Imagining the sounds of 90.1 and 91.1

Current (05/30/2001)

At 6 a.m. on March 15, 2000, WNAN on Nantucket Island, Mass., signed on officially. Sister station WCAI serves Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. Both are operated in a unique arrangement with WGBH-FM in Boston.

With public radio already saturating most of the Northeast, it was not common to find two new stations starting up, and it was even less common that the founders would seek and get advice so widely and then set out to break the mold.

Founder Jay Allison, a prominent independent radio producer, led an effort to mark the station with the voices and sounds of its region, creating hundreds of “sonic i.d.’s” that air between programs.

The idea of the sound modules came out of Allison’s 1999 request for suggestions from public radio people across the country. The suggestions received could spark ideas at any station, new or old…