ARTHUR TAIT
The great scourge of modern television, in many countries, has been the so-called reality show. The title is a misnomer, for the programs do not address reality at all. Rather, they portray artificial situations that are variously confrontational, surprising, competitive, or embarrassing; and they portray the reactions and interactions of the people in them. In all cases, the situations are manifestly contrived.
Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of these telecasts is that they turn the viewer into a voyeur: of other people’s frailties, haplessly caught in the lights. Granted, the participants are there willingly — or so it would seem. But whatever their motives may be (in competitive programs, the motive is greed), their willingness is cynically exploited by the networks: the programs are cheap to produce, but richly profitable in advertising revenue; and to reap those outlandish rewards, the program-makers will go to any melodramatic lengths to heighten the participants’ tension, as individuals, or the friction between them.
In contrast to such spurious “reality”, television and radio documentaries are fundamentally rooted in the actual realities of life, frequently the political and social realities of concern to the citizenry, sometimes the biographical or historical realities that constitute the past we inherit. For the most part, the program content consists of interviews and quotable documents, with the addition, in television, of archival footage and, in radio, of pertinent recordings. The intent of the programs is to explore a subject not wholly familiar to the audience and, in the course of doing so, to raise questions, if not to answer them. When the work is skillfully done, the audience’s grasp of reality is fruitfully enlarged: the viewers or listeners are plunged into a human situation that lies outside their experience but to which they can empathetically relate. This sense of entering into the unfamiliar territory of other people’s lives has more immediate impact, though not necessarily more depth, than similar reflections of reality in print. That impact is a direct product of broadcasting’s ability, not merely to conjure up reality, but actually to reproduce it.
However, it is in radio rather than television that the impact is most striking. To some extent, that is because television is a passive medium, whereas radio is an active medium, enlisting the listener’s creative imagination to be part of the process. But there is also a technical device, in some radio programs, that plants the listener fair and square in the middle of the visited reality: the Kunstkopf.
In the early nineteen-seventies, at the laboratories of the Helmholtz Institute in Berlin, acoustical scientists invented, and eventually marketed, a revolutionary system of surround-sound recording, to which they gave the name Kunstkopf. A Kunstkopf is a lifesize artificial head (hence the name) made of solid black rubber. On the sides of the head are two carefully sculpted outer ears; and leading in from them, to the interior of the head, are two narrow tubes like the eustachian tubes in a human head. At the interior end of each tube is a tiny microphone, which picks up the sound coming in from the outside via the outer ear and the inner tube. Thus the head, so to speak, “hears” the outside world in exactly the same way as a human head hears it. Moreover, such hearing is a complete surround-sound experience: that is, it not only embraces omni-directional sound on the horizontal plane (front and back, left and right), but also embraces omni-directional sound on the vertical plane (ground level, the sky above). All this sound can be accurately recorded by feeding the input of the two microphones to conventional two-track tape. The tape can then be broadcast on a stereo transmitter, for home reception. Listeners who tune it in on the two speakers of a stereo radio will hear merely a conventional stereo sound, left and right. But a listener who plugs in stereo earphones will have the complete surround-sound experience. Accordingly, if the Kunstkopf is set up on location (in a public park, by way of example), the listener will hear everything going on in the location as though actually there in person: it is an accurate and convincing you-are-there sensation.
In the early years of Kunstkopf development, a CBC Radio producer was in Berlin for a conference and, while there, learnt about it and about how it had begun to be used there on the local radio station, Sender Freies Berlin. Returning to Canada, he persuaded his network to buy a Kunstkopf and to schedule a series of nation-wide broadcasts using the technique. The series was the first of its kind in North America. In the interest of truthfulness, all programs were recorded on location and were so announced: faking the surround-sound would be dishonest, and anyway was technically impossible; authenticity was the fundamental principle that had to be observed.
In the course of the series, the versatility of the Kunstkopf was demonstrated in widely varying programs. A short list of them indicates its range.
In a performance of a J.G. Bach Symphony in B flat, played by the National Arts Centre orchestra in Ottawa, conducted by Mario Bernardi, the Kunstkopf was placed in the best seat in the house; and the listener at home, in effect was there in person, enjoying the music from the ideal vantage-point. That approach to picking up an orchestra was quite similar to a conventional stereo pick-up, but better: the difference lay in the sense of actuality, in the transportation of the listener to the hall.
Other approaches to music were more imaginative, drawing on the Kunstkopf’s unique capabilities in a creative way. A performance of Tallis’s massive forty-part motet, by the Elmer Iseler Singers, had the eight five-part choirs positioned in a perfect circle around the Kunstkopf, so that the listener was equidistant from all the choirs and could, in perfect balance, hear the composer’s interplay of his multiple forces; no such placement would be feasible in a live performance.
One of the dramas in the series was recorded in a hospital, in a private room. The Kunstkopf was placed on the bed’s pillow, where the head of the patient would normally be. The listener became, as it were, the patient who, in the story of the play, had had a stroke that left him paralyzed and without speech, but with full cognition. Assembled around the bed, talking, were his wife, his priest, and his nurse. And as so often happens in such cases, they tended to talk about the patient as though he weren’t there and couldn’t understand what was being said. Forced, by Kunstkopf, into the role of the patient, the listener underwent that rather callous predicament with a subjective grasp of what it would be like to endure it.
That was an imaginary situation conceived by the playwright, Menzies McKillop. Fiction it may have been; but the sense of being there (an actual hospital room was used, complete with all the incidental sounds of such an institution) gave it extraordinary power.
Non-fictional situations, in documentaries, benefited greatly from the Kunstkopf ‘s ability to capture real life and transplant the listener to the location. One small but impressive feature, by David Hutchison, exemplifies that ability. He persuaded a friend, who is an expert downhill skier, to mount the Kunstkopf just above his head, and to ski down a long hill, wearing it. Any fellow-skier, listening to the recording, would instantly become that skier, schussing down that hill. And any non-skier, listening, would know for the first time, directly, what that experience was like.
All programs on the series ended with an announcement crediting members of the production team by name, but not by function, in alphabetical order. Many of the names would differ from one week to the next. But one name was constant: Arthur Tait.
That was a name playfully given to the Kunstkopf itself. It was based on a trilingual pun. Art, of course, is short for Arthur; it is also a direct translation of the word Kunst (which means either Art or Artificial); and the word Kopf, which means Head, would be translated into French as Tête, which is a homonym for the surname Tait. Calling the device Arthur Tait was an in-house joke of no importance at all. But it did cause one amusing contretemps.
A producer’s office, at the time, always had his or her name-plate on the door. The producer of the Kunstkopf series needed a second office to accommodate his work on the series, while he carried out his other duties in the office that had long been his. On the door of this second office he installed a name-plate reading Arthur Tait. Everyone in the unit knew who, or rather what, Arthur Tait was, and took his identity for granted. But there arrived a new supervisor in the department who made a point, after his arrival, of introducing himself to everyone in the unit. After a few days, he was heard to confess himself at a loss: Arthur Tait never seemed to be in his office. Who was he? What did he look like? Was he away sick?
That he was thus baffled was a fairly clear indication that someone had been parachuted in with very little background in program production and little interest in broadcast innovations, either artistically or technically. But if his bafflement over Arthur Tait caused him a certain discomfiture, this was fine, too: for that particular individual was widely disliked.
It is hard to know whether that discomfiture triggered a negative corporate response. But the fact is that the Kunstkopf series, after an exciting year on the air, was not renewed. And poor Arthur Tait was banished to the basement, to gather dust.
