“A Long, Strange Trip”: An Engineer’s Journey Through FM College Radio
Today is World College Radio Day, and it’s more important than ever to honor and preserve free airwaves for our communities, now and for the generations to come. Sounding Out! is marking the day with a special post devoted to the intergenerational relationships that power college radio and keep it lit, whether over the terrestrial airwaves or via online streaming. College radio binds campus and community in tangible ways and builds deep and long lasting connections, as Sean Broder’s (WHRW 90.5 Class of 2025) conversation with Freddie Montalvo (WHRW 90.5 Class of 1987) certainly shows. Tune in to the people and keep it locked on college radio. –SO! Eds
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In 2026, Binghamton University’s WHRW 90.5FM will celebrate its 60th birthday. Ferdinand “Freddie” Montalvo has been an prominent member of the station for 45 of those years, which means he has experienced many changes in radio’s culture and technology. Supplemented by his experience as a professional electrician, Freddie’s enthusiasm for a traditional approach to broadcasting has remained unchanged through the station’s many alterations, bringing undeniable authenticity to the forefront of the station, and showing newcomers how they can do the same.
An expressive medium, college radio has enabled students of all backgrounds to project their voice and music taste as far as the radio waves take them. Whereas some former college radio DJs apply their newfound power of expression to other professional fields, others like Freddie have only continued to develop their broadcasting style, which is why I wanted to get his perspective on college radio’s evolutions. Freddie has never lost sight of the art and the value of individualized broadcasting in the age of streaming music, and he generously shares it with incoming members who seek their own voices.
I met Freddie for this interview in the station’s current location in the basement of the university union. WHRW has three studios, one of the largest record libraries in the northeastern United States, and a common space that’s layered in stickers, posters, and graffiti spanning several generations of broadcasters. I found him in WHRW’s primary studio, CR-1, serving as the required broadcaster for a student talk show. As this was the end of the Spring ‘25 semester at BU, I was able to briefly catch the thank yous and goodbyes of the hosts at the conclusion of their final show. Freddie continues to host his own weekly radio show–Dimenciones on Saturdays from 7-10 PM on terrestrial radio 90.5 in the Greater Binghamton area and via WHRW’s livestream–but his additional involvement as an engineer for others at the station continues to enable newcomers to develop and project their own voices, even if they’re not certified broadcasters themselves. This post offers some excerpts of our in-depth conversation concerning Freddie’s life and rich history with WHRW, as well as his perspective on the continued importance of college radio, and of course some of the many valuable music recommendations he shared over our two hours together.
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Freddie’s journey into the world of FM radio began in 1976, when the South Bronx native transferred from Bronx Community College to Binghamton University. It wasn’t until ‘79 that he would be introduced to the station by a friend of his who was hosting a Latin music show on the campus station WHRW 90.5, which had Freddie instantly hooked. Coming from a Puerto Rican family, it meant a lot to Freddie to join his friend in the station’s Latin Department; he became the first Latino program director in 1981 and the first Latino general manager in 1982. While serving leadership roles and maintaining his weekly programming, Freddie attended Binghamton through the work-study program BOCES (Boards of Cooperative Educational Services). It’s here that he trained to become an electrician, further intertwining his personal connection to WHRW:
BOCES… they taught you the fundamentals and at that time, I was getting involved at the station, and it was like a synergy of that, you know? Between electronics and radio broadcasting. So, at that time I was going to school in the evening, I went to the BOCES program 8-4/8-5, went to school at night, was doing radio, so everything was involved and influencing each other.
As a leading member of his department, Freddie embraced the alternative radio that WHRW was known for, broadcasting an assortment of music ranging from Latin Jazz to Cumbia, Disco, Salsa, and Santana… not to mention his confirmed favorite song: “Sofrito” by Mongo Santamaria.
In the decades following his transfer to BU, he has established a home and marriage in Binghamton, describing his life’s journey in the city as “a long, strange trip.”
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WHRW has been a free format station since it began in 1966, giving each DJ and engineer freedom to play their favorite pieces of music within the FCC guidelines. WHRW has always been, according to Freddie, about “protecting that alternativeness on campus and off campus… we weren’t copying anybody.” He brings attention to what he calls the “great social redeeming value” of alternative broadcasting, which surpasses the confines of the station and not only enriches the surrounding community, but influences future forms of expression by DJs, or “broadcasters” as Freddie calls them.
When you record your shows and listen to yourself that’s how you develop your sense of style… The voice is an instrument, and you learn to modulate when you turn that mic on, always make sure you have on your headset, and that’s how you develop your style. ‘Cause at first you don’t realize these things, but as you evolve, you’ll notice these different nuances.
As his career progressed and Freddie became an installer technician, he increased accessibility to new musical programs for local residents, most notably, MTV. Combining this work with his many hours at the station, Freddie felt a great sense of pride and responsibility in bringing the forefront of new music to the lives of countless listeners. “I always called it therapeutic radio,” he explained to me, bringing attention to WHRW’s commercial-free programming, and the station’s ability to allow for its broadcasters to express their personalities. Freddie has never felt the need to possess an alter-ego while broadcasting as many do, explaining that members of the station are “audiophiles experiencing music, certain different genres, and that’s what we’re presenting. And when you do a show, you’re that show. That is your artwork in action.”
In addition to producing unique art on air, each WHRW broadcaster makes and plays hourly “carts,” public service announcements that are the closest thing to commercials on 90.5. There too, the station’s members have managed to transform the regulation-required station identifiers, PSAs, promos, and announcements into pre-recorded miniature productions; each about a minute long. During Freddie’s earlier years at the station, engineers made carts on Ampex audio track tape machines, quite different from the digital editing software utilized today. While traditional, bulky tape machines offered creative possibilities, they were be far less forgiving of errors than modern audio editing software. As Freddie told me,
there’s a certain thing that you can do with reel-to-reel recorders, where you could do sound-on-sound and sound-with-sound, and what that does is it creates an echo effect that is different from the electronic echos that you can do with the software… The mixing and the editing was hardcore, it was physical.
One of Freddie’s favorite promotional carts was “La Emisora Que Vuela,” made several years ago on the Ampex by a DJ apprentice of his, Francisco Reyes. Freddie remembered that it took eight full hours of recording, splicing, and layering for the minute-long audio production. Rightfully so, he refers to both the production process and final recording as true art, going on to describe the context of the dialogue:
So it’s like a gathering in a Latin household talking about different foods. And… It’s like a sitcom in a sense because he’s goofing with the different characters and he’s talking about, you know, the foods to be prepared. You say, well, who is this guy? That’s when he starts talking and saying: ‘you’ve got to be listening to WHRW in Binghamton.
“La Emisora Que Vuela” (“The Station That Flies”) -Francisco Reyes
The Ampex isn’t the only thing that has changed during Freddie’s 45+ years at WHRW. Other significant changes to the technologies utilized for broadcasting over the years. Because the station has always operated 24 hours a day, it required a certified broadcaster to remain on air at any given time for many decades. More recently, an automated system has allowed for some time slots to be occupied by a digital playlist, inevitably creating a distinct gap between WHRW’s night owls and early risers. Additionally, physical media such as vinyl records and CDs are no longer necessary for radio shows on WHRW. After the implementation of a Eurorack–which allows DJs to use an aux chord to play their shows–most current station members went digital. Despite this change and preference, Freddie remains loyal to the art of digging through physical media, for him primarily CDs, in order to find music that portrays his personality and taste.
Not too many people have FM radios at home, which was the norm. Everybody had records, they were listening to FM radio, and the only way you could listen to the station was tuning in with an FM radio. Today, everybody’s into Spotify… they’re not pulling records, they’re not pulling CDs, there’s no more really hands-on, it’s all plug in a laptop and sitting back… But that’s just me because I came from a different era, you know, where we had the hands-on with vinyl… once they put that Eurorack in there, it’s not the same. That’s why we have to have turntable classes to teach people how to work with the vinyl cause most of the younger crowd didn’t grow up playing 45s or lps, you know?… That’s when you’re definitely an audio aficionado.
Despite the sonic and technological changes that have permanently altered radio broadcasting, Freddie urges people of all backgrounds to get involved with radio given the opportunity; especially on the rare occasion that the station is free-format like WHRW has been since its inception. Technological changes aside, WHRW harbors the unique and deeply personal environment that deems college radio so valuable. Today, more than ever it is vital to understand the importance of large-scale audial expression in the face of vastly different musical soundscapes, as explained by Freddie:
This (the station) is the focal point for social interaction relating to music but, you know, today it’s more Spotify based, which is not the greatest because with a CD or an LP, you’re able to read the line-in notes, you get to read about the musicians, the group, the transition of between groups. Just think about Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin, let’s say Led Zeppelin 1, 2, and 3: different LPs, different flavors in their musical repertoire, you know? And you’re reading the LP, and you’re reading about the musicians and all the songs and the line and all… I’m not sure if Spotify has the same thing today… it’s not interactive. With LP’s, you’re fully engaged with that LP as you’re listening to it, whereas with that it’s just, you know, a certain song, or if you go looking for a little bit of tidbit, but it’s not the same experience. With the LP you get to see, you get to feel the artwork… it has to be different from the laptop experience… it’s more tactile.
Today, everything is digitized, it’s not like we have our live broadcaster or radio DJ… it’s not visceral in that sense… radio is different today. ‘Corporate radio’, as they refer to it… There’s no personality in it, and if there is a personality, it’s more blahblahblahblahblah and very little with the music and all… Even today, I listen to some DJs that I was listening to then and they’re still around today, and there’s a difference between that time and today. But, their influence must have influenced me unknowingly, and so as I experienced radio here, it’s vastly different from what I thought about radio at that time.
The thing is, when you do radio here [at WHRW], it is different than if you weren’t doing radio just listening to your laptop or Spotify. When you’re doing radio, you are engaging actively and producing your own show… It will influence you too, you know, we always used to say here: ‘expand your horizons’ and not just stay in a certain genre. As you experience WHRW, you will be listening to certain things, or you should be listening to certain things, and exposed to certain things, and that’s what opens your whole view, you know, musically, orally. And so, what you were listening to two years ago might be vastly different from what you are listening to today. And, when you go back home and you listen to radio you say ‘man, I could do better than that shit!
WHRW is vital for those who have ever been involved in its community, expressed to its truest extent by Ferdinand Montalvo. Members define the atmosphere within the station and the growth of the station outside of it. Despite the many technological changes to broadcasting, college radio has continued to build a symbiotic relationship with its members and the local community of listeners.
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Featured Images: Courtesy of Ferdinand “Freddie” Montalvo
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Sean Broder is a recent graduate of Binghamton University in Binghamton, NY, where he was a trained DJ at WHRW 90.5 FM as well as an English Literature major. He was a Sounding Out! intern in Spring and Summer 2025. He’s from New Rochelle, New York and has always had a great love for music.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn–David Goren
Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-language Radio–Dolores Inés Casillas
“Chicana Radio Activists and the Sounds of Chicana Feminisms“–Monica De La Torre
Radio and the Voice of the Aymara People – Karl Swinehart
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Faithful Listening: Notes Toward a Latinx Listening Methodology
**This piece is co-authored by Wanda Alarcón, Dolores Inés Casillas, Esther Díaz Martín, Sara Veronica Hinojos, and Cloe Gentile Reyes
For weeks, we have been inundated with executive orders (220 at last count), alarming budget cuts (from science and the arts to our national parks), stupendous tariff hikes, the defunding of DEI-anything, the banning of transgender troops, a Congressional renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, terrifying ICE raids, and sadly, a refreshed MAGA constituency with a reinvigorated anti-immigrant public sentiment. Worse, the handlers for the White House’s social media publish sinister MAGA-directed memes, GIFs across their social channels. These reputed Public Service Announcements (PSAs), under President Trump’s second term, ruthlessly go after immigrants.
It’s difficult to refuse to listen despite our best attempts.
“The ASMR video was true.”
On February 18, 2025, the official White House social media account, @WhiteHouse, shared a 40-second video showing a group of detained immigrants boarding a military aircraft for deportation. The video was captioned: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, features gentle, soothing sounds—such as whispering, tapping, or brushing—which can evoke pleasurable tingling sensations. In this satirical ASMR-style post, however, the sounds include the clinking of metal shackles on concrete floors, the jangle of handcuffs against bodies, and the grating of metal on metal as detainees slowly ascend the aircraft’s steps. By framing these distressing noises within the ASMR genre, the video invites listeners to consume them as aesthetically pleasing; encouraging a visceral embodiment where the sounds of violence toward migrants elicit an uncontrollable physical pleasure that seeps through the body. This effectively turns state violence into an unsettling sonic spectacle. Cruelty towards migrants, according to Cristina Beltrán, is not a failure of democracy but an expression of it. The (sonic) spectacle of migrant cruelty functions as a political practice meant to sustain white democracy as both a racial and political category.
Framed within ASMR, Trump’s official message is unmistakably “saying the quiet part out loud.” But not all that well. A closer listen reveals that the roar of the jet engine drowns out more intimate, human sounds: footsteps on the tarmac, the rustle of police pat-downs, and the deep, rhythmic breaths—proof of life—condemned. Listening to this disturbing post, we become attuned to our own internal pleads; our refusal to believe until the unsettling truth confirms: this isn’t a parody or a hoax—it’s real.
How does a sonic social media trend—built around such sounds as the crinkling of chip bags, the crunches of eating, the tap-tap of acrylic nails, the gentle clinks of typing or espresso-making—become a soundboard for the forced removal of immigrants? Indeed, the video has amassed nearly 105 million views on X alone. Clearly, the post broadcasts a pedagogy of cruelty—a lesson in how to aestheticize suffering—and we are left questioning just how far that message both travels and resonates. For many, the video is neither entertaining nor soothing, but rather shocking, offensive, and deeply disturbing.
Written comments show more revulsion than support, with many users openly challenging the video. In doing so, their protest, contained in the comments, starts to dismantle the ASMR aesthetic, undercutting its intended sense of calm. After all, the video isn’t particularly convincing as ASMR to begin with! These are echoes of dissent, outrage, and refusal, that accompany the in-person collective actions that have taken place across the nation rallying against Trump’s broader white-supremacist and anti-democratic agenda.
“What was louder was the screaming and cursing inside my head.”
History shows us that abolitionist efforts often relied on the sounds and images of chains to evoke empathy for enslaved Africans—making their suffering and humanity visible to a broader public. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection makes clear, such representations can easily devolve into a spectacle of suffering, where the emphasis shifts from the enslaved person to the emotional response of the white witness. Today, that same auditory imagery—clinking metal, mechanical restraints—resurfaces, but in a profoundly different register. No longer stirring empathy, they risk desensitizing listeners to the pain and struggle of Latinx migrants. This ASMR instance, directed at MAGA-listeners, prioritizes a cruel-yet-gleeful response without any compassion whatsoever towards immigrants.
The word “Illegal” in the caption further amplifies the discourse of criminality, evoking a long legacy of racialized policies and media portrayals that cast mexicanos and Chicanos as perpetually deportable. Note the hypocrisy in naming the people as illegal, when their forced removal without legal due process, is itself illegal. U.S. immigration policy—think Operation Wetback and the Bracero Program, have long simultaneously expelled and depended on Mexican labor. The enduring power of these tropes lies not just in law, but in sentiment—in the way migrants are imagined, portrayed, and ultimately policed in the public eye. Just as Hartman argues that the end of slavery did not mean the arrival of true freedom for Black Americans, so too have U.S. immigration policies failed to fully embrace immigrants as residents or neighbors and much less citizens. In both cases, legal status did not equate to genuine belonging or liberation.
What is notable in the current deployment of “illegality” in the @WhiteHouse post is its expanded scope: whereas earlier rhetoric primarily targeted Mexicans and Mexicanness this framing now extends to encompass all Latinx peoples, which always includes Black, Indigenous, Trans and Queer. This further intensifies prior waves of anti-Mexican sentiment while broadening the reach of criminalizing discourse. In doing so, it reinforces a racialized logic of illegality that casts an ever-widening net of suspicion and exclusion.
The MAGA White House’s broader propaganda – from the self-deport ads on Spanish-language media and Kristi Noem’s pinche photo-ops from CECOT (El Salvador’s infamous mega-prison) to SCOTUS attempts to revoke birthright citizenship – raises the stakes of listening, rendering our response—and our work as Latinx sound studies scholars—urgent.
Like it or not, this video reshapes the contours of our field in real time. Using the ASMR video as a point of departure, we offer a mode of listening on the side of resistance—a practice that affirms our solidarity with migrants and their right to move, work, and live with dignity. Drawing on the work of the late María Lugones, we advocate for a practice of faithful witnessing—a listening attuned not only to sound, but to histories, structures, and acts of refusal that resist dehumanization.
Ofrenda
From Lugones’s book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, she teaches that a collaborator witnesses from the side of power; a faithful witness stands with resistance even when it entails risk. And, to witness faithfully is to recognize and honor acts of resistance—even when doing so defies common sense of what we recognize as political acts/sounds. In Decolonizing Diasporas, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez reminds us of the important coalitional sociality Lugones envisions in practicing faithful witnessing. For Figueroa, “the practice of faithful witnessing is one that oppressed and colonized peoples have deployed since time immemorial as a method of bearing witness to each other’s humanity even as they faced myriad forms of violence” (156).
Faithful witnessing entails centering the plight of all MAGA political scapegoats, migrants in precarity, pro-Palestinian student activists, the still separated children, trans youth, women, and who ever is next on the Project 2025 agenda. Faithful witnessing is not about centering our own emotional response, but about coming together to listen, to bear witness, and to protect. In response to these distorted public signals, we present a suite of countersonics, shared in a lo-fi listening mode that enacts faithful witnessing and affirms our roles as co-resisters to sonic oppression. We conclude with a noise-filled, healing artifact: a sonic limpia for deep listening and a playlist to sustain the good fight.
FOR THE FULL PLAYLIST CLICK THIS LINK, OR START BELOW!
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Featured Image: Philly Immigrant May 1st, 2025 march for Justicia. Migrant workers and supporters rallied at 4th & Washington and marched in the streets to the AFL-CIO Mayday rally and march. Image by Joe Piette, cropped by SO! CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Wanda Alarcón is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research takes up sound as a generative site and method for hearing and amplifying resistant grammars in Chicana narratives. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Chicana Soundscapes, which listens closely to sound, noise, language, songs, echoes, and silences, and proposes decolonial feminist ways of hearing Chicana and queer Chicana worlds.
Dolores Inés Casillas (she/her/ella) is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) and Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), co-editor of The Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016) and Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018).
Esther Díaz Martín (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Radiophonic Feminisms: Latina Voices in the Digital Age of Broadcasting, (UT Press, 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening and attends to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media.
Sara Veronica Hinojos (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research critically engages popular representations of Chicanxs and Latinxs as racialized, “accented” speakers. Her current book project, The Racial Politics of Chicana and Chicano Linguistic Scripts in Media (1925-2014), intentionally brings together language politics, digital media, humor studies and sound studies.
Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her/ella) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and perreo profa from Miami Beach. She is a Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Music and has a PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing focuses on how Indigenous Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. Her pieces have been featured in Sounding Out!, Intervenxions, and the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit.
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Thank you to Daimys Ester García for care in the form of editorial labor.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature–Wanda Alarcón
Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region–José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness–Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
Listening to Digitized “Ratatas” or “No Sabo Kids”–Sara Veronica Hinojos and Eliana Buenrostro
Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body–Cloe Gentile Reyes
Latinx Soundwave Series–Edited by Dolores Inés Casillas
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