Lightning Birds (Jacob Smith)

May 11, 2021 | 00:38:22

 

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.

[Feedback Noises]

Jacob Smith: The crests of waves in the sea of human knowledge will roll across the entire country into each local radio station.

The metallic throat of radio beams rays of song to its many metallic singers.

Metal sings.

[Techno Beats]

The crests of waves in the sea of human knowledge…

 [Techno Beats Cont.]

[1:13]

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom power, a show about sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood.

This is probably the final, proper episode of season three, as I, and most of my collaborators on this podcast are academics, we tend to release these episodes during the academic year and take a bit of a break during the summer.

But don’t worry, this feed will not run dry. I’ll keep posting once a month, probably running some reruns of early episodes in the grand tradition of summer television in the U S.

But I may also have one or two pleasant surprises for those of you who have been listening to us from the beginning and shout out to you folks, by the way. Thank you.

And speaking of pleasant surprises, I recently received an email from the hardest working man in audio format scholarship, Professor Jacob Smith, Director of The Masters in Sound Arts and Industry Program at Northwestern University and author of, uh, frankly, I’m losing count. I think it’s six books.

Jake is a cultural historian focused on media and sound, and he never fails to come at his subject matter from an oblique and completely original angle.

His first three books, I would say, focused on the relationship between the media technologies that developed over the course of the 20th century (Phonograph, radio, film, TV), and the kinds of performance styles that we have come to expect from our performers.

So, for example, his 2008 book Vocal Tracks, tackles questions such as how radio changed acting and why fake laugh tracks developed on television and why we feel so weird about canned laughter.

But in more recent years, Jacob Smith’s work changed in a couple of ways.

Thematically, he took a hard turn towards environmental criticism. His 2015 book, Eco Sonic Media, lays out an agenda for studying the negative environmental effects of media culture, while also telling a strange alternate history of green sound technologies, hand cranked gramophones with eco-friendly shellac records, and needles sourced from cacti instead of diamonds.

His next book maintained this eco critical perspective while revolutionizing the format of the scholarly book. 2019’s ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene, was a 10-part audiobook that mined golden age radio shows and sound art to explore the dawn of the Anthropocene era in which humans emerged as the primary force affecting earth systems.

[4:10]

In episode 12 of this podcast, we played an excerpt of that book and we also interviewed Jake about the process of crafting a book length, scholarly argument in sound by sampling sounds from other eras.

Jacob: So, I’m listening to lots and lots of golden age radio, partly inspired by my colleague Neovera’s work, partly inspired by the sense that it’s a time that’s coinciding with the birth of the anthropecy.

But at the same time, I’m listening to all this wonderful work by contemporary sound artists working in the area of field recording, using digital tools to go out into the world, allowing us to listen to the natural world in a really dramatic new way.

And I found myself wanting to create a mashup of those two things.

[Nature Sounds]

So, I found myself re-imagining the argument in all kinds of ways in the process of doing it in sound, and I also found that the emotional element of the argument would come out in all kinds of different ways.

You know, it starts to become much more of a, a musical experience, and for me, at least, that meant a more emotional kind of experience.

So, it was, it just really changed the process of writing for me.

Mack: I highly recommend checking that out. If you haven’t heard it, I’ll drop a link in the show notes.

And that’s where the aforementioned surprise email comes in, because Jacob Smith has just let us know that he has dropped another eco critical audiobook.

This one is called Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves.

Once again, it’s an audio only book that uses expert production to craft a wildly original argument, this time about the relations between radio and bird migration.

This time Jake tells a new story about radio, describes important scientific discoveries about bird migration through interviews with key researchers, and continues exploring his singular mode of eco criticism, combining text-based scholarship with sound art, music, and audio storytelling.

I listened to the first chapter and it really knocked me out. So, I want to share it with you making Jacob Smith, our first ever repeat guest.

[Robotic Transitional Music]

So, today we play the entire first episode of Jacob’s Smith’s new audio book, it’s available in its entirety free of charge, and we’ll provide the link in the show notes and on our website at phantompod.org.

After you hear this first chapter, I think a lot of you will want to hear the rest, but even if you don’t, this introduction is a great standalone experience that I think you’ll really enjoy.

[7:18]

[Sound of the Sea, Seagulls Squawking]

Jacob Smith: Lightning Birds

[Crack of Thunder]

An aero-ecology of the airwaves.

[Radio Pinging/Seagulls Squawking]

People have often thought about radio in relation to the sky. Early newspaper accounts of radio had headlines like “Messages in the Air” and “Out of the Clouds.”

We talk about radio existing in the airwaves and commercial images, like the logo for RKO Pictures depicts radio as a halo of lightning bolts.

With its tall transmission towers and messages carried by waves in the atmosphere, radio is what John Durham Peters’ calls a “sky media.” Other examples of sky media are flags, beacons, spotlights, and fireworks.

[Sound of Fireworks]

So, we’re used to thinking about radio existing in the sky, but we don’t usually acknowledge that humans share that space with other creatures, most notably with birds.

For birds, the sky is a habitat, which biologists call the “aerosphere.”

For migratory birds, especially, the sky is a landscape full of meaning and significance as they orient to the sun and stars, gauge the winds, and monitor the changing seasons.

As human technologies have moved into the sky, they’ve become entangled in this aerospheric habitat. Lightening Birds explores the contact zone between radio technologies and the aerosphere.

[Radio Pinging/Seagulls Squawking]

Over the next five episodes, we’ll be riding the cross winds of bird migration and radio history, to undertake an aero-ecology of the airwaves.

[Seagulls Squawking/Thunder Cracking]

[9:45]

[Old Timey Music]

Lightening Birds is going to tell a new story about radio.

This story isn’t so much about radio as a platform for entertainment or politics. Instead, it’s about how radio technology has generated knowledge about bird migration.

When I say “radio,” I mean, an assemblage of devices associated with radio broadcasting. Things like radio stations, towers, microphones, radio waves, recording devices, and tube or transistor amplifiers.

In each of the episodes of Lightening Birds, I’ll focus on a different component part of that radio assemblage and show how it also played a role in the domain of ornithology.

I’m a media historian, so one of my goals is to tell a new kind of radio history, but I also have an environmental motivation, which is maybe best summed up by a question that was recently asked by the anthropologist Anna Singh and her collaborators.

They asked

[Spacey Voice]: How can we repurpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of progress to make visible the other worlds it has ignored or damaged?

Radio is one of the quintessential tools of modernity and in Lightening Birds, I want to repurpose its history so that another world becomes audible.

The world of the avian aerosphere.

[Birds Chirping]

Birds migratory flights around the globe have been called the most spectacular, long distance migration of any organism on the planet. Those flights connect what might seem to be disconnected and distant ecosystems.

[Lavinia de Sousa-Mendez Singing in Another Language]

A beautiful expression of that idea can be found in a song written to celebrate world migratory bird day.

[Lavinia de Sousa-Mendez Singing in Another Language]

A young woman named Lavinia de Sousa-Mendez, from Guinea-Bissau in west Africa, sings:

“I am a migratory bird. I make the link between people and ecosystems. I am a part of life’s history. I am the beauty of landscapes. I am not only a bird, but also a vision of the world that is yours.”

[Lavinia de Sousa-Mendez Singing Fades Out]

The concept of sky media helps me to move across the domains of ornithology and media history.

One function of media is to orient people in time and space and migratory birds have sometimes served as calendars or clocks.

For example, the nature writer, John Burroughs described how his sense of the seasons was shaped by the arrival of particular migrating birds.

March was announced by the Song Sparrow.

[Song Sparrow Chirping]

April by the Brown Thrasher.

[Brown Thrasher Chirping]

And the Barn Swallow

[Barn Swallow Chirping]

And May by the Kingbird

[Kingbird Chirping]

The Wood thrush

 

[Woodt hrush Chirping]

And the Oriole.

[Oriole Chirping]

The bird sounds we’re hearing come from the remarkable website, Xeno-canto.

[Birds Chipring]

We’ll be hearing many Xeno-canto recordings in Lightning Birds, and more information can be found about them at the Lightning Birds website, hosted by the University of Michigan Press.

[Birds Chirping]

There’s one other way that Lightning Birds will enact a kind of environmental media studies and that’s by examining the materiality of radio technology.

I’m interested in the materials that have made radio possible and one material in particular: aluminum, which we’ll see has provided much of the scaffolding for the aerospheric contact zone we’ll be exploring.

[Birds Chirping]

There’s an urgency to understanding and appreciating the avian aerosphere, given that by one estimate, 13% of all bird species are threatened with extinction.

That fact is troubling enough, but the stakes get even higher when we know that birds have been called sensitive environmental indicators, that herald changes in ecosystem health.

Birds become media again, this time they’re barometers gauging the health of the planet.

[15:01]

My title comes from a poetic essay called The Radio of the Future written by Velimir Khlebnikov in 1921, we’ll hear quotes from Radio of the Future at the start of each episode.

So, let’s begin with our first audio epigraph from Velimir Khlebnikov.

[Radio Feedback]

Jacob [Spacey Voice]: The crests of waves in the sea of human knowledge will roll across the entire country into each local radio station.

The metallic throat of radio beams rays of song to its many metallic singers.

Metal sings.

[Old Timey Music]

[16:01]

Over the centuries, people have tried to understand the strange fact that some birds seem to disappear at certain times of the year.

There were theories that birds hibernated in the ground or transformed from one species into another, or even that they spent the winter on the moon.

It’s not surprising that the phenomenon we now know as bird migration was such a mystery for so long.

For one thing, many bird species migrate at night, making it difficult to observe. It was also hard to tell individual birds apart and knowledge about bird migration began to grow when techniques developed for marking individual birds.

First ink or paint was applied to a bird’s feathers, and then in the 19th century, metal rings were placed on a bird’s leg, in a practice called: “bird banding.”

In an early experiment, John James Audubon marked a brood of Phoebe’s with silver wire. By the end of the 1800’s, the Danish ornithologist, Hans Christian Mortenson, had begun to systematically band birds and track where they were recovered.

[Wear This Ring (With Love) by The Detroit Emeralds Plays]

The practice continued to grow in the 20th century.

In 1909, the American Bird Banding Association was formed, and in 1920, the United States Biological Survey established a national network of bird banding stations across the country.

Each station needed a government licensed to operate, and the bureau provided leg bands stamped with a serial number.

[Wear This Ring (With Love) by The Detroit Emeralds Plays]

During the same decades that bird banding stations were linking up, another network of stations was coalescing around the new technology of radio.

Wireless telegraphy first made headlines in the 1890s. During the next two decades, amateur radio operators began to set up transmitting and receiving stations in homes across America.

This network of stations is the first piece of the radio assemblage that I want to extract from radio history and compare to the study of bird migration.

There are some interesting similarities between the early culture of radio and the community of bird banders.

Both were amateur hobbyists and tinkerers, and both groups linked their home stations into a network of long distance communication and information sharing.

[Radio Feed]

Muffled Male Voice: Hello, W9 W-ZE Chicago. Hello, W9 W-ZE Chicago.

Jacob: For the radio buffs that meant engaging in what the historian Susan Douglas calls “exploratory listening,” striving to tune into signals sent from far away.

The further away, the better.

[Radio Feed]

Muffled Male Voice: Hello, W6QD Los Angeles, California. This is W9 WZE Chicago coming back. Now let’s hear something about that marvelous California weather. eh?

Alaska, Australia, Europe, South Africa. These were regular, almost daily experiences in many amateurs’ homes.

Jacob: Bird banders also had a kind of exploratory practice sending messages from their home stations in the form of numbered leg bands.

Radio amateurs, and bird banders, we’re both negotiating a social dynamic that Raymond Williams calls “mobile privatization.”

Williams thought that modern industrial society existed in a state of tension between two connected, but paradoxical tendencies.

One tendency was towards mobility.

[Old Timey Music]

Male Voice: Many people thought the automobile would never replace the horse, but it certainly took the place of the Polder sofa on a Sunday afternoon.

Jacob: And the other was toward the privatization of the self-sufficient family home.

Female Voice: When you step inside the Total Electric Home, you step into an entirely new concept in living organized around electric centers, such as this entertainment center.

Electric heating and cooling keep the home comfortably and automatically at the most livable temperatures all year round.

Jacob: Radio and television broadcasting worked to resolve those contradictory pressures.

Male Voice: NBC presents: The First Nighter Program.

Jacob: It satisfied people’s desire to go out and see new places, but it did that while remaining in the privacy of the home.

Male Voice #1: Once again, ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to attend the premiere of a new show at the Little Theater off Times Square.

Here is our host for the evening, the genial First Nighter.

First Nighter: Good evening. My cab is waiting, won’t you step in?

Alright driver, to the Little Theater.

Off Broadway, across 42nd street, past gay crowds and twinkling signs into the heart of Theaterland.

Jacon: Network of amateur radio stations was the first embodiment of mobile privatization in the realm of radio.

The network of bird banding stations did something similar, but in the domain of ornithology. Bird banding allowed an amateur ornithologist to track the global movements of a migratory bird without leaving the privacy of their home laboratory.

There’s a wonderful expression of this aspect of bird banding that’s found on a memorial that was erected in honor of Hans Christian Mortenson, the pioneer of scientific bird banding.

The plaque reads:

“The birds he followed on their journey, but in the quiet town, he stayed himself.”

Both radio and bird banding negotiated the tensions of mobile privatization by establishing a network of stations.

And both could have similar pleasures as well.

Part of what made both of these activities fun was that they were so open to chance.

Radio waves travel through the ionosphere, which is in a state of constant flux. This gave radio operators a tantalizing in sense of unpredictability. They never knew what might be heard on any given night.

Being a radio operator was sometimes compared to fishing. Interesting signals were like a prize Marlin that you either caught or lost forever.

Just as radio operators fished for signals sent from far away, some bird banders set up nets and hope to catch rare migrant birds.

[23:40]

Now it’s time for the first installment of what will be a recurring segment on Lightning Birds.

And that’s to tell the story of Paul Gallegos, modern fairytale, The Snow Goose, written in 1940.

Muffled Male Voice: Have you ever seen a snow goose?

 Have you ever looked up under the deepest blue of the heavens, with your eyes straining to penetrate distance itself?

Have you ever seen suddenly a black speck coming toward you?

A speck that, in the space of seconds, is transformed into a black and white pinioned dream.

Jacob: As we listened to The Snow Goose in installments over the next five episodes, it will become a kind of allegory for the Lightning Birds project.

The Snow Goose is the story of a lost migrant bird blown off course that becomes the prize discovery of a little girl named Fritha.

[Snippet from The Snow Goose TV adaptation]

Muffled Male Voice: My name is Phillip Rioter. By my own choice, I left the world of human society in the late spring of 1930.

One November afternoon, three years after I had come to the great marsh, I stood at my enclosure feeding the birds

 [Radio Feedback]

I looked along the seawall and saw a child, a little girl. She was no more than 12.

Slender, nervous, timid as a bird.

What is it, child?

Muffled Female Voice: I was! I was!

Muffled Male Voice: Come child, don’t be frightened. I won’t hurt you. Come closer.

What have you there?

Muffled Female Voice: It’s a bird!

It’s hurting. Is it still alive?

Muffled Male Voice: Yes. Yes, I think so. Come in child, come in.

Let’s see what’s the matter with it. Just hold it here for me on this table.

Please, don’t be frightened.

Muffled Female Voice: I found it in the marsh.

[Inaudible]

Whatever kind of bird is it, sir?

Muffled Male Voice: It’s a snow goose from Canada, but how in heaven came it here?

Muffled Female Voice: You can heal it, sir. Can’t you?

Muffled Male Voice: Yes, I hope so. Anyway, we will try.

Don’t be afraid.

Muffled Female Voice: I’m not afraid, but I have never seen a bird like her before.

Muffled Male Voice: No, nor have I in any parts of the country close to here. Now she came to us from a very great distance.

Muffled Female Voice: Wherever did she come from, sir?

Muffled Male Voice: I’ll tell you all I know of her. She was born in the northern land far across the seas. Every winter, she flew to the south to escape the snow and ice and bitter cold.

This year, a great storm must have seized her from world and buffered her about, you can see how strong her wings are.

Muffled Female Voice: Yes!

Muffled Male Voice: The storm was stronger.

For days and nights, it held on its grip and there was nothing she could do, but fly before it, when finally, it had blown itself out, she dropped to rest in a friendly green marsh, only to be met by the blast from the hunter’s gun.

Yes, a bit of a [inaudible] for the visiting princess, but it’s not as bad as it might’ve been. In a few days, she’ll be feeling much better. You and I will call her The Princess. The Lost Princess.

[Old Timey Music]

[27:09]

Jacob: In a 1971 television adaptation, Phillip Rioter played by Richard Harris, operates a bird banding station.

[Snippet from The Snow Goose TV adaptation]

Muffled Male Voice: Could you help me band him? I don’t think I could manage alone.

There! December 16, 1939.

Muffled Female Voice: How’d you do that?

Muffled Male Voice: There’s a code number beside the date, that way we can keep track. We want to know and preserve their feeding grounds.

We try to protect them.

[Old Timey Music]

Jacob: So, our first installment of The Snow Goose helps to illustrate how bird banding was like early radio.

Both worked through a network of stations and both offered the chance for exciting encounters with faraway places.

 There was a material link between bird banding and radio too

[Old Timey Music]

Muffled Male Voice: Aluminum on the march.

Jacob: Aluminum is a very modern material and it was only possible to mass produce it starting in the 1880s.

Soon, it was being used in more and more ways.

Muffled Male Voice: It’s great strength combined with extreme lightweight, an outstanding advantage in almost every metal application.

Jacob: World War I was something of a watershed for aluminum and it was used in canteens, cups, and maybe most importantly, in aviation.

This remarkable, lightweight metal allowed for larger and faster airplanes.

After the war, aluminum became associated with speed and sleek, streamlined, modern design.

The same properties that made aluminum so great for airplanes also made it ideal for bird banding.

Aluminum leg bands were durable and lightweight, and they could be placed on small migratory birds without impeding their long-distance flights.

Aluminum was also an important component in radio sets because of its lightness, strength and high electrical conductivity.

To borrow the language of Velimir Khlebnikov, aluminum amplified radios metallic throat.

[Radio Feedback]

Aluminum manifested a material link between radio, aviation, and the study of migratory birds. We’ll see those domains moving in tandem again in subsequent episodes.

[Old Timey Music]

[30:00]

I’ve started my parallel history of radio and bird migration with these two networks of stations.

In the next four episodes of Lightening Birds, we’ll move forward in time to track the history of radio.

But we could also move back in time to think about birds and sky media before radio.

Once we start thinking about radio in the context of the era’s fear, we might begin to recognize surprising precursors, like singing kites.

Kites are an early example of a human technology moving into the aerosphere, and they’re named after a bird.

In both the east and the west, the same word is used for a bird of prey and a device that flies on the end of a string.

In the west, that bird is a kite.

[Kite Chirping]

In some parts of the world, kites are given sound making attachments like bows or pipes.

In Cambodia, these singing kites have been referred to you as “the radio of the countryside.”

This recording, and lots more fascinating information about singing kites, can be found at the website Windmusic.com.

[Recording from Peter Cusack]

Another pre-radio sky medium is the Chinese tradition of pigeon whistles. These are small pipes that are attached to the pigeon’s tail feathers, and that make a haunting whistling sound as they fly through the sky.

[Recording from Peter Cusack]

We’re listening to a recording made in Beijing by the sound artist Peter Cusack.

[Recording from Peter Cusack]

Singing kites and pigeon whistles aren’t usually part of the story of radio, but they have a place in Lightening Birds and we’ll encounter many similar surprises when it comes to media history in the episodes to come.

Remember that besides telling a new kind of radio history, my other goal is to tell you about how scientists have gained knowledge about bird migration.

Bird banding produced the first great collection of data about bird migration. One author even claims that the leg band did for the study of migration, what the telescope did for the study of astronomy.

Data from bird banding revealed the global scope of migration, as well as the remarkable fidelity that some birds had to specific sites.

[Lavinia de Sousa-Mendez Singing in Another Language]

One thing that banding made clear was that the flight paths of migratory birds don’t recognize national borders.

The data suggested that international cooperation was going to be needed to protect migratory species.

The knowledge generated by bird banding helped to support pioneering legislation, like the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.That act began a hundred years of international treaties to protect migratory birds.

A century after it was passed, the act is back in the news again, as the Trump Administration tries to weaken it.

Banding showed that bird migration was a global phenomenon, and now human caused climate change is putting a troubling spin on that fact.

Birds migrate because our planet has regular seasons, but the seasonal activities of many plants and animals are happening earlier in the year in a warming world.

[Spacey Tones]

This can cause a mismatch between the time of a migratory journey and the seasonal availability of food.

For example, warming temperatures in the northern hemisphere have led to earlier springs for plants and insects, but migratory birds that winter in the south still arrive at the same time. This means they might miss the peak in their food supplies.

[Birds Chirping]

Central European Pied Flycatchers arrive at their breeding grounds at the usual time, but the peak in their food resources has already happened.

In North America, the caterpillars eaten by Wood Warblers

[Wood Warblers Chirping]

Start to emerge before the birds arrive, meaning that many of them miss that limited window of abundance.

[Wood Warblers Chirping]

John Burroughs thought of migratory birds as part of a reliable seasonal calendar. Global warming has thrown off those ecological rhythms, giving a new urgency to our attempts to understand them.  

[Birds Chirping]

Our knowledge of the avian aerosphere took a quantum leap with the emergence of bird banding stations. During the same decades, a network of radio stations began to move human communication into the airwaves.

In the next episode of Lightening Birds, we’ll see that the growth of radio in the decades that followed relied upon the construction of a new metallic infrastructure.

That infrastructure would quite literally make the parallel worlds of the airwaves and the aerosphere collide.

[36:46]

[Lightening Birds Theme Music]

Lightening Birds was written and produced by me, Jake Smith, and published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press under a creative commons NC license.

Postproduction is by Liam Davis and the theme music you’re hearing is by Dominick Eulberg.

You can find all five episodes of Lightening Birds and learn more about the project at www.press.UMICH (that’s U M I C H).edu/plightningbirds.

Thanks for listening.

[Lightening Birds Theme Music]