This course investigates radio as a medium of disembodied presence—an aesthetic, political, and technical form shaped by absence, resonance, and delay. Students will explore radio not only as a platform for communication, but as a speculative space for voicing the unspeakable, relaying the disappeared, and transmitting memory. Engaging with both historical and experimental traditions of radio-making, the course introduces key concepts in transmission art, narrative form, and the ethics of sound storytelling. 

At the same time, we turn to the colonial sound archive—particularly the ethnomusicological and ethnological recordings held at the Phonogrammarchiv and Lautarchiv at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum—as sites where voices were captured, extracted, and silenced through technical mediation.  

These early recordings often foreground the body only in its spectral trace: a voice without breath, a song severed from context. Here, the disembodiment of archival voices meets the ghostly affordances of radio. Across the course, students will consider how radio can be mobilized as a tool for resuscitating archival sound—not to restore what is lost, but to listen anew to its remains. 

Bridging critical theory and artistic practice, students will be introduced to sound studies as method, and to radio-making and sound production as a form of both research and composition. Working with sound archival materials students will develop their own short radio or podcast pieces (10-15 minutes). Students will also explore spectrality in both its technical and philosophical senses—working with audio editing software and AI to "clean” and process archival audio while interrogating what is lost, added, or conjured in the process. What does it mean to restore a voice? What ghosts do we summon in acts of sonic repair? Drawing on hauntological theory, sound art, and AI-inflected composition, students will reflect on the ethics and poetics of listening to absence and the remains. And what kinds of truth or fiction do we transmit in doing so? 

The seminar will explore the following topics and questions as starting point: 

• Radio and transmission art 

• Disembodied voice and the politics of presence 

• Archival recording and the colonial ear 

• Specter and Spectrality in audio editing and hauntological composition 

• Listening as speculative, embodied, and decolonial method 

• Sound storytelling: narrative, abstraction, and dramaturgy 

Students will be asked to contribute and curate their own topics, research questions, and case studies drawing on the seminar theme.