Re-Imagined Radio

A program about radio storytelling

Re-Imagined Radio adapts and shares stories via the radio medium that engage your ears. Listen to a sample of the production "9/11 Radio Stories" below.

Hiro & Liling by Kristina Jones and The Martian Death March by Ernest Kindy X Minus One a Tribute Featuring The Veldt by Ray Bradbury and The Cave of Night by James E Gunn Lone-Green-Challenge: The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, The Challenge of the Yukon A Mighty Span William Conrad: A Tribute to a Great Radio Voice
Current Episode

Dimension X

Stories in time and space told in future tense

20 November 2023
Season 11, Episode 11
Re-Imagined Radio celebrates Dimension X, a pioneering radio science fiction series that provided the essential radio storytelling DNA for X Minus One, perhaps the most acclaimed science fiction anthology radio series ever broadcast.

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What We Do

Radio Stories that Spark Imagination

Re-Imagined Radio adapts and shares stories via the radio medium that engage your ears. Play out for your mind's eye. And spark your imagination. We share our stories as radio broadcasts, live and/or on-demand streaming, and podcasts. Lots of ways to listen.

Our radio storytelling draws from dramas, comedies, oral and aural histories, documentaries, fictions, soundscapes and sonic journeys, radio and sound art. Each story utilizes the fundamental components of radio storytelling: dialogue, sounds for context and/or effect, and music. We provide stories with cinematic qualities inside your mind. The pictures are better there. The screen is larger, and you are the star.

Our audience is local, and global. We strive to connect with each listener, providing radio stories that are engaging, enduring. Entertaining, informing. This website provides information about our radio stories and the research inquiries behind them.

Re-Imagined Radio was created and is maintained by John F. Barber, faculty with the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver. Barber produces and hosts each episode. LEARN more: mission, background, manifesto, outcomes.

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Re-Imagined Radio: Medium, Storyteller, Narratives, Imagination

Radio as the medium
Sound(s) as the storyteller
Narratives inside listeners' imaginations

Re-Imagined Radio: Mission

Re-Imagined Radio is a not-for-profit community partnership that produces and shares radio storytelling as broadcasts, live and on demand streaming, listening events, and more. In telling and sharing these stories we uncover truths that can restore and bolster our humanity. In listening to these stories we amplify the aesthetics of the telling and support our community auditory-cultural heritage.

Re-Imagined Radio: Background

Re-Imagined Radio was begun in 2013 by John F. Barber as a creative research and community performance project to consider radio as a form of storytelling. Re-Imagined Radio draws from Barber's Radio Nouspace project, an experimental online radio station providing curated, on demand, and broadcast listening opportunities for radio drama and art, and Barber's creative practice with radio+sound art. Each is a form of research-as-practice, action research, and/or practice-based research guided by the Re-Imagined Radio Manifesto.

Re-Imagined Radio: Manifesto

Re-Imagined Radio is a community partnership to provide listening experiences for audiences local and global. We (Barber + community voice actors, Foley artists, musicians, sound artists and engineers, and other creative people) select, produce, and perform stories across a spectrum of radio genres, from dramas to comedies, from oral to aural histories, from documentaries to fictions, from soundscapes to sonic journeys, from radio to sound art. We strive for human interest stories where creative use of sound(s) drives the storytelling. We strive to create images in the minds of listeners through sound narratives and sound design. The desired result: listening and attention becomes more intent. This intimacy helps amplify the aesthetics of stories told with sound.

Our approach to sound-based storytelling is community focused. Through multi-media, sound design, and production Re-Imagined Radio re-thinks, re-mixes, and re-conceptualizes sound-based storytelling so to augment the community listening experience and narrative potentials.

This deeper listening context is important as we believe that radio sparks the imagination like no other medium. Images in our mind's eye, prompted by sound(s), are more compelling, engaging, immersive, interactive than those presented by our highly processed and commercially focused visual culture. The result: old medium, new engagement. Radio as never before heard, or see. Re-Imagined Radio.

Re-Imagined Radio intends to promote broad interest, value, and support for our community auditory-cultural heritage by careful and creative use of the features, affordances, and constraints of radio storytelling.

Re-Imagined Radio: Outcomes

Several outcomes have been realized from research undertaken for Re-Imagined Radio. See "Research" > Outcomes