“I used to spend hours at night in the laboratory listening to the many strange noises in the telephone and speculating as to their cause.” – From Thomas A. Watson’s 1876 research notes on the development of the first telephone with Alexander Graham Bell.

What Watson heard over their half-mile long test wire across roof tops, as he correctly hypothesized, was radio emissions from space; the sun and planets etc.
This is what we call “natural radio”. We now have a  proliferation of electromagnetic wave emitting apparatus surrounding us, especially in this Polytechnic building; computers, servers, lights, heating. Natural radio has changed, but the sounds that Watson heard, before radio had even been invented, making him the first to hear the universe, are still there to be heard.

The title refers to the noise that plagued the clean signal of the original test telephone wire of Watson and Bell. And to the fact that “natural radio” is not purely astronomical in source, but polluted and jaundiced by the “sea of energy” (Hinterding) that surrounds us.

Project is a collaboration between RIXC (Latvia) and r a d i o q u a l i a (New Zeeland) artists and VIRAC

Joe Banks film/recording of a train ride through tokyo, sound is the VLF/electro-magnetic emissions of the city as they roll by.

Electro smog.

Her piece Aeriolgy is particularly relevant to my project, as it uses copper wire coils as receptive inductors for VLF reception.

Joyce Hinterding - Aeriology

The points of failure in my apparatus are that it is not a purpose built machine for receiving VLF. These sounds are received, but their full reception is not realized due to restriction of the amplifier and also coil size/design.

I would, given more time, have built an amplifier with the correct low frequency abilities. I also would have been able to research the best way to build coils etc.

Call it MEDIA POVERA.

A recording i took of radio from the speaker on the front of the phone. Below is pic of set-up.

first trial of copper coil

THE WINDING OF THE TRIAL COIL:

two cymbal stands sped up winding

i used one kind of insulated wire wrapped on a spool, and then connected up the lacquer coated copper wire i got from jewelery department and wrapped that over the other. To get more copper and winds; more winds and more copper= more signal.

new version of phone with better speaker and louder amplifier built in

So, right now we have a techno poetic object that keeps to itself. A kind of closed cirtcuit communication device, or plain parody of the idea of tele-communication. Especially because it has such wonderfully crackely lo-fi quality!

BUT, the next step is to turn it into a different peice. I will this week try to turn it into a VLF listening device. Then decide which work is stronger/ more successful.

first amplifier circuit - turned out to be too quiet

shot of controls built into rear of phone

HORAY!!!! if only it fell on the day of the exhibition.!!!!!!

One of the most common sounds was a snap, followed by a grating sound that lasted two or three seconds before it faded into silence, and another was like the chirping of a bird.  My theory at this time was that the currents causing these sounds came from explosions on the sun or that they were signals from another planet. They were mystic enough to suggest the latter explanation but I never detected any regularity in them that might indicate they were intelligent signals. (Watson 81)

The sounds Watson describes here could have been simple static, the kind of static still prevalent on telephone lines today.  However, his description of snapping and grating sounds bears a close resemblance to the so-called “Very Low Frequency” or VLF signals that W.H. Preece first described in an article for Nature magazine in 1894 (Preece 554).  These signals, which resemble long whistles or grating snaps, are naturally-occurring electromagnetic radio signals that emanate from lightning storms, the aurora borealis, and the Earth’s magnetic field.

If Watson’s sounds were, in fact, VLFs, then he probably was, as he claimed, “the first person who ever listened to static currents” (Watson 82).  More than this, his initial theories—that the sounds “came from explosions on the sun” or arose “from the same source as the static that afflicts the modern radio” (Watson 82)—were proved correct.  In the 1930s, while conducting experiments designed to effectively mask the electrical nature of the telephone’s signal and to allow the telephone to function with perfect clarity, Karl Jansky and his colleagues at Bell Laboratories discovered that this interference, in fact, was produced not by the phone lines themselves but by background microwave radiation, which exists throughout the universe. Jansky and others later devised specific instruments (radio telescopes) to capture, study, and analyze the information contained in these stellar signals (Burke and Graham-Smith 274).

By inventing radio astronomy, Jansky and others effectively proved Watson’s “explosions on the sun” hypothesis correct.“

from http://www.hauntedink.com/liveworks/galaxybeing.html

Im thinking that i may stage a tribute-type piece that has a telephone available in the gallery for you to pick up and hear VLF (very low frequency) noise picked up by a large pile of wire that looks as though it has been pulled down from the lines.

SPACE WEATHER FROM NASA

A streaming radio of VLF sound from nasa.

http://www.radioqualia.net/

From Watson and Bell, through to Jansky, and now with NASA and through to artistic acts like r a d i o q u a l i a, there is a nice long history being spun of Radio Astronomy. I want to tie it back down to the invention of the telephone. Devices such as these:

are what has developed in the realm of high Radio Astronomy. But I will look at the possibility of re-staging the original listening down the lines, what turned out to be a huge radio aeriel, the Bell and Watsons telephones wires.

This is what one DIY person has been using to pick up VLF noise:

it is four coils of copper wire, he wires it straight into his computer with no amplification.

http://www.vlf.it/harald/strangerec.htm