Category Archives: Music

From the Isle of Music and Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot, September 2024

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill Tilford, who shares the following announcement:

From the Isle of Music, September 14, 2024

On August 10, 2024, we will feature music from the Academic Music categories (concert soloist, chamber, symphonic) of Cubadisco 2024. This will include a rare opportunity to hear some Beethoven performed by Cuban virtuosos.

Times & Frequencies are:
1700-1800 UTC 9670 kHz with beam E-F towards South Asia but usable in Eastern Europe and parts of Eurasia
1900-2000 UTC 3955 & 6070 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)
2300-2400 UTC 9670 kHz with beam P aimed at the Caribbean but usable in much of the Americas and possibly listenable in parts of Sourh Asia
All transmissions from Channel 292, Rohrbach, Germany

Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot, September 21, 2024

Our special guest Julio Cesar Pereira, who has done the excellent Ginga Brasil! programme on shortwave in the past, will be with us to present the very distinctive music of the states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sur n Brazil. This episode may surprise even regular followers of Brazilian music.

1700-1800 UTC 9670 kHz with beam E-F towards South Asia but very good in Eastern Europe and parts of Eurasia
1900-2000 UTC 3955 & 6070 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)
2300-2400 UTC 9670 kHz with a special beam M-N towards South America for this episode. This might also be audible in parts of South Asia.
All transmissions from Channel 292, Rohrbach, Germany

Reception reports will be recognized via eQSLs even if webSDRs are used (provided that which SDR is clearly identified and the report covers the whole program, not just a few minutes.)

Spread the radio love

Alan Roe’s A-24 season guide to music on shortwave (version 4.0) & program grids for BBC WS, VOA and CGTN English services

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Alan Roe, who shares his A-24 (version 4.0) season guide to music on shortwave. Alan provides this amazing resource as a free PDF download:

Click here to download Music on Shortwave A-24 v4.0 (PDF)

As always, thank you for sharing your excellent guide, Alan!

This dedicated page will always have the latest version of Alan’s guide available for download.

Programme Grids

Alan notes:

I also attach copies of my shortwave programme grids for the English services of BBC WS, VOA and CGTN in case these are of interest. Click links to download:

Spread the radio love

The Radio Phonics Laboratory

Fastradioburst23 here to let you know about a brand new book from Imaginary Stations contributor Justin Patrick Moore. The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music is a radiocentric look at the origins of electronica. Radioheads will find much to enjoy in the pages of this tome including:

  • Elisha Gray’s Musical Telegraph, arguably the world’s first synthesizer that used telegraph wires to send music down the line to distant listeners.
  • Lee De Forest’s Audion Piano. Radio pioneer Lee De Forest used his invention of the triode vacuum tube, or audion, to make an electronic musical instrument, perhaps his least contentious invention!
  • The radio work and espionage activities of Leon Theremin, who worked as an engineer at a distant station deep within the Soviet Union where he discovered the principles to make his famous antenna-based instrument.
  • The avant-garde antics of the Lost Generation composer George Antheil and his collaboration with actress Hedy Lamarr that led to the development of the spread spectrum suite of transmission techniques that now permeate our everyday life wherever there is WiFi.

But that’s not all! At the heart of this narrative is the evolution of speech synthesis. Spanning the groundbreaking work of Homer Dudley at Bell Laboratories with his work on the voder and vocoder to the dual discovery of Linear Predictive Coding from the research done by Fumitada Itakura at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in Japan to the parallel discoveries in the same field made by Manfred Schroeder and Bishnu S. Atal at Bell Labs. Linear Predictive Coding gets put to work whenever someone picks up a cell phone to make a call, or when they get on their DMR radio to join a net with their fellow ham radio friends across the world. Linear Predictive Coding was later put to work in the compositions of early computer music pioneer Paul Lansky at Princeton.

Tracing the early use of the vocoder in enciphered radio transmissions between Churchill and Roosevelt in World War II to its use by Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos, this is the story of how investigations into the nature of speech generated a tool to be used by the music makers who merged their voices with the voice of the machine.

But wait, there’s more! The creative use of these phonic frequencies really took hold when radio stations and radio companies spearheaded the creation of the first electronic music studios. These laboratories include:

  • Halim El-Dabh’s use of wire recorders loaned from Radio Cairo to create the first pieces of what was later called musique concrète, where raw sounds were manipulated to create a new kind of music.
  • Pierre Schaeffer’s creation of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) under the auspices of the Radiodiffusion Nationale station in France, leading to the subsequent spread of musique concrète.
  • The genesis of the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) born out of early developments in elektrische music made by the countries experimental instrument builders.
  • The subsequent building of an electronic music studio at NHK in Japan.
  • The story behind the “sound-houses” of the legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and its pioneers Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.
  • The development of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music studio made in conjunction with the RCA company and the building of their gargantuan instrument, The RCA Mark II Synthesizer.
  • And further explorations in the work being done at Bell Labs where the computers made music under the guidance of Max Matthews leading to creative breakthroughs from composers Don Slepian and Laurie Spiegel.

Of particular interest in this realm to the radio buff is the work of John Chowning, a composer who worked out the principles of FM synthesis, essentially figuring out how to do frequency modulation in the audio domain. He went on to create the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford, which became a model for the kind of sound laboratory later implemented in France at IRCAM, Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music.

This the story of how electronic music came to be, told through the lens of the telecommunications scientists and composers who transformed the dits and dahs of Morse code into the bleeps and blips that have captured the imagination of musicians and dedicated listeners around the world.

The Radio Phonics Laboratory is available directly from Velocity Press here in the UK and Europe. North American readers can find it on Bookshop.org here , Amazon.com here and fine bookstores everywhere.

Spread the radio love

August 2024 Schedules: From the Isle of Music and Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill Tilford, who shares the following schedule:

Our transmissions at 2300 UTC have been changed from 3955 to 9670 using Channel 292’s booster beam aimed at the Caribbean, which should also allow for good listening in some other parts of the Americas.

The 1700 UTC transmissions may occasionally bounce into parts of SE Asia and Oceania depending upon propagation conditions.

From the Isle of Music, August 10, 2024
We will feature music from the Música Bailable Actual (Current Dance Music) category of Cubadisco 2024

Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot, August 17, 2024
Our special guest Daryana Antipova, a member of the Transglobal World Music Chart who curates Russian and Balkan world music charts, will give us a taste of world music bands in Russia and by Russian world music bands working in other countries.

Times and frequencies for both programmes:
1700-1800 UTC 9670 kHz with beam E-F towards South Asia but listenable in Eastern Europe and parts of Eurasia
1900-2000 UTC 3955 & 6070 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)
2300-2400 UTC 9670 kHz with beam P towards the Caribbean (but listenable in other parts of the Americas)

Spread the radio love

From the Isle of Music and Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot Schedules for July 2024

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill Tilford, who shares the following update:

1. From the Isle of Music, July 2024

On July 13, 2024, we will feature music from the winning album in the Tradicional Variado category (“Danzoneando: En vivo desde Matanzas” by Orquesta Failde) of Cubadisco 2024
Times & Frequencies are:
1700-1800 UTC 9670 kHz with beam E-F towards South Asia
1900-2000 UTC 3955 & 6070 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)
2300-2400 UTC 3955 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)
All transmissions from Channel 292, Rohrbach, Germany

2. Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot, July 20, 2024

On July 20, 2024, we will feature various multiethnic music that blends musical styles from different cultures
Times & Frequencies (note new schedule) are:
1700-1800 UTC 9670 kHz with beam E-F towards South Asia
1900-2000 UTC 3955 & 6070 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)
2300-2400 UTC 3955 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)
All transmissions from Channel 292, Rohrbach, Germany

For both programs, even if you are listening on a remote websdr rather than a radio, we will still acknowledge reception reports with an eQSL IF:
1. The entire program is listened to and reported
2. which web SDR is clearly specified (that will be mentioned on the eQSL)
Shorter reports will be acknowledged with a brief note of thanks.

Spread the radio love

Alan Roe’s A-24 season guide to music on shortwave (version 3.0)

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Alan Roe, who shares his A-24 (version 3.0) season guide to music on shortwave. Alan provides this amazing resource as a free PDF download:

Click here to download Music on Shortwave A-24 v3.0 (PDF)

As always, thank you for sharing your excellent guide, Alan!

This dedicated page will always have the latest version of Alan’s guide available for download.

Spread the radio love

“Music On The Move” explores portable audio technology developments over the decades

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ed, who writes:

Last night on my bedside radio I heard on BBC World’s ‘The Forum’ a wonderful 49-minute piece about portable audio. Much of it covers the earliest portable electron tube radios and transistor radios, and their influences on society in different countries. Mediumwave, Shortwave and FM radios and stations are discussed, as well as evolving technologies. The societal impact of the Compact Cassette and digital audio players and recorders is also discussed. Probably all SWLing Post readers will find this worth listening to!

Cheers,

-Ed

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5n09

The Forum: Music On The Move

Released On: 22 Jun 2024

Many of us remember the first portable music device we owned: a transistor radio, a boombox, a Walkman or perhaps an iPod. We might even recall the songs we played on it. But we might be less aware of how profoundly audio technology developments from the 1950s to 2000s changed the ways in which we consume music and other audio outside of the home or concert venue. Transistor radios allowed outdoor sounds and noises to mix and compete with those coming over the airwaves, creating new auditory experiences; the cassette player gave the listener a cheap way of making and re-making their own playlists; and the advent of digital music players encouraged us to ‘own’ music recordings without possessing a physical copy of the audio.

Iszi Lawrence discusses the history of portable music with Dr. Annie Jamieson, Curator of Sound Technologies at Bradford’s National Science and Media Museum; American drummer and writer Damon Krukowski; Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey, science historian and Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru, India; Karin Bijsterveld, Professor of Science, Technology and Modern Culture at Maastricht University; and World Service listeners.

Spread the radio love