Static!

According to the dictionary the noun static is defined as crackling or hissing noises on a telephone, radio, or other telecommunications system. My own definition is that sound that makes all the music we used to hear on the radio real! I don’t know about you but when I was growing up in Northern Florida, there was no time in the year that you couldn’t hear the faint snap crackle and pop of static in the background of our favorite songs while they were being played on the radio. Of course this was when AM radio was king and everything was recorded on vinyl which had a “static” all of its own.

Maybe up north, there was no static on the radio but down near ground zero for the highest level of storm fury, there was always static. It never occurred to me to be annoyed by static’s interference with my favorite tune of the day. In fact, I sort of missed static when playing a song off of vinyl. Somehow it didn’t seem so alive, you know; kind of flat and well, “static” in the sense of the adjective “lacking in movement, action, or change.” Sure there were scratches and pops on vinyl but they always came in the same place on the song and my mind integrated them with the percussion or rhythm lines in the song. It became part of the performance.

But static coming from the atmosphere or as we used to call it back then, the Ether, was random and changed from a weak background noise in the dead of winter to almost as loud as the tune itself when a summer storm was lashing the earth nearby. I’m not saying that I enjoyed loud static; I didn’t, especially if it was too much and I couldn’t hear the song that was playing, but when it was just the right amount it added something to the pleasure of the listening experience.

What was the perfect static to me? It was the static that came from distant thunderstorms late on a humid afternoon. Just around sundown, you could see the flashes of “heat lightning” far off near the horizon accompanied by a burst of static on the radio. One never heard the actual thunder that was audible to those closer to the storms. And that was fine with me. What stands out in my memory is sitting in the car at a drive in movie listening to the radio as twilight deepened and the time the movie would start was approaching. Anticipation of the start of the movie increased when you could hear the radio station switch from the day time to the night time power levels. Most of the time that meant that the static would get louder relative to the music, but in my memories when the radio station was WAPE and the movie was the Lowes Normandy Drive in, the music got louder instead. That unusual condition was because the drive in was much closer to The Big Ape’s night time transmitter a little farther out the highway than it was to the day time tower down in Orange Park.

Back in the AM days, the FCC required the announcer to constantly monitor the transmitter, usually done by having a radio plugged into the speakers and headphones that we used. I quickly developed a sense of space and distance present in the sound of my own voice when it came back to me drifting over a low bed of static. It was almost a mystical experience as if I was being blended into the natural noise of the Ether, surrounding the earth. Almost as if my music and I were becoming part of the Earth’s song. I could feel my voice driving down the telephone line and through the hot tubes of the transmitter then pushed up the tower and out into the universe to travel forever across space and time, all because I could hear the crackle and pops of the distant thunderstorms. Some of those storms were in places that I would never see; Cuba, the Bahamas even South America. It made me feel more alive and connected to my listeners than I ever would on the pristine, static free signal of an FM or digital station.

Because of the delays in FM and digital broadcasting, it is not practical for the DJ to listen to the output of the transmitter; instead we rely on monitoring the output of the audio console that we are using to mix the different elements of our programs; microphones, CDs or Audio Files, telephones, ETC. We hear the pure, unprocessed sound but not really what the audience hears. I know of at least one DJ that disliked not hearing the station’s processing of the audio that was fed to the transmitter that he convinced the station engineer to build a second identical audio processing train that fed only his headphones.

I admit that sounds a bit extreme, but I completely understand where he comes from. A really good DJ knows how to work the sound processors by slight adjustments of the mixing levels at his or her command and it makes for a slightly better performance. Performance is a really good word for it too. Over the years, thanks to my musical training in high school, I began to think less of operating a console to more like playing a console being similar to the process of playing a piano. And like a pianist on a stage in a concert hall, what he or she hears is what the audience hears in a concert hall. Only my concert hall has a little static in the background.

Unfortunately, in today’s world that can’t happen. On my digital stations, there is processing between my audio console and the encoders that carry the signal out that I can’t hear. The same is true of the FM station where I do my weekly oldies show. Fortunately for both of these, I have the ability to record the shows and listen later to what you hear real-time. I am always amazed at the small differences I hear in these recordings that I did not hear as I did the show. Slowly but surely I can fine tune the actions that I make on the mixer to improve the listening experience; a little more music level here vs. a slightly louder microphone there. But I still miss the ability of doing that on the fly on the old AM stations.

Sometimes, when playing a particular oldie on the FM or the digital stations, if I sit quietly, I can almost hear the crackle of a thunderstorm two states away, I know it is not real and I know my audience can’t hear it, but I can, and that makes me smile. Oh MY!