The birth of noise in modern China: Radio, amateur engineering, and the sonic network

Abstract

This article argues that noise was born in modern China with the advent of radio and radio broadcasting. The media specificity of radio required that any radio listener must be an acoustic engineer to some extent, dealing with “noise current,” “tunable hum,” and “interference” before tuning into the desired radio program. This novel experience of listening as engineering gave rise to a new conceptualization of noise not merely as unpleasant sounds (the music-noise dichotomy), but also in terms of modern information technology (the signal-noise dichotomy). Integrating both modes of understanding noise, this article further suggests that the affordable radio sets and the public-oriented radio broadcasting together constituted an unprecedented sonic network, one that transmitted heterogenous sonic information from all over the world back home and at the same time deprived of any individual’s agency in deciding what to listen to. Living in this sonic network, one’s body-mind had to function as if it were a radio set, exposed to overwhelming information streams and trying to filter out noise as both disturbing signals and undesired contents. Radio noise is therefore symptomatic of the most fundamental dilemma China was facing in an era of global modernity, national crisis, and information explosion.