Essays

WFMU

I am writing a book on New Jersey independent listener-supported freeform radio station WFMU and alternative media for music in America. I post about my research on my blog.

“Freeform Radio and the History of Music Streaming,” in The Oxford Handbook of Radio Studies, edited by Michele Hilmes and Andrew Bottomley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 22-40. – About WFMU’s early experiments in “streaming” music via telephone, gopher, and the web in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Provincializing Spotify: Radio, Algorithms and Conviviality,” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 18, no. 1 (2020): 29-42. — About the Free Music Archive.

“The Past and Future of Music Listening: Between Freeform DJs and Recommendation Algorithms,” in Radio’s New Wave, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2013), 62-76. — About WFMU’s relationship with music recommendation apps.

Podcast Interview

In November 2023, I was interviewed on Mack Hagood’s Phantom Power podcast, talking about radio audiences, freeform radio station WFMU, and the plundering of open source software movements by big tech.

Image: Cover for WFMU newsletter, Lowest Common Denominator (LCD), for Summer 1986.

Sound and AI

As a context for my research on listener-supported freeform radio, I am researching algorithmic music recognition, recommendation, and mastering. My WFMU essays elsewhere on this site also tackle music recommendation issues.

with Jonathan Sterne, “Tuning Sound for Infrastructures: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Cultural Politics of Audio Mastering,” Special Issue “Infrastructural Politics,” Cultural Studies 35, no. 4-5 (2021): 750-770.

with Jonathan Sterne, “Machine Learning in Context, or Learning from LANDR,” Social Media + Society 5, no. 2 (2019): 1–18.

“Shazam: The Blind Spots of Algorithmic Music Recognition and Recommendation,” in Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps, ed. Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 257-266.

Image: Two panels of the five-panel “Silence” xkcd comic by Randall Munroe.

Film Translation

I research live translation of sound films–also called “live dubbing,” “simultaneous film translation,” and “spoken cinema”–as a key infrastructure for transnational circulation of cinema, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere outside the West, during the Cold War.

“On Soviet Spoken Cinema,” in Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Networks, Exchanges, ed. Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022), 157–75.

“The Liberation Politics of Live Translation,” In Media Res, October 30, 2020.

“The Liberation Politics of Live Translation: Global South Cinemas in Soviet Tashkent,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 4 (2020): 183–88.

“The Politics of Translation at Soviet Film Festivals during the Cold War,” SubStance 44, no. 2 (2015): 66–87.

“Listening to the Inaudible Foreign: Simultaneous Translators and Soviet Experience of Foreign Cinema,” in Sound, Music, Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, ed. Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 162-178.

Talk

“The Politics of Film Translation,” Conference “Saving Bruce Lee — African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy”, HKW — Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 20, 2018.

Image: A scene from Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (1981), where a local interpreter translates a French sound film into Wolof live in colonial Senegal.

Cinematic Diplomacy

In several articles, I trace film festivals as instruments of cultural diplomacy and national liberation during the decolonization era. These anticolonial cinema networks became precursors and counterpoints to the post-1968 influential militant “Third Cinema” movement.

“Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the Soviet Union, and Cold War Circuits for African Cinema, 1958–1978,” Black Camera 13, no. 2 (2022): 451–73.

“Ascesa e caduta della diplomazia sino-sovietica dei festival cinematografici, 1957-1966 [The Rise and Fall of Sino-Soviet Film Festival Diplomacy, 1957-1966],” trans. Francesco Pitassio, Cinema e Storia: Rivista di studi interdisciplinari 10 (2021): 87–103. In Italian. English original appended at the end.

“An Air Map for World Cinema: Aeroflot as an Infrastructure for Cinematic Internationalism,” Special Issue “The Union of What? Soviet Internationalism Thirty Years after the Fall of the USSR,” Russian Review 80, no. 4 (2021): 661–80.

“Cinema in the Spirit of Bandung: The Afro-Asian Film Festival Circuit, 1957-1964,” in The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas, ed. Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu, and Katherine Zien (London: Routledge, 2021).

“World Cinema at Soviet Festivals: From Cultural Diplomacy to Personal Ties,” Studies in European Cinema 17, no. 2 (2020): 140–154.

Image: A Soviet poster for an Indonesian film by Bachtiar Siagian, Turang (1957), an audience and critics’ favorite at the Afro-Asian Film Festival in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1958.