Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America. By Christopher H. Sterling and Michael Keith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, July 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8078-5888-2, $22.50. 336 pages.
Review by Joseph Michael Sommers, University of Kansas

In light of the rapid development in communications over the last decade, it feels unusual to pick up a recent study accounting for the history of FM radio in a twenty-first century dominated by live-streaming internet broadcasts, .mp3s and Steven Paul Jobs’s seemingly ubiquitous contribution to digital media: the iPod. As Lynn Christian notes, “the big question,” in this day and age, seems to be less where the medium of FM broadcasting began, but, rather, where is the once predominant distribution hub of all musical programming headed in a century primed to abandon the airwaves for smaller, clearer, and less ad-driven portable handhelds (x)? What will FM radio’s legacy be as a new millennium ushers in a new medium? Will FM radio remain a relevant participant in the discussion, or will it fall by the wayside like its predecessor, AM radio? In Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America, Christopher H. Sterling and Michael C. Keith suggest that we can focus our understanding of FM radio broadcasting’s future by revisiting the cyclical nature of its past. The book tells a story of the unstoppable will of technology and consumerism forcing the medium’s advancement, followed by the medium’s unwilling self-consumption.This is not to say that Sterling and Keith claim to know, or even speculate thoroughly on, FM’s future. On the contrary, one of the few criticisms that can be lobbied at this masterful investigation into the FM radio story is its lack of interest in the last fifteen years of the medium. While the authors rightly pay respect to analog radio as it enters the final days of its lifecycle—its “decline,” beginning with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (echoing, as they note, AM radio’s death knell with the Communications Act of 1934)—they pay only middling attention to FM’s august years in a terse, truncated montage of a final chapter. This becomes especially evident when this ultra-brief coverage is compared to the replete investigation of FM’s infancy, early struggles, and boon years. Given that their argument hinges on the notion that the digital revolution seems to mirror FMs usurpation of AM radio a half century earlier, it is odd that the authors do not make a stronger connection to the next evolutionary step in the format. In other words, in shirking a greater investigation of the current moment, particularly as it is so well-documented, Sterling and Keith fumble in a manner similar to the AM operators they write about, who did not believe that there was any future in FM transmission. The authors do acknowledge this point, indicating with some sense of wistful nostalgia that they know the end for FM radio is nigh, but that does not mitigate treating the “phase out” years as a somewhat sentimental montage (213).Minor criticisms of their treatment of the contemporary moment aside, this study is far more handsome and replete when documenting the early and middle years, even if it does come up short closer to the present day. Written with a prose as lively as it is erudite, the authors connect the rise of FM broadcasting to a global event and a man—The Second World War and Howard Armstrong—and that man’s struggle to convince American broadcasters to embrace a tiny slice of the band that would eventually come to dominate the spectrum. More importantly, besides simply accounting for the dramatic rise of the medium, theirs is a study that fills a dearth in the research documenting the greater cultural history surrounding the project: FM’s birth in New England; its struggle with corporate AM, Congress, and RCA (a story as dramatic, arguably, as the struggles history suggests occurred between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla); the Eureka! moment of stereophonic sound; and the migration into cities and into automobiles by a swelling American population after WWII. Hundreds of such narratives give the greater pastiche a well-defined and discernable shape. The names and faces are familiar, and the authors use a deft methodology to cover an immensely dense field of personalities ranging from Orson Welles and his famous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 through Sirius’s recent acquisition of Howard Stern, with the narrative tact of a nineteenth-century Russian novelist.In the end, Sterling and Keith make a more-than-commendable, and largely successful, effort to make FM radio’s story reflect a larger socio-cultural relief. They examine FM’s history as a test case for the question of “Who owns the media, and how does that matter?” (5). In recent days, as questions such as these seem to occupy the American zeitgeist across the greater media, Sterling and Keith’s volley into the discussion is a well-considered exploration and response. The authors use FM radio as one such example in order to illustrate George Santayana’s famous dictum concerning the ramifications befalling those who fail to remember their past. That the authors do not prognosticate the immediate future of FM radio is not necessarily a fault as much as a caution, given the speed with which the medium is evolving. Yet, given the otherwise overwhelming successes and merits accomplished in this whirlwind barnstorm across the dial over the course of some eighty years, even Sterling and Keith’s opinions on FM’s future would have been appreciated. As is, the study is marked by an intrepid effort into a history that still floats out into the reaches of space as radio waves. Given the strength of their analysis, superb prose, and generosity of spirit toward the subject matter, Sterling and Keith seem to have spent long nights listening to those broadcasts while composing this fine contribution to the field of communications.