Helen Thorington, who helped pioneer sonic art for radio, dies at 94

Helen Thorington passed away on April 13 at the age of 94 in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She was renowned for her work in sonic compositions, bringing radio art to a nationwide audience and contributing soundscapes for choreographers, filmmakers, and artists.

Radio art was an art form that was not widely known when Thorington began her work; however, she helped bring attention to the medium, through her work on NPR as well as New American Radio, a project for which she was the founder. The project commissioned broadcasts of over 300 works on more than 70 radio stations for more than a decade starting in 1987.

Thorington began her pioneering work in the 1970s as a writer with an interest in expanding her short stories and scripts into impressionistic radio dramas. She fused her own musical attempts on a synthesizer with audio snippets of industrial or nature sounds, unaccompanied improvisations by musicians on various instruments, and samples from radio broadcasts to produce the auditory equivalent of an art installation.

Her first composition for public consumption was “Trying to Think,” a synthesizer-fueled rumination inspired by the idea of a fictional woman who feels empty and lost after hearing news on the radio of the drowning of two young boys. The report made its debut on NPR in 1977.

Thorington mixed and matched sounds from different environments, producing a new kind of narrative that touched an emotional level. Her sonic compositions were often part of multimedia collaborations with musicians and visual artists. One such acclaimed performance was “Adrift,” which included early virtual-reality technology. The piece, which suggested the terror of being lost at sea and the faint hope of being rescued, was presented live and streamed on the internet in various iterations from 1997 to 2001.

In many of her pieces, Thorington focused on the dire results of humankind’s domination of nature. She often performed her work live, collaborating with choreographers and artists. She also worked with filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, who used Thorington’s soundscape for Hammer’s 16-millimeter short biography, “Optic Nerve,” premiered in 1987 at the Berlin International Film Festival and also featured in that year’s Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

When funding for radio art began drying up in the 1990s, Thorington shifted her focus to the internet. She founded an influential net art site called “Turbulence.org” in 1996, which provided funding and a distribution platform for emerging web-based artists. She flourished in the new medium, exploiting the web’s open-ended nature to reach a broader audience and to interact and even collaborate with users.

Thorington argued that sound provides a sense of grounding, even when floating through the ether; Sound gives geography, which she found significant in modern culture whereby people keep moving frequently. She said that sound creates a space that people can enter and have a feeling of knowing where they are, at least imaginatively, substituting a disappearing sense of belonging to a community.