“Experiencing Radio at the Interface: Preserving the Past and Designing the Future of Radio.”

In this short essay, I discuss various meanings of “interface,” borrowing from fields such as software design, human/computer interaction, and music technology, and I consider ways in which the metaphor of “interface” could benefit the study of radio. As radio shifts from the one-to-many, temporally dependent medium of terrestrial broadcasting to the many-to-many, play-on-demand media of podcasts, Internet radio, and other emerging forms, considering the variety of interfaces at play in radio will help scholars and archivists to study, preserve, and perhaps recreate the phenomenological experience of radio in its various forms and transmutations.