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Luke Stadel

Abstract

Media theorists and historians have long posited a genealogical connection between radio and television, with the idea of television as “radio with images” a common trope in scholarly understandings of the relationship between the two. Although recent scholarship has produced a more sufficiently historical understanding of the industrial, cultural, and technological connections between radio and television in the American context, the way radio influenced the development of sound norms for television remains largely unclear. Rather than assuming that television simply illustrated the silent genres of radio, adding image to an otherwise blind medium, this article uses the model of perceptual technics to analyze the development of aesthetic standards for American television, offering a historicized view of the way television could be said to have inherited the aesthetic mantle of radio. Specifically, this article challenges the way “flow,” Raymond Williams’s influential postulation of the experience of American television, has underpinned models of experience attributed to television sound. In place of flow, this article posits noise as the most significant influence of radio on early television. Concern over noise, a defining aesthetic trait of AM radio, marked historical discussions over the standardization of aesthetic parameters for American television, a fact that can be seen clearly in the proceedings of the National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) hearings of 1940 and 1941. In setting maximal allowances for the presence of noise in both image and sound transmission channels, the NTSC provided a technological basis for the way television would come to be understood during the network era as a “cool” medium, a medium marked by partial fidelity and significant levels of noise.

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