Ghost Radio

Around 2008–10, a group of friends and I were collecting any blank cassette tape or answering machine tape we could find—swap shops at dumps across Cape Cod, yard sales, thrift stores, et cetera. We would review the tapes and digitize anything interesting we found. All told, there are about 50 recordings we compiled, ranging from funny, to nonsensical, to sad, and a few karaoke and original songs as well. We dubbed ourselves Found Sound Collective.

My thesis topic (currently titled Ghosts: Exploring Ways In Which We Are Haunted) explores ways we are “haunted” in a broad sense—not specifically in the western paranormal/horror movie sense. Some of my ideas relate to defunct technology and technological ghosts, some about obscuring information and narratives. For Ghost Radio, I have created an FM transmitter that plays the tracks while the transmission frequency changes so the user has to continually adjust the tuner to keep following the recordings. This creates an interactive experience wherein the user chases down the mystery recordings to keep listening. The user also has to compete with existing FM stations being picked up as they adjust the tuner. I am playing with ideas of anti-narrative (because the recordings mostly don't make sense due to the lack of context), ghost as radio broadcast signal decay and the idea of intercepting a lost transmission, and physical technological ghosts by using a 40-year-old car stereo.

The radio itself is the head unit taken from a 1981 Volvo 240. I have chosen this particular automotive head unit because it came from a 240 belonging to a friend that we removed in favor of a cd player with a USB input. I have held on to it for some unknown reason for over 15 years, haunted by it every time I came across it in the various boxes, basements, and storage units I've occupied over that time. This is not someone I am in touch with any longer, so our friendship is now a ghost as well.

The radio is wired to a speaker and power supply hidden inside the mount and controlled by the factory power/volume knob and tuner knob. The FM transmitter setup can also be hidden inside it as well. That system consists of a Raspberry Pi running a Max patch that selects which track to play, sends it to an Adafruit FM transmitter which is being controlled by an Arduino Uno that handles what FM frequency to transmit at, and when to switch between a predetermined set of unused frequencies.

Ghost TV

This project is basically a visual version of Ghost Radio.

An animated typographic sequence plays on a portable television manufactured in 1980 (again, technological ghost). This is made up of fragments from the various found recordings in an attempt to string together an entirely new (although still intentionally vague) narrative.

This project takes the animated typographic sequence created in After Effects and runs it through various distortion filters in Touch Designer. Touch Designer takes audio input from the environment (via the microphone on the laptop running it) and fades or removes some of the distortion to allow the text to be read momentarily. In this demonstration, I am making one singular noise to show how the video reacts, although the parameters in Touch Designer are setup for a noisier environment so the user isn't responsible for making noise and reading the screen at the same time.

The video reaches the analog TV from an HDMI out from the laptop, into a "digital to composite converter" which outputs the video into RCA cables, which then feed the signal to an "RF modulator" which converts the signal to UHF or VHF and outputs to a coaxial cable to hook up to the UHF or VHF inputs on the TV itself.


Created by Seth R. Abrahamson for Networked Interactivity with Dana Moser, Fall 2023, Massachusetts College of Art and Design.