According to Austrian broadcaster Kunstradio’s manifesto, radiophonic art is “radio made by artists”. 1920s post-First World War playwrights were exploring surrealism in radio drama, and producers, writers, technical operators focused on the potential of broadcasting equipment – tape machines, oscillators, filters – to manipulate recordings of environmental and industrial sounds for creating uncanny soundscapes. The terms radiophonic art and radio art are intertwined. The former tends towards the composition of sound effects and music composition, whereas the latter is more focused on production methods. Both are equally concerned with the potential of experimental radio.

In 1924, Hans Flesch broadcast his spoof comedy Zauberei Auf Dem Sender, which was allegedly the first German hörspiel – radio play – to use abstract noises. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin soundscape Weekend followed in 1928. In 1934, Lance Sieveking led a unit at the BBC’s Programme Research Department for experiments with new radio sounds. After the publication of FT Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s 1933 Futurist radio manifesto La Radia, experimental approaches to the airwaves developed around Europe and the US, including Orson Welles’s 1938 live CBS broadcast of The War Of The Worlds.

In the 1940s Pierre Schaeffer, working as managing radio engineer for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, began his Essais Radiophoniques – a series of audio plays and accompanying book – outlining a theory of radiophonic art based on his audio engineering experience. These first essays informed Schaeffer’s later theories of musique concrète and sound objects. He observes the musical transformation that occurs when a radio operator accidentally plays out a tape or disc at the wrong speed or backwards and the rhythmic qualities of looping “sillons fermés”, or locked record grooves.

The essays included reflections on radio’s intrusion into the domestic setting, and on the human capacity for listening to unfamiliar sounds without recourse to visual confirmation of their physical source. Spoken word is key to radio and Schaeffer discussed the abstraction of language and the poeticisation of prose. He compared “sons et sens” (sounds and meaning) in “les arts relais” (cinema and radio). This research led to his ambitious 1944 production La Coquille À Planètes, an eight-part cacophonic radio opera for one voice and eight monsters.

The radiophonic artist composes or writes for a potentially huge audience of isolated listeners. Tuning in privately in their own homes, they join a community who share a common interest in a radio programme but cannot see or hear each other. The concert hall’s audience-stage divide is irrelevant, and no one has bought a ticket. It is a discipline in which writing, speech, sound design, music and technology all merge equally.

Radiophonic studios at national broadcasters began to emerge including Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai at RTF (1943), Germany’s Studio für Elektronische Musik at WDR (1951), Studio di Fonologia at Radio Milan (1955), and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw (1957), which developed into centres for electronic music. In the US, John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No 4 (1951) for 12 radios playing network tuning noise and Radio Music (1956) for eight radio operator performers. For Drive In Music (1967), Max Neuhaus installed 20 radio transmitters in trees along a New York highway, each broadcasting different sounds.

In 1957, British radio drama producer Donald McWhinnie approached Schaeffer for advice in establishing a BBC Electrophonic Workshop, as it was first called (the name changed after his visit). Its output extended beyond radio drama into electroacoustic jingles, stings and music beds for other programme strands, but it resisted becoming a pure electronic music studio. In this sense, the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop remained consistent throughout its lifespan with Schaeffer’s notions of a true radiophonic art, whose remit is the creation of innovative radio.

The BBC unit served both radio and TV. It employed from other departments technical staff members with musical skills. Perhaps the best known are workshop co-founder Daphne Oram, and Delia Derbyshire, who is recognised particularly for her involvement in the theme music for BBC TV’s Dr Who, which she did not officially compose, but radiophonicised. Derbyshire ingeniously transformed a minimal score by composer Ron Grainer into an internationally recognisable and timeless classic of abstract early radiophonic art.

Derbyshire is iconic as a radiophonic artist because most of her oeuvre is from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Like Schaeffer, radio was her main passion. I interviewed her in 2001, and remember her emphatic statement: “Radio was my love, it was my education.” She had an instinctive understanding of how to engage and retain listeners’ imaginations immediately through sound; immediacy is important in radio, where there is no guarantee of an attentive audience. Manchester University’s Derbyshire archive reveals a rigorous mathematical approach to composition, tuning oscillators using pre-computer log books. After leaving the Radiophonic Workshop, Derbyshire did not dedicate herself to music composition like other former radiophonicists including Daphne Oram, Elizabeth Parker, Beatriz Ferreyra and Else Marie Pade.

The art of experimental radio continues in the digital age. In 1987, Heidi Grundmann founded Kunstradio at Austria’s ORF. In 1993, BBC Radio 3 opened the Between The Ears programme, including a broadcast of the sounds of Gateshead Multi-Storey Car Park (2005) by Langham Research Centre. In 2001, Marie Wennersten established SR c experimental radio network within Sweden’s national Sveriges radio.

In 2014, Australia’s national ABC RN set up its Creative Broadcasting Unit. Prolific UK radio artist and theorist Magz Hall co-founded Radio Arts in 2001. Her works explore the border between private and public space in radio. In 2015, her Tree Radio sound sculpture installed sensors within the bark of an oak, with a transmitter through which passing listeners could connect their mobile phones to hear the inner sounds of the tree. Glasgow’s Radiophrenia and Berlin’s Signals2Noise are contemporary festivals dedicated to emerging radiophonic artists.

The concept of radiophonic art is still blurred with electroacoustic music. There is now a synthesizer band of former Radiophonic Workshop employees that takes that name. But radiophonic art is much more than this. It’s a century-long, discrete, theorised practice, that has extended the composer’s palette sonically, technologically and philosophically. 

Jo Hutton is a former studio manager for BBC Radio. With special research acknowledgement to John Dack (1994), Colin Black (2014) and Teresa Winter (2015).

This essay appears in The Wire 496. Wire subscribers can read the essay in our online magazine library.