Episode 36, Introduction: "Looking Back, Basement Living Was Really Good."

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #36: FUN MADNESS with Control Voltage Radio Tuning Unintended uses of Radio Signals to make Insane Noises Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the show. The lead image here demonstrates that a radio can be a hat, but I'd like to dive even deeper on radio. Radio is more powerful than we give it credit. Its transformative possibilities as ubiquitous electromagnetic waves make it truly wonderful and ghostly. Did you know a common anxiety in the early century was picking up radio reception in your teeth, btw? But the most insane thing to consider about radio is you are constantly surrounded by hundreds of concurrent station broadcasts, in varying frequencies from around the world, blasting on your head simultaneously. In many ways, this signal bombardment is similar to reality. One concept of what happens with LSD is the filters that control which signals we see are turned off. That's one trick of hallucination: You see (or think) all the signals at once, making a distortion. This is also considered madness. So when we are "sane", our mind does the work of filtering what thoughts or moods to selectively see and feel. In radio, the receiver, or radio tuner, does that for the radio transmissions. Instead of hearing all the stations at once, it allows you to only hear one station at a time, on the dial number you've selected. This "single station" concept is awfully boring, though – especially when you consider any city's radio feed might have 15-20 stations playing at the same time on the FM dial. Why can't you hear all the stations at once! This is much more exciting, and I'll demonstrate a method to approximate such a joyful sound this week, using control voltage to play a radio tuner in a mad way where the the stations are notes on a keyboard. We'll use an array of control voltage sources (a Pot Action Recorder, Stepped Voltage CV generator, and a few CV sequencers) and an Arradio module. Prior to that, I remember my dad's wonderful Marantz 2200 series receiver, which he gifted my brother and me, partly, I feel, to not feel terrible about upgrading to something else for himself in the 1980s. (Just give the kids the old one!) I think the Marantz was better than the upgrade, though, and it gave me a lifelong addiction to radio dials and switches, as the Marantz had GREAT switches and dials. You can hear this memory in the lead track, "Basement Living Was Really Good". Finally, this week's episode concludes with "White Man's Blues", introducing you to Charlie's co-worker Duncan, who is a big Double Trouble fan. Want to delight the undelightable? Episode Packs of Spoken Word with Electronics are great holiday gifts, incidentally. They're marked down to $5 a piece through the New Year on Bandcamp: https://eptc.bandcamp.com/ That's cheaper than a Radio Hat! Thanks for supporting the show. Have a very good week, Ethan