Evocations of the eerie: the acousmatic voice in Canadian radio drama

ABSTRACT

Radio is a medium that traffics first and foremost in disembodied voices. English Canadian radio drama has historically drawn upon the eeriness of the disembodied voice as an aesthetic object, and it has done so in an outsized fashion when compared with other national contexts. This trope of the disembodied or acousmatic voice draws upon a relationship to place defined by an experience of alienation and the conceits of settler colonialism. In radio, it expresses Canada’s unique relationship to technological mediation, given the central role of technology in major nation-building projects and the anxieties that stem from technologically-mediated economic and cultural imperialism from south of the border. The themes of excess, dislocation, and alienation associated with technological mediation and conveyed in the disembodied voice recur throughout nearly a century of CBC radio dramas. This paper attempts to make sense of this trope through Mark Fisher’s conception of “the eerie” as a distinct aesthetic form. It is a form that is shaped by the larger socio-cultural context within which it operates, but which also inheres with the potential to both reproduce and challenge those socio-cultural underpinnings.

KEYWORDS:

• Acousmatic
• disembodied voice
• radio drama
• Canada
• the eerie

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “[Radio] used to be the mainstream in the USA and Australia but lost out to television in the middle to late 1950s. It would seem that at the ABC in Australia, which like the BBC in Britain and CBC in Canada has a monopoly on public funding for radio drama, there has been an abandonment of any popular gestures towards storytelling for large audiences. The CBC has been eminently more imaginative, courageous and cost-effective with public money and produced drama for the mainstream as well as the cultural intelligentsia”. (Crook 1999, 151).

2. The emphasis on English-language radio is significant here as the nation-building project stemmed from Anglophone anxieties and relations to place, as distinct from the Francophone preoccupation with survivance, and eventually maîtres chez-nous.

3. In the stage production of the play (Peterson 1972, 3), the voices are visualised as “short-lived patches of dim light” and are themselves described as “simple, eerie”.

4. More accurately we would call the body of water Kangiqsualuk ilua, Tasiujarjuaq, Wînipekw, or Wînipâkw.

5. The term “scream” seems the most accurate framing, as per the anthology series producer’s account: “Actor John Stocker provided the descending scream”. (Howell 2021. Email message to author, Aug. 27).

6. In similar fashion, “The Dispossessed Daughter” (1989) produced for the BBC’s Fear on Four entails strange sounds picked up over a baby monitor. The initial mystery is soon resolved, though, when we discover the sounds stem from our family’s other child, now deceased, and seeking to displace their newborn. The eeriness dissipates further as we are offered an explanation – the dispossession event corresponds to the pagan holiday of Candlemas.

7. To some extent the “failure of presence” Fisher describes is arguably a feature of listening to low-fidelity recordings from nearly a century ago; the poor audio quality withholds from us an experience that, on account of that withholding, remains ungraspable and elusive; voices failing to never quite fully be present. But the eerie I draw attention to here is more closely knit into the texts themselves, in how they introduce the acousmatic dimension.

8. Across multiple productions of the play, the protagonist moreover is coded as an ethno-racial outsider, given the strong Eastern European accent of the voice actor for the radio play (Peterson 1946) and the casting of the Canadian actor of Afro-Portuguese descent, Percy Rodriguez, in the production for CBC television in 1961.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Follert

Michael Follert teaches sociology at the University of Guelph and Carleton University in Ontario, Canada. His other recent work can be found in the Journal of Classical Sociology and Constellations. Prior to completing his PhD in sociology at York University, Michael worked extensively in Toronto’s film, television and radio industries. Included among his more sound-oriented teaching is an interdisciplinary course on the horror genre in Canada.