Seite - 40 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 3/2017

40 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Patricia Jäggi | Cosmopolitan Noises the Anmutung of radio broadcasts. My research fields thus were the production archive of the Swiss Shortwave Service and the Shortwave ether itself. To follow the sensory-atmospheric traces of shortwave radio broadcasting, I interviewed people about their auditory experiences, and also undertook my own listenings. In the follow - ing, I mainly refer to my own listening experiences, which also served as a basis for the listen- ing experiments performed with groups of people. Overall, my methodology was inspired by ‘sensory ethnography’, an anthropological approach that not only looks at the role of the senses in everyday social and cultural practices, but also tries to redefine the role of the researcher according to his/her bodily presence and sensory experience (Arantes 2014, Pink 2009). Taking my case as an example, I tried to use my physical-sensory capabilities in the research field to reconstruct past listening experiences. Here, physical-sensory refers to the neurobiological inter- action between the senses, by which they function, to some extent, synesthetically. Listening to something can trigger various parts of the brain such as vision, memory, or emotions, recalling the German saying that Radio ist Kino im Kopf (radio is cinema in the head). In addition my fine motor skills were challenged when turning the knobs of the various old radio sets on which I tried to find the right frequencies. Ultimately, through my research, my aural and sensory skills have somehow grown in their sensitivity to details and contexts, underscoring the sensory ethnographic research premise that not only the reflecting mind, but also the senses and body learn and adapt through challenges in the field. My first field was the sound archive of the Swiss Shortwave Service and I was methodically challenged to capture my auditory impressions. But when I started my research with archived radio sounds I found myself irritated and disappointed. The digitised programmes from the Swiss Shortwave Service were lengthy, sounded raw, and made me quickly feel bored; it was nothing like today’s radio production, in which several soundtracks with music, text, and other sounds are mixed together to create a complex and rapidly-changing sound experience. This irritation suggests that my listening habits as person in the 21st century are very different from radio listeners from the 1950s to the 1970s – the period I was focusing on. My listening habits hindered my understanding of what I actually wanted to find out. The method I started to use, and which allowed me to widen my auditory horizons, is inspired by techniques of écriture automatique (Breton 2012 [1924]). In automatic writing, one writes down everything that comes to mind. What I practiced was a form of focused auto - matic writing: I concentrated on hearing and wrote down everything I was able to perceive. After that experience, I realised that I needed to listen in a more structured manner. I therefore first transcribed the oral parts – in the words of Michel Chion this mode of listening is called semantic listening (Chion 1994, 28). In the next listenings of the same programme I started to write down ‘the rest’ of what I was able to perceive. Here, the reconstruction of the source of the heard sounds, such as a squeaking sledge in the snow, became the next important mode of listening, which Chion calls causal listening (Chion 1994, 25-28). But sometimes, especially with noisier sounds, the sounds’ source remained vague. Continuing to use automatic writing, homologies with other auditory or other sensory impressions came up naturally in my descrip- tions of what I perceived: something which sounded like a slithering blade, sounded harsh, or made me feel giddy. In other cases memory played a role, noises which reminded me of dis- torted e-guitars or of an event in my childhood. When imaginations were triggered I called it