This past week, I finally made a so-far useful research database on Notion (mostly moving to this platform sorry MURAL but despite my thesis inquiry into data structures, I love lists). Most of the research I did this week through ACM was to see if I could broaden my scope in fm radio and general radio experiments since I came to somewhat of a roadblock with my latest set of experiments. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing more research on data practices through class readings and problems more specifically related to music valuation and the public infrastructure within this space. Of the ACM articles, I came to a greater appreciation for radio as a much more local, democratized medium, one that offers affordances of collective, analog experience and nostalgic sensoriums that are lost in digital technologies. Repurposing FM: Radio Nowhere to OSMs Everywhere explores the possibility of using FM to deliver social network content to Indigenous communities where Internet access isn’t always accessible. RDS already exists as a pretty robust infrastructure, so hacking these towers to disseminate important cultural info within these communities was a significant breakthrough. Most of the need for such access to social networks was highly local, indicating that smaller, geographical modes of communicating is valued within these communities (local in geography as well as cultural identity). What I didn’t realize before was that so many areas (in America too) only have FM broadcast stations to deliver media. The researchers also studied the ways in which users received the content and based on observations, were able to determine various scheduling approaches to better deliver content to members at times when certain content was more suitable.

The other article that opened up new possibilities was one on a custom radio that serviced collective memory – FM Radio: Family Interplay with Sonic Mementos. I loved this one because it was a very tactile approach to re-imagining how we as humans crave memory sharing and memory recollection. An idea that stuck out to me was the design justification of using radio because it is a shared listening experience. As something analog and physical, it requires collective decision-making through a set of knobs and careful tuning. Even the ways that the subjects described their experience listening to the memories they recorded a year before was emotional, not representative of a snapshot in time, but of a rich narrative. “Sound is a special kind of digital memento. It does not exist in any other form, i.e. printing isn’t possible. It is also very different from images as it unfolds in time as opposed to being instantaneous.” It reminds me of this statement a panelist at CTM made in that “music is virtual reality for emotion.” There’s just something more satisfying in tuning into and listening intently to ‘data’ rather than sorting and going through stuff you end up throwing into folders within folders within folders. Based on feedback from this morning’s feedback collective, it’s clear that people (not just in this cohort) are hungry for tangible connection, and I’m starting to really appreciate this mighty fm confluence, a hurrah as well to this micro – fm manifesto.