Radio/Television/Sound:

Radio Aesthetics and Perceptual Technics in Early American Television

Media theorists and historians have long posited a genealogical
connection between radio and television. Most commonly, this relationship
has been discussed in terms of a history of broadcasting, the dominant
framework within which both media were developed in an American
context. In addition to the large number of historiographic works that stress
the institutional continuity between television and radio, theories of television
sound have typically centered on the assumption that the emergence of
television was simply a function of adding images to the medium's blind
ancestor, the inverse of the transformation from to silent to sound cinema in
the 1920s. But as a 1950 television advertisement by Westinghouse Electric
Corporation demonstrates, the relationship of radio sound to television sound
is not as uncomplicated as existing models of television sound have
suggested. During the two-minute spot, the company's spokesmodel
emphasizes the "eighteenth-century styling" of the unit on display and touts
the benefits of the company's proprietary "electronic magnifier" feature as well
as the Westinghouse black glass tube, which would deliver "a better, clearer,
sharper picture, day or night." In addition to the unit's allegedly superior visual
capacities, it also offered superior sound via "three other kinds of
entertainment right at your finger tips": AM radio, FM radio, and phonograph.
In distinguishing the first two formats from one another, the spokesmodel
observes, "you get wonderful static-free music when you turn [the dial] to FM;
you get your favorite radio programs when you turn it to AM."
As this example neatly illustrates, radio at the dawn of television was hardly a
singular phenomenon, with the presence or absence of static marking a major
dividing line between different modes of radio transmission, modes of
transmission that emanated not only from the speakers of free standing
radios but also from television sets. In the case of combination sets, it was
entirely possible for television to function as "radio without pictures." Further,
the choice of an FM subcarrier as the format for sound transmission during
the establishment of technical standards for American television was based
on a complex understanding of the perceptual experience of television in
which achieving maximal fidelity, the goal posited by most histories of
television's technological development, was not the primary goal. Recent
scholarship by Michelle Hilmes, Shawn VanCour, and Philip Sewell has
expanded on institutional and regulatory perspectives to give a more
sufficiently historical understanding of the cultural, technological, and
aesthetic connections between radio and television, but the way radio
specifically influenced the development of sound norms for television remains
largely unclear.
 Rather than assuming that television simply illustrated the textual
forms of radio, and that the identity of network-era American television can
thus be essentially defined through its status as the technological,
institutional, and aesthetic inheritor of radio, this article offers a historicized
view of the way aesthetic standards for American television developed in
relation to existing models of radio aesthetics. Specifically, this article
investigates the way "flow," Raymond Williams's influential postulation of the
experience of American television, has underpinned models of experience
attributed to television sound, a heritage that always explicitly or implicitly
relies on seeing a fundamental homology between the acts of television and
radio auditorship. The idea of a continuously attentive televisual spectator
sitting immersed before the screen, the normative viewing model posited by
flow, hinges on the ability of television broadcasters, set manufacturers,
technicians, and audiences to negotiate a feature central to the medium's
technical aesthetics in the broadcast era: noise.
In unpacking the implicit assumptions about the relative fidelity of the
television apparatus that underpin flow as an experiential model for television
viewing and listening, a model in which textual organization is seen as the
most important dimension of the television experience, this article posits
noise as the major aesthetic influence of radio on early television. Concern for
noise, the most significant aesthetic trait of AM radio (at least from a technical
perspective), marked early historical discussions over the standardization of
aesthetic parameters for American television, a fact that can be seen clearly
in the proceedings of the National Television Systems Committee (NTSC)
hearings of 1940 and 1941. Although the NTSC literally conceived of
television as an additive combination of radio sounds plus moving images,
with the image channel occupying one portion of the electromagnetic
spectrum and sound being sent over an appended FM subcarrier channel,
this equation was not marked by a straightforward assumption about either
sound or image achieving maximal fidelity as individual phenomena. Rather,
the NTSC conceived of television as an interrelated sensory experience, one
in which sound and image were combined in such a way as to render the
experience of noise, which midcentury communication theorists argued was
an inescapable feature of electronic communication, below certain perceptual
thresholds.
In setting maximal allowances for the presence of noise in both image
and sound transmission channels, the NTSC provided a technological basis
for the way television would come to be understood during the network era as
what Marshall McLuhan famously called a "cool" medium, a medium marked
by partial fidelity and, despite the NTSC's best intentions, significant amounts
of perceptible noise at the level of viewer experience. However, in order to
avoid the culturally problematic and ahistorical assumptions underpinning
McLuhan's theory of television experience, this essay instead draws on the
model of perceptual technics advanced by media theorist Jonathan Sterne.
Rather than viewing television's limited or partial fidelity as the return of a
"primitive" oral form of communication and an ontological feature of television
as a medium, this article treats network-era television's relatively low fidelity
as the product of historically specific assumptions about the way media
technologies relate to human perceptual capabilities. Understanding noise as
a key factor in the early development of television not only gives a new
perspective on models of experience attributed to network-era American
television, but also illuminates the technical factors behind the transition from
"old" TV of the broadcast era to the "new" TV of the post-network era, in
which high-definition image and multichannel sound are often alleged to have
freed television from the technological limitations of its earlier incarnations.

The Persistence of Flow

First advanced in Williams's seminal 1974 monograph on television,

the concept of flow has exerted a pervasive influence on theoretical models of
television sound in which television is treated as a form of illustrated radio.
According to Williams, flow was the defining characteristic of American
television, the way a certain sociopolitical imperative, the need to present a
continuously attentive audience for commercial advertisers, was made
manifest at the level of textual form. In his 1986 essay "Television/Sound,"
Rick Altman builds on Williams's notion of textual flow to posit the
complementary concept of "household flow," within which, according to
Altman, television consumption typically takes place. Citing Nielsen data on
television viewing habits, he asserts that although the average American
viewer may not sit transfixed before his or her television set, as would the
ideal viewer posited by Williams's model, sound nonetheless regulates the
kind of constant attention that is central to the way television viewing is
structured in American culture. For "important" events, whether a home run hit
in a baseball game, a severe weather alert, or just the next advertising break,
sound functions to keep the viewer constantly attentive to the television set,
even when the set itself is not visible. Here, Altman borrows from John Ellis's
observation about television's importance as a sound medium being due, in
large part, to the fact that sound "radiates in all directions, whereas the view
of the TV image is sometimes restricted. Direct eye contact is needed with the
TV screen. Sound can be heard when screen cannot be seen. So sound is
used to ensure a certain level of attention, to drag the viewer back to looking
at the set." In grounding Ellis's claims about sound-image relations within a
specific set of historical circumstances, the fact that most television viewers
are not actively "watching" when they claim to be watching, Altman explains
how sound sutures the American television experience, linking political
economy to representational form and spectatorial engagement.
Though Altman does not specifically invoke radio as a precedent for
the sound aesthetics of television in his discussion of flow, this connection
was central to Michelle Hilmes's revisitation of the subject in 2008. As she
argues, Altman's lone essay on television sound and a scant few pages in
Michel Chion's Audio-Visionnotwithstanding, sound theory developed over the
span of three decades almost exclusively in relation to the norms of cinema,
and is thus fundamentally ill-suited to explain the function of sound in
television. In contrast to models of sound theory that frame cinema viewing as
the normative mode of audiovisual spectatorship, Hilmes asserts that
"television owes its most basic narrative structures, program formats, genres,
modes of address, and aesthetic practices not to cinema, but to radio." 13 Due
to television's supertextual structure, in comparison to the discrete textuality
of the individual film, she observes that television is marked as a "historical
legacy of enormous textual variation," a problem compounded by the
"present-time transmission" and "episodic, often open-ended structure" of the
average programming schedule. As such, Hilmes suggests that, rather than
adopting outright the models of auditorship used in film sound scholarship,
television scholars should emphasize the particular conditions of the
television event, such as the use of buffer music between shows, leading her
to describe the overall sound aesthetic of American television as being
characterized by "streaming seriality." But despite her acknowledgement that
flow underpins previous theories of television sound in a way that gives an
overly essential perspective on the experiences of television listening and
viewing, Hilmes's concept of streaming seriality ultimately reinscribes the
primacy of flow to television sound theory, while overlooking other factors
important to the experience of television sound as it relates to precursors in
radio that cannot be explained by an appeal to flow.
Specifically, the idea of sonic flow regulating viewer interaction with the
television set is grounded in implicit assumptions about the relative fidelity of
the television set, particularly compared to the experience of theatrical
cinema, television's other oft-noted technological predecessor. Indeed, it is
precisely this assumption that underpins Ellis's 1982 claim that television
sound should be understood as the medium's most significant form of
sensory appeal due to the inferior quality of the television image. Ellis notes
of sound's central role in the experience of television, a role that is the inverse
of sound's allegedly subordinate function in theatrical cinema, that "the TV
image tends to be simple and straightforward, stripped of detail and excess of
meanings [. . .] the image becomes illustration, and only occasionally
provides material that is not covered by the sound-track." Thus for Ellis, the
primacy of sound to the experience of television is not due simply to the
phenomenological divide between the acts of looking and listening—the
driving assumption of Altman's model—but is related directly to television's
image having been "stripped of detail," which, like flow, is also a unique
characteristic of the American television system, which reproduced 100 fewer
scanning lines (525 versus 625) than the Phase Alternating Line (PAL)
standard used in European television. 18
If flow requires television sound to guard against the possibility of
viewer inattention, this is required because of the unstable and low-fidelity
nature of television transmission itself as much as the possibility for
household distractions posited by Altman as underpinning the need for sound
to drive the experience of television. For example, in another Westinghouse
television advertisement from 1950, a pair of spokesmodels touts the set's
"synchro-tuning" capabilities, a feature necessary to correct for the possibility
of optimal sound tuning interfering with optimal image tuning. Given that good
sound and a good image, as the ad suggests, might have been mutually
exclusive for historical television audiences, at least to some extent, is it
important to explore the ways in which the likelihood of a low-fidelity television
experience or variations in the levels of relative fidelity achieved by sound
and image affects the possibility for continuously attentive spectatorship,
something that was desired by audiences (imagine the picture suddenly
cutting out in the final five minutes of a live anthology drama) and advertisers
alike.
Despite the fact that he makes no reference to Understanding Media in
discussing television sound, Ellis's claim that a stripped-down image is the
driving force behind the way television functions as primarily a sound medium
can be read as a reframing of McLuhan's earlier argument about television as
a "cool medium." According to McLuhan, television's coolness is a product of
this very same stripped-down image referenced by Ellis, which he juxtaposes
with the "hotness" of radio sound and the filmic image. Williams's dismissal of
McLuhan's position as being technologically determinist has marked most
subsequent scholarship in television history, scholarship in which the
presence of technological systems of recording, transmission, and reception
are commonly treated as given rather than as distinguished by the same
degree of cultural construction and historical contingency as television
programming. Although McLuhan's positions are in need of contextualization
and qualification, they still offer a useful starting point for explaining the
importance of noise to a historically specific model of television spectatorship.
In following the experience of televisual flow back to the aesthetic norms in
McLuhan's earlier characterization of the medium's technical aesthetics, a
different horizon for the experience of television sound can be discerned, one
structured not around flow and constant attention but rather the penchant of
sound to engender noise, discontinuity, and interruption.