Richard Crow

Towards an imaginary Hospital Radio

Copyright Richard Crow 2005

Towards an imaginary Hospital Radio

Index

Introduction

1. A short history of Hospital Radio 

2.  <Towards an imaginary hospital radio from Minute by Minute to Sucking up Souls>

2.1 Hospital Soundscape and Patienthood

3.  <A Short history of medical sound> 

3.1 Cystomy

3.2 Live Electronic Dissections

3.3 The Sound of Medicine

3.4 Nurse Music 

3.5 Bone edits

3.6 Music for Hospitals (Hospital ambient)

4. Hospital radio as Experimental radio

5. Conclusion

Bibliography/Discography/Filmography

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to think beyond the normal route in which hospital radio has been studied and is commonly known.

As part of my current investigation and research on sonic art of the body and experimental radio, in this essay I will explore how hospital radio represents a potential medium and a framework for developing ideas and notions about “medical sound”. Therefore how the conventional hospital radio can be re-thought and re-imagined as a medium for sonic artists engaging with a wide field that comprises noise aesthetics, radical radiophony, post-industrial and ambient music’s.

The essay takes its cue from the concept and project proposal I devised/presented for the artist-in-residency program Soundworks 2004, and re-elaborates (and develops) some of the thoughts written in my brief account that followed on from my talk for the Soundworks seminar (Cork 2004).[1]

In reconstituting my own process of development and experimentation around the initial idea of an “imaginary hospital radio”, from the project Minute by Minute to the performance Speaker, Stain, Silence (AGM05), and from the sound work by Diastolic Murmurs to the piece Hospital/Radio.[2]   I will argue how I have considered the hospital as a site for artistic intervention and sonic appropriation and how this leads to my idea of experimental radio.

The essay is structured in five parts.

In the first chapter I will look at the way in which traditional hospital radios operate and how they address their audience of patients/listeners. Secondly, I will analyze how the sonic representation inherent with the hospital environment brings into question the notion of soundscape in relation to the “construction of patienthood” (Tom Rice)[3] and how this notion can be re-interpreted and re-contextualised.

In the third part of the essay I will look in particular at how the noise and acoustic material recorded in or inspired by the hospital environment can be inscribed within a history of “medical sound” and what that might suggest for a radical retuning of the hospital radio.

Through a series of examples of recorded material that spans French Baroque through Industrial to Electronic Music, I will describe different approaches and methodologies through which sonic artists (and composers!) have been appropriating, collaging, exploring inner, visceral, surgical, dissecting noise and sounds that in its own way inform a sort of parallel history of noise, industrial/experimental music.

In the fourth chapter, I will finally attempt to trace my idea of experimental hospital broadcasting in briefly looking at examples of radical radio and what it might mean to subvert the normal route that hospital radio takes.

The conclusion, written as a sort of manifesto brings together, at the end, the ideas developed throughout the essay about an imaginative hospital radio.

The research for this essay is informed by a wide range of sources that include along with the available literature on radiophony and sound art, interviews and archive material published and unpublished that I have gathered from informal discussions and conversations with sonic artists Adam Bohman, Clive Graham, Bernhard Gal, Christof  Migone, Matt Rogalsky, poet Jude Rosen, researcher Tom Rice and Emily Sophia Palmer, (one time volunteer) at Westminster Hospital Radio.

1. A short history of Hospital Radio

“Dear Patient – Nothing can be more boring than having to spend all day in bed. It is even more boring and unpleasant when you have to spend that time in a strange bed. That’s where we at Woodside Hospital radio come in to help.”

Woodside Hospital Radio, Patients Guide[4]

“Your in bed with the best!”

Westminster Hospital Radio (jingle)

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, there is a tradition of broadcasting that dates back to 1926 when Thomas Hanstock came up with the idea of creating small radio stations to serve and entertain hospital patients. Hanstock’s interest in wireless receivers and his work with the Chief Physician at York County Hospital led to the installation of 200 sets of headphones and 70 loudspeakers throughout the hospital, fed from a wireless receiver housed in a small alcove.  Although some of these early transmissions featured music (often performed live to air) much of the broadcasting was speech orientated, with football commentary, church services, poetry and plays among the favourites.

In the 1960s, hospital radio became primarily a music-based service. By the 70s and 80s, hundreds of stations, were broadcasting on a daily basis.

According to John Watson, Chairman of Hospital Radio Perth “Organisations had to work harder than ever before, patients were spending less and less time in hospital and ward visiting became even more important amid the anonymous bustle and rush of the modern infirmary. But it was that relationship with the patient, that ability to speak to the listener perhaps only a few moments before the programme went on air that marked hospital broadcasting as something special. No other media has the ability to get so close to its public. Over the years that has proved the strength of the movement – patient orientated programming.”[5]

Here this notion of patient orientated programming refers clearly to the main objectives and commitment of hospital radio, which are, as Watson puts it, “to bring entertainment and cheer to the patients”.[6]  Thus the ordinary way we may look at hospital broadcasting is mainly in terms of a direct service for the patients, which has become somehow part of the hospital infrastructure through the use of the bedside patient entertainment centre. These devices not only allow a radio service, but television, telephone and even access to the internet, all of which constitutes the “Patientline” service.

In recent years the success of hospital broadcasting has been proved by the simple fact that almost all major Hospitals in the UK and Ireland have an “in house” hospital Radio of some kind that serves patients through various technical means. Most stations exist on closed-loop wires and can only be heard inside the hospital wards on headphones or speakers next to the patient’s bed. There are a few stations using AM or FM free-to-air transmission. While others use the Internet and LPFM (Low Power FM).

Some stations broadcast for only a few hours each week while others, using computer technology, are now able to broadcast music and pre-recorded programmes when the studios are unattended ensuring that they are on-air 24 hours a day (for example Milton Keynes Hospital Radio Service).  Almost all stations broadcast live programmes in the evenings and at weekends, times when there is less ward activity or other distractions to help relieve the boredom and isolation of a patient’s stay in hospital.

This service provided by the hospital radio, seems however to exist as a sort of hidden, hermetically closed community sealed within the hospital walls.

As the HBA (Hospital Broadcasting Association) emphatically states:

“Whatever the means of distributing the programme the service is exclusively for the patients in that station’s locality. Although it may be possible to hear their programmes outside the hospital grounds the station will not recognize any audience outside the hospital[s] they serve”[7].

Another aspect that is interesting to observe, is also, how the current model of Hospital radio is constructed around the participation and involvement of team members and presenters who are mostly volunteers or “friends” as in the case of Radio Moorfields. Their role is to visit and talk to patients in the various wards and to find out what music they enjoy listening to and how they feel the radio service could be improved.

Generally, the programs follow the same pattern with shows that feature comedy, nostalgia (usually a look back at music from the 60s or 70s). The function of the broadcasts seem then in some ways to copy and reproduce the banality of more mainstream radio with music, news, requests and dedications, with the supposed aim to pacify and to block out or mask the daily soundscape of the hospital with all its distractions and dramas.

2. <Towards an imaginary hospital radio> from Minute by Minute to Sucking up Souls

My first encounter with the idea of hospital radio as experimental radio occurred to me during the shooting of three one minute films for Minute by Minute [8] – a project produced in collaboration with the group ‘desperate optimists’. All three films were shot on location at Newham General Hospital from the same fixed camera position. 

The film “c h”’distills a painful yet visionary out-of-body experience whilst under the influence of morphine.

It had a ramp, a ‘sit up and take notice of me’ bed with a plastic undersheet to catch any slip ups.

The sheets were creased, with brownish streaks, dried blood…. they were not for changing. The bed leaked fluids that it

Did not have.

In the middle of the night she sat bolt upright and naked.

“Are their mosquitoes here?” she inquired.

“What do you think you’re at the seaside”, the nurse retorted. The itching went on all night.

At six o’clock everyone woke up and she conked out.

My bed floated in the sea, the pain was on the end of a telephone line and I could hear it faintly in the distance.[9]

In fusing voice/text/image the film ‘’ch’’ is somehow constructed through (and by) the fragmented narrative and disorientating soundtrack, while simultaneously mapping an inner space as well as the cinematic experience, activated through the zoom, of navigating corridors within the hospital.

In the other film ‘’for a future experimental hospital radio station’’ [10] this disorientation is heightened by imagined noises of the hospital soundscape compressed and speeded up into one minute of cacophony. We are here on the threshold of the hospital, looking in/listening in.

 

2.1 Hospital Soundscape and Patienthood

The way in which these films opened up the possibility to think about the hospital as a radical site for artistic intervention and appropriation, is in looking at and bringing into question the sonic representations inherent within the hospital environment, and how that soundworld might be re-interpreted and re-contextualized.

So what therefore constitutes the sonic environment of the hospital? And in which terms is it possible to talk about a hospital soundscape?

According to the (first) definition of soundscape coined by composer and sound ecologist R. Murray Schaffer[11] (circa 1967) the soundscape is any sound environment from either the natural world or in any recorded medium.

In relation to the meaning of soundscape as sound environment, the hospital soundscape can be defined/understood, as Tom Rice acutely observes in his anthropological study, within the “construction of patienhood”. And that sounds (perceived within the hospital environment) are central to the patients’ experience of themselves as ‘patient selves’.[12]

In one of his interviews conducted with a patient (at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary) Tom Rice notes:

“He had numerous other complaints concerning intrusive sounds. He was bothered by the noise of the television, which he could not see properly from his bed. Hushed voices and whispers, the rasping of bed curtains and the squeaks of hospital-trolleys also became oppressive. Of course noise was muted in the interests of quiet, but that only served to increase its irritant effect. A deafening hush, a constant, grating symphony surrounded him in hospital.”[13]

What I find interesting in this passage is how the hospital soundscape comes out from the patient’s complaint concerning the persistent noise in the hospital. And how in this sense the soundscape is formed mainly by unwanted, “intrusive” sounds that threaten the supposed quiet required by the hospital environment. 

This ever-present soundworld that permeates the hospital ward constitutes, in the words of Rice, a sort of “sonically constituted sense of self”, a soundscape that can be experienced as part of this construction of ‘patienthood’.[14]

Shall we then consider, what might be the potential for (sound) artists working with/in this hospital soundscape and participating in this sonically constructed identity, after all, are we not in short all potential patients/listeners?

A possible answer comes perhaps with a striking description by musician Steven Stapleton on his piece Sucking Up Souls[15] which traces a potential terrain for the auscultation or listening in to the imagined hospital soundscape:

“‘Sucking Up Souls’ was inspired by when I was in hospital, I had a lot of trouble with my ears, tinnitus and all kinds of problems, and I’d lie in hospital at night and listen to the sounds of the hospital, just people milling around in wards far off, the occasional sound as metal things clanked, and both David [Tibet, Current 93] and I thought it would be a really good idea to try and recreate that sound. Just being in bed, being immobile, and just listening. I was fascinated by it; I just lay there listening for days. There is a really heavy, unique atmosphere to a hospital. I think there is a kind of warmth there – you’re protected, you’re safe, you’re being waited on – you’re being pumped full of horrible drugs as well but you can lay there and almost become a vegetable.” [16]

As David Keenan comments in this interview:

 “The almost fetishistic detail which the whole scene inspires in Stapleton makes it seem woozily appealing, until you remember that all around you people are actually dying, strapped to life support machines, in iron lungs”.[17]

To consider composing for an imaginary hospital radio might mean in this lightturning the intrusive, disturbing sounds into active signifiers which under the rubric of the ‘noise aesthetic’ are denied by the ordinary functions of conventional hospital broadcasting.

Therefore, what was once deemed unsettling and unwanted (in sound) can now be re-appropriated and radically juxtaposed in the mind’s ear of the creative sonic artist.

So here lies the obvious paradox in that the sound sources that one would be interested in as a sonic artist, (the sounds that are so rooted to place),will always be to some extent denied and repressed by conventional hospital radio as it currently exists.

Therefore, I would take that paradox as my starting point in re-thinking and re-imagining Hospital radio as a space where we are all listeners and all ‘potential patients’ in this unconscious life of the hospital. [18]

3. <A Short history of medical sound>

A few years after the project Minute by Minute, I was invited to give a short presentation on my investigations, research and obsessions on what an imaginary hospital radio might sound like.[19]

This talk was more a set of questions to myself than an attempt to come to any definitive statement.[20]

Here, I will expand on these ideas. In particular, I will look in more detail at the notion of a medical soundscape in terms of recorded material, and how these often-associative sounds and noises have contributed to my present thinking about an imaginary hospital radio that is linked to what I have (loosely) defined as ‘a short history of medical sound’.

But what constitutes medical sound within this context? And how might we identify it?

The term medical, from Latin “medicalis”, “medicus” (physician, medicinal, healing), is generally used to describe the study or practice of medicine and/or a requiring treatment of illness and injuries. It is also concerned with physicians or the practice of medicine often as distinguished from surgery. In addition, the word “medical” is related to the term “physical” (body), as for example, “an examination of a person’s body by a doctor in order to discover if that person is healthy”. (Cambridge Dictionary)

Medical sound and medical soundscape might refer then both to the range of sounds produced by medical treatment (e.g. an ultrasound scan) and/or more in general to surgery (operations, etc.). In relation to music, I will then define ‘medical sound’ as any sound or combination of sounds that are appropriated and reprocessed by sonic artists, sounds that contribute to a sort of parallel music history that from the noise aesthetic to, more in general the sonic art of the body, traces a critical context that I would like to briefly examine here.

3.1 Cystotomy

We can find no better introduction than in Le Tableau de l’Operation de la

Taille [21] by Marin Marais (1656-1728) an early example of instrumental program music. This is a music that is intended to evoke images in the mind of the listener by representing a scene or particular mood. In this case, the graphic details of a Cystotomy (cutting out a bladder stone) – an operation that is vividly recounted in Dr Philip Sandblom’s hugely informative study Creativity and Disease.[22]

Marais undoubtedly underwent this surgery so the narration inscribed (and spoken) in the score is doubly revealing.

“The view of the operating table – trembling at the sight of it – serious thoughts – the incision – here the stone is delivered – here one nearly loses one’s breath – blood is flowing – here one is put back to bed.”[23]

3.2 Live Electronic Dissections

There is nothing more useless than an organ (Antonin Artaud)[24]

Moving forward in time to the late 1980s and listening to a much sought after cassette copy of To have done with the Judgement of God   the first (and indeed the last) radiophonic work/event by Artaud[25], I experienced this underground classic as both an affirmation and as a departure point for my own sound explorations at that time.

Inspired by Artaud’s recordings, his writings and the Theatre of Cruelty, I founded with the musician Adam Bohman the group Diastolic Murmurs, a sort of improvised noise outfit whose name was taken from a found record of diseased heartbeats.[26]

Diastolic Murmurs were active from around 1985 to 1994 and explored an Artaudian ‘desire for sounds that cannot be endured’, an inner visceral sound world that was given full expression in extreme ‘theatrical’ audio-visual performances that we called Live Electronic Dissections and in numerous (home) studio recordings that took place in London at the Institution of Rot. [27]

Diastolic Murmurs employed directly injected contact microphones to explore as fully as possible the occult sound world inherent in any given object and used a variety of sound sources and found materials,[28] including prepared/home-made and broken instruments, discarded everyday objects and the taped sounds of bodily functions.[29]

As early as 1926, Artaud had written:

“The spectator who comes to us, knows that he has just exposed himself to a true operation, where not only his mind but also his senses and his flesh are at stake. He will henceforth go to the theatre as he goes to the surgeon or the dentist”.[30]

Moving from the Artaudian influence, the core of the Diastolic Murmurs’ Live Electronic Dissections became a kind of “concrete music”, which took its origins from surgical operations: screeches, scrapes, creaks, rustles, squeaks, buzzes, beeps, whirring, hums, crackles, pops, groans, murmurs, gurgles.

 

 

 

3.3 The Sound of Medicine

The use of medical imagery in performance and what I am identifying as ‘medical sound’ has a long and interesting history within Industrial Music [31] and the later noise scene(s), which it has spawned. I will not go into a lengthy description here, but will cite some seminal works (from Industrial music and beyond) that have inspired and influenced my thinking.

By far the most unsettling and atmospheric is the piece Medicine (1981) on Throbbing Gristle’s last studio album Journey through a body (1982)[32]. As Simon Ford notes in his exhaustive survey of TG  “The body, as both medium and subject, had always been central to the group’s concern with improvisation, performance and the concept of sound as an offensive weapon.”[33]

Medicine is composed around the bleeping of a ECG life support system, heavily treated vocal sounds (deep breathing, faint cries), and more abstract performative sounds and noises including the pre-recorded cut-up voices of encouraging nurses which are used here to great effect. It has been likened to the aural environment a baby might encounter after its emergence from the womb.

3.4 Nurse Music

Steven Stapleton’s Nurse with Wound have also utilised pre-recorded medical cut-up voices most notably on Duelling Banjos (1981) and Registered Nurse (1981). Although often associated with Industrial music and the aforementioned Throbbing Gristle early on, NWW’s music is however much more complex and work like visual collages in sound. Influenced as much by musique concrète as Dada and Surrealist Art[34], Stapleton’s music skilfully challenges our listening with elements that are deliberately designed to humour, shock and irritate us.

A particularly deranged medical soundscape is sewn together on the Duelling Banjos[35], which along with low rumbling, electronic and machine noise includes cut up extracts from a comedy sketch record that injects some serious black humour into the mix.

3.5 Bone edits

Worthy of note here is the Canadian sound artist Christof Migone whose output since Hole in the Head (1996) has remained consistently

fixated on the noisiness of (our) bodies, encompassing what Allen S. Weiss[36] describes as “skull partitas, glottal toccatas, ear arias, bone requiems, intestinal fugues, heart sonatas, nerve rhapsodies, [and] blood symphonies”.  For

Crackers [37], Migone recorded the sounds of humans literally cracking up, a portrait of a city through the cracking bones of its citizens, or ‘bone edits’ as he calls them.

3.6 Music for Hospitals (Hospital ambient)

To end this short account, another sonic area that can be inscribed in medical sound is finally music for hospitals or what we might term ‘hospital ambient’, such as in Bernhard Gal’s Defragmentation/blue (1999).[38]

Through the use of floating micro-tonal sound textures, rising and falling tones and pulses, Gal recreates something of the monotonous, artificial, aesthetic sound environment of the hospital where normal time seems suspended.

4. Hospital radio as Experimental radio 

“…The first thing to remember about radio [is that] it is a fearful medium.” R. Murray Schafer (Radical Radio)[39]

In the first part of this essay I have described how conventional hospital radio aims to create a sort of alternative mood or joyful space within the ‘heavy’ atmosphere of the hospital and tries to respond to the supposed needs of the patients.

I have also investigated how the hospital soundscape – with its unwanted sounds and noises that are contained and reverberate within the physical environment, are actually a crucial element in the construction of patienthood.

Moving from these dual considerations around the hospital soundscape (versus patienthood) and live-to-air hospital broadcasting (versus Patientline), I will attempt to trace here my idea of experimental hospital radio, a radio in which to some extent we all are potential patients and listeners.

As part of my ongoing investigation into secret spaces, from the series of remote performances in the 90s to the recent sound piece Speaker, stain, silence[40], the device of performing in spaces not directly accessible to the viewer is very much connected to an idea of a forced confinement of the body and the mind, which is perfectly represented by the physical space of the hospital, its cinematic, performative and sonic ambience.

In re-framing hospital radio as an experimental radio I imagine then a broadcast unit and/or a recorded time/space where this notion of a hidden, closed community (hermetically sealed, on a permanent loop) is somehow embodied in the ordinary model of hospital broadcasting, and can be constituted by the performative and reclusive space of the hospital in itself.

A radio hospital in which a hospital in itself becomes the receiver and transmitter of inner, visceral, surgical and dissecting sounds and noises, a sort of broadcast unit “per se”, a sonic body architecture.

In other words, I consider the hospital architecture as an in/out site for sound, ‘a graft on to the ears’, to break down its formal content and switch on its poetic possibilities, where the incoming ‘mental noise’ is sampled and remixed.

The aim then of experimental hospital radio would be in a sense to replicate and amplify the real and imagined medical soundscape, as a kind of sonic “tableau”, an invisible operating theatre in which the sonic/audio surgery occurs.

The line I am thinking of is moving towards radio as a live studio composition  (studio as instrument and performative tool) but also in a more Cageian sense with the ‘radio as instrument’ in itself.

One might cite Christof Migone’s experimental radio show Danger in Paradise [41] as a good example of this practice, also the ‘Psychic Rallies’ (live-to-air noise/body performances) by Rudolf Eb.er [42] (Runzelstirn & Gurglestock)/Schimpfluch Gruppe on Radio Lora 104.5 FM in Zurich (circa 1989) and closer to home the recent “One hour as” [43] series curated by Ben Green for Resonance 104.4FM.

In their own way these manifestations of the performative radio body are what Allen S. Weiss has in mind when he calls for a transfigured radio body that is  “concerned with transmission, circuits, displacement, degeneration,

metamorphosis – not communication, closure, articulation, representation, simulacra.” [44]

To come back to the above dual argument (between patienthood and patient-line), there is here, however, an obvious contradiction between what the conventional hospital radio aims to do to in cheering up the patient and how in actual terms it fails to recognize its true potential as a broadcast medium.

This imagined experimental hospital radio lies somewhere in between this idea of a closed ‘community’ and a constructed identity and in some ways aims to highlight the disparity between a forced community and a constructed identity.

My idea of turning the environment of the hospital, its voices[45] and noises into an experimental broadcast unit, does not in fact resolve the complex issue of how the ordinary hospital radio would possibly change in terms of service for the actual patients.

Considering for example hospital radio as a social and aural representation of a hospital “community” in which actual patients could be invited as active participants, the terrain I would set for a possible development of an “alternative” hospital radio would remain still within the framework of radio as an art form rather then as a service. If it is true that radio is a fearful medium, as much as it is in the image we commonly have of hospitals, I can only imagine experimental radio hospital as a metaphorical space in which the unknown, the remoteness internal to us can be confronted with humor, the grotesque or the acceptance of disease as life forces in conflict.

What I would like to propose then is a kind of ‘inside out’ hospital radio. A radio that both inhabits the psychological and physical space (of the hospital), “a sensation resonating along aural pathways and passage ways”,[46] rather than to offer an alternative space outside of itself.

5. Conclusion

The hospital radio I imagine does not exist. And if I want to hear it (and that of course implies that others will want to hear it too) I will have to (re) create it, for myself. 

Within all its contradictions and open questions Hospital radio here takes its birth cry as:

a. sounds which are denied by ordinary hospital radios by reproducing the banality of mainstream radio with music, news, requests and dedications, with the supposed aim to pacify and to block out external (hospital) sounds

b. a daily soundscape of the hospital with its all distractions and dramas

c. a radio in which the Hospital and all its associations become the sound source par excellence

d. a broadcast unit that as such is a radio in/out for the hospital

(a broadcast unit that is in some ways an input/output)

e. a space where we are all listeners and all ‘potential patients’.

f. ”a point, unlocalizable and mysterious, where listener and radio are indistinguishable [….we ] therefore seek that realm where the voice reaches beyond the body, beyond the shadow of its corporeal origins, to become a radically original sonic subject” [47]

g. An Imaginary Hospital radio that fluctuates somewhere between these states of disembodiment and embodiment, articulation and disarticulation.

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Weiss, Allen. S., 2002. Breathless – Sound Recording, Disembodiment and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia, Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press

Whitehead, Gregory., 1997. “Impossible Voices, Un-makeable Beings”. In: Resonance  5 (2) (London) pp. 40-41.

Young, Rob., (Ed.) 2002.  Undercurrents -The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music.  London & New York: Continuum

Selected Discography

 

93, Current.,  (& Steven Stapleton). 1986. “Sucking up Souls”. In: In Menstrual Night. London: United Diaries (LP)

93, Current., (& Steven Stapleton). 2003. A Little Menstrual Night Music. Seatle: United Durtro/Anomalous (CD)

Acconci, Vito., (1971). 2001. Waterways – Four Saliva Studies. + a remix by undo (Christof Migone and Alexandre St-Onge) entitled “Vito Acconci’s undoing.”  Montréal: squint fucker press (CD)

Artaud, Antonin., (1947).1999. Pour en finir avec le judgement de dieu  (To Have Done with the Judgement of God),  (with Maria Casarès, Roger Blin, Paule Thévenin). Brussels: Sub Rosa (CD)

Burroughs, William, S., 2001.  Breakthrough in Grey Room.  Brussels: Sub Rosa (CD)

Coil, 2001. “Disco Hospital”. In: Love’s Secret Domain. London: Threshold House (CD)

Crow, Richard., 2005. “Hospital/Radio” In: Forrester, Julie., Danny McCarthy. (Eds), 2005. Soundworks – For Those That Have Ears.. Cork: Art Trail Publications (Book + CD)

Disinformation. 2005. Sense Data & Perception, Highbridge, Somerset: Iris Light (CD)

Gal, Bernhard (Gal)., 2005. Installations. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag (Book + CD)

Gal.,2000. Defragmentation/blue – An audio-architectural exploration of time, Germany: Plate Lunch (CD)

Gal., 2004. Hinaus:: In den, Wald.. Vienna: Klang Galerie (CD)

Galas, Diamanda., 1996. Schrei X. London: Mute (CD)

Geckeler, George. D., (M.D.) 1949. “Murmurs: Band No.4 – Late Diastolic Murmur of Aortic Insufficiency”. In: Stethoscopic heart record. Holland: Philips (LP)

Gristle, Throbbing., 1978. D.o.A. The Third and Final Report. London: Industrial Records (LP)

Gristle, Throbbing., 1982. “Medicine”. In: Journey Through a Body.  Hamburg: Walter Ulbricht Schlfoilen (LP)

Gristle, Throbbing.,  1995. Blood Pressure: A Medical Casebook by Throbbing Gristle. Berlin: Dossier (Un-official Release) (CD)

Marais, Marin., (1732). Le Tableau de l’ Opération de la Taille  In: Pieces de Viole du Cinquieme Livre. France: Accent (CD)

Matmos,. 2001. A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure. London: Matador Europe (CD)

Migone, Christof., (1996) 2004. “The Death of Analogies” In: LaBelle, Brandon, Achim Wollscheid (Eds). 2005.  Christof Migone  – Sound Voice Perform (Critical Ear Series Vol 2), Los Angeles/Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press and Museet for Samtikunst, Roskilde with Ground Fault Recordings (Book + CD)

Migone, Christof., 1999. “Crackers#4” In: LaBelle, Brandon. Steve. Roden, (Eds.) 1999. Site of Sound: of Architecture & the Ear. Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press/Smart Art Press (Book + CD)

Migone, Christof., 1996. Hole in the Head. Québec City: Ohm/Avatar (CD +booklet)

Murmurs, Diastolic & Furt., 1993. Hospital of the Soul #1. London: Vintage  Productions (MC)

Murmurs, Diastolic., 1987. Electro-Medicine. London: DiaM (MC)

Murmurs, Diastolic., 1990. Purgations  (flushed 1×10). London: DiaM (MC)

Nicols, Mike, & Elaine May.,1962. “Calling Dr Marx” & “Nichols and May at Work (Registered Nurse).“ In: Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors. London: Mercury Records (LP)

Peristaltic Sounds of Gastrointestinal Obstruction. RCA Victor 1960 (LP)

 

Undo (Christof Migone and Alexander St-Onge), 2000.  Un sperme qui meurt de froid en agitant faiblement sa petite queque dans les draps d’un gamin.Montréal: squintfucker press (CD)

Various (Graeme Revell, Deficit Des Annees Anterieures, Nurse With Wound).,1986.

Necropolis, Amphibians And Reptiles – The Music Of Adolf Wölfl. London: Musique Brut (Booklet +LP)

Various (Marina Abramovic, Alexandre St-Onge, Jocelyn Robert, Yasunao Tone, Robert Ashley, John Duncan, Gregory Whitehead, Michel Chion, Christof Migone, David Dunn, Randy H.Y. Yau, Achim Wollscheid, Arthur Petronio, Vito Acconci). 2001. (ed by Brandon Labelle & Christof Migone). Writing Aloud -The Sonics of Language. Los Angeles/Copehagen: Errant Bodies Press with Ground Fault Recordings (Book + CD)

Various.,(Curated by Allen S. Weiss). 1996. (Curated by Allen S. Weiss),.Voice Tears,

(in conjunction with TDR: The Drama Review (T151) Experimental Sound and Radio) (CD)

Various.,2004. Extreme music from Russia.Edinburgh: Sue Lawly (CD)

Various., 2003. As….(Curated by Ben Green).London: ResonanceFM/LMC (2xCD)

Whitehead, Gregory., 1986. Display Wounds In: New American Radio [online]

Availiable at <URL http: http://www.somewhere.org/NAR/catalog/full.htm#w >[Accessed 20.11.2005].

Wound, Nurse with.,1980.  Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. London: United Dairies (LP)

Wound, Nurse with.,1981.  “Registered Nurse” In: The Second Coming. London: Come Organisation (LP)

Wound, Nurse with.,1981. “Duelling Banjos” In: Hoisting the Black Flag London: United Dairies (LP)

Wound, Nurse with., 2004. Shipwreck Radio Volume One – Seven sonic structures from Utvaer. Preston: ICR (2xCD)

Filmography

Hospital, 1969. Film. Directed by Frederick WISEMAN. USA

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[1] Crow Richard., 2004. Towards an Imaginary Hospital Radio: some notes from a work in progress, Soundworks, Cork. 21-30 June 2004. Organised by Art Trail, Cork.

See also <http://www.arttrail.ie&gt;

[2] Hospital/Radio (Human Shield), 2004, appears on the compilation CD, accompanying Soundworks – For those that have Ears. Cork: Art Trail Publications.

[3] Rice, Tom. 2003. “Sound selves – an acoustemology of sound and self in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary”,in Anthropology Today Aug 19 (4) pp 4-9

[4] Ralph, Keith (Chief Engineer). 2001. “Dear Patient” in

Woodside Hospital Radio  – Patient’s Guide.  Newham General Hospital

Chelmsford: Hospital Radio Publications, p. 1. Free guide circulated at Newham General Hospital.

[5] Watson, John. 2001. History of Hospital Radio [online]: Milton Keynes.  Available at: URL <http://www.mkhrs.org.uk/historyofhr.htm> [Accessed Date 23.4.2006]

[6] Ibid

[7] Hospital Broadcasting Association. The Hospital Broadcasting Association is a national charity which promotes and supports hospital broadcasting in the UK. The HBA represents over 250 member stations. See also http://www.hbauk.com/

[8]  Crow, Richard. 2002. Delivery, CH and for a future experimental hospital radio are three one minute films as part of Minute by Minute – 24×1 min films shot on location in the London Borough of Newham and made specifically for the internet. Produced by desperate optimists.

See http://www.desperateoptimists.com/minute/pages/richard/mainrc.html

[9] c h uses a text fragment from Jude Rosen’s 1999 poem Crohn Heroine. The use of Crohn in the title refers directly to Crohn’s disease – a chronic inflammatory disease that can involve any part of the digestive tract, from the mouth to the anus.

[10] Crow, Richard., 2002. for a future experimental hospital radio see http://www.desperateoptimists.com/minute/pages/richard/mainrc.html

[11] See also Schaffer, Murray. R.,1973. “The Music of the Environment” in Cox, Christoph., & Daniel Warner. 2004. (Eds.) Audio Culture – Readings in Modern Music. New York & London: Continuum. pp 29-39

[12] Rice, Tom. 2003. “Sound selves – an acoustemology of sound and self in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary”,in Anthropology Today Aug 19  (4) pp 4-9.

Rice became interested in the links between sound and medicine whilst working as a volunteer for a hospital radio as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University.More recently,he gave a short presentation Sound Sickness on his current research   on the stethoscope a d auscultation  (stethoscope listening) at Sonic Subjects & Acoustic Objects a one-day symposium on sound at Goldsmiths College, London 27 May 2004.

See also: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/departments/music/ems/sonicsubj.html

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] 93, Current., 1986 (1988 re-issue). “Sucking up Souls”. In: In Menstrual Night. London: United Dairies (LP). Re-issued in 1994 on CD by Durtro. See also Current 93., 2003. A Little Menstrual Night Music. United Durtro/Anomalous. The latter is a special remix by Steven Stapleton containing two new versions of In Menstrual Night. These pieces were used as the introductory music for Current 93’s performances in San Francisco in 2003.

[16] Keenan, David and Steven Stapleton (Nurse with Wound). (Circa) 1998. Interview [online] Available at: URL <http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/21/nurse.html&gt; [Accessed date 19.12.2005].

[17] ibid, Stapleton continues: “I didn’t actually consider that. It just adds to the atmosphere I suppose. Nurses must see that all the time. Just imagine, though, you’re lying in bed at night and you’re looking up at a darkened hall and there’s the matron sitting there with her light and you can hear her pen scraping, you can hear creaks coming from the beds, patients turning over, beds rattling a bit, someone dropping a utensil ten wards down. The echo, the bare walls.”

[18] This is perhaps close to achieving what Gaston Bachelard was thinking of in Radio as Reverie: “Radio really does represent the total daily realization of the human psyche.” Bachelard, Gaston., 1971. “Radio as Reverie” In: Strauss, Neil, and Dave Mandl, eds. 1993. Radiotext(e). New York: Semiotext(e) #16 (Vol VI, issue#1), p. 218

[19] Soundworks 2004. Cork. 21-30 June 2004. Organised by Art Trail, Cork. See also http:www.arttrail.ie

[20] See also Crow, Richard., 2005 “Towards and Imaginary Hospital Radio- some notes from a work in progress” In:  Forrester, Julie. Danny McCarthy. (Eds), 2005. Soundworks – For Those That Have Ears. Cork: Art Trail Publications. pp 40-51

[21] Marin, Marais., 1725. Le Tableau de l’Operation de la Taille  (Depiction of a surgery and recovery) is by all accounts an autobiographical work from the fifth book of Pieces for Viol. See also Selected Discography.

[22] Sandblom, Philip. M.D., Ph.D. h.c., 1995 Revised edition. Creativity and Disease – How illness affects literature, art and music.  New York, London: Marion Boyars. pp. 160-161

[23] Ibid, pp.199

[24] Artaud, Antonin., 1947. “Conclusion” from Pour finir avec le jugement de dieu  (To have done with the judgement of god) in Eshleman, Clayton, Bernard Bador.1995. (Ed. and Trans. by), Watchfiends and Rack Screams – Works from the Final Period by Antonin Artaud. Boston: Exact Change. p. 307

[25] To have done with the Judgement of God is now freely available both on CD (see discography) and via the internet as an mp3 download. Available online at

<URL:http://www.ubu.com/sound/artaud.html&gt;

In the preface to Phantasmic Radio Allen S. Weiss recalls the date 2^nd of February 1948 as following: “This is the date of the non event which inaugurates my study – the suppression of Antonin Artaud’s scheduled radio broadcast of To have done with the Judgement of God.The year 1948 also marked the origin of modern radiophonic and electro-acoustic research and creativity, for it was at this moment that magnetic recording tape was perfected and began to become available for artistic purposes. The confluence of these two events – Artaud’s final attempt to void his interiority, to transform psyche and suffering and body into art, and the technical innovation of recording tape, which henceforth permitted the experimental aesthetic simulation and disarticulation of voice as pure exteriority-established a major epistemological – aesthetic shift in the history of art.”

[26] D. Geckeler, George. M.D.(1949.) 1960. Stethoscopic heart record. Holland: Philips (LP)

[27] In 1992 I founded with Nick Couldry The Institution of Rot, an artist run space for site specific performances, installations and sound work and occasional curatorial projects. Diastolic Murmurs issued a series of limited edition cassette albums: Electro-Medicine (1987), Live Electronic Dissections 1 & 2  (1990), Purgations (flushed) 1 x 10 (1990), Nervenkrankheiten (1990), Live Electronic Dissections 4 / Hyperaesthesia (1990), Eresthisma (1992); Hospital of the Soul #1 (1993) a collaborative project with the group Furt and a 7 CD set Medical Instrumentation  (2003) the latter includes all the cassette releases plus previously un-released material and documentation of performances. .

[28] In 1985, Holloway General Hospital (in close proximity to the IOR) was shutting down its X-ray Department. I passed one day to find a skip full of hundreds of b/w glass plate negatives, which I rescued from oblivion. These images included grim hospital interiors, patients, operations, and a bizarre teaching set with nurses demonstrating the correct use of gowns and masks.  This formed a sort of absurd archive that with other medical items and paraphernalia was used for our live performances.

[29] Peristaltic Sounds of Gastrointestinal Obstruction. 1960. RCA Victor (LP)

[30] Artaud, Antonin., 1926. Le Théâtre Alfred Jarry  (The Alfred Jarry Theatre),

In: Schumacher, Claude., 1989.  (Ed by.)  Artaud on Theatre.  London: Methuen

pp. 29-31

[31] For a detailed overview tracing its origins and main protagonists see Chris Twomey, “Developments from Industrial Music: Noise and appropriation” In: Lander, Dan., & Micah Lexier. 1990. (Ed by.)  Sound by Artists, Toronto: Art Metropole and Walter Phillips Gallery. pp.267-281

[32] Gristle, Throbbing., 1982. Journey Through a Body. Hamburg: Walter Ulbricht Schlfoilen (LP)

[33] Ford, Simon., 1999. Wreckers of Civilisation – The Story of Coum Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle, London: Black Dog Publishing. Chapter 11, p. 9

[34] “There’s no comparison between Throbbing Gristle or Industrial music and Nurse. To me Nurse music is surrealist music. It’s the displacement of something ordinary into an extraordinary setting. I take ordinary things-instruments, solos, what have you, and place them in unusual settings, giving a completely different angle on the way instruments and composition are looked at”. See Keenan, David and Steven Stapleton (Nurse with Wound). (Circa) 1998. Interview [online] Available at:

URL <http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/21/nurse.html&gt; [Accessed date 19.12.2005].

[35] Nicols, Mike., & Elaine May.1962. Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors London: Mercury Records (LP)

[36] Weiss, Allen. S.,1996. “Phonic Gaps and Gasps” text published In: Migone, Christof.,1996. Hole in the Head. Québec City: Ohm/Avatar (CD +booklet)

[37] Migone, Christof., 1999. “Crackers#4” In: LaBelle, Brandon. Steve. Roden,(Eds.)1999. Site of Sound: of Architecture & the Ear. Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press/Smart Art Press (Book + CD)

[38] Gal., 2000. Defragmentation/blue-An audio-architectural exploration of time, Germany: Plate Lunch (CD).

[39] “that is the first thing to remember about radio. It is a fearful medium because we cannot see who or what produces the sound: an invisible excitement for the nerves.” Schafer, Murray. R.  (1987).“Radical Radio” In: Strauss, Neil., and Dave Mandl, (Eds). 1993. Radiotext(e). New York: Semiotext(e) #16 (Vol VI, issue#1), p. 292

[40] Speaker, stain, silence (2005). Prefix Gallery, Toronto as part of AGM 05 -SILENCE (hosted by SOUNDplay festival) September 2005. In this piece the passage occurred from secret space to radio space in terms of performative body becoming radio body.  See my previous essay “Speaker, stain, silence”  (Module ELA4902), p. 19

[41] Danger in Paradise (1987-1994) CKUT-FM, Montréal – material derived from this show is included on the CD that accompanies. the recent monograph Christof Migone  – Sound Voice Perform  (2005). See also Bibliography.

[42] For a detailed overview of Swiss noiscians: Rudolf Eb.er, Runzelstirn & Gurglestock, Schimpfluch Gruppe, Sudden Infant. See Daniel, Drew., 2003. Aktion, Time, Vision – Schimpfluch Gruupe. London: The Wire. Issue #227. Jan 2003. pp 20-25

[43] The “One hour as” series was a unique show that allowed (sound) artists the opportunity to create a new work within the format “[duration] as [you complete]”. This also allowed for live studio and networked performances. See also http://www.resonancefm.com and Selected Discography.

[44] Weiss, Allen. S., as quoted In: Various. 1996. (Curated by Allen S. Weiss),.Voice Tears, (in conjunction with TDR: The Drama Review (T151) Experimental Sound and Radio) (CD)

[45] Here I refer above all to the use of embodiment/disembodiment experimented in “Speaker, Stain, Silence” and the piece Hospital/Radio that preludes to the idea of Hospital Radio as an imaginary space, as recording itself.

[46] Apple, Jacki   “The Art of Radio”, In:Strauss, Neil., and Dave Mandl, (Eds), 1993. Radiotext(e). New York: Semiotext(e) #16 (Vol VI, issue#1) p307

[47] Weiss, Allen. S., 1995. Phantasmic Radio, Durham and London: Duke University Press. p7