Evening of Sounds: Auditory Cultures in Radio Call-in Programmes

Abstract

Since 2012 Finnish Broadcasting Company has been broadcasting a call-in programme on environmental sounds. A three-hour live programme called Äänien ilta (Evening of Sounds) with approximately 220,000 listeners consists of callers’ narratives of their personal experiences and memories on contemporary and historical sonic phenomena from urban, agricultural and nature settings. Sound requests are fulfilled with the help of sound archives and present-day soundscape recordings. This chapter studies the cultural, social and aesthetic nature of the requested sounds hypothesising them as being parallel to those of music call-ins in sharing music and experiences related to them. Theoretically the programme is critically evaluated in relation to the concept of the radiogenic referring to experiments made specifically for the medium of radio. The chapter is historically contextualised to Dziga Vertov’s and Paul Hindemith’s sound art in the 1920s on radio art and modes of listening.