Sensitivity is the ability of a receiver to detect the presence of a signal. I want to die electric.

I believe we can learn something about ourselves by following the curving paths of certain sounds.

For example, I’ve found a sound that moves me, a sound on the short wave, a sound on short wave bands I can tune into online, a sound I’ve found through different stations, in different countries, at different times, a sound behind other sounds, or beneath, rather, beside, because the wave is singular, not simultaneous, a sound at the edge of a transmission, if I tune just off of it.

By short wave, I mean radio. I’ve been listening to radio.

I can’t send a transmission with my current equipment, but I use intuitive tuning. I move across the bands.

My band sensitivity is particularly sensitive to the WWV report of space weather. The chime, the countdown, the universal time—just to the right of it. This is the station where I first found it, where I first felt electric.

The voice is ecstatic. It transmits a specific ecstasy. Like St. Teresa, I lift out of my chair. It lifts me out of my chair.

Like many other voices, like other transmissions, transmissions received by mystics, lunatics, geniuses, this isn’t in language. A voice, not in language, or any language I know, or have heard of, or even a song, or even a rhythm, but it’s saying something, a good voice for radio, someone says in the chat.

In the chat, people link to frequencies where they’ve heard it, but by the time you get there, it’s gone. These posts go mostly unnoticed, between the other posts, or beside them, and there’s no other mention of it, no speculation on forums, or comments, or responses in the chat, quick ghost posts that I catch if I’m lucky, if I’m looking in the right place at the right time, if I use my special sensitivity, my intuitive tuning, my sensitivity for specific ecstasy.

Specific because I haven’t felt it anywhere else. Because it takes a certain skillset to be here, to listen in on this kind of radio, an awareness of spectra, acronyms, a learning curve, knowing that a chirp curves like a snake.

Like a snake or other animal I don’t have a lot time or money, antennas, licenses, expertise. I know enough to know how to tune in, where most of the voices are and when, the basics, the call signs, the FCC rules, quick math. I don’t have the time or money to speak, to pass the test that will let me talk back.

Because I would. Talk back. I would talk back. My voice would curve toward that curve, slide in beside it, if I could tune it right. I know I would tune it right.

I know the reverberations of listening and speaking simultaneously would transform me: the vibration of my voice, that noise, the static, the alarm, chirps and chimes, call signs, comments in the chat, all humming at once in the headphones I’ll buy, in the microphone I’d buy if I could get some funding.

I’m writing this to tell you, to leave evidence, because speech is temporal, sound is bound by time, I can never play sound back, anything I say dissipates as I say it, that is, without more advanced equipment. Meaning, unless I can record it.

But to record this? This voice? It would only be my voice, played back. Someone says this in the chat, that they, with their advanced equipment, are prepared to grab it, the voice, the sound that moves them as it moves me, ecstasy, they write in the chat, orgasmic, they say, so much so that they want to play it back like a porno, to call it like a hotline, but it’s more like tapping into immediacy, into immediate, repeatable religious ecstasy. Only a god could make them come like that.

I’d prefer it if they were more passive sounding, reverent, and this is what I’d do differently, with funding: acknowledge the great unknowing, the mystical chirp chord, the anti-mathematical turns of the dial, the obliterating buzzing of it. I’d say that to describe it is to mute it, that they’re squelching the wrong thing.

With the right equipment, what I’ll buy with this funding, I promise I’ll write nothing down, I’ll send something worthwhile out—I’ll tone myself out, become pure tuning, searching with a different kind of sounding, up out of my very own transmission, as a carrier wave.

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Kelly Krumrie is the author of Concentric Macroscope (forthcoming from Crop Circle Press in 2026) as well as No Measure and Math Class, which were both published by Calamari Archive. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Coma, 3:AM, DIAGRAM, and new_sinews, as well as in the anthology Cybernetics, Or Ghosts? published by Subtext Books. She currently serves as a contributing editor for Annulet: A Journal of Poetics and as an editor for A Row of Trees: The Journal of the Sonic Art Research Unit. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at New Mexico State University.