Softcover, 17x24 cm, 176 pages.

The air around you is full of radio waves. Most of them come from broadcast towers, phones and Wi-Fi routers, but some originate in lightning strikes thousands of kilometres away, or in the restless hiss of the ionosphere. In Tune In!, sound artist and instrument designer Wouter Jaspers shows how to listen to all of it, and how to turn it into material for art.

The book explains the physics and the tools in plain language, from the crystal set and the shortwave receiver to software-defined radio, low-power transmitters and antennas you can build yourself. It examines the politics of a spectrum that belongs to everyone yet is controlled by very few, and maps out fifteen artistic approaches through the work of artists such as Christina Kubisch, Joyce Hinterding, Tetsuo Kogawa and Anna Friz. Throughout, Jaspers draws on more than twenty years of his own installations, experiments, performances and field recordings, from an antenna made of a rusty length of rebar near Chernobyl to a friend’s grave in Hannover that became a radio station.

Most chapters close with exercises, many of which require nothing more than a portable radio and an attentive pair of ears. With a full glossary and a timeline of radio art from 1909 to 2026, Tune In! is both a practical handbook and a field guide for anyone who wants to work with radio as sound, as medium and as material.