UW-Madison Faculty
Location: Humanities 1641
The debate over radio's capacity to create its own unique universe of expression, on the one hand, versus its ability to capture and transmit reality, on the other, goes back as far as its very first theorist, Rudolph Arnheim. In the United States and Great Britain, techniques of live studio production had risen to a height by the late 1930s, using music, voice, and sound effects to create a kind of program celebrated as "pure radio," inimitable by any other medium. Yet a counterforce, linked to slowly developing technologies of recording, sought to capture the voices and songs of working class people in an atmosphere of democracy in crisis. Add a transatlantic element — many of these experiments involved both British and American producers, working in tandem — and the scene was set for a short-lived period of unique experiments in sound that involved writers, composers, and musicians such as Arthur Miller, Archibald MacLeish, Norman Corwin, Benjamin Britten, Bernard Herrmann, Alan Lomax, and Dylan Thomas, as well as newsmen and documentarists such as John Grierson, Pare Lorentz, and Edward R. Murrow.
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