Classical Convert

P(f)=k

Sometimes I leave my radio tuned between stations. It’s like a mid-20th-century GPS system. The closer I get to home, the clearer the broadcast becomes. At thirty miles out, everything is whirring waves of white noise. At twenty, voices start to swarm below the surface, all oddly shaped and colored, and pushed and pulled and stretched out. At fifteen, the voices slice through the static like a swell torn apart by a breakwater. At ten, as the car snaps around the crest of the closest hill, the last of the whitecaps fall away and disintegrate.

There is something intrinsically fascinating about progress bars, about little flickering percentage signs and numbers. How many times have I watched in torpid enthrallment as a downloading file turns a light-gray bar into a dark-blue bar? Or stared at the microwave for four whole minutes, as it counts down the launch of a plate of chicken pot pie?

The radio-static proximity check is another progress bar, but it’s more beautiful. It’s a parallel journey, it is part of arriving. Hearing the local station identification ritual (“This is WSKG public radio broadcasting on WSQG-FM 90.9 Ithaca,  WSQC-FM Oneonta…”) is almost as defining a homecoming experience as seeing the first minor road with a name you recognize.

I was searching YouTube for radio static related goodies, gave up, and then found this (oddly appropriate) piece by Iannis Xenakis on a different search mission:

I like it. Not quite in the same way as I like Shosty; but I like it.