Seite - 50 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 3/2017

50 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Patricia Jäggi | Cosmopolitan Noises This can be explained in comparison with the near absence of noise in the media channels of today’s digital era. Perceiving noise that is generated by the shortwave transmission and recep- tion process offered me a sensory experience of distance that is missing in today’s borderless communication. I also never felt cosmopolitan when youtubing or soundclouding the world. Using an analogue transmission technology like shortwave, one is able to perceive the distance: one hears that the signal had to travel long-distance because it sounds used. It is neither easy to receive nor to keep up the connection with a signal. This is experienced in the constant need for interacting with the apparatus guided by the perceived noises. A polyphony of the squeaking snow from Switzerland and the noises of the radio transmission creates the perceived cosmopo- litan atmosphere. An understanding of cosmopolitanism as a “sense of universal worldliness” (Acharya 2016, 36) is mirrored in a desire for transnational interconnectedness which was ex- pressed in the listeners’ letters. According to the Swiss Shortwave Service they received 21’000 letters per year (Padel 1957, 46). The regular listeners of shortwave radio lived mostly in the countryside. Besides having fewer entertainment possibilities, these listeners may also have had a bigger need to feel connected with people from other countries than people living in the already multicultural and cosmopolitan cities. International radio, with its new listening ex- periences, allowed listeners to be mobile, to travel worldwide by ear. It is an imaginary mobility which was able to produce real experiences of cosmopolitanism. Including the presence and materiality of noise opens up the possibility of including it as a historical and cultural entity in a history and culture of the senses, atmospheres and cosmopolitanisms. Reference List Acharya, Malasree Neepa. 2016. ‘Cosmopolitanism’, in Noel B. Salazar, and Kiran Jayaram, eds., Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements (New York: Berghahn Books), 33-54 Adank, This. 1950. Matterhornbesteigung von Walliser Bergführern mit einem Team des Radiostu- dios Lausanne. Sendung vom Gipfel (Bern: SBC) digitized radio broadcast accessible on data- base <http://www.memobase.ch, Memobase-ID: SRI_CD_HIS_001_Track09> [accessed 08 November 2016] Appadurai, Arjun. 2000. Modernity at Large – Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneap- olis: University of Minnesota Press) Arantes, Lydia Maria. 2014. ‘Kulturanthropologie und Wahrnehmung. Zur Sinnlichkeit in Feld und Forschung’, in Lydia Maria Arantes, ed., Ethnographien der Sinne: Wahrnehmung und Methode in empirisch-kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschungen (Bielefeld: Transcript), 23-38 Attali, Jacques. 2006. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press) Badenoch, Alexander, Andreas Ficker, and Christian Heinrich-Franke. 2013. Airy Curtains in the European Ether: Broadcasting and the Cold War (Baden-Baden: Nomos) Bijsterveld, Karin. 2004. ‘“What Do I Do with My Tape Recorder …?”: Sound Hunting and the Sounds of Everyday Dutch Life in the 1950s and 1960s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24 (4), 613-34 Böhme, Gernot, and Jean-Paul Thibaud. 2017. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (New York, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group)