Broadcasting

Songs broadcast on the radio have a quality all their own, even if we scarcely attend to this quality today. 

Nor do we have trouble recalling the particular acoustic quality of radio: we know the sound radio makes and we can notice the quality of radio transmission as such and very specifically, say, to use Adorno’s own example in his Current of Music, if we are tuning a radio set.

But if new technology can (and it is important to note that it does not always) make this a less common experience — even satellite radio drifts, and the internet has a rather famous instability from time to time — we nonetheless notice the ‘sound’ or the fact of radio transmission when the weather changes or else when we are moving about or driving, due to the call letters constantly announced as well as the character of broadcast sound.   

As in the case of cellphones, this fading quality of wireless broadcasting is one of the things that has not changed since the beginning of publically accessible radio broadcasting in 1922 (which public broadcasting should thus be distinguished from Nikola Tesla’s invention of the technology needed for radio broadcast or Guglielmo Marconi’s first transmission in 1895).