KChung Radio ID

My buddy Solomon runs a low-power radio station in Chinatown called KChung Radio, named after its origin on Chung King Road. It started out broadcasting just one evening a week, but since the fall it has grown to cover five hours a night Sunday through Thursday, with dozens of DJs and live performances.

The station is currently holding a contest, mostly for their own benefit, to create audio station identifications for broadcast.

The winner gets a cute little KChung lightbox:

(I’m pretty sure I took this photo.)

So I cobbled together a submission tonight, attempting to redo my “I Am Sitting in a Room”-style experiment. Someone had to point out to me that I did it all wrong: I recorded straight from tape to tape in the same console instead of letting it play out loud and recording the room tone along with it. Doh!

But in this experiment I went back and forth between two portable cassette recorders. The first one is running out of battery, so my voice is slowed down (but I still can’t wrap my head around how it gets sped up to normal pitch). It pretty quickly degrades into feedback and then static.

If you want to compete too, submissions are due April 1.

• No parameters except it should probably say “KChung”
• Email to contact@kchungradio.org

I Am Sitting in My Room

This week in my first writing class, we listened to all 45 minutes of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” in which he transfers an analog tape recording of his voice back and forth until his speech totally dissolves and “the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves.”

Even though it gave me a headache for the rest of the day, I really did enjoy listening. It reminded me to dig up this 30-second loop cassette of someone’s answering machine message that Ben J gave me:

But instead of just posting the message, I thought, hey, I have two cassette decks and an hour to waste! Why not create my own version of Lucier’s piece:

(This is only every other repetition, since that was the easiest method. I did no digital editing except to uniformly boost the volume.)

Obviously, this exercise did not create as melodious a work as the original, but it was still fun. While listening to Lucier’s and while making this, I heard familiar high-pitched tweeting sounds that I eventually realized are the same analog-to-analog artifacts we have to edit out of “Phoning It In” for the podcast.