Page - 41 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Patricia Jäggi | Cosmopolitan Noises 41 associating listening. Descriptions which came close to Chion’s notion of reduced listening could also be found. In reduced listening the ear focuses on the “traits of the sound itself” (Chion 1994, 29). For example when the voice and its prosodic elements were focused the descriptions approached reduced listening: “louder voice, the voice springs up, nearly somersaults, sounds extremely excited as he forgets to breathe.” This was the voice of a reporter who, with three other men, went down an icy bob sled run. Through the relistenings of the same sounds and in the manner of a palimpsest, I crafted so-called Wahrnehmungsprotokolle (WP, listings of perception). The only difference to a palimp- sest is that you leave everything you have written down before and weave the new impressions in-between the former ones. These WPs not only served as a basis to analyse the archival mate- rials in depth, but they also provided a sensitisation training. It was interesting to observe that when my descriptions left the safety of the semantic and causal area, they tended to grasp moods that were generated by spoken words, music, and also different noises. The initially boring archival findings suddenly acquired their own appeal, and their atmospheric qualities attracted my perception. Following some extraordinary findings, I would like to show how the programmes were also ‘made’ to attract and provide unique atmo- spheres (Böhme 2017), and how the Swiss Shortwave Service tried to make a Swiss atmosphere. In the sound archive: Making atmospheres Swiss The Swiss Shortwave Service wished for Switzerland to be seen as a modern, industrially and technically advanced country, while also celebrating its unique local aspects. The Swiss Short- wave Service positioned itself as ‘the voice of Switzerland’, aiming to attract listeners inter - nationally, inform them about Switzerland, and spread a positive image of the country. Accor- ding to their strategy, the Swiss international radio favoured traditional Swiss folk music to represent the country sonically (Padel 1957, 44-46). Thus, making the atmosphere sound Swiss was an important part of programme design. Local sounds served to differentiate the broad- caster in an international listeners’ market from competitors such as the British, the US-Ameri- can, the Canadian, Dutch or Australian international radio broadcasters. One day I realised that more elaborate programmes that often portrayed Switzerland as an alpine nation repeatedly included outdoor recordings. The Swiss international radio also experimented with other local tunes for their programmes than claimed in the official strategy. In addition to these reportage-like feature programmes, I found bruitages, collections of field re- cordings which were used as sound effects. Both give evidence of the Swiss Shortwave Service’s experimentation with using the local soundscape of Switzerland to make sonic atmospheres Swiss. The archive of the Swiss Shortwave Service holds pictures documenting how such out- door recordings were made. The first picture shows an interview taking place in front of an archaeological site in 1956. Here a car was still needed as battery power. The second picture is an example of a reporter recording a goat bleating during a folklore event taking place in the late 1960s. His portable audio recorder is still quite big compared to the 1980s version of a cassette recorder carried by the reporter in the third picture, who was looking for Swiss emigrants in the Brazilian rainforest.