Experimental Radio Practice – Samantha Simmons

Samantha Simmons – Driving

This piece is about traffic reports given via radio, intimacy and voice, listening memory from hearing names and titles, searching, routine, politeness, and the loneliness of commuting. I often bike through cities using google maps with music playing, and the google voice has become part of the soundtrack and listening experience. Similar to FM and AM radio that broadcasts to a specific distance and influences a certain group of people’s sound memory based on their location: hearing names of streets, places, accents, and languages act as sound marks that trigger a sound memory and a particular time.

In Driving I was thinking about the practicality of radio traffic reports, and how to structure a composition with directions given by voice, for arrangement purposes based on early ideas of collage. I wanted to take something from contemporary commercial everyday mass-culture and use it for aesthetic purposes. The directions serve a new purpose to be used as a collage, copy and pasted, cut up, composition tool.