RADIO DAY
From the credible to the improbable. Radio between truth and fiction

Simulation and falsification are the central themes of this round table dedicated to radio.

Luciano Pinelli, Director of the Prix Italia, celebrated radio as an essential part of the Prix Italia. The Prix was born as a prize for radio programmes and still numbers the most important radio broadcasters among its members. The second edition of Radio Day was an important moment for reflection and experimentation with the new forms and new meanings of radio, an extraordinary opportunity for operators in the sector, top researchers, authors, and other experts to meet and talk.

Sergio Valzania, director of Radio Due and Radio Tre, stressed the great vitality of this means of communication, which is currently enjoying a moment of significant expansion and high audience appreciation.

Veniero Rizzardi, lecturer in radio direction at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, stated that when reflecting on the radio medium and its creative potential we should try to avoid falling into the nostalgia trap – exalting the obsolete – and concentrate instead on certain characteristics that are at the origin of radio but which at the same time contain indications for the present and a possible future for this medium.

Some of radio’s most memorable moments are connected to the blatant falsification of reality. Orson Welles’ "War of the Worlds" in 1938 and the less well known, but equally sensational French production "Maremoto" of 1924 are examples of simulations which were extremely effective in disguising simulations as truth. And the relationship between the radio medium and the concept of truth is revealed as very different from that of other media and, in particular, television.

Alan Beck of the University of Kent spoke of radio as being suspended between blindness and invisibility, between the concreteness of the word and the imagination. With growing exposure to and consumption of very sophisticated audio products (Dolby Surround, Home Theatre, etc.), listeners in the digital era have developed a sort of "hyper-ear". Today the "ratio of the senses" that McLuhan spoke of in the 1960s has changed and we need new experiences, new forms of listening. We have explored the limits of the word in radio drama and discovered that we cannot fully reach the limits of the unconscious, in the sense of a pre-verbal state, as happens in the theatre and the cinema. In the past a "sparse" form of radio drama prevailed, dominated by the word, but today a new type of "dense" radio drama, characterised by a more filmic style, is emerging. We are dealing with a new aesthetic, which breaks down the boundaries between radio, TV and cinema, and is not afraid to use techniques borrowed from cinema within the radio universe. Radio drama dialogue is now accompanied by emotional music and various sound effects. A new tri-dimensional sound and a new use of symbolism are typical of this phase. The productions of the radio drama director John Dryden, broadcast by the BBC in the last three years, are typical examples of this kind of approach. This "dense" new radio drama is expanding, breaking through barriers and introducing a perpendicular experience to radio (which was previously horizontal, linear), thanks to the fullness of the sound and a new combination of time, space and movement.

Naturally, every radio drama needs both components, the "sparse" and the "dense".

Angela Ida De Benedictis of the University of Pavia underlined the importance of the theme of the listener’s expectations. What do listeners expect when they switch on the radio? What does it mean to them to listen to a product that is offered as a simulation of the real and of reality? The debate on radio has always centred round the two poles of reality and fiction, themes that have been declined differently in the different phases in the history of this medium and that even today can be subjected to very different interpretations. The question which arises with radio about the blindness and invisibility of this means of communication, should be reformulated to take into consideration the potential inherent in this blindness. And this potential should be seen in relation to the falsification not only of a context already in itself false, such as that of the radio drama, but also within the context of information. Today the falseness of radio, or this interference that it can create between reality and fiction, is only possible when radio completely invents a character (for example the character of Jack Folla created by Diego Cugia) or a situation, and not when it tries to represent and reproduce the real as such.

Giorgio Pressburger - Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest, introduced at a very young age to radio by Andrea Camilleri – stressed that the world of sound always reinforces the visual capacity. Even the most fantastic and unreal. The individual begins to have external contact with the world through hearing. Thus cognition of the world probably begins with the voice and perception of it, as is affirmed by the great myths, whether Christian, Jewish, or Hindu.

Discerning sound, and trying to reconstruct the world through sound, develops a great capacity to imagine space and fill it with visions and true perceptions. This connection between sound and vision was at the centre of a period in which radio was the vehicle of important multi-disciplinary experiments involving musicians and composers such as Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono. One such experiment was the attempt to create a visible theatre, a sort of hybrid between theatre and cinema, through pure sound. In other words, they tried to represent a space filled with objects and characters through sound, first monophonic and later stereophonic, finally managing to transform Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting "Children’s Games" into a radio programme. The result was a thirty-three minute programme called "Children’s Games" which reproduced some of the three hundred games depicted in this painting through sound alone. This programme won the Prix Italia in 1971.

Radio has never pretended to tell the truth and the comparison with fiction and the imaginary is part of its intrinsic nature, claimed Olivier Kaeppelin, writer, critic, radio producer and head of cultural programmes for Radio France. The microphone, the recording of the sound, the choice of language, of the volume and the editing are all artifices. Every instrument that radio employs to create meaning produces a mental, intellectual, ideological and artistic construction. And after incidents like the attack on the Twin Towers, questions regarding the relationship between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction, have become central to analysing the significance of this means of communication.

We have to distinguish "reality" from the "real". We call "reality" the means by which we recognise things and give them a name. In this sense reality, in that it is static, does not interest radio. The "real", on the other hand, is always in movement, it is the relationship we have with something material, whether another individual or an object. And it is this that interests radio.

It is also worth reflecting on how to develop a radio creation that is not targeted merely at an elite but at the general public.

It would also be interesting, in today’s political climate characterised by strong social tensions on a worldwide scale, to repeat an updated version of, Orson Welles’ experiment. For example, one could make people believe that the war against Iraq had already begun, in order to see what the reaction would be to such a programme today.

I believe that radio continues to test our ability to create images through which we interpret a continually changing reality. When we listen to the radio we are not located in the present (which is too fleeting to seize) but in a strange time projected between a past reconstructed through memory and a future imagined through the interpretation of what we are listening to.

Radio must continue to experiment in as many directions as possible. That does not necessarily mean inventing something new, but sometimes reinventing what has gone before.

Vincent Tiffon, of the University of Lille-3, addressed the theme of fiction from another point of view, that of the electroacoustic medium. Radio is the origin of all electroacoustic experimentation (the art of recorded sound) which gave rise to acousmatics, a new type of listening – listening to sounds without knowing their origin – which in turn influenced radio drama as a confluence of word, music and noise.

The invention of musical recording, and thus the possibility of recording sound, opened up horizons previously unknown throughout the history of music, marking a decisive passage: music, or rather listening to music, removed from the physical presence of its executor and the musical instruments. The sound object was born. From the "concrete" music of Pierre Schaeffer, which is made up of pre-existing elements, borrowed sonic material – whether noise or traditional music - composed experimentally, through a direct construction, to the beginning of "i-son" (image-sound), of his successor François Bayle, composer and one of the directors of the GRM, "Groupe de Recherches Musicales", it led to a new way of expressing the real through sound.

Acousmatics, using the microphone to isolate sound from its audiovisual context, creates favourable conditions for listening to sound as such and frees our imaginations and perceptions as we listen to the sounds (whether they be dramatic works, narrative, abstract conceptual or musical). And it is here, with this separation between the visual and the sonic, that we find the question of the truth/fiction relationship.

Pierre Lepori, journalist with Radio Svizzera Italiana, described how the birth of Italian Swiss Radio in 1932 coincided with the birth of a professional theatrical tradition. And it is interesting to note how these two events influenced and contaminated each other. Despite being intrinsically connected to the real, radio distanced itself from it by allowing itself to be contaminated by the theatre, initially for a question of dignity, seeing too much realism as something inferior to the cultural role played by other media in different historical contexts. This "theatralisation" of the real, this radiophonic theatre that played with the real, was in a certain sense a failure. It did not manage to establish itself and, meanwhile, theatre itself has changed, going out into the street.

In recent years journalism has invaded every aspect of radio and television. Today reality is falsified by a journalism that has appropriated certain theatrical techniques and turned news into spectacle.

In today’s multimedia world, radio is still a one-way medium, which cannot be subtitled and is thus still able to "provoke" through the ambiguity of the relationship between reality and fiction. In a society dominated by the image, radio continues to challenge the theory of the deception of the image elaborated by Roland Barthes and Edgar Morin. It is not only the image that can betray, sound can too, the sound of a microphone falling in a radio interview, etc. Thus, radio challenges common sense with respect to the world of the media.