Introduction

In our third issue of the sixth volume of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, we welcome to our editorial board Dr. Rosa Eberly of Pennsylvania State University. Rosa brings expertise in theories of rhetoric, publics theory, public memory, and sound, and she has been the driving force behind the journal’s special series “Listening to Harry Shearer’s Le Show.” Departing our editorial board is Emma Dillon, the Thurston Dark Professor of Music at King’s College London; we thank her for her service and wish her all the best.In “‘Silence Becomes Something Else’: Cage, Al-Saji, and a Phenomenology of (Sonic) Hesitation,” author Molly Kelly ably scrutinizes Cagean notions of silence and how it equates to a politics of hesitation as advanced by the philosopher Alia Al-Saji. In her phenomenological analysis of Cage, Kelly cites Husserl’s notions of “activity” and “passivity” as a lens through which Cage’s 4’33” might be considered.To listen to silence, then, is to listen to sounds that are often overheard or relegated to the background within everyday listening. In such a framework, the difference between sound and silence is not primarily ontological but phenomenological. In other words, Cagean silence does not approach sound and silence as distinct “objects” or “types” within the soundscape, but as different, co-present valences within a perceptual horizon.Kelly’s framing of Al-Saji’s theories of phenomenology onto 4’33” offers opportunities for both critical reinterpretation and a newly politicized analysis, positing that the famed composition can be better understood by categorizing it as a piece that is bound by its historicity.Thinking specifically about 4’33”, I subsequently argue that a critical phenomenology of Cagean silence not only tasks us with turning toward unintended sounds but also compels us to question how certain sounds come to be the objects of intentional awareness while others are made peripheral. Like Cage, then, Al-Saji’s focus on racializing affect concerns the pre-intentional realm. Unlike Cage, however, Al-Saji makes clear that perception and affect, as pre-intentional or pre-reflective phenomena, are necessarily shaped by historicity and contingency.Author Andrea Smith’s contribution, “A Plague on All Our Houses: How Screens Kept Audio Drama Alive During the Pandemic,” is a succinct examination of how actors and producers, mainly at the BBC and with the Public Theater in New York, adopted online platforms like Zoom to reach audiences who were in isolation because of the COVID-19 pandemic.The style of radio drama has changed hugely over the last century as producers embraced developing technology. However, during the pandemic, this technology went through a step change: For the first time ever, remote working had to be facilitated, as did remote editing and sound effects. Teamwork had to be carried out at a distance, something that would have been considerably more difficult without video-conferencing software. Producers working in both the UK and the USA at this time appear to have found the same solutions to their problems independently of each other, with their productions sharing several technological similarities. Despite this, their end products were quite different, possibly reflecting the different starting points for audio drama in each territory.We are privileged to present the third part of our special series “Listening to Harry Shearer’s Le Show,” guest edited by Rosa Eberly, a rhetorician and faculty member in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University.In “Sonic Gumbo: Reflections on 40+ Years of Harry Shearer’s Le Show,” filmmaker and radio host Tom Roche guides readers on a history of Le Show’s influences. Remarking on the nameless status of Shearer’s initial broadcasts on KCRW, Roche shares:In its first weeks, the program actually had no name: just Shearer playing some of his favorite eclectic tracks and occasionally one or two quickly made satirical bits created with his (already) vast expertise from Credibility Gap and SNL days. After a few weeks, he settled on the name Voice of America for the program. It was assumed that the taxpayer-funded broadcaster in Washington, DC, wouldn’t mind. But word was received that they did indeed mind, and KCRW retired the program title Voice of America.Roche’s overview of Le Show’s history also lays out how Shearer’s unique and multiform talents as the producer, the scriptwriter, the news editor, and the master mimic. For Roche, these are some of essential ingredients that help create the “Sonic Gumbo” of Le Show. But for the author, it is also Shearer’s humanity, his willingness and passion in keeping the format of Le Show mutable in times of need:When Hurricane Katrina hit the region, causing approximately 1,392 deaths from the storm and the failure of the federal levees, Le Show elected to skip over the Who-What-When of traditional journalism. Instead, multiple Le Show episodes looked at the rarely covered Why. Why did the city flood? Why were warnings ignored? Why did a more powerful storm in 1960 cause far less damage? Why are wetlands crucial?Author James J. Brown Jr.’s contribution to the special series is a novel inquiry into the “Apologies of the Week” segment of Le Show. In “Keeping the File Open: Harry Shearer’s Le Show and the Mechanics of Apology,” Brown presents a fascinating look at the “age of apology” that creates connections between the histories of rhetoric and the present state of writing that is generated by artificial intelligence.This reading of apologies and of “The Apologies of the Week” is linked to my long-standing interest in thinking about where rhetoric and computation intersect, in the ways that rhetoric might be seen as a series of “machines (‘whatsits,’ ‘gadgets’) for generating and interpreting arguments” in different situations toward different ends. The rhetorical tradition can be understood as a set of machines that have been built up over millennia. Whether we want to persuade, entertain, enlighten, or apologize, we draw upon this stock of machines, an archive of material and of procedures. Those procedures might be deployed by humans, but it’s not always a human enterprise.We are pleased to present the third part of our special series “Sound History Is Cultural History,” which has been developed by Resonance associate editor Josh Shepperd and his co-editor for this series, Amanda Keeler.In “When to Use Fair Use in Sound Recordings Archiving,” archivists and researchers Brandon Butler, Peter Jaszi, and Patricia Aufderheide present a valuable update to their 2015 study that was supported jointly by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), the Council on Library and Information Services, and the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. Matters pertaining to copyright are complicated, and archivists’ understanding of fair use is an essential component of how the work of generating new culture is undertaken.The complexity of copyright in music creates obstacles for archivists. And whether specific problems are real or imagined, factual or hypothetical, they all create genuine chilling effects on archivists’ core mission. When archivists collect, preserve, catalogue, curate, exhibit, and allow access to sound recordings, they are generating new culture at every point. Their work is just as important to generating new culture as the work of any musician, sound recordist, or producer. The archival mission, moreover, is driven by the larger goal of creating resources available not just for today but for tomorrow, for members of the public who may not exist yet for decades to come.In “The Missouri Model of Radio Preservation: An Interview with Frank Absher,” media historian Michael Socolow presents a valuable history that charts the creation of a media conservation model originated by the veteran broadcaster Frank Absher. While state and federal archives abound, the Missouri model of radio preservation is a novel arrangement. As Socolow notes:The Missouri model comprises an effort to preserve audio, documents, and other ephemera through the collaborative and cooperative work of multiple stakeholders—including commercial broadcasting organizations, universities, nonprofit foundations, and the State Historical Society. As the record of the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) has shown since its inception in 2014, the collection and preservation of public broadcasting materials have generally been more carefully organized and professionally systematized in comparison to commercial radio preservation. There exist numerous reasons for this, yet the Missouri model offers an example of an existing commercial radio audio repository effort that might be duplicated elsewhere.