Fading Tech: Dialup Internet

A look at WFMU.org, the web site of WFMU, shows that dial-up Internet users will not be able to access archived version of the freeform station’s programming starting next month:

Beginning July 12th, WFMU’s new archives will no longer be available in 20k Real Audio, and this change will affect archive listeners on a dial-up connection. Going forward, all new archives will be available in the higher quality 64k AAC+ format, which sounds fantastic with our new Pop-Up Player. However, the Pop-Up Player and new archives from July 12th onward will NOT work if you have a dial-up connection.

I doubt if this announcement sent any thunderous shockwaves down the Intertubes. WFMU’s live audio feed will continue to be available to dial-up users. The station’s unfathomably enormous archives which date from time immemorial will also remain available through next month’s cutoff date, at which time the station will cease production of archives for dial-up users. This would seem to reflect the continuing fade into irrelevance of the RealAudio format, a codec which revolutionized online audio but failed to garner any good will because of it.

I was piqued by this announcement because I first heard WFMU over dial-up, in a hotel room far from New York. I had heard of WFMU but I had never actually heard this purportedly influential radio station that allegedly broadcast to this city.

I have lived in New York for 19 years and I have never been able to pick up WFMU’s signal on a plain old radio. Never — not from Manhattan, not from Queens, not from anywhere, not even as a faint slip of sound glimmering within a blizzard of static. That blizzard of snowy noise is all I have ever heard at 91.1 on any of my numerous FM radio sets.

I understand a certain measure of feng shui can help achieve WFMU reception but access to ‘FMU over the web has (for me, at least) made such maneuvering unnecessary.

Some years ago I applied to host a show at WFMU but my application was completely ignored. Not rejected, but ignored. I do not know if that is typical of WFMU (I know they are very, very busy) or if my application was just particularly laughable, but I meekly allowed this little bit of discouragement to keep me out of radio for another decade.

Radio was supposed to be my calling after college, where I was Classical Programming Director for a couple of years at the school station. In 1990 I came close to landing a spot at KTPB, a new classical station in Kilgore, Texas; and I was in the running for a spot at a station in Sitka, Alaska. If I remember this right I believe I got near-offers from stations in Tampa and Orlando, but those calls came after I had left Florida for New York (where I was eventually by rejected by every radio station I applied to) in October, 1990.

I would have been a poor fit at any commercial or time-formatted station. I have the voice for radio but not the temporal discipline. Though I was officially in charge of Classical at my college station I would often take to the airwaves talking about things like rubber canoes:

RUBBER CANOES
slathered with
mineral frosting and

GULLIES OF DEATH
in which the

college president
stirs
black beans and rice
with his
35mm
mandolin!

During the summers (when the station was officially off the air) I would sneak in to the station at 2 or 3am and commence broadcasting to whoever had their radio on at that moment, talking like a surrealist poet (or so I thought) and playing only the music of the human voice. During these sessions I took the station’s telephones off the hook so none could intrude on my over-the-air solitude. By design I never recorded any of these litanies, and in fact the above is something I made up just now to demonstrate the spirit of those broadcasts, not the material.

I believe in randomness in all things. I believe that without randomness nothing exists. In the spirit of that and of the above-mentioned attempts at surrealist searchings I think that the radio programming closest in spirit to what I would want to do is the Joe Frank series, though I wish he had the freedom of not falling into the 58-minute format, filling out shows with what unnecessary padding just to make them long enough to fill buckets of air time.

I imagine a type of programming that is radio-like but not necessarily on the radio. I remember my days working with the Apology Line, a telephone art project which held way too much influence over me but which I nevertheless recall with interest and nostalgia.

I remember Apology for its sound. Just yesterday, for instance, I was listening to phone calls made to the Lost and Found Photos site, and the sound of the voices evoked memories of those lonely, depressing telephone messages left to Apology. That is not to suggest that the calls to Lost and Found Photos are either lonely or depressing — entirely the opposite, in fact. As a Found Photos enthusiast I found those recorded statements to be interesting and enlightening. But at first blush it was that sound, that timbre of human voices rising up from the wire of the telephone that captured my imagination and reminded me of Apology. The gruff, crackling, voyeuristic timbre of analog phone calls compels my attention and makes me listen.

Some time ago, as I described toward the end of this story over at Sorabji.com, I pursued a project I had contemplated for a long time prior. For several nights I shook up payphones around America by patching them in to conference calls. At random I chose some of the few payphones I could find that still accepted incoming calls and, using an Internet phone software, I called them all at once. As many as 10 payphones located anywhere from Wisconsin to Chicago to Texas to Florida all rang at the same time, and after a few moments individuals at these locations answered. The first person to answer always sounded to me like the most excited, but in fact everyone who connected to this sudden community answered with varied sense of anticipation, anxiety, and even anger.

The first person to pick up, though, was the crux of the endeavor, for it was that person who answered a phone and heard not the voice of another person but the sounds of other phones ringing. That person’s attention was always critical.

One night the first person to answer was a bar fly in Wisconsin, a man who picked up a payphone and heard ringing phones, then waited long enough to hear a woman at another bar in Wyoming answer the ringing payphone there. Beneath the din of the other phone lines still ringing followed confusion between these two people, half-crazed accusations of who called who and questions of what the hell was going on.

Into the mix fell a third person at a bus stop in Arizona, followed quickly by someone at a motel in Tampa. The first moments of each new player started with a bit of combat, settling into the place while simply comprehending what it is.

The sound was unbelievable. It was opera, sounding to me like great art in that it challenged my personal sense of control, reason, even sanity.

If I called 10 lines the number of people who stayed to talk would usually settle at 4 or 5, eventually petering out to 2 as the mystery of how this connection came about was never forgotten but simply accepted.