audio-field of the highly directive speakers. In the performance, Lanzmaier and Zißler and their collaborators actively blur the lines between performer, listener, musician and landscape, turning the whole ecosystem of the site into an instrument. The sounds picked up by the binaural microphones provide an audio stream from the "perspective" of the performer which will be broadcasted for the radio audience on WGXC 90.7-FM and wavefarm.org/listen.

Andreas Zißler and Fabian Lanzmaier are transdisciplinary artists based in Vienna. Coming from different backgrounds (architecture, fine arts, and sound/music) they share an interest in sound and its relation to space. Recently, they have collaborated on different site specific installations, working with feedback systems, parabolic sound reflectors, and spatial audio.