Airwaves unfolded

Airwaves Unfolded is a piece based on a radio recording produced in the 1960s in Tarija, southern Bolivia, by Radio Universidad de Tarija. The program introduces Indigenous instruments and discusses how they have been intertwined with labour, daily life, and ritual, as well as how new instruments and musical forms developed after Spanish influence.

What drew me to this recording were the instruments’ unstable yet resonant tones alongside the narrator’s voice. The voice carries a sense of responsibility, warmth, and quiet pride, reflecting an intention to preserve cultural knowledge and pass it on to future generations. Although the broadcast was created for its own present moment, it now reaches us as a fragment of cultural memory. I approached the recording not as a fixed historical document, but as material whose meaning can continue to shift over time.

In the process of making the piece, I extracted short fragments of narration and placed them alongside the instrumental sounds to explore new relationships between them. Heavy processing was avoided, with an emphasis on preserving the instruments’ resonance, pitch fluctuations, and texture as they appear in the original recording.

The piano serves as a primary, foregrounded presence throughout the piece, while its recording captures the room’s resonance and ambient qualities as a field-recorded sound. The piano is played using scales and harmonies chosen to closely complement the original sounds, acting as a quiet foundation for the piece. The original radio programme fragments are placed within this piano texture, allowing the voices of the past and the present performance to intertwine gently.

During the production process, I also researched the instruments featured in the programme and their historical and social contexts. While engaging with a field recording from a culture different from my own, I continued to reflect on what I am actually hearing and what I may be imagining. Airwaves Unfolded takes shape as a space in which voices from the past gently touch the present.

Bolivian radio programme on folk music reimagined by Masako Yokouchi (Sonotant).

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds