There Is No Cat - Forward into the past!

Hollering into the void since 2002

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Forward into the past!

Mike Wendland writes in the Detroit Free Press about a man who is bringing original radio drama to the Internet. Inspired by the old-time radio collector phenomenon (I have a few friends who do this), Bob Parsons is creating original radio serials, which are being streamed from AMPCast. Wendland doesn't link to Parsons' web site, but a little digging found it. Wendland focuses on a sci-fi serial called Invasive Species involving giant zebra mussels destroying Bay City, Michigan (hey, my great-grandmother was from Bay City!), but it looks like Parsons has another serial, Ambassador Service, that appears to be a comedy. I haven't had a chance to listen to either of these, but it bears further investigation. I'm delighted to see someone out there with a love of radio. God knows you don't hear this sort of thing on commercial radio in the US today (or even public radio, for that matter). You might hear it a little more in Canada. I remember visiting CBC Radio's studios in Toronto a bunch of years ago and seeing the huge studio they had devoted to recording radio dramas. It was quite impressive, with different areas of the studio capable of producing different kinds of ambience. Given the methodology Wendland describes in his column, where geographically dispersed actors recorded their lines on their own computers, and Parsons stitched them together, I doubt they'll have the kind of production values you can get with a studio like the one in Toronto, but it'll still be fun to listen to.

Posted at 12:46 PM

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio