Speaking to the Dead with Radios
In Speaking to the Dead with Radios, Magz Hall invites audiences into the liminal, highly charged territory of the radiophonic ether through a dynamic presentation encompassing a site-specific sound installation and an electronic live performance. Drawing deep inspiration from early 20th-century spiritualist movements and historical radio sweep practices, Hall positions the radio spectrum not as a mere commercial utility, but as a psychological and esoteric threshold. Rather than seeking to validate or debunk paranormal activity, Hall uses micro-transmitters, custom multi-channel speaker arrays, and raw analog frequency static to deliberately engage the human brain’s instinct for pattern recognition.
This iteration represents a mature structural fusion of themes Hall has interrogated for over two decades. Visitors familiar with her site-specific installation Radio Mind (2011) will recognize her ongoing fascination with early 20th-century psychic research and the aesthetics of divine transmission. Where her acclaimed bookwork Spiritual Radio (2014) physically embedded an FM transmitter into the spine of a telepathic text, this work and installation explodes that transmitter into an immersive, audio environment.
Crucially, the accompanying live performance elements bridge her historical media archeology with the raw, hands-on electronic improvisation with her contemporary feminist sonic intervention art band Hand Jobż. During the live activation, Hall manipulates continuous radio sweeps and analog dials in real time. This immediate, physical interference triggers sudden bursts of auditory pareidolia and apophenia—the cognitive phenomena that cause us to extract human speech and hidden meanings from random static. By coupling a persistent multi-speaker static installation with a volatile, live-modulated performance, Hall completely shifts the focus of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) away from the supernatural. The “voices” we decode are revealed as a profound mirror, reflecting the deep, creative, and complex inner workings of the living mind.
The Radiophonic Ether as Psychospatial Threshold: Media Archaeology, Spatial Installation, and Live Performance for Magz Hall’s Dead Radio
Speaking to the Dead with Radios, a practice-based sound research framework by Dr Magz Hall that intersects acoustic ecology, media archaeology, and cognitive neuroscience.
Presented simultaneously as an immersive sound installation and a live electronic performance, the work contextualizes the history of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and early 20th-century “spiritual telepathy” as fertile ground for exploring the mechanics of human perception. Hall utilizes custom micro-broadcasting networks, localized transmitter sculpture, and raw, real-time frequency sweeps to convert ambient white noise into an active, liminal canvas.
Theoretical Context and Trajectory
Speaking to the Dead with Radios operates as a conceptual and technical lineage extension of Hall’s previous media archaeology projects. Culturally and historically, it builds upon Radio Mind (2011), which investigated the intersections of early telepathic theory and radio wave transmission among Anglican clerics. Methodologically, it scales up the sculptural circuitry of Spiritual Radio (2014), wherein a functioning FM transmitter was bound into archival literature to comment on the absurd disjuncture between early wireless electronics and spiritual promise. In the performance space, the passive archiving of dead airwaves is replaced by an active, tactical manipulation of signal feedback and spectral frequency drifts.
Perceptual and Cognitive Mechanics
The localized spatial sound installation provides a uniform, baseline field of ambiguous acoustic information. The resulting auditory illusions and phantom speech forms illuminate how the brain’s temporal and language networks actively manufacture order out of entropic noise to minimize uncertainty. Ultimately, Hall argues that abandoned analog bands persist as haunted cultural spaces, demonstrating that the ultimate architecture of transcendental communication resides entirely within the live, neuro-auditory systems of the living subject.
Magz Hall 