Radio Banda

RadioBANDA is a multimedia project for a radio station whose purpose is to recreate, intervene and transform the total of the material transmitted in all the bandwidth in which said station emits its signal. This intervention is achieved with the direct participation of listeners. For this, an Internet address contains an interactive graphic that, when modified, generates the transformations of several radio stations. The different signals of the stations are produced by a collection of analog radio stations that together form an installation. These signals are sent to an Internet server controlled by the interactive graphic.

Conceptually, the project has several purposes: to make listeners make the full spectrum of the Radio their own; create an acoustic bridge between the different listeners, and to be a mechanism for the Radio to listen to its public. At the same time, it is sought that each of the elements that make up the project is by themselves an aesthetic work that speaks directly or indirectly about the Radio.

The RadioBANDA project is made up of several elements: an installation of analog radios; an Internet server that contains the page that users use to modify the material produced by the installation; and the radio station in charge of transmitting the material that listeners modify. The radio installation is a collection of radios with different characteristics, each one tuned to a different station seeking to cover the entire frequency range. At the link: www.radioBANDA.net the listener could access the graph that controls the transformation parameters of the radios, an interactive graph consisting of several objects. Each of these objects represents one of the radios of the installation and, therefore, a radio station. By clicking on one of the objects and scrolling it throughout the graph, the listener intervenes in one of the stations. In this way, a radio station can be intervened by only one listener at a time, and a listener can intervene only one radio station, although they can change stations if they wish. The modifications that other listeners make during the intervention are also represented in the graph, in this way all the participants propose and respond among themselves. If all the stations are intervened, the rest of the listeners can observe the collaboration of the active listeners and wait for someone to vacate one of the stations. The final result or mixture of this collaboration between different listeners must be transmitted by the station that participates in the project.

The installation presented in Radio Educación consisted of eight radios with different characteristics, some are portable, others are old and there was also a car player. The main intention was to show that Radio is an accessible resource and is present in different moments and situations of daily life: on the street, in the car, at work, etc. The signal from these radios was received by a computer through a digitizing card. Each radio had its own audio channel. A “patch” developed in Max / Msp, specifically designed for the installation, was responsible for carrying out the transformations of the different audio channels in real-time. It was decided to use granular synthesis since this process offers a wide range of transformations while preserving the loudness of the original audio without its clear recognition. The audio transformations were determined by the strokes that listeners made on the animated graphic. It is important to emphasize that this project necessarily involves analog radio and, therefore, although it is true that the audience could receive the audio via the Internet, the intention is to use traditional radio.

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF RADIO ART
1.Radio art is the use of radio as a medium for art.
2.Radio happens in the place it is heard and not in the production studio.
3.Sound quality is secondary to conceptual originality.
4.Radio is almost always heard combined with other sounds - domestic, traffic, tv, phone calls, etc.
5.Radio art is not sound art - nor is it music. Radio art is radio.
6.Sound art and music are not radio art just because they are broadcast on the radio.
7.Radio space is all the places where the radio is heard.
8.Radio art is composed of sound objects experienced in radio space.
9.The radio of every listener determines the sound quality of radio work.
10.Each listener hears their own final version of a work for radio combined with the ambient sound of their own space.
11.The radio artist knows that there is no way to control the experience of radio work.
12.Radio art is not a combination of radio and art. Radio art is radio by artists.