Securing the aural border: fieldwork and interference in post-war BBC audio nationalism

Abstract

At the close of World War II, the BBC Director General called for radio that was ‘firmly British in character’. This article tells two stories about how sound was used to produce the nation in the post-war moment. The first story is one of radio fieldwork, listening to how recording technology was used to recover fragments of the nation through the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952–1957). The second story tells of institutional efforts to combat interference through international technical regimes and emphasis on fidelity in transmission. Both tell the same story of how sound was nationalized and nationalizing, constructing a nation free from interference. I frame this as a process of securing the aural border. By tracing and connecting these labours and materialities, this aural history probes how sounds are used to index nations, how listening is conditioned as a national activity, and what gets silenced in the process. Acts of securing the aural border sat at the intersection of cold war techno-politics, international frequency plans, anxieties about mass culture, and post-war multiculturalism. National purification limited representational space at a time of great demographic change, imbuing the nation with particular assumptions about class and race. This article concludes by questioning the politics of wavelengths and technologies, critiquing ways in which national identity has been institutionalized in sound, and thus challenging discourses of national culture.