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Artist Research Gregory Whitehead

Before working on Best Partners, I spent a while digging into radio art as a field, and that’s how I came across Gregory Whitehead. He’s one of those figures you just can’t skip. He’s American, based in Massachusetts, and his practice sprawls across writing, radio production, sound art, text‑sound poetry, playwriting, and media philosophy. Allen S. Weiss has called him an important voice in sound art and radio art, and Wave Farm places him squarely as a key figure in the revival of radio art since the 1980s.

The first piece of his that really got under my skin was On the Shore Dimly Seen (2015). I’ll admit I got the subject wrong early on in my research—I had it mixed up with something about the Titanic. Actually, the piece is built directly from the interrogation logs of Guantánamo Bay detainee #063, which Time magazine first published in 2005. Those logs document, in excruciating detail, month after month of sensory assault using loud music. Whitehead himself explained what pushed him to make the work: “In reading this complete log of documented abuse over many months, I was shocked by the sustained use of loud music to assault the detainee’s senses; in particular the use of the national anthem ‘The Star‑Spangled Banner’—during which the detainee was ordered to stand at attention, with his hand over his heart.” He went on to say that the texts “provided me with both a title, and a commitment—to break the appalling silence around the no‑touch torture regime imposed at the Guantánamo camp.” In the piece, Whitehead reads the interrogation logs, actress Anne Androne reads an approved list of torture techniques and a brief history of no‑touch torture, and vocalist Gelsey Bell’s improvisations “both embody and exorcise the brutal logic behind the texts.” The piece was shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Italia.

The more I looked into his work, the clearer it became that Whitehead and the 1940s radio drama series Quiet, Please (which I was also researching at the time) are basically opposites in one fundamental way. Cooper’s silences in Quiet, Please come from a place of narrative technique—he deliberately pulls sound away and lets the listener’s imagination fill the gap. It’s a carefully controlled dramatic tool, and the creator always knows exactly what he’s doing. Whitehead is different. His handling of silence isn’t a technique choice; it’s a judgement, a position. In On the Shore Dimly Seen, he’s not just telling a story about torture. He’s using sound to place you directly inside that interrogation room, turning you into a witness, maybe even an accomplice, with absolutely nowhere to escape.

This way of working connects to a wider aesthetic that runs through his practice. An academic study of his early works from the 1980s points to “interference” and “entropy” as key aesthetic and structural elements. His approach has been described as showing a “deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium of poetic navigation and free association,” and his pieces often “interweave documentary and fictional materials into playfully unresolved narratives.” Across his sound and text‑sound works, he explores “the tension between continuous pulse and sudden bursts of rupture, and the entropy and decay of language.” In an interview, he once said that his starting point for radio was to treat it as “an adventure,” not as a delivery system for information. Another line of his that I’ve never forgotten: “A good radio programme invites the listener to navigate.”

Whitehead has been making sound work since the 1980s. He was active early on in the cassette culture scene, with pieces like Disorder Speech (1985), Display Wounds (1986), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1987), and The Pleasure of Ruins (1988). His 1985 piece Dead Letters runs 56 minutes and starts from New York City’s “Dead Letter Office”—the department that handles undeliverable mail—then follows a team of decipherers as they attempt “longed‑for yet perhaps doomed communications,” spinning out an associative narrative about sound, language, and breakdown. Among his best‑known works are Pressures of the Unspeakable (1992, which won the Prix Italia), Shake, Rattle, Roll (1993), and The Thing About Bugs (1995, made with Christof Migone). From around 2000 onward, he’s produced a lot of features and documentary essays for BBC Radio, including The Marilyn Room (2000), American Heavy (2001), The Loneliest Road (2003), and No Background Music (2005). The Loneliest Road won a Sony Gold Academy Award, with the jury calling it “a masterclass in sound.”

In 1992, together with Douglas Kahn, he edited an important collection of essays called Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant‑garde, published by MIT Press. The book directly addresses what they saw as the “most conspicuous silence” in contemporary theory and art criticism around the history of sound and radio art. It brings together original essays and translated texts on figures and movements like Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp, the Russian avant‑garde, French Surrealism, the German Neues Hörspiel, and William S. Burroughs’ cut‑up ventriloquism. The title itself—“Wireless Imagination”—feels like it contains the whole core of Whitehead’s creative life.

After really spending time with his work, I got a much sharper sense of what I was trying to do myself. For me, Whitehead’s work and Quiet, Please represent two very different kinds of force. Quiet, Please showed me technical precision—when to pull sound away, for how long, in what way. These things can be precisely controlled as narrative tools. Whitehead showed me something else: on top of technique, a person who works with sound can have a stance, a set of judgements. Sound can respond to what’s actually happening in the world right now. Both of these things stayed with me. Later, when I wrote the script for Best Partners, I took from Cooper the ability to use silence as a narrative device. From Whitehead I took a different lesson: if you make work with sound, you can’t just care about sound itself. What you choose to let people hear, and what you choose to keep silent—those choices reveal where you stand. Our little 12‑minute‑32‑second piece doesn’t carry anything like the political weight of Whitehead’s work, but in those two seconds of silence after the grandmother tells the truth, in that empty space I insisted on leaving open, I used something he taught me.

Sources

1 Gregory Whitehead, artist statement for On the Shore Dimly Seen, gregorywhitehead.net.
2Wave Farm, “Gregory Whitehead,” wavefarm.org.
3 Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio, Duke University Press, 1995.
4 Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant‑garde, MIT Press, 1992.
5Prix Italia 2015 shortlist, prixitalia.rai.it.
6Sony Gold Academy Award citation for The Loneliest Road, radioacademy.org.
7Various academic analyses of Whitehead’s early tape works, including discussions of interference and entropy in his radiophonic practice.

Artist Research: Gregory Whitehead

Before working on Best Partners, I spent a while digging into radio art as a field, and that’s how I came across Gregory Whitehead. He’s one of those figures you just can’t skip. He’s American, based in Massachusetts, and his practice sprawls across writing, radio production, sound art, text‑sound poetry, playwriting, and media philosophy. Allen S. Weiss has called him an important voice in sound art and radio art, and Wave Farm places him squarely as a key figure in the revival of radio art since the 1980s.

The first piece of his that really got under my skin was On the Shore Dimly Seen (2015). I’ll admit I got the subject wrong early on in my research—I had it mixed up with something about the Titanic. Actually, the piece is built directly from the interrogation logs of Guantánamo Bay detainee #063, which Time magazine first published in 2005. Those logs document, in excruciating detail, month after month of sensory assault using loud music. Whitehead himself explained what pushed him to make the work: “In reading this complete log of documented abuse over many months, I was shocked by the sustained use of loud music to assault the detainee’s senses; in particular the use of the national anthem ‘The Star‑Spangled Banner’—during which the detainee was ordered to stand at attention, with his hand over his heart.” He went on to say that the texts “provided me with both a title, and a commitment—to break the appalling silence around the no‑touch torture regime imposed at the Guantánamo camp.” In the piece, Whitehead reads the interrogation logs, actress Anne Androne reads an approved list of torture techniques and a brief history of no‑touch torture, and vocalist Gelsey Bell’s improvisations “both embody and exorcise the brutal logic behind the texts.” The piece was shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Italia.

The more I looked into his work, the clearer it became that Whitehead and the 1940s radio drama series Quiet, Please (which I was also researching at the time) are basically opposites in one fundamental way. Cooper’s silences in Quiet, Please come from a place of narrative technique—he deliberately pulls sound away and lets the listener’s imagination fill the gap. It’s a carefully controlled dramatic tool, and the creator always knows exactly what he’s doing. Whitehead is different. His handling of silence isn’t a technique choice; it’s a judgement, a position. In On the Shore Dimly Seen, he’s not just telling a story about torture. He’s using sound to place you directly inside that interrogation room, turning you into a witness, maybe even an accomplice, with absolutely nowhere to escape.

This way of working connects to a wider aesthetic that runs through his practice. An academic study of his early works from the 1980s points to interference and entropy as key aesthetic and structural elements. His approach has been described as showing a “deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium of poetic navigation and free association,” and his pieces often “interweave documentary and fictional materials into playfully unresolved narratives.” Across his sound and text‑sound works, he explores “the tension between continuous pulse and sudden bursts of rupture, and the entropy and decay of language.” In an interview, he once said that his starting point for radio was to treat it as “an adventure,” not as a delivery system for information. Another line of his that I’ve never forgotten: “A good radio programme invites the listener to navigate.”

Whitehead has been making sound work since the 1980s. He was active early on in the cassette culture scene, with pieces like Disorder Speech (1985), Display Wounds (1986), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1987), and The Pleasure of Ruins (1988). His 1985 piece Dead Letters runs 56 minutes and starts from New York City’s “Dead Letter Office”—the department that handles undeliverable mail—then follows a team of decipherers as they attempt “longed‑for yet perhaps doomed communications,” spinning out an associative narrative about sound, language, and breakdown. Among his best‑known works are Pressures of the Unspeakable (1992, which won the Prix Italia), Shake, Rattle, Roll (1993), and The Thing About Bugs (1995, made with Christof Migone). From around 2000 onward, he’s produced a lot of features and documentary essays for BBC Radio, including The Marilyn Room (2000), American Heavy (2001), The Loneliest Road (2003), and No Background Music (2005). The Loneliest Road won a Sony Gold Academy Award, with the jury calling it “a masterclass in sound.”

In 1992, together with Douglas Kahn, he edited an important collection of essays called Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant‑garde, published by MIT Press. The book directly addresses what they saw as the “most conspicuous silence” in contemporary theory and art criticism around the history of sound and radio art. It brings together original essays and translated texts on figures and movements like Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp, the Russian avant‑garde, French Surrealism, the German Neues Hörspiel, and William S. Burroughs’ cut‑up ventriloquism. The title itself—“Wireless Imagination”—feels like it contains the whole core of Whitehead’s creative life.

After really spending time with his work, I got a much sharper sense of what I was trying to do myself. For me, Whitehead’s work and Quiet, Please represent two very different kinds of force. Quiet, Please showed me technical precision—when to pull sound away, for how long, in what way. These things can be precisely controlled as narrative tools. Whitehead showed me something else: on top of technique, a person who works with sound can have a stance, a set of judgements. Sound can respond to what’s actually happening in the world right now. Both of these things stayed with me. Later, when I wrote the script for Best Partners, I took from Cooper the ability to use silence as a narrative device. From Whitehead I took a different lesson: if you make work with sound, you can’t just care about sound itself. What you choose to let people hear, and what you choose to keep silent—those choices reveal where you stand. Our little 12‑minute‑32‑second piece doesn’t carry anything like the political weight of Whitehead’s work, but in those two seconds of silence after the grandmother tells the truth, in that empty space I insisted on leaving open, I used something he taught me.

Sources

Gregory Whitehead, artist statement for On the Shore Dimly Seen, gregorywhitehead.net.
Wave Farm, “Gregory Whitehead,” wavefarm.org.
Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio, Duke University Press, 1995.
Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant‑garde, MIT Press, 1992.
Prix Italia 2015 shortlist, prixitalia.rai.it.
Sony Gold Academy Award citation for The Loneliest Road, radioacademy.org.
· Various academic analyses of Whitehead’s early tape works, including discussions of interference and entropy in his radiophonic practice.

There was a thought I couldn’t quite figure out for a while: in radio art, what exactly is sound?

At first, I thought sound was just a carrier of information. Dialogue delivers the plot, sound effects create the space, music heightens the emotion—all tools serving the story. But through the research process and the hands-on experience that followed, I gradually began to feel that this understanding was too shallow.

When I listened to Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen, what moved me most wasn’t any specific line of dialogue. It was the process of the Morse code gradually blurring beneath the ocean waves, eventually being swallowed whole. It didn’t just tell a story about lost connection—it made you experience lost connection directly. Those few seconds of the signal fading told you what it means to lose contact more immediately than any explanation ever could.

Later I realised that this is the most fundamental difference between radio art and other narrative forms. In film and television, time is an accessory to the image. Editing can jump back and forth. But in radio art, time is the sound itself. The rises and falls, the loud and soft, the fast and slow, the pauses—they all trace a continuous, flowing line of time. The listener is held on that line. You can’t pause it, you can’t skip it. You just have to follow the sound, second by second, forward. That feeling of being carried along by time—no other medium can give you that.

This had a big impact on how I wrote the script for Best Partners. I started consciously thinking about how time was distributed. When should the dialogue rhythm speed up—like that section where Xiao Liang and Ken talk over each other, the tension of words chasing words coming not from the content but from the rhythm itself? And when should everything slow down, or even stop altogether—like those two seconds of silence, not there because the blank space looks nice, but because at that point, both time and emotion needed to take a breath.

I also started to respect the independent value of sound materials. The sound of Da Lin flipping through folders—it doesn’t just tell you he’s looking at something. The very texture and rhythm of that sound conveys a sense of order and control. Xiao Liang’s backpack sounds chaotic, ungoverned—those noises are an emotion in themselves. I began learning to use sound itself to shape the emotional arc within time.

If my earlier understanding of radio art was “telling stories with sound,” now I’d rather say it’s using sound to carve out a stretch of time. Whether you carve well or not isn’t measured by how much information each sound explains. It’s about whether, within that stretch of sonic time, the listener was truly drawn in. Whether there was a moment when time itself seemed to stretch a little longer, or contract a little shorter. That’s the magic of sound and time, and it’s what I most want to keep exploring.

Before making Best Partners, my idea of radio art was pretty simple. I thought it was just about having people talk, adding some music, layering in environmental sounds, and making the story clear. Sound was a tool. Dialogue was the lead.

Then I did some research. I listened to Gregory Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen and Wyllis Cooper’s Quiet, Please, and I realised how narrow my thinking had been.

Those two works showed me that the most distinctive thing about radio art, what sets it apart from other narrative forms, is its relationship with the listener. Film bundles image and sound together and delivers them straight to you. You sit there and receive it. But radio art can’t do that. It only gives you sound. The images have to be built by the listener themselves. What kind of light the desk lamp casts, how big the room is, whether the person’s face is sad or frozen in shock—all of that is drawn stroke by stroke inside the listener’s mind. It’s actually a very deep kind of collaboration, one that demands more participation from the listener than any other medium. And Cooper taught me something else: silence in a sound work is not the same as emptiness. He could give you an entire scene with nothing in it—just breathing and pauses—but that silence has a weight to it. It pushes you forward, makes you lean in, makes you think. It’s not laziness, not a failure to fill the space. It’s a kind of courage. It’s choosing to swallow back an emotion that’s already risen to the throat, and handing that space, untouched, to the listener.

I carried both of these things into the making of Best Partners.

When I wrote the script, I started consciously thinking about which moments should be told through sound, and which moments should simply say nothing. The sound of Da Lin flipping through folders, the chaotic clatter of Xiao Liang’s backpack zipper—these weren’t designed to fill the background. Their purpose was to use sound directly to lay the two characters’ personalities in front of the listener. You close your eyes, you hear the crisp efficiency of paper being handled and the messy rattle of a bag being rummaged through, and you know exactly what kind of people these two are—no dialogue needed. And the pause after the grandmother reveals the truth—we agreed on two seconds, no more, no less—that came straight from what I learned from Cooper. At that moment, where language couldn’t reach, sound didn’t have to rush in. Silence itself could be the moment where emotion is fullest.

Looking back on the whole process, my biggest takeaway is this: radio art is not storytelling with your eyes blindfolded. The very thing that makes it special is that it gives you only sound. And that limitation is not a shortcoming—it’s a unique kind of freedom. When the creator doesn’t fill in every line, that’s when the listener has room to step inside. The best radio art is not a monologue from the creator. It’s a single breath, completed together by the creator and the listener.

While researching On the Shore Dimly Seen, I also came across another sound work—Wyllis Cooper’s 1947 radio drama series Quiet, Please. There’s an episode in the series called Nothing Behind the Door, and the opening stopped me cold the first time I heard it. No dramatic sound effects, just a man speaking in a low, tense voice. It sounded like he was wrestling with himself, or maybe facing off against something unseen. The whole passage was almost empty of sound. The background was bare, just the faintest electrical hum here and there. The rest was all breathing and pauses. I remember thinking, why does nothing happening make me turn the volume up and lean in closer?

That was the most immediate thing Quiet, Please gave me—it showed me that silence doesn’t have to be emptiness. It can be a presence with its own weight. Cooper practically made the listener’s imagination a co-writer. He didn’t fill everything in. He left space, and let the person listening do the guessing, the fearing, the filling. There was nothing behind that door, but every listener painted the most terrifying thing there in their own mind. That kind of courage—the courage to not give you something to hear—felt completely new to me. I hadn’t realised that a sound maker could trust the audience that much.

Later, when I started writing the script for Best Partners, I kept coming back to that thought. Our piece is a light comedy, not horror, but I really wanted to use that same sense of “leaving room.” After the grandmother reveals the truth, I insisted on a moment of total silence. Ken worried that if it went on too long, listeners would think the audio had cut out. QDY also reminded me that it would affect the timing of the music’s re-entry. I told them that what I’d heard in Quiet, Please had taught me something—that kind of blank isn’t a mistake. It’s an entrance for the listener to step through. In the end, we settled on two seconds. Nobody said anything in those two seconds, but I think that’s the moment when Xiao Liang’s heart churns hardest, and it’s one of the things I’m most satisfied with in the whole script.

If On the Shore Dimly Seen taught me to use noise and silence as material, Quiet, Please taught me something else—to trust the weight of what’s left out, and to place it at the most crucial turning point. These two works, one from the 1990s avant-garde radio art scene, the other from a 1940s commercial radio drama, opened up two different directions in my understanding of sound, one after the other, before I ever started making Best Partners. And in those 12 minutes and 32 seconds that Ken, QDY, and I eventually made together, there are traces of both of them in many places.

Before making Best Partners, I spent some time researching radio art and earlier sound works. During that process, I came across a piece that left a deep impression on me—Gregory Whitehead’s 1995 work On the Shore Dimly Seen. This piece uses the wireless telegraph communications from the sinking of the Titanic as its source material, weaving together fragmented Morse code, muffled underwater echoes, indistinct spoken words, and sudden cuts into silence. The first time I listened to it, what struck me most was its handling of silence: the radio signals had been sounding all along, and then suddenly there was nothing. Those few empty seconds hit harder than any sound could. I remember thinking, in a sound piece, a moment without speech or noise could carry that much weight. He also treated signal interference and distortion as narrative elements in their own right—not as flaws to be cleaned up, but as a way to express the difficulty of communication between people. This approach felt completely fresh to me, because I had never considered that noise itself could tell a story.

Later, when we started working on our own project, Best Partners, those insights stayed with me and kept shaping my decisions. For example, Whitehead treated the sound environment as a character, and that made me think: Xiao Liang and Da Lin have completely opposite personalities, so their sonic environments should be different too. Whenever Da Lin appears, you hear crisp, efficient sounds like flipping through folders. Xiao Liang, on the other hand, almost always enters accompanied by chaotic noises—a stuck backpack zipper, things dropping on the floor. These sonic distinctions lay out their personalities in an immediate, auditory way, for both the other character and the listener, without needing any extra lines of dialogue to explain. This idea shares a common thread with the clash between clear signals and noisy interference in On the Shore Dimly Seen, except I translated that conflict from technical signals into the everyday sounds of life.

What influenced me most was the use of silence. I felt a strong urge to leave a moment, right after the grandmother reveals the truth, where everything and everyone simply stops. I asked QDY how many seconds would work there. She said it couldn’t be too long, or the music wouldn’t be able to re-enter smoothly. Ken also said that too long a pause might make listeners think the audio had cut out. But we all felt that without a pause at that moment, the emotion wouldn’t have space to turn. In the end, we settled on two seconds. Those two seconds were something On the Shore Dimly Seen taught me—sometimes the moment that moves listeners most isn’t about what you add, but what you choose to withhold. When the sound suddenly disappears, the listener’s own heartbeat and breathing get pushed to the foreground, and they start filling in all the unspoken things inside their own mind.

Although the two works ended up with entirely different emotional registers—Whitehead’s is tragic and filled with lost connection, while ours is warm and pulls back towards reconciliation—I’m very clear that my understanding of sound was opened up by that earlier piece. Doing the research first, then getting my hands dirty, meant that throughout the writing and recording process I carried a quiet awareness: sound is not decoration. Where language cannot reach, sound can go; and where sound cannot reach, silence can go. A lot of what lies at the heart of our Best Partners actually came from there.

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