[{"id":"9267","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E1, Stories of SpokenWeb, 7 October 2019, McLeod and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Cheryl Gladu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/dafaa46d-8602-4296-8aa7-0a66ba8253f2/ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,524,400 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nCamlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007).\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, “Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts,” No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/\\n\\nMcKinnon, Donna. “A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage.” https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement\\n\\nMorris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.\\n\\nMurray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection” http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/\\n\\nToppings, Earle. “Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).\\n\\nUrbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549348155393,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard?\n\nFor this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes…\n\n00:07\tTheme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. I’m so excited to introduce our inaugural episode Stories of SpokenWeb, an introduction to this very podcast and the project it stems from. SpokenWeb is first and foremost a literary research network dedicated to studying literature through sound, but how did it all begin and how did these audio archives make their way from basements and car trunks to university libraries? In this episode SpokenWeb contributor Katherine McLeod takes us into the lives and archives of some of the founding spoken web members to uncover the origins and future of the project.\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tHere is “Stories of SpokenWeb”\n01:39\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat is SpokenWeb? SpokenWeb is a research program, a network of scholars, students and artists all studying literature through sound. But how did it all begin? What does the story of SpokenWeb sound like? My name is Katherine McLeod and I asked SpokenWeb collaborators at universities across Canada how they got involved in the project. Needless to say, each story is different and there are many more than are told here, but their stories do have a few things in common that tell us something about the project. All of their stories begin with an interest in audio well before SpokenWeb assumed its current form, and all of their stories, or nearly all, involve a box of tapes. In 2014 I joined SpokenWeb as a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. I met Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. At that point SpokenWeb was based out of one university, but I remember him saying that there was an interest in widening the network. So how did SpokenWeb become what it is today? To answer this question, I spoke with a number of SpokenWeb scholars from across Canada. We’ll start the conversation with one story of how it all began.\n03:22\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. I am the author of several books about literature and sound recording and I’m the director of the partnership grant of SSHRC Social Science, Humanities Research Council of Canada, called SpokenWeb. I was going to say it began when I was a graduate student and became, in earnest, interested in the history of early sound recordings of literary performance. But I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach, and the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class played to me by my professor, John Miller, who later became a colleague of mine for a spell. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And that really piqued my interest and, well, really just what it was that we were listening to and what it meant and what its significance was. So I think the interest in sound recordings of literary works or of something that identified with literature really began when I was an undergraduate. When I went to grad school, I became interested in really thinking about this as a research project. It wasn’t my dissertation project, but it became my second project that you always have to be able to talk about when you go to job interviews and things like that. And at Stanford University they had a pretty good sound archive with a lot of historical recordings. So I was able to look into the longer history of spoken recordings and began to research that topic. I’ve always been interested in sound recording because I play music, and I’ve recorded myself writing songs and playing my own songs or playing in bands with friends since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been saving up for the latest recording device.\n05:41\tJason Camlot:\tWhen I came to Concordia – it’s almost like in this sort of fortuitous moment – I was asked to have a meeting with the department chair in the first week that I was installed in the department, just to go over very practical things. And sitting in his office I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of tape boxes – boxes that held reel to reel tapes. And I remember asking him what those boxes contained. And he said to me, “Oh, that’s just some poetry reading series that took place here in the 60s.” And I remembered that, although I didn’t do anything about it at the time. I went about my business of teaching and publishing and getting tenure here at Concordia. And then maybe a decade later I thought about those recordings again and I went back to him and asked, “Do you still have those recordings?”\n06:47\tJason Camlot:\tThe department had moved floors and I remember we threw out a lot of stuff during the move. So I kind of feared that maybe those reel to reel tapes didn’t make it during the move, but he told me that he had deposited them in the university archives that held the English department fonds, the records of the English department. So knowing that the tapes were still accessible, I started looking into them and found a bunch of boxes again that I couldn’t listen to. So it was a bit of a stumbling block, not being able to actually hear what was on them and I set about trying to rectify that problem, and to figure out whether this collection of tapes might be of interest from a literary point of view.\n07:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. As SpokenWeb grew, researchers began working across disciplines. In addition to working across disciplines in one university SpokenWeb has built collaborative connections across different universities. We’ll hear from researchers at a few of those universities in a moment, but we’ll start first with someone who has been part of the project since the beginning.\n08:07\tAnnie Murray:\tMy name is Annie Murray. I’m Associate University Librarian for archives and special collections. At the University of Calgary. What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets, were going on reading tours. And so the Sir George Williams section was just one slice of literary life in a given year.\n08:32\tAudio Recording:\tWelcome to the fourth, third, week of the fourth series of our readings here at Sir George. And this one is a special one partly in that it was, it is being presented… [Overlapping audio recordings, exact words not audible]\n08:57\tAnnie Murray:\tAnd we were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings or not leaving behind. And wouldn’t it be great to understand where did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read to kind of sonically recreate those years of very active poetry reading performances?\n09:24\tAudio Recording:\tGets hard to read your own stuff after a while, you forget what it sounded like the last time.\n09:29\tAnnie Murray:\tCause we knew different archives across the country would have some audio record of these events. And we thought: this should all be brought together. This should be a massive aggregation of recordings so that you could listen to a poet across the country and kind of, just as bands tour, see how a poet toured and how they intersected with other poets. So I think we saw the meaning in the individual readings for sure for literary history and analysis. But that the sort of possibilities opened up by knowing what all readings were preserved and bringing those archives together. And I will say in most cases, these are hidden collections that hadn’t been digitized before. So with a partnership grant, it allows us to bring all of these collections out, focus on them in a different and concerted way and try to create that sort of national recording of all of these performances that had taken place.\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe project continued to grow. Now it is in over 13 universities right across the country.\n10:44\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how incredibly grateful I am to be able to work with these materials and with the multidisciplinary scholars that are a part of this project. This is honestly, as I came to recognize during our days together in Vancouver this past summer, this is one of the great research and intellectual opportunities of my career and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this.\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Michael O’Driscoll, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.\n11:18\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve been here for the last 22 years and my work ranges across into the areas of critical and cultural theory. Various kinds of media studies. I’m interested in American literature, poetry and poetics. And I spend a lot of my time thinking a lot about archives and thinking about digital media as well too. You know, the lessons of the world’s great archives theorists – I’m thinking about Arjun Appadurai, I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida – is that archives are oriented not towards the past, but towards the future. Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. We only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them. And the true focus of an archive is its own futurity, not the history that it records.\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tMichael shared with us some background as to how the recordings were made.\n12:13\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWhen personal recording became available, when somebody could pick up a portable or reasonably portable reel to reel recorder and show up at a reading with it, folks just simply started recording everything that moved. There was so much enthusiasm about the new technology. Many, many of the readings that happened in the late sixties and through the 70s and the eighties, eighties, were recorded on reel-to-reel and then subsequently on cassette tape. But one of the realities of that enthusiasm as well as while there’s lots of enthusiasm for the recording, more often than not, those recordings were put in boxes, stored away and never listened to again. And they have as a result, sat inert for the last 50 years or so at this incredible cultural and scholarly resource, untapped.\n13:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn fact, many of the people we spoke with for today’s episode shared with us a story that, at some point mentioned a box of tapes. Just like that story that Jason described earlier of finding a box of tapes and eventually listening to them.\n13:21\tAnnie Murray:\tI think that’s an origin story in a lot of people’s involvement with SpokenWeb; “Hey! What are those tapes?”\n13:28\tDeanna Fong:\tGoing to SFU, Simon Fraser University, and just by happenstance came across this box of tapes as we all do.\n13:35\tRoma Kail:\tOur research assistant was so excited about the project that she went to our chief librarian with the archivist and they found us unprocessed box.\n13:45\tKaris Shearer:\tHe went to get a cardboard box at one point and brought it back to her and said, “You know, I want to give this to you and someday you’re going to know what to do with it.” And she said to me, “I think, I think this is it. I think this is what I’m supposed to do with this box.”\n14:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’ll introduce you to each of those voices in a moment. But for now, let’s go back to Michael who shared with us the process of working with this kind of material.\n14:14\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo the process that we are working by is, first of all, the materials are digitized and we create the digital records of them. Then we produce the metadata that will be associated with those records. At the same time, once those materials have been digitized, they will be made available to the library for formal accession\n14:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhile that seems easy enough, there are in fact many challenges in working with these found recordings, which are often made with older technology such as reel to reel or cassette tapes. The challenges aren’t just technical, they are also legal. Let’s go back to our conversation with Annie Murray.\n14:56\tAnnie Murray:\tIt can be expensive to do digitization. It’s very time consuming. If you don’t have ready equipment or infrastructure in your organization, you need to contract out an expert to make the recordings. With archival audio recordings, you don’t always know what’s on tapes that an author gives you with their archive. So you could be investing resources in something that might not even be a performance. It could be somebody’s voice answering machine tape, which is also interesting. But, if a collection is kind of under-processed, because it’s an audio item it does take resources to get the content out and usable. The other thing is that copyright can be a barrier. So if people don’t know who made the recording or what the status is of the audio work, it can be an impediment to digitizing it because the library or archive might not know how widely it can be shared. So those are some of the things that libraries and archives grapple with. But I also think we’ve just got to work through those problems to make sure that this content gets preserved.\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tPart of the reason it can be challenging to sort out the rights around these recordings is that they were not always straight-forward recitations or performances. Sometimes recordings include informal conversations, off the record interviews and discussions around a presentation of a work.\n16:29\tRoma Kail:\tSo my name is Roma Kail. I’m a librarian at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. I have done some work with the Earle Toppings fonds here at our special collections at Vic Library.\n16:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tEarle Toppings was an editor at Ryerson Press and worked for CBC Radio. He interviewed many Canadian writers such as poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and Al Purdy. The archival collection for Toppings includes correspondence with writers along with audio recordings of readings and interviews and background notes compiled by Toppings himself.\n17:10\tRoma Kail:\tSo here he is talking about – he wrote this in his notes, he wrote about his recording of Gwendolyn MacEwen – he writes that a standard microphone was used. It was a standard RCA Victor 44 – he called it the radio workhorse – and it recorded her voice softly and beautifully. Gwen was a gentle caressing reader, a sort of Billie Holiday reciting poems as she did at creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as, the creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as the Bohemian Embassy. There was a musical feeling in all her work and she almost, saying her poems, which had their own melodies. So it’s just an extra, as my research assistant pointed out, all of that accompanying material brings in an extra bit of narrative, or a different narrative to the actual sound recordings. And it was the sound recordings which really correlate with the initial goal of SpokenWeb as it was presented to us.\n18:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s Karis Shearer, the director of the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab and Associate Professor of English in the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies who has been working with the SoundBox collection, sharing another example of the rich but curious sounds found in these archives.\n18:39\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we recently acquired a new set of tapes, a gift from George Bowering and Jean Baird, which include 19 tapes that George Bowering made, going back to the 1960s. One of them that I particularly like is a tape that was made in July of 1969 and it’s labeled ‘Warren, Roy, Moon, etcetera.’ And so I was just too curious not to give this a listen before we started digitizing it, and it is on the occasion of the moon landing…\n19:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beep] Now selection [Beep]\n19:18\tKaris Shearer:\t…in 1969, and what you hear on this tape is George Bowering, Angela Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and Warren Tallman. All of whom were in Montreal at the time, Warren was passing through, Roy Kiyooka was teaching at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, and George Bowering was teaching there as well. And they’re all just hanging out in their living room, at George and Angela’s living room on Grosvenor Avenue in Montreal, and they’re listening to the broadcast of the moon landing.\n19:50\tAudio Recording:\tWell, we had a picture with the earth right in the centre of the screen, over.\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tSo again, it’s a very messy, interesting tape because there’s lots of, people talking over each other. There’s a broadcast going on in the background. But what’s interesting to me is they’re not recording just the broadcast. Right? It’s not like, “Shh, everybody, we’re gonna record the broadcast of this historical moment.” What the recording is, this kind of very social dynamic moment of them talking about poetics, talking about poetry. Fred was on his way back from Albuquerque to Canada. Did you know, they’re talking about writing, they’re also at various moments, you know, looking at the astronauts on TV and in some cases, you know, making some great jokes. And so it’s a moment of recording their interaction with this historical moment, their interaction with each. So it’s a wonderful tape and I’m excited for people to be able to listen to it.\n20:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s one of Karis’ collaborators across the SpokenWeb network explaining why this sort of recording can be so interesting to study.\n21:00\tDeanna Fong:\tSo my name is Deanna Fong. I’m a postdoctoral fellow working with SpokenWeb. My work with Karis has been so indispensable for my thinking. We’ve worked together on numerous occasions, but thinking about that question of what it is we’re listening to when we listen to this certain kind of artifact, or I suppose what, what are we listening for? And I think one of the things that we’ve found ourselves listening for is that, in any sort of informal or speech-y accounts that we have, we get a sense of the labour that goes on behind the scenes in the production of literature. And a lot of that labour is unevenly divided along gendered lines. So, you know, thinking about women’s contributions to building communities and to maintaining community spaces, acting as public historians, maintaining community archives, taking care of community members when they’re ill or when they need help, providing feedback, being auditors for work in progress, all these sorts of things that you hear, that don’t necessarily make it to the page. So I think that’s been a really crucial concept for the work that she and I have been doing. I don’t know if this is some continuation of my past or something, but I remember when I was a kid and going to hall shows and stuff like that, oftentimes I was way more interested in just sitting outside and talking to people about the bands, like, just as interested in that as I was in actually listening to the bands. So I think there’s a great interest, for me, in listening around rather than listening to, and I find conversations about literature vastly more interesting than a lot of literature itself.\n22:55\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve learned along the way to appreciate the virtues of close listening in the sense that one can learn a lot about the cultural moment of the reading by paying close attention, not just to the words that come from the speaker, but to everything else that is happening in the room. So I think, for example, about Margaret Atwood reading in 1970 and a now defunct gallery of a hub mall on the University of Alberta campus. [Audio, from the 1970 recording: Please come in and sit down, there’s lots of room at the front.] And you can hear during the recording, [Audio: He will be very unhappy if you stand up during all this. So please sit down.] Her coming in and trying to wend her way through the audience and get herself settled down in a hubbub of things, and an introduction starts, and then stops, and then there’s a moment where people have to direct people into the room to find space ’cause it’s so crowed. [Audio: The people standing up at the back can, you not sit down?] And you just get this incredible sense of the energy of that moment and what it meant to have this really fantastic young emerging writer [Audio: There’s lots of room, does everybody, everybody just shuffle forward] show up to do her thing. And the kind of excitement that that could generate along the way [Audio: That’s more like it.]\n24:15\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tLet me give you one other one, and that has to do with when Phyllis Webb is performing at the student union building art gallery in 1972. It’s March 9th, 1972 and she comes into the room, the recording’s already going and she’s completely breathless. She’s breathing hard and she’s clearly rushed over to get to this moment and she’s there late and she says.[I have to catch my breath.] And you can hear her say that, and just that moment of that physical presence and embodiment of this poet, again, with all of that energy that gets pulled into that archival moment into that event of the archive, it’s a really exciting thing. These are real people doing real things and real situations and the audio is a rich medium for capturing that if you’ve only listened closely enough.\n25:24\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n25:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with Deanna I thought about how important it was for her to be involved in the SpokenWeb project early on in her graduate education. After speaking with Roma and her work with student research assistant, Eva Lu, I thought even more about how student training through SpokenWeb is changing what it means to study literature. At UBC Okanagan [UBCO], Karis has taught and mentored many students who have gotten involved with the SpokenWeb project. I asked her more about student training and she had a terrific story.\n25:59\tKaris Shearer:\tFor me, pedagogy is central to what we do here at UBCO on the SpokenWeb team, and it always has been. So the example that you brought up of Lee Hannigan: first student to work on the project back when it was just in its very early stages. Lee came on as a work study student and we trained him in digitization, and so I reached out to a colleague, Stephen Foster, who very kindly invited us into the media centre that he was running at that time. Mike Berger, who’s a technician trained both me and Lee in the digitization process and gave us space in the lab to do that. So it’s always been a very collective process and SpokenWeb has always been such an interdisciplinary project that has required me to reach out to and do some of that community building with other experts in the area, in order to train students and bring them onto the project. That has stayed true all the way through to the current iteration of the team. We have students who are, again, central to the project and bringing their own expertise. And, at the same time, we are training them. We’re training them in the digitization process. We’re training them in design work. We’re training them in cataloguing and producing metadata. But their expertise as they’re learning that is, again, central, so in our team meetings we always come back to having the students talk about – do a bit of a round – and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing, and also what directions they see the project needing to go in or areas that need to be developed. And so the pedagogy is something that is student driven. It’s also, I guess for me, it’s also something that comes right out of our archive – it comes out of the cardboard box, which is at the pedagogy of the archive itself. The collection is very pedagogical. It records Warren Tallman in the classroom. It records Tallman inviting students to his living room to talk about poetry with his wife, Ellen Tallman; they bring up Robert Duncan and record Robert Duncan giving lectures and talking with students. So within the archive and the collection itself, students are central to that. And so, for me, the pedagogy we’re enacting now is very much in dialogue with, or taking a card from that, from the collection.\n28:47\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tFrom a cultural and scholarly point of view, well, audio is, almost and surprisingly so, a kind of unknown frontier. One of the ways I like to think about it is texts are never stable entities: they sit on the page surely, but as they go through various forms of socialization and cultural mediation, they change and shift over time. We deal with versions, we deal with variants, we deal with different contexts of reading and circulation and so forth – so they’re certainly not inert. But I would say if you take a poem by a particular mid century Canadian author that has sat on that same page for the last 50 years, and then you add to that archive, you add to that corpus 6 or 8 or 10 recordings of that author reading the poem, performing the poem, describing it to audiences, responding to audience questions, to hearing the audience itself respond to that poem.\n29:44\tAudio Recording:\tFairly recent poem, which isn’t a political poem. I told them, but a human poem and one that I wrote as a result of watching on television, the debates in the United Nations on the Middle East crisis. And one of the horrible things I felt as I watched it was how completely dehumanized it all was, that the real human issues had been lost sight of and sort of round in an ocean of resolutions and memos from embassies and all this sort of thing.\n30:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWell then that thing suddenly leaps off to the page to an nth dimension of variability and versioning, And suddenly the scholarly opportunities to work with those poems as cultural objects, as objects subject to scholarly comparison and critical analysis becomes all the more richer, all the more lively, all the more vibrant. And that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective.\n30:59\tJason Camlot:\tThere’s still a lot of work to be done before the field recognizes archives of sound as really significant or relevant, even still to the study of literature. Part of the, I wouldn’t call it resistance, but just sort lack of a sense of how to go about engaging with these materials is a result of changes in the way literature had been taught over the course of the 20th century. I think that recitation or oral interpretation was a very important part of the way literature was taught. The way interpretation was understood so that, when we thought of interpretation, it wasn’t critical analysis done silently in an essay about a poem on the printed page, but it was actually an oral performance in which one’s understanding of the poem was communicated through the intonations and vocal actions that one took in order to literally interpret, you know, deliver in sound their version of the poem. Students would be, in a sense, graded on their oral interpretations that would be part of the exam. Exams in the 19th century were called recitations and a lot of the performance of knowledge in the 19th century – Catherine Robson has written about this – was delivered orally, right? But I think during the course of the 20th century, Especially from the 30s on when methods, identified with what was called the New Criticism came into being, certain ideas of oral performance dropped out of the critical analysis of literature. And it became in a sense, silenced or replaced by more abstract concepts of the voice of the poem or in the poem, but not one that one expects to actually hear. But one voice that one expects to find, to give a sense of unity to the poem, and to describe, but the noisy classroom filled with recitation sort of became silenced. And students were asked to scan poems on the page and the sounds of voices were replaced by the sounds of pencils, scribbling paper on the printed poem. So I think that long tradition in pedagogy related to the teaching of literature has created a kind of barrier to our sense of even how to begin engaging with this kind of archive in relation to the development of sort of literary history, the analysis of a different kind of prosody that one can hear in performance, et cetera. So things were already being done in the late nineties, or some initial thinking was being done around this, but I think the archives themselves weren’t prepared, and still to a large extent haven’t been yet prepared for us to engage with this material in the same way, with the same facility, or with a facility that’s even close to that of the printed archive.\n34:26\tDeanna Fong:\tI will say, I’ll begin by saying that I wasn’t that interested in audio at the time. So I remember feeling a great deal of apprehension when I started working on the project in that I had no idea what these artifacts were or why they were, why they would be of interest to anybody or, you know, who would possibly want to listen to them. But when I dove into them and listened to, I found myself particularly drawn to the kind of extra-poetic speech, which is something that I’ve become very interested in, in my own research. But I was really interested in the liveness of these events. And so I remembered one of my first tasks as an RA on that project was to develop just a sort of lit survey around the research that had been done around audio poetry, like audio recordings of poetry. So I dove into Charles Bernstein’s close listening, and had this major revelation where I was like, “Whoa, a live reading of a poem is totally different than the reading of a poem on a page,” which is something that had really never occurred to me before. Like, I just, that it was a simple recitation and I really got a sense of the difference between a performed poem versus a poem on the page. And that difference became immediately very interesting to me.\n35:49\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, Karis – and really everyone we’ve heard from today – are all asking us to consider: what can these archives teach us? And it seems that sometimes these lessons can come from unexpected places. For example, what can this cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative project teach us about academic collaboration more generally?\n36:14\tJason Camlot:\tI’ve been very interested this past year, throughout the past year, in having intensive conversations with Yuliya Kondratenko, the Project Manager of SpokenWeb on project management methods. And which ones are best suited to a research program of this kind. And really to begin to map out what project management for humanities-based research might look like. So I think what we’ve been doing to a large extent has been listening and watching to see how activities have unfolded, what approaches have worked, which ones haven’t been picked up as successfully as a way to then reflect upon and describe, and then ultimately, I wouldn’t say codified, but, you know, abstract in a way so that we could perhaps learn from our methods that are initially just sort of iterative experiments. So that’s another thing that I’m really interested in from that sort of more distant perspective. And it’s been great having Yuliya as a kind of sounding board so that we can actually begin writing this up a little bit and sort of maybe map out a whole new project management approach based on the disciplinary messiness of our project.\n37:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, who we met at the top of the show. So what pulls all of these stories together? Well, at the heart of this project is an ethos of sharing. And as we’ve heard, it often starts with a box of tapes that a community member shares with a member of the team. But that is not all.\n38:06\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things that we see in the archive, vis-à-vis copies, is the circulation and gifting of recordings and tapes within members of the poetry community. Our current SpokenWeb project at UBCO is very much founded on gifting and sharing. And so when I look around the AMP Lab, which is where our collection is housed, so much of what we do is made possible through gifts, and so I’m thinking particularly of Stephen Foster, who is my colleague in visual arts. Our hardware, and even the early, the very first time that we digitized the reels, again, made possible by Stephen’s inviting us into his own lab and sharing his resources with us. And that’s been true all the way through for us, that that idea of the work on the SoundBox project is made possible through the sharing of things, the donation of tapes, and the gifting of hardware. So we really appreciate that.\n39:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, the web of SpokenWeb is not only the collaborative network of researchers, but it is also this web of archival recordings held together by a desire to make these available to more listeners. And this plays into what we’re trying to do here with this podcast. Provide a platform not only for researchers to share with the wider public the outcomes of their work, but a place where people might access the recordings, reflections, and sounds that have inspired so many of us and that continue to inspire us as the SpokenWeb partnership moves into its next year.\n39:57\tJason Camlot:\tOne thing I’m looking forward to in the coming year is beginning to see our metadata ingest system, which we call SWALLOW, which is sort of swallowing up or capturing all of the metadata that’s being typed in to that system, to see it build up and then to see what kinds of questions we can start asking as a result of having all of this metadata built up about the collections.\n40:26\tRoma Kail:\tOnce we have our records in and other institutions have theirs in, it will be interesting to see how they overlap or how they compliment each other. So we certainly have material that would maybe fill gaps in other institutions collections or vice versa. So I’m very excited to see when we are able to search it, for example, who has what and how that how that represents sort of all the institutions across Canada in terms of a collection.\n41:04\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we are, at UBCO with our SpokenWeb team, we’re actively building a website, so there’ll be a landing page very soon, and there’ll be a selection of tapes from a much larger collection that will feature – once we’ve cleared permissions and created some contextualisation for them – a number of recordings that’ll be featured on that site for people to listen in while we’re actively processing the rest of the collection. And so we can stay tuned for that, in fall 2019.\n41:35\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo one of the things I’m also really excited about is having some conversations with some of the individuals who were involved with these moments of recording in their day. And learning a little bit more, not only about the events and the authors and the atmosphere of that moment, but also learning a little bit more about their motivations for recording; what they were doing and how they understood, they were producing an archive and for whom and for what kind of future. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of the collection that we have. But I’d also like to learn a little bit more about the heart of the collection that we have.\n42:14\tJason Camlot:\tPart of the reason that this past year has been so successful has been just because of the people who are involved. That they’re very open minded, courteous and interested, and also extremely hard working, and so we have a bunch of people who share the desire to make things happen, but also a shared desire to have a great time while doing it. You know, I think that’s been a winning combination for our project and has really allowed us to get a lot done, and has allowed for that kind of flexibility and reflectiveness without panicking about whether we’re getting to where we want to go even before we might know where we want to go. And the other thing has been that I didn’t mention yet but that I think is very important in the development of this project has been the role of graduate students and even undergraduates. I mentioned that they were at the beginning of the project in terms of describing that first collection, but I think the network was in great part built because of students who moved from here to go on to study at other universities. Simon Fraser and Alberta and UBCO in particular come to mind where those students came from here, where they’d been working with sound collections and then arrived there and said, “Where are your sound collections? I want to work with them.” And that required those universities to sort of think about, “Oh yeah, we do have huge holdings in this area that we haven’t really looked at or listened to or touched in years.” And it’s really through the students in great part that a lot of the connections with some of these great people I’ve been describing are made possible. I think there’s a lot to learn. And this became very clear from our first institute, from the students and their approaches and the methods that they’re experimenting with in making sense of these kinds of materials. I think the highlight for everyone were the two and a half hours where we heard short talks from all the students across the network on what they had been doing and what they had learned over the past year. And I think that’s a sound that I think we’re going to be amplifying really over the next year or two.\n45:01\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n45:07\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much for listening to the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Cheryl Gladu and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, Roma Kail, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, and Karis Shearer for their candid interviews and continued contributions to SpokenWeb. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9275","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E2, Sound Recordings Are Weird, 4 November 2019, Camlot and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Cheryl Gladu"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Cheryl Gladu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Cheryl Gladu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/d43444be-7bce-40fc-8a82-091032ea2dba/sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"1:01:28\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"59,075,231 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"128kbps\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-11-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford Universiy Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23893\\n\\n—. “Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21 (2015). https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.744/\\n\\nConnor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.\\n\\nErnst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording.”\\nFolklore Forum 32 (2001): 57-102.\\n\\nGitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.\\n\\nStanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.\\n\\nNaremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016.\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke\\nUP, 2003.\\n\\nUCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549461401600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In “Sound Recordings are Weird: Stories and thoughts about early spoken recordings”, SpokenWeb research Jason Camlot interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb Network to uncover the stories behind the making of Early Literature Recordings. Drawing from his recent book “Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings”, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological and personal meaning of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we are interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them? What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world? And What do they mean now?\n\n00:00:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n00:00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As we dive into episode two in the SpokenWeb series, I want you to picture the oldest recording technology you can think of. Oh, what are you picturing? Is it a cassette player? You can tell me if it’s a cassette player. Is it a phonograph and maybe a wax cylinder? In this episode spoken web researcher Jason Camlot, interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb network to uncover the stories behind the making of early literature recordings. Drawn from his recent book Phonopoetics, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological, and personal meanings of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we’re interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them. What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world and what do they mean now? Here is Jason Camlot with episode two: Sound Recordings are Weird: stories and thoughts at the earliest spoken recordings.\n00:02:08\tMusic:\t[Instrumental]\n00:02:19\tJason Camlot:\tPart one. Old Sound Recordings are Weird.\n00:02:44\tJason Camlot:\tNo, there’s nothing wrong with your device. Do not adjust your radio dial so to speak. What you are listening to is an early sound recording.\n00:03:06\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. A Victorian scholar, that’s someone who studies 19th century literature and culture, and a researcher who is interested in the relationships that exist between sound and literature.\n00:03:29\tJason Camlot:\tIf you listened to the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, you might recall that the sound you’ve just heard is what first got me interested in research about the history of sound recording and how people have read literature out loud since the 19th century. I was an undergraduate student taking a full year of Victorian literature class. We were studying the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson. And then one morning, my professor, John Miller,\n00:03:56\tJohn Miller:\tI’m John Miller, and I’ve retired from teaching Victorian literature at Concordia University in Montreal,\n00:04:02\tJason Camlot:\tWalked in with a boombox.\n00:04:04\tJohn Miller:\tThe classrooms weren’t equipped, so I had to get a boombox and trundle into the class and fiddle with the dials and so on.\n00:04:18\tJason Camlot:\tAnd played us that recording you just heard. I have to say the first time I heard the piece, I found it to be a bit off-putting and scary because of the way it sounded, but also kind of strange and wonderful, sort of magical.\n00:04:35\tJohn Miller:\tI think there was some fairly stunned silence because, of course, none of us ever expected anything like this.\n00:04:44\tJason Camlot:\tIt was exciting to know that this long dead poet we were studying was, all of a sudden, transported to us in our classroom through a boombox. Many years later, I asked John Miller if he remembered the first time that he had heard the recording.\n00:05:01\tJohn Miller:\tI first heard the recording when I was a graduate student in a full-year Tennyson and Browning course, and John Pettigrew who was teaching the course had a copy of it and wowed us one day.\n00:05:19\tJason Camlot:\tI asked him if he remembers what it sounded like to him when he first heard it.\n00:05:22\tJohn Miller:\tIncomprehensible.\n00:05:24\tJason Camlot:\tAfter a while, as you listen to an old recording repeatedly, you can get past the strangeness of the sound and begin to decipher the words and tune into the way the reader is delivering or performing the poem. You come to hear the reading as a form of interpretation, a manner of actually performing the meaning of the poem through the use of different kinds of intonation and other vocal techniques that shaped the sound of the text with and through the reader’s voice. There are lots of different interpretations of this same poem recorded by Victorian actors and elocutionists around the turn of the 19th century.\n00:06:05\tAudio Recording:\tHalf a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred. / “Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” he said. / Into the valley of Death\n00:06:24\tJason Camlot:\tThe recording we have of Tennyson reading his own poem is the first such recorded oral interpretation of this poem. It gets us thinking about how Tennyson interpreted his own poetry with his voice.\n00:06:37\tJohn Miller:\tIt’s, I think the term that we came up with was elegiac rather than heroic. Tennyson recites the poem so slowly, that any heroism is evaporated. And, really, I think his performance reverses much of the conventional wisdom about the poem at the time.\n00:07:13\tAudio Recording:\t“Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” He said. / Into the valley of Death”\n00:07:21\tJason Camlot:\tThe heroic sound of the poem that John Miller refers to is clearly audible in this torrential rendition of the poem by Victorian stage actor Lewis Waller known for what James Naremore has described as his ‘phallic performing skill.’ The interpretation that John Miller hears in Tennyson’s reading goes against that standard accepted idea about the meaning of the charge\n00:07:45\tJohn Miller:\tthat it was a kind of newspaper, a poet Laureate glorification of British foolhardy gallantry. Rather than a lament for the disaster that it was\n00:08:10\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:08:11\tJason Camlot:\tHalf a league, half a league, half a league onward. In the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Forward, the Light Brigade. Charge for the guns, he said. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Ellipsis. Dot, dot dot. When can their glory fade? O, the wild charge they made. All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made. Honour the Light Brigade. Noble six hundred. This translation of an unintelligible old recording into clear or at least clearer words that I have just performed, represents an act of demystification, an unweirding of this old recording. Old sound recordings like the one we just heard are weird, not just because we can’t always decipher what the actual sounds are, but because, well, firstly the recording has preserved the voice of a famous person from another century whose voice we may have thought was lost for all time. So it’s weird to have an emanation from that body assumed eternally absent, resonate again, vibrate through the air for us to hear. It creates a kind of vocalic body, evoking the physical body that’s no longer there. That idea of the vocalic body comes from Steven Connor’s book about ventriloquism. Secondly, the recording itself doesn’t sound normal to us. This is because we are listening to a digitized version of a different material medium; a late-Victorian brown wax cylinder. The particular cylinder behind this recording wasn’t preserved according to best archival practices. It lost some of its shape over time, distorting the voice of the poet, making it kind of warped or erie or creepy sounding to our modern ears and adding other sounds that are derived from the material medium itselfT from the wax. Those sounds become even stranger as the sound is migrated from one media format to another. In the case of this early Tennyson wax cylinder recording, it went from brown wax cylinder to a small flat disc record that was sold to the public by the Tennyson society. John Miller purchased that record and then transferred that to a cassette tape and played it through a boombox. Hearing odd cylinder noises through a 1980s boombox estranges the original sound from its source. Same goes for when we turn it into an mp3 file and listen to it through a computer or iPhone. There are a lot of additional sounds beyond the voice that we cannot identify in this recording. For example, starting from about one minute and 33 seconds into the recording, we hear a loud banging sound.\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\tWe can’t know if this is a feature of the recording technology or if Tennyson himself was simply getting carried away with his recitation, banging a lectern or a table as he performed the poem. This is what John Miller assumed the banging sound to be.\n00:11:55\tJohn Miller:\tI think there are points at which he is pounding his cane on the floor, points which he runs out of breath, and that does give an extraordinary sense of the life, I think.\n00:12:08\tJason Camlot:\tAn extraordinary sense of Tennyson’s sonic presence, of his vocalic body. There’s also the issue of context. We can’t always hear context in a sound recording, although there are sometimes clues that can be heard. In this case, it’s hard for us to understand what was going on at the time. Why was he even making this recording? What would that have been like for him? Where was he exactly? What time was it? Was he reading or reciting his poem by heart? These old sound recordings are like escaped fugitives from their original media and historical contexts. And yet, despite all this strangeness, even with all this missing information, when we hear a historical voice recording, when we listen to Tennyson read The Charge of the Light Brigade again, over 100 years after he recited it into a phonograph, there’s something very real about it. This sense of the realness of recorded sound seems to have been felt by listeners even at the earliest exhibitions of the tinfoil phonograph.\n00:13:17\tLisa Gitelman:\tI think there is something to that, that this was an experience of temporal continuity, that there was a slice of time that was being inscribed onto these sheets of tinfoil, in a way that when you write down what somebody said, you’re not putting down – you’re putting down the words, but you’re not putting down a slice of time. My name is Lisa Gitelman. I’m a professor at New York University where I teach in the departments of English and the department of Media, Culture and Communication. There were several ways I guess we could say that these recordings and these exhibitions became experiences of temporality, right? The, the kind of preservative nature of the tinfoil but also the kind of the temporal duration of the recording itself.\n00:14:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe realtime quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what philosopher Wolfgang Ernst has called the ‘drama of time critical media.’ I like the idea that something dramatic happens when we play with time by playing sound recordings. An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing. It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one is hearing is living in the present, replicating the live event of which it is apparently a real time reproduction. Sound recording works on human perception itself and on our perception of time in particular. So Ernst’s argument about the strange drama of sound recording is based on his idea that we’re not cognitively equipped to process events from two temporal dimensions at the same time. When we immerse ourselves in real time sound, we perceive it as live and this jars our awareness of time. So that’s another weird quality of early sound recordings: they give us the experience of feeling time as multi-dimensional. In that way, a phonograph is like a time machine and we’re the time travellers. As an aside, HG Wells published his story, The Time Machine in 1895 soon after the invention of sound recording and film media technologies. Maybe he was inspired by this weird drama of time critical media that Wolfgang Ernst just talking about\n00:15:51\tJason Camlot:\tPart two, what is an early sound recorder? How did recording sounds become possible and how did those early technologies work?\n00:16:05\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:16:06\tJason Camlot:\tMaybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As we just heard from Lisa Gitelman, wax cylinders weren’t even the first recording technology, just my personal entry into the world of recorded sound. Like a lot of innovations, in hindsight, it seems almost obvious that humans would record sound, including the human voice, and play this back for all the reasons we’ve come to expect. However, like a lot of human inventions, there was a certain degree of serendipity involved in the development of recording technologies and also some inventive talent. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, that one name kept coming up.\n00:16:52\tAudio Recording:\tThomas Edison, Thomas Edison, Edison, Thomas Edison.\n00:16:57\tLisa Gitelman:\tI have doctorate in literature, so I’m a person who’s interested in texts, interested in reading and writing. And after I went to graduate school, I got a job at Rutgers University in New Jersey, working with a team of scholars that have, for a long time, have been researching and publishing the papers of the American inventor, Thomas Edison.\n00:17:19\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:17:21\tLisa Gitelman:\tAnd I spent many years working with that team of scholars to educate ourselves and educate the public about this archive and what was it. One of the things in it was a lot of material about the invention of recorded sound and I just was kind of bitten by the buck and became fascinated. In particular with the kind of earliest moments in 1877 and 1878, when the idea recorded sound itself didn’t really exist. One of the most precious things there, were experimental notebooks. So we have the original experimental notebooks in which Edison and his team of inventors were playing around in the 1870s – let’s say, in the fall of 1877 or the summer of 1877 – with lots of telephone devices, basically trying to invent a better telephone. And there was a lot of work in this period by Edison and by many others on telephone and Telegraph work, and there were lots of telegraph systems that did involve paper tapes. Either a telegraphic messages printed on paper tape or paper tape used as a kind of repeating device for telegraph communication, to make telegraphy a little bit more automatic. So using paper was something they had around and it also locked into expectations about inscription. And we have documents that more or less show us a certain moment when Edison realized, ‘Look, the way we’re doing this, we could actually use this technology to not just, you know, sort of transmit sound, but actually save it up.’ So you can actually see this in the manuscript notebooks. And then of course there are lots and lots of pieces of correspondence and business papers, then some promotional materials, so the archive is just a kind of many-splendored collection of oddities in a way. But it’s filled with these stories that can be pieced back together by historians who go through the papers.\n00:19:44\tJason Camlot:\tI’m going to try to take you through a history of acoustic recording technologies from the pre-recording phonautograph of the 1860s to the invention of the tinfoil phonograph in 1877 to the perfected wax cylinder phonograph in 1888. And then, eventually, To the introduction of flat disc gramophone records and beyond. To give this early historical account of sound recording technologies. I’d like to introduce you to:\n00:20:14\tPatrick Feaster:\tMy name’s Patrick Feaster. I’m media preservation specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative at Indiana University and I study the cultural, social, and technological history of sound recording with a particular emphasis on very, very early sound recordings. When we talk about sound recordings today, we generally think of them as something that is intended mainly to be listened to. You record speech music…\n00:20:40\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:42\tPatrick Feaster:\t…some kind of sound, then you play it back again as sound.\n00:20:46\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tThe first person to record a sound out of the air and then play it back was Thomas Edison in 1877, But he was not the first person to record a sound out of the air. The first person to record a sound out of the air was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He was a scientific proofreader who, In about 1850 to 1853, was given a treatise on physiology, which included a section describing how the human ear and eardrum work. As he read this, he began imagining to himself an artificial eardrum that would vibrate in the same way that human eardrum does, but then instead of passing those vibrations along to the auditory nerve and the brain so that we could hear them, it would write them down so that, as he imagined, any sound that the human ear was capable of hearing could be written down in this way. The invention he came up with consisted first of all of a big funnel with the membrane at one end of it. And the idea was you’d direct sounds of speech, song, whatever it was, into this funnel, they would cause the membrane to vibrate, then a stylus attached to the other side of the membrane would move back and forth with the vibrations. Now underneath the stylus would be a sheet of paper covered with the soot of an oil lamp and wrapped around a cylinder, and as sounds were directed into the funnel, you’d rotate the cylinder and as the stylus moved back and forth, it would draw a wavy line in the soot. After you’d made your recording, you’d take the sheet of paper off the drum, you’d fix it in an alcohol bath, kind of like fixing a charcoal drawing, and then you’d have this visual record of sound. Now the wavy line on that sheet of paper contains the same kind of information as the wavy groove on an LP. In both cases, we’re dealing with a graph of sound vibrations, the amplitude of sound vibrations over time, but Scott’s phonautograms were not intended for playback, which hadn’t yet occurred to anybody as a possibility at this point. Instead, he thought of the phonautograph as recording sounds in the same sense that a seismograph records earthquakes, you would not expect to be able to take a seismograph record of an earthquake and use it to create another earthquake. In fact, if you could do that, seismographs would probably be a lot more tightly controlled. But at the same time, we don’t think of seismographs as not really recording earthquakes. They really do, they graph out the vibrations of the, uh, the earth tremors and so forth. And similarly, these records were records of sound. But they were intended to be looked at visually, not listened to. Scott wasn’t sure exactly what people would be able to make of these records. He had rather ambitious thoughts that people would learn to decipher recorded words from them. You could perhaps sit and look at a recording of a performance of dramatic oratory or an operatic aria sitting in your chair at home, and maybe if you learned to read these things well enough, you could imagine in your mind’s ear what their performance had sounded like. But again, it was to be strictly a visual record. That’s not to say that we can’t play them back today. In fact, we can, what we need to do is make a high resolution scan of the phonautogram use an algorithm to detect the position of the wavy line and then convert that information into samples in a digital sound file. Once we do that, we can listen to the recordings Scott made, even though at the time they were made, there was no mechanism available to turn them back into sound. There are a few more things we need to do to get intelligible sound out of a phonautogram. The cylinder on which sounds were recorded was turned by hand, so the recording speed was very irregular. If we were to play the sound waves straight off the paper as the appear there would be extreme speed fluctuations, so severe that you wouldn’t be able to recognize the melody of a tune – something like that. Fortunately, Scott recorded the vibrations of a tuning fork next to the trace of the voice, and the nice thing about that is that the tuning fork always has the same number of vibrations in a given amount of time. And so if we adjust the tuning fork so that it’s at a constant frequency, then we bring the voice in along with it, we can correct for the speed fluctuations from the hand cranking of the cylinder. When we do this, we can hear songs, recitations, very much as they sounded back in the day. The, the tambour was not recorded so successfully, but the pitch very much was\n00:26:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tScott’s recordings were all test recordings to one degree or another. He was really still trying to figure out whether his invention worked and what it could be used to do, so he didn’t go out and record the voices of famous people or famous singers, he pretty much just recorded himself, his own voice. But there was some variety in his recordings. Sometimes he is clearly conducting a dry scientific experiment. Maybe he’s pronouncing words very slowly and deliberately or, or singing a song like ‘O Clair de la Lune’, but holding each note for an uncomfortably long amount of time. The idea here was to see whether, looking at the trace afterwards, you could understand what was going on, you could tell one note from another, maybe different vowel sounds, different consonants would look different from one another. In these cases that’s the sort of thing he was trying to figure out. But sometimes he lets loose with something that really is a full fledged performance. A piece of impassioned, dramatic oratory, a lively rendition of a song from the opera. Here Scott is experimenting with another of his goals for the phonautograph, which is that it could record virtuosic performances. That is, you could have the celebrated figures of the theater and the music hall stand in front of the phonautograph, perform the works for which they were best known, once they were recorded as phonautograms perhaps the, the genius of these people wouldn’t die with them, but future generations could experience it. They could look at those phonautograms, they could hear the performances again in their mind’s ear.\n00:28:29\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, the real breakthrough I think was when they released themselves in a sense from the idea that paper was a recording medium, and started to try experiments with sheets of tinfoil. Um, so the first successful recording surface was sheets of tinfoil, which sounds weird. They are paper-like, right? They certainly come in sheets. But it was a slightly more durable material and it sort of proved useful for what they were trying to do, which is a very kind of crude acoustic recording. The original device was not electronic in any way, it was just mechanical, and in a sense the tinfoil was part of the machine. So in 1877, and then moreso in 1878, the tinfoil phonograph started to gain a lot of popular attention in newspapers, and eventually there were kind of worldwide demonstrations of this, then miraculous, device.\n00:29:36\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo what this machine looked like, it was basically a long cylinder with a handle or a crank at the end that you could sort of spin to make the machine revolve. It had a funnel attached to it that the speaker would speak into, and then the sound of their voice, the vibrations in the air, would create indentations on the tinfoil. And then those indentations on the sheet of tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder, that was sort of the first sound recording. My name is Matthew Rubery, I am a professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Theoretically, that sheet of tinfoil could be replayed again and again, taken off the machine and put back on another machine and played again. But in reality, it did not go so smoothly. Often these sheets of tinfoil tore, they were quite delicate. It was very difficult to rewrap a sheet of tinfoil around a cylinder again, once you’ve taken it off. And then you had to sort of get the rotation speed just right, so you had to have a real skilled operator to turn that handle at just the right speed to recapture the pitch of the original voice. But these tinfoil photographs were the first ones that were made and sort of scraps of tinfoil that were given out at the end of these exhibitions, I mean, what a souvenir, those would be incredibly valuable today.\n00:30:55\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, I mean, if I were to imitate this recording for a classroom it would be easy for me to, I mean, these sounded just terrible. I’m gonna, you know, fake it, but I think they would have sounded like this, [inaudible,] you know just lots of scrapey surface noise. So the real question there is not so much ‘What did we listen to?’ But the real question becomes, ‘How are people so excited about this new recording technology?’ That question takes you back again to this threshold, when things are really new and you need a way to think about them. Apparently available in 1878 was an intuitive sense of fidelity, that ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, that’s you!’ on the recording, because there was nothing to compare it to.\n00:31:58\tDavid Seubert:\tMy name is David Seubert and I’m the Curator of the Performing Arts Collection at the University of California Santa Barbara. And part of my responsibilities here are the management of the historical sound recordings collection, which notably includes one of the world’s largest collections of early cylinder recordings: about 19,000 titles at this point. And we also have the discography of American historical recordings, which is a large database project to document the output of the early North American sound recording industry. A wax cylinder is really the commercial product that resulted from Thomas Edison’s invention of sound recording in the 1870s, where he initially recorded onto a roll of tinfoil wrapped around a cylindrical mandrel in order to use it for mass production of audio content, whether that’s spoken or music or whatever else it might be. They developed a wax cylinder which is a hard metallic soap that allowed for people to both record onto it and then to play it back as well. So unlike flat disks, a wax cylinders are really a read-write medium like cassette tapes or like an mp3 file where people, individuals could buy commercially produced recordings or make their own. So we have some early interesting content there on cylinders.\n00:33:26\tJason Camlot:\tThe history of early sound recording technologies reveals a close connection between sound and visual text or script. As Patrick Feaster explained the original idea for sound recording, the phonautograph didn’t even imagine playing it back, but conceived of sound recording as a kind of sound to printed script technology. The sound goes in and produces a squiggly line that we might perhaps be able to read. Léon Scott wasn’t able to read the squiggles with his own eyes, but Patrick and his colleagues who work on the first sounds project were able to get a computer to read them as digital data and to make that play t`he sounds that were originally recorded in the 1860s. Pretty amazing. Amazing in part because acoustic recording technologies are so very basic. A simple mechanical approach to capturing the air pressure produced by sound producing events like a person speaking. There’s no electrical transduction of the air pressure in this acoustic process, just a horn or tube to direct the sounds toward a thin diaphragm that is sensitive to the changes in air pressure and a stylus or needle that records those changes in air pressure onto something paper – tinfoil, wax – for safekeeping, and then a reversal of just the same process in this case from recorded bumps or squiggles on a material surface, via a stylus, to make the diaphragm shiver and stir the air again and a horn to make us hear those air pressure movements as the sound that had stirred the air in the past. The connection between sound recording and writing was strong from the beginning. Thinking of sound as a kind of printed text may distort or limit our understanding, our apprehension, our hearing of what is spoken recording really is. What if we try to think of these recordings not as visual scripts to be played, not as spoken or sounded versions of print works, but as audio texts, as generic forms in sound.\n00:35:45\tJason Camlot:\tPart three what are the formal and generic features of early sound recordings? What does it mean to think of a recorded speech as a formal entity? What are the elements that constitute the shape and significance of the audio text? The sound of early speech recordings can help us think about how to answer these kinds of questions. They help us hear how the nature of the recording technology itself had an impact on the Sonic qualities of the audio text that could be produced. As we now know, the technological and material underpinnings of an audio text have a hand in shaping how it was produced, used, and consequently the social and cultural meanings it might come to have. This is a pretty typical argument of design theory, which suggests that the material substratum of an artifact informs the possible courses of action that can be taken with it and frames the practices and meanings that surround it. Now, I don’t mean to say that the capacities and limits of the phonograph as a recording and sound playing device, or the material affordances of a wax cylinder as a storage media format, completely determined the use and meaning of all of the sounds that were accorded in preserved with phonograph cylinder technology, but they did play a role in deciding what kinds of sounds could be captured and in the case of speech recordings, what kinds of spoken audio text could be produced. Two quick examples of this. One: acoustic sound recording required the speaker to speak loudly. You practically had to shout to make that diaphragm vibrate enough so the stylus would dig into the wax deeply enough for the recording to the audible when it was played back. This affordance of phonograph recording technology meant that you couldn’t be all that subtle in your recitation of a literary work. You couldn’t whisper a poem into a phonograph. It wouldn’t stick. So early speech recordings couldn’t rely on wide ranges in amplitude, that’s volume or loudness, to communicate the feelings of the speaker. Here’s a second example: cylinders could hold no more than a few minutes of sound. So the storage capacity of the wax cylinder as a preservation medium had some serious implications for what kinds of texts and speeches could be recorded.\n00:38:33\tDavid Seubert:\tYou know the format was short. I mean, it’s a cylinder up until 1908 or so, only held two minutes of content. And after then, after 1908, they introduced four minute cylinders.\n00:38:45\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s David Seubert again.\n00:38:47\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo Edison, when he invented his phonograph, the first sort of prototype made in December of 1877,\n00:38:55\tJason Camlot:\tDr Matthew Rubery.\n00:38:56\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo, going all the way back to the 19th century here he tested it out by reading or reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. And I think that’s an interesting choice, although there’s been a lot of speculation about, you know, why start recorded sound history with this particular example. A few reasons come to mind, one is it’s a very short verse, and the first recordings could only record, you know, I think this one was under 10 seconds, which was perfect for a test case. It’s also something that sort of sticks in the mind quite easily, so you don’t have to think about the words, they just sort of come effortlessly to you as many nursery rhymes still do. It’s also helpful for an audience when listening to these early recordings because even though at the time the recording quality was talked about as being incredibly lifelike, when you hear this today, they sound practically inaudible.\n00:39:51\tAudio Recording:\tMarry had a little lamb, his fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.\n00:40:00\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it helped to have a recording that was familiar, the Lord’s prayer, for instance, was another recording that was often used to sort of demonstrate the phonograph.\n00:40:13\tAudio Recording:\tIn the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Hallowed Father who art in Heaven…\n00:40:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tBut that was when people heard these verses read aloud, they could recognize them clearly. Whereas if they heard something unfamiliar, it’d be a lot more difficult for them to actually hear what was being said. So some of the earliest recordings then started out with just snippets of nursery rhymes, a verse or two of poetry, maybe a short speech from a play, and these all sort of fit the earliest sound recording devices, which could only record up to two or three minutes. But they work great, too, for public demonstrations where the phonographic knowledge had been taken around to places and debuted in different cities. And let’s say a scrap of verse might be read, a speech might be recorded as well, some funny noises by the exhibitor might be made, a little bit of music too, to get the sense of the variety of things that could be done with these, these phonographs. That was what happened in 1878 when the photograph first came out, and it wasn’t until about 10 years later that we get to send in the more literary recordings or serious exhibitions. So the phonographs sort of disappears for 10 years after that.\n00:41:24\tJason Camlot:\tYou weren’t wonna make a recording of paradise lost or a full length play or novel because it would have required many hundreds of wax cylinders to do so. Early on when he first introduced the phonograph, Edison had bragged in some newspaper articles about soon having Charles Dickens’ novel, Nicholas Nickleby, on a single audio record.\n00:41:48\tMatthew Rubery:\tThe main thing holding back audio books or full length audio books is what we talked about earlier. The fact that records could only hold two or three minutes of sound up until the 1930s. And it’s not until 1934 that the technology is capable of recording an entire full length book on a set of discs, let’s say nine or 10 records for an average novel. So that’s a big change from a few decades earlier when, you know, Mark Twain once tried to record one of his novels using these wax cylinders that could only hold a few minutes of speech, and he got up to I think about 40 or so and then just gave up because it just wasn’t going to work. There were way too many cylinders needed to make a literary recording. But in the 1930s radio, the radio industry and organizations representing blind people start collaborating to come up with a way to make the record record as much as 20 minutes of speech on each side of a disc. And once that breakthrough is made, that enables the first full length recorded books to be made. And interestingly enough, they’re not made for sighted people, the first recorded books are made for blind people beginning in 1934.\n00:43:04\tAudio Recording:\tTyphoons by Joseph Conrad written in 1903, recorded for the Talking Book Library for the blind by kind permission of the trustees to the estate of the late Joseph Conrad. Chapter one.\n00:43:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it’s a rare example of people with disabilities receiving a technology in advance of everyone else. And it’s not until about 10 years later, until 1948, that those LP records, long playing records, go on the commercial market.\n00:43:32\tJason Camlot:\tSo the forms of early spoken recordings were necessarily short and the audio texts produced were either abridged versions of longer works or ingeniously condensed synecdotal instances or scenes that evoked a larger work from which they came. What actual genres of spoken recording did these media constraints make possible? You couldn’t hear a whole Dickens novel on a cylinder, but you might hear a minor character addressing you as if you are a character yourself in such a novel, giving you the feeling that you were listening to a Dickens character as if he were a real person and as if you were a fictional character.\n00:44:08\tAudio Recording:\tAh, my dear [inaudible] come in come in. I am rejoiced to see you at this [inaudible] moment. Oh and my dear regal friend, [inaudible], now, welcome to this–\n00:44:25\tJason Camlot:\tOr you might get a key transformation scene taken from the play adaptation of a novel to stand in for the novel as a whole, as if somehow Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could be boiled down to the moment when the professional and respectable Jekyll or Jeekul, as the recording puts it, loses control and transforms into the atavistic monster Hyde.\n00:44:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Chiming bells.] … that terrible night when, transformed as I was into that fiend incarnate Hyde, I murdered the father of the woman I loved. [Organ music.] Ah, I must pray—Pray God to keep away the demons. Ah, God, look into my heart and forgive my sins. You were right. I was wrong. Ah, ah the fiend is coming. Yes. Hyde is here! [Shrill throaty noises.] Stop that damned organ! The noise offends me ears! [Cackling laughter.] [Knocking.] They come for me! They’re going to take me to the gallows! [High tempo organ music.] But I don’t die on the gallows…\n00:45:28\tJason Camlot:\tOr George du Maurier’s best-selling late Victorian novel, Trilby, could be summed up by the scene in which the treacherous and antisemitically-rendered musical genius and mesmerist Svengali mesmerises the innocent Trilby.\n00:45:46\tAudio Recording:\tThe day will come when I shall be the famous Svengali, and hundreds of beautiful women shall fall in love with me — Prinzessin and Contessen and Serene English Altessen. But Svengali will not look at them. He will look inward at his own dream. And that dream shall be all about Trilby — to lay his heart, his genius, his thousand francs at her beautiful white feet. And you shall see nothing, hear nothing, thinking nothing but Svengali, Svengali…\n00:46:20\tJason Camlot:\tWhile no sound recording offers a transparent or unmediated record of a performance event, early sound recordings demanded greater accommodation of the affordances of the recording technology and preservation media than those made after the widespread use of tape recording. So we can’t separate a discussion of the kinds of recordings made in the first decades of sound recording from the technologies and media formats that were used to make them. That said, there were a great variety of genres of recordings made during the acoustic era of sound recording. Looking back to the beginning and the kinds of recordings that were made can help us try to understand why people were interested in these recordings, why they bought them, when they became commercially available, and what they may have meant to the people who listened to them.\n00:47:07\tLisa Gitelman:\tWhen a recorded sound first came into existence. The way people had to understand it was on its merits, in a sense, in relation to older technology, right? When a new technology comes along and the only way you can grapple with it is to look backward., and looking backward from recorded sound in the 1870s was really to think about text, was really to think about reading and writing and what we now think of as all the alternatives to recorded sound.\n00:47:38\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:47:39\tLisa Gitelman:\tA bunch of people signed up with this company, this exhibition company. A lot of them were journalists. Again, going back to the idea that this was somehow about writing and reading. But they were entertainers too, and in my research I just became kind of fascinated with newspaper accounts of these demonstrations. And they all, I mean, weirdly, they all seem to take something of a similar form. When people were faced with this recording device in small audiences or even large concert halls they tended to mimic to the machine to recite nursery rhymes, little scraps of Shakespeare, little tidbits of things they already had memorized, lots of kind of mimicry and animal noises and, I won’t say farting into the machine, but so that kind of mentality, it was a kind of, you know, low brow bonding, if you will, over the potential of this machine\n00:48:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tHistories of the commercial recording industry tend to focus on music, but really the spoken word was a very important part of what it had to offer from the very beginning.\n00:48:47\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Patrick Feaster again.\n00:48:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tMoreover, there were a few different types of recordings that featured spoken language very, very prominently. Some recordings were relatively straightforward recitations of existing, often well-known literary works, somewhat more common than this where recordings in which a performer would take on some particular persona, often an ethnic character, and perform a monologue in that character, usually humorous. A number of different ethnicities were represented. A performer, Will N. Steel specialized in a Jewish character named Einstein.\n00:49:28\tAudio Recording:\t[inaudible] my boy Ikie is a bright boy. Some day he shall set the moon on fire [inaudible]\n00:49:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tFrank Kennedy had a German character named Schultz.\n00:49:38\tAudio Recording:\tChildren are a necessary evil. There’s many different kinds of children. For instance, there’s the good boy, who goes to Sunday school when it grows up he becomes cashier in a bank and he finally skips to Canada with all the money he can get a hold of.\n00:49:53\tPatrick Feaster:\tBest known example of this type was a performer named Cal Stewart whose character Uncle Josh Weathersby was enormously popular for about 20 years.\n00:50:06\tAudio Recording:\tWell sure, we’ve just had our annual camp meeting at Punkin Center.\n00:50:11\tPatrick Feaster:\tThis was a character from rural New England who would tell about his naive blunders visiting New York city. Or sometimes he’d talk about things that happened back home in Punkin Center.\n00:50:26\tAudio Recording:\tIt was a great affair. Wow. For several days we was pretty busy baking and cooking and making preparations.\n00:50:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tThen there’s a third category of more elaborate productions in much the same spirit as later radio drama or radio comedy where you have multiple characters performing sound effects, music, all fitting together to convey some story through sound.\n00:50:53\tAudio Recording:\tMorning [inaudible]. Morning [inaudible] Don’t you know me? Wait ’til I take off my whiskers. We’ll i’ll be darned if it ain’t the constable. What be ya doin’ up outside? Doin’ up? Detectivin’! That’s what I’m doin’ up.\n00:51:08\tPatrick Feaster:\tBut this was done with the phonograph, much earlier examples of this stating back well into the 1890s. Not all early phonographic audio theater was humorous. There were serious examples including a dramatization of the San Francisco earthquake, reenactments of battles in the Spanish American war, one piece by Ada Jones and Len Spencer called House Cleaning Time\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording:\tLet me in. [inaudible] don’t you dare come in without drying your feet on the mat. Why, woman my feet are so wet you couldn’t dry them on the stove! Well, come in then.\n00:51:41\tPatrick Feaster:\tIs really more of a sentimental piece, an old couple reminiscing about their lives together, but a majority of it is humorous and a very large proportion of it involves ethnic humour.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording:\tGood morning Miss Riley, how are ya this morning?\n00:52:02\tPatrick Feaster:\tThere were practical reasons for this, much the same as the practical reasons that made ethnic humour so popular in other venues on the Vaudeville Stage in high dialect pieces published as filler in newspapers. Invoking an ethnic stereotype meant you didn’t have to spend any time on character development.\n00:52:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Inaudible] for you Mrs Riley, my husband and I have been married for two long years.\n00:52:34\tPatrick Feaster:\tBy taking on an Irish stage dialect, a black stage dialect, a German or so-called Dutch stage dialect, any one of a number of different conventionalised ways of speaking, but as soon as you adopt one of these conventionalised dialects, you can take for granted that your audience will make certain assumptions about the character you’re representing and will understand what’s going on based on them. And if all you have to work with is a short slot on a Vaudeville schedule, a few lines of space in a newspaper or two to three minutes of sound recording, then this type of efficiency can be very valuable.\n00:53:22\tJason Camlot:\tPart four: why early spoken recordings are important for understanding of the longer history of audio books, sound recording, and performance today. When I say that early sound recordings are weird, maybe what I’m really saying is that recordings from the early period of the technology can teach us a lot about those of subsequent periods. The fact that we are estranged from the content media and methods of performance in early sound recordings help us see and hear the elements that are less obvious to us in the case of recordings and media that we take for granted today. When we think about literary history by engaging with sound archives, it requires us to think about how the recordings that document the performance of literary texts, conversations, and activities were made and used and how the media and methods of production shaped the audio documents we can hear today. When tape recording became widely accessible in the 1960s with people carrying portable Wollensak and Uher reel-to-reel tape recorders around, they still weighed like 20 pounds, so not quite so portable as an audio cassette Walkman, a mini disc recorder, or an iPhone still when they were carrying these Wollensak and Uhers around, suddenly live readings that lasted an hour or more could be captured and listened to in another time and place.\n00:54:55\tAudio Recording:\tIt’s the sort of thing we do in Vancouver, like we sit down and read the whole book and this was published the same day as Dan Persky’s The Day, a book called The Day and uh it’s about the same length, about a hundred pages and he read The Day and then we took a break and I read Autobiology and then we took a break of a couple of hours and then he read The Day again.\n00:55:17\tJason Camlot:\tWe know that literary readings lasting hours did take place in the 19th century too, there are newspaper reports about that. But there were no reel-to-reel tape recorders back then. Our audible history of the literary past is shaped, in part, by the material nature of the media and archives we have today. Early recordings help us understand that about all subsequent media recordings, even the seemingly invisible digital formats like MP3 files. The difference between digital audio media and the analog and acoustic media technologies is pretty significant. For one thing, analog media capture sound in one continuous stream, and in that sense represent a kind of material index of the original sound event, it records. Digital media, on the other hand, capture microcosmic slices, samples according to a bit rate or frequency data that allows us to rehear the past events, rehear the past events, the past events. They certainly sound as clear or clear to us than all previous analog media and they can record sound events for than any previous material medium, just depends on how much hard drive storage space you have. But there are missing spaces in the documented temporal event in digital audio files that aren’t there in analog recordings. Maybe that makes a difference. Born digital recordings or digitized recordings of the past, turn literary sound into a new kind of data with its own remarkable affordances. We can control, analyze and listen to such audible data in a greater variety of ways than we could with earlier audio media technologies. It’s now very easy to record, store, entire novels on portable devices and to replay them in a variety of places, in the kitchen, walking the dog at the gym, driving to work, and to replay them in different ways. For example, the difference in speeds without changing pitch of the reader’s voice. Speed listening has been around since the 1930s at least recent work by Matthew Rubery, Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills has shown this. But digital media make possibilities for the manipulation of the human voice, virtually infinite.\n00:57:33\tAudio Recording:\tA set of drum rondos from synth loops in the cyborg opera. [beatboxing]\n00:57:42\tJason Camlot:\tMe may admire an avant garde poet’s performance of synthetic sounds, like Christian Bök vocalizing drum loops in a movement from a cyborg opera, as evidence of ingenuity and virtuosity in performance\n00:57:56\tAudio Recording:\t[beatboxing]\n00:57:58\tJason Camlot:\tBut really, with digital media plugins, what can’t the human voice sound like or do? Since the end of the 19th century, each phase of media history, performance history, literary history, and socio-cultural history has come with audible recordings of the human voice for us to decipher. By Listening to these recorded voices and all their sonic historicity. We can begin to understand the meaning of human expression as an auditory phenomenon, which is to say as a relational human phenomenon.\n00:58:37\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:58:39\tJason Camlot:\tWhat methods of listening, what audile techniques – to use a phrase from Jonathan Sterne’s book, The Audible Past – have we developed to help us decipher this remarkable audible archive? That’s a big and important question that I’m going to save for a future Spoken Web podcast. In the meanwhile, why not hop onto LibriVox or Audible and have a listen to the complete works of Charles Dickens.\n00:59:13\tAudio Recording:\tA tale of two cities by Charles Dickens. Book one, ‘recalled to life.’ Book one, chapter one, ‘the period.’ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.\n00:59:46\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n01:00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Cheryl Gladu and Jason Camlot. Our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller, and Matthew Rubery for their candid interviews and continued contributions to Spoken Web. An extra special thank you to everyone who joined us for last months’ #spokenwebpod listening party in celebration of our inaugural episode. Add your voice to the mix on Twitter with #spokenwebpod. To find out more about Spoken Web visits, spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the spoken web podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Please rate and leave a comment on iTunes or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9277","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S2E1, Deep Curation – Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice, 5 October 2020, du Plessis and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/ "],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2e2272f2-55cd-4126-9504-959fca8bda69/audio/ea743428-b8dd-4aa5-b204-c8d72da6416b/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:56:13\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,035,897 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print Recordings:\\n\\nBernstein, Charles. ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nBourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009.\\n\\nBrown, Lee Ann. In the Laurels, Caught. Albany: Fence Books, 2013.\\n\\nChristakos, Margaret. charger. Vancouver: TalonBooks, 2020.\\n\\ndu Plessis, Klara. “Santa Cova Muscles.” Unpublished.\\n\\nKellough, Kaie. Magnetic Equator. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019.\\n\\nLongair, Sarah. “Cultures of Curating: the Limits of Authority.” Museum History Journal 8.1 (2015): 1-7.\\n\\nMiddleton, Peter. “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem.” Oral Tradition 20.1 (March 2005): 7-34. Web. 25 December 2016.\\n\\nNakayasu, Sawako. Texture Notes. Seattle: Letter Machine Editions, 2010.\\n\\nObrist, Hans Ulrich and Asad Raza. Ways of Curating. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.\\n\\nRadford, Deanna. Poems. Unpublished.\\n\\nRobinsong, Erin. Rag Cosmology. Toronto: Book*Hug, 2017.\\n\\nRogoff, Irit. “Curating/Curatorial.” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 19-38.\\n\\nVidokle, Anton. “Art without Artists?” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 216-226.\\n\\nWheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.\\n\\nPoetry Recordings:\\n\\nDeep Curation 4th Space. Feat. Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Deanna Radford. 7 November 2019. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Boston University. Feat. Lee Ann Brown, Fanny Howe, Sawako Nakayasu. 30 January 2020. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Mile End Poets’ Festival. Feat. Aaron Boothby, Klara du Plessis, Canisia Lubrin, Erin Robinsong. 24 November 2018. Personal archive.\\n\\nSir George Williams Reading Series. Feat. Jackson Mac Low. 26 March 1971. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1\\n\\nFour Horsemen. Two Nights. 9 and 10 October 1987. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/4-\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549464547328,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Who chooses what words will be heard at a poetry reading, in what order, and why? Since 2018, Montreal-based poet and researcher Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation.\n\nThis episode – the “Season Two” premiere of The SpokenWeb Podcast – chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form, with excerpted and intertwined works creating a thematic, cohesive arc. The eventual collaborative, choral, and sometimes improvisational nature of this project raises questions about authority and authorship. As such, this episode conceptualizes shifting degrees of responsibility between curator and authors, and the dynamic space created as a result of this shared and mobile agency. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio, include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong.\n\n00:03\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:21\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitch Voice Ends] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Picture yourself at your local arts cafe for a poetry reading with some of your favourite artists and writers. You settle into a nearby seat and the hum of idle chatter around you begins to fade as the poet’s ready to take the stage. Now ask yourself: who chooses which artist reads first? Who chooses what words will be heard at the poetry reading and in what order and why? Since 2018 Montreal based poet and researcher, Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation. This podcast episode chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form with excerpted and intertwined works, creating a thematic cohesive arc. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong. Here is Klara du Plessis with season two episode one of the SpokenWeb Podcast “Deep Curation: Experiments with the Poetry Reading as Practice.” [Theme Music].\n02:18\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m Klara du Plessis. A poet and PhD student in English at Concordia University. I’m doing research on the history and practice of the curation of poetry and performance. [Instrumental Strings] About three years ago, I saw a friend in Toronto and we sat on a terrace with our drinks. Our conversation felt energetic and I shared a new idea that I was excited about. So excited about that I continued not only thinking about it, but doing it. I call this doing Deep Curation.\n03:00\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation is a practice of experimental poetry reading organization that I developed and theorized over the past few years. Through it, I deliberately heightened the curator’s role while questioning assumptions of who gets to shape the poetry reading, why, and what the implications of those choices are.\n03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices as sample of Deep Curation performance]\n03:29\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the initial phase of experimentation and in my role as a Deep Curation curator, I would choose the poems read by the authors and the order of the presentation.\n03:41\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices]\n03:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the later phases and in Deep Curation’s more robust form, I worked to create a thematic arc, to re-contextualize the poet’s work, to place poems in conversation with each other through proximity, but also excerpting and formal experimentation.\n04:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Voices]\n04:06\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Strings] The idea for Deep Curation hit me after almost six years of field work organizing the monthly Montreal-based Résonance Reading Series. [Music: Strings increases volume, includes overlapping audio of background event chatter] While this series precedes Deep Curation, it forms the foundation of my experience in thinking about curation. It was a big deal for me to wrap up that series. [End Music: Strings] It was such an ongoing, almost durational part of my curational life. I’ll never forget the final closing event of the series, held on 7, August 2018. [Audio Recording: Background Chatter]\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Klara du Plessis] Can everyone hear me? Amazing. It’s a really huge turnout, which is amazing and I’m so, so happy to see all of you. There are some extra fold up chairs kind of by the front door, on the right-hand side, opposite the counter. So, if anyone wants one, they’re there. Please help yourself. Or ask me to help you. Yeah, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, welcome to the final Résonance reading! [Cheering and Clapping] Yeah, it’s been six years of plus minus 10 readings per year, which makes that give or take 60 meetings right here on this stage. So, I’m gonna allow myself to be nostalgic for a moment because Résonance kind of started by accident in a way, like I just finished my Master’s and decided that I was going to take some time to do my own writing. And that led to me actually working here at Résonance Cafe in different capacities. But then of course I noticed the stage. I was like, okay, well it’s a perfect venue, let’s organize one reading. And so, I invited some friends to read and it was a huge success. It was super fun. And it kind of, then we decided that, “Oh, well, we can just as well start doing it again and again.” And I started organizing events on a monthly basis, but like one month by one month. And if I can give any aspiring curator advice, never organize month to month because it’s incredibly stressful. Like every couple of weeks, “Oh my gosh, I still need three readers, where am I going to find them.” And it just feels like you’re constantly organizing. [Mechanical Sound]. So, there was a point that I realized I needed to step up. And I started organizing the readings way in advance, like up to a year in advance. And this shift in attitude also kind of became a shift in who it was booking. So, I started inviting people who I thought wouldn’t say yes, you know, so I can be like, “who do I want to see on stage?” “Who do I really, really admire?” And then I’ll just reach out. And like the amazing thing was that pretty much everyone I’ve ever invited has said yes. With a few exceptions, with very legitimate reasons that they can’t come. And yeah, so I just realized that people [Metal Clanging] need a platform, people want to share their work. And yeah, that felt like a major kind of shift in what Résonance became. [Mechanical Sound] And then people started asking me to read people —agents and publicists started contacting me — and Résonance became larger, kind of like national in scope. It felt more serious and it felt like  way more responsibility. This is maybe like three, four years in. And then I very slowly started thinking that Résonance had become a form of authority in the sense of being able to offer or withhold opportunity. Those high standards are one of the reasons that I ended up deciding after six years that this kind of like the end of an era, in a sense that if Résonance were to continue, I would want to keep doing better and doing more. And as like one woman doing this, I don’t have the time or the resources to do that. But I do want to say that curating Résonance has been an absolute joy. It has been fun. It has been fulfilling. It has been challenging, energizing, and I’ve learned so much and I’ve met such great people [Audience Member: Woo!] So, thank you. [Clapping] That’s like the longest speech I’ve ever given here. [Instrumental Strings]\n09:01\tKlara du Plessis:\tI had heaps of experience organizing and hosting literary events, but Deep Curation was somehow different. I wanted to curate a poetry reading. I wanted to really curate a poetry reading. I wanted to invite poets whose work I love to read. And then I wanted to tell those poets which poems to read and in what order. “Oh”, my friend said, “yes”, my friend said. “That is a good idea.” [Instrumental Strings with Percussion]\n09:33\tKlara du Plessis:\tWhenever I chat with art historians or exhibition curators about the research that I’m doing, they always have one of two reactions. They either insist that curation in the visual arts is grossly under theorized and not thought about critically at all, or that the word curatorial has been overused and they couldn’t stand hearing it one more time. Coming from a literary perspective, though, it seems to me that the visual arts has done a tremendous job of sussing out critical vocabulary surrounding the presentation, dissemination, and structures of collaboration inherent to curating. For starters, practitioners of the visual arts and museum studies have theorized a very useful division between the terms of curating and curatorial. I’d like to quote scholar and curator Irit Rogoff on this rift. Rogoff suggests quote: [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “the distinction is of curating as professional practice, which involves a whole set of skills and practices, materials, and institutional and infrastructural conditions. Developing the concept of the curatorial has been about getting away from representation and trying to see within this activity, a set of possibilities for much larger agendas in the art world. The curatorial then defines the larger frame” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumental] When I think of most poetry readings that I have been involved in, and especially those that precede Deep Curation, I interpret curating versus the curatorial as a division of labour. Often the poetry reading organizer takes on the work of curating. I mean that the organizer invites the poets, they book a venue, promote the event on social media, they check the microphone and adopt a responsibility of care towards presenters and audience. They ensure that everyone is having a good time. In contrast the poets themselves enact the curatorial role. The poets choose which poems they will share, how these poems will be framed by anecdote and preamble, and in which order they will be performed. As critic Peter Middleton says, choosing which poems to read is quote, [Click] [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “a fiercely held prerogative of the poet.” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] [Click] All of this implies that the organizer of the event has little to no input into the work performed at the poetry reading. They don’t know whether they will like the specific works chosen by the poet. They also don’t know whether the works by different poets will enter into relevant dialogue with each other, [Audio Recording: Echoes of chatter at an event] or whether there will be a thematic or conceptual arc to the event as a whole. Differently put the literary curator has little agency to shape or mediate the event as a cohesive relational platform for the presentation of art. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this division of curating and curatorial and how it impacts the organization of literary events. I became obsessed with trying to shift this dynamic, to play with it, and to get material answers to theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s pivotal question: [Begin Music: Intermittent Strings] what does a form become when it is plunged into a dimension of dialogue? This isn’t a new question. As Bourriaud historicizes in terms of the visual arts, a paradigm shift occurred after cubism resulting in a radical turn away from human deity and human object dialectics and a turn towards human to human relationality. Starting mid-century and swelling through the ‘70s, into the ‘90s, happenings, gatherings and participation-focused art, place sociability and the relationships between human experience center stage. [End Music: Intermittent Strings] At the same time, collaboration and interactivity became a source for exploration in the literary world.\n13:19\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\t[Inaudible/Multiple voices reciting poetry over one another] Opening quotations number. Open quotations. [Inaudible] Closed quotations. Semi-colon. [Inaudible]\n13:30\tKlara du Plessis:\tA good example [Audio Recording from above continues faintly] is Jackson Mac Low’s communal readings using volunteers from the audience to perform elaborate scriptings of his poems.\n13:37\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tSemi-colon. Evan. [Inaudible]\n13:43\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Audio Recording continues faintly] These readings often resulted in cacophonous chaos. This audio clip is from Mac Low’s appearance at the Sir George Williams reading series on 26, March 1971.\n13:54\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tX [inaudible] capital E. A. V [Inaudible] R.Q. comma. semi-colon. period. K. N. Apostrophe. P. 6. D. [Inaudible] Dash. Dash. Dash. Dash. Semi-colon.\n14:14\tKlara du Plessis:\tAnother relevant example is the so called Four Horseman: BP Nichol, Steve McCaffrey, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. [Begin: Audio recording, inaudible] These four poets exploded the potential of sound in their polyvocall joint compositions. This audio clip is taken from the 1988 record, Two Nights.\n14:51\tAudio Recording, Four Hourseman\t[Various Vocal Sounds, inaudible]\n14:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation clearly stems from a rich tradition of experimental collaborative poetry performance. It is also engaging though with contemporary vocabulary from the visual arts and importing it to explore literary potentials. I want to listen to some audio clips from three Deep Curation poetry readings curated between late 2018 and early 2020. But I also want to linger on the shift that is activated when some of these theoretical questions come into play. The division of labor between curating and curatorial with poets themselves often deciding how to present their work upholds the familiar concept that poets perform their own roles as authors on stage. Contemporary authors voice their own work as a display of authority and authenticity. [Sound Effect: Box Opening] As scholar Leslie Wheeler suggests [Sound Effect: Box Closing] poetry readings are manifestations [Begin Music: Instrumental] of authentic authorial presence. There is of course also the opposite danger of tipping the scale of authority away from the author to the curator. This is something that curator Anton Vidokle relevantly critiques in terms of the visual arts. He says, curators have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics. Vidokle warns that curators can easily usurp credit from the artists or poets and rob the voice of their creative work. [End Music: Instrumental] One of Deep Curation’s key points of investigation is to trouble the notion of static authorial authority by distributing curatorial agency between author and curator alike. The curator of a Deep Curation poetry reading aims to direct the presentation of poetry by facilitating polyvocal dialogues between poets and between the works of those poets. Yet poets always retain authorship over the poetic output. Poems and excerpts of poems are placed deliberately alongside each other to create thematic narrative and conceptual arcs and arguments. The poetry reading is no longer a series of random poems placed side by side. Rather, the poetry reading presents a cohesive entity of combined poems that collaborate towards a larger sonic event. By directing, scripting, but also working together to design the poetry reading in this way, agency circulates from the poets to the curator, and back to the poets. Poets and curator constantly navigate a dynamic balance between control and freedom, individual authorship and collaboration.\n17:07\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m going to share audio clips from three phases of my Deep Curation experiments, narrating the project’s development, and illustrating shifting approaches in my practice. [Begin Music: Instrumental] The audio clips will further inspire a discussion on this relationship between control and freedom. [Music Intensifies] Deep Curation: Phase One: Resonance. [Music Continues] One of the first Deep Curation experiments I curated, I invited poets Aaron Boothby, Canisia Lubrin, and Erin Robinsong to participate. I knew that their poetry would form a relevant conversation and I could imagine a reading that centered ecology, language, and loss. In hindsight, my tentative curatorial strategy was just a buffed-up version of a normal poetry reading. And of course, I realized how fraught the word ‘normal’ sounds. For the most part, I scripted the order and interlay of poems by the different authors, but I rarely excerpted or initiated any kind of material intervention into the structure of the poems and their coexistence. I also included some of my own writing. And so, the four of us read together at the vegan jazz bar Résonance Café during the Mile End Poets Festival on 24, November 2018. Here is a short audio clip from this reading. Erin’s poem “Cortes” is deliberately positioned beside a section from an early version of my long poem, “Santa Cova Muscles”.\n18:49\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong\tThe mountain told my eye / its sparkling name / and in return, I answered / from the ashes/ and green /gathered round/ and echoed /along the windy heights/ O my friends/ if you are alone / stretch out both brains / and lash together a middle one/ thus three-way / we waited for the dawn/ fresh and rosy fingered / as the backs of animals/ when evening falls / nobody / yet saved his skin/ so we ourselves untie / the ship took places at the oars/ and seek again / an island where /with burning clouds / and loyal dark / we soon rouse\n19:48\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis\tDespite density a kind of stupidity crushing words/ into a pulp of intelligence /no /air /allowance/ Instead, a breakage into sight /breakwater from words, hieroglyphic impotence / gathering light through the eyes, tearing it out/ salt, water, ocean writing, / organic prismatic/ I stumble over my love for the sea and rest my head on mountains/ I’d like to posit a theory that we’re all descendants of headstones/ The soft jagged edge of the mountain range / where I walk daily for three weeks, then leave/ encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder/ This mountain intelligence, reasoning beyond the usual kind. I reject truth, but fixate on beauty/This might imply a material privilege, visual impulse, / but this banal state of mind is reversed to a vibration, the vibratory / relation exceeds the eye, yet enters everything through the surface of the eye/  to inoculate everything/ Heading towards the garden, which is the museum, / this ontological greenness…\n21:13\tKlara du Plessis:\tI love how green and eyes weave a connecting thread. When Erin says [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Stretch out both brains and lash together a middle one] I respond [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder, this mountain intelligence reasoning beyond the usual kind] thematic coherence and a similar affective register bind these independent poems together. They become perceived as a unit, or at least as a conversation. Despite Erin and myself each composing our poem separately at different times and with different intents. They merge here in this reading through adjacency to create a temporarily shared authorship. In this case, I am both an author sharing my writing beside other authors, and I am the curator of the event as a whole. This implies that my authorship oscillates between a kind of directive stance towards the event as a combined performative entity and the embodiment of intimate listening in proximity to other poets while collectively sharing our poetry. I returned to Résonance Café, the venue for this Deep Curation event in order to jog my memory about the reading, but also to record myself in a less formal, more journal-like way. One could say that I’m [Begin: Echo Effect] Deep Curating my voice through time [End: Echo Effect] as I collage archival material from 2018, formal narration for this podcast, and soundscape audio from the field.\n22:36\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\t[Background Noise] So here I am in Résonance Café, the venue of many, a poetry reading over the course of six years. All kinds of background noises: [Microwave Beep] cleaning the fridge, pots [Coffee Grinder] the coffee machine. Many readings were ambiently disrupted by the coffee grinder. [Background Noise] With me is Isis Giraldo. She’s one of the co-owners of Résonance Café.\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHello!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDo you want to say hi?\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHi!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tAs already mentioned the second Deep Curation event with Canisia, Erin, and Aaron, also happened here in Résonance Café. And, this is really one of the spaces where I’ve listened the most deeply I’ve ever listened on the stage being in such close proximity to the people around me on stage. Because we hadn’t rehearsed very much and because we had such minimal scripting for the reading we were very attuned to what the other readers were doing to make sure that we didn’t miss a cue or forget where and when to start reading. And so just the degree of listening between the four of us on stage was very acute. I remember in particular that Canisia was reading a lot slower than me and that as the event progressed I kind of matched my pace to hers  — it was an element of kind of like empathetic performance where we really tried to listen and adapt to what was happening sonically and collaboratively.\n24:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe four of us were in this together. We were on the stage together. But perhaps counter-intuitively, our togetherness came at the cost of remaining separate. Each poet’s reading is extremely clear and articulated in solitude. Each poet’s words remain their own words and as fellow performers we each respect the sonic space needed for another poet to project their work into the room. The images of Erin’s poem make eye contact with the images in my poem, but they don’t overlap or resolve into chaos.\n25:15\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong:\t[Inaudible]…and seek again an island where with burning clouds and loyal dark, we soon rouse\n25:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tPoems touch, but don’t merge.\n25:31\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDespite density, a kind of stupidity/ Crushing words into a pulp of intelligence /No air allowance.\n25:36\tKlara du Plessis:\tAs the curator of this event, my intention was to create a dialogue between the different poetries presented, but I was also clearly hesitant to overstep my own adopted authority. I felt strange to excerpt poems that I had not authored or to demand borders between poems to be blurred. This is of course symptomatic of the fact that this reading was only the second experiment in a series of Deep Curation poetry readings. I was still figuring out my own project of taking control of the poetry reading’s form. I was trying to strike a balance between directing the reading and maintaining the authorial integrity of the authors and of their works. Here is another excerpt from my audio journal, now seated on Resonance’s patio.\n26:17\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tI’m sitting on the patio outside now. And I’m still thinking about this Deep Curation event that I did with Aaron, Erin, and Canisia. And I’m thinking back and reflecting on the extreme release of energy that happened directly after we performed together that night. And just this like real recognition of the potential of what the project held and what we could feel it, the project could still develop into. And I remember kind of talking to Aaron, Erin and Canisia and, you know, asking how that felt about the very small instances of excerpting, you know, whether they felt comfortable with that after the fact. And they really made it clear to me that while I was being very tentative about excerpting and intertwining, those are really the moments that were the most valuable. And that going, moving forward with the project what I really needed to do was to be less careful, be less tentative and be more dramatic with the process of putting poems in conversation with each other and that this approach would really define, should really define what Deep Curation was and how it made it different from other poetry reading events.\n27:35\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental] Our conversation excited me and I felt inspired to design stranger, more exploratory Deep Curation scripts. Deep Curation: Phase Two: Fourth Space. [End Music: Instrumental] With a green light go ahead from Erin Robinsong, Aaron Boothby, and Canisia Lubrin, I started formally experimenting with what I now call refrains. These are longer, highly excerpted sections that combine lines and a theme from different poets and different poems into a new whole. Conversations with friends occasionally introduce the words, remix, or cento in relation to these refrains. Borrowed, poetic language repurposed as a new creative body of work. I often fantasize about creating an entire Deep Curation poetry reading using this technique. The following audio clip illustrates this refrain style. It is taken from a Deep Curation poetry reading featuring poets, Kaie Kellough [Audio Recording, Kai Kellough: The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.], Margaret Christakos [Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: Listen, they’re not listening], and Deanna Radford [Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: Voices everywhere, talk talk]. Most of the text is from Kaie’s book Magnetic Equator, Margaret’s Charger, and Deanna’s still unpublished work. The event took place on 7, November 2019 at Concordia University’s Fourth Space, a venue dedicated to the sharing of new scholarly research.\n29:05\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:08\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tListen, you’’re not listening.\n29:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tTongu, words. Sibilant chorus.\n29:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:26\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n29:29\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:44\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n29:50\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:53\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n29:57\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am listening\n30:02\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back, is this a beginning? Is it preferable to be erased, to have a voice that does not know the chorus\n30:10\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tvoices mime rooms\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry to listen.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us, ears\n30:27\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country and ear facing upward and listening,  listening, receiving signals from the world.\n30:37\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whisper. Lip to ear. Through glass. Walls. Plastic. Light scope.\n30:44\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n31:10\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n31:12\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am. Listening.\n31:14\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back. Is this a listening? Is it preferable to be beginning? To have a voice that does not know the chorus?\n31:22\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tRooms mime voices.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry. To listen.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us. Ears.\n31:35\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear, facing upward and listening/ listening, receiving signals from the world.\n31:47\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA speech act for ears / speech acts for ears.\n31:50\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tEars would be like metal or dreams of hallucinatoria.\n31:58\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whispered lip to ear through glass, walls, plastic, light scope.\n32:04\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tVaricose, inner ear exorcism.\n32:09\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear facing upward and listening/ Listening, receiving signals from the world.\n32:16\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tSignal whistling for us chorally / come into my arms, darlings / come soft into this cloud.\n32:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tComposing these excerpted refrains on shared topics of listening and poetic articulation clearly took a high degree of familiarity with the author’s work. I needed to recall relevant lines in order to place them in thematic conversations. At first, my process was to mark up hard copies of authors’ books, but in time I realized that searchable PDFs hugely facilitated the process. A PDF allows quicker access to lines and the ability to copy paste excerpts into the refrain. Creating these refrains took a poet’s mind and an eye for composition. Lines were extracted from the original works. They were recombined into a new context and new conversation with lines from other poems and from the minds of other poets. This is a good example of the curator adopting the role of the author. As a curator, I was doing more than mediating the creative performance. I was also molding, creating and literally authoring a new script. Although I always worked with the consent of the invited poets, I was possibly also overstepping my role. My role as directive curator was productively challenged working with [Begin: Background Chatter] Kaie, Margaret, and Deanna, skilled performers and formal experimenters themselves. Kaie had graciously welcomed us into his home serving coffee and warm croissants as we settled into work on the script of our design. We discussed the arc of the event, performance cues and logistics. My memory of our discussion has Margaret questioning the possibility [End: Background Chatter] of opening up the script. She was curious about more organic instances of interjecting into another poet’s words, supporting them with echoes, or drowning them out with overlay. Margaret, Kaie, Deanna and I were all excited about this possibility of opening up the script and worked to integrate new strategies into the performance outline. Some poems needed to be read solo, to maintain the impact of the words’ meaning. But some sections were begging to be choral, to maximize the potential of three voices in performance. In the following audio clip, the three poets’ voices are organically interspersed. The poets borrow each other’s words and insert them into their own poems to create a dynamic and playful conversation.\n34:34\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tI never cared to be a pastoral poet wrote poetry, a small flatland  longings, a poet of evangelical strictures\n34:43\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors.\n34:45\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tRevolutions, oceanic futures written in the veins of the vegetal/ Tenements of Babel dense with voices/ Languages spilling out the summer windows.\n34:56\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors, nor errs/ Nor ers /Nor ors. But ore\n35:08\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tEarthen oar. Earthen tongue. [inaudible] speechless under death. Oar. Air. Weightless volume of big sky.\n35:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors /nor errors, not ers, nor ors but ore /for roses, for eros in decision making/ if edgewise among tongue that propriety.\n35:27\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tErrors, airs, URS, oars, or roses/ name or summon arrows/ muse or crave savour moan or receive conceive arise or arouse.\n35:41\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLike her name was inland/ a corpus yours/ Tongue yours and corp yours.\n35:51\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tEarthen tongues ripple speechless under yours/ Air weightless volume of big sky.\n35:57\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLaps and licks and skirmishes.\n36:00\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tWriters circumnavigate the question with smiles and gestures that dismiss/They write from everywhere at once.\n36:07\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tThe a-ha of poetic inspiration.\n36:12\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe only places the a-ha/ The immediate port at which the next letter a-ha.\n36:18\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\t— a-ha!.\n36:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t— is detained, arrives, or vanishes. [Overlapping Voices] Thank God it exists. A-ha! The ah-a exists either here nor there/ Is every weather, where? / Which is here, which is nowhere.\n36:32\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tA-ha. A-ha. The a-ha a poetic inspiration, shifted to an a-ha reflex of thank God it exists a-ha more is a-ha now I can have this and this to this a-ha this works.\n36:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tA-ha! The poets are taking a-ha! authorship directing the a-ha! performance, developing it and initiating exchange. They’re also leaving audile space for the semantic soundscape of different voices to be heard alongside each other. This is not always the case.\n37:11\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t[inaudible, voices reciting poetry overlapping one another] Press down to form home print that scattered over future service, entrusted. disclosed. incidental behavioural derived body unsettled my reaches organic my past and now my scaped spread evenly over my spaces my means of speech my body my body my personal info invisible presence a proxy my body my body is measured is measured is filled with water scattered future interested disclosed incidental my reach is organic my past image spread evenly over my face [inaudible] stretch. [inaudible]\n38:32\tKlara du Plessis:\tHarmony transgresses into cacophony. Deanna and Kaie read briskly over each other, while Margaret doubles words standing out to her and adds a third layer to the mashup. This is a true merging of voices. Separate strands are no longer clearly audible. Rather, an assembly of voices, tones, and timbres swell chaotically into a shared ownership of poetry.\n38:57\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tHere I am, again, reminiscing on my audio journal almost a year after the Deep Curation event. I traveled down to Fourth Space, the venue of this Deep Curation event and imagined that I could see the event replaying itself through the glass walls almost photographically. So, today has been quite an odyssey. I’m now down by Concordia University’s Fourth Space, which, is of course closed. And I can — the most I can do is peer through the big glass windows and try and imagine again how this Deep Curation event happened with Kaie, Margaret and Deanna. And so, I’m kind of envisioning again the large screen that had a PowerPoint presentation projected onto it and the chairs that I had reconfigured into a circle so that the three poets and I kind of sat at the four cardinal points of the circle with the audience members interspersed in between. This really created the sense that audience was part of the performance, that they were inside the sound and you know that the sound was emanating from three different directions. Also, that the three poets could really make eye contact with each other. They weren’t standing in a line on a stage.\n40:15\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin: Instrumental Strings] There was strength in collaboration. Working with Margaret, Kaie, and Deanna on the design of this Deep Curation poetry reading developed it into an expansive, dynamic, and engaged performance. It also generated methods that I continue to use for Deep Curation as an ongoing project. [Instrumental Strings increase].\n40:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation: Phase Three: Boston University. [End: Instrumental String] Preparing for my first PhD field exam I stress-dreamed that I had to create a Deep Curation script in 10 minutes. “Oh no!”, I thought. “This is an impossible task.” “I haven’t spent months reading. In fact, I’m not familiar with the poetry at all!” Luckily in a happy turn of the nightmare variety, I solved the conundrum. In my dream, I created a set of performative cues for improvisation. In my dream, the poets had to choose their own poems, but they had to read them according to my design. The real life, non-dream Deep Curation event that took place at Boston University on 30 January 2020, definitely wasn’t limited to 10 minutes of preparation. But it did function as a broad structure with signals for the authors to move more freely. In other words, my authorship of the outline demanded reauthorship from the poets as they played and reworked their words collectively on stage. This reading included prerecorded audio of Fanny Howe’s poetry and the following audio clip features live performance by Sawako Nakayasu —\n42:22\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tSo, where’s my werewolf pillow.\n42:24\tKlara du Plessis:\t— and Lee Ann Brown.\n42:27\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tBlockade.\n42:27\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis clip extracts poetry from Sawako’s book, Texture Notes, and Lee Ann’s In the Laurels Caught.\n42:36\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Blockade is pink lemonade made from strawberry library books. The Totoro house hums a deep song in yonder glen. You’re a fragment of my imagination. Experience wafts its checkered travelers in with a thumbprint. Vexed then fixed. Seeing signs shaped like huge shoes Fox church road sprang up on her left. Bright blue-green beetle vale under a rock. Keats’ favourite letter was V. She spins it like a tiny DJ on her alphabet box. Wendy Mandy over the wall straggles in with beeping shoes, lit up like a kite.  The leaves are out of pollen or soon will be. Who are you calling a verdant lush. Here, mommy, hold this moss. Hold this mess. Don’t say to me. I don’t like to. Blap is my friend. He’s a boy. He’s a ghost who lives in New York. He painted with me. His hair is yellow.\n43:46\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis section of the Deep Curation script is constructed as a series of wave formations. Lee Ann begins by reading a poem up until the word yellow. Yellow serves as a cue for Sawako to begin reading her poem, “Texture of Needing Yellow”, in the background.\n44:09\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Yellow! He painted. He painted pink hair. His hair is red. I am blap. Here are some pieces of puzzles for you. I will make some more for you. Are you a cat bus? We’re getting married. I married this train. We’re getting married. Cheeky Dickie married a Chickadee. You’re dead, Chuck with yourself. Scraping together, scraping away at a bleeding book and you should be too. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. Where is my werewolf pillow? Sawako.\n44:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tLee Ann improvises. She fixates on the weirdness of the werewolf pillow and transforms this poetic image into a direct question, addressing Sawako head on.\n44:51\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tSawako. Where is it?\n44:53\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tWhere is your werewolf pillow?\n45:02\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tWhere’s my Totoro house that I want on the hill so I can go up there and see all those little puffballs.\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tIt’s down the old [inaudible] stomping in the Ramsey cemetery?\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t[inaudible].\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s where you’re gonna find your werewolf pillow.\n45:22\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tIt’s up in the house. I love my pillow. That deep pillow song. That deep pillow collaboration and curation.\n45:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat deep pillow collaboration and curation? Ha! Reality is ousting any kind of script.\n45:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices, Improvisation] That deep pillow collaboration and curation. [Inaudible]. These mountains are old mountains. Rockies. Where are we now. 5 million years old. What happens to the yellow you had here? Appalachians. 500 million. The texture of yellow. [Inaudible]. Which are plentiful here, like overgrown version of some families, private [Inaudible]. And the position.\n45:59\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe positions have reversed. The poets have exchanged words so that Sawako performs Lee Ann’s words, and vice versa.\n46:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Voices Overlapping] The positions reverse. Raised from [inaudible]. Yellow is a light that contains a friendly sort of heat. I am drawn to a newer [inaudible]. Maybe yellow is light which massages. [Inaudible] Carved. Straight path. Thus transmitting. Bumpy road to heaven. And then at a later moment. Existence for a straight arrow. Transposed. It’s an altogether different, similar. The way your friends are different, similar. That way. Here. The point of meeting yellow and it’s specific geography. Down on the bypass where someone wept. Maybe yellow as a geography that grows and shifts. Otherwise, known as now. The now of needing yellow. I need more yellow. That comes lower forth like an angel, the angel needing yellow. Needing yellow without needing yellow. Missing without being missed. Being close to needing yellow is close to not needing yellow. Needing yellow is all —it shows up becomes less being yellow becomes more needing yellow. Near being yellow from the distance or after or close at hand. More, more needing yellow. And more and more and more and more and more needing yellow in result of an explosion, which is yellow and is not needed. That’s enough.\n47:43\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako interjects. Self-reflectivity of both Sawako and Lee Ann’s performance amplifies their authority over the poetry reading at hand. By commenting on what they’re doing while they’re doing it, they showcase their awareness of their words. They actively take authorship of their poetic presentation by manipulating and reworking the words at their disposal. This is no passive replay of a script, but an engaged and playful [Audio Recording, Overlapping Voices] public display of fluid and fun authorial control.\n48:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] [Inaudible] Five. Million. Years. Old. Yellow that you had here. The texture of being yellow. The permutation of being yellow.\n48:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the Q&A discussion after the Deep Curation performance, Kate Lilley, poet and professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney queried the relationship between improvisation and script.\n48:40\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThe script [inaudible] opened some doors and then we opened some more doors in the moment.\n48:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Sawako.\n48:53\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tYeah, we just read through it a little bit yesterday. We had the script before, but we didn’t really do any of this yesterday at all.\n48:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Lee Ann.\n49:04\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tYeah it was very — but I think we were just interested in listening to each other and —\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t— Playing.\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\t— Playing. Yeah. And Lee Ann and I have known each other for many, many years, which I don’t think Klara knew when she curated us. But there is a feeling of friendship that also contributed to the way it felt to be in conversation through our poetry in this particular moment. That was like a gift that Klara gave us.\n49:27\tAudio Recording, Kate Lilley:\tThat certainly came across.\n49:35\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako’s metaphor of the door is apt. As the curator, I initiated gestures that opened doors between the writing of Sawako, Lee Ann, and Fanny Howe. But gestures are never static. The doors kept swinging open and shut as the poets themselves move through doorways and opened other entries and exits that I didn’t even know existed. I’d like the sense of play and improvisation as impetus for the poets to author their own work again, recurrently. I want to extend Charles Bernstein’s claim that each performance of a poem adds to its “fundamentally plural existence”. Not only is the poem multiplying into variant forms, but each performance allows the author to rewrite that poem in performance. By restructuring the conditions in which a poem was being presented and by placing that poem in new proximities to other poems, Deep Curation instigates a radical potential for dynamic and organic re-authorship. [Begin: Instrumental Strings] As the curator of a Deep Curation poetry event, I author the possibility for the poets to re-author their own poetry. [Instrumental Strings continues]\n50:56\tKlara du Plessis:\tDifferent curators have different approaches to curating and to the curatorial. Whether they’re working in visual arts or literary fields. Critic, Sarah Longair’s notion of curatorial authority, [End: Instrumental Strings] for example, imagines the curator’s role as that of resident scholar. The curator is someone who dedicates her life to the preservation and dissemination of a body of work. For her, the curator embodies expertise about a certain collection and thereby gains authority to define and control its public representation. Thinking along very different lines, celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist supports an organic model, providing a space in which experiences are generated according to the individuals displaying or interacting with artworks. Obrist is more interested in connections that may form when a curator comes temporarily into contact with a set of art or literary works. The curator never defines the work, never becomes a spokesperson for the work, but rather supports the audience in creating their own experience and understanding of the work. I want to quote Obrist on his curatorial practice. He says, quote, [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumental] “curating is simply about connecting cultures, bringing their elements into proximity with each other. The task of curating is to make junctions, to allow different elements, to touch.” End quote. Deep Curation allows different elements to touch. I like that. Thinking back to the performative work of Jackson Mac Low, and the Four Horsemen, their experiments also allowed elements to touch, even to merge. But I wonder if they would have liked the term curation. [End: Upbeat Instrumental] I doubt it. Thinking of Deep Curation in terms of curation, as the name, obviously underscores, initiates a methodology at odds with past modes of collaborative poetry performance. Curation has a hipness to it, which some find off-putting. Curation also derives its concepts of collectivity, proximity, and relationality from the exhibition, the gallery space, rather than from performance practice. Curation projects the visual onto the literary, and then waits to see what kind of performance will erupt. Yet, Deep Curation is still in flux [Begin: Instrumental Strings] as a curatorial practice it keeps developing and transforming as my own interests as a curator change. But also as the work comes into contact with various poets and audiences and the world of expertise these individuals bring to the project.\n53:23\tKlara du Plessis:\tDue to COVID-19 Deep Curation has been on a break for six months and once life reconfigures itself, who knows how the project will have changed. I can see Deep Curation taking on gentler forms that are less labour intensive while still embodying the core tenet of creating conversations between poets and poems. I’ve also fantasized about ways of expanding the project, having more time and resources to work with poets for more extended periods of time to progress past the first draft of a performance and to create a truly integrated and rehearsed experimental poetry reading experience. In contrast, I’ve considered ways of creating a solo show. This might be limited to my own poetry, or it might be a way to include other poet’s work, but without their physical presence and performance. It might also be a re-curation of archival audio material from past Deep Curation poetry readings. Hang on to that thought. [Echo effect] Hang on to that thought. [Theme Music]\n54:54\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Klara du Plessis and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. For more work from Klara du Plessis check out their freshly released second book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh from Palimpsest Press, available now. A special thank you to Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Isis Giraldo, Kaie Kellough, Kate Lilley, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin: Overlapping Choral Voices] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand-new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, bringing us mini-stories about how literature sounds. 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Collection: Period Backgrounds.  Editor, Benet Bergonzi.  Published, 1994.\\n\\nAubrey Grant,  “Poe’s Impossible Sound”\\n\\n— Sound Clips: Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room, Lovely Music Ltd., 1981.\\n\\nAndrew Whiteman,  “Bronze lance heads”\\n\\n— Sound Clips:\\n\\n—“Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound” March 26, 1976, U of San Diego; accessed from Penn Sound Robert Duncan’s author page. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php)\\n\\n—“Ezra Pound recites Canto 1” 1959; accessed from Penn Sound Ezra Pound’s author page (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— —“The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide” by Richard Siebruth, interview with Al Filreis May 22, 2007. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— Sampled 1940s film music; date and origin unknown.\\n\\n— Original music; composed by Andrew Whiteman, Dec 2020.\\n\\nReferences:\\n\\nEidsheim, Nina Sun.  The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African Music. Duke UP, 2019.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “’The Following Record’: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908.” PhD Dissertation.  Indiana University, 2007.\\n\\nHoffman, J. “Soundscape explorer: From snow to shrimps, everything is a sound to Bernie Krause.” Nature, vol. 485, no. 7398, 2012, p. 308, doi:10.1038/485308a.\\n\\nKittler, Friedrich. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.\\n\\nKrause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little Brown, 2012.\\n\\nPeter Miller, “Prosody, Media, and the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” PMLA 135.2 (March 2020): 315-328.\\n\\nMayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.\\n\\nPicker, John.  Victorian Soundscapes.  Oxford University Press, 2003.\\n\\nPoe, Edgar Allen. “The Bells”, Complete Poems and Selected Essays, ed. Richard Gray, Everyman Press, 1993, pp. 81-84.\\n\\nRobinson, Dylan.  Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Inner Traditions/Bear and Co., 1993.\\n\\nSiegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Rea. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.  Fordham UP, 2015.\\n\\nStoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.  New York University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTeibel, Irv. Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore. LP Record. Syntonic Research Inc., 1969.\\n\\nWorld Soundscape Project – Sonic Research Studio – Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/worldsoundscaperoject.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021.\\n\\nAdditional Sound Clips:\\n\\nCamlot, Jason.  Ambient Music for “Cylinder Talks”.\\n\\n“A Christmas Carol in Prose (Charles Dickens: Scrooge’s awakening )(w Carol Singers [male quartet]).” Bransby Williams, performer. Edison 13353, 1905.\\n\\n“Big Ben clock tower of Westminster – striking half past 10, quarter to 11, and 11 o’clock” (Westminster, London, England). July 16, 1890. Recorded by: Miss Ferguson and Graham Hope, (for George Gouraud). Edison brown wax cylinder (unissued). NPS object catalog number: EDIS 39839.\\n\\nbpayri. “crowd chattering students university loud”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\nHumanoide9000. “Glacier break”, Freesound, 2017.\\n\\nNew, David, and R. Murray Schafer, “Listen.” National Film Board of Canada, 2009. https://www.nfb.ca/film/listen/\\n\\n“Micawber (from ‘David Copperfield’).” William Sterling Battis, performer. Victor 35556 B, 12” disc, 1916.\\n\\nNew, David, director. R. Murray Schafer: Listen, National Film Board of Canada, 2009.\\n\\nsbyandiji. “short alarm bell in school hall”, Freesound, 2014.\\n\\nSpliffy. “Hallway of University in silence”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\n“Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby.” Herbert Beerbohm Tree, performer. Gramophone Concert Record, 10” Black Label Disc, GC 1313, 1906.\\n\\n“The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Len Spencer, performer. Columbia matrix, [1904] 1908.\\n\\nUdall, Lyn. “Just One Girl.” Popular Songs of Other Days, 2012/1898.\\n\\nWesterkamp, Hildegard. “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” Transformations, Empreintes DIGITALes, IMED 1031, Enregistrements i Média (SOPROQ), 1989/2010. https://electrocd.com/en/piste/imed_1031-1.3.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549488664576,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does “listening” mean within the context of the literary classroom?\nIn this episode we join Director of the SpokenWeb Network and Professor at Concordia University – Jason Camlot – in conversation with SpokenWeb podcast supervising producer and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate – Stacey Copeland – to explore how sound studies is being taken up in the literary classroom. Together we listen back to select “Cylinder Talk” sound production assignments created by Concordia graduate students, and unpack the experiences, ideas and discussions that the production and study of sound can incite across disciplines. A 3-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s most recent graduate seminar – Literary Listening as Cultural Technique – the Cylinder Talk draws on a history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with literature studies.The episode features sound work by Alexandra Sweny, Sara Adams, Aubrey Grant and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Ends]\n00:00:34\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. On the SpokenWeb Podcast, we talk a lot about different ways that sound and literature collide, whether that collision takes place in the SpokenWeb archives or through research symposiums, poetry, readings, and literary events. While past episodes have brought us into the university setting through interviews with professors and explorations of student work in the SpokenWeb network, we have yet to really explore how sound and literature collide in the classroom. Whether that’s high school, university, or elsewhere, what are the different ways that sound is being taken up as a learning tool in the literary community? We could even say we’re in a classroom of sorts together [Sound Effect: Classroom Chatter] here and now listening and learning in dialogue through the SpokenWeb Podcast.\n00:01:33\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Bell Ringing] And it sounds like class is about to begin. In this episode, we join director of the SpokenWeb network and professor at Concordia university, Jason Camlot in conversation with SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer, and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate, Stacey Copeland in exploring sound and listening in the literary classroom. Together, we’ll listen back to select “cylinder talks” created by Concordia graduate students and unpack the experiences, ideas, and discussions sparked by the production and study of sound across disciplines. A three-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s graduate course, Literary Listening as Cultural Technique, the cylinder talk draws on a rich history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with the study of literature. Here are Stacey Copeland and Jason Camlot with Cylinder Talks: Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies. [Theme Music].\n \n\n00:02:31\tJason Camlot:\tHey Stacey.\n \n\n00:02:31\tStacey Copeland:\tHello. How are you?\n \n\n00:02:36\tJason Camlot:\tGood. Sorry about that. I was in the wrong room.\n \n\n00:02:40\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, that’s what happens when we have probably five or six different links we’ve used now for the podcast.\n \n\n00:02:47\tJason Camlot:\tExactly.\n \n\n00:02:47\tStacey Copeland:\tAll right, you want to get started? [Begin Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tLet’s go for it.\n \n\n00:02:56\tStacey Copeland:\tPodcast project manager, Stacey Copeland here. I’m joined In our podcast classroom of sorts, AKA Zoom video room, by Jason Camlot, director of the SpokenWeb research network, and likely a familiar voice if you listen to season one of the podcast. So being a student, myself, teacher, a sound scholar, I’m quite interested in the different ways that audio media production is being taken up as a learning tool across different disciplines. Whether that’s a project like SpokenWeb, or I think might be the case with the audio we’ll be listening to today, audio assignments that take students out of the traditional essay writing headspace and into a different mode of engaging with ideas in the classroom. But rather than me guessing at the inner workings of your graduate course, Jason, you’ve brought a selection of student assignments for us to listen to together. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about the course, the assignments, and what we’ll be hearing today? [End Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:03:56\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. Well thanks Stacy. Very much. I’m entering our SpokenWeb Zoom classroom, as you describe it, both as a student and as someone who just taught a grad seminar called (Literary) Listening as Cultural Technique. I should say, I’ve been trying to teach with sound in my literature courses for about a decade now with varying degrees of success. I think the first few times that I taught sound recordings of literary performances in a classroom, I just played them and then expected something to happen and nothing happened because I found that in the students, and myself as well, we weren’t equipped to actually engage critically with those kinds of materials. And so. I called this course, (Literary) Listening, and literary is in parentheses. So it’s a very typographical title I suppose. Literary is really cordoned off from listening as cultural technique.\n00:04:49\tJason Camlot:\tAnd most of the seminar we’re reading theories of listening from disciplines that are not literary. As far as the assignments went, assignment for the entire seminar were really leading towards a final paper. And then there was this assignment that we’re talking about, which I called it the cylinder talk, right. And I’ve done this before. And the cylinder talk, the title, really comes from my own research fairly extensively in early spoken sound recordings and thinking about the implications of media formats in relation to what I would identify as literary forms. Right. So how did the constraints of a particular format inform what one can do in terms of delivering a story or a poem or an argument of some kind. Because cylinders, back in the day, in the acoustic period of sound recordings, sort of pre 1920 and usually much earlier than that —so from the 1890s on —generally held between two and four minutes of sound. The cylinder represents a time constraint as a result of preservation surface. So it’s using a material artifact on which sound was first recorded as a temporal constraint to begin with for an assignment. For the courses where I was doing these cylinder talks, they knew what a cylinder was and understood what the implications were because we’d studied them. So we’d listened to cylinder recordings, right. We’d studied late Victorian, early sound recordings where full Victorian novels were compressed into the timeframe of a three-minute cylinder. How do you deliver a David Copperfield in three minutes?\n \n\n00:06:25\tAudio Recording, “David Copperfield” performed by William Sterling Battis :\tMy dear Copperfield, come in. Come in! I —\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:28\tJason Camlot:\tEarly cylinder remediations of fiction mainly focused on either character sketches— that’s one way in which you compress a 400 page novel into three minutes — or they would focus on key transformation scenes. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde —\n \n\n00:06:47\tAudio Recording, “The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Performed by Len Spencer\tThe fiend is coming! Yes, aye, is here! [laughter]\n \n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:57\tJason Camlot:\t— Or the mesmerism scene from George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby where Svengali is mesmerizing Trilby —\n \n\n00:07:01\tAudio Recording, “Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby” performed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree\tAnd you shall see nothing ,hear nothing, thinking nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali…\n00:07:14\tJason Camlot:\t—or in a Christmas Carol when Ebeneezer Scrooge is transformed from a squeegee Scrooge into a benevolent generous person —\n \n\n00:07:28\tAudio Recording, “A Christmas Carol in Prose” performed by Bransby Williams:\tGod sent dreams to save me from meself. May God in this merry Christmastime be thanked for the reformation that you now begin with Ebeneezer Scrooge.\n \n\n \n\n00:07:42\tJason Camlot:\tAnd so the fiction cylinder, that’s the way they got around the question of constraint and compression. In this seminar, I wanted to have the students engage in a sort of, not a super demanding way, but just to have the experience of working with the digital audio workstation. Even if it means just having sort of two tracks and having to edit, select, engage with digitized sound, to think about both the media, through which we were encountering all of the sounds in the course, and I also wanted them to experience the kind of intensity that audio editing entails. Having to engage in that activity, I felt, represents a way of thinking about methodology. So that it’s sort of a form of listening that to some extent estranges you from the listening, because you may not know how to use the tools that well, so it’s not so natural to use them.\n00:08:32\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s a nice extension of the longer sort of theoretical discussions we’ve been having throughout the semester, about listening as a kind of audile technique or as a cultural technique. So it required them to produce a sound work. So that was sort of one of the goals. And the other constraints, apart from time alone, was they had to present a main idea, argument, or concept that they were going explore in the paper that they were writing. And they had to integrate at least one sound from the area that they were exploring. And I did imagine this not only as a kind of production oriented assignment, but I knew we were going to have a listening session, listening party of sorts in our very last class where everyone will get to hear everyone else’s cylinder talks, but also engage in responding to what they heard.\n \n\n00:09:20\tStacey Copeland:\tYou’ve brought in four talks from the course for us to listen to today, which will give everyone a bit more of a sense of what the students ended up with after engaging in this cylinder talk format. We’re going to play the full talk, which of course is only three minutes. It’s not too long for each one. And then we’ve chosen a bit of discussion to illustrate some of the critical thought that came after that listening experience together.\n \n\n00:09:46\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. As we were listening, of course we were on Zoom, so a bunch of squares showing everyone’s faces, everyone’s video is on. And that was one of the most enjoyable and interesting elements of the several hours that we spent listening together was just watching everyone’s reactions. This was the first time that everyone got to share something they’d made in this way. And so that was, I think, a really special aspect of this last listening session that we did together. So, which is the first one we’re going to listen to?\n \n\n00:10:14\tStacey Copeland:\tI think the first one I have queued up is Alexandra’s talk.\n \n\n00:10:18\tJason Camlot:\tSo Alexandra Sweny was thinking about and reading about environmental soundscape production. I think Alexandra — who is really working on Canadian poetry so this is not necessarily in her wheelhouse — really just became excited about some of the articles that were about environmental sound. And she pursued that topic.\n \n\n00:10:38\tStacey Copeland:\tAlexandra’s talk “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s, Environments Series”.\n \n\n00:10:44\tJason Camlot:\tYes.\n \n\n00:10:44\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:10:47\tAudio Recording, Alexandra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White noise to me has always sounded like falling snow. When I was little waking up after VHS always felt like falling asleep and waking up in the middle of a snow storm. I picture static like a blizzard that surrounds and disorients you. Every sound we hear it exists on a spectrum analogous to colours. White noise, like snowfall, has a wide frequency spectrum and clear tones, a narrow one. According to bio acoustician Bernie Krauss, in a healthy ecosystem in a healthy soundscape, the sound spectrum is full with living creatures, filling every frequency band. In altered and recently developed landscapes, such as clear cut forests or logging paths, the sound spectrum has notable gaps. [Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White  noise helps you forget about all that. Snowfall is an ambient sound and it blankets what it covers audibly just as it does visually. Snow absorbs noise and it isolates and insulates. I use recordings of snowfall to study, read, and write. In a library, snowfall through my headphones would dull the sounds of rattling coffee cups and scraping chairs. It began when I encountered Irv Teibel’s Environment Series, a set of set of 11 long playing records created in the ’60s and ’70s. “Alpine Blizzard” is the title of the A-side on the last record. I could imagine myself isolated as if on top of a mountain, piling text on a page while the snow piled high around me. But this isn’t how the sounds were recorded. Rather than setting the top a prime peak and letting the natural world do the work, colleagues of Teibel recall how he viewed nature as an obstacle to be tackled, wrestled, and refined.\n00:12:51\tAudio Recording, Alexndra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\tRather than any old beach sound, for instance, he wanted the perfect beach sound. A track he eventually mixed with samples across 12 different locations, which were ultimately processed using localizers and equalizers. The sounds broken down into new recombinations and new synthetic waves to cover this places. The result was his first track “Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.” In my essay, I want to contend with the ethics of Teibel’s Environments series, which are among the first and most contentious field recording compositions to be sold in mainstream markets. I ask what are the risks of psychologically ultimate sounded field recordings, which are designed to soothe and calm, but which distance us from the psychologically and acoustically disruptive noises of anthropocentric contact and occupation? How do these ambient and curated soundscapes made for the human, but without the human, frame our relationship to the landscape, both imaginary and real? What are we to make of soundscapes that allow us to forget our place in the world, rather than which remind us of it? [Sound Clip: White Noise].\n \n\n00:13:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tGreat job, Alexandra.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAny first thoughts for us on it?\n00:14:14\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah, I guess I got on thinking about it from one of the additional readings on the bibliography of listening that talked about other field and sound recordings that have come up in the past years and just how the composer stance to the original recordings have changed. I think the article was talking about Derek Charke’s “Falling from Cloudless Skies”, which recorded the sounds of glaciers cleaving and melting. [Sound Effect: Glacier Break] And then songs of the humpback whale also mentioned that article. So I was just thinking about how field recordings have changed to reflect the attitudes that we’re having towards the natural world since the ’60s.\n \n\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tMichael.\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tI thought that the thing was, in some ways, very objectively beautiful because you have this white noise, and then the idea is that all of these —not only these ideas that you’re talking about are like being evoked out of the white noise, but you also have this really — I guess this is what meditation tips in general do is that they have white noise and then they have people evoking landscapes out of them that you’re supposed to visualize. But here you actually told us that they were coming out of the white noise itself, which is really interesting. It literalized the trick that I think that those, that meditation tapes usually used.\n \n\n00:15:18\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Michael Menezes.\n \n\n00:15:19\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you. Yeah. Meditation tapes, just even as a whole, would be a really good example of this that are just designed to put you to sleep and really zone out. I’ve listened to those also in the past.\n \n\n00:15:27\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAndrew Whiteman\n00:15:29\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman\tOn that, what I was thinking, what you were doing is you have sound behind you [Sound Clip: White Noise] and then it fades out and then you bring the sound back again [Sound Clip: White Noise]. And I thought you were tricking it. I thought you were playing us something from the LP series you were talking about. And then I thought you were fading on actual white noise because I find a lot of sort of new laptop based composers or are trying to make fake natural sounds using the sounds that are only available inside the digital audio workstation playing with the nature-culture thing there.\n \n\n00:16:00\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah. And no, that was that was just a recording on my fire escape with the bells that came in right at the end. And I figured I’d put them in because those are very much, they take me out of whatever I’m doing and remind me like exactly what time it is and where I am.\n \n\n00:16:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah. Just to build on everything that everyone’s been saying, I thought it was a wonderful example of a kind of anti-meditation tape or a meditation tape that makes you reflect on all the ethical issues surrounding what meditation tapes are trying to do perhaps. But also I thought rhetorically the way you brought us into the description of what a natural soundscape and it’s sort of diverse frequency spectrum would normally entail going to the silence that memetically performs that. And then when you say white noise makes us forget about all that, rhetorically that whole sequence was really, really effective and powerful because you brought us into like, “Oh, okay, we’re going to hear this sound over and over again, but we’re not going to hear it the same way” because you’re teaching us how to hear it differently. And sort of the implications of what we’re hearing.”\n \n\n00:17:01\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tThe images you actually evoke are not — you start by saying that there are these beautiful nature landscapes but then the white noise is something that is blocking out global catastrophe, like glacier slipping off of mountains. And, I don’t know, the songs of humpback whales was also a very good image.\n \n\n00:17:18\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, I never thought I would hear a student referencing Bernie Krause in a literature course, but there we go. So what is it like listening back to this discussion for you, Jason?\n \n\n00:17:31\tJason Camlot:\tIt brought me right back into the moment of sort of the excitement immediately after hearing the piece for the first time. I really did think that Alexandra’s cylinder — more than others —had a kind of almost ASMR quality to it. Really it was very tactile and also the way she delivered her text was really interesting because she allowed for a lot of space in between sentences. It almost sounded like a poem. So I think I was hearing a little bit more the form of the piece even more than I had the first time. Her selection of sounds really did get to the core of some of the ethical issues that she was interested in exploring.\n \n\n00:18:08\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, before the discussion came in, my mind was already churning all around all the possibilities of what you might’ve been listening to in the course because that sort of close recording, that very ASMR, tactile quality that the white noise track has in Alexandra’s piece really reminded me of Hildegard Westerkamp’s work—\n \n\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tThese are the tiny, the intimate voices of nature. Of bodies, of dreams, of the imagination.\n00:18:38\tStacey Copeland:\t— particularly her Kits Beach piece, which does also have a very poetic flow in the vocal performance. And then the very close recording and very tactile sensation of listening to the barnacles on Kits Beach in Vancouver.\n \n\n00:18:54\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tYou’re still hearing the barnacle sounds. And already they’re changing.\n00:18:59\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd this recording brought me right back there. So then I was so surprised to hear in the discussion that Alexandra just recorded this on her fire escape. And then also the bells, because then I was thinking, well, if you were listening to R. Murray Schafer, maybe the bells were intentional and kind of an ode to 1970s acoustic ecology, but no, it was just her everyday experience.\n \n\n00:19:22\tJason Camlot:\tThere was a longer discussion about the bells after, cause we talked about bells an awful lot in our seminar from Schafer, but also because one of the earliest sort of documentary recordings was of Big Ben tolling [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”] in London in 1890 so, we talked about what, what that meant, what it means to record a bell, what a bell is, especially a publicly heard bell as a means of something that many people in an area can hear, how the bell measures time, et cetera. So yeah, we thought about bells a lot and yet there they areright, just in her neighborhood and she integrated them. We really didn’t do much listening to soundscape recordings in the seminar. The majority of the recordings we listened to were still voice-based in one way or another, even though they may have been quite experimental, but that was all Alexandra following her interest and discovering sounds.\n \n\n00:20:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI love this first example, because it really illustrates some of the ways that thinking through sound studies, regardless of whether you’ve listened to specific acoustic ecologists or sound recordist, like Hildegard Westerkamp and thinking about the World Soundscape Project, and you had a bit of introduction in the course for students around R. Murray Schafer, and round soundscape and those ideas.\n \n\n00:20:43\tR. Murray Schafer from “Listen” (NFB 2009):\tWe are the composers of this huge miraculous composition that’s going on around us and we can improve it or we can destroy it. We can add more noises or we can add more beautiful sounds. That’s all up to us.\n \n\n00:20:58\tStacey Copeland:\tThink about how reading those ideas can then lead to very similar sonic aesthetics in this particular cylinder talk. It’d be interesting to see how that translates across different disciplines as well.\n \n\n00:21:10\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s such a great question. And coming from literature, one of the challenges is to move away from the semantic signal when you’re listening to voice recordings. Alexandra’s interest in moving away from sounds with semantic meaning was a fulfillment of what we were often trying, but failing to do in listening to some of the literary recordings. Another thing that I think I heard in the responses to Alexandra’s was a real interest in trying to identify what Michel Chion would call “causal listening”. I thought you were making the sounds do this, but actually it turned out to be that. And that also is an ongoing sort of frame for our course — thinking about what it means to identify sound as objects or with particular sources.\n \n\n00:21:56\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of see some similar overlaps in these ideas of sonic environment and our relationship to the soundscape and the way that these kind of core ideas that come out of cultural sound studies have been taken up by your students through this literature course. And we hear these themes come up again in the next Cylinder Talk that you’ve chosen for us.\n \n\n00:22:18\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. So this is Sara Adams. This is probably in some ways the most challenging of the projects, because most of the sounds that she wants to write about can never be heard again. Her world is set in the 1840s in Victorian London. Sara is a PhD student and she’s a 19th century scholar. I’m a Victorianist first and foremost, I suppose, still. And so she’s come to work on Henry Mayhew, who was journalist, also an early ethnographer, oral historian, data collector about, I guess, marginal peoples living in urban environments in the 19th century. His best-known work is called London Labour and the London Poor, which is a remarkable, extensive, and expansive document of interviews with people who are living and working in London, but not necessarily in recognized jobs or positions. So many of them are doing things, doing the work in the city that is rendered invisible to anyone above the lower middle classes. The street sweepers, the garbage collectors, people who are selling wares in the streets. A very famous figure for Mayhew who that gets anthologized for some reason, the watercress girl is the one that that gets repeated and anthologized a lot.\n00:23:31\tJason Camlot:\tMayhew —half of his work, or more than half of his work are actual transcriptions of interviews that he held. He writes them in the voices of the people he interviewed. We don’t know how accurate and there’s been a lot of sort of critique of sort of him as a mediator of these voices. So those are sounds that Sara was very interested in exploring as sounds. So actually I don’t think she had thought of them as sounds previously that informed her new investigation for her, I think, and for me, cause I hadn’t thought about Mayhew this way, either. Thinking about where different people who make certain sounds as a result of the labour they pursue, whether they’re perceived as noise or as a kind of meaningful signal in certain ways.\n \n\n00:24:13\tStacey Copeland:\tGreat. Let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:24:14\tAudio Recording, Sara Adam’s Cylinder Talk:\tOver the course of the 19th century, Victorian London experienced an unprecedented growth in population size. Consequently Britain’s largest city was not only choked with dirt and dust, but it was also overwhelmingly “alive with sound.” [Sound Clips: Victorian Street] In the city street markets, butchers, fishmongers and other street sellers shouted over each other, trying to catch the attention of passers by. The raucous symphony of London streets was also filled with bamboo flute players, Oregon grinders, and other street musicians, as well as the clomping of horses hooves, the clattering of carriages and carts, and the distant roar of the new railway. It was truly an “age of osculation” as John Picker argues, full of careful and close listening to a noisy and rapidly changing modern world. While some 19th century writers and intellectuals try to escape from the piercing sounds of the city streets, the journalist Henry Mayhew embraced them, diving headfirst into London’s East End and interviewing street vendors and other impoverished street folk in order to compile an encyclopedic archive entitled: London Labour and the London Poor first published in 1851. London Labour was ultimately an unfinished multi-volume work that recorded the everyday living and working conditions of London’s marginalized, urban poor. Mayhew was explicitly interested in reproducing in print form the real and “unvarnished” voices of London street folk “from the lips of the people themselves.” By deploying carefully detailed and mimetic description while also striving to transcribe his subjects interview answers verbatim, Mayhew attempted to create a literary work that faithfully sounded and re-sounded like a phonograph. Not only did Mayhew seek to bear witness to and preserve the voices of a rapidly disappearing population, but his project also simultaneously pushed the boundaries of what print could do. In my paper, I will explore how Mayhew uses sound to immerse his middle-class audience in the urban underworld of outcast London. How does Mayhew’s use of sound in the text create the conditions of possibility for hearing? What kind of ear witnessing does Mayhew perform in the text and what novel aesthetic ethical or political realities does this osculate of work make possible? I find it fascinating that Mayhew’s text reverberates, not only with the sights of the city, but also equally with it’s sounds, creating an immersive reading experience that grounds its reader firmly in a stable spatial and temporal setting. Mayhew’s text is also striking because it not only records the everyday noises of the city’s quotidian hustle and bustle, but it also trains its ear and by extension it’s reader’s ear on individuals and their personal stories of loss, struggle, and small moments of joy. In this way, Mayhew conditions his readers to differentiate sound from noise, listening from hearing, a sonic and sympathetic movement with profound ethical and political possibilities.\n \n\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tThanks guys. I guess I’m always interested in like, what does it mean to listen? What does it mean to hear? What conditions specifically political arise out of certain kinds of listening? And also what do they not make possible or what does incomplete listening or partial or warped? I mean, it’s always mediated through all sorts of things. And I think in those clips there’s so many different levels of my mediation and like interpretation, but then also Mayhew trying to get towards like an authentic kind of unvarnished, untouched, idea of someone’s sound and someone’s story, but we just know that’s not possible. Right. We know that that mediation fundamentally does distort and that there are implications for that.\n \n\n00:28:39\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\tI’m not too familiar with Henry Mayhew —\n \n\n \n\n00:28:42\tJason Camlot:\tAubrey Grant.\n \n\n00:28:42\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\t—but I know that within that context of the different social reformers at that period, there was a lot of talk of questions of sanitation and cleanliness, of the dangers that the poor brought onto society in terms of illness, in terms of also smells as well and all this stuff. But thinking about in terms of noise — I was wondering there was like a connection between a kind of discourse, the sanitation and a discourse of noise.\n \n\n00:29:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. I guess for both, I was sort of connecting them and actually I’ve done a lot of work on waste and sanitation during this period. So that’s why I was sort of like, “Oh, I never thought of the sonic qualities.” I’ve thought of like material pollution in the terms of like dirt and dust and human waste, decaying weight matter, whatever, but not in terms of noise pollution. A lot of those people and places have been extinguished and have been made obsolete by industry and by industrial processes and by modernity. And that’s actually a really big part of Mayhew’s project was actually to record these people’s voices, and their everyday lives and the details about their mundane to-ings and fro-ings because they all like disappeared basically. Slowly. Like police were more —there’s more police around so there was more policing of like the city and making people move around more and not letting them just sell wherever. There were more laws about street music and who could play where. We have that today still with like red zoning people who are on the sides, on the streets, like asking for money, policing the poor and all sorts of ways,\n \n\n00:30:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tIs sound in any of his [statistical] tables? I don’t recall.\n00:30:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. So they’re not. The closest would be like, he talks about how many carriages are on the road, how many more carriages there are now than there were before. Like for me it feels like he’s kind of putting that osculation, like that idea of like the stethoscope, he sort of applying it to the body politic or at least a very small part of it, of the urban poor in London taking its heartbeat.\n \n\n00:30:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tI just called up cause you were talking about it sort of one of my favorite methods of categorization that Mayhew uses of the population. Right. And it could be interesting to think about what sounds did these four sectors of the population create or do they tend to create right. He calls them the enrichers, the auxiliaries, the benefactors and the servitors. And the thing about Mayhew that’s so cool, right, is that it’s very leveling these categories it’s based on your instrumental contribution rather than your social status. Servitors are the actors, the servants, all of the London poor that you’re talking about, like the street sweepers and scavengers — but the queen is considered a servitor as well. And members of parliament. To think about songs sonic emanations, according to some of these attempts at categorizing populations and the spaces they use, obviously, cause space and going back to Aubery’s point thinking maybe sound is more important to me. I’d really —I’m really excited to look back and think about the status of sound in relation to the other senses in Mayhew.\n \n\n00:31:33\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s great. Listening back to this discussion, you can really hear how excited you are about this topic.\n \n\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Well it reintroduced Mayhew to me in a whole new way. So I was super excited about what —where Sara was going with her work and there’s been some excellent sort of sound studies oriented work in Victorian studies. She mentioned John Picker and John Picker’s book, Victorian Soundscapes does a lot of excellent sort of analysis of noise pollution in the Victorian period and how it relates to identity formation and different sort of […], and  especially the bourgeois subject. But I don’t think he talks about Mayhew — and I really hadn’t thought about Mayhew. And in so many ways it’s such an obvious text to think about from a sonic perspective.\n \n\n00:32:14\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. And I mean, in this discussion, I mean, this is just like a little slice of the very in-depth discussion that the students were having after listening to Sara’s cylinder talk around ideas of noise and the politics of what is defined as noise versus sound, how that relates to the Victorian era, but then also talking about contemporary politics of noise and sound and policing. And it was such a rich conversation to hear coming out of this application of sound studies ideas to say, Henry Mayhew in this particular era. And I was also curious — we hear this politics of noise come up from scholars like Jennifer Stover when we’re thinking about the sonic colour line and the racialized ways that sound is defined as noise in relation to identity. And so it should be —I would think, I mean, maybe I’m just so nerdy that I’m excited about it— quite fascinating to see how these kinds of identity politics unfold in Henry Mayhew’s discussions of sounds and noise in this particular era.\n \n\n00:33:15\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you’re exactly right in your instincts about sort of where some of this may have come from. We talked about Stover, we read Sun Eidsheim’s work The Race of Sound.. And that was a very important book I think for students in the seminar as was Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, which was amazing. The very first thing it does is take down R. Murray Schafer on this question of noise, right. Basically his account of Inuit throat singing as kind of awful noise, right. And so the politics of what is called noise and what isn’t called noise in relation to identity formations and identifications was much discussed throughout the seminar. And I think that Sara was sort of bringing some of that back to the Victorian works that she’s really interested in writing about.\n \n\n00:34:02\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of got on the topic of bells earlier. And this next cylinder talk that you’ve brought in for us brings up to the idea of bells yet again.\n \n\n00:34:11\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. So this is a cylinder talk by Aubrey Grant on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Bells.” There is actually a very recent article in PMLA, which is sort of like one of the major literature journals of the modern language association, on this poem that I assigned for the course, it was published just last year, 2020. So really very recent by Peter Miller called “Prosody Media and the Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe.” Aubrey really dove into readings around prosody, which was sort of a new area to him. So thinking about literary prosody, so the sound in the printed word, right. That’s one way to describe what prosody is —these are things you learn in high school assonance and consonance and rhyme, right. Those are ways of thinking about how sound functions in poetry off the page, but the combination of our course and his discovery of prosody and his already quite mature thinking around signification and theories of language resulted in kind of a mind blowing reading of this poem, using language and signification techniques to communicate sound in ways that he argues are quite unique to Poe.\n \n\n00:35:21\tStacey Copeland:\tSo here is Aubrey’s talk titled “Poe’s Impossible Sound.”\n \n\n00:35:28\tAudio Recording: Aubrey Grant’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Begin/Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”  underplay] In a short story from 1919, Rilke describes his mysterious fascination with a skull he has brought home from an anatomy lesson. Where once it contained within its narrow confines, a brain and an unbounded subconsciousness, it now appeared to him as a hollow structure, an empty vessel. One evening as he passed it flickering in candlelight, he was struck by the realization that he had seen the coronal suture once before. That jagged zigzag pattern of connective fibers that joins the front of the skull to the back was the very same pattern he had seen inscribed on an equally hollow wax cylinder. When, as a child, he had listened to his own voice in all its sonic ephemerality separated from his body for the very first time. What kind of sound would issue from the skull, Rilke wondered, if a phonograph needle were to trace the contours of the coronal suture? What primal sound would be produced if, rather than simply tracing the graphic inscription of a sound that already existed, the phonograph could play the as yet unheard lines, grooves, cuts, and graphemes of nature itself? Setting aside speculation of whether the sound would be noise or music, Rilke’s perspective is decisive. It is only by means of mechanisms, machines, and techniques that it becomes possible to listen, to really listen to the unsounded sounds of the real. More broadly, the phonograph itself and its cylinder of which this talk is a simulation, points to the fact that listening has always been a technique for intervening in the real. In this way, the phonograph is merely the technological exteriorization of a practice of signal processing with its own history. A history which revolves around the question of how we listen. That is, of the techniques we use to filter sounds out of noise, to produce something that we can hear. In my essay, I argue that Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” articulates a transformation in listening techniques marked by a shift from a regime of signs to a regime of signal processing. Taking Friedrich Kittler’s media technical a priori as a starting point, I argue that Poe’s poem is a kind of phonograph avant la lettre, which is both invested in print culture and sonically undermines it. Arguing along lines set out by Eliza Richards, Peter Miller, and Jerome McGann, I will begin by situating Poe’s attention to the mechanics of prosody within 19th century print culture and industrial reproduction. In this reading Poe’s poems are prosodic machines that not only produce an infinite variety of performances, but are themselves technologically reproducible. In a manner analogous to Benyamine’s analysis of cinema it is the very reproducibility of the poetic machine that constructs the cultural modalities of listening in the mid 19th century. However, while holding onto this theory and historical context, I believe that a close reading of “The Bells” will reveal Poe’s attention to a kind of listening that exceeds the boundaries set by written signs and human voices. My reading will center around the orally evocative deployment of onomatopoeia in the poem. Although Poe’s use onomatopoeia to emphasize themes and enhance the musicality of performance has been well-documented, what has escaped notice is the fact that the word bells is not itself onomatopoeic. Rather, it is only through his use of repetition that it becomes so. Like a real bells percussive clapper, which makes its hollow interior ring and resound, the repetition of this mechanical supplement empties the word of signification while retaining its acoustic qualities. What occurs, I argue, is that the graphic inscription becomes an empty vessel. Like Rilke’s skull which channels uncoated frequencies of a primal sound concealed in the materiality of the letter. In other words, the noise of the real and impossible inhuman sound that the signifier normally articulates into signs becomes audible for the first time in Poe’s poem. From sign to signal, this sourceless acousmatic sound may well be the music of the printed words own disillusion into the noise of the coming phonographic age.[End:Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”underplayed]\n \n\n00:39:57\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\tYeah. Talk about repetition.\n \n\n \n\n00:40:03\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tYes, exactly. Exactly. So just a couple of things. Yeah. The sound that I used in the back, I think we’re all familiar with that. We listened to it actually at the beginning of the course, it’s the ending segment of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room. The reason that I wanted to use that segment was because I had intended to actually base part of my thing on that. Cause what I was looking at was like, what is the sound that is sort of like hidden in the voice and how is it revealed or made present through this kind of structure of like repetitive feedback looping and how it dissolves articulation into pure noise.\n \n\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nYeah. Michael.\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Michael Menezes:\tI just thought that your cylinder was like very symbolically lovely. I think that you set up — I mean obviously the background noise thing, it felt like someone turning a large wheel of music in some ways when the wheel makes one revolution of the sound, of the piston hits the thing. And the piston, obviously from your presentation, the piston reminds me of like the mechanical aspect of the bell. And the sound reminds me of the individual trying to like capture this beautiful sonorous noise, just having them connected directly in one machine with no like feeling of humanity in between. And only the skull was like a, was a great image.\n \n\n00:41:12\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tI love the Gothic media theory stuff. I mean, this stuff is great. Ultimately, Michael that’s sort of what I was aiming at. I wasn’t thinking of it as much as a piston, although that works too. Thinking about the way in which like a record [Sound Recording: Surface Crackling] as it turns, or a cylinder, as it turns is a kind of cyclical repetition. And that repetition doesn’t have to just like a bell ringer, like a hammer banging and going like laterally, but it’s actually like a cyclical process.\n \n\n00:41:40\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nA couple of things that came to mind I — just thinking about the relationship between the sign and sounds so really —and the idea of being able to, in a sense, play something like a skull or something in nature. So basically how the sound reproduction technologies seem to evoke and suggest these new possibilities of turning any sign into sort of sonic content. And this is talked about in an article by Theodore Adorno called “The Curve of the Needle.” For him, piano rolls, right, were seen as that source of potential sound [Piano roll music].\n \n\n00:42:20\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nHis way of thinking about it’s sound recording and sort of the bumps on a cylinder or a flat disc are still indexical to original things that made sounds that caused the air pressure to record them, but the piano roll in so far as it was generating sound just from punched holes, suggest the possibility of creating sounds out of nothing. Right. In sense, or just out of random — it made me really think of digital processes. And so this link is to Patrick Feaster’s work, and he —rather than talk about his work as about sound reproduction, he calls it eduction to reduce this, to bring out elicit, develop from a condition of latent, rudimentary, or merely potential existence. So the repetitious sound of your sound piece, in a way is one of the base necessities for educing something because it has to be moving and cyclical in order to generate a sense of continuous sound or sonic quality. So you can’t just have sort of random symbols there has to be some kind of ultimate pattern assigned. Just the concept of sonification in a way is one that it seems could be useful for you to be thinking about in relation to your project.\n \n\n00:43:31\tStacey Copeland:\tWhat are you hearing in listening back to this piece and the discussion, Jason?\n \n\n00:43:35\tJason Camlot:\tOh, it’s funny. I haven’t — the first thing I said when it was done was “talk about repetition”. Right. But what I was referring to there actually was a discussion we’d had about Poe’s “The Bells” previously, which is a poem that is built on repetition. Right. And as Aubrey points out one of the main things that’s repeated is the word “the bells” [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”]. So there are full lines of the poem that are just bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.\n \n\n00:43:59\tJason Camlot:\tSo, just to continue with your idea that really starting with what is not an overly respected poem, Poe’s piece. It was like a recitation staple it’s seen often as not a very deep poem, very surface-y. And that’s one of the points that interests Aubrey very much actually. Discovering prosody, literary prosody as a kind of field of technical discourse around the analysis of poetry and then filtering it through some of these other disciplinary fields like media history in particular, that was extremely productive and generative for him. And I think having to engage in this sound piece exercise also expanded his way of thinking. I mean, I don’t really know, but I’m not sure that he would have taken his thinking as far as he did, if he hadn’t had to go through the process of actually making a sound work himself.\n \n\n00:44:54\tStacey Copeland:\tI do have quite an appreciation for this poem. I think because it was one of the poems that I had to read in high school, very in depth. And I think we took turns reading it aloud in the class, these kinds of things. But at the time, I hadn’t really been thinking about the ways in which Poe is really very thoughtful and thinking about the different textures and materials and the different actual soundings of these different bells. As we were listening to this, I had to pull up the poem again, to jog my memory about some of the descriptive language that he’s using. And some of the, again, prosody and techniques that we might think about and the ways that he’s describing silver bells and golden bells and brazen bells and iron bells. So I think this is really a great poem to go to almost as one of the starter texts you can think about in applying sound studies, concepts, and techniques to poetry and to poetry readings.\n \n\n00:45:46\tJason Camlot:\tI think that’s right. And I think what Aubrey and the discussions we had in this seminar did for my thinking about the poem was to move it out of sort of the elocutionary realm, which is where I would normally sort of stay in thinking about this poem, because like I said, it was a recitation manual staple in the 19th century, which means that people would find it in these parlor recitation books that they would do for their own amusement at home. Right. And this was one of the poems that they would readily read. And there were tons of parodies of the poem as well, cause it does lend itself to that. Right. But it was a kind of staple piece for the performance, the demonstration of virtuosity in elocutionary performance and ability to innocence sound the poem and do justice to the various qualities, tonal qualities of the different metals, for example, that you mentioned. How do you do that with your voice? So you could think of it as if it were a song in the 1990s, it would be a great piece for like Celine Dion to perform, right? Because it would really allow her to show off her voice and in all of its virtuosity. But I think moving it into the realm of thinking about it from the pointof view of signification and of media as Aubrey really pursued it, like you say, made this poem a kind of obvious staple for a literature slash sound studies course.\n \n\n00:47:02\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s definitely a cover that I would love to hear — Celine Dion doing a song version of Poe’s “The Bells.” [Audio Clip: Stacey vocal as Celine] But talking about covers that actually brings us perfectly to the final cylinder talk that you’ve brought for us to listen to today.\n \n\n00:47:19\tJason Camlot:\tThis piece was done by Andrew Whiteman. So Andrew, among all the students in the seminar has the most training in sound recording media. He’s a professional musician and has been for the last 20 years. And so he didn’t attend my workshop on audacity because he really, he knows how to work with digital audio workstations and make sound. But also he’s very interested in engaging in doing sound pieces that involve poetry. So he has a whole art practice that’s around this. Anyways, he sort of fell upon finally a topic that seemed like it would be a good one to pursue and essentially boils down to the question of the idea of the cover. We talk about cover songs — can we talk about cover poems? Or the idea of the poet’s cover as he phrases it. And so, because he was interested in oral poetry, let’s say The Odyssey— like Homer Homeric bardic poetry. He started thinking about an opening canto of Pound’s “Cantos”  which is kind of a cover of a short section of the Odyssey, and then pointed him to PennSound’s archive, where there are recordings of Pound reading that opening “Canto I”as well as some other poets reading portions of it. And so he had a sort of mini archive that he could work with that brought in his interest in a bardic poetry, sort of oral poetic forms, which are formulaic forms. So we can’t think of doing a cover in the same sense because the poem changes every time a bard re-performs it versus the question of someone reading the printed already sort of fixed version of a poem differently, and thinking about that as a kind of cover. And so he focused on Robert Duncan’s sort of lecture on Pound in which he performs Canto I.\n \n\n00:49:06\tStacey Copeland:\tHere is Andrew Whiteman with “The Poetic Cover.”\n \n\n00:49:10\tAudio Recording, Andrew Whiteman’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Audio Clip: Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound] Hi. When I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community. And that is that it’s total interest in Mr. Ezra Pound seems to have faded. [Music Begins] [Sound Overlapping with Ezra Pound recites “Canto I” ] My initiation and the counters. How did I come to hear it? Set keel to breakers forth from a godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also/ Heavy with weeping, [Duncan] I found myself in the prep and a terrifying presence of mighty blue stocking who knew the entire modern scene, which made her vastly superior to the [Pound overlap returns] [inaudible] and in one fell swoop I was initiated to the mysteries of [inaudible] trembling and running [inaudible] Ezra Pound on Telegraph Avenue. Elliott. And found there the 30 cantos, what was then the avant garde. [Enter Filreis interview] A very confused domain of something one might call voice. Which in Pound, one doesn’t know whether voice is sort of actual or metaphorical. Especially — [Dunan returns] And I opened the page and then went down with the ship [Pound returns]And then went down to ship [Dunan] I can’t bear it. This is too much! For a whole week I went — [Pound] And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breathers, forth on godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship/ [Duncan] But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You go to dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah [Reverb effect] . You find it the way they find it in music — [Pound] cadaverous dead, of brides/ Of youths of the olde who had borne much; [Duncan] Most people can’t find it [Pound] Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads/ [Duncan] When Pound’s recordings were made we each found out something we could not know [bell] when we read in the thirties, the forties and so forth. And that is that Pround intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of, a sort of singing, intoning to the line. “And then went down to the ship/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea [music rises]…” [Pound] Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms/ [Overlapping voices] These many crowded about me with shouting/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads read [Overlapping voices] [Duncan] Our American trouble with men, many. I mean, we have what we do that word men many. A man is difficult enough when you get that many in there, men, many mauls with bronze lance — and so. So, I don’t always find the most elegant reading. [Filreis interview?] [Inaudible] Olga’s husband says well, “Sound like you never got out from under the influence of Yates or something like that.” And Pound is really hurt [Small voice: He doesn’t like that] and leaves the room and take his —and then the next day reads in a completely different fashion. Much more relaxed and much more conversational. And you have the two readings there. [Small voice: He took it to heart!] [Duncan] We can overlap so the thing plays a double role. Now. [Filreis interview] He took it to heart. It’s really interesting the first high Yatesian reading, and then the next much more kind of casual and incidentally superior reading. It’s a really interesting. [Small voice: That’s great, and where did you find this thing ?] She sent them to me. [Small voice: Oh fantastic.] [Overlapping voices] [inaudible] [Small voice: I wonder if other stuff will start to surface.] Well I’m hoping. [Duncan] If you don’t find the music you have not found the elegant solution. [End music]\n \n\n00:53:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah, Aaron.\n \n\n \n\n00:53:17\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aaron Obedkoff\tI find it an incredibly potent and effective way to tackle Pound’s enormous influence. I mean, he’s kind of like — when it comes to modern contemporary poetry, he’s like the wizard of Oz behind the screen, he’s just everywhere. And so the way you made him disappear into his progeny, his voice kind of being subsumed under Duncan’s and the like, I found it very, very effective.\n \n\n00:53:39\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Aaron Obedkoff\n \n\n00:53:41\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tWe always get this image of Pound, Aaron as you’re saying, as the wizard of Oz. But in that talk where Olga’s husband, who’s British, who says, “Oh, well, gee, you really can’t get away from Yates can ya?” It’s like, Oh my God, the ghosts, like whether you find them this horrible fascist monster or whether you find him — in whatever way, he looms so big. And this is like a little [Pop Sound] it pricks, the bubble in this image of poor Pound going away with his book and then coming back the next day and changing his reading style. But what’s interesting is we don’t know, like the sound of Pound that we have there where he’s like, this [Imitates Pounds dramatic style] is that him toned down? Like, there’s a whole question there. Was even worse before? Like was even more before? We don’t know.\n \n\n00:54:28\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tWe’re really interested in the way you used space panning and also accelerating to differentiate between — sort of continuing Aaron’s observation about where Pound’s voice was in the mix of his “after-Pound era.” The way where you were using it as a way to actually make your arguments. If you, if you want to talk a little bit about like, whether there was much intentionality or whether you were just going with what sounded good, but I also liked the way you took the Filreis conversation, the talk, which is like one contemporary manifestation of continuing to engage with these recordings, the effect of speeding it up, almost highlighted it’s gossipy nature, or sort of relegated it to a less important discursive register that actually accelerating suggests belittling or something like that.\n \n\n00:55:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tYeah. I think you’re Dr. Freud-ing me really well now because — and also trying to make them talk to each other that’s probably the big thing. I like trying to make different eras to talk to one another where they don’t belong. And so where Duncan says “I was in the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking”, like whoever that is! Someone who initiated him, he uses the word initiate three times, which I put in there because he places himself in vis-a-vis Pound in a religious place. And so when he says “the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking” I have Pounds “Aphrodite. Golden girdle.” Or whatever, to just try and emphasize Duncan’s position as an initiate. And then that is what my paper’s about. How Duncan says the exact same words that Pound says, but his cover of “Canto I” is completely different and signifies in a completely different way.\n \n\n00:56:18\tStacey Copeland:\tThis one has — it’s just so rich. It really is more of a soundscape composition. And this really does show the range that your students brought to the table when they were thinking about the idea of a cylinder talk, where here we have Andrew’s cylinder talk that doesn’t have his voice in it at all. It’s really engaging with the archive and engaging with these ideas of covers, and covers almost as layers of sound layers on top of each other through time through space, through these different contexts that he’s grappling with in these different poetic covers. Tell me a bit about listening back. What’s coming forward for you?\n \n\n00:56:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. I’ve been thinking more like, as you were just saying about what a cover is. Cause I think one of the things that his cylinder talk does so successfully is exactly what he said he was going for, which is communicate the ways in which the same sort of text can not only sound differently, but also through that sound represent an entirely different worldview, literally worldview. So ideology in relation to the world, but also sort of literary worldview, meaning what literature and what talking about literature and what performing literature is supposed to be accomplishing. He layers them for us to sort of understand that we can only partially see or know the meaning of what a sounding of a poem would mean in a particular historical context. That’s one of the things that I hear in this piece.\n \n\n00:57:44\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, every time I listened to this, I feel like I’m hearing something else and it could just be me projecting, but I feel like we are experiencing a bit of Andrew’s personal experience of grappling with these archival sounds. We get the sort of disorientation and listening to the harsh panning back and forth in the first half of the cylinder talk there. And then we also have this comedic moment with the speeding up of the voices, which again could be, I mean, for me evokes the feeling of the monotony and maybe the hilarity that ensues after listening to hours and hours and hours of archival tape in real time. Right. Because its sound. You have to listen and you have to digitize in real time and it can make you a bit loopy.\n \n\n00:58:28\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s what he was referring to when he said I was Dr. Freud-ing him, like, I think he was sort of the point he was making is that he —you can hear his own himself in the positioning that he gives to the sounds in the piece, but he’s also positioning them in relation to how he feels about what he’s doing right now.\n \n\n00:58:45\tStacey Copeland:\tInviting students to engage in audio production — one of my hopes and what I think sound does really well is opening up the doors to allow students to grapple with and experience and describe and share their own embodied experience of engaging with these ideas outside of the very traditional essay writing format that we get engrained with in high school and then carries forward into their undergrads and haunts us later in our academic careers as well.\n \n\n00:59:14\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really true. And I think we’ve heard some of that through the various comments in response to all of the cylinder talks that we listened to. It’s somewhat different from the formulae of knowledge production that they’re used to engaging in. And so I think that’s very quickly associated with putting themselves out there a little bit more, right. That there’s more of themselves in the decisions they’re making, because the decisions haven’t been sort of pre-made for them as to what an essay is supposed to be or what this kind of knowledge production is supposed to have in it. And then also as you point out that it is a very embodied experience because it involves listening. It involves bodily fatigue because that work can really take a long time when you’re sitting at the computer doing the sound editing.\n \n\n00:59:57\tJason Camlot:\tAnd then it makes me think also about the relevance of calling this a cylinder talk assignment rather than a podcasting assignment, because no one knows what a cylinder talk is. Right. It’s sort of a made up idea as a constraint. And I add some—and we did have discussions like say, well, what is a cylinder talk? So that they knew what they could sort of engage in. But people have ideas about what a podcast is already. So in some ways a podcasting assignment would allow them to lean a little bit more on models than an assignment where they have to do a cylinder talk where there aren’t really aren’t any precedents for this. In retrospect, I think that was a productive aspect of the assignment was that there wasn’t even a kind of sonic generic precedent that they could rely upon.\n \n\n01:00:40\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the cylinder as a —.\n \n\n01:00:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah.\n \n\n01:00:44\tStacey Copeland:\t– a very simple constraint that has a very material aspect to it as well. Versus I think if we thought about podcasting more in that way, we might start to create some more interesting things.\n \n\n01:00:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Yeah. Possibly.\n01:00:57\tStacey Copeland:\tI was curious listening through some of the cylinder talks that your students made, how you see this kind of assignment being applied to other courses that you teach, or maybe in the future, other disciplines as well.\n \n\n01:01:10\tJason Camlot:\tI guess it all starts with an exercise in the use of constraints, to generate really interesting creative solutions. The cylinder talk, it’s a cipher or an empty container in a lot of ways. And yet a very restrictive constraint simultaneously, right.The idea of having assignments of constraint and maybe of unfamiliar constraint could be extremely productive across the disciplines. I mean, this seminar was really about engaging with theories of listening from many different disciplines and then thinking about our own discipline from the respective of those readings. But I think the sound assignment was getting at that question [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] and problem and goal in a different way, in a much more practice and sort of embodied way.\n \n\n01:01:56\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the different ways that we can approach our pedagogy. What other assignments can we bring in to kind of shake students awake a little bit? So I guess at this point now it’s my turn to go and listen back through the that we just had.\n \n\n01:02:20\tJason Camlot:\tSorry, we talked too much!\n \n\n01:02:24\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Maybe we should put out an extended cut.\n \n\n01:02:27\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, exactly.\n \n\n01:02:28\tStacey Copeland:\tThis has been a pleasure listening to some of the work that your students put out because this is one of the frustrations always is both as a student and as an instructor, students create these wonderful works and only everyone in the course gets to hear it. And no one else. I’m glad we got to share some of these out in the world for others to enjoy as well. [End Music: Ambient Sounds]\n \n\n01:03:05\tHannah McGregor:\t[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Stacey Copeland of Simon Fraser University and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A special thanks to Alexandra Sweeney, Aubrey Grant, Sara Adams, Andrew Whiteman, and all the students of English 604: Literary Listening as Cultural Technique for their cylinder talks and discursive contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourselves and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9285","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E7, Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word, 5 April 2021, Fong and O'Driscoll"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/1856e0ce-b7c4-459b-a647-fda358f5396a/audio/784305a8-060a-4ebe-8a56-4876884a0869/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:49\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"56,532,367 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-04-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The following are Creative Commons attribution licenses\\n\\nTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray (Old phonograph “Cabaret”)\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_Various_Artists/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_05052009/Take_Me_to_the_Cabaret\\n\\nNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/Night_on_the_Docks_-_Sax\\n\\nBlur the World by Tagirijus\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Manuel_Senfft/Easy_2018/manuel_senfft_-_blur_the_world\\n\\nQueer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta \\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta/unlikely_objects/07_-_isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta_-_unlikely_objects_objetos_improvveis_-_queer_noise\\n\\nThe following are spoken word performance clips\\n\\nMathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, courtesy of recordist.\\n\\n“Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen, courtesy of Radiofreerainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books. \\n\\nHartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, courtesy of The People and the Text, \\n\\nT.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at Edgy Women Festival, courtesy of performer.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549498101760,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode is a series of interviews with Humanities scholars Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L. Cowan about their approaches to the ethics of listening in their own research. We join Deanna Fong and Mike O’Driscoll as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Deanna Fong (Concordia University) and Michael O’Driscoll (University of Alberta), with additional audio courtesy of the radiofreerainforest Fonds at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections; the Hartmut Lutz Collection, made digitally available by the SSHRC-funded People and the Text project (https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/); and support from Jason Camlot, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, and Judith Burr. Special thanks to Deanna Reder and Alix Shield of The People and the Text Project, and to Mathieu Aubin, bill bissett, Hartmut Lutz, Maria Campbell, and T.L. Cowan for permission to share interview and performance audio. \n\n\n00:00\tHannah McGregor:\tHi! Hannah McGregor here. Before we get into our episode today, I want to tell you about our new partner podcast [Start Music] , New Aural Cultures: The Podcast Studies Podcast. If you like the sound studies episodes of SpokenWeb, you’ll love this in-depth but accessible take on podcasting culture with hosts, Dr. Dario Linares, featuring interviews with internationally renowned podcast producers, academics, and critics, New Aural Cultures delves into the medium in all its complexity. New Aural Cultures is also a distribution network for one-off podcasts, ongoing series, and sound-based projects of all kinds. If you have a sound based project or idea that you think would lend itself to becoming a podcast, reach out on Twitter @NewAural, that’s aural as in A-U-R-A-L. To listen to the show, head over to anchor.fm/NewAuralCultures or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll even hear episodes featuring SpokenWeb members like Stacey Copeland, Jason Camlot, and me! And now onto our episode. [End Music]\n \n\n01:30\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWord Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What does ethical mean to you? Perhaps you took an ethics course in school where they taught you about Aristotle or Kant, about ethics as a system of rules or theories concerned with what is good for individuals in society. O.r perhaps ethical is something tied more to the way you live each day, your interactions with loved ones and strangers, your choices in what food to buy or political cause to support. But how does ethics apply to the way we listen? And in particular, the way we listen to the spoken word? Poet Robert Duncan once described himself as a poet who “listens as his poetry pictures his listening”. A reminder that poetry is, in its first instance, a record of sonic performance, an artistic practice that takes place as much on the stage in front of a listening audience, as on the page. What’s more, poetic performance is at its heart about attunement and attention. About a response, or a responsibility, to the world enacted through sound. We can think of listening as ethics or “po-ethics”, as the composer John Cage often said. In this episode, we joined SpokenWeb contributors, Deanna Fong, and Mike O’Driscoll, as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them. Here is Deanna and Mike [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] with “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n04:01\tMusic:\t“Take Me to the Cabaret” by Billy Murray\n04:16\tDeanna Fong:\t[Continue Music] Hi, I’m Deanna Fong.\n \n\n04:16\tMike O’Driscoll:\tAnd I’m Mike O’Driscoll. In her book The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, Gemma Corradi Fiumara remarks that genuine listening creates ever new spaces in the very place it is carried out. We’d add, it’s a site for the emergence of something radically new. [End Music] New forms of care, new ways of relating to our environments and to each other. Like her, we believe that listening is a revolutionary activity.\n \n\n04:48\tDeanna Fong:\tOver the next hour, we will introduce you to four speakers who cultivate that creative space of listening in their practice: T.L. Cowan, Mathieu Aubin, Treena Chambers, and Clint Burnham. Each introduces us to a sound recording that is important to their work and takes us through what attentive, ethical listening means to them. As you listen to this podcast, we invite you to be attuned to your own listening by considering the following questions. What are you listening for in the space of this podcast? At what points is your attention fixed and at what points does it wander? What is the material situation of your listening? Where does it take place? What else is going on? How does listening feel in your body?\n \n\n05:30\tMike O’Driscoll:\tBy giving special attention to these cues, we hope that this episode will prompt you to reflect on your own ethics of listening by considering how you listen and what is important to you when encountering the spoken word and other sounds.\n \n\n05:47\tDeanna Fong:\tI’m going to guess that when most of us imagine what listening sounds like, we imagine nothing at all. Silence. But for queer cabaret performer and professional spokeslady Trixie Cane, also known as Professor T.L. Cowan, it sounds a lot more like this.\n \n\n06:02\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tIt’s not too late. You can [Audience Laughter] eat me today. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n06:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tHi T.L. Thanks for joining us today. Can you begin by telling us a bit more about that clip and why it’s important to you?\n \n\n06:38\tT.L Cowan:\tSure. Thanks. And thanks for having me. This is just fabulous. This was my performance at the final cabaret of the Edgy Women Festival, which was a festival of feminist performance –performance art that was organized and curated by a really awesome person named Miriam Zenith GA in Montreal from 1994 to 2016. So a 22 year run of this feminist performance festival. And so this was the very last show of that festival and it was called Left Fe and the cabaret was hosted by Edgy Women superstars, Dana McLeod and Natalie Clode, and the festival or the cabaret itself was a kind of funeral awake and a celebration of life of The Edgy Women Festival. And Natalie and Dana as the hosts took us through the stages of grief. So I was invited and commissioned –invited to perform, commissioned to make a piece.\n \n\n07:35\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so I was performing as my alter ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane. And Mrs. Trixie Cane is –she’s a character who I perform in drag. And she is a professional spokeslady, and I was performing alongside my partner Jazz Rock, who is a very good cello player. And Jazz and I play together as a duo called Mrs. Trixie Cane and Her Handsome Cellist. And it was called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. That was the title of the performance. But what you’re listening to now is the very end of that performance. And this was happening at the Leon D’or Cabaret in Montreal.\n \n\n08:20\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tHi. [Audience Laughter] I’m Trixie King. [Audience Laughter] I’m here tonight to talk to you about an exciting new fundraising initiative called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. [Audience Laughter] Or, “EW-MILF-PAPT-GO-OFFE.” [Audience Laughter]\n \n\n09:06\tT.L Cowan:\tSo that clip is important to me because I have been a performer for many, many years, and I’ve performed in lots of different kinds of venues, but, the thing that I have found the most remarkable about a performance life is when it feels like the audience is just really picking up what you’re putting down and that they’re like, they’re in it, they’re listening, they’re following along. They get all of the stuff that you’re trying to do with your look, with your gestures, with your texts, with your movement, with your sexy cellist – all of those kinds of things. And when you’re a feminist performance artist, it’s not that often in the world that you feel “gotten” that you feel like people really get what you’re doing. Usually, in my professional life, I always kind of joke that I feel like I’m the fire-breathing lesbian in every in every professional meeting, for example.\n \n\n10:09\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so, usually the way –our ways of being in the world are kind of at a weird raw angle to a kind of mainstream straight non-feminists way of doing things. And so, when we bring our performance selves into these spaces and get that kind of applause, it’s like the best mental health medicine ever. Because it’s a moment where you feel seen and heard, understood and that you share a sense of set of references and that you share a set of aesthetics and understandings [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] and that people get what you’re doing.\n \n\n10:54\tDeanna Fong:\tThis reminds me of your recent article on the avidly channel of the LA Review of Books, which is a great series, right? It’s writing with intense eagerness [Laughs] and that essay, “Holding for Applause: On Queer Cabaret in Pandemic Times”, you wrote –there’s a quote here: “Applause is necessary. It makes us feel seen and arguably safe, loved. Applause is the audio equivalent of the sweaty crush upon crush, a bodily affirmation that you can hear. ” And I love that implication of like the sonic importance of applause there. So – how does applause and all of the other sort of like audio accoutrement of heckling and cheering and callback and all these sorts of things – how in your mind does that relate to an ethics of listening in the context of live cabaret performance?\n \n\n11:43\tT.L Cowan:\tWell kind of coming back to what I was saying earlier about the applause that I got for that – my Edgy Woman performance in 2016, I would say that that kind of applause indicates that the audience was paying attention. And that you have not been ignored. You’ve not been dismissed, you’ve not been overshadowed, you’ve not been written off as the kind of flamey queer in the room. Or as I said earlier, that like kind of fire-breathing lesbian in the room, or the angry feminist or whatever it is. But instead by bringing those elements to the stage, and bringing them into that trans feminist performance scene that you are –and telling your stories – that you’re taking a risk to a certain extent, right? That you are hoping that the audience will love what you’re doing, that they will pick up what you’re putting down.\n \n\n12:41\tT.L Cowan:\tBut you never really know. So it’s always a risk. You’re always making yourself vulnerable. And trans, feminist, and queer people know the experience of vulnerability and risk so well because almost anytime that we are ourselves, that we’re not kind of a muted down version of ourselves, in the ways that we need to mute ourselves to generally survive in our everyday lives – that by bringing the kind of full self, the flamboyant self into the space, and then for the audience to be like, “Yeah, that was amazing. I see what you’re doing!” That means that you’re being paid attention to and that not only that, but that what you have to offer is needed, not just tolerated. And so that what you’re bringing into that space is something that people need and want. And that when people give you that kind of applause back, it’s a kind of building a relationship of that kind of intensity that kind of need that kind of caregiving. So a performer giving that kind of performance is a way of caring for her or their, or his community. And for audiences to give back with that amount of attention and love, I think is a kind of ethical engagement with not just the work, but in building these spaces where these stories can be told in a way where they’re going to be supported and appreciated and attended to, and not met with a kind of like cool indifference or or derision or anything like that. But that, that you really are going to feel like your work is needed and loved, and that you are not going to be judged in a way that leaves you feeling like shit – sorry – about yourself afterwards. That you’re going to end up feeling like, “Oh yeah, I can bring my – I can bring what I’ve got here. I don’t have to tone it down.” [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] And so when audiences also don’t tone it down, then that produces a kind of reciprocity of a queer fabulousness and flamboyance and over-the-top-ness that many of us need to thrive and survive, but don’t get in our everyday lives.\n \n\n14:47\tMusic:\tTake Me to the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n15:16\tMusic:\tNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\n \n\n15:16\tDeanna Fong:\tT.L Cowan reminds us that an audience’s response, applause, cheering, and other forms of vocal affirmation are not only acts of listening, they’re also acts of care. But how does that care extend beyond the live space of the performance, into the collection and interpretation of participants’ memories of those events? To put it differently, how can historical listening also enact an ethics of care? To answer this question, we turn to our next guest, Mathieu Aubin.\n \n\n15:43\tMike O’Driscoll:\tMathieu Aubin is a scholar of print and performance cultures in Canada. He’s working towards recuperating queer people’s contributions to Canadian literary culture, and his work on queerness and literary communities in Vancouver has been published in the Journal Canadian Literature. Here’s Mathieu at work interviewing legendary poet, bill bissett.\n \n\n16:11\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tI was so grateful for Warren’s support of me. There was a television station then I think called CKVU.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOkay.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nI think –\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWas that a local Vancouver station?\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nYeah.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOk.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tAnd I did a reading on it and Robin Blaser was there supporting me and saying wonderful things about me. And I lived in secret and I was, everything was kind of very bizarre and wonderful, the possibilities of things getting better. And then after that, like my phone number was listed. And after that I had death threats about five times a day –.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWow.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\t– just from that TV appearance, I was only chanting. It’s like, people are, it’s like still, I mean, Trump mobilizes those kinds of people. They’re so addicted to everything being the same. And that’s not a judgment at them. They get that way probably because they haven’t read enough books. They’re not informed enough. They hadn’t had an education. Maybe they’ve been very frightened when their children, by something awful that happened to them. And now they can’t handle anything. And it was only musical chanting that I was doing. It was based on the honey chant. And maybe I read a couple of love poems, you know? [Music Begins: Night on the Docks – Sax] And everyone in the house I was living in, they all knew that I was living there secretly, they came down in the apartment, we all watched it together. They thought it was fine [Laughs] but not everyone.  [Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n17:49\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThanks for being here with us today, Mathieu. To begin, can you give us a bit of context about the clip that we just heard?\n \n\n17:59\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this clip is from an interview that I conducted with bill bissett in April, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia. And at the time I was really interested [Music Ends: Night on the Docks – Sax] in this reading series called The Writing and Our Time reading series that happened in 1979. And so I had the chance to meet with him in Kitsilano, a neighborhood of Vancouver. And we had met a few times beforehand, so we already had some rapport and we’ve been working together a few years. But the main interest was really about the series and thinking about perhaps its role as a form of queer cultural activism. The reason why I was thinking about that is because the series was started as a way of organizing people together and getting them to raise funds for bill bissett who’s press, blewointment press, Canada Council funding had been cut. And as you know, small presses definitely depend on that money to be able to survive.\n18:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo the issue, in part, was a result of accusations in the House of Commons in the year prior and the year before that – so ’70, ’77, ’78 – that we’re calling poetry by bill bissett as well as that by Bertrand Lachance pornographic. So the issue really was that there was this huge debate that led to a lot of backlash. And when I was asking you about the role of homophobia in those events and the House of Commons, as well as the sort of galvanizing movement around challenging what I thought was homophobia with the reading series, he told me about a CKUTV reading, and that happened in ’78 –September ’78, – that was organized by Juan Tolman and attended by many other poets. And so, what you hear in the recording here is basically him describing what happened – [Start Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod] obviously the excitement of the event, but also the kind of negative backlash that happened afterwards.\n \n\n20:06\tDeanna Fong:\tSo I know a lot of your research and also your pedagogical interests revolve around something that you’ve called listening queerly or queer listening. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the techniques and practices of queer listening?\n \n\n20:21\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this is something that I’ve been working on for a few years now, even more closely as a postdoc at Concordia. And to me, queer listening entails basically attending to how LGBTQ+ people interpret or articulate their lives. And that means like friendships, family, intimacy, politics, artistic expression, really all different kinds of facets, but from a queer position. And so, what I’m often listening for and where I’m listening for is often audio recordings of literary events or conversations, but also in oral history interviews. But when I’m thinking about old recordings, I’m mostly interested in thinking about how they’re articulating queer codes, and how they’re connecting with other LGBTQ+ writers in the room, people who are presenting an audience members, or how they also introduced their works, discuss the works and even just the works themselves, obviously, it seems like the most obvious point, but it’s not just about the work itself, but also around it. And how is it actually shaping what we’re listening for?\n21:31\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd with a quick reference to the clip that I shared with you just before we started recording, there’s one moment I – it makes me smile now listening back again, because – not the condition that he had to go through, but like when he says “living in secrecy” I know what that means, but somebody who might not quite understand the context would not be able to understand the resonances of that. And so for me, it’s thinking, okay, well, 1978-79, bill bissett gay poet, who is under the – has been targeted by the Canada parliament, excuse me, Canadian parliament – I wass going to say the Canada Council, but that wasn’t the case. And then, and also getting death threats. And so living in secrecy for him meant survival at a time when homophobia, wasn’t just something that people were like, “Oh, we’re homophobic, but we hide it.”\n \n\n22:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tIt’s like this was public and overt. And for him it meant survival. So living in secrecy – if he is mentioning something like that – is speaking much louder from a queer positionality, if you’re listening and attending to those concerns. Or another thing could be him reading a poem about RCMP surveillance. Sure, he was arrested for possession of cannabis, but he was also surveilled for other reasons. And part of that was his own sexual identity. So, when he reads a poem about queer surveillance and the RCMP, you know that means more than simply just police state. So, what does that mean about that time period? And what does it mean to be able to share that in that moment to a public audience?\n \n\n23:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut in an oral history interview, queer listing, for me entails something not quite the same, but quite similar at the same time. And it’s about how that person, how they –they would probably identify as LGBTQ+ – how they’re interpreting whatever facet of their lives from a queer positionality and how that might resonate differently for queer listeners. So it’s not just about listening to the past, but it’s thinking about how are they interpreting that time in their life today. And that’s why I think like that moment of secrecy – living in secret system. Okay. Well, what does it mean? And maybe along the person to unpack that a little bit, or even just keeping it at that. Not letting it just be a queer code. [Transition Music: Night on the Docks – Sax]\n \n\n24:07\tDeanna Fong:\tAnd so, what sort of ethical considerations have been important in your work – especially as you say that you’re listening for the articulation of these kinds of queer codes, connections between members of communities, perhaps intergenerationally, especially when queer subjects had been the target of so much censure and violence? And I guess maybe one more, very specific question is: in that case, do you feel that there is an ethical impetus to make those codes legible outside of a queer community? Is that part of your task as an oral historian or is there a different kind of ethics that those sorts of artifacts and conversations demand?\n \n\n24:57\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think your questions are right on point. They’re important things that I’m thinking about at the moment. Some of my ways of thinking about this have been – two key ethical principles have been one – and we talked about this last week– which is non extractive listening where things like Dylan Robinsons work – but here more in the queer context because with the measure of the RCMP using tape recorders to literally record people who would be identified as queer today to incriminate them or blackmail them, how do you today listen to this from a position of white privilege and power at the institutions that we work with, and not reproduce that kind of violence? So how do you listen, not extractively but listen with or hopefully from a respectful position. And I think that part of that work – like you’re saying –is thinking about it for me through the queer context, through works that have been written about that period by people who are reflected by that time period.\n \n\n26:07\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut, “who is this for?” is a question that I keep asking myself. Am I writing this to inform the general public, or is this for the communities themselves? And I think it’s a bit of both, but always first and foremost, the queer community itself, because if you’re doing the work for others, how are they going to benefit whatsoever from listening and interpretation and oral history telling. But I think that the general public also needs to know when there’s a lack – like when they don’t understand what it is – the experiences of queer people over the last 50 years, let’s say.\n \n\n26:47\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat’s interesting to me is when I share these kinds of historical events with people who would identify as maybe an ally or who would try to not be homophobic [Begin Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod], they’re always – they’re often surprised by the stuff that I document for them, about this time period and share with them. So, I think that’s like – the ethics is like how do you do that in a way that’s not just meant to like reproduce the power structures? [End Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n27:26\tMike O’Driscoll:\tListening, much like the language we listen to and for can be structured by uneven relations across social forms, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and cultural background. Mathieu shows us how queer codes land differently for different listeners, depending on their position in relation to heteronormative power structures. For our next guest Métis writer, scholar, and organizer, Treena Chambers, language offers us a vantage to critique and dismantle structures of colonial power, and also to heal through storytelling and deep listening. [Music start: Blur the World] Thanks again, Treena, for agreeing to meet with us. You’ve worked extensively with the Hartmut Lutz’s collection of interviews with Indigenous writers, which has been made available on the People and the Text site, listening to them, cataloging them, digitizing them, and even traveling to Germany to work with the collection. It seems that so many stories about the archive begin by encountering a box of tapes. Can you tell us that story and what that encounter was like for you?\n \n\n28:47\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah, I’m happy to. So, I was working with Dr. Deanna Reader and she had some money and was trying to go through Dr. Hartmut Lutz’s library. So, she found myself and Rachel Thomas and Thompson, and sent us to Germany [End Music:  Blur the World by Tagirijus] to go through his archives because he was getting ready to retire. And, in going through all his books and all his paraphernalia, we came across this box of tapes and low and behold, open it up, and there are interviews with all sorts of people. Howard Adams, Maria Campbell, Thompson Highway, there was just so many. And so we looked at these and immediately tried to figure out how we can save them– because very quickly, looking at the box– when you pull out a box from the 1960s and 1970s, you’re like, “Uh-Oh!” [Laughs]. Technology has changed, tapes degrade, all of that.\n \n\n29:46\tTreena Chambers:\tSo immediately we’re like, how do we, as quickly as possible get these into some sort of format that we can use? And the only thing we could do at that point was get them back to Canada and hopefully work with the library. So I packed them into a backpack and carried them through Germany and through Portugal because I was making a stop. And then back to Vancouver.\n \n\n30:10\tMike O’Driscoll…:\tHow did it feel, the first moment you got to start listening to them? What did – what was that like for you?\n \n\n30:18\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. I grew up outside of a strong Indigenous community. I had a very strong Indigenous family who understood its self as Indigenous inside those sort of walls of our home. But we grew up in a very white, small town in Canada that was proud of its mining roots and settler roots. And so there was always a conflict with how you understood being Indigenous within that context. And so sitting down and going through those tapes, was a really interesting exercise for me to think through who I was and the sort of dichotomy that I lived within. And so the tapes were really – yeah I just loved hearing [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] these people, these thinkers that I had heard at the kitchen table being heard in a larger context. [End Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n31:23\tTreena Chambers:\tOur goal was to bring them back to Canada. As soon as we saw what they were, we really wanted people to be able to hear the voice of Indigenous thinkers, Indigenous writers, and to hear them here on our shore and to give them the respect that a German scholar gave them, but nobody in Canada had given them in the past. So to bring them home, preserve what we could, document what we could, and make them available for Indigenous scholars, for settler scholars, and to bring them back to the land that they spoke of.\n \n\n32:01\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. And so I think you mentioned that you’ve listened to about 25% of this quite large collection of interviews is that right?\n \n\n32:08\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah. Yeah. It’s been a really interesting project. I mean, we were really lucky that once we got them back to Canada, there were so many other people who were willing to help us digitize them, willing to help us work towards transcripts and that. So a lot of my job became, connecting all of those different groups. So I really got to listen to just the ones that drew me [Laughs] into everything.\n \n\n32:37\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah, of course among those is Maria Campbell’s interview with Hartmut Lutz, which you’ve selected an excerpt for us to listen to today. So, would you mind giving us a little bit of context about that choice and why that tape spoke to you?\n \n\n32:51\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. So, I was lucky enough–doing the work of preserving them, that I was able to put them on my phone and listen to them as I was commuting back and forth back pre COVID days where we had to commute further than our bedroom to our living room. And so I was commuting from Burnaby to downtown Vancouver. I was doing my Master’s in –or am still doing my Master’s in public policy at SFU. And, there’s nothing quite as colonial as public policy school. And so having these – the Maria Campbell in particular interview in my ears as I was going to school was a really interesting experience, to hear her talk about her experiences in Canada, and to understand her as a strong Métis woman who really defined community for so many years for so many of us. Yeah, so it was a beautiful moment to think through what she was saying about how we tell stories, and the obligation of stories, and the work that stories do before I would go into a school that started to talk about, “Oh, we’re all neutral and we’re data driven” and I’d be like, [Laughs] I know you’re not! And I heard someone tell me that on the way to school!\n \n\n34:13\tDeanna Fong:\tNo language is neutral. No data is neutral.\n \n\n34:18\tTreena Chambers:\tExactly.\n \n\n34:18\tDeanna Fong:\tSo why don’t I play? I’ll play the clip for us here. I’ll just share my screen.\n \n\n34:24\tAudio Recording, Hartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, Maria Campbell:\tSo one of the things that’s very difficult for me is I don’t, I don’t think of myself as a writer. My work is in the community. Writing is just one of the moves that I use in my work as an organizer. If I think that something else will work better than I’ll, you know, so I’m, it’s multimedia kinds of things. I do video, I do film and I do oral storytelling. I do a lot of teaching. Well, I don’t like calling it teaching, but it’s facilitating. And, I work a lot with elders, so it’s not like I’m a writer and I’m bopping around all over reading and talking about the great literature or anything. I’m not a – I don’t think of myself as an authority on –in fact, I get quite embarrassed when I – if I have to speak from the point of view of a writer, because I really don’t know what that is. I know what a storyteller is. And a storyteller is a community healer and teacher. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n35:40\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. So fantastic recording and so much to talk about. Can we just start by asking you why this particular recording or this particular excerpt of this recording is important to you?\n \n\n35:54\tTreena Chambers:\tWell, I think –so in the work that I do, I’m trying to challenge the way we use language within public policy. We often talk about things like Crown land and stuff like that, but we don’t need interrogate what that means. And particularly in British Columbia, there’s no such thing as Crown land really. There’s unceded land and there’s treatied land, but the Crown [End [Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] has not established a real legal claim to the land here. And so I think often about the work that the story that we tell ourselves both in how we envision the birth of what we call Canada, how we envision our obligations to each other and what story can do. And I think in particular, Maria Campbell has taken that very, very seriously and built story and done story work that has really worked to heal many people’s experiences on the land, but also challenge our assumptions about what words mean, what story does and, how we relate to each other. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n37:13\tTreena Chambers:\tSo most of the listening that I do is done just to experience it. It’s not done with this end goal of, okay, this is my conception of this author, or of the speaker, of this process, or product. Therefore I need to listen specifically for things that relate to that. So when I’m listening, I listen just to listen. And that’s not to say that my own internal biases and my own processes and ideas don’t influence what I hear, but I don’t go into much of what I’m listening to with a specific question in mind. I don’t have a research question that I am exploring. I don’t have a specific understanding of the people that I’m listening to. That influences what I’m listening for. I try and listen just to hear what they have to say. And, for me, that allows me to experience what I’m hearing, but also to maybe hear things differently.\n \n\n38:25\tTreena Chambers:\tI think the interesting thing is when we were listening to the Maria Campbell interview, the types of quotes that people pick out and the moments like the moments that you picked out as important were ones that I’m like, nah, that’s kind of a throw away for me. Because it just wasn’t something I was listening for. The Canadian literature scene is not my scene, particularly. I have lots of friends who are in it and I love being there, but I wasn’t listening to hear Maria Campbell’s critique of, or experience of being in groups of other writers. I was just listening to see what she had to say. And in particular, I guess for me about what she had to say about community. And so that’s one of the beauties of just sort of promiscuous listening, I think, is that you don’t go into it with a preconceived agenda and you can enjoy it for –just for the sake of listening that you don’t have to be made better for it. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]  You don’t have to learn from it. You can just listen and be.\n \n\n39:44\tDeanna Fong:\tWe can listen attuned to the resonances of historical context and the dynamics of power as Mathieu Aubain asks us to do, or we can listen through response as T.L. Cowan invites us as a fundamental practice of careful relationships and community building, or we can listen simply to be fully present and enjoy as Treena Chambers reminds us. But it’s listening always unequivocally a good thing? To address that question. We turn to Clint Burnham, professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and a cultural theorist who brings the writings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to our conversation on the ethics of listening. [Music: queer noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n40:25\tClint Burnham:\tI want to do two things. First of all, I want to hold that up and think about, or add or critique. I still believe in the idea of critique, the notion, that listening is an unalloyed good. And then secondly, I want to say, listen, if listening is not great, it’s also not, not great. So part one, we’re told in the era of #MeToo that we should listen to women. We were told in the era of reconciliation that we should listen to residential school survivors’ stories. Let me be clear that what I am not saying is that we should not listen to survivors. Yes, should we should read and listen to testimony. You have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We should read and listen to their stories and songs and novels and poems about that horrible continued history of cultural genocide in our settler colonial past and present.\n \n\n41:14\tClint Burnham:\tAnd yes, we should listen to our loved ones, our colleagues, our students, and our public figures when they talk about acts of sexual assault and improprieties. But, I also want us to think more about what listening means, what it entails. I want us to consider how listening is often the activity of the powerful. Think of the judge in a courtroom who listens to testimony, or a priest who listens confession, or a therapist who listens to a patient. The structure of listening actually bequeaths a kind of master position onto the listener, who then decides what to believe, what to do with this knowledge. We put too much trust in listening. We think the listener is a good person. It’s good to listen. We have an entire repertoire of neoliberal, therapeutic listening, active listening. “I hear what you are saying.” Blah, blah, blah.\n \n\n42:12\tClint Burnham:\tSo what am I proposing? So, I’m not proposing to get rid of listening, to stop listening, but I am proposing that listening is not, not great. Lacanian psychoanalysis proposes a different kind of listening. So it’s still based on the idea of the psychoanalyst, but it’s a different sort of modality, Lacan famously combined the words caritas, or love, and trash, or déchets in French, to characterize what the analyst does as decharite, or what was translated into English as “trashitas.” So not caritas, but trashitas, a kind of a sifting through, a listening to garbage. And part of this is because there’s a through line of Lacan talking about his work as garbage. He’ll pun on poubelle-lication – a publication and poubelle, meaning garbage. Or he’ll say his work is only fit for the wastebasket. So he is talking about his own writings as well as about what the analysand, the patient, is saying.\n \n\n43:12\tClint Burnham:\tBut trashitas comes from caritas, so it’s also the love of garbage. An example of listening as trashitas can be found in how I listened to the Radio Free Rainforest archive. So thinking about the archive, sifting through the archive, of looking for that nugget, that gold, the archival jolt, as I think actually Michael O’Driscoll first theorized it. So we’re looking for something in the archive and the rest is– the remainder, is dross, is garbage, is uninteresting to us. [Audio Recording: “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman] And so for me then finding the poem, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman…\n \n\n44:04\tAudio Recording, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman, courtesy of Radio Free Rainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books:\t[Drumming] [Singing] [Drumming] [Singing] [Repeats] [Voices overlapping]. A moment ago, once I was like, this is an interesting thing. Once I was interested in [inaudible] everything. I was talking a moment ago. Everyone’s talking to someone. Nobody’s talking to noone. [Breathing sounds]. [Singing].\n \n\n46:58\tClint Burnham:\t“Mayakovsky”, a sound poem by the sort of Canadian avant-garde sound poetry group, the Four Horsemen, active in the 70’s and the 80’s. This is actually a record that was from a record, their record, Live in the West from 1977, played on Jerry Gilbert’s radio show called Radio Free Rainforest in, I think November, 1990. And that was a show on community radio CFRO in Vancouver. That show ran for 15 or 20 years. And at a certain point after Jerry passed away, his fonds became – were collected by the contemporary literature collection at SFU. And the tapes –he taped all of his shows – I actually have cassettes of when I was on that show in the late 90’s. He would give a cassette to people when they were on the show. And he also kept tapes himself. Larry Bremner for a while was his technician as well, the Case W poet. And so all those tapes ended up at a SFU and through the SpokenWeb team of gremlins, [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] they were digitized and archived and now it’s all up on the SFU library website, which is quite amazing.\n \n\n48:20\tClint Burnham:\tAnd even then, as we just listened to the poem, sound poetry itself as a genre takes these, these kinds of – in this case, mostly with the body, but not necessarily, there’s a drum in there as well –these guttural or breathing or throat singing. There’s a bit of that Tuvan sort of thing going on there. The versions of sound that don’t quite seem to be language, that seemed to be something else that we might think of as being experimental or trashy or garbage, like in a certain kind of way. And of course, even listening for that extraneous stuff, the chatter, the car noises, the needle on the – in the grooves of the vinyl and the dust and the scratches and the vinyl that make for that kind of noise. And finally thinking about the mediation of that sound. We’re listening through a computer – it was a tape that had been digitized from a radio show. There was a record being played – what has to do with the affordances of how we listen, the ear buds, and so on. All of the ways I’ve been thinking about listening to “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen via Radio Free Rainforest, for me, is a form of listening that embodies that kind of trashitas ethics.\n \n\n49:40\tDeanna Fong:\tThat’s great. And you know what immediately comes to mind is, I remember Tony Power, who’s the contemporary literature collections librarian at SFU. When that collection came in, Gerry Gilbert’s fond , it was full of literal trash. It was full of cigarette butts and old birth control packages from the 1970s and paperclips and all sorts of things. So I think actually what you’re proposing here is a different reading of the archive itself too. Not as this elevated site of the arc-on, as we imagine it in other various theoretical texts, but literally the trash heap [Laughs] in many cases. And that’s a way to sort of unravel that archontic kind of power.\n \n\n50:32\tClint Burnham:\tYeah. I mean, both – so, I mean, it’s that trash heap, and something that Lacan rifts off from Joyce as well – a letter, a litter from Finnegan’s Wake probably –that materiality of it is trash, is the sublime is unsorted. But then also that the listening, I think, to talk about listening in terms of the trashitas means – and it’s not to, it’s not to say that what I mean, whether it’s a work of literature or a testimony or something else is trash in the sense that it doesn’t matter, it’s just that– because on the one hand, there’s this love for it, there’s this real desire to hear it– but it’s not treating it as this kind of, that that makes me a better person for having been the person who listens. That ethical call to listen is what I think really has to be, thought about because it puts the listener into this position of the master, of the beautiful soul.\n \n\n51:33\tClint Burnham:\tAnd I’m using master very conscious of the ways in which, with Black Lives Matter over the past six months since the George Floyd uprisings, has really asked us to think about what the signifiers are. And that mastery itself – we can sanitize or cancel language in terms of when – you know, master bedroom or master files and so on. And some of that obviously is very important, but I think I want to retain that idea, that one is put into a master position by the ethics of listening for precisely, for the problem of being a master. That perhaps when we call on others to listen to us, we don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we’re putting them into that powerful position [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] and we have to think about that.\n \n\n52:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tSo Clint, I’d like to ask you about modalities or methods of listening then in terms of recognizing that the listener assumes a master position, even while purporting to conduct a kind of ethics of listening. So how can that position of mastery be subject to disruption or to intervention? Is – are there ways that one might imagine listening or not listening, or not assuming that position of mastery that you might imagine?\n \n\n53:06\tClint Burnham:\tThat’s the hard part. I was saying to Deanna earlier, I hadn’t got to the the conclusion. I hadn’t got to the, “what do we do now?” part of the evening. And I think it’s in part what I’m calling for. First of all – what I’m saying and what I’m asking, but also what I’m saying is that we have to think about that power position itself. And being aware of it – of that problem is the first thing. And being aware that when I’m listening to somebody tell me of – give this testimony or talking about their trauma. Let’s just say, let’s just put it in that kind of way, right. That I can’t make the mistake of thinking, or I should be really critical of thinking that this makes me a better person because I’m the one who’s listening. And in a certain kind of way, the problem with the ethics of listening is that it depends on the speaker having this trauma to bring to me. You know, I can only be a good listener if you’re going to tell me about the horrible day you had you know, at the level of an analyst or, you know, about your sin, if I’m a priest or about your crime, if I’m a judge. I can only do those – all those positions depend on that person, bringing that trash to them, bringing those horrible things to them. So my beautiful soul, as Hegel put it, as a listener, depends on the trash in the other person’s soul. And so it’s a very disavowed relation, I think, it’s something that –or a repressed relation perhaps to put it more strongly, that the listener has with what is being brought to them. That what is being brought to them, makes them into a good person. [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]And just to flip it around as well, when we are saying, “listen to me”, we are elevating that person into a position of power, and do we want to do that? [End Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n55:19\tDeanna Fong:\tLike the great variety of sounds that move us in our practices as makers and researchers, so too, are there many modalities of listening each with their own ethical demands. Sometimes listening demands an embodied response where we offer our voices as gifts freely given to a community-based and reciprocal trust. Other times, listening is about generating space. For thoughts, for reflections, for emotions, as they play out in the improvised performance between an interviewer and an interviewee. Sometimes voices ask us to listen otherwise, without the impulse to place demands upon that which we are hearing or to extract what we want to hear toward our own ends. And sometimes, listening asks that we turn the acoustic mirror back on ourselves as listeners to examine our own implications in a social and political forces that structure our listening.\n \n\n56:10\tMike O’Driscoll:\tFor us, the creation of this podcast has been an extended exercise in listening. One that in many ways has placed our own definition of ethics in tension with demands of the podcast genre. That is, what you have heard today represents only a small portion of the conversations we’ve had with friends, colleagues, and interviewees recorded and unrecorded, that themselves comprise a larger scope of listening activities around this final product.\n \n\n56:44\tDeanna Fong:\tIn the spirit of imagining an ethics of listening that is multiple, nuanced, and context-specific, we invite you to listen to the full recordings of these interviews, which have been made available for streaming on the Archive of the Present, ArchiveOfThePresent.SpokenWeb.ca. We also invite questions, comments, and further dialogue by email to Deanna.Fong@Mail.Concordia.ca and MO@ualberta.ca.\n \n\n57:11\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThank you for listening.\n \n\n57:19\tMusic:\tTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n57:28\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Deanna Fong of Concordia University, and Michael O’Driscoll from the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland, and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. Thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L Cohen for their generous contributions to this episode. Special thanks also to Deanna Reader and Alex Shield of the People and the Text project, and to Hartmut Lutz and Maria Campbell for giving their permission to share the audio from their interview here on the show. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there, and we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals]\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9288","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E8, Talking about Talking, 3 May 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-about-talking/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3ce8b0fe-6175-403e-8a62-87afba9aed34/audio/8aae097f-18b7-4b66-8223-57c76570c48e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-s2ep8-talking-about-talking.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:57:00\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,780,700 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-s2ep8-talking-about-talking\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-about-talking/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-05-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music used in episode:\\n\\nOriginal SpokenWeb Theme by Jason Camlot\\n\\nNight Watch by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/34642\\n\\nLinks to sounds and artists mentioned in this episode:\\n\\nLillian Allen: https://lillianallen.ca/\\n\\nOctavia Butler, Kindred: https://www.octaviabutler.com/kindred\\n\\nMichelle Pearson Clark, Suck Teeth Composition (After Rashad Newsome): https://www.michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions/\\n\\nNikita Gale, Hot World: https://www.nikitagale.com/hot-world\\n\\nAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals: https://www.alexispauline.com/\\n\\nJessica Karuhanga, through a brass channel: https://www.jessicakaruhanga.net/through-a-brass-channel\\n\\n“Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pm80etkAzE\\n\\nShani Mootoo fonds, https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/manuscripts\\n\\nSoledad Munoz: https://soledadmunoz.com/\\n\\nRashad Newsome, Shade Composition: https://rashaadnewsome.com/performance/shade-compositions-pittsburgh/\\n\\nJeneen Frei Njootli: https://www.jeneenfreinjootli.com/\\n\\nRucyl, Sound Prism: https://rucyl.com/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549504393216,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga talk about the sounds and sound-based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. For her residency, jamilah is building an online archive highlighting Black women sound artists across Canada to provide inspiration and representation for future sound art from Black femmes across Turtle Island. Jessica is creating “a sanctified Black space in the form of a website that celebrates aural, visual and somatic witnessing” through shared audio recordings of personal stories.\n\njamilah and Jessica sit down – over Zoom – with producer Katherine McLeod to share two pieces of audio from past works that set the groundwork conceptually and methodologically for their current projects. As the producer of the series ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. When talking with jamilah, they start by listening to the audio composition “Listen to Black Womxn” and, when talking with Jessica, they start by listening to the audio composition, “ALL OF ME.” In between these conversations, Katherine talks with SpokenWeb RA, poet, and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections with their projects in mind. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run throughout these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or, as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking.”\n\n\n00:08\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voices]\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\t[Music Continues: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. An archive is a space of collective memory, a place where materials deemed to have historical or social significance are stored and ordered. But who controls what is collected – what gets remembered? Archives are inherently political. And we can rethink the archive as a space for celebrating marginalized voices, for contending with historical exclusion violence, and under-representation through addressing the politics of the archive, what futures might we imagine? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, artists and SpokenWeb fellows jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence award.\n01:44\tHannah McGregor:\tWe also hear from SpokenWeb RA poet and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run through these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking”. As the producer of the ShortCut series on the SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. Here are jamilah malika, Jessica Karuhanga, Faith Paré, and Katherine McLeod [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] with “Talking about Talking”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n02:46\tjamilah malika:\t[Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot] I’m reading Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. And she has this quote here – chapter one is called “Listen”, and she says, “listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in.”\n03:08\t Katherine McLeod:\tThat was jamilah malika. jamilah holds the position of Artist in Residence with SpokenWeb this year.\n03:15\tjamilah malika:\tHey everyone, I’m jamilah malika and I’m so happy to chat with you today, Katherine, about sound and my upcoming project with SpokenWeb. [End Music] I am a sound artist. I also work with tech stuff – page, but also thinking about video and installation. Mostly my practice is thinking about Black women and care. So whatever I make, no matter what it looks like, or what it reads like, or sounds like, Black women are always at the center.  [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n03:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tFor this episode of the SpokenWed Podcast, I sat down over Zoom with the two recipients of this residency, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga. In these conversations, we’ll start with an audio piece and we’ll learn how the piece began, the voices that inform it and how it’s influenced the current residency projects.\n04:11\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview\tWhy don’t we jump right into talking about the audio that you sent over and use that as our ground –\n04:17\tAudio Recording,  jamilah malika, Zoom interview.\tOkay! Cool.\n04:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe way that I approached these conversations was like sitting down to talk and listen together like we do on shortcuts. Yes, I’m Katherine MacLeod and you may recognize my voice from ShortCuts, a monthly feature on the spoken web podcast feed on shortcuts. I play a shortcut from spoken web audio collections as a starting point for reflecting upon what it means to listen to archival sound for my interviews with jamilah and Jessica, I thought I’d try using the ShortCuts approach in which an audio clip would be the starting point for our conversations. Listening to this piece was how jamilah and I started our conversation and that’s what we will listen to now. This is “Listen to Black Womxn” by jamilah malika.\n05:51\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\t[Layered background sounds] This is / As a Black woman / which is / Black, Blackness/ calling myself / constantly being called out for/ my people/ my people/ I even subjugated myself and tried to hide / thinking about/ as a Black woman/ it’s expected/ it’s expected/ it’s expected/ my people/ my white boyfriend/ I said “hi, thank you!”/ [inaudible] talking in a way that makes white people comfortable has become a second skin/ I worked for 24 years in a telecommunications company without using my Trinidad dialect /super comfortable/ super comfortable/ dialect/ [Repeated breaths] Yeah/ Um, um /Yeah, um/ I’ve been moving and loving / My spirit in a way, I feel it/ As a Black woman/ in my spirit I can feel it /moving, trusting/ [Repeated breaths]/ in spirit I can feel it/ navigating /it’s so powerful /yeah / power/ like I said/ brown girl that was Black/ authority/like I said/ in relation to others/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ finding space for yourself/ finding space for yourself/ less small /with and in my body in totality/ [Repeated breaths] Um, ah, um, and, um, um, uh, / Yes, what do you feel it is in order to get your needs met?/ Which seems like a lot, but all of those things are happening/ Ugh! I don’t know [Laughs]\n10:31\tjamilah malika:\tYeah, “Listen to Black Womxn” is such a community – and lonely – it was such a weird evolution of a project. I was out in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute having a really hard time. And I was in this cool class – it was called psychoacoustics and it was led by this great artist named Kamala Patterson. And he had asked us to think really broadly about a sound project, and thinking about how sound occupies space. And I started thinking a lot about code switching and how in the space of the school, I was doing something with my voice in certain exchanges, notably with white women, where I was trying to mimic pitch and tone and like register as a way to navigate a lot of this terrible tension around being a Black girl who was making a lot of trouble.\n11:38\tjamilah malika:\tSo in my first month and a half at that school, I was in about five meetings with admin about things that we talked about in Canada, like cultural competency and decolonizing your curriculum, and what’s going on with your cannon, and how can you transform that and make it more accessible for different kinds of people. I was trying to figure out how to be a part of shifting that, and hearing myself bend and contort vocally. And so I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to do a project where I record myself doing these shifts.” And I just, I felt so lonely [Laughs]. I was just really intensely lonely. And I just put a call out to my friends, like “can you send me audio of yourselves just talking about what it’s like to talk as Black women?” Just talking about talking –\n12:37\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\n \n\nLess small/ how I’m actually always in my body / in totality/ in relation to my body/ in relation to/ trusting [Breathing]\n12:48\tjamilah malika:\t[Audio Recording of “Listen to Black Womxn” continues and fades] I made it for the class and then I took it to a sound symposium at school, and I felt really weird.\n13:54\tjamilah malika:\tAnd other times I’ve had it playing in conjunction with a video work. Other times through headphones, and I ask people to look in a mirror and watch themselves listen. And then there’s a notebook where I ask them to leave me a reflection. What does it feel like to listen to Black women? And the idea of: pay attention. So once it was at Prefixed Gallery and they have an audio art gallery, so that’s like this just very nice enclosed space. And a curator who saw it there reached out to me and asked me if I would design an enclosure. So now, I got to think about what’s the interiority of that sound as an experience of what I could wheat paste in terms of a collage, or what the smells might be in that space or what the lighting would be like that space. So it’s really been this exciting evolution at work.\n14:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s fantastic to hear about all the different iterations of it –\n15:00\tjamilah malika:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n15:00\tKatherine McLeod:\t– and there’s so many things from what you just – because the piece is about the speaker and the speaker’s voice, but really – especially as I made a note of the word relation that starts to emerge through. And so thinking that even in the presentation of it, if there’s a sense that there’s a connection between the sound and the listener and that you could be part of developing a sound booth to design that experience, or really to be thinking about “how is this sound reaching the listener, and what is that experience like?” And so then the piece becomes about that listening experience too, which is really, really fascinating.\n15:36\tjamilah malika:\tI’m always really curious – what is it like to listen to Black women? When’s the last time? – so some of the prompts in the notebook were like, “when’s the last time you listened to Black women?” And what are those circumstances? And I think one of the showings was around the moment of Trump’s election and there was so much social commentary around –we should have listened to Black women and this idea of the Black women in your office or the Black women in your private personal spaces – how do you listen? When do you listen? Do you listen? I’m really interested in that as a bigger question.\n16:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tCircling back to that very first – the very first sound that we hear in the piece. Could you speak about that?\n16:25\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. Like the non-verbal. And I think there – in the first iterations I made, they were very legible and I think – somewhere conversations with friends, with advisors, what is a move more towards like fugitivity, and mystery and not explaining everything? And so a lot of those [makes sounds] – those sounds, they do a lot more. They do the thing they’re talking about – and how we can’t explain everything, but it can be something the body does – just a letting go of something or a sucking in of something and how that just comes out really organically.\n17:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd even the sound of it – I felt like it caught attention. You almost do take a breath yourself or just kind of really pause – the breath is so integral, but also it really says it says everything. So it’s –.\n17:39\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. You know, and there’s ways – I’m Nigerian and Trinidadian and in both of those cultures, we suck teeth and Michèle Pearson Clark has this beautiful sound work that’s also a visual, it’s an audiovisual work that’s just acquired by the National Gallery. It’s exciting when sound work is becoming a part of that echelon of art to me, because that work, you know, it’s “Suck Teeth Composition”. And it’s really just about that sound and everybody making that sound and how that sound relates to grief and to emotion and to all kinds of responsiveness and and it has meaning. And Michèle names that work “Suck Teeth Composition” after Rashaad Newsome. And he’s an African-American sound artist and that – his work is called “The Shade Composition” and it’s all these Black women making all these nonverbal sounds. And I learned about it only after making “Listen to Black Womxn”. I was like, “Wow!” It’s this really beautiful performance where he has all these Black women on stage.\n19:00\tjamilah malika:\tAnd it’s really orchestral and like a symphony of these nonverbal sounds. It’s really– it’s very special about these – [Laughs] like I just did it. These sounds that are just a part of knowing Black women. If you’re –in knowing this kind of little responses. But it’s very personal, it’s very intimate.\n19:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. And it also – thinking too about something becoming something that is so personal and intimate becoming, say a composition or becoming compositional. And I did think of the way that the voices – like I wrote down the word polyphonic at one point of thinking about what it creates. And it really – it’s this overwhelming sort of polyphony of voices, but they’re, and they, they become very musical. It felt like a very polyphonic experience in listening to it –.\n19:57\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. There’s definitely rhythm. And I think there are places when I really played that up. And it just –it felt good.\n20:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, exactly. Exactly. And it feels good to listen to as well.\n20:11\tjamilah malika:\tYeah! That’s great to hear.\n20:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd I love the idea too of it being sort of – coming out of also thinking about talking about talking too –\n20:20\tjamilah malika:\tYeah.\n20:20\tKatherine McLeod:\t– because that’s something that – just thinking of it’s a way too, to think of how we connect as bodies together too. So…\n20:32\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\t[Words with echoes and layered sounds] Just as I am/ As a Black woman/ Power in her voice/ That’s her bass/ that’s her bass / that’s her bass / that’s her bass\n20:40\tjamilah malika:\tWhen it comes to the SpokenWeb project, this is really an opportunity to build an archive that shows that Black Indigenous and People of Colour artists who make sound works, who are women, femmes, gender nonconforming, are really contributing to what sound art looks like, and it doesn’t have to be verbal. So Nikita Gale is a sound artist who I really love who makes works that – there’s an installation she has where it’s water rolling off of drum kits. And there’s an artist named Ruth Seal, some Black woman who makes a solar informed sound work. Right. So has these panels and they are connected to different notes and they sat out in this field and they just produced sound. Right? There’s just so much sound art that is really about found sound, about evoking sound, and also all the way into the spectrum of recordings that include voice, and how do Canadian Black artists show up in this work?\n22:17\tjamilah malika:\tAnd in my work, I know who I’m in conversation with. I don’t know who else knows. So the project is really about giving –and I hate to use the word visibility because it’s not about visualuality right? Because it’s giving an audibility to these sound artists who I’m really certain that when it comes to people who face the burden of representation and just the way the art as the market drives certain trends in reproducing Black pain and trauma. And I think what sound does is it undoes what visualuality does. And I think it does what visualuality cannot. It makes the listener almost interrogate themselves in a different way than looking. When I think about art and its limitations or its libertory capacity, I really think that sound art is this really exciting opportunity to free yourself of visualuality and to give whole new possibilities in terms of relating to the audience.\n23:42\tjamilah malika:\tI hope the website as an archive serves to highlight these Canadian contributions. I think there might be some works like across Turtle Island, but largely Canadian contributions to sound art – and in my greatest hopes will inspire a lot of young people who are Black Indigenous and of colour to try their hand at some sound art. There’s some great stuff in the archives like Lillian Allen, so sound poems, and Faith Paré as being really super helpful, helping me navigate the archives. So I think if I had to kind of go into the SpokenWeb archive and dig around myself, I would probably be having a way harder time. So it’s really helpful that Faith, as someone who’s at SpokenWeb is really collaborating with me and I owe her a great deal for helping me figure out –she’s like, “okay, kind of what are you, who are you looking for?”\n24:51\tjamilah malika:\tAnd I’m like, “Okay, these people, these people, these people.” And she’s like, “Got it”. And so there’s some great recordings of Shani Mootoo that she’s found. And so it’s – Shani is a writer and a novelist and also a painter it’s this quite large range, so Shani talking is going to be included. And I think it does – this idea of drawing a circle is kind of where I’m at in this moment of like, what is in, what is out, how do I make something that feels not comprehensive, but as generative as possible so that people are like, “Oh, there’s all kinds of possibilities”. And yeah, I think kind of hard definitions isn’t really what I’m going for, but more so this feeling of range. [Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]\n25:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with jamilah, I was interested in the kinds of resources in the SpokenWeb audio collections that she might be tapping into. And what could these recordings tell us about the sound of Black women’s voices in the archives? She mentioned SpokenWeb RA Faith Paré and I asked Faith about what she had found so far and also about the process. [End Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]\n26:17\tFaith Paré:\tYeah. I think what was really interesting and starting off with Cumulus project reading through it for the first time after she was selected by the jurors and starting to get acquainted with it and our first Zoom meetings, was how much I felt immediately that her project, as well as Jessica’s, was going to impact my own research as a Black woman poet with a huge research interest in Black cultural production in Canada. I’m really invested in taking a look at Black created artifacts and my own experience at SpokenWeb for the last year or so – almost a year – has been digging through and seeing what is also in the archives that is waiting to be discovered or waiting to be animated in a particular way. Last summer, I had worked with the Words and Music shows metadata and community collection which contains a lot of spoken word.\n27:16\tFaith Paré:\tThat’s a tradition that’s full of Black innovators, and it’s a tradition that I’ve come out of and I’m very familiar with. From the get-go I revisited this collection because I’d grown to know it so closely and known grown to know the curation and the collaborators on that project. I started off by essentially listening to pieces that I had already listened to a few times – sets by Lillian Allen, for example, or Takita Tanya Evanson. And then from there, it was a matter of consulting Swallow, which has SpokenWeb’s open source metadata ingestion system, as many will know, and using keywords around Black poetry and poetics in an attempt to find recordings from other institutions. Because we have lots of community collections, there were also really exciting pieces by young Black spoken word artists, who may be recording technically for the first time, as well as there were more formal readings coming out of SFU, for example, of Esi Edugyan and Juliane Okot Bitek And there was also some materials too that probably will make it into the final, just because of the particular interests that jamilah has run her project, which is really about honouring the sonic artistry of Black artists. But there were some interviews as well with Gwendolyn Brooks and the Amiri Baraka, and some more materials of Amiri Baraka’s that I wouldn’t have expected to find not only in SpokenWeb’s archives, but just to Canadian archives, per se, as well.\n28:50\tKatherine McLeod::\tIn terms of recordings that really sort of caught your attention, what would they be?\n28:55\tFaith Paré:\tWell, I’m a huge, huge, huge Lillian Allen fan. And particularly when we think about Lillian’s career and her huge influence in dub poetry, not only in Canada but in the Caribbean and around the world, that dub poetry is the perfect example of a form that integrates a literary form, and what’s going on in a studio, and also the oral performance tradition and also rejects all of those labels at once.\n29:38\tAudio Recording, “Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen\t[Caribbean Beat] Riddim and hardtimes [Singing] [Speaking] [Repeated]\n29:38\tFaith Paré:\tTo hear some of her work again in the archives was very exciting. And because I also have a huge interest in what a Black aesthetic is and what tradition of Black criticism around poetics is finding some of those Amiri Baraka interviews was very, very exciting too. And I’m very excited to revisit them. And we also –me and jamilah had another gushing moment when we got sent some Shani Mootoo  recordings and Shani Mootoo  is an Indo-Caribbean, particularly Indo-Trinidadian writer. She’s not Black, but because jamilah is Trinidadian and has a relationship and all of Shani’’s work, we had this, “Oh, wow!” moment of, I can’t believe this is like sitting in an institution. We haven’t been able to listen to it! So, it’s one of those things where I think when you’re researching, everything is never going to make it into the final cut, but still finding those recordings and knowing that they can enrich your own listening experience, or also you can pass them along to someone else who might benefit from it.\n30:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt makes me think too, that it really – in finding these recordings, it’s also changing the sound of SpokenWeb as a project and sort of it not only changes the sound of what one thinks of in terms of the sound of it [Music Begins: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions], but also the what kind of sound-based research can be done through its archival collections.\n31:13\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI really think storytelling is about self articulating. It’s also about witnessing. It’s also about every assertion or an affirmation of presence that I am here. [Music Ends: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I am Jessica Karuhanga – I also go by Kichoncho. I am a multi-disciplinary artist.\n31:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tI spoke with Jessica on Zoom. We started with an audio clip of where it all began. It is a piece called “ALL OF ME”. You can find a link to the entire piece in the show notes for this episode. We started our conversation by listening together to the opening section.\n32:05\tAudio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by  Jessica Karuhanga:\t[Electronic Orchestra Chords – interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing] Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed. Big. And never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. [Choral Singing] Because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life. [Choral Singing] [Drumming and singing begins, underlaid] I don’t want to think about the past so, like, I don’t really, like, I don’t really like to think about nostalgia because it just makes it sad because we don’t really have a family anymore. I don’t know sometimes like, cause like, just when you think about happy memories with your family, but, and you remember when your family was happy, your family is just so not even existed anymore. So thinking about those happy times, or we had like a childhood and, and we would get in the van and go camping every weekend. And our, like our summers used to be us as a family, swimming in the pool and how happy we were and I guess sometimes you gotta think about that stuff because you remember when you were just like purely happy and just didn’t have to stress out about, about the dynamic that your family was in, because you thought – felt safe and you felt secure. So I feel like I feel nostalgia. I feel nostalgic for the feeling of when I was a child and I felt secure and safe and happy, and I didn’t have any care in the world. I’m really – I was nostalgic about not necessarily even nostalgia – I just yearn for that feeling. And I wish I knew at that time that I should enjoy that feeling because I have – because of all the stuff that was going to happen. And like, I guess it makes you look forward to when I have children of my own, I want them to have those memories and then never let those memories get ruined, like the way that those memories have kind of been ruined for me. Yeah. Is that good? Sure. [Vocalizing music]. [Piano chords] There is no time in the past that I want to return to in my life because I have trouble relating to who I was in the past. I can never quite return to that headspace. I experience regret and time travel for me would be an opportunity to correct those mistakes, rather than stay within the same history as it played itself out.\n35:35\tJessica Karuhanga:\t“ALL OF ME” is the name of the piece. It’s an assemblage of voices, Black women, femmes, nonbinary, gender non-conforming folk, and I basically ask people who are close to me – so there’s that innate trust there, which felt very pertinent – to just address how they were feeling. The original voice that we listened to, the initial voice is an acceptance speech that Viola Davis made for an Emmy or a Golden Globe. I remember being really blown away by this because she was articulating something for me that transcended – kind of affirmed or reminded me that there’s a lot that you’re still injuring in doing the work or the work that she may be doing, a person that I do not know, but I felt there was analogies I could draw to my experience. So I was very moved to that notion of exhuming and withstanding these kinds of thresholds. So yeah, that just felt like the initial impulse.\n36:42\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd then I was – from that I wanted to just hear from people that I know intimately to speak to these kinds of alterities, these self-forming self articulations – the imagination, like how we imagine ourselves. So, I find that in moments of despair, there are two-fold responses: one that is kind of this nostalgic past tense, looking to the past, romanticizing it. And then it’s like, for what? For whom? Often the greater your proximity to whiteness or able-bodied cis-hetero embodiments, maybe the more likely you are to have this kind of nostalgia, or it’s about these alterities, they’re trying to imagine, a kind of Afro-future, or maybe it’s just an entirely different dimension. And there is one of the speakers who speaks to – later on to dimensionality and time travel and all these beautiful, strange things. So, it’s in a constellation with Octavia Butler’s thinking and is – actually, the project was heavily inspired by texts of her as like Kindred and Black science fiction as well. So that’s –it’s really through the voice I feel like there’s something there that maybe is tied to storytelling, mythmaking, and like oral rituals.\n38:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. I’m thinking the opening line of like, “they ask me all the time, what stories do you want to tell?”\n38:17\tJessica Karuhanga:\tYeah. I really wanted to take you kind of on a journey –a journey like where you begin being hyper aware and attentive to every word that’s being said, but that the music can be a kind of compliment or buttress or support to that voice. So, I listened over and over and over again to the recordings I recorded on voice memos, on recorders that I have – so they’re a mix of low and very high fi, depending on if I can meet in person for person or if we are geographically dislocated. But I basically listened – spent time with these recordings after getting their consent and okay to use the material, and just spot about what sounds could compliment it. Already in having these voices, it speaks to a history of assemblage and sampling, and these kind of markers of hip hop, R&B, pop music, all music at this point involves a lot of sampling and remixing.\n39:24\tJessica Karuhanga:\tThere’s all these different stylistic things that happened that were really just me kind of reflecting back –back and forth between us. So I really wanted to reinforce that kind of call and response. So I asked a question, they responded to it and I– and when they’re comfortable a few seconds into speaking, it becomes kind of free form. You kind of lose yourself in the storytelling. And then the same –then I respond again with the sound. So it’s this kind of call and response in the actual making and coalescing of the project. And also it’s a project that’s about, it’s almost 30 minutes long, the entire piece, so it’s something – I mean the experience, or witnesser always has a choice to stay or go. And also I usually have it playing on a loop on headphones, kind of evoking what might be a listening booth at music stores, just as an experience.\n40:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tTo step outside the conversation for a moment on Jessica Karuhanga’s website, there’s some documentation from a piece called through a brass channel from 2017. I wanted to ask her about a woman moving while listening to headphones. I asked her if she was listening to “ALL OF ME”.\n40:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t– the visual of the listening… so I had to ask you that.\n40:43\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAbsolutely. And what are you privy to? So, you’re close. Yep. Yes and no. So, in that installation, it’s – I call it like a multi-vaillant, multi-channel installation. So I had about six different works that were either sculptures, video installations, and whatnot. So, in that documentation of the performance and exhibition making, you are really saying, seeing exhibition making happening in real time and temporality, which is also like an element of music making it space making, but it’s like oral, you know? And so that person, they’re listening on headphones to the sound of a video that’s looping, but you’re not privy to the screen. And that was also a structure – a structural or a devisive choice I made – that when you entered the space, through the doorways, that the back of the screen would be towards you.\n41:50\tJessica Karuhanga:\tSo you as a spectator have to acknowledge that being a viewer, observer is a verb, is an action, that you are complicit in the space making. So someone else can go to the listening booth, listen to “ALL OF ME”on their headphones and then be watching what it is you’re looking at. So that’s why I was saying yes and no. It’s both, the two co-exist – is because someone actually had that experience where they were – they’re explaining to me that they had the headphones on and they were listening to “ALL OF ME”. And then they saw the performer in the corner, swaying back and forth with their headphones on kind of in their own world and felt like there was a moment of synchronicity, a moment that they shared that was temporal that no one else could embody and experience. So I really was wanting to cultivate that.\n42:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter hearing that response, I knew that I had to ask Jessica one more question about through a brass channel. I saw that the performance had featured a guest M. NourbeSe Philip, and I had to ask her about what that performance was like.\n43:01\tJessica Karuhanga:\tthrough a brass channel was the installation, and “ALL OF ME” was one of the art-i-facts in that constellation of words. So there – there is that another project was called Kiss the Sky, another object, and they all had different names. The video that the person’s witnessing with the headphones on is called Moon and the 12th House. And there were four constant performers that are circulating the space. And I just basically told them come and go, as you please. And the roommate, the initial kind of precursors or determinants were, “I want you to come to the space with an object or a gesture. That’s something that only we share.” So someone brought in an urn, someone else brought in turmeric, someone brought in salt, someone brought in cloths. And at first you were using them the way that the general public might think to use them. Like salt, I’m pouring it out, picking it up.\n43:56\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI’m like –a scarf. I’m folding it, unfolding it. But over time, it went from not just using these objects to like the wall becomes material. The headphones that have a utilitarian function for visitors becomes an art material as well. So that’s where those boundaries started to blur. It’s like giving that – in the spirit of liberatory politics, giving that freedom to the people I invited in to activate the thing. And then with NourbeSe Philip we met through a childhood friend of mine who has worked with her for years. So through this connection of a mutual close person in our lives, we kind of built this friendship, or this like – from my side, it’s deep affinity and respect and reverence. And also from someone who’s very kind and generous and you feel like they’re approachable.\n45:01\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd so just based out of that kind of respect or affinity– I shot my shot, so to speak and asked if she would be willing to be a guest in my piece. And I think she found it really interesting because I don’t think she considers herself a performance artist, even though she does these – every year, this kind of elergy. And to be clear, I think the enactment raison is not at all a performance. It is like a reading. It is a response. It is elergic. So it isn’t – it isn’t an enactment that happens annually or sometimes multiple times a year. It’s different from performance art capital. But even with my performance art, I’m not – precisely because I am a Black queer person, it’s very different for me because of the gaze that I’m there, that we have to deal with but have no power over. It also doesn’t feel like performance art for me.\n46:00\tJessica Karuhanga:\tIt’s not – I’m not ever playing a character. It’s never play time for me. In fact, it’s exhausting. And that is why I told the performers, show up however you are, if you need to take a break, if it’s only for 15 minutes today, if it’s for four hours, what is it that you can do? So in asking Nourbese I –yeah, we didn’t, I just invited her. We’d decided on a date. We opened it to the public for people who wanted to witness. So we had seating there. And we kind of just improvised and intuited what we did. So she brought in leafs from [inaudible] – photocopied leafs and some libations and other ritual objects, because that was also –it was already happening in this space. And we just did this call and response.\n46:52\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI couldn’t tell you if it lasted an hour or two hours, there’s no documentation of it at all. Maybe some poor quality cell phone photos that were very discreetly taken so as not to disrupt the energy exchange that was happening. And the few people that shared with me, their experiences of watching us said, they thought we rehearsed it. Like there are moments of profound synchronicity or just sharing. Like there was a moment where she was making these sorts of sounds or gestures, and I kind of received it, but my eyes were closed. Just these beautiful moments that happen over and over and over again. And I think it involves trust and risk and an openness to allow for something like that to happen, to not want to control the thing, to understand that it isn’t, that it is art, but it also transcends art.\n47:45\tAudio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by Jessica Karuhanga:\t[Electronic Orchestra Chords – interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing].\n47:56\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI guess I’ll start with how my relationship to SpokenWeb took shape or came into vision. The feel of the vision. There was an open call and I responded. And then was at a moment where, we are reeling around more unmoored from not simply the deaths of George Floyd and others – just the kind of response to that. Like suddenly, because we are all forced to be silent and home and obedient kind of proletariats to care – suddenly people were like, “Oh, I have proof I’m witnessing anti-Blackness differently”. And so there’s this retraumatization that was also going on. So I had a lot of feelings thatI was going through, a lot of grief, a lot of rage, a lot of this. So that there’s that bit and then all the opportunities predicated – are riffing off of people’s guilt. Do the Instagram takeovers, to do, to make art, not even people naming that it’s directly a result of this, but we know that it is no coincidence you have all these positions popping up in institutions of Black people doing Black things and the IG takeovers, whatever it is, like all of these positions being formed in the wake. There that’s the second bit. The third bit is in my way of dealing that was plugging out and ignoring that thing. And in resistance to the pervasive circulation of images, violent images being like, I want to return to this other space. I want to be with the music I’m doing. I want to – I want to feed my senses, nourish my senses, and I want to start to heal. So I actually was remembering this piece in that project and as a whole and how nourishing it was for a different point in my life where I was also dealing with a lot of grief and illness.\n49:54\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd some friends of mine had brought up the project. So I was like, okay, there seems to be this need for this. I found myself sharing a lot of voice notes with close friends. And I was like, Oh, there’s something here with the voice note, even musically, how something like an interlude functions as this kind of interstitial thing. So I kind of put all those things together and vomited up a proposal very last minute, kind of undulating –should I, shouldn’t I? And then I was like, no, I’m gonna, this feels important. I’m going to just do this. It’d be nice to have support and resources to help make this happen because I’m one person and I don’t know how much I could actually facilitate different people being vulnerable. You know, I’m not a therapist. I don’t have a practice like that and all of these things. So that’s kind of what happened.\n50:43\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI responded to this open call. I got selected. And now what – how that has to do “ALL OF ME” is “ALL OF ME”  was started within my own circle. These are people that I cared deeply about. These are close friends. But I wanted to bring it expanded outward to people who are not my family, but are kin, are fam. So I was like, Oh, maybe it has to be an open call. I want to facilitate something that is bigger than me, larger than me. That can become a self-sustaining thing. So that’s how I arrived at my current project, which is basically a digital artwork, website repository for people to unleash their stories.\n51:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ve covered a lot. But I was wanting to ask you about whether you see this as an archive…?\n51:31\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI think it is. I think– I have this project that is also involved sound and performance called a #carefree. And with that, I made a video collage out of all the images and videos and Vines – when Vine was still a thing – and Twitter. With that is all archived cause hashtags are a form of archiving or classification we can say, classified through carefree Black girls. And I was like, Oh, it’s interesting –or carefree Black boy– and I was like, Oh, what if all of these things – I assembled all of these things into this visual assemblage and I responded to them. So again, that call and response thing is there. What if it’s cues for choreography? So I think of it in a similar way because these people are still living people, they’re present. They were in the moment and present when they made these videos. It’s all about self defining. Like I am deciding the terms of how I reveal and conceal and what I share, what I don’t share.\n52:38\tJessica Karuhanga:\tThat’s where the social media bit is distinct, but interesting. So I do see this as in proximity to that or in a constellation of that. So it is an archive, but I just don’t feel like oftentimes when we speak about archive particularly in relation to Indigenous subjectivities, I mean that globally. So let’s get even more specific about African peoples. There’s primitivism, it’s always about this past and this thing of like, rareify our subjectivities to the past as objects, so a larger thing, like these museological conversations, cabinet of curiosities, these kind of colonial capturing of artifacts and living beings, whether they be plant life or humans that are captured. So yeah, archive is loaded. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] Artifact is loaded, but I don’t know what other words to use. It is situated in not saying, but in a space of reclamation or something\n53:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tAt one point, Jessica refers to the recordings as “cues for choreography”, a phrase that not only suggests that the recordings invite a response, a doing, a making, but also that this doing and making might happen in another medium or art form altogether. I think back to speaking with jamilah and how throughout our conversation, she was sitting beneath a vivid painting, and only when our conversation veered into the archives towards the end and about the writers whose voices are recorded there, she mentioned Shani Mootoo  and that the painting behind her was in fact, a Shani Mootoo painting. [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I tell that story here, because it feels as though it brings it all together, the painting, the recording, the speaking body in front of the painting, the listening, the conversation.\n54:32\tjamilah malika:\tShani is a writer, and a novelist and also a painter. I’m actually sitting under one of her paintings.\n54:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tI wanted to ask you but I was like, Oh, maybe I’ll wait til the end [Laughs].\n54:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tThey were all invitations or responses to “cues for choreography”. And thinking back to that, painting reminds one that talking about sound art is not only talking about sound. Talking about talking is not only about talking. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]What kinds of cues for choreography do the sounds of this podcast activate? In which practices of everyday life might this activation bring a kind of freedom? What might you make in response?  [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]\n \n\n55:21\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n55:36\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb team member Katherine McLeod of Concordia University. Thank you to Jessica Karuhanga, jamilah malika, and Faith Paré for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. And our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Dr. Kristin Moria of Queens University and to Tawhida Tanya Evanson of Mother Tongue Media for their role in adjudicating the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWord Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. 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It used the recently published volume, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry), as an opportunity to think about and discuss the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study – a subject central to the mission of the SpokenWeb Podcast. \n\nIn this episode of the podcast, Jason draws upon the recording of this event to revisit key moments: a presentation by Dario Llinares about the main theses of the book and his reflections on how the landscape of research around podcasting is rapidly developing; brief position papers from respondents Stacey Copeland (SFU), Elena Razlogova (Concordia U), Kim Fox (American University in Cairo), Michael O’Driscoll (U Alberta) and Deanna Fong (Concordia U); and questions and participation from event attendees. You can watch the full event as a Zoom recording on the SpokenWeb Project’s Archive of the Present: https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study-20-april-2021/\n\nHere’s a note from Jason about making the episode and using the Korg Monotron to score it:\n\nIn editing and producing this episode, my goal was to capture the feeling and flow of the original panel presentations and discussion, while speeding up the pace a bit, and creating new thematic sections and transitions, where necessary. To mark transitions between thematic sections I decided to compose some sounds using a lo fi instrument, the Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.  This little device has just a few knobs, switches, and touch ribbon keyboard, but can generate a vast range of sounds.  It is simple, DIY and accessible (anyone can play it), yet it also suggests endless possibilities of sound, pacing, tone and mood; just like podcasting!  It was also just there, sitting on my desk, ready at hand. For these reasons, I felt the Monotron was an appropriate instrument to use for scoring this collaborative discussion about podcasting as a critical medium.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\t Hannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: Intro Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As you, our listeners, may well know at this point, we’re a podcast created by and grounded in the scholarly research of the SpokenWeb project community. It’s natural, then that we’re interested in how podcasting is generally being taken up as a tool, talked about, and studied in academic spaces. It may seem surprising that this is happening, that podcasting is being studied as a form of scholarly production, as an important new mode of knowledge making and sharing. An episode of your favorite podcast feels and sounds so different from the written journal articles and conference papers traditionally used to share academic knowledge. What does it mean when podcasters engage with, infiltrate, maybe mess with and transform the way the production and dissemination of knowledge happens in the academic sphere and what critical work is currently being done to understand the impact that podcasting is having on specialized fields of research, scholarship and teaching?\n01:49\tHannah McGregor:\tJason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb project and he’s helped us think through pieces of this question in past episodes of the podcast. In our episodes, ‘Ideas have feelings, too: Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in Podcasting’ and ‘Cylinder Talks: Podcasting in Literary Sound Studies’, Jason, and his co-producers took us into the university classroom and showed us how students are using podcasting as a tool for critical analysis and communication. Scenes from these episodes demonstrate the emotional and intellectual depth and merit that podcasting has when used as a teaching method and research tool, and raise questions about what podcasting is doing in scholarly contexts. When Dario Llinares invited Stacey and Jason to discuss their cylinder talks episode for his own New Aural Cultures podcast, they got to talking and thinking that it would be fun to organize a panel with a bunch of scholar podcasters to consider the current state of podcasts studies. Is podcasts studies emerging as an actual disciplinary field of study in the way that film studies and radio studies have established themselves in the academy?\n02:57\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does it mean to define podcasting as a distinct field of critical study? Is that something we really want to do? Jason and Stacey went on to organize the panel. They invited Dario to provide some opening remarks based on arguments he first outlined in his co-edited collection, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. Stacey acted as a respondent along with Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, Michael O’Driscoll, and Deanna Fong, each of whom had something unique to say in response to the core question: what is podcasting as a field of critical study? In this new episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Jason has selected and arranged key parts of a conversation that was first heard live on Zoom on April 20th, 2021 in a virtual panel called “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. I, Hannah, hosted the panel and you’ll hear my voice alongside some of my esteemed colleagues who are deeply engaged in thinking about podcasting as a powerful medium of scholarly inquiry. So let’s get on with the episode, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music. ] “Revisiting ‘Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study’”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n04:12\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.] And what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies?\n \n\n04:17\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nHow are shows categorized? How are they discovered across different platforms?\n \n\n04:21\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nA new stage of podcasting, the industrialization of podcasting.\n \n\n04:25\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI want to challenge you to be more open and inclusive.\n \n\n04:29\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech, as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio and Hindenburg.\n \n\n04:36\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nWe felt a clear tension between ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast.\n \n\n04:44\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI hope the audience get in on this. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.]\n \n\n04:51\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHi, everyone. Welcome to “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. My name is Hannah McGregor, and I am going to be moderating the conversation today. For those who don’t know me, I am a professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University, as well as a podcaster as is the case with, I think basically everybody on this panel. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that I’m speaking to you from the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I think in this era of digital events, it’s harder than ever to ground ourselves in the places where we live and work and play, but it’s also more crucial than ever to think about where our knowledge comes from. And that includes recognizing whose territory we’re residing on, for those of us who are living on Turtle Island. So I would like to encourage you to add your own territory acknowledgment in the chat if you would like to do so, or just pop into the chat and say hi to the assembled group and tell us where you’re coming from. We’ve got quite [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] an international gathering here today.[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n06:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOnto the event itself: Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study builds on the recent volume podcasting, New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, to think and engage in discussion about the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study. We are going to begin with some comments from Dario about the book, followed by brief position papers from respondents, Stacey Copeland, Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, and Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. So first up, Dario Llinares is principal lecturer in contemporary screen media at the University of Brighton, and of course co-editor of Podcasting New Aural Cultures and Digital Media and co-producer of the accompanying podcast, New Aural Cultures. Note: this is a SpokenWeb panel that is also co-sponsored by the Media History Research Center at Concordia. So thanks so much from Concordia – to Concordia for helping us to put this together. That is all of the housekeeping stuff, so now I will stop talking and we will hear from Dario up first. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n07:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThanks, Hannah, very much appreciated. And thanks to Jason and Stacey for inviting me and for setting everything up [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and welcome to everybody. Glad you could join us. I was thinking about how to prepare for this event and since taking up podcasting, whenever I’ve given a lecture or a talk in another university or a conference paper, I’ve used only loose notes, usually just bullet points comprised of prompts that point me in the direction of what I want to talk about. This move away from writing a script and reading it out was actually one of the effects of podcasting – one of the effects that it had on my academic practice. So learning how to edit, hearing over and over again, the foibles of how I presented myself orally and how content came out as a result reminded me how much meaning is created and received differently through the speech that articulates thoughts in the moment. Rather than speech that is pre-prepared.\n08:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, on the other hand, if you’re riffing the speaker and listener have to deal with all the hesitations, the repetitions, the mis-speakings, and the possibility that one’s immediate thoughts actually don’t really amount to very much. So, today I’ve prepared a written text, as you can probably tell. And the reason I’ve done this is to try to articulate some of the ideas and questions that influenced the development of the book that I edited with Neil and with Richard: Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media – particularly with regards to what we might mean, what we do, and what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies. The book as a whole was an attempt to draw out and articulate the ways in which we as editors and the authors were making sense of the impact of podcasting practice, to recognize its significance in the cultural landscape because of these practices, and, in turn, an encouragement to think reflectively as to why this significance needs to be examined.\n09:18\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tTo put a name on this, Podcast Studies, was a call to engage with the possible parameters through which critical study could be done. Perhaps the most profound development since the book came out has been the extent to which podcasting, particularly in the United States, is discussed as an industry. The journalistic, popular cultural, and professional production narratives are overtly concerned with monetization, audience expansion, and corporate infrastructure. The focus on this from a critical standpoint is, and should continue to be central to popcast studies. The question of what podcasting is, which probably everyone here is engaged with in some form, is in many ways the foundational question of Podcast Studies, and I’ve tried as many of us have to intellectualize that through research, analysis and self-reflection. But in the end it still does remain somewhat personal and ineffable. Because of this, the introduction to the book does read are speculative. “Are people thinking the same way about this media as we are?” is the question we were implicitly asking ourselves.\n 10:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tIn order to try and schematize what we lay out in the book – I’m thinking about the myriad research I’ve read or listened to in the proceeding few years after the book was published – I offer now three interrelated strands that might help to engage with what Podcast Studies is doing conceptually. These are notionally and intentionally broad in scope. So I ask you for a little of what Malcolm Gladwell calls conditionality in your interpretation of this. These strands are communication, knowledge, and identity. To complicate matters though, I think these three categories can each be broken down in terms of the interrelationship between structure, form, and content. So in terms of communication, we may think of the structures that not only make podcasting feasible, but have manifested what we think of now as an identifiable and discreet medium. This might incorporate technological elements, such as RSS and iTunes, audio recording technology, podcaster apps, podcatcher apps, but also social media and internet functionality.\n 11:28\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow do these structures foster processes of production, distribution, and reception that we identify specifically as podcasting? Communication forms may relate to the aesthetic artifact itself. What do podcasts sound like? Are podcasting forms the same as genres? Aurally, what makes a podcast different from radio or, for example, from a piece of recorded audio that is simply accessible online? How might we consider the experience of listening, both in terms of apparatus the mechanics of how we listen and affect? – and I’m thinking here about the thorny issue of intimacy. Communication content engages with what a podcast episode and series is about. Interestingly, that area of research may look to leave the mechanics of podcasting behind. But isn’t an analysis of a podcast or podcasting that discusses content only – is that really Podcast Studies? To me, we have to think about this in a synergistic fashion. How does structure, form, and content merge in ways that allow us to engage with how podcasts work as a medium?\n 12:35\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tKnowledge, the second strand, reflects on how we might understand the impact of podcasting philosophically or epistemologically. For example, in terms of the structures of knowledge, to offer a student a podcast to listen to, rather than a journal article to read should make us reflect on how knowledge is made available to us and what function does it serve. If we organize our lives around listening to podcasts, how does what we listen to reflect our exposure to knowledge, and then how we might disseminate that knowledge further? It’s clear that a key element of Podcast Studies relates to its pedagogic use. So how might podcasting as a form of knowledge creation help students in the understanding and application of their own learning? What does it offer both in conceptual knowledge and in terms of skills-knowledge? I’m very much interested in the speech, text image relationship. In that context, how universities, the media, and politics frames knowledge is fundamental to the cultural zeitgeist.\n 13:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPodcast Studies needs to contextualize podcasting at heart of this, particularly where speech and knowledge is being fought over ideologically. A critique of big technology companies and their content gatekeeping analytics program decision-making is another question of knowledge structure, form, and content that we also want to investigate. The third strand, identity, relates to what we ask ourselves in terms of who our podcast producers, podcast listeners, and podcast fans. Furthermore, what do podcasts tell us about the lives of the individuals and groups they represent? Structurally, we can think about the demographics of producers and listeners, but a more vital question might be: how do individual subjects or community groups formulate a sense of self through podcasting? What might be the barriers to entry, even considering how we might assume the relative ease of access, there are many cultural, social and economic obstacles to creation, production, and even listening. We doubtedly want to consider and critique the replication of hierarchies of power based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, et cetera. In terms of forms of identity, we might consider the crucial element of the voice.\n 14:49\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow might we analyze the voice as a key tool in podcasting? It’s texture, it’s timbre, it’s materiality, to be sure, but how does the disembodied voice then materialize a sense of embodiedness through its use in podcasting? Podcast Studies must consider what it means to have a voice and to be listened to. And in this sense, it has to advocate openness, equality, and diversity through its structure, form, and content. Of course, we need to think about Podcast Studies in relation to other disciplinary fields. In the introduction to the book that the relationship with radio was a key element, but the need for us was to interrogate and assumed filial relationship. Should Podcast Studies look to disassociate itself from the history, culture, and aesthetics of radio? No, of course not. It really can’t. But if there is to be a usefulness to Podcast Studies, there has to be a criteria of autonomy.\n 15:43\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tEven if we acknowledge that the very term podcasting is a flash of journalistic serendipity. We need to analyze the important influences of other forms of mediums that make podcasting the flexible, hybridized, liminal medium it’s been described as. This brings us to sound [Start Sound Effect: Echoes] itself, and the overlaps with sound orientated disciplines: sound study, sound arts, audiology, musicology are all areas in which Podcast Studies can take methodological and conceptual influence. Indeed, there is an interesting question with regards to how Podcast Studies should articulate the centrality of sound. The nature of sound on an ontological level, may be fundamentally of interest to Podcast Studies analysis. In turn, the recording, editing and production of sound could be envisaged as key to a particular angle of research. Furthermore, the cultural impact, psychological effects, and phenomenological shaping of our material experience through sound might be at the heart of Podcast Studies concerns. [End Sound Effect: Echoes] One of my favourite podcasts recent times was Hannah and Jason and the team at SpokenWeb – their episode on “How we are Listening Now”. Does podcasting make us listen to the world and therefore experience it in specific ways?\n 16:57\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, it is vital that podcasting has a focus on criticality from whatever perspective or approach acknowledges the essential sound artifact or process as a podcast. This, to me, is true of individual podcast criticism, audience research, industry analysis, cultural studies, or media technology. What gives the focus of research it’s “podcastiness” is the cornerstone of the discipline – and I’m still not a hundred percent sure whether I like that word. This may require the researcher to expand, extend, or challenge notions of what a podcast is. And therefore, we must accept and reflect that the parameters of podcasting ontology will continue to be a contested area. Thinking about the impact of one’s own practice of podcasting should also be central to Podcast Studies. But that leads to the question: should Podcast Studies academics be actively using the medium? I guess this argument depends on how much you see the discipline of Podcast Studies needing to push an agenda that podcasting and other forms of non-traditional media practice should be recognized as being both a research tool and a method of dissemination that doesn’t have to default back to the text as a guarantee of rigor.\n 18:10\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis requires us to challenge the mechanisms, both material and structural, of closed source access, publishing and peer review traditions, and attitudes to the very nature of knowledge and learning and their ideological function within academia. Finally, I argue in the book that podcasting sits in a liminal space, not exactly conforming wholly with producers or consumers, with professionals or amateurs, with teachers or students, with interviewers or interviewees. I think it’s important that we see Podcast Studies challenging the traditional status quo, but also reflecting on its place in relation to the highly uncertain digital future that we are all inculcated in. We all know podcasting is great, but that cannot remain an uncontested assumption. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 19:16\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOur first respondent is Stacey. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Stacey Copeland is a Joseph Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication here in Vancouver, Canada, where her research engages with feminist media oral histories and sound archives.\n \n\n 19:35\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nOh, great. Alright. So, thank you Dario. That was really informative and got me tweaking some of the things and thoughts that I brought to the conversation today. So in revisiting the collection, which I have of course my copy fresh, you can kind of see through the background that I’ve chosen to exist in today. I was brought back to the moment I first received the call for chapters back in 2016, a fresh faced master’s student at the time navigating my new found identity formation as a media scholar and a queer feminist. My gender and media studies professor at the time, Dr. Susan Driver, recommended I submit a course paper I’d written about The Heart, which I fangirl over all the time, as a proposal for the book. It seems so long ago now, 2016, a time when there was still a need to argue for the importance of sound as a valuable field of study. Podcasting was still so new in popular culture and podcasts studies, even newer, not quite yet a field of its own back then, and some would argue it still isn’t. Podcast Studies feels like it will always still be emerging.\n 20:52\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nThere’s a sense of newness about it that I, and many others, including Dario, would argue is key to the very ethos of the medium itself. A newness defined on the oldness of other media forms, particularly radio. As Lisa Gitelman so eloquently writes on the newness of new media, quote “This overdetermined sense of reaching the end of a media history is probably what accounts for the oddly perennial newness of today’s new media. ” Unquote. Podcasting is a new media with an old history. And the same can be said about Podcast Studies as an emergent academic field. Now I’m less concerned with defining podcasting as its own unique medium of study, as separate from radio or other media forms, and more interested in the ways in which the growth of interest in podcasting has opened up new or renewed conversations around mediated, spatial politics, platformization, sonic narrative form, and the role of sound-based media in shaping our subjective everyday experiences. In short, how identity and community, knowledge and power, power play out in the podcast arena.\n 22:03\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo I’m intrigued by some of the correlations and overarching themes that Dario has invited us to consider today. Now, what I particularly love about this collection and Dario’s work on podcasting, is that it straddles the two worlds of theory and practice. I truly do believe as scholars, we learn just as much, if not more, by embedding ourselves into the practical aspects of our field of study. Sometimes I’ve learned – something I’ve learned really through my time in radio and podcasts communities and something I continue to practice in my academic work. In the introduction to this collection, Dario, Neil and Richard write, quote, “podcasting imbued in us the enthusiasm of possibility.” And we see this term possibility spark again in Dario’s opening remarks. This line really sticks with me, drawing me back to the forever newness so key to podcast culture. Possibility, a sentiment we often hear in relation to podcasting, listeners and producers alike can hear this possibility, the potentials for podcasting to give space to voices unheard in the mainstream, to engage deeply with niche audiences, and communities across the globe.\n 23:20\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nStill, by approaching the sentiment of possibility with a critical ear, I would argue we must also consider the increasing constraints of the platforms on which podcasting takes place. We’re seeing major giants like Spotify and Netflix now enter the podcasting race. And these are important questions to consider. Echoing Dario’s early remarks on structure in relation to communication, knowledge, and identity, this is one of the key differences we can consider that defines podcasting from other mediums is it’s distribution and discoverability through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and more. Podcasts studies provides a grounding, a community in which to study these platforms and algorithms so deeply entangled in key questions of identity and representation, of possibility. How are shows categorized? How were they discovered across different platforms? And how is this changing now that podcasting has truly entered the mainstream? How long will this sentiment of possibility last and how true is it in practice? In a talk I gave at SCMS last month, I mentioned how in 2019, a search for “queer” as a term on Apple Podcast actually assumed that I was searching for the word queen, which was really opening my eyes to just how interesting these tools can be in study, who they are built for, and how.\n 24:39\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nDid queer not exist as a search term? Or was this a tongue-in-cheek joke coded into the platform by a fellow queer? So, all of this said, I still believe in this sentiment of possibility Dario, Neil, and Richard first wrote about. And as researchers, makers, and listeners, by establishing podcasting as a serious object of study, a cultural practice, we play a key role in shaping how this possibility unfolds into action. So as you scroll through your podcast feed today, I invite you to consider the age old critical question: what do you hear? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 25:24\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Stacey. Our next respondent is Elena Razlogova. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Elena Razlogova is an associate professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, though she is not coming to us from Montreal today, she’s coming to us from Moscow. She is also the author of The Listeners Voice: Early Radio and the American Public, and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture”, an issue of the Radical History Review.\n \n\n 25:57\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you very much. It’s great to be here. I was happy to be invited to participate on this panel. By the way, my background is my parents’ kitchen – that’s why it’s blurred. I’m in Moscow right now and I can’t have a fake background for some reason. So I was really happy to be invited to this panel because I’m a radio historian, rather than a full-on Podcast Studies person –so I’m kind of an interloper here. I’m most excited about podcasting as a fantastic teaching and public dissemination medium. And in my field history, especially, there’s a great variety of podcasts out there that demonstrate to historians alternative ways to tell stories about the past. From Nate DiMeo’s 10-minute Memory Palace that uses dramatic music and sound effects to tell stories about individuals in history, to Hardcore History where just one dude, Dan Carlin rants about history for over three hours at a time. You get professional historians like Jill Lepore and outsiders like Malcolm Gladwell, and you get 99% Invisible, a great podcast about the history of design, as well as More Perfect about the American Supreme court. And all of that is history. I have assigned podcast making in both undergraduate and graduate courses as group work and individual work.\n 27:15\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd podcasts as a term assignment introduces a creative element to coursework. It makes students think about sound effects, diegetic non-diabetic music, proper ways to intro and outro the narrative as well. After making the podcast, they no longer think of interviews as an optional research method. And writing for speaking, as Dario mentioned, writing for speaking aloud makes them better writers as well. So I’m looking at podcasting as a practitioner rather than simply an academic. And I also should say that I actually didn’t ever publish a podcast, but I work as well – I volunteer on campus radio, so I do a little bit of radio. So reading the introduction to the book, and the book itself, several chapters, it’s amazing how much podcasting has advanced since the years since its publication. It may no longer be a liminal medium, and it’s harder to argue for liminality today, than in 2018, because Spotify, for example, has this whole stable of gated podcasts, including the Michelle Obama podcasts.\n 28:20\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tJeremy Moore calls this new stage of podcasts the industrialization of podcasting, where standards, and barriers for entry are much higher and it is more difficult to stand out, as other speakers already mentioned. And research on platformization of podcasting aligns with studies of music streaming and algorithmic recommendations in general. So, I hate to come back to the point, to the question whether podcasting is radio or not, but as a radio historian, I have to come back to it. In the introduction, authors focused on BBC and NPR as radio counterpoint to podcasting. But I would like to come back to independent radio broadcasting rather than large scale government sponsored networks. A few features of independent radio broadcasting seem lost to podcasting, but perhaps can be recovered, such as real-time possibility for community organizing, the critique of commercialism, and border-crossing that pirate, low power, and community radio offers. For radio, national borders matter in a different way.\n 29:29\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd here I’m thinking of Black power activist, Robert Williams broadcasting his Radio Free Dixie from Cuba in the 60s to the still segregated American South, or more recently, Christina Dunbar-Hester’s work on low RFM radio service to local communities, or in [inaudible] Garcia’s work on Spanish-language radio warning of anti-immigration rates via real-time call ins. As well, independent shows and hosts often migrate to podcasting in a sort of “brain drain”. And here I’m thinking of Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show, or Benjamin Walker’s Care of Everything, both migrated from audience supported station WFMU. Or more locally, a show called Audio Smart, that started at CKUT at McGill University, and then was taken from the station and turned it into a podcast. So my question is: compared to these local community radio forums, how do we recover in podcasting the forms of solidarity and activism that these alternative radio forms have been doing and perhaps alternative or independent podcasting is the answer? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 30:40\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing. Thank you so much, Elena. Next up is Kim Fox. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Kim Fox is a professor of practice in the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo, where she primarily teaches audio production and other journalism courses. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 31:04\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you, Hannah. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] I’m really excited to be a part of this and thank you all. I really want to add something very important and build on the conversations that we’re hoping to have here. So thank you for having me a part of this discussion about the current digital cultural phenomenon that we know very closely as podcasting. And I’ve decided to freestyle a little bit, so I’m sure that I will not take up my full time, but perhaps I can get that time back at the end. I do want to kind of build on what Stacey was saying in terms of – about the listening and more or less like where to from here? In this short time, since the book has been published, we see this huge gap in terms of what has happened.\n 31:48\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021::\tI mean, there’s a huge gap in terms of what happened between now and last year, but where the future could go is more symposia like this, where we’re able to have these conversations that are really important, especially as we try to redirect the lens of what is podcasting? You know, and what is Podcast Studies specifically? And I’m also thinking about this multicultural lens. I’m thinking about the women’s centeredness of it, or perhaps a lack of it. And of course, LGBTQ issues, other marginalized communities, who we would think there would be a space for them in this independent world, but as we see the commercialization and capitalism that’s involved in podcasting, that perhaps they too will get left behind with this new platform and in the academic look at the platforms. I’d also like to add about the kind of research that we are seeing in the field.\n 32:50\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd there is a lot of cultural, there is a lot of critical, which is great. Perhaps we want to look at, how do we diversify that? And especially when I start to think about: what will be the Podcast Studies canon? Surely some of those people are in the room. Thank you, Richard Berry. But we’re also thinking about how much more depth will that have and what will that look like? Because we also see from the past what the history of theory, for example, in many fields, if you’re thinking about classical social thought and how do we grab a hold of the field now to help decolonize before it becomes something that we want to avoid that has already happened? Also, we want to think about the critical production that we’re aiming to produce, and looking at it in terms of, is this an opportunity for us to again, make a concerted change? I really liked the points that were made about the embodiment and disembodiment of voices. Again, that’s something that is very valuable to us. But as I wrap up, I do want to say, I want to challenge you as media scholars to be more open and inclusive in your future research. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] So that’s both in terms of content and in collaboration. Thank you.\n \n\n 34:31\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Kim. Our final respondents are Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Michael O’Driscoll is a professor in the department of English and Film Studies in the faculty of arts who teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories, including material cultural studies. And finally, Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, also in Montreal where her research project towards an ethics of listening in literary study intersects the fields of oral history and literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices.\n \n\n 35:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Hannah. Deanna and I would like to use our platform to share our recent experience in producing an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast series. The episode was launched in early April and was titled “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” We’re interested in particular in talking about podcasting as a form of self-reflective critical practice and reflecting on our experiences during this collaboration. We entered into producing this podcast with a specific meta-critical goal, listening attentively to our conversations about listening. We did so with certain presuppositions about the imbrication of theory and practice as mutually constitutive activities. And we did so with a focus on listening through an ethical lens, asking particular questions about how we listen, why we listen, the material conditions of that activity, and with attention to the conventions of listening within the constraints of podcast production. The episode was an open-ended experiment that involved recorded and non-recorded dialogues with scholars who perform, gather, curate, and analyze spoken word performance across a range of audio textual genres. The queer cabaret performance, the oral history interview, the circulation of an archive of Indigenous creators, and scholarly engagements with spoken word recordings.\n 36:39\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThroughout, we felt a clear tension between our own ideals about ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast within the affordances of the medium and the conventions of possible podcast genres. We listened as our interviewees represented their own practices of listening and worked to achieve a certain attunement to the convolutions of critique. And I mean critique in the truest self-reflexive sense of that term, with an openness to difference, to the incalculable, and to the indeterminacy sees this scenario provoked.\n \n\n 37:16\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tSo for me, coming from a background in oral history and literary study, particularly a study of sounded poetry, making this podcast was an important meta-critical experiment that deepened my understanding of my research goals and methods in these fields. Listening has always been at the forefront of my work and as an attendant theoretical concern, paying attention to how we listen, what we listen for and the different modes of listening that are occasioned when we shift contexts from readings to interviews, when we speak of genre or from live events to digital and analog recordings when you speak of media. One of the fascinating outcomes of our foray into the podcasting world was new forms of deep, and I would argue ethical, listening that it invited at every stage of production. Before recording the interviews with our respondents, Michael and I had informal unrecorded conversations with them, both to create a level of comfort and intimacy –there’s that word again – but also to zero in on what we wanted to talk about in the interview.\n 38:10\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis genre of interviewing differed from the meandering type of life story interview that I’m used to conducting. As Michael suggested in our conversations leading up to this panel, what we were listening for in this case was expertise in lieu of, or at least in addition to experience. Our listening practices continued as we edited and transcribed interviews shaping them into a continuous, or at least resonant narrative. I don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio inHindenburg, adding an extra two seconds, pause to let an idea, breathe or editing a sentence to best reflect the speaker’s line of thought – with their permission of course. Underlying each of these editorial decisions is a complex set of ethical questions. How we represent the speakers who give us their ideas and voices, but also how we connect with and create a listening environment for an imagined audience. On the other side, the podcast’s extensive engagement with the voice gave us multiple opportunities to critically reflect on our own practices as scholars and carry those observations forward until the other academic work that we do.\n \n\n 39:15\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPerhaps one of the most provocative moments in the podcast is our conversation with Simon Fraser University scholar, Clinton Burnham, who proposed that while listening is without doubt an ethical imperative, it does not always in and of itself constitute an unalloyed good. That is, Clint reminded us the position of one who listens –and you might think here of judges, priests, analysts – is structurally configured as a position of mastery, a master position in which what is received is put back into circulation in a revalued – you might think extracted refined, reprocessed – form of judgment, absolution, cure and so on. You might extend this insight into all forms of listening, especially those in which a listener, however well meaning, receives the disclosures of those who have been harmed in some fashion. The unaddressed question here is how a listener might disavow, or acknowledge, or act in response to that structural configuration, and how listeners constitute themselves across a range of listening practices.\n 40:21\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd I’m thinking having just listened to Kim’s words that this has perhaps particular resonance with the call to decolonize and diversify. One of our thoughts on this front is that if podcasting remains yet in its formative stages of development, and that question is on the table right now, if podcasting is a germinal cultural practice, studying offers enormous possibility and a little shout out here to Stacey and Dario, even while constrained by its own ideological and historical horizons, the process of podcast production offers rich opportunities for such ethical engagements, born of the very contradictions inherent in this cultural practice. And furthermore, we might ask ourselves whether this kind of self-reflexivity is germane to the practice of podcasting: do we all listen to our listening? Or whether podcasting is itself, a field of cultural production that has only begun to engage [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] in a practice of self-reflexive critical collaboration?\n \n\n 41:33\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing, thank you both so much. There were [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] a lot of really beautiful threads that were weaving through that and a really interesting conversation already starting in the chat about canonicity, which I think is really fascinating. So maybe we can start the round table conversation there thinking about the sort of idea of canonicity. So Dario, maybe you can start us off on this idea: is it time for a podcasting studies canon?\n \n\n 42:05\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question specifically. I mean, I think what’s interesting is whenever you’re talking about canons, these are sort of not neutrally organic developments, but they are an outcome of the – both the structures and the people who are defining what is being talked about, what is being written about, what is the focus of interest. So I think that the idea of there is a group of scholars or a group of works that are going to be forwarded as part of the canon will happen because of the way that universities look to define these are the works that we need to be engaging with. So the question then becomes, how does everybody – as Kim was talking about – how do we open up the possibilities of access, both in an academic sense, and also in a production sense for podcasting to be this inclusive area where we do podcasting, we talk about podcasting, and we self-reflect on how it represents people? And then the analysis of that will hopefully naturally come out as not being a problematic, bounded kind of canonical approach or set of texts. Now, maybe I’m – maybe that’s slightly naive. You know, maybe we need to make that happen more. I guess that’s both– that’s my first sort of opening gambit now on that I suppose.\n \n\n 43:38\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’m really interested in the possibility of an audio cannon. I think Richard Barry mentioned it in the chat because it is a time – and I agree that canon is a terrible word in the sense that it’s always about exclusion. And then it needs to be always attacked and reconsidered, but starting it, it’s kind of exciting to look back three years or five and already knowing what was important. So I wonder what you guys would think. What would you put there?\n \n\n 44:07\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThoughts? What would you put into an audio canon? It’s a fascinating question, I think particularly for folks who teach podcasting, is the sort of the incredibly lateral world of podcasting as a medium, the sort of deep niche listening practices make it difficult to establish shared objects of study that conversations can circulate around.\n \n\n 44:31\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, by audio canon, Elena, do you mean specifically pieces of audio that we would use to create canon over texts or both?\n \n\n 44:39\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nNo, more like a mixtape of podcasts to share with other people.\n \n\n 44:45\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI love that. I love that – we should record them onto tapes.\n \n\n 44:48\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s what the kids call a playlist. So yeah, mixed tape is old school [Laughs].\n \n\n 44:53\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nMixed tape is good. It creates this awareness of looking back – the history of old media and the new media. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] [Sound Effect: Creaking Wood]\n \n\n 45:08\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI wonder if we might [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] – one of the things that was really striking to me about the sort of overlap between all of our panelists’ comments was about the relationship between practice and theory of Podcast Studies. And Laurie has put the question really well in the chat here, that it is important for podcast academics to also be practitioners and Dario your point that that may be more so than for other media. Laurie would like you to expand on that, but I would also love to hear from the rest of the panel about how you think about the relationship between practice and theory in podcasts studies and whether that feels – I think particularly if people coming in from, from different disciplinary perspectives – how’s that different from the relationship between theory and practice in film studies, or in literary studies, or in radio studies, which are all media-engaged disciplines.\n \n\n 46:03\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThat was just kind of born out of experience. And when I was doing podcasting, it was making me look at the way I write and the way I speak, not just in an objective sense, but also the identity of that. But the difference, say between something like film, which is the background that I came from, probably is just for the fact that film has 120 years behind it –\n \n\n 46:23\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs].\n \n\n 46:23\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t–and therefore there’s 120 years of people saying what film is, and you don’t have to start a film studies essay by having to – three or four pages explaining what you think film is –.\n \n\n 46:38\tSeveral Voices:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n 46:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t– in a way, whereas a lot of Podcast Studies papers do because we’re still arguing about it. So, I think maybe that’s where my assertion that having a practical sense of podcasting leads you to a wider understanding of what it is at this point.\n \n\n 46:55\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s really, hasn’t been my position for some time, especially coming from a radio background that I find when people who don’t have that background, they really do teach it from a perspective of like, well, that’s not how it works. Like that’s not how news is made. And once you’re in the room and you know how the meat is made, then you kind of have a better insight and your positionality is so much more informed than your previous self. And also think about this, when anthropologists embed in communities, there’s a reason there’s a certain observation level that takes place from that perspective. And so when I’m trying to coach students into producing audio, storytelling, and podcasts, it really comes from a place of, I know this process and I can help you develop this story into something – into something really interesting. So I think having that practicality under your belt is really useful and it’s something that everyone should venture into, even on a short series, a podcast, or just an interview podcast, whatever. I think everyone should have that experience.\n \n\n 47:58\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo this is a great conversation to have and something that I’m constantly engaging with in my own work. And I think it’s interesting to think about it in the broader sense of media studies as well. So as a media studies scholar, documentary researchers for instance, have been making their own media for a very, very long time. And that’s a field I look to quite often for what that might look like in the podcasting realm as well, both radio documentary and film documentary. And I think what those fields can tell us is podcasting is an interesting place to bring together practice and theory, because it’s also a medium that is very much grounded in a personal practice, in an individual researcher. Even when we’re thinking about large podcast productions, teams are still realistically quite small, maybe five or six people who are actively working on a podcast series together. These aren’t the same as a large Hollywood film production, which would be a much more difficult thing for a scholar to, well get the funds to do, but also the resources and people to actually put it together. So thinking about podcasting, I think in relation to film and radio documentary is quite useful in this way. And we see, of course, people like Siobhán McHugh writing about this. And we need to look to those scholars for some answers around this connection as well.\n \n\n 49:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI just wanted to throw a term into the conversation because I think I’d be really interested in hearing what people think about it. And I keep thinking, as I’m listening to you, keep thinking about the concept and the practice of research creation and I’ll do a shout out to my colleague, Natalie Loveless, who has an amazing book called How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation. I think in many ways there are a whole set of well articulated practices and theories coming from colleagues in the creative and performing arts about what it means to bring practice and theory together in this way in a manner that is very much about the production of research and insights through this. And I think there might be some real opportunity there for thinking about how podcasting might itself constitute a form of research creation.\n \n\n 50:09\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tGreat point, Mike. Yeah, because for myself, I’m coming to the field with this kind of wide-eyed naivete, in that I really, I think only listened to a podcast for the first time in maybe the last six months, before embarking on making my own. [Laughs] But I think as I was trying to suggest in our response, that so many of those ethical decisions, that one makes that one is really attuned to, come from those editorial decisions of figuring out like, oh if we have four guests, do we need to balance things out? What parts of all of these incredible interviews do we keep in? Do we put music beneath people’s speech? Does it enhance the experience that their words? Is it music that they ultimately hate and want to change? Like all of these very, very small material decisions matter in how we’re representing other people’s voices. And, for me, that’s just absolutely essential in grappling with those ethical considerations on a material level.\n \n\n 51:09\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. And there’s wonderful – it’s a beautiful chat and there’s I think really, really significant sort of amplification of those questions of materiality. It’s a great point here from Jennifer Lynn Stover about the way that a focus on practice could become another form of gatekeeping. Because access to the possibility to even experiment in audio composition goes hand in hand with certain material conditions. And it does seem like there is an interesting overlap between this question about practice and this question about canonization, which has to do with what forms and genres and styles and structures to be introduced to our students as the way that podcasts are made. That there is possibility for implicitly creating canons through how we ourselves practice podcast making, or teach podcast making. So these all – just a beautifully tangled [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] set of questions.\n \n\n 52:24\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nLet’s let the audience get in on this.\n \n\n 52:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve got a couple of questions sort of flagged here. So are there sort of emerging recognized genre forums in the podcasting world and where is the experimental genre-defying work happening?\n \n\n 52:42\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWell, I know that PhD student Anne [Inaudible] – I don’t know if she’s here, Anne – but she’s doing work on the genres and forms, which is interesting because I think what she’s talking about is the way in which traditional genre categories related to things like film and television music don’t really work in the same way for podcasting as they do for those media. So there’s a kind of layering of how you would have to think about podcasts in terms of taxonomies and categorizations like that. And I think it’s just indicative as well of the difficulty of that whole process in the way that Apple podcasts, when it did its revamp just seemed to add to the problem.\n \n\n 53:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs].\n \n\n 53:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs]. I think. So, yeah. I mean, I think it’s an, it’s an interesting question about, about genre distinctions in terms of podcasting.\n \n\n 53:32\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI really appreciate that you brought up Anne, Dario because Anne and I have had some really great conversations around this, and Kim’s been in many of those conversations as well as part of our podcast PhDs group. And we’ve been talking a lot about genre, about how we define podcast genre, and how we approach storytelling and narration. And for me, because I guess because my media studies background, I do see quite a lot of correlation between a genre’s set up in TV, film, radio being really just pushed onto podcasting because it’s what’s familiar already. That said, because podcasting is really this messy mishmash network of all of these different media forms put together, we do of course see experimental work being done as well is just less talked about, as we see in all other media forms as well. It’s really about where the money is, and those are the podcasts that we see and hear, versus maybe some more experimental work that’s being done. And I’d encourage anyone interested to maybe look more into soundscape composition work and experimental radio for where those ideas are really coming from.\n \n\n 54:43\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tRichard Barry has suggested three – a sort of typology of podcasting here, which is narrative, conversation, and experimental, which I think is a really sort of interesting non-generic way to break down the world of podcasting. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 55:06\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was wondering [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] what is the space of the critical writing in podcasting, not academic writing, but critical writing. There is some, there are recommendation articles and magazines, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be the place to make the marginal mainstream, because that’s how mainstream manual music happened in particular decades. Not always, but occasionally it does happen that music journalism drives certain genres to prominence. And I think as academics we could participate in that kind of boundary crossing activity.\n \n\n 55:44\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tA good site is somewhere like Bello Collective as a starting point for that. They do pieces that –they do kind of recommendations in terms of kinds of lists and stuff, but there is some what you call journalistic longer form critical writing about podcasts. What’s interesting is that the – it is people who are just interested in podcasting doing the writing as well as producers and some academics. I think the difficulty is if you look at long form journalism in film, again, that is now contracting, it’s all short form listicles type stuff or academia. I mean –and especially the pandemic that sort of, the idea of the long form magazine [Inaudible] all these kinds of things, they’re managing to survive, but it’s such a small kind of base. So I think, again, it’s in terms of academics doing that and just generally producers, whoever’s interested in podcasting, is kind of having to do it off your own back.\n \n\n 56:42\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was just adding in the chat, how I know that there are some journals that are – not only will the journal have a podcast, but in the physical journal, they are accepting podcast reviews as you would with a book review. So that’s one way to get sort of a critical look or maybe a critical conversation going about a specific podcast or series or something like that. And of course, Radio Doc Review, which was mentioned in the chat as well.\n \n\n 57:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s interesting to think about that historical formation that, is it anything about podcasting that doesn’t lend itself to long form critical analysis, or is it just the way the emergence of podcasting aligned with the sort of disappearance of that particular form of critical writing from our media landscape? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n 57:21\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] There is a question in the chat that I actually think will be useful probably for a number of the folks here. This is from Devin Bait. They say, “I noticed that the word intimacy was brought up a couple of times and seemed to carry some weight: why? I’m brand new to Podcast Studies.” [Laughs] Which I love –that I’m brand new. Why is intimacy spoken with such a tremble?\n \n\n 57:54\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, I’m happy to start. [Speaks closer to the microphone] Is it better if I speak like this? Is this a bit more intimate for our particular talk of intimacy? So I put in the chat, I actively avoided using the term intimacy in my provocation today, and that was intentional. So the word intimacy gets thrown around so much in the discussion of podcasting and there’s great work being done by scholars like Alan [Inaudible], who’s just finished up their PhD on podcast intimacies specifically. And we see this term used in radio as well, but less so in public broadcast radio and the kind of radio that reaches out to the masses and more so radio and podcasts that are speaking to you as an individual listener, the individual you in your ears. And that has created some really interesting scholarship around the relationship between headphone listening and intimacy with podcasts and even deep into discussions of how podcasts are produced, among producers as well, being produced for headphones to kind of create this internal sense of a voice in your head, in the experience of listening to podcasts. So there is a ton you can dig into in relation to the term podcasting and intimacy together. But maybe that’ll start off the panel on the subject.\n \n\n 59:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWhen you actually sort of get down to it, what do you really mean when you’re talking about intimacy? And I think with people that are writing a paper and they’re setting out criteria of what they understand by intimacy is fine. Just get on with it! It’s when it’s like oh, podcasts are an intimate medium. That’s too broad and a little bit too problematic, I think.\n \n\n 59:46\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’ll add to that from a bit of a different perspective and maybe this comes from my radio days, but I really got used to the Zoom world and especially all of these black squares, because I just feel like I’m on the radio. And, who’s really listening? Who am I talking to? And occasionally with Zoom, someone will talk back, but with students at eight in the morning, you’re usually just talking to the ether. So that sort of dynamic in that intimacy, when we think about the famous phrase from NPR in their “driveway moments” that either it’s in that car radio space or if you’re wearing earbuds and it is like Dario and Stacey mentioned that – the tenor of the voice, what is it that really makes us feel connected?\n1:00:31\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd even when teaching podcasting and teaching audio storytelling, you’re writing in a certain kind of way, there’s a writing for radio style and that you’re writing for one person, potentially. I tell students now about design thinking, you’re designing this prototype of a listener and then you’re going to talk to that listener so that you really create this connection. So that’s a little bit of what I think about intimacy and podcasting and radio.\n \n\n1:01:01\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Well, I will say for my part on the idea of physical intimacy I definitely affected a calming ASMR lady voice for my podcast [Laughs] which I don’t know why, but it seemed like the thing to do. But on a more social level, I would say the most interesting thing that came out of our podcast was all of the forms of intimacy that happened outside of the episode, that spilled over the container of the episode. Which are the many conversations that we had with the interviewers, getting in touch with bill bisset and Maria Campbell who had excerpts of audio in the podcast, knowing that they were listening to the podcast. So I think actually if we look at the podcast, not necessarily as contained within the media form itself, but as a broader set of social practices, then we get into this really sort of exciting territory of community building and social intimacy, which to me, I think is probably the most exciting part.\n \n\n1:02:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. I love that emphasis. That makes me think back to what Elena was saying about pirate radio practices and the possibility of community [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] formation. And how do we build for community in this asynchronous medium? There has been a wonderful conversation [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and links and resources shared in the chat here. Thank you again so much to all of our wonderful panelists. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:02:42\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nCan everyone on mute and say goodbye? So that’ll be some good sound for the podcast.\n \n\n1:02:46\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nEverybody unmute! We need 46 goodbyes. Let’s go.\n \n\n1:02:50\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs]\n \n\n1:03:01\tVarious voices:\tGoodbye! [Laughs] Bye!\n \n\n1:03:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs] Love this audio. Love it.\n \n\n1:03:07\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s a sound poem if I ever heard one.\n \n\n1:03:07\tVarious voices::\t[Laughs] [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:03:07\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n1:03:26\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb project director, Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Stacey Copeland, Deanna Fong, Kim Fox, Dario Llinares, Michael O’Driscoll, and Elena Razlova for their contributions to the panel discussion featured in this episode. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] From all of us at spoken web, thanks for listening to season two of this SpokenWeb Podcast, and we hope you’re ready for season three, coming soon with brand new episodes from the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9595","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E4, Genuine Conversation, 6 February 2023, Fyfe"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/genuine-conversation/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creator_names_search":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/57d4aa97-aa60-4920-acb2-82fea5edbdc4/audio/1d809ebb-6e39-40ca-a736-16390cc90357/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e4-genuine-conversation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:53:12\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"51,068,804 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e4-genuine-conversation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/genuine-conversation/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-02-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Antin, David. “Talking at the Boundaries.” How Long is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin. Edited by Stephen Friedman, University of New Mexico Press, pp. 31-64. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Strauss &  Giroux, 1975.\\n\\nDiepeveen, Leonard. Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception. Oxford UP, 2019.\\n\\nGoffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. Simon and Schuster, 2008.\\n\\nKreillkamp, Ivan. “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing.” Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 69-88.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549530607617,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What makes a genuine conversation? And why is it so difficult to have one? Frances Grace Fyfe is on a quest to find out. This madcap talk therapy session has the SpokenWeb RA consider the literary concept of the dialogue, the verbatim transcription of speech in writing (through an exploration of—what else?—Charles Dickens’s early forays in court stenography), especially “expressive” phonemes, and david antin’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s. An investigative journalist, a peer supporter, and one especially sincere friend weigh in to help FG orchestrate the most genuine conversation of all: one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:35)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End music: SpokenWeb Podcast theme music]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Conversation. When was the last time you thought about conversations, thought about what exactly makes them conversations? In this episode, SpokenWeb research assistant Francis Grace Fife thinks about the literary concept of the dialogue, about conversations by having conversations.\n\nFife has conversations with an investigative journalist who conducts interviews for a living, with a friend whose thoughts on the capabilities of speech over writing informs how their most genuine conversations take place, with a peer supporter at Concordia who intentionally makes use of non-speech responses to create connection in conversation and even with herself, in the style of talk therapy. But Fife goes a step further delving into what happens to conversations when they are transformed from speech into writing.\n\nTaking up Charles Dickens’s foray into court’s stenography and David Anton’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s, Fife thinks about those aspects of genuine conversation like those affirmative “mm-hmm’s” in conjunction with their written representations.\n\nDigging into expressive phonemes, the pathological urge to mirror your conversation partner’s speech style, and the discomfort of silences in speech conversations. Fife reflects on when and how speech might be inescapably performative and considers what happens when speech is literally performative, but also genuine, like in David Anton’s talk poems. We invite you to listen with us to what Fife calls the most genuine conversation of all, one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form. [SpokenWeb theme music begins] Here is episode four of season four of the SpokenWeb podcast. Genuine Conversation. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n\n(02:58)\tPhone Voice 1\tHey, how are you? [clears throat] Hey, how are you? Yeah, good, thanks. Yeah, thanks, um, for agreeing to talk with me today. Hopefully this won’t take up too much of your time, but, yeah, as you know, the idea for the podcast is about genuine conversation.\nHey, [laughs], how are you? Yeah, good, good. Thanks. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me. Um, yeah. Hopefully this won’t take up too much of your time, but, yeah, as you know, the idea for the podcast is on the topic of genuine conversation, and I just thought I’d reach out cuz I thought you might have something to say about that. [Sound effect: phone rings] Oh, shhh Sorry. [Soundeffect: Answer phone] Hi, sorry. Can you hear me? [Music begins: calm jazz with high hat and piano] Um, sorry. This is kind of awkward.\n\n(04:10)\tNarrator\tIn Aldous Huxley’s short story “Over The Telephone”, a young poet mentally rehearses a whole conversation between him and the woman he hopes will accept his invitation to the opera. [Sound effect: phone  rings] But when the operator finally makes the connection, he stumbles hopelessly and she declines. Nothing, in other words, goes as planned over the telephone.\n[Music fades and ends]\n\n(04:33)\tPhone Voice 1\tSorry, I don’t really know where to start.\n(04:37)\tPhone Voice 2\tThat’s okay. Why don’t you start by telling me what it is you want to talk about?\n(04:44):\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah, I guess that’s partly what I came here to find out or, yeah. To talk about. I guess I’m seeking an occasion for the kind of conversations I wanna have or, yeah, I don’t know. I guess I could just use some practice.\n(05:01)\tPhone Voice 2\tPractice talking?\n(05:02)\tPhone Voice 1\t[overlapping] Talking [laughs]  Yeah.\n(05:06)\tPhone Voice 2\tOkay. Well, why don’t you start by telling me how long you’ve been feeling this way?\n(05:13)\tPhone Voice 1\tThere was, there was a period where it was hard to talk to people. You remember, I’m sure. A lot of people thought that would make it a good time for writing. I don’t know. I, I, I guess I just feel like being away from people writing began to feel so insincere and then, you know, since I’ve started this master’s degree in English, I’ve just been feeling like, I don’t know, I don’t wanna read books anymore. I wanna talk to people, actual people.\n(05:42)\tPhone Voice 2\tThat sounds difficult.\n05:44)\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah. I mean, it’s [laughs], it’s, it’s whatever. Yeah. I guess.\n(05:48)\tPhone Voice 2\tI think you might benefit from talking to a specialist. I have someone in mind. I’m gonna transfer you over. Okay? [Sound effect: phone dialing and then dial tone starts]\n(06:00)\tHannah\tI essentially had to learn how to interview people twice or maybe even three times as my working practices changed and learning how to construct conversations all over again, such that they were delivered in a human and interesting and relevant way was a really important part of what I had to learn how to do.\n(06:21)\tNarrator\t[Music begins: electronic with drum beat]\nThis is my friend Hannah talking. She’s a journalist working in current affairs and investigative reporting. As someone who has, according to her LinkedIn profile, a proven track record negotiating difficult access to people for print and television reporting, I thought she might be a good person to give me pointers on how to structure a conversation in the first place.\n\n(06:41):\tInterviewer\tI’m interested in the human aspect of it. Are there some strategies you can use to prod someone to speak in a sort of interesting or even humorous manner to get a good clip for your video?\n(06:53)\tHannah\tAbsolutely. There are ways of working that are very helpful. The first of which is most profoundly is like, just don’t be a jerk, right? Show up and be human and be present. And people like to act sometimes, like there is a way of gaming a conversation or short cutting it somehow. And there isn’t. The most important thing that you do is show up and engage with someone in the way that they expect to be engaged with. And you get very good in a slightly pathological way at mirroring people.\nYou become very good at matching somebody else’s conversation style. If they crack jokes, you crack jokes. If they take it more seriously, you take it more seriously and you catch yourself doing it in non-professional situations and you realize that it is really quite a creepy thing to do. But we’re responding to someone as they hope to work is a really important part of what I do.\n\n(07:55)\tInterviewer\tI have written in my notes, “don’t be a jerk”, which seems like a good maxim, generally speaking.\n(08:00)\tHannah\tIt’s a good rule in life.\n(08:02)\tInterviewer\t[laughs] Yeah, I’m interested in what, and maybe it’s not a good question, but maybe you can answer it to the best of your ability. What is it that makes a good question to ask?\n(08:19)\tHannah\t[Music begins: electronic and spare] So I have a couple of answers to that. The first and most obvious one right, is open-ended questions. We like open-ended questions. What you want, again, it’s that people are more comfortable expressing their experience, which is something that they know to be true rather than an opinion or even a fact that they just think to be true.\nAnd beyond that genuine engagement and that genuine sort of interface, there are a couple of things that are helpful. The first of which is being genuinely passionate and curious about people’s own personal experiences. People are uncomfortable talking in hypotheticals, talking about things that they may not be sure about, all those kinds of things, but people are always secure in their own experiences and their own perceptions. I think the other thing that you always want to do when you’re asking someone questions is, again, so where people are more comfortable expressing their own experience, make it clear that that is what you value and that is true for personal stuff as well as for professional stuff.  What you value is them as people and what they bring to this conversation and not what they think or what they know. They’re not quantities to be known to you.\n\n(09:36):\tInterviewer\t[Music ends] Well, I value your skill as a journalist, [laughs], just so you know. [Hannah laughs] And you know, and keeping with the kinda self-reflexive nature of question asking and the open-endedness. Maybe you could tell me like, how do you feel this interview has gone so far?\n(09:54)\tHannah\tI think it’s gone really well. I think, so what you’re trying to do here is something really difficult, right? Which is that you’re trying to record for academic content fundamentally and record the building blocks of something that will prove an academic point, but in a performative way. And that’s actually a very difficult thing to do.\nAnd I’ve said this before, but, you are doing now what I do professionally, and I am both paid money to do it and given a lot of time to do it in, and I still find it difficult. [Music begins: soft tones] So I think you should be proud of this interview and I think you’ve done a good job with those questions in as much as they’re reflective from me, they’re interesting for me, and it’s a selection of questions that I don’t think I remember being asked before, which makes this feel like a contribution that you value, which is good.\n\n(11:00)\tInterviewer\tI really was not fishing for anything. I just wanted a sound bite. But [Interviewer and Hannah laugh], I appreciate- [Soft tones music fades into jazzy piano music]\n(11:05)\tHannah\tHappy to provide.\n(11:15)\tNarrator\tNow that I had some formal training from Hannah, I figured it was time to test out some genuine conversation skills in real time. So I called up one of the best conversationalists I could think of, my friend Ben. Remembering Hannah’s advice I try to ask open-ended questions and show a genuine interest in the subject matter. Here’s me asking Ben about his own relationship to making conversation.\n(11:40)\tBen\t[Music ends] It used to be that it would happen on the fly. And then I was introduced to the phenomenologists and that really made a difference in the way that I speak. I can’t remember what made me stop and then start to hesitate before speaking, but there was some shift in second year university where all of a sudden the words that I was using, um, got caught.\nUh, and I started to have more trouble just speaking off the cuff. And then with Sarah Ahmed she writes about, and Alia Al-Saji both write about, uh, hesitating and stopping and how that might interrupt, uh, some unconscious sort of, well, racism that can, that can come out in speaking and just that has really, uh, that has really impacted the way that I have conversation with others. I think I hesitate, um, out of a fear of stepping into, out of a fear and also a care.\n\n(13:07)\tInterviewer\tI mean, that was a great answer. I really wasn’t expecting anything [laughs]. And because I, you know, the final form of this podcast is interested in the relation between speech and writing. It’s interesting to me that you’re kind of telling me you’re getting some of these ideas about how to speak from texts that you were encountering. Well, did you feel like it, this kind of fearful and careful speech is an imitation of text, or is that maybe not,\n(13:41)\tBen\tHuh. Huh.\n(13:43)\tInterviewer\tYeah.\n(13:44)\tBen\tI wonder, that’s a good question. I mean, as a, I mean, I think, I imagine that you are someone who, are you someone who is more comfortable with text then speech for that reason because of the hesitation? [Interviewer gasps]\n(13:59)\tInterviewer\tUm, I don’t know. I just, I also feel  similarly to you in that speech and speech patterns were molded so much from being in university and studying writing and, but, you know, there’s also, I think that the writing that happens in the classroom and also the kind of teaching in and outside also equally inform modes of speech. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t know, but interesting too that you’re using this metaphor too, of like the words getting caught, this sort of, yeah. Yeah. Interesting image of-\n(14:37)\tBen\tYeah. And I think mm-hmm. I think that when I am too thoughtful about what I say, well, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking more about speaking from the heart, as opposed to speaking from my head. I think a lot of times I’m speaking from my head, especially when I’m having a higher level theoretical conversation with someone. But also, when I’m having an uncomfortable conversation with someone or a conversation where there’s a, there’s a power asymmetry, or we’re talking about a power asymmetry. [Music begins: calm tones] But oftentimes if I can manage to surrender that and speak from the heart, then I surprise myself with what comes out of my mouth. And, sometimes that can be a good thing.\n(15:41)\tInterviewer\t[Music ends] So beautiful. [Interviewer and Ben burst out laughing] It’s so weird. It’s like, I’m, I’m, I’m conscious thatI’m trying to interview you and I’m thinking about how this is gonna sound on the podcast, and also thinking about Yeah. Syncing up this audio and not wanting to interject too much [laughs] Like, woah, it’s such a great conversation. I wish I was just jumping in a little more, but, well, yeah. Let’s see.\nWe can, that can be an interesting reflection, I guess, later.  But, um, I, I also wanted to ask part, the reason why I wanted to interview you as well was I know that you spend a lot of time by yourself or at least last year when I knew you, you were kind of spending maybe two weeks at a time in your kind of cabin in the countryside. And I’m just curious, like if you spent, well, if you consider that time alone and if you spent any of that time talking to yourself?\n\n(16:45)\tBen\tMm-hmm.  I did spend a lot of time alone last year, and I haven’t spent very much time alone this year. And I almost feel a little bit lesser for it. I think it’s because of the conversations that I’m not able to have, but I don’t talk with myself too much when I’m alone. [Music begins: soft tones] I have really appreciated speaking to the non-human environment around me. [Sound effect: birds singing]\nThat was something that I think I got into a little bit more. And it has brought me  a lot of joy to be in, like a conversational relationality with the birds and the squirrels and the trees. And yeah. So it’s not something that I do regularly, but when I do do it, it feels pretty good. [Music and sound effects end]\n\n(17:45)\tInterviewer\tI mean, are you also writing down the things that you’re speaking aloud?\n(17:49)\tBen\tNot very often. Yeah. Not very often because I get, um, sometimes the hesitation. I feel that stronger when I’m writing. And oftentimes, like, this has happened a couple times recently where I’ve had friends request significant conversations over text. So, you know,  there’s a difficulty in our dynamic, and I’d like to attend to this with you in this text messenger format. And I’ve had to set a boundary and say it like, let’s call on the phone or  speak verbally because  when it comes to expressing myself, I really have a block  textually. I can write an essay, but  if I want to, um, yeah. If I want to articulate how I feel  I really struggle. I, it’s like pulling teeth, to get that into a paragraph that, that I can then read back and think, yeah, that’s, that’s how I felt.\n(19:06)\tInterviewer\tHmm. I’m trying to think about what question to ask you then about the relationship between speech and writing. Is it because?\n(19:17)\tBen\tWell, I-\n(19:17)\tInterviewer\tSpeaking is- no, you go.\n(19:20)\tBen\tThere’s just so much that I, I mean, I say this with trepidation to an English student [laughs].\n(19:28)\tInterviewer\tI really don’t know anything, don’t worry about it.\n(19:29)\tBen\tBut, okay. Well, just that, there’s a lot that I haven’t, there’s a lot that I can’t capture in writing, like the medium of writing doesn’t deal well with silence, [Music begins: instrumental and electronic] with pauses, with those little ums and ahs. And yeah. And that means that I think I really depend on those to express myself. And without them, there’s sort of a certainty that I don’t think is genuine to where I’m coming from.\nAnd there’s also, I’m just realizing this now as I’m thinking while speaking, there’s also a tugging that happens when you are in conversation like a requirement to finish the sentence. Whereas you can take however long you want to finish a sentence on paper.\n\n(20:42)\tInterviewer\tYeah. Well, there’s, I guess it’s something riskier about, I mean, this is a bit basic, but about speech in that it can’t be edited. But maybe that also speaks to, I think, your desire for it to feel. Hmm. Yeah. The real possibility-\n(21:00)\tBen\tYeah-\n(21:02)\tInterviewer\tOh, no, go.\n(21:04)\tBen\tIt’s the question of like, when you’re thinking of the art of talk, is the talk or the conversation, is the conversation the medium of the art? Or is it the object of the art? And, you know, maybe it’s the object of the art if you are featuring a conversation, a powerful conversation. But if it’s the medium and it can’t exist in any other, like by putting it into a podcast takes away, that’s something that, yeah, that’s something that really interests me is what is possible within the medium of conversation that isn’t possible in text or in recordings or in an image?\nYeah. Which is why I love, which is why I love live radio as opposed to a podcast, [Sound effect: radio voice talking and ends] because live radio seems to me it’s slightly more conversational and, huh. I love silence and radio silence, and the awkwardness of radio silence. I hope that you include it at least somewhere in your piece.\n\n(22:20)\tInterviewer\tYeah. What do you mean by radio silence?\n(22:23)\tBen\tOh, just this idea of dead silence and in an audio format that is to be avoided at all costs. Like, you know, you’re just, at least with radio, you’re just supposed to talk, you know, it doesn’t matter what you say, just don’t let it get silent, because that silence is so discomforting to someone who’s listening. Um, but I really, I really love that discomfort. [laughs]\n(22:51)\tInterviewer\tYeah. Well, I’m curious about that because most people don’t. In real life do you also like that discomfort?\n(23:01):\tBen\tUm, if there’s, [long pause]  depends on how it ends. It depends on how it ends. Sometimes it ends in conversation with an inability to find the other person, to attune yourself to them again. And the conversation falters and then it ends awkwardly. And that’s a horrible feeling. [laughs] But on the flip side, some of those uncomfortable silences have opened a space for a really deepened, beautiful connection. [Music begins: soft tones] And so maybe you can’t have one without the other.\n(23:58)\tNarrator\tBen’s conversation left me thinking much about the differences between conversation and the written word. For Ben, the genuineness of the encounter, or in his words, a deep and beautiful connection is made possible only because of the failings of conversation. The fact that it can hesitate, stumble, or lag into silence. Writing feels disingenuous to speech then, in Ben’s terms, because we don’t have the notation to represent these hesitations in the first place.\nIt’s the same way Isaac Pittman, a British teacher felt when reading the London journals in the early 1900’s. Reporters at that time, he felt, didn’t accurately transcribe parliamentary speeches they were reporting on. Rather, they recorded them in the way they were accustomed to writing. That is to say, in grammatical English, but spoken English, as Ben gestured to, isn’t grammatical. People “um” and, “uh”, or more accurately to the Britain of the time,” irm” and, “uh”. In order to better capture these noises, Pitman invented phonography, a new system of shorthand that would allow for a more exact registration of speech than ordinary writing could claim.\n\nAs Ivan Kreilkamp writes, “shorthand promised not simply an efficient system of information storage, but a means by which writing might be infused with orality and the living breath of vocal articulation.” One photographic manual went so far as to claim that phonography would indeed render a greater service to mankind than the discovery of a new world.\n\n(25:23)\tNewspaper Boy\tExtra, extra! Read all about it!\n(25:26)\tNarrator\tPhonography was interestingly enough, essential to the writing career of one Charles Dickens, who learned the craft first as a court stenographer, and later as a newspaper reporter of public speeches. As Kreilkamp writes, “Dickens characteristic style, the vivid immediacy of his character’s voices owes a significant debt to the shorthand mastery that meant so much to him.” Indeed, Dickens’ experience with phonography was essential to pioneering a new type of Victorian realism. Where before a novelist like Jane Austen might present a highly stylized representation of conversation, as in some sense, speech itself, Dickens shorthand could more accurately represent conversation generally. All the speech patterns and mannerisms of the characters in his novels have a corresponding sign where every sign represents a real life sound.\n(26:12)\tScrooge\tBah humbug!\n(26:13)\tNarrator\tDickens’ mastery of phonographic shorthand led some people to consider him something of a writing machine. Here Dickens describes the mechanical movement of his writing hand when listening to a dull speech.\n(26:25)\tCharles Dickens\tI sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old way. And sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the tablecloth taking an imaginary note of it all.\n(26:37)\tNarrator\tDickens’ idea of a mimetic representation of speech in writing mirrors my own experience putting my conversation with Ben through my computer’s automatic transcription software. Going over the transcript I noticed the prevalence of one word over any other one my computer spells h-m-m.\n(26:55)\tBen\tHmm.\n(26:56)\tNarrator\tIf automatic transcription exists in Pitman’s words, to eliminate all ambiguity from language by creating a one-to-one correspondence between sound and sign, what exactly does this sound signify? Let’s replay the tape. [Sound effect: tape rewinds]\n(27:11)\tInterviewer\tI know that you spend a lot of time by yourself-\n(27:16)\tBen\tHmm. [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:16)\tInterviewer\t-or at least in the classroom, and also the kind of teaching in-\n(27:20)\tBen\tHmm. [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:20)\tInterviewer\tAnd it can’t be edited.\n(27:23)\tBen\tHmm.  [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:25)\tNarrator\t[Music begins: jazzy piano] On its own I find the “hmm” sound has a soothing quality unto itself. It seems I’m not the only one with this mysterious intuition. In his book, What Makes Speech Patterns Expressive, for example, the linguist Reuven Tsur looks at sound patterns in six “especially tender” poems by the Hungarian poet, Sándor Petőfi, and finds that what they have in common is an unusually high frequency of the “m” phoneme.\nThere’s this 1995 study by British linguist David Crystal that seems to confirm the poetic mode of speech perception Tsur writes about can’t be separated from the way we perceive speech more generally. What Crystal did was pull a whole bunch of writers alongside the general population, and found that they all agreed one of the prettiest and most relaxing consonant phonemes, at least in received British pronunciation, was the M Sound.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nAt the same time, I also read this M or “mm” sound in my conversation as a sign of responsiveness or attention to the conversation at hand. Here’s Irving Goffman on the discursive power of this word: [Music begins: electronic]\n\n“In conversation, there are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works, to attract the attention of the interlocutor, or to confirm his continued attention. Are you listening or in Shakespearean diction, lend me your ears. And on the other end of the wire mm-hmm.”\n\n(28:47):\tPhone Voice 2\tCan you hear me?\n(28:48)\tNarrator\tThis sound, in other words, is an expression of the state of a social relationship, one in which one participant consents to their continued participation therein. I noticed in my conversation with Ben that the sound also acts as a way of vocalizing or making legible what would be an otherwise silent listening practice. To learn more about this noise and its relationship to listening more generally I decided it was time to consult another expert.\n[Music ends] [Sound effect: phone number dialing]\n\n(29:15)\tMirdhula\tI’m Mirdhula and I am a peer supporter at the Concordia Gender Advocacy Center.\n(29:22)\tInterviewer\tPerfect. That’s great. And just for people who maybe don’t know, what does a peer supporter, what does that role look like?\n(29:29)\tMirdhula\tSo, as a peer supporter, you can actually come in and we can provide you with a space where you can feel validated and where you can experience any feelings that you’re feeling and maybe not feel so alone in those feelings. Because we’re not certified professionals, we don’t offer advice. But that’s kind of the concept of peer support.\nIt’s to offer validation and to remove that power struggle between a mental health professional and the person seeking support. So the way we even out that power struggle is by being  a person who doesn’t lead the conversation, doesn’t offer advice. We purely let the person navigate their feelings in however way they would like to. Whether it’s in silence, whether it’s just going on a rant, we don’t control the conversation in any way.\n\n(30:30)\tInterviewer\tYeah. I’m so interested in this really particular form of conversation because it’s a different form of conversation than we’re used to. What does it look like for you as a peer supporter to not lead a conversation? What actual kind of methods are you employing to signal to the other person that it’s their time to talk?\n(30:50)\tMirdhula\t[Music begins: quiet drum beat]\nBasically, as a peer supporter, we specifically received training, because it’s not something that comes very natural to everybody. We’re taught to constantly kind of riff off of what people are saying and to keep a conversation going. The importance of keeping a conversation going is really important in our society. But what I had learned personally, what really was like, so jarring to me in this training was how much I felt like I needed to quickly respond to things and not actually listen to what people were telling me. And to exist in the silence that is required to really think about what people are telling me, you know?\n\nBut some methods that we use, including [laughs] incorporating some silence to give people time to think is reflection. So we reflect what the people are telling us. And what that is, is like not assuming any emotions that somebody may be feeling unless they explicitly express that they’re feeling those feelings, and to kind of mirror what they are telling us in order to validate what they’re telling us. So that they don’t feel any pressure to feel a certain way or to even figure out how they’re feeling, but to really just live in that moment.\n\n(32:14)\tInterviewer\tAre you conscious about other kinds of gestures or things like nodding your head, like, I’m really interested in, in the technical aspect. What other kind of signals besides sitting in silence can you show to somebody that you’re paying attention to?\n(32:28)\tMirdhula\tSo, this has been my saving grace as for my impulsivity. Like, basically the replacement for every single interjection that I wanna insert, because I always wanna, I’m very expressive in the face, vocally. Anything you were just saying, every time I nod my head, it’s me preventing myself from being vocal about it. And that’s also a skill that we learned. We learned about different ways of expressing your validation, or sorry, expressing your validation by nodding your head. And for me, that’s a big one. And then the “mm-hmms”. And the “oh, yes, of course”. Like, I try not to use too many cop outs. So there are some, there’s some terminology that could be seen as surface level, like, oh, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about that. They really tell us to avoid terms like that just because it can come off as insincere.\nAnd sometimes we just say that. So sometimes when we apologize for somebody and offer them our pity, it could be seen as us trying to get through our discomfort with their feelings. So I try to stick to the “mm-hmm” and “yes”, like just very simple terms for validation. But the head nodding is big for me. It’s my, one of my biggest ways of validating what someone is saying to me. [laughs]\n\n(34:06)\tInterviewer\tIt’s interesting to me that you’re talking about how you’re such an expressive person. I mean, it’s coming through just in the interview. It seems to me like part of peer support isn’t getting rid of that personality. It’s about mobilizing expression in a way that feels really conscious and sincere. And yeah. This is something actually, I think a big part of the podcast is that I’m really interested in words like “mm-hmm” or sounds that we signal to someone that we’re paying attention, that aren’t necessarily words, but they do signify something. Do you feel like you’re using those more in your everyday speech now?\n(34:44)\tMirdhula\tDefinitely.I’ve noticed, like with this training, I’ve noticed more how much I was rushing through conversations in my day-to-day life. So these are my tools to stay more grounded and to be more present in those conversations. So I definitely, like, even my friends have actually noticed a difference. They’re like, I’ve really felt heard, and I thought that was so amazing. It’s really validating to feel like you can give someone, you can give someone a safe space with just a head nod and a few, like, sounds, you know, like validating sounds, and I think it’s really powerful. Um, but the “mm-hmm,” that’s like my big one, that’s my big validation sound. [laughs]\n(35:33)\tInterviewer\tAnd it also makes me think about, you know, the particular dynamics of talking on the phone with someone, like in peer support, it seems like body language is really important, but in a context like this, you know, especially if we couldn’t see each other, then those words become a lot more helpful.\n(35:53)\tMirdhula\tThey’re an anchor.\n(35:54)\tInterviewer\tHmm. Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it.\n(35:56)\tMirdhula\tLike that! There you go. Yeah. You got it. [Mirdhula and Interviewer laugh]\n(36:02)\tInterviewer\tOkay. Great. Thanks. Well, that was super helpful. I won’t take up any more of your time unless there’s one nugget of wisdom you wanna share us with me? [Music begins: soft tones]\n(36:09)\tMirdhula\t[laughs] Nugget of wisdom. That’s a lot of pressure. [laughs]. Um, honestly, this training alone, I’ve felt transformed. I know that’s so dramatic, but I’ve truly felt transformed. It was very difficult to face these things because they feel like failures at first. But when you can face them, and that’s what they teach you to do, to face these things that are so ingrained in your person, these dynamics of conversation that are so drilled into us, like from a young age, to face that and to realize that I can change, it’s like, it’s, it’s a different kind of education that I’ve received in my lifetime.\nIt’s a different type of learning. And I really had to accept that I wouldn’t be comfortable in it. I had to accept the discomfort of changing the way that I communicate and connect with people. And I think that is so powerful and so important for people to experience in life. So what they’re doing at the center is just amazing. I am so happy to be a part of something, something so groundbreaking.\n\n(37:22)\tNarrator\tMirdhula’s conversation helps me reframe this noise, not just as a signal of responsiveness, but of genuine responsiveness. Interestingly, it seems to me that the authenticity of this responsiveness comes from a failure to speak or find the appropriate words to say in the first place.\nIndeed, both Ben and Mirdhula talked about silence’s ability to create a sense of meaningful connection between speakers when faced with a difficult conversational situation. Maybe then, what we can say of this noise is that it’s a sonic representation similar to what Goffman writes about eye contact. It allows us to quote, “monitor one another’s mutual perceiving and develop a heightened sense of moral responsibility” for both participants’ speech acts.\n\n(38:03)\tPhone Voice 1\tI have a confession to make. I’ve noticed that ever since talking to Ben and Mirdhula, I’ve been making this hmm humming noise more often than I ever have. [Music Ends]\n(38:14)\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, that sounds like a good thing, right?\n(38:16)\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah. Although I have to wonder, how can I be sure it’s not just an imitation of responsiveness? Or like, I’m worried I’m modeling my own speech patterns on them because I wanna be read as someone who’s responsive. Didn’t Hannah say something like that? Hang on, let me find it. [Sound Effect: Tape rewinding]\n  (38:34):\tHannah\tAnd you get very good in a slightly pathological way at mirroring people. You become very good at matching somebody else’s conversation style. If they crack jokes, you crack jokes. If they take it more seriously, you take it more seriously, and you catch yourself doing it in non-professional situations and you realize that it is really quite a creepy thing to do. [Sound Effect: Tape fastforwarding]\n(39:02):\tPhone Voice 2\tIt still surprises me that you know how to do that.\n(39:05)\tPhone Voice 1\tOkay, but can we get back to this issue? How do I know if I’m being genuinely responsive and not just mirroring responsiveness in a performative or worse still, pathological way? I’m thinking of something Isaac Pitman said about phonographic shorthand, that it would eliminate all ambiguity from speech and writing by creating this kind of perfect correspondence between speech and science.\nBut doesn’t the hmm noise evade signification in some way? Or like, isn’t it a representation of the ambiguity of the silence generated by awkward or difficult conversation? I just worry I’m imitating Ben and Mirdhula becoming like Charles Dickens, but instead of a writing machine, I’ve become this speaking machine, a kind of automatic generator of conversational noise.\n\n(39:48):\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, let me ask you this. What is genuine anyway?\n(39:52):\tPhone Voice 1\tOkay, Socrates, take it easy.\n(39:54):\tPhone Voice 2\tNo, for real. That was a real question or object of scholarly inquiry. I was just reading about the invention of the typewriter and its relationship to the development of the aesthetics of modernist poetry. It made it so that language could be edited down to seem artificial, and it also at the same time made the mechanical reproduction of poetry easier. So it was this kind of generation of distance and proliferation that made poetry’s intent… Hmm… Unclear. It’s what led people to think of modernist poetry as insincere. They thought they were being duped somehow.\n(40:25):\tPhone Voice 1\tIt’s funny, the ambiguity surrounding the intent of modernist poetry reminds me of some conversations I’ve had about David Antin. Have you heard of him? [Phone Voice 2 affirms with a “mhmm”]\nHe was this conceptual artist who in the 1960s started performing these improvised talk poems at readings and exhibitions. What he would do is come up with a theme beforehand, or sometimes whoever was getting him to perform would give him the preassigned topic, and then he would talk off the cuff sometimes for an hour, hour and a half at a time.\n\nMeanwhile, he would use a tape recorder to record the whole thing, then go home and transcribe the work onto the page. But even before the transcription, Antin was really adamant that what he was doing wasn’t just talk or like a means to communicate something else through it. Rather, his talk was actually poetry. It had this distinct aesthetic quality.\n\n(41:09)\tPhone Voice 2\tLet me get this straight. The talk itself wasn’t necessarily adhering to a regular meter or rhyme? So what is it about the practice that makes talk poetry?\n(41:18)\tPhone Voice 1\tWell, that’s part of it, right? What enabled Antin to define his talk as poetry was that he had defined himself as a poet from the outset. You know, someone who gets contracted to perform poetry allowed at universities. And actually most of his poems are preoccupied with the institutional forces that make something like poetry happen or legible in the first place.\nLiterally, the opening lines from the written text of “Talking at the Boundaries” starts with him recounting getting contracted to perform the poem. Antin writes, “when I agreed to come here to Indiana, Barry Alpert didn’t have a title for what I was gonna talk about. I think maybe he forgot to ask me, which was I suppose just as well.” And on and on and on. [Sound Effect: Take being put in player and someone pressing start]\n\n(42:01)\tClip of David Antin  from “Talking at the Boundaries”\tWhen, uh, I agreed to come out here to talk, Barry didn’t have a title for what I was going to talk about. I think maybe he forgot to ask me, and I think it probably didn’t make a terrible great difference. Uh, it was probably six or one half dozen or the other, whatever you called it. But, uh, he did wind up with a title, which somehow reached me, some voucher form came back to me in the mail that I had to sign, and then I signed in the wrong place and I had to sign it again.\nBut on it, it said what I was gonna talk about. And I was very relieved because, uh, until then I thought I would have to find out myself. But it said, “talking at the boundaries.” And, uh, I think in a way it was kind of a great piece of good fortune to encounter my subject on a voucher and in a sense… [Audio fades] [Sound Effect: Tape stops]\n\n(42:55):\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. That’s interesting. On one hand, I can see how Antin’s self-consciousness about the institution of poetry can be read as kind of maddening or self-indulgent. On the other hand, well, I don’t know, like, do you consider the talk poem a genuine work of poetry? Or-\n[overlapping]\n\n(43:10)\tPhone Voice 1\t-Well, I guess-\n(43:12):\tPhone Voice 2\t-I dunno. Oh, no, sorry. You Go ahead-\n(43:13)\tPhone Voice 1\tNo, I was just gonna say, well, yeah, I guess the proliferation of new recording technologies like the typewriter in the case of modernist poetry or the tape recorder Antin used to record as poems generate a kind of multiplicity of artworks in our society that don’t necessarily allow for the focus or time or one-on-one interactions required to establish sincerity.\nLeonard Diepeveen argues that because of this in the 20th century, people had to come to rely more and more on news signs of sincerity, like the professional certification to attest to a person or a work’s genuineness. I think Antin’s playing with this idea, his poems are sincere in so much as they’re insincere. He knows he needs to market himself as a professional poet or performing artist to get the university to pay him to perform in the first place. But then again…\n\n(44:01)\tPhone Voice 2\tThen again?\n(44:02):\tPhone Voice 1\tI don’t know, it seems to me like the talk poems portray so much an interest in conversation in the first place. Like, there’s this funny conversation, Antin recounts between him and his cab driver in “Talking at the Boundaries”. Here, I’ll play the clip. [Sound Effect: Tape being put in player and starting]\n(44:18):\tClip of David Antin from “Talking at the Boundaries”\tAnd he said things were like that then. He says, it’s not like that now. He says, now everybody’s got money. He says, I don’t have money. He says, everybody’s got money. My children now have money. He says, so much money. He told me they sent me to Israel for my vacation. I said, they sent you to Israel for your vacation. I said, was it dangerous? Uh, he said, um, he said, well, dangerous. He says, like, they said to me, what do you want? Do you want to go to the islands? What do you want? They’ll send you, they’ll send you anywhere. What do you want? And he said, I’ll go to Israel. So I went to Israel. I said, for long? Did you get a good look at it? What was it like? He said, well, he said, I really saw it. He said, I was there for five days. He said, one of those tours you got at Athens and Rome, and then you go to Israel. And I said, that’s great. I said, you know, like, uh, did you stay in one place for the five days? He said, no. He says, I went all around. He says it’s a very interesting place. [Audio fades] [Sound effect: Tape ends]\n(45:09):\tNarrator\tNotice how many times in this clip Antin repeats the word, said, his recollection of verbatim dialogue signals to me, this kind of sincere interest in the poetics of talk more generally, the way it generates this rich, sad, and often funny social life we co-create or yeah, I guess it returns to talk this kind of especially poetic quality.\nAnd for me, these rambling kind of elliptical accounts of other conversations that populate Antin’s work, they’re doing something like Erving Goffman’s idea about eye contact. They don’t mean anything but a desire to participate in social life in the first place. I see in Anton’s preoccupation with representing conversation in literature, my own preoccupation with the study of literature. I’m interested in books the way I’m interested in people.\n\n(45:57):\tPhone Voice 2\tThat’s nice. [laughs] A little cheesy, but nice.\n(46:02):\tPhone Voice 1\tDo you want me to open up to you or not? [laughs] No, that’s actually fair of you to make fun of me for that. I maybe wasn’t being totally sincere. And by that I mean I was actually quoting someone else. This book critic Parul Sehgal. I’m thinking about an interview where she’s asked about the initial process of marking up a book for review. Here, let me pull it up. [Sound effect: Old Dial Up sound effect]\n(46:25):\tParul Sehgal\tMy inclinations are so much, I think maybe a little eccentric in the sense that I’m interested in the way that texts can be like people, you know, they can falter, they can fumble, they can have secrets from themselves. They can be very flawed and very, very beautiful and very, very noble. All of these adjectives, I think, are more interesting to me than good or best even.\n(46:45):\tPodcast Host\tSo, you’re, you’re sort of like figuring out what you think as you write.\n(46:48)\tParul Sehgal\tYeah, I think that I only think when I’m writing, I think it just goes blank when I’m not writing. [laughs]\n(46:53)\tPodcast Host\tLike you’re not taking like, uh-\n(46:54):\tParul Sehgal\tNo, I take notes. I take notes and I’m like in the margins and it’s just like, you know, all my gormless checks and, you know, um, sad faces and all that’s happening there. But-\n(47:01):\tPodcast Host\tWait, you use sad faces.\n(47:03):\tParul Sehgal\t[laughs] All kinds of embarrassing marginalia.\n(47:07)\tPodcast Host\tBut tell me about it. No, but it’s, I want to know how you do your job!\n(47:08)\tParul Sehgal\tI mean, I, I talk a lot back to the book in the margins. You know, um, there’s definitely a lot of, I mean it’s stuff some, some of it, I’m flagging it for myself, but there is also a real way that, yeah, you’re reading this book and you’re reacting to it constantly, you know? I’m not gonna give you any more embarrassing stories about you. No [laughs]. I know, but yeah. But it’s, I mean like it’s-\n \n\n(47:32):\tPhone Voice 1\tI’m interested in the way Sehgal frames the initial critical impulse as a kind of conversation, what she refers to as “talking back to the book in the margins.” Funny too, that this marginalia, really the work of the book critic, should be seen as something embarrassing, maybe because it’s too sincere or impressionistic to be taken for a professional practice. Or maybe because talking back to the book in the margins too closely resembles talking to yourself, which at least in our society is kind of a faux pas.\n(48:02)\tPhone Voice 2\tIs it? I wouldn’t know.\n(48:05)\tPhone Voice 1\t[laughs] [And then sarcastically] Oh my God, so funny. Haha.\n[Seriously]\n\nNo, but I mean, speaking about things that are embarrassingly sincere, talking to Ben and Mirdhula reminded me of the way I sometimes markup favorite passages for my own text with this kind of shorthand,  m m m, which stands for hmm. But when I think about it, I only really do it for passages that really moved me, but I can’t quite articulate why.\n\n(48:34)\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. This kind of initial sonic or onomatopoeic response to text you’re talking about is reminding me of a passage from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. I’ll pull it up. Although be warned, it’s kind of sexy, [laughs] Ahem, here it is:\n[Music Begins: soft electronic tones]\n\n“Writing aloud is not phonological, but phonetic, its aim is not the clarity of messages. What it searches for are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh. A text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal\n\nstereophony.”\n\n[Music ends]\n\nI guess I take Barthes’ idea of reading aloud as a kind of metaphor for the sonic aspect of the way text elicits a bodily response. I read into your own marginalia a kind of textual representation of the sonic expression of the way text moves you. That hmm, is articulated as a kind of expressivism incident, to use Barthe’s terms. It makes me think too of Wordsworth, you know, for him what sincerity was, was expression itself, which is interesting, right? Because that word means two things. There’s artistic expression and then expression as vocalization.\n\nThe romantic idea of expression is tied mostly to a sense of overwhelming emotion that needs to be expelled from the body somehow. And they developed conventions for this in writing that epitaph or the elegy were seen as more sincere because they were tied so strongly to this overwhelming emotion. But I guess from Barthes, we also get the sense that emotion is so overwhelming it can’t necessarily be bound by any form.\n\nThe response that elicits from you is totally bodily. I see a parallel to this idea in Ben’s sense that conversation is more sincere than writing because it’s less conventional. It can’t be edited in real time. Or maybe the lack of the edit is its own convention, which is symbolized for me, at least by this hmm noise. [Music Begins: jazzy piano] And to return to Barthes, there’s pleasure in that, I think.\n\n(50:31)\tPhone Voice 1\tWait, what do you mean “there’s pleasure in that”?\n(50:34)\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, for me it’s the pleasure of recognition. I see my own ability to hesitate in speech in someone else’s, and that suits me. You know, this version of me that’s always rehearsing what I’m gonna say and then inevitably fumbles when the time comes.\n(50:46)\tPhone Voice 1\tNow, I didn’t think you did so bad there.\n(50:49):\tPhone Voice 2\t[laughs] You mean that?\n(50:51)\tPhone Voice 1\tI do. I really, really do.\n(50:58)\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. [laughs] Hmm.\n(51:01)\tNarrator\tOkay. Time to cut the tape. Enough of this genuine conversation. I talk about this too much. [Music ends]\nSpecial thanks to Hannah Cogan, Ben Heywood-MacLeod and  Mirdhula Kannapathapillai. Although their audio didn’t make the cut, my conversations with Alia Hazineh, Barbara Saldana, and Matt Fyfe informed a part of my thinking for this podcast. [Music Begins: Soft tones with the sound of wind rushing through trees]\n\nThe inimitable Matthew King performed the voice of Charles Dickens.\n\n(51:31)\tScrooge\tBa humbug! [Music ends]\n(51:47):\tKatherine McLeod\t[Music Begins: SpokenWeb outro music]\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Francis Grace Fife, an MA student at Concordia University, and a research assistant on the Concordia SpokenWeb team.\n\nOur supervising producer is Kate Moffatt, our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. Special thanks to the interviewees and voice actors of the episode, Hannah Kogan, Ben Haywood, Mirdhula Kannapathapillai, and Matthew King. And thanks to Jason Camlot for providing early initial script and audio feedback.\n\n[Music fades into the SpokenWeb theme music]\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades and ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9596","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E5, The Affordances of Sound, 6 March 2023, Eastwood"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-affordances-of-sound/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/b3e0dc23-17dd-48c0-baf1-37efbe9e6ac2/audio/b69f4a17-24df-4ac2-b188-4b76a967ed1f/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e5.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:53:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"51,756,765 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e5\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-affordances-of-sound/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-03-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. 1992. ‘General Introduction’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.\\n\\nBrinkmann, M. (2018) The ‘audio walk’ as a format of experiential walking, Phenomenological research in education. Available at: https://paed.ophen.org/2018/06/25/gehen-spazieren-flanieren-das-format-audiowalk-als-erfahrungsgang/\\n\\nCardiff, J. and Miller, G.B. (no date) Walks, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Available at: https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/\\n\\nGrint, K. and Woolgar, S. 1997. The Machine At Work. Cambridge: Polity.\\n\\nHutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42856294. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.\\n\\nKellough, Kaie, et al. “‘Small Stones’: A Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography.” “Small Stones”: a Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography – SpokenWeb Archive of the Present, https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/small-stones-a-work-in-poetry-sound-music-and-typography/.\\n\\nLevine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine, host. “The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts, Season 3, Episode 5.\\n\\nMills, Mara. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press, 2015. “deafness” p.45-54.\\n\\nRicci, Stephanie. The Making of “Small Stones” (2021) SpokenWeb Archive of the Present. SpokenWeb.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549535850496,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What is sound design? This is the question Miranda Eastwood, current Sound Designer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, is looking to find out. Exploring soundscapes of all shapes and forms, Miranda draws from interviews with friends, colleagues, and academics, as well as Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network to tackle this particularly tangled question. From sonic literature to audio walks, podcasting to music, this episode is a deep dive into what it means to “sound out” any and all audio texts, and the affective power afforded to sound as a medium of art and communication.\n\n(00:05)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music ends]\n(00:34)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Back in 2019, when the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast was coming together, a big question for our team was, what do we want the podcast to sound like? We ended up deciding that we didn’t want to be prescriptive.\nWe wanted SpokenWeb researchers listening to the podcast and thinking about pitching an episode themselves to really know that the podcast welcomes all approaches when it comes to what your research about sound sounds like, and that we are there as an editorial team to collaboratively shape the sound design of each episode. But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about sound design? Fast forward to the fall of 2020 in Jason Camlot’s grad seminar at Concordia University on sonic approaches, where current spoken web podcast, sound designer Miranda Eastwood, was faced with the question, what is sound design?\n\nThe question of sound design sent Miranda Eastwood on an epic sonic journey, armed with their own experience, scholarly literature on the topic, and interviews with a wide ranging cast of individuals engaging in sound design in their own work. This episode, whens its way through both the theoretical and the practical.\n\nThe episode itself is exploring the affordances of sound, including how the medium is both a form to be used and a space in which to play. What does it sound like to ask the question, “what is sound design” on a podcast all about literary sound? Well, that’s what you are about to hear. Here’s episode five of season four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, The Affordances of Sound. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music plays and then fades]\n\n(2:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[deep breath] Yeah, okay. [Piano music begins]\n(02:45)\tElevator\tSixth floor.\n(02:47):\tMiranda Eastwood\tAlright, come on. Here we go. [sound effect: footsteps walking]\nWe’re in the English Department right now at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal. I’m Miranda, by the way. I’m also currently the sound designer for the SpokenWeb podcast, and right now I’m taking you to Professor Jason Camlot’s weekly seminar course, Sonic Approaches. [sound effect: door opens] [piano music ends]\n\n(03:12)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSo I was doing my presentation on podcasting in Jason’s seminar.\n(03:16)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI just finished one of our assignments, a presentation.\n(03:20)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd I kept throwing around the term sound design.\n(03:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI volunteered to go on the week in which we covered scholarly podcasting.\n(03:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tLike, remember to start thinking about sound design early on, or you might want to consider sound design before you start recording, you know, stuff like that.\n(03:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBig surprise.\n(03:39)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tThen Jason says something along the lines of we’re going to move on, but we’ll circle back to that term, Miranda, and we’ll get you to tell everyone what sound design is. And I just blanked, I just blanked for 30 seconds because I was sitting there like, I don’t know what sound design is.\n(04:01)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[Piano music begins] Oh boy. The sound designer doesn’t know what sound design is.\n(04:05)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOr at least, I know what it is, but I don’t, I don’t know how to describe it. Not in a way that makes any sense.\n(04:13)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo I did some research.\n(04:15)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tYou know, Google doesn’t count as research, right?\n(04:18)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd I got some definitions.\n(04:21)\tMultiple Voices\t[Piano music fades and ends] The art and practice of creating soundtracks for a variety of needs, creating the audio, the craft of creating an old term, which describes….\n(04:31)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tThese definitions. They don’t tell you anything. Some of them are too specific or too vague or they focus in on one aspect of the process. They describe one design choice rather than the series of choices as a whole or, or these definitions don’t even begin to cover the question. It’s too big. This…\n(04:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis could be a podcast episode.\n(05:02)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\t[Piano music begins and ends] Ah, okay.\n(05:03)\tJason Camlot\tSo where are you at with things?\n(05:05)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWell, maybe I’ll just, I’ll do like a quick speed run of my outline. It’s no,t like this is really…\n(05:11)\tMiranda Eastwood\tReally fast forward a week or two or three. Let me get the syllabus.\n(05:16)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThere’s gonna be a lot of back and forth. There’s a lot of overlap between…\n(05:20)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSee, part of the seminar course was the option to tackle a long form podcast.\n(05:26)\tJason Camlot\tAre you doing short form, longform?\n(05:27)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYes.\n(05:29)\tJason Camlot\tOkay.\n(05:29):\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAbsolutely. Why on earth would I write an essay when I could make a podcast?\n(05:33)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Laughs] So like, would any good student I pitched my idea to Jason.\n(05:37)\tJason Camlot\tOn air! [Laughs]. Hi, I’m Jason. I’m a professor in the department of English at Concordia University and a Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound studies.\n(05:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tDo you have that, is that like a script in your head that you just like…\n(05:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tLike I mentioned, this all started with his seminar.\n(05:55)\tJason Camlot\tPutting your key concepts front and centre…\n(05:58)\tMiranda Eastwood (05:58)\tSo I got some feedback and he gave me a book. Forms: Whole. Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Carolyn Levine. Good book. Great book. And I’m going to be using it to build a roadmap, so to speak, based off Levine’s concepts of forms and of affordances.\n(06:19)\tJason Camlot\tAnd reminding us of them, you know and sort of making it almost like a quest narrative for…\n(06:26)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tA quest narrative. I like that. I like that a lot.\n(06:33)\tMiranda Eastwood\tA quest! [Videogame music plays and ends] Here’s our game plan. [Soft electronic music begins]\nWe’re going to rely on Levine’s five main ideas about forms in order to navigate different genres of sound. What are the five ideas?\n\n(06:44)\tMultiple Voices\tForms. differ, forms do political work in particular historical context, forms travel, forms, constraints, various forms, overlap and intersect.\n(06:55)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhat are the genres?\n(06:56)\tMultiple Voices\tVoice, podcasting, music, audio walks and sound effects.\n(07:01)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDid you get all that?\n(07:02):\tMultiple Voices\tUh no.\n(07:04):\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’ll come back to them. Tackle them one by one. Our weapon of choice: affordances. Paraphrasing from Levine, who’s borrowing from design theory, “Affordances are the potential actions or uses of a material based on, well, the object itself, the teapot, for example, is very good at what it does because its form and material lend themselves to pouring tea and keeping hot liquids contained. This is due partially to the ceramic and partially to the fact that the teapot has a spout and a handle.”\nAnother example, this one’s from Levine, is the doorknob. A doorknob affords not only hardness and durability, but also turning, pushing and pulling. Outside of its design, certain materials and forms can also have unexpected affordances, like using a chair to get to that top shelf or substituting a mug for a flower pot. Likewise, forms also have limitations, but we’ll get to that later. For now, we’re going to use this idea of affordances as a blade.\n\n[Sound effect: Sword unsheathing]\n\nYes. A sword that will help us cut through the jungle of interconnected forms and navigate the landscape of genre, right up to the moment where we face the ultimate question. Our proverbial dragon. What is sound design? [Music fades and ends]\n\n(08:46):\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[People talking in the background] Excuse me. Pardon. Scusez. Merci. Sorry. Phew.\n(08:49):\tMiranda Eastwood\tHey, how’s it going? I’m not late, am I? Good? Good. We’re sitting in the crowd at the Casa del Popolo. It’s March, 2020. Kaie Kellough, Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, and Jason Sharp are performing their piece tonight, Small Stones. While they’re setting up, I thought we could talk a bit about forms. Yeah. I’ve been throwing the concept of form around like a hacky sack, so I figured I should explain beyond the main ideas. Going back to Levine… Forms are a sort of indication, an arrangement or pattern, a shape, something identifiable. Sounds vague? Yeah, it kind of is, but this inclusive definition allows us to break down Levine’s ideas and use them to our advantage. The first main idea we’ll look at is this:\n(09:51)\t(onstage) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking on stage] Forms differ.\n(09:53)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDistinct forms are different from each other. Easy enough, right? Right. [Sound effect of mic feedback] Oh, they’re just about ready to start. [background talking spots]\n(10:05)\tJason Sharp (off mic, barely audible)\tSo like we, we do what we were just doing…\n(10:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI thought it’d be nice to start here with Kellough, with voice, the voice as it’s featured in poetry, music, podcasting, everywhere and anywhere in audio texts. [Sound effect of mic feedback] [Calm electronic music begins]\nI think it’s a good way to explore this idea of forms differing from one another because this voice, this performance, we’re about to hear… this never happened. [Music ends]\n\n(10:37)\t(onstage) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking on stage]\nHi. Hey. Yeah. Does anyone remember March, 2020? COVID 19. “Small Stones” was originally planned as a live performance.\n\n(10:49)\tKaie Kellough\tThis work was supposed to be a performance, like a live in-person performance.\n(10:53)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Kaie Kellough, from an interview from “The Making of Small Stones”.\n(11:00)\tKaie Kellough\tBut because of COVID, that was no longer possible because this was originally scheduled, I think for 2020.\n(11:06)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis migration of form, from a physical space to a virtual space. I mean, it begs the question: how does this change the nature of the piece itself?\n(11:17)\tKaie Kellough\tIt was generally decided that an in-person performance wouldn’t work as well, and it would be very complex because we would need to rent a venue if we wanted to present a live performance.\n(11:31)\tMiranda Eastwood\tKatherine McLeod, current host of the podcast actually had a talk with Kellough about this exact topic, but from an alternate angle. In ShortCuts Season 3, “The Voice That Is The Poem”, Katherine and Kaie revisit a piece he performed as part of an online Words and Music show. In that interview, he talks about the difference between a live piece and a studio-produced piece, the exact opposite of what we were just discussing.\n(11:58)\tKaie Kellough\tThere’s a raw, rawer quality to it than… Like, if this were made in a studio, it would’ve been a different piece because it would’ve been created for audio, right? It would’ve been created exclusively as an audio piece, and there would’ve been really limited emphasis on the visual aspect of performance and that communication with an audience, it would’ve been a much more, it would’ve been elaborate in a different way as a sonic object.\n(12:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Quiet string music begins]\nThe voice, manifested in these separate situations has its own set of affordances, even if as Levine tells us, no one has yet taken advantage of those possibilities and also to their limits, the restrictions intrinsic to particular materials and organizing principles.\n\n(12:41)\tKaie Kellough\tIn the studio, it’s a bit different. You wind up assembling the piece part by part.\n(12:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou can manipulate the voice in different ways.\n(12:49)\tKaie Kellough\tAnd then if you can overlap them or layer them or have them speak across one another and sometimes sync up and sometimes diverge, then it becomes not just multiple voices, but it becomes an interplay among multiple voices, sort of directed movement. [String music ends]\n(13:09)\tJason Sharp\tDoing so in the studio gives us a really unique opportunity to use the studio as an instrument.\n(13:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Jason Sharp, the musician behind “Small Stones”.\n(13:19)\tJason Sharp\tIt allows us to kind of, to compose using a wider sonic palette while still being sourced with just a saxophone and voice.\n(13:30)\tMiranda Eastwood\tRestricting the performance to a studio, then, can open or widen the soundscape of a piece.\n(13:36)\tKaie Kellough\tAnd then what happens when you have multiple voices? What do you do with them?\n(13:39)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAn affordance, born of limitation.\n(13:42)\tKaie Kellough\tWe’re trying to take a very broad approach to sound. So everything from sharp high screams to low brassy pulses like you’re hearing now. [Low electronic music begins] We’re trying to explore sound. So sound, to me, also relates to exploration and listening.\n(14:04)\t[Beginning of\nSmall Stones plays]\t[Audio fades in] The chronicles of [inaudible] relate that in remote times… at the auction of a circus. [Audio fades out]\n(14:22)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to shortcuts. [ShortCuts theme music plays briefly and fades]\n(14:27)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis concept of multiple voices is very interesting to me. Digitally we can layer voices. Similarly, with effect pedals, we can loop and layer vocals to, in Kellough’s words, “make the sonic field a little bit richer”. But what about your voice, the quality of a single voice working in different ways?\n(14:51)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn that summer I had the opportunity to work on the first episode, so…[Laughs] [Sound fades}\n(14:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis Is From a very lucky interview I had with Katherine Mcleod, current host of the podcast, longtime host of Shortcuts, and the producer of the SpokenWeb podcast’s very first episode.\n(15:10)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWe’re, we’re here at the podcast studio at Concordia University.\n(15:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSomething I would hear a lot during Jason Camlot’s seminar on sound was the phrase, “I hate listening to myself. I hate the sound of my own voice.”\n(15:25)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s, everybody hates the sound of their own voice. It’s just you hear yourself and, and there’s that, it’s weird. It’s like, ooh, is that, is that what I sound like? [Laughs]\n(15:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt’s a common expression, but the real statement here is: “I don’t sound the way I want to sound.” [Soft piano music begins to play]\nBut then… What would you like to sound like?\n\n(15:48)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tFilling slots for season one, you mentioned that there was a struggle for that, and I think you mentioned that part of that was that apprehension to working with sound and to going into what is perceived as a very technical field and then putting your work out there. And, and there’s that common question that comes up is like, I don’t, I don’t know if this is a good idea or not, and it’s like every idea is a good idea. [Laughs]\n(16:13)\tKatherine McLeod\tBut knowing that, that that idea is gonna be in public is it, is there’s, there’s apprehension about it. Also, something that often first time producers will comment on is that hearing themselves speak, hearing a recording of themselves speak… It will just be such a sort of process of just letting go of a lot of the ways that we hear ourselves and often really judge ourselves.\n(16:43)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, yeah, I don’t know how many…[Piano music ends]\n(16:45):\tMiranda Eastwood\tThere seems to be an immaterial standard of voice. A voice towards which we all reach or compare ourselves to. It’s different for everyone, you know, based on ourselves. But that standard can get in the way of artistic creation.\n(17:02)\tKatherine McLeod\tThis is something that Hannah McGregor has talked about quite extensively around voice, is the idea of like, how does the voice have authority and what or what do we think of when we think of a voice that has authority? And I think that sometimes when we hear ourselves if we don’t think that we sound authoritative, we can think, oh, oh no, I don’t, I don’t want this to be in public.\nBut then realizing that, well, I think we, we just, we have a… [Laughs] When we evaluate our own voices, we often don’t think that they sound authoritative. Whereas we’d be very, you know, easily I could say, oh, you, you, you sound like you know what you’re talking about. [Laughs] But it could, it might, we might be much, again, harder on ourselves.\n\n(17:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tNot just in relation to the voice, but in podcasting itself.\n(17:50)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, I was gonna ask about that. Like doing the first podcast episode. Like to me, like, that sounds like a lot of pressure, [laughs] that sounds, that sounds very, like, did you have, going into that, did you have a notion, like a sort of standard that you set yourself for that episode? Did you have an idea in mind going into it, or was it sort of just like, I don’t know what I’m doing and we’ll see what happens? [SpokenWeb theme music plays]\n(18:17)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n(18:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYes. Podcasting! Finally, we get to take a look at podcasting, academic podcasting ,to be specific.\n(18:33)\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, for the, for the SpokenWeb podcast, I would say that the idea has always been there from the beginning, in the sense that when SpokenWeb became a Cross-Canada partnership in 2018, that there was really an interest in making literary criticism that was also exploring sonic possibilities. So there was discussion right away from the beginning about having a podcast as part of the research dissemination.\n(19:03)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhich makes sense, right? I mean, SpokenWeb. Spoke, speak, sound. It seems obvious, but maybe it wouldn’t be as obvious just a few years ago. [Low string music begins]\n(19:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tI remember in 2019 when we had our first SpokenWeb institute at SFU, Hannah gave a presentation to try to show the SpokenWeb researchers in the room how podcasting was very accessible. We had to, you know, gather into groups and come up with a pitch for an idea for an episode. And it was really exciting to see everyone kind of thinking about this possibility, ’cause I think that it was, it was something at that point that nobody had really thought about.\n(19:51)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn my interview with Katherine, we touch on and explore a second idea relating to forms. That is, forms do political work, in particular historical contexts.\n[Music swells and then fades]\n\n(20:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. And even the way that the podcast forum is rooted in more of like a DIY culture where you know, it’s not necessary, it’s not something that is supposed to be made sort of at the sort of top down. It’s supposed to be coming from a grassroots place of just being able to record a conversation or work with some sounds and make it yourself, basically. So that sense of it being accessible and something that, again, doesn’t have to sound perfect. [Laughs]\n(20:44)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn Levine’s words, “forms […] shape what it is possible to think, say, and do, in a given context.” This idea provides somewhat of an answer to Grint and Woolgar’s question, “Does technology determine, or is it determined by the social?”\n(21:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tAs you know, as academics, there’s such a push for the finished product to be really polished, as polished as possible. And again, the podcast can still be rigorous places for thinking, but they don’t have to sound the same as an academic paper.\n(21:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSurprise! It’s both.\n(21:24)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tLike, that was a decision that you, you sat down and you were like, do we wanna set a structure for the podcast, or do we just invite anyone to come in and, and do what they wanna do?\n(21:36)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Quiet electronic music begins] The decision was to be as open as possible in terms of the kinds of sounds that people wanted to bring to the table and the kinds of approaches that they wanted to take with their episode.\n(21:45)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThe idea was to build a podcast that reflected the ideas of researchers, rather than suggesting a rigid structure for episodes to follow, producers can arrange each episode to reflect their research strategies. Audio essays, panel talks, and interviews, all make an appearance in the SpokenWeb podcast. Just recently, we’ve released an episode based on a dramatic script.\n(22:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tI think that we also kind of by chance in terms of which episodes we were pitched the first season, really does show that very well too, because we have an episode that Kate Mofatt made with very raw audio that was recorded at that SpokenWeb symposium and institute in 2019, not knowing that it would become part of a podcast, but it did. And she was able to edit the audio, but also then interview one of the panelists afterwards.\nAnd so there was both a sense of hearing the raw audio and then also adding an interview to it. But that episode is a great example of being able to work with what you have and make something really exciting out of it. [Music ends]\n\n(22:55)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut these, these genres of podcasting, they’re still established forms. There is a right way to do an audio essay as well as an interview. There is a version of a podcast episode that works or does what it’s supposed to, what it’s designed to do.\n(23:15)\tKatherine McLeod\tThere’s a responsibility and a creativity to that process.\n(23:20)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIf your episode doesn’t end up doing what it’s supposed to do, is that a failure in sound design? A lack, maybe, of design? Or maybe even overly designed, overly produced? [Sound effect of someone walking on gravel] What would that even sound like?\n(23:44)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThis.. is not an audio walk. I mean, depending on the definition. I’m walking. You might be walking too. If you are walking, does that not make this whole episode an audio walk?\n(24:00)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’re up to our third idea about forms.\n(24:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tI’m on Mount Royal, by the way.\n(24:09)\tMiranda Eastwood\tForms travel.\n(24:11):\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tLevine’s point with this one is that, that forms travel across time and space.\n(24:18)\tMiranda Eastwood\tCheesy. I know. Introducing this concept with an audio walk.\n(24:22)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tYou’ve gotta start somewhere.\n(24:24)\tJason Camlot\tI think that’s a great place to start.\n(24:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tHopping on back to office hours with Professor Jason Camlot.\n(24:30)\tJason Camlot\tBut there are audio walks that don’t require technologies, right?\n(24:35)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(24:36)\tJason Camlot\tYou can just go walking and listening.\n(24:38)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(24:38)\tJason Camlot\tAnd that’s a sound walk, right? You might say, we don’t hear much more when we’re walking without headphones than we’re here with headphones.\n(24:46)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(24:46)\tJason Camlot\tIf we’re not actually trained or intentionally trying to listen, right?\n(24:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMm-hmm.\n(24:50)\tJason Camlot\tSo that it might be, I think it’s important… No matter what you’re talking about in terms of sound design, remember that our hearing is already mediated, right?\n(25:04)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(25:04)\tJason Camlot\tEven without using technology extensions, right? You know…\n(25:08)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Plucked strings music begins to play] But a unifying function of most audio walks, to paraphrase Malte Brinkmann, is an effort to reframe the individual, the walking subject, and to draw our attention to our own perception and observation of what surrounds us. That being said…\n(25:26)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThose walks, you don’t, you don’t really want to be following a map when you listen. It’s overwhelming. For a reason. Of course, they’re meant to be immersive. Maybe that’s just the way this form of the audio walk is evolving.\n(25:45)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI’m quoting Bijker and Law here, “Technologies do not have a momentum of their own at the outset that allows them to pass through a neutral social medium. Rather, they are subject to contingency as they pass from figurative hand to hand, and so are shaped and reshaped. Sometimes they disappear altogether. No one felt moved or was obliged to pass them on. At other times. They take novel forms or are subverted by users to be employed in ways quite different from those for which they were originally intended.” [String music ends]\n(26:26)\tJason Camlot\tAnd what else do you see here that’s really weird?\n(26:27)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(26:28)\tJason Camlot\tOh, two headphone jacks. That’s a really great device. All metal casing. [Laughs]\n(26:34)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah. Nice, nice brick in your pocket.\n(26:35)\tJason Camlot\tYeah.\n(26:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\tJason showed me a button on the original Walkman.\n(26:39)\tJason Camlot\tI actually have one still. It doesn’t work anymore, but I may get it repaired one day.\n(26:43)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah. Well, what’s the big yellow button?\n(26:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOn his computer. Not in real life.\n(26:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, that’s a mic.\n(26:49)\tMiranda Eastwood\tUnfortunately.\n(26:50)\tJason Camlot\tSee That? So there’s a mic on it.\n(26:53)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. Just for the podcast to know, I’m at an angle from Jason’s computer, [laughs], like, this isn’t me being-\n(26:57)\tJason Camlot\tAnd we’re zooming in on an image of the first Walkman TPS- L2 model.\n(27:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut it is a button that allows you to switch from listening to your tape, to your surroundings. A sort of anti-isolation.\n(27:15)\tJason Camlot\tThere was a fear of one’s listening being blocked out from one’s actual environment. And if you press this button, it would pick up sound from the outside through this microphone. It could not record, but it was designed to hear the outside world.\n(27:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDespite this being “old” technology, we’ve recently seen a resurgence in demand for headphones that offer an ambient noise function. That is, they let you hear your surroundings with the push of a button.\n(27:47)\tJason Camlot\tBut it went away after-\n(27:47)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tI did come back-\n(27:48)\tJason Camlot\tWell- Did it come back?\n(27:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tIt has come back.\n(27:50)\tJason Camlot\tAnd why…?\n(27:50)\tMiranda Eastwood\tTechnologies travel. Sometimes they go in circles.\n(27:56)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking in gravel]\nOh, should’ve… Okay. I should have went left. I think I’m caught in a loop.\n\n(28:09)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAll right, kiddos, we set?\n(28:10)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah, I think so.\n(28:12)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOkay. So here’s one thing about those definitions from the beginning, those definitions on what sound design is. A lot of them, for me, only capture a part of the process, a moment.\n(28:25)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tAs opposed to having to go up. Because I, I like, I don’t know, it just feels like there’s more abilities here than there is…\n(28:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd it’s true. Sitting down with an arsenal of sounds and trying to make them into something cohesive can and usually is the most time consuming part of the process. But what about recording?\n(28:44)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAre we set?\n(28:47)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah, I think so.\n(28:48)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Kaitlyn.\n(28:50)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t[Laughs] Do you wanna, do you wanna take a moment?\n(28:51)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tNo, I think I’m good.\n(28:53)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay.\n(28:54)\tKaitlyn Staveley\t[Piano music begins to play]\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn and I am Miranda’s friend.\n\n(28:58)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tUh, No. [laughs]\n(28:59)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tWait, we’re not friends? This is news to me. [both laugh]\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley, and I’m a full-time cat servant. [both laugh]\n\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley and I’m gonna sing a song. [laughs]\n\n[Music fades and ends]\n\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley. I am a hobbyist musician, singer and artist.\n\n(29:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is us in my home studio working on some vocals for a Christmas collaboration.\n(29:31)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tAnd it was just giving me…\n(29:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt took us about two hours for two minutes.\n(29:38)\tKaitlyn Staveley (singing)\tDecorations of red.\n(29:41)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tIt’s clipping.\n(29:42)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, it’s definitely… Alright, we’re gonna tune it down.\n(29:44)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThe majority of those hours being spent on decisions.\n(29:48)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tCan we perhaps scoot this one over because I need to be able to see the lyrics? Can we lower this just a little?\n(29:55)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOh yeah.\n(29:56)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tDo you have like a little, like a little seat? Because I feel more comfortable with my diaphragm down a bit as opposed to up, because… I was curious if maybe we could lower it all together and I can sit and sit maybe just a tiny bit lower? I’ll have a little sip of tea.\n(30:09)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, let’s have a sip of tea.\n(30:11)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tSorry.\n(30:12)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tNo, no, no. That’s why, that’s why this is…\n(30:13)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSound design begins long before you sit down at the computer.\n(30:18)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tExactly. If you’re gonna do it, just do it. [Piano music ends]\n(30:26)\tJames Healey\tSo it’s like the truest representation of the sound field at that time.\n(30:30)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThat, that statement just corroborated, ugh, Corroborated…. I’m gonna cut that one out. [laughs]\n(30:36)\tJames Healey\tCrimina!\n(30:36)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\t[Laughs]. Just, I keep saying-\n(30:37)\tJames Healey\tSound criminal.\n(30:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSometimes it starts at the studio at Concordia University. Again.\n(30:46)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAll right. That… Shouldn’t be humanly possible. [laughs] That’s the real mark of a musician. You can snap with all four fingers.\n(30:52)\tJames Healey\tThats. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how they know.\nMy name is James Healey. I work with sound and music. I specialize as a sound recordist in like, ambient music.\n\n(31:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThere’s no right way to set up a microphone. I mean, there are definitely wrong ways, but talking with James…\n(31:12)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since last week about your setup on that record we were listening to. Which was insane. There was a name for it…\n(31:23)\tJames Healey\tYeah. Yeah. So there were four microphones.\n(31:27)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI realized that sound design begins even before you set foot in the studio. Or wherever you happen to be recording.\n(31:35)\tJames Healey\tThree of the microphones were in an array known as a double mid-side. You can do an abbreviation M-S-M, so mid side mid. We’re gonna, as you say, unpack this a bit, and we’re gonna do a little bit of wave physics.\n(31:54)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh boy. My favorite. [laughs]\n(31:56)\tJames Healey\tHa, yes.\n(31:57)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo, I realize this isn’t the podcast to air a 20-minute conversation about wave physics, so we’ll fast forward through this one.\n[Sound effect of conversation fastforwarding]\n\n(32:09)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. But like, like what… That sounds like so much work. What’s the advantage here?\n(32:15)\tJames Healey\tSome stuff suffers for the good stuff. I mean, whatever turns out good is the good stuff, but then some stuff suffers and then if you don’t do it justice, you’ll find that in post you’re fighting against it in the mix rather than working with it. It’s very risky.\n[Electronic drum music begins]\n\nAnd the advantages, I think, kind of outweigh that. Using one mic configuration to pick up several sound sources live off the floor, essentially causes a compression of the sound sources together, kind of like a glue to your mix that is natural to the acoustics and the spacing.\n\n(33:02)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tNatural to, like, our hearing?\n(33:05)\tJames Healey\tIt’s, it’s natural and true to the room. It’s natural and true to how the sound sources are placed. It’s natural to their amplitude according to each other.\n(33:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd although James works in music, these recording setups could be applied to the design of any sound-based text. Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks, for example, use binaural recording; a method that more accurately captures the way we perceive sound. [Music ends]\n(33:32)\tJames Healey\tLike. I’m just like, I’ll hear the music and I’ll think of the record as like a whole. And I’ll think of the vibe to say something very not technical.\n(33:40)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAre there sound shenanigans that you’ve pulled off? Like similar, really interesting, I guess noteworthy?\n(33:47)\tJames Healey\tSo-\n(33:48)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tDo, do a rapid fire.\n(33:50)\tJames Healey\t[‘Soulless Days” by James Healy begins to play]\nOkay. The first record I ever made for a band would be a band called Dumpster Juice. And we just committed eight channels to four track cassette tape. I ended up doing some records in Dawson City Yukon, where I was running a recording studio over the winter up there doing some cool EPs in like, sort of this barn workshop in my friend’s loft of this like barn workshop in the woods there. And did some records in like negative 50 outside. It was, it was crazy. T\n\nhere was another one, the Wakefield session where I was studying the record, “The Trinity Session” by the Cowboy Junkies. So I did the same thing, but in a church in Wakefield, with the sound field microphone, and that’s the first record, I think, that was like really a professional piece of audio, but when I finally did it, I was like, wow. Like, it was not all in vain. It was very stressful. [Miranda laughs]\n\nYou know, I made a record. I have like some, an ambient project called Jupiter Machine where I made a record all to cassette tape.\n\n(34:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’re listening to it right now. This is “Soulless days”. You can check out the show notes for a link to the rest of the album. [“Soulless Days swells and fades]\nThe idea of an organic or natural sound… That’s not going to be the same across cultures, industries, or individuals. Sometimes you’ve just got to keep the context in mind.\n\n(35:26)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tI feel… maybe like one more take cuz it’s… I’m drying out.\n(35:31)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo, in terms of what form is doing here.\n(35:38)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay, I think we’re good. All right. Are we ready-Eddie-setti?\n(35:39)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah.\n(35:40)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOr what idea the form of recording represents.\n(35:43)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t3,2,1…\n(35:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tForms constrain.\n(35:50)\tKaitlyn Staveley (singing)\tI’ll have a blue Christmas without you. I’ll be so blue just thinking about you. You’ll be doin’ all right, with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.\n(36:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t[Miranda claps] Yay!\n(36:29)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tThank you. How was that? How does that sound? I didn’t hear it in the headphones.\n(36:35)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tWait, so what does that mean? Forms constrain? That doesn’t sound positive.\n(36:40)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhen we designate something as a specific form, we also designate its limits. The teapot includes the lid, but not the mug next to it. The sonnet is made of 14 lines, no more, no less. Or it isn’t a sonnet.\n(36:58)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tRight. Right.\n(36:58)\tMiranda Eastwood\tLet’s go back to affordances. Remember? What a form can do and what it can’t do or what it does badly. [Piano begins to play]\nTo quote Ian Hutchby: “the reason is that different technologies possess different affordances and these affordances constrain the ways that they can possibly be written or read. While a tree offers an enormous range of affordances for a vast variety of species, there are things a river can afford, which the tree cannot and vice versa.”\n\n[Music ends]\n\nI mean, it seems obvious when you put it like that, right? The thing is, we don’t really decide what forms are. If I put a sonnet in front of you and you refused to acknowledge it as such, the form of the sonnet wouldn’t seize to exist. That poem wouldn’t stop being a sonnet.\n\n(37:53)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tNo. If only I were that powerful.\n(37:57)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIdentifying forms is the first step to understanding how they work and what their affordances are. This might seem straightforward. After all, is sound not a form? Could we not simply explore the affordances of sound?\n(38:14)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tThat’s a bit ambitious, isn’t it?\n(38:17)\tMiranda Eastwood\tImpossibly ambitious. Sound is made up of multiple, countless other forms, or rather multiple countless other forms are made up of sound. Which, by the way, leads us to our final idea about forms.\n(38:32)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tForms overlap.\n(38:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd intersect.\n(38:39)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…Because it’s not… Yeah, no, Like that’s a nice sound. Wait, wait, just do. Oh-oh-oh yeah.\n(38:47)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThat’s me.\n(38:49)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWe look like fools. [Laughs]\n(38:50)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Laughs]. Oh yeah. And Ghislaine.\n(38:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tThis is fun. Hello, my name is Ghislaine Comeau and I am a PhD student at Concordia University where I study early medieval English literature.\n(39:04)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe spent a morning at Concordia University collecting sound effects for our short form podcast assignment.\n(39:10)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[String music begins]\nAnd secretly I am also an amateur artist.\n\n(39:16)\tMiranda Eastwood\tShe was also in Jason’s seminar.\n(39:19)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWith the clacking of the feets and the doors and an occasional plexiglass slider and keys.\n(39:28)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd she was after very specific sounds.\n(39:31)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tWe can take the zoom recorder and we can get footsteps like literally in the hallway.\n(39:34)\tGhislaine Comeau\tYeah, in the hallway.\n(39:35)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s Thursday morning-\n(39:36)\tGhislaine Comeau\tYeah. And it’s gonna, we’re gonna make it sound like a big fancy schmancy archive place in the hallway.\n(39:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou could call what we were doing Foley art.\n(39:49)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tRemember it’s not about like how-\n(39:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIt’s about all of it.\n(39:55)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s not about how leather actually sounds. It’s about how you think, how we would think leather sounds, you know, decontextualized from its environment. [Music ends]\n(40:06)\tMiranda Eastwood\tFoley art brings an environment to life through sound. From big things like thunder… [Sound effect of thunder plays]\nTo small things, like brushing dust off a hardcover book…[Sound effect of someone brushing dust off a book]\n\nFoley started in radio, but has since evolved into a term used primarily in film.\n\n(40:26)\tJames Healey\tThe concept of Foley plays with sort of this perception of source bonding.\n(40:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI talked a bit about Foley with James.\n(40:37)\tJames Healey\tI’ve done some post for a handful of short films, as well as one feature where there was some Foley involved, sort of like informal, you know, using rubbing on a table if they’re rubbing on something else or you know….\n(40:56)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(40:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn Foley, what you record is rarely the object you’re trying to imitate. The sound you capture will be more exaggerated, sharper, more focused. There’s a difference between sound as we experience it and sound effects.\n(41:13)\tJames Healey\t[Upbeat electronic music begins] So source bonding in electro acoustics is basically relating a sound to the context of its source, like attributing sonic characteristics to a certain sound source. And that is enforced by the visual on the screen and therefore sound also enforces the visual context as well. So they’re sort of acting in resonance.\n(41:40)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tI guess that’s why they call it Foley “art”. [Music ends]\n(41:42)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt’s although I will say that thunder from before? [Sound effect of thunder plays]\nI did get that one right outside my apartment. So not that it’s my goal to cover everything, because as mentioned, that would be insanely ambitious. But we do need to talk about… [Spooky music plays and ends]\n\nThe dark side of affordances. Affordances, remember, are a double edged blade.\n\n(42:21)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of sword being unsheathed]\nBy the way, this sword sound is actually me dragging a spoon across an empty travel mug. Isn’t that cool?\n\n(42:29)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAffordances are useful in describing what a material does well, but also what it does not so well. It’s limitations, it’s failures, which brings us to a difficult question. How does sound fail? [Spooky music plays and ends]\n(42:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThe only anecdote I can think of, like where, where sound, at least sound design has really failed personally for me is I… That workshop with Oana… Avasilichioaei?\n(43:00)\tJason Camlot\tYeah.\n43:01)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood (\tYeah. So we submitted a short piece and I thought I was doing something very nice and artistic by ending my piece with, you know, footsteps on gravel walking off into the sunset, she marked the, she timestamped that moment with a little comment, why is somebody chewing? [Jason laughs]\nAnd I was just like… where does that come from?\n\n(43:23)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tWould this sound like walking to you if you didn’t have any context? [Sound effect of someone walking]\n(43:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\t“In any given circumstance, no form operates in isolation.” That’s a quote pulled directly from Levine. When we immerse ourselves in sound, we’re not coming to the table empty handed. We all have our own personal and cultural experiences that can and will shape the way we hear. You could argue for the affordances of sound as… Immersive, transformative, but what happens… [Sound effect as though Miranda is speaking in an echoey hallway]…when sound can’t reach you?\nFrom Hutchby again, “it is important to see that affordances are not just functional, but also relational aspects of an object’s material presence in the world.” [Sound effect of someone walking] You could say sound offers us immersion, but who’s the us in this case? More importantly, who are we excluding here?\n\n(44:34)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\t[Breathes deeply] 51, almost at the top. You know, it’s, it’s funny when, when people ask for directions to the chalet, they don’t call it the chalet. They say ‘the view’. Which way’s the view? Oh, right. We were, we were talking about deafness, right?\n(44:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tTwo technologies clashing.\n(45:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tIs it ironic to talk about deafness on a podcast?\n(45:10)\tMiranda Eastwood\t“The ear itself is a composite organ which hears by mechanical and electrical means.”\n(45:16)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tOr is it of the utmost necessity?\n(45:19)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThat was a quote from Mara Mill’s chapter from Keywords in Sound. And I believe it’s useful to think of our own hearing as a sort of technology, but one that’s unfixed, subjective. There are different degrees of deafness, paraphrasing Mills, which can be conceived as a pre-condition of hearing, or as the resistance to hearing.\nAs we age, we often lose our ability to hear. Exposure to loud environments over time will wear down our ability to hear sounds at certain frequencies. Acknowledging the inherent differences in an individual’s hearing can reshape the way we design sound. If I were to design a piece for a friend that could only hear low frequency rumbling, I’d likely come up with something that would be physically difficult to listen to for someone with a wider frequency range. But beyond that, acknowledging limitations can also invite quite literally, invention.\n\n[Electronic music begins]\n\nThomas Edison identified as deaf, once remarking, “I have not heard a bird since I was 12 years old.” Quite the anecdote from the guy who invented the phonograph. Mills mentions other audio-notable figures in her chapter who similarly identified as deaf or hard of hearing. To quote Mills, “deafness has afforded insights into etology, acoustics, and phonetics, and in turn given rise to new psychotechnical devices.” All this to say that the affordances of sound are not isolated to sound itself, but emerge from a relationship between the listener and the audio text. Sound design insinuates that the piece is being designed with a subject in mind. Considering the subject as an open position encourages us to reconsider the role, function, and form of sound.\n\n[electronic music ends]\n\n(47:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAlright, um…\n(47:28)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWell, we’ve been all over the place.\n(47:34)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tThis is… this is a box [laughs], and it’s got a little latch.\n(47:41)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI hope this has been as much of a journey for you as it has been for me.\n(47:45)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd inside the box is another box. A music box. It is, yeah, that’s, yeah. It’s a music box that is literally, [sighs] It’s a box that makes music. Um…\n(48:02)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut what about our question?\n(48:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tAt the top. Can you hear that? Can you hear the, the flag?\n(48:10)\tMiranda Eastwood\tMy question, Really.\n(48:12)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThe flag hitting the metal pole in the wind.\n(48:16)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…And you run the strip of paper through it, and the idea is that the paper, you can make little holes in the paper and the holes dictate where the notes go because it’s a music box. It makes music.\n(48:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAfter all this, all this talking.\n(48:36)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd yelling and screaming! And stomping down hallways. [laughs]\n(48:41)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWhat do we think?\n(48:42)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd there’s a little crank. You have to.. I’m gonna turn the, turn the crank. Like-\n(48:49)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhat is sound design?\n(48:52)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSo it’s this, it’s [laughs]. It’s a, it’s a neat little, little machine. I love it. The thing is about… So there are rules, you, well rules. You can’t play the same note twice. It’s just because…\n(49:09)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSomething, I think, that has summed up every step of the way, every mark on our map. It’s been this…reaching for something…\n(49:14)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…Fast Enough. There’s no way it can go fast enough reaching for something for the same note, hit twice, two beats in a row. Also. it’s got a weird scale.\n(49:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou’re aiming for something when you begin that process of design. You’re practicing intention.\n(49:34)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tI made it. There’s, there’s the view.\n(49:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAt the end of this podcast episode, I’m making the argument for sound as a means of transport and creation. Sound design is, well, design. Design is creation. Creation is storytelling. And stories take us places. [Music box music begins to play]\n(50:04)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tI’d… Like you to meet my imaginary friend..\n(50:11)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWhat does sound design mean to you?\n(50:17)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tWe stay up late…\n(50:17)\tKatherine McLeod\tSoundscape.\n(50:18)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tSoundscape. Let’s narrow that down a bit.\n(50:21)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd thinking that when one, say, has a recording of something that one wants to work with…\n(50:28)\tJason Camlot\tIt’s about thinking through the affordances of, like, hearing and listening.\n(50:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tSo how does the Hunched Wizard sound like when he walks? [Laughs]\n(50:40)\tJason Camlot\tAnd the media technologies through which one is actually manipulating sound.\n(50:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tMarvelilicious!\n(50:47)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah? Was that better than the last one?\n(50:48)\tJames Healey\tFor me, it’s like, almost sculpting.\n(50:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn an episode or in a, you know, a performance or what have you.\n(50:56)\tJames Healey\tYeah, you really are, you’re sculpting like a stereo field.\n(51:00)\tJason Camlot\tAnd coming up with a sonically formal configuration of those sounds…\n(51:05)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat is gonna be the, the sort of the sound that holds that sound.\n(51:11)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tSaid, you were mine, mine, mine. Gimme, gimme, never get. I know the going’s tough, but we can’t give up just yet. So breathe on 1, 2, 3.\n(51:22)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThe sound that holds the sound.\n(51:23)\tJason Camlot\tA particular listening model in mind in order to achieve specific effects.\n(51:30)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tShould we listen to it with music?\n(51:32)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSure.\n(51:33)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tMusic to me is, you know, kind of the highest form of sound design you can say, because it’s so.. Difficult.\n(51:43)\tKaitlyn Staveley\t[laughs] Yeah, exactly. You’re right.\n(51:44)\tJames Healey\tRight. Becomes this glue to the work, which actually sort of makes the viewer or the listener feel like those elements have always belonged together.\n(51:55)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, I said that you were mine. You said that you were mine. I’d like to keep my imaginary friend. My imaginary friend. My imaginary friend. [Music box ends]\n(52:26)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tUgh. Good. One more take? One more take.\n(52:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYeah, okay.\n(52:46)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Spoken Web] heme music begins] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nOur producer this month is Miranda Eastwood, an MA student at Concordia University and our very own sound designer for the SpokenWeb podcast. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. A special thanks to Professor Jason Camlot, professor Katherine McLeod, James Healy, Kaitlyn Staveley and Ghislaine Comeau for lending this episode their original voices.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [Theme music ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9600","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4 Bonus, The Serendipitous Headlight 24, 7 August 2023, Pitella, Elbanhawy, Affonso, Ruby, Andrews, and Eastwood"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-serendipitous-headlight-24/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Carlos A. Pittella","Sherine Elbanhawy","Alex Affonso","Ariella Ruby","Olive Andrews","Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Carlos A. Pittella","Sherine Elbanhawy","Alex Affonso","Ariella Ruby","Olive Andrews","Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Carlos A. Pittella\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20169375254524282048\",\"name\":\"Sherine Elbanhawy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Alex Affonso\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariella Ruby\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/59173484194347231513\",\"name\":\"Olive Andrews\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/abc0784b-45ae-4014-8d4e-5fa1ba8e6d7b/audio/5ad0c7d9-d592-4a0c-80f5-8b2091a3b8b8/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"final-mix.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"37,998,385 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"final-mix\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-serendipitous-headlight-24/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-08-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["No transcript."],"contents":["“Though staff turnaround is a challenge for student-run publications, community support remains when people love it. Let’s revive the love for Headlight.”\n\nThis was the sign-off of an application for managing editor for Headlight, Concordia University’s graduate student-run literary journal. Carlos A. Pittella’s application was accepted shortly after—along with Sherine Elbanhawy’s application for co-managing editor—and the 24th edition of Headlight was put into motion.\n\nThis episode is a behind-the-scenes look at Headlight 24, and an exploration of what happens when print publication meets audio production. Diving into a host of recordings made along the way, the episode revisits readings from authors featured in Headlight 24, as well as recordings from the journal’s launch at the De Stiil bookstore in Montreal. Also featured is a roundtable conversation with the editorial team—Carlos A. Pittella, Sherine Elbanhawy, Alex Affonso, Ariella Ruby, Olive Andrews, and Miranda Eastwood—as they revisit the challenges faced in reviving the journal following pandemic restrictions, as well as the exciting new directions embraced by this year’s team.\n\nHeadlight 24 will host the second part of their launch at the 4th SPACE at Concordia University, August 31st, at 2pm. We hope to see you there!\n\n"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"No transcript.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bandukwala, Manahil. “Turning Twenty-Four on the Rise of the Sturgeon Moon”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nSolomon, Misha. “Tubes”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nMazur, Ari. “A&W”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nO’Farrell, Paz. “I don’t even know what to do about all this”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nPalmer, Jade. “Onyx and Rose Gold”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nTrudel, Nadia. “Goblin”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nCirignano, Sophia. “Giverny”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nWayland, Tina. “The Tending of Small Gardens”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549666922496,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.2450583},{"id":"9601","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E1, Invitation to Sonic Poetry: Demarcations, Repositories, Examples, 7 October 2024, Whiteman"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creator_names_search":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/35145971350432331044\",\"name\":\"Andrew Whiteman\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/559b1f32-3d22-44aa-9b3f-3125de148a67/audio/225b5ac2-e7fd-45a6-a035-97f4c89bb277/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,284,009 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Happy Birthday Ed Sanders Thank You!”, written and performed by Edward Sanders ( from “This is the Age of Investigation Poetry and Every Citizen Must Investigate” part of the “Totally Corrupt Dial-a-Poem Series by John Giorno. Found at https://www.ubu.com/sound/gps.html ) and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track.\\n\\nAudio clips of Amiri Barak, Helen Adam, and the Four Horseman from Ron Mann’s 1980 film Poetry in Motion. found at https://vimeo.com/14191903.\\n\\n“The Great Reigns” written and performed by Erica Hunt ( from Close Listening with Charles Bernstein at WPS1 Clocktower Studio, New York, June 20, 2005, available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hunt.php ), and Andrew Whiteman.\\n\\n“#7” by Alice Notley and AroarA. Unreleased track. Text taken from Notley’s book “In The Pines”, Penguin Books. 2007.\\n\\n“ Pinbot” and “Abu Surveillance” by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track. Text taken from Waldman’s book “Iovis: the Trilogy”, Coffeehouse Press. 2011.\\n\\n“How I wrote Certain of my Books” by David UU and the Avalettes.  from the casette Very Sound (Sound Poems By David UU). Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.18. 1984.\\n\\n“whn i first came to vancouvr” by bill bissett. from the cassette Sonic Horses. Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.19.1984.\\n\\n“From The Life & Work Of Chapter 7 (For Steven Smith)” by Tekst. from the cassette “Unexpected Passage”.\\n\\nUnderwhich Audiographic Series – No. 15. 1982.\\n\\n“ Canto One” by Andrew Whiteman featuring Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, Richard Sieberth, Al Filreis. buried somewhere at Penn Sound. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/. Unreleased track.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549667971072,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this first episode of Season 6, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. We all know it when we hear it, and we have mixed feelings about it. Why does the archaic meeting place of music and poem hit such a nerve? Is this art form literature or is it music? Surely, it’s not song, is it? And if poems already carry their prosodic intentions within themselves – why bother supplementing them with extraneous audio?” These questions are answered by Siren Recordings, a new digital-DIY sonic poetry label run by Kelly Baron and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:51\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. The episode features the playing of newly created works of “sonic poetry,” along with recordings of sonic poetry that inform and inspire this type of sound work that reactivates audio archives.\nLet the sounds wash over you as you listen, and maybe even start dancing. Plus, along with all of this sound, this episode announces the creation of Siren Recordings, a new multi-platform collaborative venture co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron.\nSiren is a record label, a digital academic hub, and a stable audio-visual archive for a growing database of sonic poetry in many forms. A place for people obsessed and interested in this kind of sonic art making that sounds like us.\nHere is episode one of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Invitation to Sonic Poetry Demarcations, Repositories, Examples.”\n00:02:00\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Sound of voice recorder] At the dawn of 1976, during the New Year’s Day marathon poetry reading given at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, Ed Sanders began his reading with the following lines–\n00:02:18\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders, 1976\tThis is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate.\n00:02:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tForty-seven years later, I raided the UbuWeb Sound archives, listening through all the incredible Giorno poetry systems albums that are digitized and archived there, and I discovered this work.\n00:02:38\tAndrew Whiteman\tI wanted to make a birthday present for Sanders, who turned 83 this past August. I altered his poem, attending to its syntax and cadences and nuances and its energies, supplying whatever skills my training as an indie rock musician affords me.\n00:02:55\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders’s reading, edited by Andrew Whiteman\t[Piano plays in the background] This is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate. For the pallid tracks of guilt and death, slight as they are, suffuse upon the retentive electromagnetic data retrieval systems of our era. And let the investigators not back away one micro unit from their investigations. And this is the age of investigative poetry when verse froth again will assume its prior role as a vehicle for describing history. And this will be a golden era for the public performance of poetry when the Diogenes Liberation Squadron of Strolling Troubadors and Muckrakers will roam through the citadels of America to sing opposition to the military hitmen who think the United States is some sort of corpse firm. And this is the age of left-wing epics with happy endings. [Upbeat music starts playing]\nThis is the poet’s era, and we shall all walk crinkle toes upon the smooth, cold drill of Botticelli’s show.\nHappy New Year.\nAnd this [Distorted voice] Is the age of the triumph of beatnik messages of social Foeman coded in videos the clatter of the mass media over 20 years ago. Oh, how we fall to salute with peels of that the beats created change without a drop of blood.\nIn 1965, it was all it could do to force cajole the writers for Time magazine not to reinforce the spurious and slinger synapse that pot puff leads to the puppy field. But now the states are setting hemp free. Ten years of coding romance yesterday, the freeing of bursts today, pot tomorrow, free food in the supermarket, and finally, [Distorted voice] haha.\nLet us never forget that this is the age of–ha ha ha. He is such a valuable tool, haha. He will set you free from worm farm haunts. Ha ha. He outvotes the warrior cast, haha. He peels out through all the cosmos mandarlid with poet angels, holding Plato’s seven single syllables in a tighter harmony than the early beach boys.\n00:06:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tThat was the track. Happy birthday, Ed Sanders. Thank you. A piece of sonic poetry from last year.\n00:06:32\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is a podcast about sonic poetry and announcing a new project called Siren Recordings, designed to create, distribute, promote, archive, and discuss it in all of its myriad forms.\nIt’s difficult to define. Here is one attempt I made.\n“Sonic poetry” is the collaboration space between contemporary poetry and music. It occupies an aesthetic space of its own making, neither coldly conceptual nor dramatically declamatory. It gathers people who are both passionate and curious about such workings. The poets give their full attention to the soundscape that compasses their words. The musicians arrange their elements in accordance with the materials of the poem.\nIt’s a bit stiff. At least that’s what Anne Waldman told me, and she ought to know, having contributed a vast amount of poetry, sonics, activism, and knowledge to the contemporary poetry scene over the past 50 years.\n00:07:27\tAndrew Whiteman\tMore from Anne later.\nI was trying to delineate aesthetic boundaries for the sonic poetry I wanted to hear and make. I wanted to cut out what I found to be lazy or ill-prepared artistic responses to the call of sonic poetry. The most obvious being either the single-note synthesizer drone, which provides a vague sense of eno-esque atmosphere to a reader. Or the quote: “my friends are great jazz musicians in their killer improvisers approach.”\nYes, I’m sure that’s true, but have your friends read Susan Howe, Percy Shelley, Anne Carson, or Jordan Abel.\n00:08:04\tAndrew Whiteman\tI want sonic poetry where both elements are scrupulously thought out and then allowed their free reign. Jazz and poetry might seem cliched, but listen to Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus or Kenneth Patchen with the Al Neill quartet, and you might have a different opinion.\nI need to remember that Brandon Hokura is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher Séance Centre. His research intersects with experimental poetics and ethnography, exploring the complex relationships between music, language, technology, geography, and culture. He is also a part of the vulnerable media lab at Queen’s University, where he’s engaged with audio and video preservation.\nHe puts the distinction of sonic poetry in this for me: There are only two categories of sound sonic poetry, really: “acoustic” and “electric.” The “naked voice” and what “sounds the body can produce,” and those transformed by electronics. I suppose you could call the former “sound” and the latter “sonic.”\nStill, I see them as almost historical distinctions since recorded sound is, by necessity, transformed by electrical electronic recording processes.\n00:09:30\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m interested in the liminal space between the human voice and sonic technologies, language and expression, and body and media. This is what makes the work so important to me. These murky, definitional waters, along with my obsession to make such art, led Brandon, myself, and Kelly Barron to decide to build Siren Recordings.\nHere is a blurb we wrote for a recent grant proposal. So yes, this is going to be a little dry as well.\n[From the grant proposal] Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as a community hub, boutique, studio and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Edward Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic, the spoken text, the text as beauteously presented on the page, and the text as performed.\nWe incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the effective social experience of poetic work. We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in our work. Archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak. [Prposal ends]\n00:11:01\tAndrew Whiteman\tWhat that doesn’t mention is Kelly’s essential grasp on the importance of building a specific, stable archive. “Sonic poetry” has always suffered from the taxonomic impulse. Where does it belong, literature or music? People often answer this differently; so much of it slips through the cracks and becomes forgotten.\nSiren Recordings has three distinct archiving, creating, and hosting options, and I’ll discuss each of them. But before I do that, I’ll first give a genealogy of how I came to this art form, how it shaped me, and some of the work I’ve done.\n00:11:38\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tHis work is about the universe. [Echo]\n00:11:39\tAndrew Whiteman\tIn the mid-1980s, late-night television provided a welcome respite to the Reagan Mulroney-saturated daytime, fortunate enough to have stumbled multiple times onto Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann’s incredible documentary poetry in motion, which put the oral or the page poetries of that specific moment upfront—witness–\n00:12:00\tAudio Clip, Presenter\tAmiri Baraka. [Cheers]\n00:12:15\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tIt’s a poem for Larry Neal and Bob Marley, two [pause] black cultural workers we lost in 1981. [Beat music starts]\n00:12:37\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tWell, as a week, we know we don’t get scared. Nothing is happening, way out nothing is happening but the positive unless.\n00:12:54\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tYou the negative whalers, we whalers, yeah. Whale, we whalers we whale we whale we could dig Melville on his ship confronting the huge white man beast speeding death cross to see the wheat but we whalers, we can kill whales we can get on top of a whale.\n00:13:17\tAndrew Whiteman\tOr listen to Helen Adam in her apartment, singing an updated ballad of the times.\n00:13:21\tAudio Clip, Helen Adam\tTimes, cheerless junkie’s song, seeking love upon a day, a day of summer’s pride. I left Long Island suburbs for the Lower East Side. The train roared and thundered, and I sang above its scream. There’s a cockroach coming towards me, but it cannot spoil my dream. Love, love and LSD. It shall not spoil my dream. Or the four horsemen cantering toward an unknown destination.\n00:14:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tToronto was having a reggae music boom, and the dub poet Lillian Allen could be heard at the Bamboo Club. Around that time, I fell into a job at the Coach House Press, a place SpokenWeb listeners need no introduction.\nIn addition to making money for rent, I received an informal education in contemporary canlet and some of the people responsible for dragging canlett into what we could loosely call “postmodernism.”\nSome of these writers were experimenting with sonic poetry. As Mann’s film documented, BP Nicoll was one of the four horsemen we just heard, and Coach House co-founder Victor Coleman was making long-playing records. This is from one called “Nothing too fragile or heavy.” [Soft music starts playing]\n00:15:14\tAudio Clip, from BP Nicoll\tI only think of–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because I only Think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing here behind it–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing there behind it–nothing good in the distance, three fates wave signals BP–\n00:16:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tNicoll died suddenly in 1988, and Coach House began a short-lived talking book cassette project with the Toronto Music Gallery the next year.\nThat same year, Hal Wilner produced a record by Allen Ginsberg called “The Lion for Real,” which burned into me and has remained an imprint of what sonic poetry might achieve if the elements are precisely attended to. The musicians with Ginsburg were all people from the downtown New York scene, the secret location that had fostered so much critical writing, art, music and activism since the beginning of the 20th century. I wanted to participate in that communal and poetic world.\n00:16:57\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tDeath needs time for what it kills to grow in, for our book, sweet sake, you stupid, vulgar, greedy, ugly American death site.\n00:17:07\tAndrew Whiteman\tAs I mentioned, I’m a musician, producer and performer by trade. In the early 2000’s, I began touring relentlessly, playing indie rock and spending an inordinate amount of time in vans, buses, and planes.\nI had been very slow to embrace computers, but when the iPhone came out, I took to podcasting instantly, and very quickly, I discovered both UbuWeb and PenSound, and my inner world exploded here.\nI must confess that my obsession with poetry has always held itself separate from my love of music, an aloof, almost higher state, nearly an inverse of Louis Zukovsky’s famous poetic statement, where in my case, music is the lower limit and speech the higher.\nThe discovery of PenSound and Ubu and the tendrils they put out to other locations and activations ignited a second, more profound wave of poetic thrill-seeking from which I have yet to recover. I discovered the incredible storehouse of recorded North American poetry that exploded from the 1950s onward. The archive, I realized, is a hive.\nI began to digitally flip through the lists of poets, listening to their speeches and eventually making sonic poetry. This is Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\n00:18:34\tAudio Clip, Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\t[Eerie music starts playing] A row of xs appeared overnight on windows across the street. We on this side wondered what they knew, what we weren’t being told. The sun shined through the taped windows and made geometric shadows on the floor. On this side, we learned that the sun did not shine that way for us. We did not know what they were doing with their days or nights. And there were photos. The family across the street taped photos onto the windows. After we put up our x’s, which was, after all, only one letter of the Alphabet, their family would never be broken. We on our side wondered what was coming to hurt us. Would our windows break into shards? Would our windows become weapons against us? We wondered who would protect us from the people across the street. Who would protect us from what they knew and that we didn’t know? We wondered what they meant to us. Were the families marked by x related to us? When would they come to occupy our apartments? What were they hiding, hiding behind the x? What did X stand for? Was it really for protection against possible flying glass? Or was it something else? Was the x a sign for the angel of death? Was it a cock? And what was it a code word for? What did the x exempt them from? Into? What did it enlist them? What did we leave out when we didn’t leave our ex? What hadn’t we joined? And what had we said yes to?\n00:20:42\tAndrew Whiteman\tI developed a rough technique for making sonic poetry related to how I used the archive. I would select a poem based on listening. Indeed, many of the works were difficult to access and print, but listening’s advantages were manifest, as Bernstein’s excellent introduction to the volume known as close listening points out that sound enacts meaning as much as designates something meant—end quote.\nWhen backgrounding a poem, I decided firstly to avoid the two situations I mentioned earlier, the default into a textural or drone-like atmosphere created by synthesis, or its opposite, the live musician improvising to poet reading style. My second move was to develop constraints based on the un, as an Alypian might. These constraints might take any form, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, or in the choice of instruments used. The formal qualities of the piece might be closer to d,  song, or something else, depending on what I heard in the poet’s voice and understood in the poem’s text.\nI’ll demonstrate how two very different examples. Interestingly, neither of these sonic poems use the archive as the Sanders and the Hunt pieces do, though it remains the greatest resource for creators and scholars. And I plan to make a record based on HD’s reading of “Helen in Egypt.”\nIn 2007, I bought books at Book Soup in Los Angeles. Alice Notley’s “In the Pines” had just come out. While reading it, I noticed her dropping quotes into the poems from a source I knew, the famous Harry Smith folk anthology records, which were legendary, and I knew because they had been re-released on CD.\nI felt instantly that I should take Alice’s numbered poems 1 through 14 and retranslate them back into faux folk songs, taking special care not to attempt any authentic folk or acoustic sound or structure which would have frozen them to death, but rather by using midi and the rough recording situation my partner Arielle and I had set up at home.\nI wanted to create a sepia sound and Dust Bowl sonics. I applied erasure to the poems and shaped them into semi-ballad forms. After securing Alice’s kind permission, we made a record.\nHere is number seven:\n00:23:17\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Alice Notley’s Writing\tEveryone said not to destroy time. We can’t have evolution, we can’t have the mind-body problem, we can’t have compassion, but I am losing mine because in the pines enchants and fortune in love once I had now I don’t in love there is no because your self-identification of the night is hard enough for identification. The night was hard enough, so in order to make the night hard enough, I slept all night. The pines as I offered to, I heard that ooh down moaning, but I’ve never heard that my defect is so beautiful. Now, it’s all that I have. My closet is on fire; turn up the clothes and shoes the closets are on fire to burn up the clothes and shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes and shoot the closets on fire to burn, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes that shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn off the clothes.\n00:25:52\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m happy to say that Siren Records will be re-releasing “In the Pines” in 2025 with extra poems read by Alice.\n00:26:00\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe second example I’ll play is my collaboration with Montreal-based poet and theorist Michael Nardone last year. From Metatron’s digital zine glycophorin, we chose his poem “Tower One, Tower Two” from the book thug titled The Ritualites.\nThe poem centers around an Italian American Sunday family dinner filled with loud, disjunctive conversation, plates being passed crosswise, and background noises of TV and the radio. Here, the constraint provided all the creative impetus needed, given that the song “Hotel California” gets referenced more than once, though interestingly, nobody at the table seems to be able to name it. I decided to scour YouTube for versions of this ubiquitous song, limit my sound choices to what I could find, and then manipulate all sounds other than the poet’s voice coming from other people’s ideas of what “Hotel California” is.\n00:26:57\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Michael Nardone’s Writing\t[Distorted voices with background instrumental] Oh, the pepper. The pasta. Pasta.\nOh, I hope we hear the one about Calvin. Such a lovely song. Such a lovely place. The crushed pepper. At Grossman’s. My dentist. At eight, I caught a commercial on his television for that concert on the national channel.\nWell, we wait until the sauce starts to simmer.\nIt’s nearly time.\nAdd sugar and your tooth, Helen. How to ache.\nBut it doesn’t hurt to eat. It does. But Bob, with all this good food, how could I not help but eat? Sue, this crab dips. My aunt Louise was in California, and she sneaked.\nThe recipe for her favourite.\nHow much sugar should I use, sue?\nTwo tablespoons.\nAdd a pinch of pepper to the pasta.\nOh, Joe. Television. Past the pasta.\nWait, wait, wait, wait. I can’t hear one word of what you’re saying.\nThe pasta, the television.\nTurn it down.\nJoe. Why must he eat adult television? Please pass the. Please, Joe.\nIt’s no use. We’ll have to wait till we have his attention.\n00:28:24\tAndrew Whitman\tWell, I faded that out. As it is a longer piece clocking in at nine minutes, I’d like to move on to Siren Records’s first release, which is slated for the fall of 2024. It’s an album based on a single book, Laois, by Anne Waldman.\nLaois is a thousand page, 30 year meditation on the patriarchy and Anne’s observations of them…uh, us [laughs].\nHal Wilner is responsible for introducing us, and back in 2009, I attempted to get him to produce an album for Anne, who largely relies on her son, Ambrose Bay, to produce her sonic poetry. “After all,” I said, “Hal, you made records for Burroughs and Corso and Ginsburg. Why not for Anne?”\n00:29:08\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Andrew imitating Hal Wilner] “This is in the eighties,” Hal drawled, “I can’t get that money anymore.”\nI thank Hal immensely for slyly shifting this job onto my shoulders.\n“What kind of Anne Waldman record do you want to hear, Andrew?” He dropped into my ear one day. Originally, I had wanted a Plastic Ono-style band featuring Cibo Matto founder Yuka Honda to back Anne up. Stark, minimal three-chord pieces, with Anne’s powerful moan reduced to a whisper. But I couldn’t get the money either. So during COVID I assembled the strongest pieces and began stitching Laois together.\n[Instrumental/techno music starts playing] I’ll play two tracks from the upcoming album.\nHere is “Pinbot.”\n00:30:01\tAudio Clip of “Pinbot”\tHe chokes me. He chose me. He chokes me. He chokes. He chose. He chose me. Pinbot. He shows me comet. He plays me Genesis. He plays TX sector. He shows me punched out Sega Turbo he needs more coins two tigers pole position two Gyrus Metro Cross Double Dribble action Circus Centipede he needs more coins Taito ten yard fight feature Spy Jailbreak super contra he shows me Wonder points Flicky Distron he plays Radical Ninja Galaga give me a break spy Hunter Ring King hat trick he shows me he shows me he shows me twin Cobra ikari warriors after burner danger zone Koban xy bots rampage silkworm Shinobi gorilla or xenophobe as the quest for freedom continues I can’t even carry or travel with this book, let alone read from it. I need a I need a roadie I need a roadie to carry it around and hold it out for me.\n00:32:34\tAndrew Whiteman\t“Abu Sus Valens.”\n00:32:41\tAudio Clip of “Abu Sus Valens”\tTo never have enough Canada never have enough being up Canada never to have enough be enough get enough have enough be enough yet enough never to have enough be enough yet do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish unmitigated, concealed our actual colour never be enough get enough never have enough be enough get enough never to have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough over in Iraq, over in Afghanistan, over in Pakistan where next?\nThat’s why we do it at night never have brown paper bags portrait death to never have enough never have enough one out of five to the crippling form of p t s d or suicide Eddie paid certainly slabs never have enough people to never have enough body slumber exultant civvies wild laughter turned on what drug area distorted by the marines where to hide set teeth to knuckles in combat wincey Lindy brutality o ever revert Abu surveillance never have enough be never again never have enough be enough or thumbs up never have a blow to the stomach cold savage beatings more brown bodies atrocity plus silence equals more atrocity Abraham not enough to never have enough link your memory to energy sleeping to never have the hungry ghost ever have enough to never have a hungry ghost more valiant have it all by itself between our realms hungry ghost that dwells in consciousness torments our desire never have a hungry ghost to never have a hungry ghosts never have enough be enough to never have enough be enough get enough never to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough yet to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have a get enough be enough get enough get enough.\n00:36:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’d like to return to the specifics of Siren Recordings’s three-part project as it is unfolding right now.\n00:36:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tFirst, the archive of Brandon’s work on the Underwhich Editions’s legacy, which informs our first acquisitions, includes most of the sonic poetry made and recorded by the likes of critical members of the Canadian avant-lit scene from 1977 to 1988.\nIn the words of our managing director, Kelly Baron, art needs to be additive, not iterative, for it to advance.\nWe need access to art that comes before us to learn from it and create something new. That access is incredibly limited when it’s originally on vulnerable forms of media, where it was never digitized and where it was originally given limited releases. I want to democratize that access and make it available. Opening up access to the sonic poetry of the past can show new artists how the boundaries between music and literature can be placed, and I hope it will inspire new art.\n00:37:17\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tThere are those who can tell you how to make Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, bombs, or whatever you might be needing. Find them and learn. Define your aim clearly. Choose your ammo with that in mind.\n00:37:29\tAndrew Whitman\tOur first two archival tasks are the Underwich audiographic editions and the Coach House talking books series. Neither have been archived in their totality.\nThe cassettes and reels from the Underwich audio, graphic series and Coach House talking books were given limited releases. There is limited time remaining to digitize them. Digitizing these works will provide widespread access to early, otherwise unseen and unheard works from significant poets in Canadian literary tradition, such as BP Nicoll, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffrey, Penny Kemp, David W., and Bill Bissett.\n00:38:10\tAudio Clip, Unknown\t[Distorted voice] Sewers go into the water instead. Where does it go from the train onto the tracks? Everyone said. My doctor told me cattle ship. That’s what the cows alongside the tracks are waiting for when the trains pass through an English bay in the waters. We could have cows dying. They would be washer cows. People could go into the water again and rob the cows on the dirt, out of the boats, or to the university. I remember a place in Nova Scotia called Cow Bay.\n00:38:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books.”\n00:39:05\tAudio Clip from David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books”\tCrowd out, crowd out. Crowd out.\n00:39:18\tAndrew Whiteman\tListening closely, we hear the voice of Gertrude Stein and notice that David W himself is mining the archive to create new forms of sonic poetry. Finally, this is the text from the life and work of chapter seven of Stephen Smith.\n00:39:56\tAudio Clip, from Stephen Smith\tWhen they turned out to be inferior to their reverse heroes, silver’s reign, the poise was the burning beauty being allowed to become holy Balsam. His dignity clouded me possessed by being like an absolute cap sometimes about unloose the full ambition. But there was a person who was certain. Latency in the way of Slosha. With all his regard for the point. Departure stiff places disappeared became gloss fit to a little reveal something a new conscious purpose beyond humanity, having originality and ancient thought while there was still echoing a mighty Asian empathy born incapable of destruction, it became easy to recognize as if sorrow to divide outside. He had known the avoiding drama Asian.\n00:41:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tLanguages would have awakened an age, Kelly continues. Our archival approach is also special. A few Underwich audio graphics series recordings are currently available on Pen Sound.\nStill, the presentation of this archive is such that each piece is just a link, and it becomes a disembodied audio source. The original materiality of that artifact is lost. This materiality is significant, as these works were handmade with unique artwork associated with each release. Our archival process ensures that everything associated with the release is documented and scanned, rather than just the audio itself. We will then describe the images via text, making this work fully accessible for people with visible disabilities.\n00:42:15\tAndrew Whiteman\tDescribing the material ephemera of the tapes will allow the blind community to experience the artwork in its original form more fully. Beyond better serving the blind community, this archival approach also helps to narrativize the work, showing the conditions and artistic context in which it was made. Indeed, Siren seeks to become the standard repository for all forms of sonic poetry, creating a stable archive where the work can be accessed easily and indexed efficiently.\nThe second function of Siren Recordings is the label itself. Depending on the project, we will release three or four full-length albums per year in multiple formats. There are a lot of artists experimenting with sonic poetry at this moment, to name just a few: Kaie Kellough, who has an album coming out on Constellation Records this year, and Fan Wu from the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective is working with Tom Gill on a full-length.\nGary Barwin has been a tireless exponent of sonic poetry since the Toronto small press fair days. Jordan Abel performed at a recent SpokenWeb conference with a crew of two musicians and two readers, and he DJ-ed recording voices during his performance.\nFrom phonograph editions in Portland, Oregon, comes records by Douglas Kearney, featuring the incredible Haitian Vodou electric composer Val Gentil and author Harmony Holliday, under the moniker Bright Moments, creates incredible lo-fi mixes of African American speeches, poetry, interviews, and then mixes everything from Jazzenhe as to Rasta Nyabinghi sounds underneath, something I would love to archive.\n00:43:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tSo here is where I would like to formally call anyone listening. Siren solicits new works, archival manipulations, and interart collaborations involving poetry and sound. We are dedicated to the sonic poets of the present. Our goal is to provide a specific venue for these poets to publish their works.\nRight now, there’s no clear venue for doing this in Canada, but there are venues doing this elsewhere. Examples include recital records from the United States, which started in 2012, and nymphs and thugs and culture recordings. Both British labels begin in the mid two thousand ten s and blank forms from the US. It’s a nonprofit arts organization that began in 2016. Our poets deserve the same opportunities as the American and English poets. We’ll give them that opportunity in science.\n00:44:35\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tI don’t believe in any of your gods or powers. It’s all bullshit. I don’t even believe in my powers or gods.\n00:44:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe third effort of the Siren is perhaps the most important and follows directly on the productive actions of establishing the archive and running the label.\nThese two activities will generate the need for responses from our wider community. Essays, interviews, reviews, reports, and other writing will be hosted, shared, and discussed on the Siren Records hub by those obsessed and interested in sonic poetry.\nStrange as it may sound to those of you who have never left the university and might be a bit worn out by the institutional setting, as a latecomer to academia, I have been energized and excited by meeting scholars and students and deepening my study of poetry in an incredibly profound way. Indeed, I found it somewhat of an initiation, something Robert Duncan speaks of in a lecture he gave in 1969, describing when he was a young man, how desperate he was to find his way into Pound’s just released 1st 30 cantos.\n00:45:41\tAudio Clip from Robert Duncan’s Lecture, With Sound Edits\tWhen I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community: its total interest in Mister Ezra Pound seems to have faded. I want to go back to my initiation in the cabinet. How did I come to hear it?\n[Audio starts getting distorted] Forth, on the godly sea, we set up mast and sail on that swart ship, bore sheep aboard her and our bodies also heavy with weeping August and terrifying presence of a lady bluestocking who knew the entire modern scene, Aphrodite and in my belt on Telegraph Avenue, Elliot and the and pound, the 30 cannons. What was then the avalanche, the whole very confused domain of something one might call voice, which in pound one doesn’t know whether the voice is sort of actual metaphorical and then went down to the ship and I said, I can’t bear it, and then went, one week I went around with that on the godly sea.\nWe set up the mast and sailed on that swart ship. But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You find it the way they find it in music. Cadaverous dead brides of youths and the old born, many souls stained with the recent tears, girls, tender men, many more found out something we could not know when we were reading the thirties, the forties and so forth.\nAnd that is that pound intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of a singing intoning to the line. And then went down the ship, battle spoil bearing and. And these many crowded with bronze lands, many mauled. I mean, just our American trouble with men, many mauled. The word ” min men ” is already tricky enough when you get that many in there: men mauled with brand land.\nAnd so the Kirkheim. So I don’t always find, you know, Ava Hess’s husband as a Brit says, well, sounds like, you know, you never got out from under the impress of Yates or something like this, you know, and the next day reads in a completely different fashion, much more original. And you have the two readings there took it to heart, making them overlap so that the thing plays a double role.\nNow, I took it to heart. It’s exciting. The first high Yeatsian reading and the following much more casual and intimately superior reading. It’s exciting. Right. And where did you find them? She sent them to me. Oh, fantastic. They have not heard since, you know, they made them back in 59 for a German rating. I wonder if other stuff will start to sound. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution.\n00:49:05\tAndrew Whiteman\tThanks for listening.\nI’m Andrew Whiteman, creative director of Siren Recordings; looking forward to hearing from you soon.\n00:49:13\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’ve been listening to the Spokenweb podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:49:32\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was produced by Andrew Whiteman.\nSiren Recordings is a project co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron. The SpokenWeb podcast team supervises producer Maia Harris, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. Our sound designer James Healy of season five will be making an exit this season, but we have a new sound designer: TJ MacPherson, who is ready to come aboard.\n00:50:02\tKatherine McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know. Please rate us, comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Also, check social media for our listening parties and more for now.\nThanks for listening."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9603","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E2, Virtual Pilgrimage: Where Medieval Meets Modern, 4 November 2024, Pereira and Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lindsay Pereira\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2d652a48-92e5-4aab-964f-13c84ab334cc/audio/768dfb20-fca9-4d6c-9e00-295fa04a0338/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e2-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:51:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"49,800,911 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e2-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-11-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Magical Minstrelsy: Where Medieval Meets Modern Through Mimesis, Season 1 Episode 1: Virtual Pilgrimage uses sounds from Freesound. All sound samples that were used in this episode are licensed under CC0 1.0:\\n\\nFootsteps on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/lzmraul/sounds/389454/\\n\\nBirds: https://freesound.org/people/MATRIXXX_/sounds/519110/\\n\\nWater: https://freesound.org/people/BurghRecords/sounds/415151/\\n\\nCows: https://freesound.org/people/Nontu_Lwazi00/sounds/541920/\\n\\nSheep: https://freesound.org/people/rent55/sounds/709921/\\n\\nHorse on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/Ornery/sounds/233345/\\n\\nHorse with cart: https://freesound.org/people/bruno.auzet/sounds/538438/\\n\\nFootsteps on cobblestone: https://freesound.org/people/SpliceSound/sounds/260120/\\n\\nMedieval city: https://freesound.org/people/OGsoundFX/sounds/423119/\\n\\nChurch bells: https://freesound.org/people/Audeption/sounds/425172/\\n\\nCoins: https://freesound.org/people/husky70/sounds/161315/\\n\\nBlacksmith: https://freesound.org/people/Emmaproductions/sounds/254371/\\n\\nMusic: https://ccmixter.org/files/asteria/2615\\n\\nChurch coins: https://freesound.org/people/scripsi/sounds/335191/\\n\\nGregorian chant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ecce.lignum.Crucis.ogg\\n\\nCrowd gasping: https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480774/\\n\\nBaby crying: https://freesound.org/people/the_yura/sounds/211527/\\n\\nBreath: https://freesound.org/people/launemax/sounds/274769/\\n\\nHeartbeat: https://freesound.org/people/newlocknew/sounds/612642/\\n\\nWorks Cited and Consulted\\n\\nAhmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2015.\\n\\nArsuaga, Ana Echevarría. “The shrine as mediator: England, castile, and the pilgrimage to Compostela.” England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century, 2007, pp. 47–65, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603103_4.\\n\\nArvay, Susan M. “Private passions: The contemplation of suffering in medieval affective devotions.” (2008).\\n\\nBailey, Anne E. “Reconsidering the Medieval Experience at the Shrine in High Medieval England.” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 203–29. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874.\\n\\nBeckstead, Zachary. “On the way: Pilgrimage and liminal experiences.” Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality, 2021, pp. 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83171-4_5.\\n\\nBeebe, Kathryne. Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: The Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri’s “Die Sionpilger.” West Virginia University Press, 2009.\\n\\nBenjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, 2018, pp. 217–220, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498909-39\\n\\nCassidy-Welch, Megan. “Pilgrimage and embodiment: Captives and the cult of saints in late medieval bavaria.” Parergon, vol. 20, no. 2, 2003, pp. 47–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2003.0101.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Tradition as play: Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth.’” History and Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 3, 2004, pp. 273–288, https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720042000257430.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, Ellen Badone, and Sharon R. Roseman. “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham.” Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2004, pp. 52–67.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and Marion Bowman. “Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Heritage, Adjacency, and the Politics of Replication in Northern Europe.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 1–23. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515341.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages.” Pilgrimage Explored, edited by J. (Jennie) Stopford, York Medieval Press, 1999. WorldCat Discovery Service, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=16637.\\n\\nDíaz-Vera, Javier E. “Exploring the relationship between emotions, language and space: Construals of awe in medieval English language and pilgrimage experience.” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 88, no. 2, 2015, pp. 165–189, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2015.1093918.\\n\\nFoster, Elisa A. “As You Came from the Holy Land: Medieval Pilgrimage to Walsingham and Its Crusader Contexts.” Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain, edited by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 91– 114.\\n\\nGertsman, Elina, and Marian Bleeke. “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage.” Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 23–41.\\n\\nGrazia Di Stefano, Laura. “How to be a time traveller: Exploring Venice with a fifteenth-century pilgrimage guide.” Making the Medieval Relevant, 2019, pp. 171–190, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-008.\\n\\nGregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010.\\n\\nHill, Joyce. “Rome in Ripon: St Wilfrid’s Inspiration and Legacy.” History, vol. 105, no. 367, 2020, pp. 603–25. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13027.\\n\\nHill‐Smith, Connie. “Cyberpilgrimage: The (virtual) reality of online pilgrimage experience.” Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2011, pp. 236–246, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00277.x.\\n\\nHundley, Catherine. “Pilgrims in the Parish: A Method and Two Herefordshire Case Studies.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol. 8, no. 3, Oct. 2022, pp. 40–87.\\n\\nHurlock, Kathryn. “Virtual Pilgrimage.” Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, C1100-1500, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 145–174.\\n\\nJenkins, John. “Replication or Rivalry? The ‘Becketization’ of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 24–47. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515327.\\n\\nKempe, Margery, and Anthony Paul Bale. The Book of Margery Kempe. Oxford University Press, 2015.\\n\\nKuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald d’Aurillac. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.\\n\\nLangland, William, and Schmidt A. V. C. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Oxford University Press, 2009.\\n\\nNickell, S. A. The Limits of Embodiment: The Implication of Written and Artistic Portrayals of Mary at the Foot of the Cross for Late Medieval Affective Spirituality, Graduate Theological Union, United States — California, 2011. ProQuest, https://lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdissertations-theses%2Flimits-embodiment-implication-written-artistic%2Fdocview%2F875240824%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D10246.\\n\\nOusterhout, Robert. “‘Sweetly Refreshed in Imagination’: Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images.” Gesta, vol. 48, no. 2, Jan. 2009, pp. 153–68. www-journals-uchicago-edu.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.2307/29764905.\\n\\nPowell, Hilary. “Saints, Pilgrimage and Landscape in Early Medieval Kent, c. 800-1220.” Early Medieval Kent, 800-1220, Boydell Press, 2016, pp. 133–53.\\n\\nSinnett-Smith, Jane. “Ætheldreda in the North: Tracing Northern Networks in the Liber Eliensis and the Vie de Seinte Audree.” Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, edited by Christiania Whitehead et al., Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 285–303.\\n\\nWynn, Mark. “God, pilgrimage, and acknowledgement of Place.” Religious Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–163, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412506008778.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549671116800,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["From medieval itineraries to modern livestreams, Christian pilgrimage is often, if not always experienced through an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth. In this episode, hosts Lindsay Pereira and Ella Jando-Saul explore the concept of virtual pilgrimage through conversations with two guests: Michael Van Dussen, a professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, teaches us about the medieval experience of pilgrimage in the British Isles while Simon Coleman, a professor in the\n\nDepartment for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto teaches us about the modern reconstruction of pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk, England.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapping with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, producers Ella Jando-Saul and Lindsay Pereira invite us to ask what makes a pilgrimage real.\n00:01:00\tHannah McGregor\tAs digital technologies and global pandemics lead to the rise of virtual pilgrimages, modern spiritual seekers can go on pilgrimage without actually going on pilgrimage.\n00:01:14\tHannah McGregor\tBut is a virtual pilgrimage a mere mediation of the authentic experience? Or are pilgrimages, by nature, an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth?\nDrawing on the expertise of Dr. Michael Van Dussen, professor of English Literature at McGill University, and Dr. Simon Coleman, professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Toronto, Ella and Lindsay explore the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages before inviting us, the listeners, to take part in our own mediated spiritual journey through their sonic reconstruction of a medieval soundscape.\n\n00:01:57\tHannah McGregor\tHere is episode two of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Virtual Pilgrimage, Where Medieval Meets Modern.\n00:02:06\tMusic\t[Soft harmonizing music starts playing]\n00:02:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m Ella Jando-Saul, a Master’s student at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, in English Literature.\n00:02:23\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd I’m Lindsay Pereira, your other equally brilliant, equally razzle-dazzle, though significantly shorter host from Concordia’s MA In Literature.\n00:02:34\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, Ella.\n00:02:36\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes, Lindsay?\n00:02:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI have a completely random and unscripted question for you that will miraculously segue into today’s topic.\n00:02:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, you’ve surely piqued my interest. Lindsay, what’s on your mind?\n00:02:47\tLindsay Pereira\tHave you ever gone on a pilgrimage or maybe wanted to go on one?\n00:02:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tUm, okay, no, I’ve never gone on a pilgrimage or even thought about doing so, to be honest. Have you?\n00:02:59\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, I’m so glad you asked. Yes, I have gone on one.\n00:03:04\tLindsay Pereira\tI’ve completed the Camino de Santiago and even have the virtual badge to prove it.\n00:03:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWait, what? Hold on. When did you go to school? Spain?\n00:03:11\tLindsay Pereira\tNo, no, I didn’t actually travel there. I did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\nI just activated the challenge on the app, and voila.\n\nPilgrimage complete.\n\nLook, it says “Camino de Santiago, start this expedition and hike 784 km by tracking your daily steps.”\n\nCool, right?\n\n00:03:14\tLindsay Pereira\tI did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\n00:03:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tHuh. So, can people go on pilgrimage without going on pilgrimage?\n00:03:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI mean, yeah, it’s a thing.\n00:03:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt’s a thing.\n00:03:40\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah, it’s clearly a thing.\n00:03:41\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut is it a good thing?\n00:03:42\tLindsay Pereira\tHow is it a bad thing?\n00:03:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m not saying it’s a bad thing.\n00:03:45\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, my brain hurts. Speak with words, please.\n00:03:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tLook, I’m just saying with my scholarly hat on.\n00:03:51\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, fine, fine. I’ll Engage Smart Mode 2.\n00:04:02\tElla Jando-Saul\tVirtual Pilgrimage. It’s not a new thing. It’s been around since medieval times, too.\n00:04:06\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, absolutely. Not everyone could afford to travel during that period or was healthy enough even to make such a long, exhausting journey to Jerusalem and back again.\n00:04:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tRight, right, exactly.\n00:04:17\tElla Jando-Saul\tThis is why we have various manuscripts meant as walkthroughs of pilgrimage that were used by nuns who weren’t allowed to physically leave the cloister.\nVirtual pilgrimage was a legitimate workaround for those who couldn’t make the trek.\n\n00:04:30\tLindsay Pereira\tA badge to validate the virtual experience and the indulgences.\n00:04:35\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd, in a way, all pilgrimage is virtual.\n00:04:38\tLindsay Pereira\tWhat’s that supposed to mean?\n00:04:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, ultimately, we are all metaphorically on a pilgrimage toward Judgment Day. And when we travel to Jerusalem, we’re symbolically walking in Christ’s footsteps.\n00:04:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tWhen we travel to Canterbury, Santiago, Walsingham, Hereford, or any number of other pilgrimages, we are metaphorically walking in the footsteps of a saint and, ultimately, of Christ and imaginatively taking ourselves to Jerusalem and Judgment Day.\n00:05:02\tLindsay Pereira\tSo then, why are you poo-pooing my flashy, virtual, totally legit pilgrimage badge?\n00:05:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tElla, I’m not.\nI’m just wondering about things.\n\n00:05:11\tLindsay Pereira\tThings like pilgrimage hierarchy.\nLike is a virtual pilgrimage less valuable or respected than an in-person one?\n\n00:05:20\tElla Jando-Saul\tNo. Well, yeah.\nI mean, it’s an interesting point to consider. Think about Benjamin, right? What’s his first name?\n\nWalter…Walter…\n\n00:05:32\tLindsay Pereira\tWalter.\n00:05:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tWalter Benjamin.\nAnd his concept of the “aura” that an artistic object has.\n\nLike the Mona Lisa, for example. It’s more meaningful to actually have the real Mona Lisa. Even if you had a high-resolution print or a near-indistinguishable replica, it wouldn’t give you the same feature feeling as being in the presence of the painting created by Da Vinci.\n\nAnd in the case of pilgrimage, it’s more concrete. Like, will this experience actually heal me? Will it actually bring me closer to God? And, will this pilgrimage actually have my prayers answered?\n\n00:06:09\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, okay.\nWell, there’s another reason I’m interested in talking about pilgrimage with you today. The Garmin Watch was merely a brilliant lead-in for my big reveal.\n\n00:06:22\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, what’s going on?\n00:06:23\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, you may previously be aware of my Portuguese background from such things as our years long friendship and the fact that I don’t try to hide it.\nAnd my, you know, clearly, very obviously Portuguese last name.\n\n00:06:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes.\n00:06:41\tLindsay Pereira\tYou may also be definitely previously aware from such things as Professor Yeager’s grad class, colourfully entitled “Virgins, Martyrs, Trans Folk, the Early English Saint’s Life,” that my interest in pilgrimage stems from my father’s 50-year plus career as leader of a religious Marian pilgrimage known as the “Romaria,” which is specific to the Azorean island of San Miguel and in existence since 1522.\n00:07:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, this is both absolutely shocking and incredibly exciting.\nTell me more.\n\n00:07:14\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, my father, Eduardo Pereira, was a master who led pilgrims on an eight-day journey during Lent.\n00:07:25\tLindsay Pereira\tThey would all walk from before dawn until dusk, no matter the weather, in a clockwise direction around the island, stopping at churches and chapels, all the while praying the rosary and singing religious songs. At night, benevolent hosts who considered such guests a blessing from the Virgin Mary would feed and shelter them.\nOr if no homes were able to take them in, they’d sleep on the floor of a local church.\n\n00:07:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, eight days. That’s a lot of walking.\n00:07:54\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah. And praying. They walk, they pray, they pray, they walk.\n00:08:01\tLindsay Pereira\tI can’t help but think about this sort of invisible yet increasingly potent buildup of what Sarah Ahmed, everyone’s favourite affect theorist, would call affective value. I’m picturing all these pilgrims doing this pilgrimage on a yearly basis, going through the same motions, and every year it becomes more important, more powerful, more valuable.\n00:08:29\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt increases in effective value. And that’s why it feels so intense for pilgrims.\n00:08:32\tLindsay Pereira\tExactly.\n00:08:33\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut at the same time, I feel like there’s this thing where something gets super popular and then suddenly it’s too popular and it’s not cool to like anymore. Or it gets commodified.\nLike everyone is going on pilgrimage these days, or I guess those days in the 14th century, and suddenly you aren’t sure if people are going because they really want to connect with God or just because they want to look good.\n\n00:08:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd someone might, for instance, take issue with feeling accomplished for having completed the Camino de Santiago via their Garmin forerunner.\n00:09:00\tLindsay Pereira\tHey, I thought we were besties.\n00:09:00\tElla Jando-Saul\tOkay, look, now I’m really excited to learn more about pilgrimages—medieval pilgrimages, that is.\n00:09:10\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, me too.\nI have so many questions, but we need more background information, more learned input, and more context.\n\nNow it’s time for “What’s up, Prof?” The part of the podcast where we interview experts in the field to learn about important medieval-ly things so we can become not just smart scholars but also smarmy Scholars.\n\n00:09:40\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, that’s not a good thing.\n00:09:41\tLindsay Pereira\tFor the first episode, we are treating you to two experts.\n00:09:45\tElla Jando-Saul\tWe interview Drs—Michael Van Dussen of McGill University and Simon Coleman of the University of Toronto.\nDr. Van Dussen speaks to us about the material culture of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. He introduces us to objects such as pilgrimage badges and itineraries and discusses the cultural conception of travel.\n\n00:10:03\tLindsay Pereira\tDr. Coleman tells us about the modern revival of an important medieval pilgrimage site in Walsingham, England. Walsingham is a remote village in Norfolk that has become a popular pilgrimage destination over the last century.\nThe site contains a variety of historical and modern shrines to Our Lady of Walsingham, an apparition of Mary in that area. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and non-religious pilgrims gather in the village throughout the spring and summer to venerate the saint and reconnect with England’s medieval past.\n\n00:10:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tWell, hello, I’m Michael Van Dussen. I’m a professor in the English literature department at McGill University in Montreal and I work a lot on medieval manuscripts, medieval travel, and I’m happy to talk with you today.\n00:11:00\tSimon Coleman\tWell, hello, I’m Simon Coleman.\nI’m a professor of the Anthropology of Religion based in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.\n\nAnd my latest book on pilgrimage is called Powers of Pilgrimage Religion in a World of Movement that was published about a year ago. And it really tries to take us through different ways in which anthropologists and others have tried to analyze the significance of pilgrimage in the contemporary world.\n\n00:11:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tFrom your email, I understood that you’ve worked with the material culture of medieval pilgrimage.\n00:11:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tYeah, I am not intentionally going for pilgrimage, though.\nYeah. So I mean, people are traveling for a number of different reasons, but the idea of “curiosity-based” travel, where you’re just going around to see the sights and that’s an end in itself.\n\nThat’s the reason for doing it. That’s not really a culturally held value in the later Middle Ages. I mean it’s coming to be one sort of. But people are apologetic about it or people are maybe doing something out of curiosity, but they are also doing something for a more traditionally legitimate reason as well.\n\nSo that could be a pilgrimage. So, it’s something that’s infused with theological, devotional, and especially significant aspects. Or it could be trade, but trade is always iffy sometimes. But it’s a legitimate reason to travel or diplomacy. So, political travel is traveling for political reasons. But one of the things that are interesting is that what I’m going to call pilgrimage sort of loosely finds its way into all of this kind of travel.\n\n00:12:59\tSimon Coleman\tYou know, some of the best historians of Walsingham and people who’ve written really interesting work on Walsingham are also themselves associated with the church in some way.\nThose are people who are very, very keen on getting the historical facts right. And, you know, Walsingham is more than just a place where there are numerous shrines. Walsingham also has numerous archives. I hope to look at the archives again in a few months.\n\n00:13:34\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so there are all sorts of ways in which people are working to try and make the if you like, the religious or the theological and the historical come together.\n00:13:50\tSimon Coleman\tThere are obviously occasions when people see them as clashing. And I guess I’ll give you one example: If we go back to the Anakin shrine, I think I mentioned to you earlier that, you know, it’s not where the original site was when it was first constructed.\nA well and some artifacts were discovered in the area when the Anglican shrine was constructed. And, you know, Hope Patton at one point was thinking, okay, well, actually, look, God has actually brought us to the original place, you know, by providence, and gradually decided, you know, it’s not clear how long he kept that view.\n\n00:14:48\tSimon Coleman\tGradually, that view tends to fade.\n00:14:50\tSimon Coleman\tIn the 1960s, an archaeological dig is made, it seems, to establish the original site further away. And yet when I first went to Walsingham in the 1990s and I said to people, hi, I’m an anthropologist.\nI’m here to look at the shrines, people said to me, oh, I hope you’re going to actually discover a real place where the original shrine was.\n\nSo even the archaeology of the 1960s had not quite settled this sense of where people felt that the shrine should be for religious and theological reasons. And so there’s always this kind of. There may be slight tension. Not always, but it’s often this slight tension.\n\n00:15:38\tSimon Coleman\tAnd for many people, you know, where history and theology or when history and faith clash, of course, for many people, faith wins. What matters is what Walsingham can do for one’s faith and how it might bring one closer to a church. And I’ve had some clergy and pilgrims say that they don’t want to know the details of the history because that’s precise. That’s not important. And that’s a distraction from Walsingham’s real message.\n00:16:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd in that sense, I find it fascinating and curious that if you go to the original site of the Holy House, for instance, there’s the kind of. That’s now a blank space, and there’s a big kind of arch, which is the original east window of the pirate.\nThat’s there, but there isn’t much else. Of course, that means that people can insert their own imaginations into the site. They can reclose a relatively blank space with their ideas of what the medieval shrine should be for them as pilgrims.\n\n00:17:02\tMichael Van Dussen\tI accidentally found an itinerary in an ugly manuscript in Prague Castle.\n00:17:10\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou know, forgive me, a proud castle for saying the manuscript’s ugly, but it’s got water damage all over it, and it’s grimy. And the last part of this manuscript is soiled. It’s gross and different from the rest of the manuscript it’s bound with. It was clearly carried on its own as a little notebook on the trip that it describes. And there’s this guy; he seems to be a knight. He’s called a Miles, a knight in Latin. But we don’t know anything about it, or what he’s travelling for.\n00:17:43\tMichael Van Dussen\tWhat we do know is that he moves from Prague and makes his way across the continent in the direction of England. He dips down to Paris, goes back up to Calais, and crosses the English Channel.\nAnd then he starts being interested in what he’s describing England. He describes stuff in other places, too, but he’s really kind of. His curiosity, you can just come back to that word, is piqued.\n\n00:18:08\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd he…It’s unclear. Sometimes people are writing their itineraries themselves.\nSometimes, if they’re a little more wealthy, they might have a secretary traveling with them who writes things for them.\n\nWe don’t know who wrote this, but I have found evidence of people going through England and other places with multiple secretaries writing their itineraries.\n\nSo that’s another layer.\n\n00:18:36\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know in this particular case, but he starts to describe the distances between places. You know, this is a very…almost literally grounded itinerary. It’s saying, from Dover or Dover to Rochester or Canterbury to London.\nThis many miles use different units of measurement. And you get a sense that his recording stops along the way, about as far as he could go in a day’s ride on a horse, probably with some other people.\n\n00:19:12\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe goes to Canterbury. He describes the shrine of Thomas Becket as one that no longer survives. One of the tricky things about England is that most of these shrines, these pilgrimage destinations, were destroyed during the Reformation.\nIt’s interesting when we find material evidence of what a shrine looked like because we don’t have that anymore in most cases. So, he describes this shrine of Thomas Becket. It’s golden and beautiful. He doesn’t give a lot of information. He goes to London, to Westminster Abbey, where the queen is crowned and everything.\n\n00:19:55\tMichael Van Dussen\tThen he starts describing all sorts of tombs, which do, for the most part, survive.\nThese still are…You could go to Westminster today and still see what he’s describing. And he describes them. Some of them are saints, some of them are just, you know, kings and queens who died. He’s impressed by these tombs. They’re imposing tombs. And he does the same in St.Paul’s Cathedral. He describes tombs.\n\n00:20:22\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe describes the dimensions of the place in swords, which is weird because he describes the dimensions in swords. It’s this many swords wide, it’s this many swords long, and it’s this many swords high from the ground into the top of the.\nThat’s hilarious—the steep. Like, wait a minute, how’s he doing this? Appropriate. It’s nuts. Is he going around with a sword? But then, how’s he getting up to the very top of this? But then I found. He’s not. He’s not.\n\n00:20:54\tMichael Van Dussen\tI found it by accident. The exact same description, maybe a couple of words different, but the exact same measurements, the exact same everything, is found in another manuscript in the British Library.\nIt tells you where those measurements are written. They’re written down. They’re written on posted texts. Say, this is St.Paul’s Cathedral. This is how big it is, this is how many swords wide it is, or whatever width it is, it’s how tall it is. These are the different tombs. This is who’s buried there.\n\n00:21:26\tMichael Van Dussen\tThis is this cross, this pilgrimage destination at the north door, this CR Cross associated with Joseph of Arimathea and the Christianization of England. There are all these guides in textual form that he’s just transcribing.\nAs I said, I first studied waiting in the 1990s, and sure, we had, you know, we could have email and so on, but it feels like it’s a kind of world apart.\n\n00:21:59\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou Know, going back in the.In the 2000s and twenties. Of course, that has to do with technology, but it also has to do with the post. Post covert experience and the sense I got, you know, having and having done. I’ve been in Walsingham a lot over the last year, especially just posting in the post-COVID period, if you can call it post-COVID. We’re not quite post Covid now, but you know, what I mean was the ways in which actually that sent that.\n00:22:24\tMichael Van Dussen\tDuring that period, people could not come to the shrines, people physically could not come to the shrines, or very few people could.\n00:22:33\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd you had this kind of. You had to have these groups separate. They were separated from each other.\nSo, you had to separate people physically from each other as they went through. So, how could the shrines respond to that?\n\nWell, as I guess must have been true for many other parts of the Christian and wider religious world, they discovered or were kind of forced into thinking about the role of technology. So rather than simply saying the shrines are closed and nobody can come, they realized that they could actually use cameras in the shrines, Facebook, and other ways of linking with pilgrims.\n\nAnd now, you started to get daily masses broadcast from the shrines—sorry, both shrines. Of course, this linked the shrines with people who would normally have been at Walsingham but couldn’t make it. But it also started to link them with even wider constituencies.\n\n00:23:43\tSimon Coleman\tSo you’ve got a shrine mass, and you suddenly realize that people who are attending that mass virtually, who are looking through the cameras at the priest at the altar, and so on, are people who are spread around the world.\n00:23:58\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so in a curious sense, you’ve, I mean, as one person put it, one, one. One priest put it, he said we broadened our constituency.\nWe actually increased our connections through COVID-19 in a curious way. And there’s one point when there’s a big, you know, celebration that takes place in the Anakin shrine. And it’s one on the national level. It’s one of the national days, and it crashes. I think this.\n\nI forget whether it’s the Anakin or the Roman Catholics, but, you know, the shrine crashes, the link crashes because there are so many people actually trying to get on or that’s certainly one possible explanation. But there’s a wider aesthetic sense here, which is that it’s not just that the linkages are made with a wider constituency.\n\n00:24:46\tSimon Coleman\tAnd okay, at the kind of Fsites, you can see how people attending mass also chat with each other.\n00:24:55\tSimon Coleman\tSo there’s another. There’s communication going on there that wouldn’t have taken place otherwise.\nBut there’s a wider sense in which the use of cameras actually means that images from the shrines are used in such a way that it allows the viewer to get much closer to, say, statues or other parts of the shrine’s material culture.\n\nAnd so effectively you might actually have an image of a statue of, say that of Our lady of Walsingham from the Slipper Chapel. And there’s an image that’ll be on the video, and nothing happens for half an hour.\n\n00:25:36\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, it. You have a cl. Effectively, you can meditate on that statue in a way you wouldn’t have been able to do if you had been there. And so I’m like, there’s a sense in which there’s a kind of diffusion of links, but also a kind of magnification and bringing one closer to these images, even if one can’t physically touch them.\nAnd then, of course, as has happened in other pilgrimage sites, you know, people do them in their local areas so that you recreate the sense of going on pilgrimage. But you can’t do it physically in Norfolk, but you can do it in your local area, possibly with walking with other people, if you’re allowed to.\n\n00:26:28\tSimon Coleman\tAgain, there are all sorts of ways in which people can retain this sense or magnify this sense.\n00:26:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tBeing in touch with Walsingham and that sort of doing a local pilgrimage because you can’t actually do the bigger one, is something that we’ve been researching a lot for this project because that’s a lot of what medieval pilgrimage in England seems to be doing is like, well, if you can’t actually make it to Jerusalem, you can make it to this cathedral in England and that’ll be a stand in for Jerusalem.\n00:27:07\tSimon Coleman\tThis is absolutely true.\n00:27:08\tSimon Coleman\tAnd of course what we need to bear in mind is that Walsingham itself, and when I think about Walsingham, I talk about Walsingham as the place, but I also talk about Walsingham as the experience.\n00:27:21\tSimon Coleman\tBoth Catholic and Anglican shrines are linked up with parishes and dioceses that will have their own local altars where you might Celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham.\n00:27:38\tSimon Coleman\tYou might get together once you know you’re part of a guild or something else orientated towards Our Lady of Walsingham.\nAnd so it’s not. You don’t just think about Walsingham when you’re going on pilgrimage.\n\nYou might actually come together, have a Mass, and celebrate Our Lady. You’ll gather under the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in your local parish church. And so, the statue itself—the statue of Our Lady might be taken from either shrine and might be taken around the country. And so you might be visited by Our Lady of Walsingham.\n\nShe might come to see you in your local church. Very famously, for instance, the Roman Catholic statue of Our Lady was taken to Wembley Stadium, a big sports stadium in London, in the 1980s, when the Pope, Pope John II, John Paul II, came to England. He celebrated Mass in Wembley Stadium, and on the altar was our statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. So she is mobile.\n\n00:29:01\tSimon Coleman\tAnd, you know, Pope John Paul II effectively contacts her and blesses her, and then she returns to Walsingham. So Walsingham, as a wider experience, is itself mobile.\n00:29:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd then this gets augmented, as we say, during COVID as people recreate not just to celebrate Mass. You can’t get together to celebrate Mass in your local church, but you can still go on a walk and coordinate with others online.\n00:29:32\tSimon Coleman\tI think this has had some degree of effect after the lockdown experience, where people have realized that you can expand the ways in which you celebrate your connection to Wolsingham.\n00:29:51\tMichael Van Dussen\tI mean, a lot of these are not like the texts, say, the Stations of Jerusalem or Stations of Rome, which are encouraging.\n00:30:20\tMichael Van Dussen\tThey’re not just saying, and it takes one day to get from here to here, or this is how many meters wide this is or something. These kinds of itineraries. Yeah, swords wide, you know, statues or something. This isn’t what they’re recording. They’re. They’re usually much more meditative. Yeah, they are. They have a reference point to specific locations and what’s there, but they might.\n00:31:03\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know if you know about the Stations of the Cross, but you’ll find in every Catholic church today and during Lent, especially leading up to Easter, the Stations of the Will, there will be Stations of the Cross. So you can come.\nIt can be separate from a Mass or part of a Mass, and sometimes physically walk around the church. It’s inside the church but around the walls. And there’ll be 14. You know, all the stations that represent the stages of the Passion of Christ. And they are located in, you know, Jerusalem. But it’s a meditative experience. And sometimes, it’s sort of a pilgrimage within the church.\n\nThis still happens every year today, but I’m mentioning that because these stations of Jerusalem or stations of Rome proceed in similar ways—not identical, but similar. So they’re very meditative and prayerful.\n\n00:31:58\tMichael Van Dussen\tUsually, there are prayers interposed between descriptions of a location so that the emphasis is.\nIt’s hard to lose sight of the idea that the emphasis is spiritual and not just sort of like, “Oh, and then there’s this great place.”\n\nYou’ve got to go to this one bar. It’s not right near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sorry, that sounds blasphemous. One of the things I have heard people talk about is that you know, of course, physically going. Going to the place does more than just put you in. Touch with a place that may differ greatly from your local experience in your everyday experience.\n\n00:33:02\tSimon Coleman\tOf course, you can have your Walsingham, your statue of Our Lady Walsingham, in your local parish, but that’s different than making an effort to travel, let’s say, 200 miles in a coach with other parish members.\n00:33:03\tSimon Coleman\tYou’ve paid. You’ve paid some money, which may be difficult for some people.\nYou are seeing fellow parishioners in a new way. And a lot of people talk about this idea of when you kind of get towards Walsingham, you feel as though there’s this. Suddenly, this bubble appears. It’s a bubble that surrounds the village. And you go through that bubble, and you’re in a Norfolk.\n\nBut you. Maybe you. You may come from industrial Manchester, okay? And that’s where you are most of the year. And maybe you haven’t. You only travel a little. And then suddenly you find yourself, Reg. You know, you. Once a year, you find yourself in this Norfolk rural village. And you’re seeing people who you may know very well. You’re seeing them in a new way. You’re not just that, but you come, and the clergy at the shrine recognize you. And some clergy are brilliant at this. They may see you once a year, but they say, oh, hello, Simon, how lovely to see you again. You know, hello, Lindsay, how. Hello, Ella. It was lovely to see you again. You know, I remember last year. Oh, have you come with your friend?\n\n00:34:21\tSimon Coleman\tSo, all of that, that complex process of hosting is occurring. And then, of course, there’s the fact that you are separating yourself from a lot of the things that you might be having to do at home.\nPeople talk about it, and it allows you to have a particular kind of focus when you actually get there.\n\n00:34:59\tSimon Coleman\tSo it’s a combination of the place itself and the experience of having gotten away and having a time and space in which you can focus in unusual ways on the pilgrimage experience, which I think is very significant.\n00:35:00\tSimon Coleman\tAnd I talked. I have written about this.\nWe need. When we think about that experience, it’s not just a question of looking at what happens actually in shrines or liturgically.\n\nIt’s also looking at what happens on one side of the official worship experiences: that you talk to people and engage in spaces adjacent to shrines but somehow significant.\n\nThey may not be obviously religious, but I call them lateral spaces rather than liminal spaces and times, kind of penumbral spaces, where you’re temporarily and spatially in the environment of a site, but you’re not necessarily celebrating a Mass at any given moment, but you are somehow orientated towards a pilgrimage experience.\n\nIt’s those fuzzier spaces that are also very important. You don’t get them when, effectively, you’ve looked at the shrine through your screen, switched the laptop off, and that’s it. And all of a sudden, you’re back into your everyday.\n\n00:36:23\tSimon Coleman\tAnd those Anglo Catholic sensibilities that we’ve talked about were sometimes derisively talked about as being kind of British Museum religion. And why are you going back to an ossified faith?\n00:36:35\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, what we’re trying to understand here is how it’s not an ossified faith.\n00:36:49\tSimon Coleman\tIt’s a faith where the past and the present are so closely sandwiched and allied together for theological and other reasons that we’ve got to try and think back into a sensibility where the past becomes living in a new.\nIn a new kind of way.\n\n00:37:07\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, well said.\n00:37:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tCan we do that? Can we create a sensibility where the past becomes living?\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWe sure can.\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWith the magic of our next segment, Medieval mixtape soundscape shapes from centuries past.\n00:37:20\tAudio Clip\t[Background noise of sheep and chatter]\n[Background chatter in Middle English]\n\nIt that will not…\n\nA fool I…\n\nWish is overcome…\n\nBut first in and…\n\nEke to bring and weave as in sweet farm Thou mayest have not of…\n\nAnother thing a brother of who hath no way he eats no kukiwal but e say natural…\n\nThe morning in the morning in the morning, in the morning…\n\n00:49:39\tLindsay Pereira\tThank you, gentle listeners, humble scholars and fellow medieval addicts.\n00:49:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tThanks to James Healy and the rest of Concordia’s SpokenWeb Team for letting us use their facilities and to the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia for lending us fantastic recording equipment.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd thank you, of course, to our lovely experts, Professors Michael Van Dusen and Simon Coleman.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tDon’t forget to check out Professor Coleman’s book– Farathya Sunder.\n00:50:08\tMusic\t[Harmonized singing and music starts playing]\n00:50:56\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. The Spoken Web Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web Team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:51:00\tHannah McGregor\tElla Jando-Saul and Lindsey Pereira produced this month’s episode.\n00:51:01\tHannah McGregor\tSpecial thanks to Dr.Michael Van Dussen and Dr.Simon Coleman for lending their time and expertise.\n00:51:18\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast Team supervises producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and, me, Hannah McGregor.\n00:51:29\tHannah McGregor\tTo learn more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen.\n00:51:36\tHannah McGregor\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us, leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tThanks for listening.\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9605","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E4, From Me to You, A Sonic Glimpse at Proprioception, 3 February 2025, Harris"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/from-me-to-you-a-sonic-glimpse-at-proprioception/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/dcf63247-f0ec-4b4d-a72a-f471c2c46d1a/audio/aef0eda4-6e4f-4343-a8ed-6c4732f445f1/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e4.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:44:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"42,922,421 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/from-me-to-you-a-sonic-glimpse-at-proprioception/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-02-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Han, Jia, et al. “Assessing Proprioception: A Critical Review of Methods.” Journal of Sport and Health Science, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 80–90. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2014.10.004.\\n\\nHickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. W.W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2014.\\n\\nStarr, Gabrielle G. “Multisensory Imagery.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.\\n\\nMechanical Buttons (DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel) by PixelProphecy — https://freesound.org/s/497026/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\nEnd Credits Music by vibritherabjit123 — https://freesound.org/s/738579/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\nWalk – Gravel.wav by 16FPanskaStochl_Frantisek — https://freesound.org/s/499245/ — License: Attribution 3.0\\n\\nsnare 2 SMALLer.wav by Logicogonist — https://freesound.org/s/209884/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nright x small crash.wav by Logicogonist — https://freesound.org/s/209870/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nMagazine Rustle and Book Closing by Zott820 — https://freesound.org/s/209577/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nEnd of 78 Record Gramaphone Running Down .WAV by trpete — https://freesound.org/s/627419/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nRagtime – https://pixabay.com/music/vintage-ragtime-193535/ Liscence: CC0 License\\n\\nrelaxation music.mp3 by ZHRØ — https://freesound.org/s/520673/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\ncelestial arp loop c 01.wav by CarlosCarty — https://freesound.org/s/572560/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\n165 bpm – Broken Beat – Guitar.wav by MuSiCjUnK — https://freesound.org/s/320630/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nSynth Lead by EX-AN — https://freesound.org/s/561505/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nShopping theme (90bpm).wav by Pax11 — https://freesound.org/s/444880/ — License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0\\n\\nSky Loop by FoolBoyMedia — https://freesound.org/s/264295/ — License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549679505408,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["A proprioception-enthusiast and a thespian walk into a podcast booth.\n\nTogether, they engage with scholars from three different fields outside of those traditionally working with and through the sense of proprioception. From spatial music mixing, to arts education, to English literature, our hosts learn how these scholars understand and apply the sense of proprioception for their work.\n\nThrough the engagement process, the proprioception-enthusiast and the thespian come to understand the affordances of proprioception for framing bodies in space and time and refigure how they understand the space between you and me.\n\n00:00:03\t[SpokenWeb Intro Song]\t[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is a series of stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine MacLeod.\nAnd each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, producer Maia Harris and guest Ryan Litvak offer a sonic glimpse into how scholars from three different fields engage with the sense of proprioception for their work.\n00:01:06\tHannah McGregor\tThrough conversation with special guests, Maia and Ryan learn how this sixth sense, the sense of where your body is in space, might apply to different fields outside of physiology, from spatial music mixing to arts education to English literature.\nAlong the way, they start to rethink the texture of how they move through life.\n\n00:01:30\tHannah McGregor\tAs a note to listeners, this is probably one you want to wear headphones for.\nNow, sit back, get comfortable in your body, and enjoy Season 6, episode 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “From Me to You, a Sonic Glimpse at Proprioception.”\n\n00:01:50\tMusic\t[MUSIC]\n00:01:59\tMaia Harris\tHi, my name is Maia. And two years ago–gosh, coming on three now-I became utterly obsessed with the sense of “proprioception.” [Faint drums play in the background] I see proprioception everywhere.\nWalking down the street [sound of steps], proprioception.\n\nPlaying the drums [sound of drums], proprioception.\n\nReading a book [sound of pages flipping], yeah, funnily enough, proprioception.\n\n00:02:26\tRyan Litvak\tI can attest that Maia will not shut up about proprioception.\n00:02:31\tRyan Litvak\tMy name is Ryan Litvak. I’m a theatre writer, director, and multidisciplinary artist.\nI’ve known Maia for a few years. We work together and do other stuff. [Laughter]\n\n00:02:43\tRyan Litvak\t[Inaudible]\n00:02:46\tRyan Litvak\tI, in fact, am not obsessed with proprioception.\nActually, I don’t really know what it is or why it’s relevant to someone who’s in the humanities, like Maia.\n\n00:02:57\tMaia Harris\tWell, Ryan, I have some great news.\n00:03:00\tRyan Litvak\tYou’re gonna tell me what it is?\n00:03:02\tMaia Harris\tNot only am I going to tell you what it is, but I’m also going to tell you why it’s relevant to you, to me, to the listeners, and, frankly, just everybody. [Faint music starts playing in the background]\n00:03:10\tRyan Litvak\tThat’s huge.\n00:03:11\tMaia Harris\tBut to do this right, to introduce you to proprioception in all of its glory and affordances, I’ve enlisted the help of scholars from three totally different fields who have one thing in common.\n00:03:23\tRyan Litvak\tWhat’s that?\n00:03:24\tMaia Harris\tThey have to grapple with a sense of proprioception for their work. [Music stops abruptly]\nLet’s start with a simple definition. To cite Gary Merrill in his book Our Intelligent Bodies. Proprioception is the sense of the relative position of one’s body in space and time. So a spatiotemporal orientation, which means that–\n\n00:03:48\tRyan Litvak\tWow, pause.\nCan you just back up a little bit there?\n\n00:03:52\tMaia Harris\tOh, I’m sorry. Yes, of course.\nIt all started in 1826 when Charles Bell began to study the anatomy of the brain-to-limb connection–\n\n00:04:00\tRyan Litvak\tStop. That’s not really. I just meant, like, what exactly do you mean by “spatiotemporal orientation”?\n00:04:08\tMaia Harris\tOh, my gosh! Yeah, let’s start there.\nSo, your body is always in space and time, right?\n\n00:04:15\tRyan Litvak\tYeah.\n00:04:16\tMaia Harris\tProprioception is our sense of that.\nIt’s our sense of our own body in space and time.\n\nSo, your sitting body position in this room, for example, or your body position when you walk and navigate the space of, say, like a sidewalk, these are spatial and temporal states.\n\nYour body and your sense of it are relative always to an object in space, to space, or even our own body, just five seconds ago.\n\n00:04:44\tRyan Litvak\tOh, okay. So, proprioception is your sense of your own body.\n00:04:49\tMaia Harris\tExactly.\nThink you’re knowing how, if you close your eyes and you put your hand behind your head, you’re aware that it’s there. That awareness of your own body is your proprioception. And this sense, what you feel with your eyes closed, is what helps to maintain one’s sense of orientation, one’s sense of balance.\n\nIt’s as simple as that.\n\n00:05:16\tRyan Litvak\tOkay, I think I understand what proprioception is, but like, how does it actually work, though?\n00:05:23\tMaia Harris\tWhat’s that now?\n00:05:24\tRyan Litvak\tLike, how do I know my hand’s behind my head? How does that feeling maintain my sense of balance?\nTo see, I have my eyes.\n\nTo hear, I have my ears.\n\nWhat about the proprioception? Is that a verb?\n\n00:05:38\tMaia Harris\tI don’t think so.\nBut to address your question first, we have these things called “proprioceptors,” which are receptors deep in one’s body and tissues. These proprioceptors sense a variety of stimuli having to do primarily with movement, from velocity to vibration to deep pressure. This information is monitored via the central nervous system and is signalled to the brain.\n\nBut I don’t want to oversimplify it because proprioception is actually a “distributed sense.”\n\nIt’s not in or of any single bodily location, nor informed by any single kind of stimuli. Our five major senses also contribute to proprioception.\n\n00:06:24\tRyan Litvak\tSorry, I still don’t understand.\n00:06:27\tMaia Harris\tWould a specific example help?\n00:06:30\tRyan Litvak\tI think it would.\n00:06:33\tMaia Harris\tTake “sound.” We know sound.\nWe do, well, we’re always relative to a source of sound. And that sense of our relative position to that source of sound is an aspect of how we orient ourselves.\n\nJames can explain it better than me, though.\n\nLet me introduce you to James Healy.\n\n00:06:53\tJames Healy\tI’m James. I work with SpokenWeb and Maya. I work in sound, and I’m an artist. I make a lot of music and other stuff.\n00:07:04\tMaia Harris\tSo I asked James about how “proprioceptive orientation” and “sound” might coexist.\n00:07:13\tJames Healy\tOne way we would basically get oriented in a space.\nBasically, the only way that we know where a sound is coming from, if your eyes are closed, is because of your ears.\n\n[You] have your pinna. What that will do is taper down high frequencies coming from behind you. It will absorb some really high frequencies and let the “lows” wrap-around, which means that if you hear that quality, it means that something is behind you.\n\nBecause of the way they’re facing, they’re not absorbing the same high frequencies as if something’s in front of you.\n\nSo, if you were to chop up your ear or something, like pull a little Van Gogh thing or whatever, you actually would have a lot of trouble figuring out where things were.\n\n00:08:05\tRyan Litvak\tOkay, that makes sense. So, our pinna is part of our proprioception.\n00:08:11\tMaia Harris\tIn short, yes. Our pinna and “sound localization” are part of the feedback loop of proprioception.\nBut what if I told you that isn’t the whole story?\n\n00:08:22\tRyan Litvak\tThen I would ask, what is the whole story?\n00:08:26\tMaia Harris\tRyan, come on, it’s not my story to tell.\nAllow me to defer to our next guest, Théo. [A keyboard click, followed by a chime of an incoming video call]\n\n00:08:35\tThéo Bouveyron\t[Soft chime plays in the background] My name’s Théo Bouveyron, and I’m currently enrolled in a Master’s degree and also working at the University of Cologne in Germany. Although, I am currently studying Information Processing.\nAfter finishing my Bachelor’s degree in Media Informatics, I actually started off with a degree in Audio Engineering. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:08:54\tMaia Harris\tThéo has thought a lot about the role of proprioception and spatiality in VR.\nHere, he is describing his project. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:09:02\tThéo Bouveyron\tI recreated a recording studio, or the very least a room resembling it, through which you can move and where you can position instruments.\nThe position of the instruments relative to yourself influences how the music is being processed and ultimately heard.\n\n00:09:17\tThéo Bouveyron\tAdditionally, I provided users with a more traditional way to control the volume of the instruments through a modelled and interactive mixing console.\nMy aim with this project was to build a virtual reality application that reconnects users with the spatial characteristics of sound by allowing them to mix audio in a fully three-dimensional environment. Proprioception is an essential part of my project as it bridges the user’s physical presence with the virtual space in the real world. We naturally use our body’s awareness to orient ourselves, understand distances, and locate sounds.\n\nMy goal is to replicate and enhance this connection in virtual reality, where spatial audio is not just something we hear but something that helps users feel embedded within the environment. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:10:02\tMaia Harris\tThéo’s project exists in a field called “spatial music mixing,” or “spatial audio,” more generally. [Keyboard click]\n00:10:10\tThéo Bouveyron\tIn conventional stereo or surround sound mixing, sounds are represented as fixed points along a two-dimensional plane or confined within specific channels. This approach can never fully capture how we perceive sound in real life, where each sound interacts with the environment and our bodies in complex ways.\n00:10:29\tThéo Bouveyron\tSpatial music mixing, on the other hand, reintroduces the body into the equation, opening the door to making the act of listening a dynamic, participatory experience.\nWith spatial music mixing, the goal shifts to recreating a more authentic auditory experience by treating each sound as a discrete entity existing in a 3D space, free to move and adapt based on the listener’s position. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:10:54\tMaia Harris\tSo, for Théo’s project, listening position – which is part of proprioception, so where you are relative to sound – is a huge deal. [Keyboard click]\n00:11:04\tThéo Bouveyron\tThe concept of “listening position” is pivotal in both “acoustics” and\n“spatial audio.” Typically, our listening position is determined by our head’s orientation and position. Our ears become the reference point for sound perception. As users move through the virtual space, the soundscape shifts in response to their movements, providing constant feedback.\nThis interplay engages proprioception, allowing users to feel their position within space and making the virtual environment feel tangible and responsive. Proprioception, therefore, comes into play not just as a means of feeling present but as an integral part of how users interact with the virtual environment.\n\nAs they move, the spatiality of sound continuously informs their perception of the world around them. This combination of spatial audio and proprioception makes the virtual environment more than just a visual or auditory experience. It becomes an embodied interactive space that adapts to the user’s movement and perspective, creating a more intuitive and immersive sense of presence. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:12:06\tRyan Litvak\tThat’s really interesting.\nI feel like these days, everybody’s plugged into their headphones all the time. And when we listen to music, or we’re watching something with our headphones, all of that sound is just inside our heads, between our ears.\n\nBecause I come from a theatre background, which is very open and communal. But I think that we, as listeners of sound in every context, deserve better than that. Like, we deserve to feel the sound in our body. And to really like “propriocept it.” [Laughter]\n\n00:12:45\tRyan Litvak\tAnd so I think what Théo is doing is really cool.\n00:12:49\tMaia Harris\tYeah, I do, too. Théo doesn’t shy away from the conceptual implications of this project, specifically about what a sense of oneself means in VR either. [Keyboard click]\n00:13:00\tThéo Bouveyron\tIn virtual environments, proprioception becomes a dynamic tool, allowing users to interact with their surroundings in ways that transcend the limitations of the physical world. This freedom introduces an exciting form of self-exploration. As users move or alter their listening perspective, they are not just shifting how they hear sound. They are actively reshaping their sense of presence and identity within the virtual space. That’s what excites me the most: how proprioception in VR enables users to rethink their identity in relation to space, where users can continuously adapt to the virtual environment in ways that redefine their relationship with themselves and vice versa. The virtual environment can also be adapted to your sense of self. [Keyboard click]\n00:13:46\tRyan Litvak\tSo, this proprioception thing is starting to feel like a big deal.\n00:13:50\tMaia Harris\tYeah, it kind of is. So Teo is building the sense of proprioception into his project, but I want to introduce you now to someone whose project was built out of the sense of proprioception itself.\nMeet Eija. [A chime of an incoming video call]\n\n00:14:10\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tMy name is Eija Loponen-Stephenson.\nI just finished my master’s in Art Education at Concordia University. I’m an artist and a scholar. I come from a background in fine arts. I’ve recently been becoming an academic [Laughs], and my work has to do mostly with, I guess, studying, augmenting, and disrupting how bodies move through urban spaces. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:14:39\tMaia Harris\tEija and I talked about her master’s thesis project, which she finished and premiered just last year. [Keyboard click]\n00:14:47\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThe really long academic title is “Urban Choreographics Tracing the Extralinguistic Pedagogies of Montreal’s Underground Metro System.”\nSo my project, in kind of broad strokes, is about how moving through public architectural spaces is really actually an educative experience. So, my thesis project looks specifically at the architecture of Montreal’s underground metro system. It was useful for me to look at a highly programmed structure. Therefore, the metro is a place in the city where bodies have to be highly organized in order to move efficiently through space. And it has to be able to accommodate, like, a lot of flux of movement. And there’s a very kind of obvious rhythm structure of those spaces. Therefore, I investigate the dominant movement patterns of those spaces through experimental long-exposure photography. And also so experimental performative, like sonic investigations, I would say. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:15:59\tMaia Harris\tWe also discussed who and what inspired Eija’s project.\nHere, she discusses Lawrence and Anna Halprin. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:16:09\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, Lawrence Halprin was an architect based out of New York City. Instead of designing structures and then kind of putting bodies in them, he wanted to invert that kind of dynamic. So he invented a kind of choreographic notation. It’s called motivation. And so it was a kind of. It was a way for him to score the ways that a body should move through space before the structure had been conceived of. He would create a score of motions or gestures according to the purpose of the building and then create a structure kind of around that. Those movements. He was a lifetime collaborator with his wife, Anna Halprin, who is kind of lauded as one of the inventors of contemporary dance. And so a lot of his ideas, like his ideas are actually things that they collaborate on together. And so his choreographic notation absolutely comes from the. The kind of history of choreographic notation that was especially big in dance at that time.\n00:17:18\tMaia Harris, recording with Eija Loponen-Stephenson\tCould you talk a little bit more about your own mode? Would you call it a kind of notation recording?\n00:17:24\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah.\n00:17:25\tMaia Harris\tCould you say more about that?\n00:17:26\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah. Thinking about choreographic notation, I think it’s just a good place to start. So it was a way to kind of codify a set of gestures because, like, before videography or photography, how does a dance actually get archived? But what I’m interested in about choreographic notation is actually the absence of exactitude. So, the kind of empty spaces that are left between the notes are not in the precise reenactment of the score. It’s actually in the spaces in between where artistry is.\n00:18:02\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, I became very interested in thinking about architecture as a form of choreographic notation. So, if we think about a building as a bunch of points, bodies have to move between. I’m interested in the similarities and variations in those spaces between the vectors of a building.\nEssentially, my first approach to trying to document these variances or similarities in movements between vectors had like a. Just kind of an inclination. I think it’s probably from my artistic training. I have seen a kind of long exposure to photography. The opening and shutting of the camera lens are very similar. These vectors are in space and like architecture.\n\nSo conceivably, I could if I stayed still. The bodies are moving in space; I could conceivably document that in-between space.\n\n00:19:04\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tIn my preliminary photography, I was getting some interesting results. But it was kind of like I didn’t have a measure. It felt very blurry and just kind of random.\nAnd so I realized that I needed to actually figure out a way to capture time and space in an intentional way where they were kind of connected. So, in my photographs, I started thinking about rhythm analysis, which is the study of the rhythms of everyday life, especially everyday motions. I developed a walking practice where I was walking in time with groups of people during rush hour. So I was using a metronome in my ears, and I was able to, as I was walking, adjust the metronome time so that the beats per minute lined up with my footsteps, like the pace of my footsteps and, therefore, the footsteps of the crowd.\n\n00:20:04\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, I’m able to get a BPM. A bpm reading of that space and time then informs the duration of the exposure. So I have the BPM, and then I determine the length of the gesture that I want to record. So let’s say it’s like a 10-step. So, it’s 10 steps between the two vectors in the architectural space. I also have a formula where I can figure out the exposure time to record a body’s movement across that kind of vector field. When the group of people, like the group of bodies in motion, are walking in synchronization, they become uniformly blurred in relation to proprioception. I think that if we can isolate these gestures and make them strange, then we have an opportunity to at least critically examine them and maybe augment them.\n00:21:06\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThat word vector comes from the text where I first encountered the concept of proprioception, which was Brian Misumi’s Parables of the Virtual.\nBrian Massumi is like a Montrealer and a preeminent scholar in the field of affect theory. He talks about proprioception in a self-referential sense. So, it is something that registers the displacement of the parts of the body relative to each other rather than finding your location in space based on your surroundings.\n\n00:21:47\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tS,o like especially, I mean, this is why it was such like a foundational text for me was that he talks specifically about when he’s on the metro and how if he were to be asked to draw a map of how he gets to the metro, through the metro, where the train goes and then how he gets out of it, he would not be capable of drawing this map. He talks about it in relation to this nautical term, dead reckoning. This form of navigation is based on measuring where you have been. Yeah, it’s a kind of way of navigating through remembrance. Yeah. Anyway, so I read this in this chapter. He’s talking about it, and he’s like, I have no visual sense of this space. Yet I could probably do this with my eyes closed. And so he’s like, this is how he locates. The idea of proprioception is in this kind of bodily memory of, like I said, transporting yourself between vectors.\n00:22:59\tMaia Harris, recording with Eija Loponen-Stephenson\tWhy do you think folks in the arts like yourself are integrating and thinking through this concept of proprioception?\n00:23:09\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tI think, in general, right now, in the art world, there is something happening where the process is kind of becoming more valuable than the product. And I think this is great. When I was just a young art student, I was really, really interested in automatic expressionist painting. It kind of. It took me a long time to articulate this properly. But how a work of automatic expressionism, like Jackson Pollock and many others, is a record of motion. So you can see it like a record of a dance.\nYeah. So I think in terms of my own practice, it’s something that I have been trying to unfold and unpick and start thinking about how. I mean, I’m still in the unpicking phase, but my fantasy is that in my future work, I’ll be able to move towards thinking more clearly and enacting the production of things through gestures first without thinking about the outcome.\n\n00:24:30\tRyan Litvak\tI’m just thinking about my day-to-day life in the context of proprioception and rhythm and, like, awareness of space and architecture and all these ways that Eija just talked about it and yeah, like, I’m never gonna step on the metro and feel how I did step on the metro before listening to those clips. Like, I never really thought about the relationship that the movement that I’m doing has to that space. So, yeah, I’m just really grateful that I got to hear that. But I am still confused. James, Aya, Theo, it’s all made sense. Why do they care about proprioception, but why you? You’re in a literature program. I just feel like I’m missing something, maybe.\n00:25:31\tMaia Harris\tYeah, there’s definitely more to the story. Bear. Literature and proprioception might not seem like an obvious connection, but it’s a really rich intersection of thought. And I’m not the only person who thinks. So. Allow me to introduce you to our next guest, Dr. Andre Furlani. [Keyboard click]\n00:26:00\tAndre Furlani\tYes.\nI’m a professor of English in the Department of English at Concordia University and a fellow of the School of Irish Studies, partly because I teach in that area. I’ve written especially about the expatriate French writer and Irish author Samuel Beckett. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:26:18\tMaia Harris\tDr. Furlani, in part, studies “walking literature,” specifically the composite subgenre of what he’s characterized as the “pedestrian excurses.”\nHere he is walking us, pun intended, through that work. [Keyboad click]\n\n00:26:35\tAndre Furlani\tSome of this work is, you know, really a kind of verbal archeology just reminding us what our language has already prepared us to see and to understand.\nAnd “excursus” is a word that has come to mean a kind of a digression, but which literally means “to rush out.”\n\nI went back to that term, excursus, and attached pedestrian to it to make it clearer.\n\n00:27:02\tAndre Furlani\tOf course, it’s also a term that was really coined by William Wordsworth, one of the arch poetic walkers in the English Romantic tradition.\nBecause there’s such a large body of modern and particularly contemporary texts, what I find in so much “walking literature,” which has famously alluded to generic classification, are traits as old as these terms.\n\nThe excursus presumes that you’re walking out.\n\nBy and large, it’s experienced through the body, it’s experienced through a weather world. It’s congressive in the sense that all kinds of other elements either precede you or accompany you to do so.\n\n00:27:44\tAndre Furlani\tAnd a great many texts have been organized on that very principle. They just go out and see what they can find, or find what they can see by serendipity, find something unanticipated, but very choice, but that which only the particularly the aimlessness of the walk can improve.\nThat is to say, the living, moving, proprioceptive kind of shared cognition that the walk precipitates is characteristic of a wide body of literature. And I thought, well, I’m going to tell you really what these books do have in common.\n\nThese are works that think in terms of the it this way, the tour rather than the map. You know, you don’t see it from above in an abstract, schematic way.\n\nYou are walking it.\n\nYou are faced with it.\n\nSomeone’s saying, “Oh, we’ll go left here,” or “Oh, I made a mistake, but it’s okay, we can turn here, and maybe we’ll find our way back.” And if you’re lucky, you get lost because, as one of these writers, Tiziano Scarpa in Venetian, says, the great thing about Venice is that you get lost in it immediately.\n\nThat’s when you start to really walk because you start having this proprioceptive awareness.\n\nWhere am I?\n\nHow am I moving?\n\nWhat’s next to me?\n\nYou start paying attention to your movements, and you see more through confusion or defamiliarization.\n\n00:29:06\tAndre Furlani\tI guess the first thing about walking is that it is successive, linear, and exposed. Of course, it’s a mode of proprioception and a limited viewpoint. So, all of those are fruitful avenues.\nAnd I think that disposition to experience has a lot to tell us. So, what one perceives in one’s immediate vicinity and through all the senses. There’s been fascinating work on how we think with our, through our skin.\n\nYou know, I always talk about thinking not just on one’s feet but with one’s feet. That sense that if I listen to the body, it actually has something it’s been trying desperately to say. So, it has actually tried to develop my proprioception.\n\n00:29:58\tAndre Furlani\tI have a very narrow, almost tunnel vision mode of attention, but I walk with people who, in fact, have been gifted or have developed a real skill of a larger, more generous proprioception.\nAnd I’ve been learning from them and then from the books which practices remind us how much is happening in the immediate vicinity and how many of our senses are available to absorb it and to interact with it, to recognize one’s, one’s place in it.\n\nThe literature was teaching me something about something you think you know how to do, how to walk around. But I think, in fact, you have to learn how to walk. There’s the first, simply the bipedal gait, and then there’s actually learning how to think with one’s feet. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:30:56\tRyan Litvak\tWait, is that true? Isn’t proprioception just innate? Can people have better proprioception than others? Can you develop it?\n00:31:05\tMaia Harris\tOh, yeah. Although proprioception is precognitive, that is, we don’t actively have to think about it for it to happen. Proprioceptive awareness is not just innate. Like all perception, it’s shaped by memory, learning, habit, or even injury and disease.\nBack to Dr. Furlani. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:31:23\tAndre Furlani\tWalking is a universal yet facultative propensity.\nBears can walk, but it’s a propensity; it’s not a species attribute at all. And you see that, of course, with the very young, how difficult it is. It is striking that walking is actually precarious. And it has been characterized basically as a perpetual successful recovery from a fall.\n\nYou know, we are not brains in a vat. We would not have the same thoughts if we were in a vat. When you walk, you realize how much you’re getting from other sources of being and how your ideas are altered.\n\nAnd the way I would put it, it is not only the body that has a mind of its own, but the body’s mind, you know, minds what it’s doing, minds itself, and mind restriction.\n\nAnd it’s by walking that we’re reminded of it. I’m a white middle-class male, so I’ve had fewer, and I’ve had to be reminded how difficult it is actually to go here or there or at this time at this place.\n\n00:32:40\tMaia Harris\tDr. Furlani also has his own walking practice.\nHere, he is talking about that. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:32:47\tAndre Furlani\tSo, in my walking practice. Well, I mean that gives it to, you know, it’s too August a term.\nBut, one of them is like I’ll fall into a certain kind of rhythm which will remind me of my wife who died of cancer many years, 21 years ago. And she was German. So, there’s a kind of German phrase that just came out of me from walking, remembering, walking with her.\n\nLike it’s, I mean, you know, Emma by Mia Unterwegs Tsuda, you know, always with me and towards you and then, so you know that again, that sense that you’re always walking with someone, whether you remember it or not, is very strong in me. And it’s a way to actually be with that person.\n\nAgain, partly because when you’re walking as well, you’re walking alone, you’re not kind of, you’re not molested – and I really use that word advisedly – molested by the shock element of the city. It is more important than ever, I think, now to be a bit militant about it for us actually to be unmolested.\n\nAnd one of the only times we are is when we’re walking from A to B. And that place between A and B is actually most of our lives.\n\n00:34:00\tAndre Furlani\tAs I said earlier, we’re always going somewhere, but it’s only the going. It’s like Gertrude Stein’s line, right now, you know where I live most of the time, right?\nThe important thing is the walk.\n\nIt is not where you started, where you are, and where you end, but the actual place where you spend most of your time in the middle, and we miss that middle thing.\n\nSo when you walk alone, it’s one of the only times when you can actually be alone, but not solipsistically alone by “you never walk alone,” let’s put it that way. You cannot walk alone.\n\n00:34:44\tMaia Harris\tSo Ryan, what are your takeaways from what you heard today about proprioception?\n00:34:53\tRyan Litvak\tWell, now I’m thinking about proprioception as far as my own practice goes.\nLike in theatre, when you’ve been doing a show, however many times you kind of intrinsically know where in space the path to your light is. And then you get there, and then you feel the warmth of the light all of a sudden.\n\nAnd I feel like that has to do with proprioception. It’s like the path getting there and spending that time in the middle from getting to your spot or even in clown. There’s this idea of the actor’s awareness behind the play within clowning. And I feel like there’s a proprioceptive element to that actor’s awareness as well, where you have that feeling of your body and the feeling of your body in space and the feeling of the movements that you are making outside of the performance in the context of theatre as a performer, but also as an audience member. And maybe wear proprioception as we talk about it as this sort of ultimate form of presence. But what about when proprioceptive awareness can kind of get in the way of being embodied or being present? And this might be a really stupid example, but I’ve been at theatre performances where the person next to me is taking up the entire armrest, so my arm is squished up on my torso, and I’m just hyper-aware of my body’s placement in space that way. And it kind of becomes a barrier to entry for that kind of presence.\n\n00:36:40\tMaia Harris\tAnd it’s so true because, yeah, proprioception is a physiological term. It does not mean embodiment. It can mean a. When it could be a window into these thoughts, you know, about embodiment, about presence. But it’s not those things in and of themselves. Right. It’s still precognitive, but we can become aware of it. We can.\nIt’s like we’re always breathing, but when we become aware of it, maybe that breathing’s a bit interrupted. Maybe it’s not as natural a feeling as blinking. When you start thinking about your blinking, it gets disrupted.\n\n00:37:21\tRyan Litvak\tYeah, absolutely.\nAnd there’s also like this relationship as we’re talking about, or maybe we’re not talking about, but we understand proprioception to be a precognitive thing that our body does. But at some point, those precognitive awarenesses often become cognitive. And how does that change what we are proprioceiving? Also, proprioception is an amazing tool for writers in poetry and prose where, oh, I’m writing a character in a situation, so let me put myself in a similar situation and think about my proprioceptive awareness and how my body feeling and finding the words for those qualities and Placing that into your work. So I’m going to start doing that.\n\n00:38:20\tMaia Harris\tYeah, that’s. It’s so true. I mean, putting your characters in situations that your body takes on. It’s speculative, but there’s something called mirror neurons. And your motor cortex kind of does activate when you read motion, and you read movement, although it is very speculative, but in a more metaphoric and maybe conceptual sense. Feelings of proprioception. Reading proprioception, what that does to the real body is real, even in terms of paying attention to it.\n00:39:01\tRyan Litvak\tYeah.\n00:39:02\tMaia Harris\tAs Dr. Furlani said, as Eija said, Theo kind of applies in his VR situations.\n00:39:09\tRyan Litvak\tYeah. And anecdotally, speculatively, I felt that while reading. It seems like we’re getting to the end of the episode.\nSo what about you? Why do you care about proprioception?\n\n00:39:31\tMaia Harris\tYeah, so I do research proprioception’s affordances for the literary.\nI focus on his name as, Charles Olson. He has 1965; we’ll call it a poem essay, actually called Proprioception.\n\nThough if you know Olson, you’ll understand. I can’t just casually get into it. And I did consider getting into that for the episode, but that wouldn’t actually really explain why I care. Not in any real way, at least.\n\nI care about proprioception because I care about being, like, really being present in my body. And what that means for poetry. Sure, but what does that mean in and of itself? Something came up in almost every interview that I haven’t really talked about yet. It’s the idea of perception, specifically proprioception, as an enactment. This idea comes from the philosopher Alva Noe. And for me, it reframes my relationship and my interest proprioception to my capital S self, and to you too, because, as Dr. Furlani said, we never walk alone in the spirit of enactment.\n\nI want to end with an exercise, if you’ll, what’s the word–\n\n00:40:49\tRyan Litvak\tAgree–\n00:40:50\tMaia Harris\tIf you’ll agree.\nI want to end with an exercise by composer and scholar Pauline Oliveros’s 1996 score Rhythms, which Eija actually cited as inspiring her project.\n\nRyan, listener, wherever you are, I invite you to stand, walk for a moment, and follow along if you’re able. Here’s Eija again.\n\n00:41:19\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThis score is meant to be a walking score, and the score goes.\nWhat is the meter and tempo of your normal walk?\n\nHow often do you blink?\n\nWhat is the current tempo of your breathing?\n\nWhat is the current tempo of your heart rate?\n\nWhat other rhythms do you hear if you listen?\n\nWhat is your relationship to all the rhythms that you can perceive? Of at once.\n\n00:42:14\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah, I think it’s a really beautiful score. And my response to her final question is and always will be my body.\n00:42:28\tMaia Harris\tThank you to the incredible individuals that appeared in this piece. James Healy and I actually spoke for over an hour.\nIn the end, I wasn’t able to include a lot of it, but a huge thank you to James for everything.\n\nThank you to Théo Bouveyron, who was so gracious in participating despite the time difference between us.\n\nThank you to Eija Loponen-Stephenson, whose art and thought are an inspiration to me.\n\nThank you to Dr. Andre Furlani for taking the time and letting me make him so late for his next meeting that day.\n\nAnd thank you to Ryan Litvak, who makes every project more fun. Thank you for listening.\n\n00:43:08\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThat’s very sweet.\n00:43:09\tRyan Litvak\tThank you.\n00:43:17\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute the audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n00:43:37\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Maia Harris and featured the voices and insights of Ryan Litvak, James Healy, Théo Bouveyron, Eija Loponen-Stephenson, and Professor Andre Furlani.\nHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod, and, me, Hannah McGregor.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen.\n\nIf you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say “hi” on our social media.\n\nPlus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n\nFor now, thanks for listening."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9606","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E5, Sounding New Sonic Approaches – A Podcast of A Live Recording Session of A Journal Issue Located in Multiple Spaces and Temporal Dimensions, 10 March 2025, Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/new-sonic-approaches/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4a081369-0b04-4bfa-917f-2a3a734e3020/audio/3c52525a-bd89-41d3-b0ee-cb006a4c8c6c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e5-mixdown-ext-outro-music.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"55,996,320 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e5-mixdown-ext-outro-music\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/new-sonic-approaches/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-03-10\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Amen Drum Break” samples all downloaded from:\\n\\nhttps://pixabay.com/sv/sound-effects/. The file names of “amen drum break” samples used are:\\n\\n140-bpm-amen-break-original-processed-6945\\n20_ca_amens-104513\\namen-sequence-01-dirty-180-bpm-102243\\namen-darkness-74126\\n175bpm-amen-punchy-loop-104487\\ndv-amen-break-133bpm-103971\\namen-break-remixed-loop-01-160-bpm-235384\\namen-break-no-copyright-remake-120bpm-25924\\nBach, Johann Sebastian. “BACH Goldberg_Variations_BWV_988_Variation 25_1955.” Looped excerpt. Performed by Glenn Gould.\\n\\nbissett, bill. “bill bissett at SGWU, 1969. 31 October 1969.” I006-11-083. SpokenWeb\\n\\nMontreal Sir George Williams University Reading Series collection. Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason. All music used to score the episode was produced from\\n“artifact sounds” derived from the source recordings combined with effects and other synthetic digital manipulations.These include:\\n\\nWork 1: “Zoom Music” developed from high-frequency sounds resulting from Zoom connectivity, equalization and reverb effects.\\n\\nWork 2: “Endless Vision” developed from interval noise run through long delay effects.\\n\\nWork 3: “EVOCalities” developed from event participants’ ambient talk and noise recorded after the event had ended, sped up and run through phase effects, delay.\\n\\nWork 4: “Pedalboard Drones and Drips” developed from sounds derived from outdoor microphone run through digital simulations of guitar pedal effects, mainly overdrive, chorus, and delay.\\n\\nWork 5: “Shapeless Fragments with Voices” developed from sounds of participants\\n\\nGinsberg. Allen. “Allen Ginsberg at SGWU, 1969.” I006-11-033.1. SpokenWeb\\n\\nMontreal Sir George Williams University Reading Series collection, Concordia University.\\n\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/allen-ginsberg-at-sgwu-1969/#1\\n\\nMartin, Daniel. “Martin_Mouth by Daniel Martin.”\\n\\nMitchell,Christine.  “Can you hear me?” Sound Collage from audio of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series.  Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), edited by Jason Camlot and Christine Mitchell.\\n\\nhttps://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/\\n\\nRobertson, Lisa. Clips downloaded from PennSound,\\n\\nhttps://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Robertson.php. File names are as follows:\\n\\nRobertson-Lisa_Voice-Box-Condensary_8-31-10\\nRobertson-Lisa_02_Introduction-to-The-Weather_PhillyTalks17_UPenn_10-03-00\\n“Vinyl Needle Drop, eclectic kitty, September 28th, 2024. https://freesound.org/people/eclectic-kitty/sounds/757639/\\n\\n“waterfall-in-the-forest_nature-sound-149379” by NickyPe.\\n\\nhttps://pixabay.com/sound-effects/waterfall-in-the-forest-nature-sound-149379/\\n\\nWaterman, Ellen. “Excerpt Dusk at Warbler’s Roost.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549683699712,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This podcast episode performs a sound-media meditation on a live event based on a collection of printed scholarly articles. In May 2023 a triple-issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) was published on the topic of “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies,” edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. The issue, designed to explore how sound, literature, and critical methodologies intersect, included thirteen scholarly articles, and an interdisciplinary forum on the place of listening as a methodology in a wide range of scholarly and artistic fields.\n\nAs the editors considered what kind of “launch” would be best suited to this issue, they felt it should build on the printed scholarship, but also take it further – respond to it,  sound it, and perform it. They asked, “What would this journal issue sound like as a chorus or collage of voices?” They proceeded to organize an event to enact the idea of sounding and performing a scholarly collection as a kind of poetic reading of criticism. Each contributor was invited to select an excerpt to perform, and the performances unfolded in sequence within the 4th Space research showcase venue at Concordia University, and through the virtual participation of some contributors on Zoom. The performance event was also the object of an experiment in the multi-track recording of a spoken word event, with microphones of different kinds situated throughout 4th Space, and even outside the venue itself.\n\nThe eight tracks of audio resulting from that recording session serve as the raw material, the bed tracks, for a podcast that playfully explores the affordances of sound design for the presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. Some of the simple yet profound possibilities of working in sound to think and argue about sound that are explored here are those of amplitude (playing with the relative loudness of sounds), temporality (the movement and mixing of historically-situated times), speed (the movement of sounds in time), space (the relationship of sounds to the places they happened), noise (the sounds we are supposed not to want to hear), intelligibility (the intention of sounding for meaning), positionality (from where and to whom one is sounding), timbre (the textural quality of sounds and what they do), among many others. The goal of this production has not been to deliver the content of the journal as one might grasp it from the print journal (read the special issue for that!), but to emphasize the possibilities and features of sound, sometimes apposite and sometimes in opposition to the intention and circumstances of the intended message. Archival voices and sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt the planned “Sounding New Sonic Approaches” event. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and mutated by an occasional soundtrack scored for monotonic analogue synths. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new kinds of meaning and feeling-making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Intro\t[Audio recording] Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds.\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor.\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature and history created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada.\nIn this episode of the SpokenWeb, podcast producer Jason Camlot explores the affordances of sound design for the presence of presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. The raw audio material for this episode was recorded at an event, a sounding of the special issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.”\n\nIt was recorded live in the room and online on zoom and with mics placed all around the room and even outside. But what you are about to hear is so much more than that live recording of the event you are about to hear.\n\nA new sound work.\n\nA new sound work that performs an exploration of the possibilities of working in and with sound.\n\nArchival voices and found sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and manipulated. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new meanings and feeling making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.\n\nHere is episode five of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Sounding New Sonic Approaches, a podcast of a live recording session of a journal issue located in multiple spaces and temporal dimensions.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\n\n00:02:28\tDifferent Recordings Edited Together\t[Chaotic overlapping voices, testing microphones]\nVoice 1: Hello? Can you hear me?\nVoice 2: I hope you can hear me.\nVoice 1: Test, test, test.\nVoice 3: If you can’t hear me, I think there are more seats up here.\nVoice 4: I’ll try to speak a little louder on my own.\nVoice 5: Is it hard to hear back there?\nVoice 6: Even with the microphone?\n\n[Multiple voices testing simultaneously]\n\nVoice 1: Test, test, test.\nVoice 4: There we go.\nVoice 5: If I talk louder into the mic, does that help?\nVoice 6: Can you hear that?\nVoice 3: It’s hard to tell.\nVoice 2: Hello? Can you hear me now?\nVoice 4: Is it still hard to hear back there?\nVoice 1: Hello? Can you hear me with this mic?\nVoice 5: Can you hear me now?\nVoice 6: Y’all hear me?\n\n[Laughter, sound stabilizing]\n\n00:03:13\tDouglas Moffat\t[Regular audio resumes, background instrumental music begins]\nOkay. Hello, everyone. I’m just going to start things up here. Thank you very much.\n\nHello, everyone. Welcome to Concordia University’s Fourth Space. Thank you for joining us for today’s event, Sounding New Sonic Approaches.\n\n[Soft instrumental music continues in the background]\n\nTo help situate you, we are streaming this event live on YouTube from Fourth Space, here on Unceded Indigenous Lands in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.\n\nWe are also running this event as a live-streamed Zoom meeting—though, as you may have already noticed, this is a bit of an unusual setup for us.\n\nWith that, it is my pleasure to hand things over to the editors of New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies, Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod.\n\nWelcome, both of you. Over to you.\n\n00:03:57\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to Sounding New Sonic Approaches, a live recording session.\nWe are recording this event here at Fourth Space at Concordia University and online on Zoom. And we’re live with an audience.\n\nWelcome, everyone! Let’s hear a round of applause.\n\n[Applause]\n\nThe idea behind today’s event is to create a spoken sound work drawn from our collective special issue of English Studies in Canada. Each contributor will sound their article—either by reading an excerpt from their piece in the journal or by selecting surrogate sounds that capture the essence of their discussion.\n\n[Scattered clapping, sound cues shifting in the background]\n\n00:04:50\tJason Camlot\tThe sounds of speech—whether spoken through microphones, over Zoom, or pre-recorded and played back through Zoom—will be layered through multiple outputs.\n[Jason’s voice subtly shifts as different sound devices are introduced]\n\nThese sounds will be played through a variety of speakers, both inside and outside Fourth Space.\n\n[A mechanical whirring sound begins in the background]\n\nThe audio from these various sources will be captured and sent to a mixing desk, where SpokenWeb audio engineer James Healy will be recording everything on multiple tracks using an RME Fireface digital converter.\n\nThis will then be used to create a new sonic approaches sound work, which Katherine and I will be producing as a SpokenWeb podcast episode from today’s performance.\n\n[Persistent clapping continues in the background]\n\nSo, that’s the basic idea. Think of this event as a big poetry reading, or maybe an open mic collaborative performance, or even a kind of literary sonic manifesto—but one that’s being recorded from a variety of sources, in multi-track layers.\n\nSpecial thanks to James Healy, Douglas Moffett, and the Fourth Space team for helping bring this event to life and for creatively reimagining how to record it.\n\n00:05:59\tKatherine McLeod\t[Katherine’s voice echoes, slightly distant]\nWe have a set list for our readers—[Sudden distorted noise cuts in]\n—which also serves as the table of contents for the special issue.\n\n[Echo fades out, sound stabilizes]\n\nWhen it is your turn, please state your name and the title of your article before reading. Keep it brief, and we’ll smoothly move from one reader to the next.\n\n[Brief pause]\n\nWith that—let’s begin.\n\nStart recording.\n\nSounding New Sonic Approaches, take one.\n\n00:06:26\tKatherine and Jason\t[Voices overlapping, slightly out of sync]\nRolling, rolling, rolling.\n00:06:30\tJason Camlot\tMy name is Jason Camlot–\n00:06:32\tKatherine McLeod\tand I’m Katherine McLeod–\n00:06:34\tJason Camlot\tand we will be reading from–\n00:06:37\tKatherine McLeod\tIntroduction New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.\n00:06:43\tJason Camlot\t[Jason’s voice echoes, layered and resonant]\nThe sound of literature is now discernible as never before.[Echo fades, voice stabilizes]\nThis emerging discernibility—inciting new sonic approaches to literature—is due, in the first instance, to digitized audio assets and online environments that have made previously analog collections of literary recordings more accessible and valuable for research and study.\n[A soft whirring sound begins in the background]\n\nBeyond this infrastructural shift, the heightened discernibility of sonic approaches to literary culture has come from a recent interaction and convergence of methods between literary studies and sound studies as a broad interdisciplinary field.\n\n[The whirring sound grows louder, filling the space]\n\n00:07:23\tKatherine McLeod\tOur Call for Papers for this special issue of English Studies in Canada invited submissions that pursue sound-focused studies of literary works, events, and performances—exploring the intersections between literary studies and sound studies.\nFrom the outset, we framed literature as an intentionally expansive concept, one that has shaped the diverse case studies featured in this collection—ranging from archival objects to live performances.\n\n[Katherine’s voice begins to distort, subtly warping]\n\nThe authors whose work we received and selected for this issue embody this diversity in their approaches.\n\n[Distortion fades, voice stabilizes]\n\nIn asking our contributors to—or rather—[laughs]—in asking them to be…\n\n[Soft whirring begins again, subtly shifting in the background]\n\n…thinking sonically, as we put it, we challenged them to write from their perspectives as listeners.\n\nIn other words, we asked them to conflate literary studies and sound studies—to do literary sound studies—while critically reflecting on what it means to listen within the context of their discipline.\n\n[Whirring fades into silence]\n\n00:08:28\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot again, and Annie Murray will be joining me.\nAnnie, do you want to say hi?\n\n00:08:35\tAnnie Murray\tHi.\n00:08:37\tJason Camlot\tDarren Wershler can’t be with us today, but we three are the co-authors of an article called The Afterlife of Performance.\n[Sound of cymbals and drums from a ritual chant]\n\nThe afterlife of performance—\n\n[Cymbal sound repeats, layered with an eerie resonance]\n\n—is riddled with assumptions about life, death, and time.\n\n[Another cymbal strike, now accompanied by a distant, guttural yell]\n\nOne major assumption is the possibility of distinction between the live—\n\n[Cymbal strike reverberates]\n\n—and something else. Not so much death—\n\n[Cymbal clangs again, layered with rising tension]\n\n—but an afterlifeness, shaped by various theorizations of media in what we might call the Age of the Zombie.\n\n[Cymbal clang echoes, now joined by chaotic grunts and shouts of exertion]\n\nBut we’re not so much interested in how particular instantiations of liveness are produced.\n\nRather, we’re examining how the afterlife of performance is produced, managed, and maintained—through the application of various cultural techniques.\n\n[The sound of rhythmic clattering, like a drum being struck]\n\nA network of people, using specific hardware, capturing performance in a particular space, on particular kinds of storage media—\n\n[Drum strike repeats, layered with subtle distortions]\n\n—along with techniques such as mastering—\n\n[Drum beat sharpens]\n\n—editing, filing, labeling—\n\n[The sound repeats, layered with an accelerating intensity]\n\n—holding (that is, long periods of neglecting), digitizing, remastering, and circulating—\n\n[The rhythmic pulse builds, overlapping voices chanting and talking]\n\n—all working together to produce our sense of the relative worth of a recording.\n\nA recording of another group of people—chanting, talking, reading.\n\n[Clattering intensifies, layered with cheers and echoes of past voices]\n\nIf we examine this assemblage closely, we can see its inner workings—the mechanism that produces literary value.\n\n[Final crescendo, then silence]\n\n00:10:13\tAnnie Murray\tI’m Annie Murray, also reading from The Afterlife of Performance.\nOnly some of the materials that document poetic practice in the late 1960s have ever crossed the formal archival threshold.\n\nOthers have been ignored, lost, or destroyed.\n\n[Faint background noise begins, like shifting paper and distant murmurs]\n\nSome, like the Sir George Williams University series, only became formal institutional records after a chance discovery, followed by validation through concerted scholarly and institutional effort.\n\n[The background noise grows slightly, a textured hum of archival handling]\n\nBeing attuned to the concept of the archival multiverse allows us to rationalize the messiness—the expanse, duplication, and incompleteness of literary legacy, especially for event-driven records.\n\nAnd finally, we can see the role of the Web—how it makes archival content both ubiquitous and messy, introducing new complexities in preservation.\n\nThinking in a multiverse way allows us to layer and intersect poetic events, poets, and their literary and geographical movements, as well as the movement and proliferation of evidentiary traces of their work.\n\nIt invites us to gain comfort with a decentralized model of both preservation and dissemination.\n\n[A whispered echo repeats:]\n“…preservation and dissemination.”\n\n00:11:35\tJason Camlot\tNext will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.\n[Distant echo repeats:]\n“Next will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.”\n\n00:11:46\tAudio Recording\t[Applause erupts, transitioning into a recorded voice]\n[Recording of a woman:]\n“Thanks a lot, Louis, and thanks, everybody, for coming.”\n\n00:11:50\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tHi there, I’m Julia Polyck-O’Neill.\nI’m reading from my article, Archives, Intimacy: Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive.\n\n00:11:59\tJason Camlot\t[Faint echo, layered and reverberating]\n“Next will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.”\n00:12:01\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tWhile researching Robertson—\n[A sharp mechanical hum begins, like an electric current surging]\n\n—meaning Lisa Robertson at SFU, I inquired about the different media available in their collections that might allow me to better access Robertson’s—\n\n[More mechanical noise, layered with a subtle distortion]\n\n—personal feminist networks, a key topic in my work.\n\nI’m particularly interested in materials related to poet, curator, and organizer Nancy Shaw, a scholar responsible for many changes in KSW’s operations, especially in its connections to Artspeak, a Vancouver artist-run center.\n\n[The mechanical noise persists, a rhythmic pulsing of archived media playback]\n\nDuring our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my focus on how KSW intersected with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.\n\n[The machine sound fades, leaving an ambient electronic hum]\n\n00:12:29\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\t[Julia’s voice echoes]\nDuring our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my interest in how KSW intersected— [Voice distortion]—with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.\n\n00:12:45\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tPresented with a box of tapes from the Kootenay School of Writing—[whirring sound]—fonds, also held at SFU, I selected the hand-annotated tapes bearing Robertson’s name, as well as those of Shaw, which only roughly corresponded with the finding aid.\n00:12:58\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\t[Julia’s voice echoes]\nIt was explained that the tapes had been annotated somewhat ad hoc over the years. [Voice stabilizes] Again, the experience was heightened and singular—[whirring sound]—made even more so by the privacy of the listening space. Putting on a pair of ear-covering headphones, I pressed play on the first tape—only to realize it had to be rewound first.\n\n[Background noise]\n\nAll of these attributes build momentum for the initial moments of listening to—[voice echoes]—the recording. Thank you. [Applause]\n\n00:13:39\tAudio Recording\t[Applause blends into an audio recording]\nThanks, Colter. Thanks, Jacqueline. This is… This is nice to be here in the living room.\n\n00:13:47\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’re going to hear a sound clip of Michael O’Driscoll reading—[sound of truck driving by]\n00:13:54\tMichael O’Driscoll\t[Voice starts in an echo]\nThis essay features a reel-to-reel recording of a 1969 classroom lecture during which Canadian poet and playwright James Rainey demonstrates sound collage in relation to his celebrated 1967 play “Colours in the Dark.”\n\nOn first encountering the recording, the listener will notice—[sound of something large approaching]—the extraordinarily intrusive presence of a jackhammer, located somewhere near the classroom.\n\n00:14:24\tAudio Recording\t[Audio blends into a recording with applause]\nThanks very much. I’ve already given you about a quarter of the reading on tape and gramophone. [Jackhammer begins]\n\nAnd fortunately, before the jackhammer started, the first thing I played was from Karl Orff’s “Music for Children,” which begins with nursery rhymes and lists of names that children recite…\n\n00:16:28\tMichael O’Driscoll\tRainey’s equanimity in this moment is astounding. One could well imagine canceling the lecture—especially one focused on attentive listening. Rainey, however, simply absorbs the intrusive jackhammer into the performance, adopting—or adapting—the sonic dissonance into the logic of a lesson already leaning toward an appreciation of—[voice starts to echo]—the affective tension and political force of jarring oral juxtaposition.\n00:17:03\tKatherine McLeod\tNext up, we have Mathieu Aubin.\nThe paper is entitled “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in the Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966–1971.”\n\n[Distorted] And we’ll be listening to a recording.\n\n00:17:23\tMathieu Aubin\tA short history on queer listening.\n[Faint sound of a man, poet bill bissett, singing in the background]\n\nIn the 1960s and 1970s, listening to and recording queer people from a police perspective was a means of documenting and regulating their behavior.\n\n[Background singing increases] Surveillance efforts targeted queer writers, monitoring their activities through bugged homes, wiretaps, and infiltration of their communities. Police forces compiled this data, circulating it across networks to justify increased surveillance.\n\n00:18:01\tMathieu Aubin\tBut quite the opposite—some queer writers saw listening as a form of homosocial rapprochement. Writers like Allen Ginsberg practiced a tender form of listening, using it to build queer bonds. Rather than being exploitative, tender listening was a way for queer people to connect, orient themselves toward each other, and foster solidarity. [Mathieu’s voice echoes faintly]\nSimilarly, some queer writers performed close listening as a practice of careful consideration—both for meaning and for social potential.\n\n00:19:15\tMathieu Aubin\tAs Jack Halberstam theorizes in Queer Time, queer uses of time and space are developed according to other logics of location, movement, and identification—rather than the heteronormative life model of marriage, family, and reproduction.\n[Singing momentarily increases]\n\n00:20:13\tKatherine McLeod\tJason Wiens: Voicing Appropriations: Sounding Found Poetry in 1960s Canada [Amen drum break sample  plays]\n00:20:20\tJason Wiens\tThe oral performance of found poetry adds a new layer of interpretive complexity to an already complex practice of appropriation and recontextualization.\n[Fast drums continue]\n\nHowever, little consideration has been given to the oral performance or audio recording of found or appropriated poetry—whether from the historical moment I discuss here or in contemporary conceptual poetry.\n\n00:23:25\tKlara du Plessis\t[Voice echoes]\nMy name is Klara du Plessis.\n\n[Whistling sound] I’m reading from “Do You Read Me, Kaie Kellough: The Words of Music”\n\n[Distorted voice and whistling]\n\n00:23:41\tKlara du Plessis\t[Very distorted and echoed voice] In fact, I’m not reading from my essay. In fact, I’m not. Instead, I’m reading from a handwritten scan titled Word Sound System 1: Read Part A, which is included in Kaie Kellough’s 2010 poetry collection.\n[Voice becomes slightly clearer]\n\nThe piece, Maple Leaf Also Reads, instructs that letters indicated by numbers should be stressed to emphasize rhythm. The goal is to repeat until the rhythmic pattern is understood.\n\n[Layered voices overlapping]\n\nD—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—y—o—u.\n\nUnderstood.\n\nE—a—d—m—a—d—d—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—e—y—o—m—a—e—n—d—o—m—y—o—u.\n\nD—r—o—a—d—o—a—o—o—d—u—e—y—o—u—m—r—o—a—u—r—o—y.\n\nD—o—u—r—y—a—r—e—d—r—o—y—o—u—y—o—a—r—I—o—e—r—e—d—o—y—o—u—r—e—a.\n\n[Voice becomes more coherent]\n\nEach component follows a logical continuation.\n\nY—o—o—y—o—a—d—and—e.\n\nSorry, the notes are confusing.\n\nEach component is a continuation of the previous—and once they are strung together, they form a tidy loop that can repeat infinitely.\n\n00:25:48\tJason Camlot\tThanks, Klara. That’s the first cover of a Kaie Kellough sound poem I’ve ever heard. [Jason’s voice blends into a recording]\n00:25:52\tAudio Recording\tYes, [Laughter]\n00:25:53\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’ll hear an audio clip from Kate Moffitt, Kandice Sharren, and Michel Levy, co-authors of Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant’s 1984 Reading of “Grip” and “Posh”.\n00:26:11\tKandice Sharren\tThe rationale behind the copy text aligns with the impulse to prioritize the story itself in our audio edition, rather than the physical artifact or recording event. In some ways, audio offers unique advantages—for instance, when a story is read by its author, it can clarify ambiguities through intonation or even provide the most authoritative version of the text.\n00:26:31\tKandice Sharren\tIn this case, our copy text was the story as Mavis Gallant performed it [eerie sound] on 14 February 1984—a version that clearly had her seal of approval.\nProducing the two podcast episodes required listening to Gallant’s reading dozens of times, and in doing so, Moffitt noticed a significant aside:\n\nNear the end of the recording, Gallant deviates from the story and remarks–\n\n00:26:54\tAudio Recording\t[Cuts to the audio recording of Mavis Gallant] I have an editorial query here. Is he imagining this? Yes, these are proofs.\n00:27:00\tKate Moffatt\tDuring a Q&A session celebrating the first episode’s release, we discussed Gallant’s reference to these elusive proofs.\nFollowing that event, SFU Professor Carol Gerson informed us that the proofs for this story, along with a cassette copy of the 1984 reading, were held by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.\n\nWith help from Roma Kail, a librarian at Victoria University, we were able to access scans and confirm that these were the exact same proofs Gallant had been reading from.\n\nOn page 24, Gallant’s editor had added an interlinear pencil notation between lines 6 and 7, stating:\n\nIs he imagining this?\n\nJust as Gallant had read aloud in 1984.\n\n00:27:38\tKatherine McLeod\t[Echo effect] Next up, Kelly Baron.\n00:27:40\tKelly Baron\t[Bell dings] I’m Kelly Baron, and I’m reading from Oral Memory in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.\nIn the opening pages of Thien’s novel—which explores intergenerational trauma resulting from the Cultural Revolution in Chinese-Canadian communities—[Voice distorts, accompanied by soft piano notes]\n\nLi Ling, the novel’s protagonist, is walking through Vancouver’s Chinatown when she hears Bach’s Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 4 playing from a store speaker.\n\nShe feels drawn towards it, as keenly as if someone were pulling her by the hand—the counterpoint of the music binding together the composer, the musicians, and even the silence.\n\nThe music, with its spiraling wave of grief and rapture, was everything she remembered.\n\n00:28:26\tKelly Baron\tThat moment sparks a memory of her father.\nIn the act of listening, he becomes so alive, so beloved that the incomprehensibility of his suicide resurfaces, grieving her all over again.\n\nBy her own admission, she had never before experienced such a pure memory of her father, Dong Kai, in the two decades since his death.\n\nLi Ling’s experience in Vancouver’s Chinatown raises important questions about the role of music in literary depictions of intergenerational memory and trauma:\n\n– How does music shape memory recall in novels like this?\n\n– How can listening to the music within literature expand our understanding of trauma and memory transmission?\n\nIn this article, I argue that listening within a literary context provides a methodology for understanding intergenerational trauma—one rooted in the sensory experiences that accompany inherited trauma.\n\nThese experiences are defined by rhythmic repetition, a new setting, and an emotional distinction that alters perception.\n\n00:29:32\tKelly Baron\tI propose that listening to music in literature represents a new method for identifying intergenerational memory.\nThis method focuses not only on the literary depictions of sound but also on how that sound shapes the experiences of future generations.\n\nIf traumatic memories are communicated through silences and gaps in declarative or narrative memory, then sound itself becomes the conduit—a means by which these memories are passed down to future generations.\n\n00:30:04\tDaniel Martin\tMy essay is called— [A recording starts playing]— Girl, the Piercing.\n00:30:09\tSPK_1\t[Recording plays] Yeah, the hell were you doing with her? It’s not what you think.\n00:30:16\tDaniel Martin\t[A low humming sound begins in the background] My essay, The Child’s Stuttering Mouth and the Ruination of Language in Jordan Scott’s Blurt and Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, explores how we read and write about the enigmatic experiences of people who stutter—without succumbing to metaphor, stigma, or the valorization of creative stuttering inherent in all textualities.\n00:30:43\tDaniel Martin\tWe put aside critical methodologies that expose the tensions between voice and text in literary expression and instead imagine the experiences of children who stutter through playful and experimental fantasies of language, devourment, and ruination. [Brief static sound] Despite their differences in genre—one a celebrated Canadian sound poetry work, the other an experimental text by an innovator in hypertext and found-document fiction—\n00:31:11\tDaniel Martin\tBoth Jordan Scott’s Blurt and Shelley Jackson’s Riddance reimagine stuttered speech beyond the prosaic deconstruction of voice and text—presence and absence, fluency and disfluency—that have shaped so much critical study on literary voicings. [Humming sound increases]\n00:31:29\tDaniel Martin\tBoth texts examine what it means to return, in Scott’s words, to the fact of the mouth. These works do not merely romanticize the stutter as inherent to language systems, nor do they simply deconstruct speech versus text, presence versus absence, or phonemic versus phonetic binaries that dominate most literary voice studies.\n00:31:51\tDaniel Martin\tOur critical and theoretical methodologies have grounded literary voice studies in these binaries, but there are other ways to reimagine the romanticization of communicative breakdowns. [A voice in the background hums an extended “mmm” sound]\n00:32:06\tDaniel Martin\tScott and Jackson both reorient the reader’s response away from a logic of extractive meaning toward an invitation to participate in the childlike pleasures of—[stutters]—devouring, ingesting, and ruining language. With this pleasure comes trauma, longing, and loss, inevitable aspects of such a destructive relationship with language. [A distorted voice emerges, layering over Daniel’s words] [Daniel’s voice starts stuttering] Their work experiments with devices, techniques, and tricks introduced under biomedical imperatives for speech cure and management.\n00:32:42\tDaniel Martin\tBoth texts raise profound questions about the history of speech therapy, the cultural history of the stutter, and its status as a haunted and haunting presence—one that is both internal and external to the speaking mouth. [A voice in the background repeats an extended “mmm” sound]\n00:33:03\tDaniel Martin\tFundamentally, these works suggest that reading or speaking fluently is not necessarily a triumph. For people who stutter, reading can feel threatening—it introduces a fragility in the relationship between speaker and language. The stutter itself is a threat of undoing. It creates a hole, swallowing up the very binary distinctions we rely on to make meaning.\nSometimes, that hole becomes a portal—a doorway to other dimensions and voices. Other times, it is simply a giant mouth, consuming language and eroding meaning, a threat as gleeful and destructive as a child’s indulgent play. These texts introduce disfluent joy, embodying the stutterer’s ruinous relationship with words.\n\n00:33:51\tKatherine McLeod\tNext is Kristen Smith.\n00:33:56\tKristen Smith\tHello, I’m Kristen Smith. I’m so grateful to voice an excerpt from Unsounding: A New Method for Processing Non-Linguistic Poetry. [Faint static noise in the background]\n00:34:15\tKristen Smith\tThe comparison of a non-linguistic poem to a graphic score emphasizes the openness of the art form. The poem as score foregrounds the reader’s role as both performer and interpreter, yet it offers no clear guidance in executing either role.\n00:34:35\tKristen Smith\tAt every turn, with each proposed paradigm for assessment, non-linguistic poetry resists. [Faint static continues] Non-linguistic poetry rejects totalizing methods for reading and unsounding. In No Medium, Krecht Dworkin performs close readings of unfilled, erased, or blank pages—seemingly silent texts.\n00:35:03\tKristen Smith\tIn his analysis of Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin asserts: Silence is always ideal and illusory. Silence is a thought experiment—provocative and unverifiable. [Eerie, distant tones rise in the background] Unsounds are filled with interpretative possibilities and semantic meaning.\n00:35:22\tKristen Smith\tThis essay specifically examines works that are not blank but still eliminate linguistic material and prevent sounding. These texts are composed of unsound.\n00:35:35\tKristen Smith\t[Eerie sound increases] Dworkin pushes further, suggesting that in such works, medium itself is as unrealizable as silence. Non-linguistic poems subvert expectations of medium or category. Moreover, these works compel readers to adopt new reading practices.\nWorks like Soult’s Moonshot Sonnet, Bergwoll’s Drift, and Schmaltz’s Surfaces require the reader to meet the poem on the page and actively work through it on its own terms.\n\n00:36:07\tKristen Smith\tWhen encountering a non-linguistic poem, the reader is forced to question their relationship to reading, sound, and communication. [Distorted, eerie sounds grow louder]\nBy resisting any singular method for interpretation, these works show that both sounding and resisting sound can communicate multivalent, albeit elusive, messages.\n\n00:36:36\tKristen Smith\tYet, these communications are incomplete without the reader’s participation—perhaps through unsounding the poetic material. The reader is essential to the visual poem’s communication. The reader is integral to the poem’s becoming. [Eerie sounds linger before fading]\n00:36:57\tJason Camlot\tNow we’re going to hear from the Readers’ Forum on Disciplinary Listening.\n00:37:01\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot.\n00:37:03\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd this is Katherine McLeod.\n00:37:05\tJason Camlot\tAnd we’ll be reading from Forum on Disciplinary Listening: An Introduction.\n00:37:08\tKatherine McLeod\tWe have developed this forum to invite further reflection from experts who have worked with sound across a variety of disciplines. We asked—\n00:37:23\tJason Camlot\t– How has your discipline taught you to listen?\n– What does listening mean within your discipline?\n\n– How do you understand sonic approaches in relation to disciplinarity?\n\n– What aspects of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field do you translate or transpose into your approaches as a researcher and teacher within a specific discipline of knowledge and university department?\n\n00:37:56\tKatherine McLeod\tNow, we invite you to listen to this voice forum as a conversation and to consider what you would write in response to these same questions. Notice the constellations of listeners evoked, the resonances in reflections. Immerse yourself in the listening that each writer educes on the page. [Static noise begins]\n00:38:20\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot again, reading from my short article Towards a History of Literary Listening. The story of literary listening may tell of two long-lasting, concurrent desires within literary encounters. One desire embraces literature as something best apprehended through sound and listening. The other seeks to extricate sound and listening—and, perhaps by extension, the intimacy of other kinds of exchange and communication that involve presence—\n00:38:56\tJason Camlot\t[Static noise fades] —from the scenario of literary study. The latter desire—to remove sound and listening from literary study—seems particularly disciplinary in its motivation. [Static starts again] This removal is often justified as a way to protect literary appreciation from the corrupting effects of sound. To the extent that literary criticism seeks to justify its status as a discipline—with established principles of literary judgment—it may be that an interesting technique for contemporary literary listening emerges precisely through acts of listening that ride the contradictions of these competing desires. These contradictory desires reflect larger critical tensions—the desire to hear the past in the present, to feel presence in absence, to know and feel the literary as it exists here and now, as it was, and as it will be.\n00:40:03\tJason Camlot\t[Jason’s voice shifts slightly] Next, we’re going to hear from Tanya E. Clement—reading from Distant Listening and Resonance. [Sound clip begins]\n00:40:14\tTanya E. Clement\tSpeech recordings: sound is text—the words people speak—but also other sounds that indicate a speaking and listening context. Tone, laughter, coughing, crying, birdsong, car engines, horns— [Tanya’s voice begins to echo]—a baby crying, thunder clapping, gunshots, the nano dropping. Using computation to analyze large datasets of sound texts has been called distant listening in digital humanities literature. I describe distant listening to sound texts as a process that uses computing to—[voice distorts slightly]—”distill the multi-layered, four-dimensional space of the text of performance—embodied within the performer’s hour of interpretation in time and space—into a two-dimensional script called code.”\n00:40:59\tTanya E. Clement\tDistant is often understood as implying a lack of presence, an observation removed in both space and emotion—detached from individual, subjective knowledge.\n00:41:12\tTanya E. Clement\t[Tanya’s voice subtly shifts] Yet, sound travels differently—and what is lacking in distance is often made up for in other ways. [Eerie sound rises in the background] What is too close can be deafening. What is far away can be heard loud and clear. As both a physical property and a cultural hermeneutic, resonance serves as a useful theory for articulating how distant listening can create meaning differently. [Sound fades]\n00:41:41\tKatherine McLeod\tNext, we have Kim Fox and Reem Elmaghraby. Kim, would you like to say hello and read your title to start off?\n00:41:51\tKim Fox\tSure, I can do that. Thanks for having me—I’m really excited to join you all. Though it is 11:43 PM in Cairo, Reem and I have an essay titled Reflections on Evaluating Soundscapes and Gathering Sounds in Cairo: The Case of the AUC Diaries Project.\n00:42:12\tReem Elmaghraby\tSo, it is now 10:30 AM, and I should probably open the curtains to see what the weather is like. [Sound of curtains opening]\nWell, it’s raining heavily, and the sky is extremely dull. What a depressing way to start the day. [Sound of liquid pouring] Time to make my everyday morning coffee—an espresso shot with a bit of lactose-free foamed milk, no sugar. [Sound of ceramic clattering] Super basic.\n\n00:42:37\tReem Elmaghraby\tI tend to get really bad headaches when I skip my morning coffee dose. I also get super grumpy, so let’s try and avoid that. [Alarm sound goes off]\n00:42:48\tSPK_1\t[Sound blends into an audio recording] It’s 6:30 AM, and I must get up for my 8:30 class at AUC. The sound of the alarm, which I snooze over and over again, is not enough to get me out of bed. That’s why I always leave the curtains open.\nI don’t like getting up this early. I don’t like it one bit. [Sound of door opening] In fact, I hate it. You know what, maybe I’ll just skip today’s morning class. [Sound of shower running] I’m too tired.\n\nNo, I need the grade. What I do slightly appreciate about this pre-8:30 class ritual is its peacefulness—the silence of everyone still asleep.\n\nAnyways, I grab my things and head out to a busy Thursday. [Sound of keys jingling, bag zipping]\n\n00:43:32\tReem Elmaghraby\t[Back to Reem] I stare at the usual pictures of my classmates—and at the black screens with names in the bottom left corner—as I listen to the lecture. [Sighs]\nThe professor just gave us an assignment, so I write it down in my bullet journal, my calendar, and on a sticky note that I put up on my wall.\n\nOrganization is the only thing keeping me afloat this semester. Otherwise, I’d get nothing done. [Sound of a pencil writing on paper]\n\nMy desk is probably my favourite place to be. The best way I could describe it? If a crazy wizard started hoarding objects from his many journeys.\n\nI have stickers on my wall, art from my favourite artists, tech gadgets, makeup, accessories—honestly, anything of interest to me is somewhere on my desk.\n\n00:44:15\tSPK_1\t[Audio switches to another recording] Minute 63—Egypt scores! [Background chatter and cheering] But then, Congo ties the score in minute 87.\n[More background cheers] We need one goal to qualify. With two minutes left, it felt hopeless. People walked out.\n\nBut then—minute 94—Mohamed Salah scores, in a moment that will go down in Egyptian history. [Loud cheers, static interference]\n\nMy microphone couldn’t handle the reaction. [Cheering and static noise blend together] It wasn’t any tamer on the streets either. [Sound of drums]\n\nIt didn’t look like I could drive home tonight, so I decided to sleep over at Andrew’s.\n\n00:44:56\tKatherine McLeod\tKristin Moriah—That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It: Hearing Blackness.\n00:45:06\tKristin Moriah\t[Audio recording begins—rain-like sound gets louder, then fades]\n00:45:06\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’re going to hear from Nina Sun Eidsheim and Juliette Bellocq.\n00:45:28\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tListening techniques are naturalized within an area of study. [Eerie music starts playing faintly]\nIn the PEER Lab—the Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research Lab, which I started a few years ago—we seek to listen to the ways different people and different fields listen.\n\nOur goal is to understand more about how the world appears through specific listening techniques.\n\nOne of my main collaborators is the graphic designer Juliette Bellocq. We took the invitation to contribute to this volume as an opportunity for me to learn more about her listening practices.\n\nThe piece we created together is called What They Say is What They Mean: Listening to Someone’s Story.\n\n00:46:09\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tI started by asking Juliette—what is listening for a graphic designer?\n00:46:16\tJuliette Bellocq\tAs a graphic designer, I agree not to be the sole author of the content in my work. Graphic design, in my practice, means sharing content.\nI place myself in a position to translate something I’ve heard, understood, seen, or reconfigured. That means that I have a voice—I am an author, but there is also a co-author.\n\nThis co-author can be a client or a community, so listening is essential.\n\nBesides working with the PEER Lab, I primarily work with architects in designing spaces. And the key question when we visit a space or meet with people is: What are their stories?\n\nListening is our primary tool and resource. [Faint instrumental music begins playing]\n\n00:47:03\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tDo you listen similarly or differently from architects or even other graphic designers? And if so, how do these different types of listening come together?\n00:47:15\tJuliette Bellocq\tI do think that I listen differently than some other designers because my primary goal is not to solve people’s problems—which is a big part of what graphic design is often about.\nMy job now is to capture something in the air, make it visible for everyone, and see if it can participate in the culture.\n\nI work to transcribe or crystallize ideas that already exist for all of us.\n\nIf I do not listen well, I have nothing to create. Does that make sense?\n\n00:47:45\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tIt does, but I’m wondering—is listening a metaphor for all the ways we absorb things?\n00:47:53\tJuliette Bellocq\tIt’s not a metaphor. It’s note-taking and research to make sure we heard correctly.\nIt’s cross-checking information to ensure that what people meant was actually what we heard.\n\nIt’s about understanding group stories before producing anything visual or graphic.\n\nIt’s a kind of listening that is meant to engage with something alive.\n\n00:48:16\tJuliette Bellocq\tSo, we have to listen in a way that is—hopefully, when done well—non-intrusive.\nIt should not orient the story but let people say what they want authentically.\n\nIt is about understanding their words in the right context before finally proposing something that can participate in the culture it comes from.\n\nSo, listening is a way to circumvent assumed knowledge.\n\n00:48:43\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tThank you.\n00:48:46\tMara Mills\tMara Mills and Andy Slater, Blind Mode: Blind Listening Techniques.\nI’m Mara Mills, a media studies professor and historian of electroacoustics and disability. My co-author, Andy Slater, is a blind sound artist who records, transcribes, and documents blind listening techniques—or what Andy calls Blind Mode.\n\n00:49:11\tMara Mills\tI first learned about Andy’s work when I was researching the history of the C1 cassette player.\nThis machine was released by the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled in the United States in 1981.\n\nIt included a time-stretching or pitch-restoration feature so that blind people could speed-read talking books without distorting the narrator’s voice.\n\n00:49:37\tMara Mills\tTo my surprise, this tape player—which is no longer in production—still has a fan base in noise and experimental music scenes.\nAndy uses sounds from the C1, among many other accessibility tools, in his compositions.\n\nAnd now, we’ll hear a recording of that.\n\n00:50:07\tAndy Slater\t[Static sound] [Robotic voice begins] Tape decks and 8-RPM record players were ugly and bulky.\nThey were meant for home use—out of sight, hidden from embarrassment.\n\nMuch like large print books and the white cane itself, some of us knew the glory of the talking book players.\n\nEverything could sound weird if we let it. [Background sound warps slightly]\n\nReading is fundamental, but any Paul Anka song could sound like sword fighting against Yamat the Chromatic Dragon on those players.\n\nJust as many of us discovered that sound itself can be an alternative to photographs and paintings.\n\n00:50:34\tAndy Slater\tThese tools, designed to be unappealing so no one would steal them, were also phenomenal noisemakers—antiquities of blind culture. [Voice gets deeper and more distorted]\nAnd they are not that different from contemporary assistive technology. Both can be used creatively—and both can disrupt and annoy.\n\nPhones talk aloud, lid detectors double as theremins, and object recognition apps are often wrong.\n\nBlind folks process multiple sound sources at once because of our use of this tech.\n\n[Voice gets faster and higher] When you compose and perform using these tools, filling the room with blind people’s sounds, you’re most likely making people uncomfortable—which is often the motive of any noise artist.\n\n00:51:10\tAndy Slater\tBut in my case, it’s about deconstructing my own culture and using tools made specifically for me.\nIt gives more meaning to the art and experience.\n\nIt’s political. It’s entitled. And it’s not just some guy showing off a thrift store find.\n\n00:51:22\tSPK_1\t[Switches to another audio recording] [Overlapping and distorted voices] What does this sound look like?\nHow is my hair? Do any disabled people work here? Am I wearing a red shirt? Can you tell me how to find the bathroom? [Sound of tape rewinding]\n\n00:52:08\tJason Camlot\tThank you, Mara and Andy.\n00:52:09\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd next, here on Zoom—Ellen Waterman.\n00:52:14\tEllen Waterman\tMy piece reflects on a research-creation project with Deaf culture artists, Spill Propagation. It’s called Reorienting Audition through Bodily Listening in Place.\n00:52:35\tEllen Waterman\t[Sound of a page flipping] The practice I’m calling bodily listening in place requires something akin to what Natasha Myers and Joe Dumit have termed improvising in a state of mid-embodiment.\nWriting about the interactive practices and responsive bodies of scientists, Myers and Dumit describe how researchers engage with experimental media, communicate their findings through narrative and embodied gesture, and develop new forms of dexterity in the process.\n\n00:53:22\tEllen Waterman\tTheir concept of the responsive excitability of bodies helps explain how experimentalists acquire new kinesthetic, affective, and conceptual dexterities—as they learn to see, feel, and know.\nTheir description matches my embodied experience. I am learning all over again how to listen. [High-pitched sound begins faintly]\n\n00:53:30\tEllen Waterman\tOf course, Myers and Dumit’s article is implicitly ableist. It assumes a hearing, seeing, mobile subject—and in that respect, it resembles most writing about music, sound, and listening.\nWe need to account for the complexities of working across Deaf and hearing music cultures. And what draws me to this work is precisely what can be learned in this reciprocal, intercultural encounter.\n\n00:53:55\tEllen Waterman\tFor example, my work with Spill Propagation has made me attuned to vibrations—seen and felt—with an intensity I have never experienced in my five decades of making music.\nWhen I listen to music through the vibrotactile vest, I can only discern a generalized buzzing and rhythmic thumping.\n\nMy haptic sense is, it seems, woefully undeveloped.\n\nWhat does it mean to acquire dexterity in a sensory mode?\n\nOr better—what does it mean to adopt an intersensory approach to listening that encompasses multiple sensory modes?\n\nAnd what happens when we foreground interdependence as a valid and precious foundation for musical creativity?\n\nThese questions animate my desire to reorient audition through bodily listening in place. [Sound of book closing]\n\n00:54:51\tJason Camlot\tThank you, Ellen. And we’re going to close this reading from the special issue of English Studies in Canada with Katherine McLeod: Archival Listening.\n00:55:02\tKatherine McLeod\tThis is Katherine McLeod, reading from Archival Listening. [Faint background sound]\nArchival listening is listening to archives while reflecting on how you are listening—and how you intend to share what you have heard.\n\nArchival listening listens with a future listener in mind.\n\nArchival listening is a practice of attending to the archival apparatus—holding the sound.\n\nWhile you were away, I held you like this in my mind.\n\n00:55:34\tKatherine McLeod\tArchival listening is hearing the body in time.\nArchival listening is situating oneself as a listening body in time.\n\nArchival listening understands that there are limits to knowing—and makes room for what cannot be heard. [Static and overlapping voices in the background]\n\nArchival listening takes time.\n\n00:55:54\tKatherine McLeod\tWe want to remember what the archive seems to remember.\nArchival listeners are removed from the time and space of a recorded event—but having heard its sound, a new memory of that event is formed, and the feeling of hearing it remains.\n\n00:56:16\tKatherine McLeod\tThat ends our recording. Thank you all for listening. [Sound fades into a whistle]\n00:56:21\tHannah McGregor\t[Beat music starts playing] You’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast—a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team.\nThis podcast is part of our work distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n00:56:45\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was produced by Jason Camlot.\nIt features the voices and sounds of Douglas Moffat, Katherine McLeod, Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Michael O’Driscoll, Mathieu Aubin, Jason Wiens, Klara du Plessis, Kandice Sharren, Kelly Baron, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Juliette Bellocq, Kim Fox, Reem Elmaghraby, Kristin Moriah, Daniel Martin, Kristen Smith, Tanya E. Clement, Mara Mills, Andy Slater, and Ellen Waterman.\n\n00:57:20\tKatherine McLeod\tThe New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies event was produced by Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, James Healy, and Douglas Moffat. [SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\nCheck the show notes for all of those names again—and for a link to the journal issue itself that this sound piece performed.\n\n00:57:36\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team includes: – Supervising producer: Maia Harris\n– Sound designer: TJ MacPherson\n\n– Transcriber: Yara Ajib\n\n– Co-hosts: Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod\n\n00:57:48\tKatherine McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.\nIf you love us, let us know—rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on social media.\n\n00:58:05\tKatherine McLeod\tFor now—thanks for listening.\n00:58:08\tSpokenWeb Outro\t[SpokenWeb theme song plays] [Harmonizing voices singing]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9610","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E11, Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in podcasting, 3 August 2020, Barker, Telaro, Barillaro and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sadie Barker\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/418173666199007392824\",\"name\":\"Emma Telaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/255946fd-ceff-4b6b-a91c-4df32581bc15/sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:08:48\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"66,125,366 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-episode-11_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-08-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bender, John and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Ed. Bender and Wellbery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey.  “A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  209-225.\\n\\nLlinares, Dario. “Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  123-145.\\n\\nRapp, Christof, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan.  “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” CanadianJournal of Communication 36.2 (2011): 207-225.\\n\\nOng, Walter J.: Orality and Literacy–The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Routledge, New York, 1988.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549693136896,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How do concepts make us feel? What is the function of affect in the communication of ideas?\n\nIn this episode, three SpokenWeb graduate students – Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker and Emma Telaro – revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise that was assigned to them by SpokenWeb researcher Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, namely the functions of voice, ambience and the overarching media rhetoric of the podcast as a form. Comprised of recorded zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini-podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from Year 1 of the SpokenWeb podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself.\n\n00:00:18\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with high pitched voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do, eh?\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Relaxing ideas, anxious ideas, loving ideas, and even heated ideas. Feelings aren’t just for people; ideas have feelings, too. Or, at least, that’s what our episode contributors this month aim to explore. If ideas do have feelings, how are they communicated? And in turn, how do different ideas, concepts, make us feel? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, graduate students Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, and Emma Telaro revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise assigned to them by Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar at Concordia University. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma, and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, exploring the connections between voice, feeling, and rhetoric. Comprised of recorded Zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself. Without further ado, here’s the SpokenWeb Podcast season finale: “Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling, and Rhetoric in podcasting.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:23\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping multiple voices] We made a podcast!\n00:02:24\tEmma Telaro:\tUsing our podcast voices and other sounds.\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] And other sounds!\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] Who are we?\n00:02:29\tJason Camlot:\tBegin Music: Light Guitar] Who are we? I’m Jason Camlot, Professor in the department of English and Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound Studies at, well, Concordia University.\n00:02:41\tEmma Telaro:\tI’m Emma Telaro, a Master’s student in the department of English at Concordia University and a research assistant for SpokenWeb.\n00:02:48\tSadie Barker:\tI’m Sadie Barker, a PhD student.\n00:02:50\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd I’m Ali Barillaro, an almost graduated grad student.\n00:02:54\tJason Camlot:\tMaking a collaborative podcast is fun–\n00:02:57\tEmma Telaro:\t–but also challenging.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe logistics of who does what and how to bring everything together is one challenge.\n00:03:03\tAli Barillaro:\tBut perhaps the greatest challenge has to do with–\n00:03:05\tAll Speakers:\t–defining the voice that shapes the podcast. [Music Changes: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass]\n00:03:09\tEmma Telaro:\tIn an audio essay, there is usually a clear narrational perspective.\n00:03:13\tJason Camlot:\tAll the sounds presented are filtered and organized through a single voice, which represents a sonically particular perspective on all that is discussed and heard.\n00:03:23\tAli Barillaro:\tIn our case, we have aimed as much as possible to allow multiple narrational perspectives to be heard and to shape this podcast episode.\n00:03:34\tJason Camlot:\tSo this podcast, the final episode from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, is kind of a meta-podcast about making podcasts. [End Music: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass] In the winter semester of 2020, I taught a graduate seminar on the topic of Literature and Sound Studies. I’d taught courses on sound and poetry before, but this seminar, more than the ones I taught in the past, was committed to bringing interdisciplinary concepts and approaches from sound studies together with literary texts and sound recordings.\n00:04:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] We are [ ]. [Begin Music: Ambient Hum]\n00:04:04\tJason Camlot:\tAs my department’s annual required theory seminar for PhDs—although it consisted of both PhD students and MA students—it was heavy with critical theories and cultural studies about sound and listening. So we read and discussed together selections from R. Murray Schafer, Friedrich Kittler, and Lisa Gitelman. Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills.   Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith. John Durham Peters and Brandon LaBelle. Douglas Kahn and Dylan Robinson, among many others.\n00:04:38\tJason Camlot:\t[End Music: Ambient Hum] We read a few literary works that framed sound, listening, and voice in interesting ways, like Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. And we considered poets whose work moved between print and sound productions, including the talk poems of David Antin, the erasure poems and time-stretching sound collages of Jordan Abel, and the poetry scripts and [Audio, Overlapping, Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] audio-visual live performances of Oana Avasilichioaei.\n00:05:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] The subject is occurence. The subject is the eye that brutesSim      the sky…\n00:05:15\tJason Camlot:\tIn the context of a literature course that aims to think about sound, it’s difficult to do so without having one eye on the print world. It’s difficult to think about sound outside of the generic categories we use to think about printed texts. Podcasting about literary sound is kind of an interestingly messy place to be. Already, asking literature students to engage with sound rather than print works to trouble their relationship to their primary source text. Asking them to think through and present their ideas in a sound-based medium was a further exercise in estrangement. They would be required to learn a whole new media rhetoric, one that involved sound editing, speaking, and recording their ideas in a voice that seemed right to the purpose, possibly the use of music or ambient sounds to reinforce or frame the ideas and arguments they were making, not to mention arranging, balancing, EQing, mixing, and exporting the final product. The results were awesome in so many ways, students made podcasts about [Sound Effect: Siren] noise.\n00:06:18\tSima Meghadadi :\tAh, the hustle and bustle of the city.\n00:06:21\tJason Camlot:\tAnd silence.\n00:06:22\tMarlene Oefinger :\tSilence, then, is not really absent of sound, but the beginning of listening. And when there is nothing to hear, you start to hear things.\n00:06:33\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why most audio books aren’t satisfying.\n00:06:37\tBrian Vass :\tI generally dislike audiobooks. I wouldn’t listen to a recorded book if I could just read the book instead.\n00:06:43\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why Samuel Beckett’s radio plays are awesome.\n00:06:47\tRyan Tellier :\tNow to be somewhat self-reflexive, Beckett’s story is partially about the very need to find a voice.\n00:06:53\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry is as extra as a Lana Del Rey\n00:06:59\tPriscilla Jolly :\tIn this podcast, I’ll speak about the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration in relation to the confessional mode using the work of Sylvia Plath and Lana Del Rey.\n00:07:09\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how the running voice in your head talking to itself is kind of like a never-ending hip hop track.\n00:07:14\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani :\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Hip Hop] Some words just make me feel uncomfortable, like soot. Ugh. That fire debris thing or whatever? You can’t see, but I just shivered saying that. They should really make some kind of visual podcast, like a vodcast, you know? [End Music: Instrumental Hip Hop]\n00:07:31\tJason Camlot:\t[Overlapping, the voices and sounds from the beginning of SpokenWeb Episode 8] At the same time that everyone was working on their own podcasts, I was also at work on one with my colleague Katherine McLeod that eventually got released as episode eight of this podcast series, the episode entitled “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” And I’d already worked on my very first podcast in the fall, episode two called “Sound Recordings Are Weird.” It hadn’t occurred to me how difficult choosing and performing a voice in a podcast would be until I tried making [Audio, Throat Clearing] a podcast myself.\n00:08:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord Alfred Tennyson.\n00:08:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe complexity of voice as a performative and expressive factor in the context of a podcast is about authority, expertise, positionality… All of which Ali, Sadie, Emma, and I discuss later in this podcast. But it’s also about something else, something that for me at least is coming to define what a podcast does to ideas, concepts, and arguments. It has to do with affect and feeling, the proximity of the speaker to her ideas. The proximity of the listener to the speaker sharing an idea. The affective exchange that is inseparable from the conceptual exchange when a podcaster talks about something. Stacey Copeland explains this idea powerfully in a recent article when she observes that–\n00:08:52\tStacey Copeland:\tThere is an inherent intimacy in voice-driven sound work. That seems to be [Begin Distortion] soaking in affect. [End Distortion] The listener puts on her headphones, presses play, and becomes immersed in an affective discourse of human experience through listening and connecting.\n00:09:13\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] So one way in which ideas have feelings is through their expression and effective communication in voice. Another way that we came to realize how ideas have feelings, during the process of making our podcasts, is through the broader sonic affordances of the medium, [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] especially the way we come to obsess with the use of music and ambient sounds in presenting stories and ideas. Podcasting uses sound to help us experience how a concept feels. So that covers voice and feeling as we’ll be discussing those topics in this podcast. When we say the rhetoric of podcasting, we’re thinking of everything that Aristotle included in his definition of the concept of rhetoric as a means of persuasion, which encompassed a) the character of the speaker, [Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] b) the emotional state of the listener, and c) the argument, logos, itself.\n00:10:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe first two elements of rhetoric as a method are pretty well covered by our categories of voice and feeling. I would define the last element—that of argument, or logos—as including the first two, plus the overarching structure, genre, that we choose to use in arranging and shaping our podcast. And also the degree to which this form of communication engages in explicit kinds of reflection upon its own rhetorical affordances and strategies. We may come to feel ideas as tenets of authentic truth, but this is so because the modes of rhetorical persuasion we use have become normalized to a point that we just don’t notice them or think about them anymore. An ideology of rhetoric sets in and a sense of the “end of rhetoric,” as John Bender and David Wellbery had dubbed it, is felt. Sometimes rhetorical protocols can come to seem so useful, normal, so right to community that uses it, that the rhetoric of it seems to disappear altogether.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s through the migration of rhetorical protocols across communities that we can find rhetoric work, interestingly, at cross purposes with its original community. Like when biblical discourse or legal discourse is repurposed by communities of poets, novelists, cartoonists, comedians, it is due to this perpetual migration of rhetorical forms, media, and effects across communities that I think podcasting represents such a powerful tool for scholarly communication and humanities pedagogy at the present time. Podcasting, in practice, is a great way to make us see and feel the rhetorical and media assumptions we use to produce and share knowledge in our scholarly disciplines. A new kind of awareness of the rhetoric of thought has been another outcome of the experience of engaging in podcasting as a form of critical expression. [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] And this is an experience that we all seem to share. So, with these keywords—voice, feeling, rhetoric—briefly explained, and with the basic plan mapped out, first here is Ali Barillaro presenting her podcast on the meaning of applause in poetry readings.\n00:12:29\tAli Barillaro:\t[Theme Music] When I started working with SpokenWeb, I didn’t really know what I wanted to research. So Jason told me to start by listening through the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and to take notes on anything that caught my attention. That ended up being the sounds of applause and the frequently conflicted comments different poets made about the presence of applause in poetry readings. So I spent my first year as an RA trying to come up with better ways of talking about applause because just measuring duration and amplitude didn’t seem good enough to me. If I wanted to find the “why,” if that’s really possible, I needed to look at the wider context. I had already produced a five-minute talk, a one-hour workshop, and a 12-page paper on this topic. On the page, I had to describe the sounds of applause and use screenshots of waveforms and spectrograms. And none of that really does the sound justice. With the podcast, it was a lot easier to weave narration or argument and the source material in and out of one another, which I think makes for a more immersive listening experience.\n00:13:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] [Muriel Rukeyser] Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it’s said that way.\n00:13:53\tAli Barillaro:\tApplause, a sign of approval, an act of support, a cultural indicator worth listening to. In John Bulwer’s manual of rhetorical gestures Chirologia, he explains that “to clap the raised hands one against another is an expression proper to them who applaud, congratulate, rejoice, assent, approve, and are well-pleased used by all nations. This public token has been of old and is so usual in the assembly of a multitude when they cannot contain their joy in silence.” Bulwer’s contemplation of applause, however, quickly takes on a judging tone with concerns about decorum and the appropriateness of the gesture in particular artistic contexts. Addressing the inherent duality of applause, Steven Connor posits that “Clapping one hand on another dramatizes the fact that you are subject and an object simultaneously, a doer and a done to.” Applause, it seems, belongs to both the individual and the crowd. It can be deliberate or uncontained, disregarded or powerful.\n00:14:59\tAli Barillaro:\tIn the context of the archival sounds of reported poetry readings collected by SpokenWeb, we can hear not only poetic voice or textual content. We hear the sounds of interactivity and deception. We hear traces of the relationships between speaker and audience that ground the poetry reading as public, as event. Despite their potential significance, sonic manifestations of audience response, including laughter and verbal address, are not consistently present or consistently treated by poets, series organizers, recordists, and archivists. In 1966, acclaimed Montreal poet Louis Dudek was invited to introduce Henry Beissel and Mike Gnarowski’s reading as part of the poetry series at Sir George Williams University. Dudek attempts to set the tone and establish the appropriate reading series etiquette, as he reflects on his effective response to Beissel’s performance, stating,\n00:15:53\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Strongly, I was impressed and moved by that reading of Henry Beissel.\n00:15:57\tAli Barillaro:\tFrom a position as both audience member and poet, he explains:\n00:16:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Really several times after the poems, I wanted to applaud, only we don’t do that.\n00:16:06\tAli Barillaro:\tHmm. If applause isn’t universally accepted as a fundamental part of the poetry reading, why are there so many instances of applause heard throughout the Sir George Williams collection? Despite concerns of impropriety, applause can function as a demonstration of etiquette or a measurement and influencer of public feeling, as Sarah Balkin claims. Tanya Clement and Stephen McLaughlin frame applause is both enabling an audience’s ability to engage in dialogue with a poem itself and effect its mode of meaning-making, or as a signifier of structures marking the transitions between different elements of a reading. Most examples of applause can be labeled either procedural, referring to moments thought to be appropriate or expected in a reading series, or as purely spontaneous phenomenon. Those spontaneous applause appears to be more appreciative in nature; procedural applause is not exclusively formal or inherently removed from appreciation for the poet, the work, or the performance. Another key feature of applause is the concept of consensus, which implies a communal response from the majority or all of the audience to a given performance.\n00:17:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause]\n00:17:16\tAli Barillaro:\tA noticeable lack of consensus is often perceived as…uncomfortable. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:17:24\tAudio Recording:\t[One person claps] [Unknown Person says, uncomfortably,] Oh! Thank you…\n00:17:25\tAli Barillaro:\t[Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] Caused by what Tia DeNora describes as individuals or small groups of people lacking the skill and practical knowledge necessary for appropriate emotional responses in a given performative context. Moments in the Sir George Williams recordings can be used as case studies to examine consensus, procedural, and spontaneous applause and to begin to unpack what specific sounds of audience response might signify when listened to within the greater context of an entire reading and the series as a whole. Let’s listen to the response to Irving Layton’s “Confederation Ode” read at Sir George Williams University in 1967 as an example.\n00:18:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:09\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton was certainly no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night, “Family Portrait,” receives the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the poetry series collection, a 40-second auditory event so intense we could call it a wall of noise.\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Very Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:28\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton’s opening remarks draw attention to the makeup of the sizable crowd gathered to hear him.\n00:18:33\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my friends and former students in the audience.\n00:18:40\tAli Barillaro:\tA statement elaborated upon in a post-grad article that details the overcrowding of the venue that hosted the university’s then-poet-in-residence. Consensus, then, is not an issue for Layton. What is worth questioning is the spontaneity of the reaction to a poem like “Confederation Ode” that was new at the time of the reading, especially considering Layton classics, like “Misunderstanding” and “The Birth of Tragedy,” are met with no audible response. Beyond finding out who is in the audience, the location and timing of the reading is also crucial to the discussion. With Expo 67 scheduled to begin just over a month after this Montreal performance and with the poem’s bold sexual imagery and overt political satire, Layton correctly assumes he need not explain his intent further than a simple preface–\n00:19:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] My contribution to the centennial year, “Confederation Ode.”\n00:19:31\tAli Barillaro:\t–for the audience to receive his message and respond accordingly. The question still remains open, though. Why did this audience react so strongly to this Layton poem in that moment. The ephemerality of the event and lack of corresponding oral history work makes it hard to firmly pin down an answer, but further inroads can be made with the use of growing audio archives that could potentially allow scholars to trace a poet’s reading history, cross-referencing multiple performances of a given piece and documenting the range of responses from audiences over time and across space. For the “Confederation Ode” applause, further research into Layton’s biography and public sentiment about Expo 67 and the Canadian government more broadly may also elucidate some of the meaningful resonances the performance affected in Layton’s listeners. Thank you.\n00:20:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:20:34\tAli Barillaro:\tWhen Jason, Emma, Sadie, and I got together for a series of Zoom meetings to replay and talk about our podcasts a few months after making them, hearing the episodes quickly conjured up…a few feelings.\n00:20:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I said something to Emma and Sadie about how I realized I kind of sound like some weird robot presenter lady in my podcast. And I… It’s so cringy to listen to ’cause that’s not how I talk normally at all.\n00:21:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] It’s always embarrassing to hear your own voice back, right? You know, to some extent, especially when you’re like, “I’m trying to do my podcast voice.” Right? You know.\n00:21:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I think it’s… I’m trying to sound like a…informational guide. I think there was only one like one or two very brief, brief moments in my mini-podcast that I was trying to break away from that. I remember in one of your comments that one of the parts that you were like, “Yes! That! That’s what you should be going for more” was just me going, “Hmm” at something. You were like, “Yeah! Like that’s, that’s something we would want to hear.”\n00:21:36\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Yeah, it’s ’cause that “Hmm” was so Ali. Right? [inaudible]\n00:21:40\tAli Barillaro:\tOverall, I think the end result was relatively well-produced and that I managed to convey a general sense of the work I’ve done on applause within such a limited timeframe. But the thing that we all kept coming back to was my voice. What exactly was going on there?\n00:21:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] What does that mean, first of all, to be doing a podcast voice? What is it?\n00:22:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] It’s funny ’cause I remember when I was in CEGEP, I had an assignment where my friends and I made a video about composting and I decided to narrate it and it sounded exactly like that. So it’s been like a thing for like a long time. And I don’t know why, like why that’s my go to voice. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s very weird.\n00:22:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Could you do that voice right now? Like on command?\n00:22:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Let me pull up something that I could like read. ‘Cause I can’t do it just like speaking spontaneously. Because that’s not how I talk! Okay. Let’s see. “The contents field serves to describe the audible content, speech, and other sounds of the audio asset.”\n00:22:44\tSadie Barker:\tIt seems so kind of genre-dependent, like your podcast, content-wise was quite academic and it was funny ’cause like listening to it, I actually didn’t notice a difference in voice at all, but then just now when you performed your voice, I really noticed it. So there’s something about like the setting of… The content setting that… Where you kind of assume a certain voice and… Yeah, ’cause it really, it really stood out in this very more casual settings.\n00:23:12\tEmma Telaro:\tI think it’s hard not to do it.\n00:23:13\tAli Barillaro:\tMhm.\n00:23:13\tEmma Telaro:\tI mean, as soon as you have a device in front of you, like tense up and that’s, I think, more often than not what happens.\n00:23:23\tAli Barillaro:\tI guess it’s like, it also feels like a safer way of doing it. Like it feels less vulnerable to have that kind of voice and not just have people listening to what you actually sound like.\n00:23:35\tJason Camlot:\tSo you’re, you’re performing the voice of sort of pure information, would you say?\n00:23:41\tAli Barillaro:\tI want it to be straightforward. I want it to be clear. Yeah, I want people to understand what I’m trying to say to them and I, for some reason, in my head, that’s what that sounds like.\n00:23:52\tJason Camlot:\tWould you say that you’re trying to make your voice almost disappear in the communication of the information so that it’s like, it’s there, but hopefully won’t be noticed?\n00:24:01\tAli Barillaro:\tYeah, I think that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do ’cause for some reason, I guess like my own natural voice doesn’t seem like the best, the best possible option for doing that. And I… It’s, it’s often when it’s something that’s scripted and it’s not like, it’s not theater or something like that. It’s something that is like argumentative or analytical or theoretical. That’s what that voice sounds like in my head. So I’m trying to perform that rather than something that’s more conversational or more natural or more performative in a different way.\n00:24:38\tAli Barillaro:\tEveryone had a lot to say about their own decisions regarding the performance of the role of podcast host or narrator. And I’ll be back later in the episode to lead you through some of our major realizations about voice.\n00:25:04\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Emma Telaro.\n00:25:04\tEmma Telaro:\tThe podcast I created for Jason’s class I named “Conditionally Audible Heat,” though future iterations should have a punchier name. Broadly speaking, my podcast examines the sonification of heat in the archival recording of the 1974 Margaret Atwood reading from the Sir George Williams University’s reading series. The curiosity I felt for this particular tape begins in listening. On the occasion of this performance, the reading is upstaged by an unbearable and unlikely October heat. The introducers, Atwood, stumble over the heat, the crowd shuffles restlessly, and this frenzy infectious makes its way through the audio recording. I found this occurrence mesmerizing and in a fit of note-taking attempted to mark all the moments when heat, though constant, materialized and usurped the reading. And yet there wasn’t a specific quality or sound associated with this heat, but a convergence, rather. So I wondered what in the first place was I listening to? [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling] What does heat sound like? How does it manifest in audio recording and what sensations does it provoke? I listened and listened again. So, I inched towards my driving question: how do we hear heat? I felt that to answer this question, what does heat sound like, to attempt a podcast on the sonification of heat, I had to begin with the event itself. Heat announces itself from the very beginning of the reading.\n00:26:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Henry Beissel] Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system. The hall is going to be too hot.\n00:26:34\tEmma Telaro:\tAnd I wanted to give a sense of the temporality of the event, the time elapsed and distorted by heat as it presses languorously and anxiously onto the reading. I had to find a way to do this, to describe, engage with, and represent 35 minutes of audio in a six-minute podcast. The podcast really took off with the introductory audio collage. Once I decided that my primary task was to sound heat, I clipped elements from the beginning of the recording to create the collage and timed it to fit a sultry musical track I found online. It felt very much like I was assembling quotations. I treated the clips, whether of speech or exterior sound, as fragments and pieced them together. To get the sounds to hit at the right time was a minute task and the more I edged towards the effects I wanted, the more finicky I got. That first sound, the one moment you’ll hear, took ages to place on the right beat and significantly, I selected it because it’s the first voice you hear in the archival recording. I felt strongly about keeping it, that short phrase captures the mood of the reading, the disorder, the tension, and the sound and feel of the room. You’ll notice how the speaker, Henry Beissel, signals the overflow, the body’s mass in the room. And you’ll hear the humour, too, which recurs in the event as necessary relief.\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Sultry Instrumental] [Henry Beissel] One moment. [Music Changes: Bass Joins Sultry Instrumentals] [Henry Beissel] We did try to get a larger hall, but it was impossible to accommodate the overflow we have set up loudspeakers in the little gallery here, how it [inaudible] in the other one, too? [Unknown Person] Outside. [Henry Beissel] Outside there’s loud speakers. So please don’t all crowd into the room. Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system? The hall is going to be too hot. [Music Changes: Xylophone Joins] [Margaret Atwood] I don’t see any reason why this thing should resemble a steam bath. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] If everybody on the chairs would, would shift over this way, and sit on sort of as if it were a bench, then some more people could sit on the edges there. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] It’s fucking hot.\n00:29:06\tEmma Telaro:\tMontreal, October 18, 1974. [End Music: Sultry Instrumental] It’s hot, really hot, an unlikely hot autumn evening. Margaret Atwood is set to perform at the Poetry Series, a reading series organized by the Sir George Williams University’s English department, now Concordia University. The room is jammed. She begins to read.\n00:29:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] Is not one– Oh boy, is it ever hot in here, I can’t stand it, yeah, hmm?\n00:29:35\tEmma Telaro:\tAtwood’s performance is of peculiar interest for two reasons. First, she’s one of the few women invited to read at the series. Second, the reading is overwhelmed by this autumn heat wave. In the recording of this performance, we hear Atwood repeatedly referenced this oppressive heat, and we hear the audience members, too, shuffling and speaking excitedly as they crowd into the room. We hear this especially in the first few minutes of the recording and in the Q and A that follows her performance. The reading itself is cut short to accommodate the unusual weather, which is ironic, perhaps, given our first point.\n00:30:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] I think I better read just three more poems…before we all die.\n00:30:19\tEmma Telaro:\t[Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] In an article written for The Guardian called “Boiling point: why literature loves a long hot summer.” Aida Edemariam writes, “Novelists have used heat waves to create tension, erotic charge, and moments of possibility. It is a time when all the rules change.” Of course, we’re not speaking of a fictional heatwave, but of a real, historical and material manifestation of heat. And yet we might pursue literary analysis and say that the sweaty, hot room acts as a framing device for the poetry reading, or if we want to borrow a term from sound studies, we might include heat in a study of the reading soundscape. But how in the first place does heat sound forth? How do we hear heat? What is the significance of an audible heat? For the most part, we’re listening to the effects of heat. Heat acts on bodies, bodies contribute to heat, voice and movement manifest discomfort or pleasure, or…pleasure in discomfort.\n00:31:16\tEmma Telaro:\tThe audible manifestations of heat, Atwood’s humorous quips, her nervous laugh, the frenzied audience response highlight the sociality of performance. Heat dramatizes the encounter between audience and performer and despite the very real constraint material circumstances of the reading, heat provides a release from constraints. We sense the overflow in the room, which contributes to the sense of possibility that emerges out of close contact with Atwood and her poems. Later, she jokes about being called a “witch” by some critics, which adds fuel to her feminism and speaks to the disarming power of her poetics. In this heat, with Atwood, we anticipate something. Boundaries might be crossed.\n00:32:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy? Has anybody died yet?\n00:32:08\tEmma Telaro:\tHeat helps us imagine what it might’ve felt like to be there. And it is remarkable that we can retrieve the sensation, if only   through recording. Heat is a conjuring trick; it signals presence even in absence. We hear the spatial, temporal, and material circumstances of Atwood’s reading, we hear the body, and of course, we hear the poems. And it all feels quite sweaty.\n00:32:35\tEmma Telaro:\tWe’ve talked about the sociality of performance sounded through heat, but there’s also the various meanings that shift in reading. Heat alters the poems themselves. Where and how you listen matters to how you receive meaning in the poem. Imagine a late summer evening, or if you prefer, a blazing mid-August sun entering deep, deep into the pore of your skin. Can you taste the sweat, smell the humidity? Or is it a dry heat, red and sandy? Are you close to, far from other bodies? How does the clothes feel on your skin? What sounds are there around you?\n00:33:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] “Late August.” This is the plum season, the nights / blue and distended, the moon / hazed, this is the season of peaches / with their lush lobed bulbs / that glow in the dusk, apples / that drop and rot / sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands / No more the shrill voices / that cried Need Need / from the cold pond, bladed and urgent as new grass / Now it is the crickets / that say Ripe Ripe / slurred in the darkness, while the plums / dripping on the lawn outside / our window, burst / with a sound like thick syrup / muffled and slow / The air is still / warm, flesh moves over / flesh, there is no / hurry. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:34:13\tEmma Telaro:\t“Late August” felt like the most fitting and only close, a return to the poem that felt nostalgic and dreamlike. Throughout the podcast, I focused mostly on extra-poetic speech, but the quality of her voice and reading shifts tellingly to [Changes voice to mimic the cadence of Atwood’s voice in the reading] the anxious phonetic pace indicating unbearable heat, slows, when she reads. “Late August” is this langour, this culmination, this release. The beautiful yet dark aura of the plums, ripe. The seductive quality of late August heat that focuses heat as an affective and aesthetic experience. It’s a heat which makes its way through autumn cracks, [Sound Effect: Autumn Bugs] the kind of heat that sometimes surprises us here in Montreal. It’s the heat of the poetry reading, from the bodies in the room, giving grain to the voice, to the poem. I wanted to end here, in “Late August,” to return to the poem, to listening, to feeling. If I speak “Late August,” I think of the swarming of bees by the Lachine Canal, but also the humidity that hangs on, that persists despite the signs of fall. There are sounds to these feelings, to describing these images. It’s perhaps a matter of listening more closely, of finding the right vocabulary for them.\n00:35:36\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Sadie Barker.\n00:35:36\tSadie Barker:\tFor the last four years, I’ve tree planted in northern BC. I would do this between my schooling, where especially more recently, I’ve been thinking and learning about sound studies. And these interests came together last summer when I brought a recorder with me to camp with the intention of recording the day-to-day world of tree planting. So when I wasn’t planting trees, I was walking around camp, interviewing people,–\n00:36:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] Okay, Michelle, we’re recording.\n00:36:05\tSadie Barker:\t–collecting the sounds of camp life, [People Chatting] and just amassing various audio. So I was pretty excited when, in Jason’s class, I had the opportunity to assemble it. Because I already had several hours of tape, I was in many ways advantaged going into this assignment, but I was still apprehensive. I never made a podcast before. While I’d written lots of essays and could appreciate music and sound, I’d never attempted to tell any kind of audio story. As someone that studies multimedia and aesthetics, podcasting made me realize that while I research and write on these topics, I hadn’t really ever diversified or experimented with my own modes of expression. I hadn’t ever really tried to facilitate an aesthetic experience itself beyond formal academic writing. So this assignment made me reflect on [Beeping Alarm] the tendencies, comforts, and familiarities of my own academic modes.\n00:37:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beeping Ends] [Crackly Static]\n00:37:17\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s 5:45 AM, cold, and the clothes you pull onto your shivering body in the pitch black of your tent are damp, coated in dew and sweat from the day before. Outside, the sun has not yet risen, but the gravel pit bears its first signs of life nonetheless. The hum of the generator [Mechanical Clacking] and the few early risers sitting on the breakfast trailer steps, brushing their teeth, smoking cigarettes, chewin’ the fat.\n00:37:49\tAudio Recording:\t[Truck Backing Up] [Unknown Person Sings] Tree planters are giving the trees a newly [inaudible] life. [Laughter]\n00:37:55\tSadie Barker:\tThis is the stretch of calm before the day. In 15 minutes, the breakfast trailer doors will open and people will shuffle through, heaping scrambled eggs and oatmeal onto silver trays to eat in the tent, both anticipating the day to come and cherishing these moments of idleness. At 7:00 AM, everyone will board their trucks and leave for the cutblock  to spend the next 10 hours planting trees. [Wheels On Gravel I could try and describe these 10 hours and the world of possibility they hold, but Charlotte Gill’s book Eating Dirt does it much better.\n00:38:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Country Guitar] [Charlotte Gill] Planting trees isn’t hard. As any veteran will tell you, it isn’t the act of sowing itself, but the ambient complications. It comes with snow pellets or clouds of biting insects so thick and furious it’s possible to end a day with your eyelids swollen shut and blood trickling from your ears. They’re swaying fields of venomous plants like devil’s club and stinging nettle. The work has the bodily effect of a car crash in extreme slow motion. Besides that, the task itself is thankless and boring, which is to say, it’s plain and silent. What could compel a person to make a career of such a thing? I’ve always wanted to find out. [End Music: Country Guitar]\n00:39:16\tAudio Recording:\t[ ] I’m Behnke, I’m from Terrace, British Columbia, and I– My name is Belle –am a second year tree planter– and I’m from Vancouver– My name is Liam Hannah– and I’m a first-year planter– Oh, my name is Alanna– I’m from Toronto– I’ve been planting for seven years– And I’ve been planting for four years– Hey, I’m from Thailand– –for two years– My name is Clara. I am from Thornbury, Ontario– Hi, my name is Sebastian– –planting for a couple of weeks now –I’m from Northern BC– –so this’ll be my first, first year– –and I’ve been planting for, this is my second full season planting.\n00:39:52\tSadie Barker:\tThere are many different kinds of planters. People come from all sorts of places and plant for all kinds of reasons. But most planters will tell you that the happiest part of any season is May, before any of the real work has started.\n00:40:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] So they say there’s three parts to the planting season–\n00:40:10\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Liam.\n00:40:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –and they map onto each month. There’s May, the honeymoon month where everybody’s having a good time and they’re enjoying themselves. They just got here. [People Chatting] They’re partying a lot every night… [People Chatting] [Begin Music: Ukelele].\n00:40:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] You spend so much time with these people, so–\n00:40:30\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Kim.\n00:40:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] –yeah, It feels… Leaving and coming back, it feels like camp as a little kid, like seeing all these people that you’ve connected with.\n00:40:41\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] I think there’s like a creative energy.\n00:40:44\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Belle.\n00:40:45\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] Music and art, I feel like that is sort of always happening in the background of camp.\n00:40:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] People are just pretty cheerful. [Music And People Chatting] ‘Cause everybody’s quite happy, ready to get to know each other and [Michelle says “Wonderwall”] joke around and…\n00:41:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] When you’re around the fire and everyone’s laughing and someone’s playing guitar… And then, again, you just sit back and you just go, “Wow, this…. This is good.” [Michelle] Katie, It’s not, Katie’s all request hour. [People Laughing And Chatting].\n00:41:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:41:28\tSadie Barker:\tAnd then–\n00:41:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –June hits.\n00:41:30\tSadie Barker:\t–it’s the June blues.\n00:41:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And people are getting exhausted and they go downhill.\n00:41:36\tSadie Barker:\tThis is when reality starts to set in, but when the bodily effect of a car crash in slow motion that Charlotte Gill was referencing, starts to occur.\n00:41:46\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] It’s, it’s really hard to justify like the toll it’s taken on my body because I felt so–\n00:41:50\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Michelle.\n00:41:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] –physically able before coming.\n00:41:54\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] I have a huge gash in like the webbing between my thumb and my index finger.\n00:42:00\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Unknown Voices] My feet are regularly cramping– The [inaudible] hurts– Common tendonitis– And it’s like a charley horse in my foot– Drought– I don’t know what I’ve done to my back– Foot pain– Some ribs popped out– So two days ago I woke up and I barely could see out of– Basically my knee started swelling up– –my right eye– –and I took my first day off ever. –it was bitten from a black fly– And so I hobble around and struggle to get in and out of the truck and struggle to get in and out of bed…\n00:42:21\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think? Is it worth it?\n00:42:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle Laughs] I don’t know. [Laughs] I don’t know.\n00:42:33\tSadie Barker:\tThis also when the days start to feel long– [Sound Effect: Rain Falling]\n00:42:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] The time doesn’t fly enough.\n00:42:40\tSadie Barker:\t–really long.\n00:42:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] Well, the worst thing that I find tree planting is…definitely the loneliness\n00:42:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] There doesn’t seem like… No birds are singing or nothing. Everything is just grey and…\n00:42:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] If you have one bad thought on the block, then it can just stick with you all day long.\n00:43:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And it’s always been the hardest job I’ve ever done and probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.\n00:43:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] But like today–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –at some point I sat on the log–\n00:43:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –July hits–\n00:43:14\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I just started laughing–\n00:43:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam]–and it’s the home-coming stretch.\n00:43:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I was laughing by myself for like a big two minutes and then I just stood up again and…planted!\n00:43:27\tMusic:\t[Begin Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso]\n00:43:27\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think, will you be coming back again?\n00:43:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Yeah, see, that’s a hilarious question.\n00:43:35\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] People always say it’s the last season, then they come back.\n00:43:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Obviously I’m saying never again after this season.\n00:43:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] That’s the struggle now where it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll come back. No I won’t. Yeah, I will. No, I won’t.” Back and forth, back and forth. I think–\n00:43:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] I think this is my last year. I think this is my last year, but I said that last year. So. Who know? Everybody always says that.\n00:44:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] I said that—I think it was my third year—that I would never come back and now I’m at four years later so…I guess it does something right. [End Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso. Rain Sound Effect Fades Out]\n00:44:19\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s funny hearing your own voice and podcast, maybe, especially, when it’s your first. I remember at the time of making this not really having a plan, maybe because this combination of sound and text was a new medium for me, not having a deliberate sense of process. But maybe because of that, having a sense of freedom. I knew I wanted to capture the everyday-ness of planting and I was excited by the possibility that I didn’t need to directly argue for the everyday or pose it as a structured thesis necessarily, but that I could present it experientially to the listener. I remember gravitating to certain sounds almost impulsively and assembling them in ways that just felt intuitive. It’s interesting now to hear the sounds that came through and the ways in which they did the sound [Mechanical Clanking] of the generator for me is interchangeable with the sound [Beeping Alarm] of the alarm clock. Both mean early morning.\n00:45:17\tSadie Barker:\tThey mean that the cook is likely starting to make breakfast and you should probably be mobilizing out of your tent. These parallels, I think, was the underlying rationale for putting those sounds in almost overlapped proximity. The sounds of the beer can and the fire and the instruments and banter. Those sounds for me capture the social world [People Chatting] of planting and the sound of the rain [Water Splashing] on the tent in the morning, which is always the first thing you hear and notice because it cues exactly the kind of planting day it will be seem to perfectly sound the ways in which planting is almost always at the mercy of the environment. So, I wanted to forefront those visceral relations between planters and their everyday surroundings and I think podcasting allowed me to do that in ways that were more in accord and representative of planting as itself: an immersive and sensory and experiential medium. [Theme Music]\n00:46:31\tAli Barillaro:\tAs Sadie, Emma, and I talked about our podcasts together with Jason, we found ourselves coming back to three key themes, including what we’re calling feeling or ambiance and rhetoric. But we probably had the most to say about voice, about vocal performance, intent, effects and affect.\n00:46:52\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio Recording] Listening to your, to your natural voice recorded is also kind of scary.\n00:46:57\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:46:57\tAli Barillaro:\tHaving that option to sound like somebody else, I guess in a way, is, is like a safety blanket, sort of.\n00:47:06\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s a really interesting point. I think it’s a great point. And it’s… I find it really… I mean, I’m not surprised, but I find it interesting that clarity and authority means voice evacuated of emotional characteristics or traits, right? You know. Which is also protective ’cause it shows that you’re not vulnerable to emotion, right? So in this version of podcast voice we’re to evacuate our voices of emotion, to communicate authority, clarity, and to somehow twist our personalities into some kind of robotic version of ourselves, you know, maybe avatars against, you know, that more authoritative robotic version of self-performance, but actually is about putting yourself out there and being casual and being yourself.\n00:47:54\tAli Barillaro:\tA lot of that comes from also feeling like sort of inadequately prepared to be that authoritative speaker as a student and for an assignment for a class. The audience was all of us, technically, like the other students, but it’s also Jason. So it’s a little hard to step back from that, even though you’re aware that you can and we were encouraged to do so in the podcast form, it’s very hard to stop doing that.\n00:48:23\tJason Camlot:\tEmma, did you feel you were also engaging in a kind of a different version of yourself, a more transparent or, or somehow, you know, objective version of yourself in your vocal performance in your podcast? Or were you doing a different kind of voice?\n00:48:40\tEmma Telaro:\tI think on some level I was–\n00:48:42\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro.\n00:48:43\tEmma Telaro:\t–just because this was a podcast that was assigned to us within an academic setting. So, and I was talking about heat in my podcast and I, I realized how that can become quickly humourous. I think like you, Ali, I kind of feel like, “Oh, that was a little bit of a missed opportunity. I could’ve made a bunch of like really silly jokes about heat.” But also I was sometimes actively trying to avoid that because I was afraid that that wouldn’t make it not serious. I often do think about that idea of the authoritative voice and how, as a student, it’s difficult to ever feel like you have one. And also like as a woman, having like a high-pitched voice is not necessarily normally seen as authoritative. So it’s something I often think about on the daily, especially at school, because I also find that my voice at the university is not the voice I have when I’m at home with my parents or when I’m at a bar with my friends, it fluctuates so much. And it’s something I pay a lot of attention to. And I think for this podcast, I wanted to find like a medium, like how can I be myself, but also sound like better than I am? Which is maybe like a silly, insecure thought, but it’s a thought that I’m sure everyone has, as soon as they’re being recorded.\n00:49:56\tAli Barillaro:\tI think a lot of us are kind of self-conscious about sounding, not, not too shrill, not too loud, and like not too high-pitched. I think my voice is actually quite deep. Like even now, I’m realizing listening to myself that when I’m talking and I know I’m being recorded, I do often try to, to keep it to the lower registers with my voice.\n00:50:20\tEmma Telaro:\tI used to sing. So it brought me back to being like in a recording studio and it brought me back to that moment, like right before record like that, that sort of… The acknowledgement you have in your head of like, “Okay, well now I’m putting on this performative voice.” And that voice felt a little bit similar to my singing voice because I was trying to like, I think extend the words and circle around the letters in a way that I don’t when I’m speaking casually. So it’s also a fake casual voice, I think.\n00:50:51\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. A performed casual voice, which is a big part of the podcasting voice that we often hear. When’s it acceptable to have emotion like in… For a narrator to have emotion or host to have emotion in a podcast? Because I definitely don’t either in my narrations, at least the ones I’ve done so far, it’s been pretty, it’s been pretty much based on like my grade eight radio assignment, you know? I don’t think I’ve progressed very much in thinking about how I’m supposed to sort of project or what a narrator’s really supposed to be. I think I’m trying to be clear. So I totally get what Ali was saying earlier about wanting to enunciate well at the same time to sound casual or conversational so, so that the text I’m reading doesn’t sound like it’s being read. There’s this kind of attempt to, to strike a really impossible or unnatural thing, balance, between reading texts, so sounding like an actual text that’s being read, but being a voice that’s doing that text in a manner that sounds conversational. I think it’s, there’s a lot of that kind of communicating a sense of reception through how one speaks back to what someone said without always saying, “Yes, I understand. Yes, I like what you’re saying.” It’s coming across through these vocal modes of expression instead, in timbre and in, in register in the voice itself. Earlier in this conversation like Ali, when you’re laughing, you know, about yourself and everything like that, that’s all there. And it’s like, “Oh, that sounds like a podcast voice to me, like much more than the formal narrator’s voice that we all seem to sort of slot ourselves into.” Sadie Barker.\n00:52:34\tSadie Barker:\tThat’s true. The podcasters, like I’m thinking of even someone like Ira Glass, kind of walks this line between being kind of well-spoken, but also can kind of respond naturally and with emotion on the spot and how it’s a really fine balance.\n00:52:52\tJason Camlot:\tIf you were to perform a different podcasting voice to sort of give us an example of what your voice might sound like if you were to redo your podcast, having reflected a little bit on the voice that you did use, what would that sound like?\n00:53:06\tSadie Barker:\t“Wake up everyone, it’s 5:45–” no. I think maybe I would just try to adopt the shifts in energy more… Like I think the, the podcast starts with kind of a lower energy, but it does kind of rise. I would reflect maybe more on my own experiences, my own personal reflections, take less of a back position and come to the fore more.\n00:53:32\tJason Camlot:\tWhat about you, Emma? Would your, your voice change, do you think?\n00:53:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThinking about it now, it was a very literary voice I think I was trying to mimic and I think I was also trying to match it with Atwood’s knowing that I would be putting the clips together. Whereas like, if I were talking about pizza, which I’m also super passionate about, it would be a very different voice. And I’m also thinking like Sadie, I wouldn’t want you to lose that like rising, quiet quality, because it’s as much part of the story as is the other speakers or the content. It is like a question of matching tone or timbre to, to content in the same way that we do when we’re writing. It shifts. But there is always something there that, that speaks of the author, right? Whatever that is. I don’t know. I don’t know if that answers the question. I guess it wouldn’t change, it would, it would maybe change. I don’t know, depends what I’d be focusing on this time.\n00:54:24\tAli Barillaro:\tIf I had to respond to this question, I’d say it might sound something like this:\n00:54:31\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio, Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] Sir George’s then-poet-in-residence Irving Layton was no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night received the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the entire poetry series collection, [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental] a 40-second auditory event so intense I call it a wall of noise. [Thunderous Applause, Previous Music Returns] In his opening remarks, Layton proudly draws attention to the sizable crowd in front of him. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:54:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my…\n00:55:03\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro\n00:55:03\tEmma Telaro:\tIt seemed that the medium, we were dabbling in, podcasting ,demanded that we concentrate feeling, that it was part of the argument, content, and narrative voice of our podcasting selves. The relational, immersive, and affective experience of sound and of podcasting guided or thematic discussion on feeling. Jason asked us to recall moments from our podcasts that were soaking in affect and to reflect on the achievements and challenges of these. We all thought of Sadie’s very successful rendering of the ambiance of camp and in particular of her campfire clip.\n00:55:36\tSadie Barker:\t[Audio, Overlapping With People Chatting] I sampled the sounds of people jamming and then I sampled sounds of people conversing. I think it was really an attempt to describe the sort of social atmosphere of planting that really… It seemed much more informative to use these small sounds, as opposed to saying, “You know, usually there’s 12 people standing around a fire and there’ll be some people playing instruments.” And I don’t know, it just made me kind of reflect on how the smallest sound can be so telling and so much more telling than kind of a lengthy description. I chose this scene because I thought it really captured the ambiance of camp.\n00:56:16\tEmma Telaro:\tSadie aptly negotiates images through sounds so that we feel like we’re there sitting around the campfire. If Sadie sought to sample atmosphere of camp, I focused on the ambiance of a room. My podcast, in a sense, was about feeling the feeling of heat at the poetry reading event.\n00:56:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy?\n00:56:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThe goal was to transmit a listening experience that centred heat, in listening closely to the room, and from there eased into a discussion of the reading event that preserved its heated texture. The heat felt all-consuming, shares much with Sadie’s rain, calling forth sensations, [Sound Effect: Stormy Rain] images, and memories that are otherwise inaccessible. I’ve never been planting in Northern BC, but I can hear the rain on my tent regardless, just like I had not been present nor alive during the Atwood reading and yet I feel I know that heat from that October night. While Sadie and I focused on the field of our particular subject matter, the sound of camp and of heat, of tree planting and of the poetry reading, Ali asks, what does podcasting itself sound like? Ali, quite brilliantly questions the mood evoked by the genre and sets the tone for the experience of listening to an informational form of communication. What remains consistent across our podcasts and in our discussion of feeling is this focus on our affective relationship to sound. The affordances of the medium seem vast in this regard, how to translate, feeling, affect, how to tell. What rhetorical methods might be used.\n00:57:40\tJason Camlot:\tSadie Barker.\n00:57:41\tSadie Barker:\tOur approach with this podcast was to structure it around thematic discussions, voice, and ambience, too. But now we land at structure itself. How do we bring all of these components together to make one coherent, but also hopefully compelling narrative? Just like the structuring of this very podcast determined through brainstorming, zooming, and certainly some trial and error, our approaches to structure were varied.\n00:58:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] It was the same feeling of having to fill up a blank page and like, where do you start? Where do you end?\n00:58:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I wanted to start with a statement.\n00:58:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs be the primary structure.\n00:58:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n00:58:23\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I found it very difficult, found it very hard. I just had a lot to say.\n00:58:27\tSadie Barker:\tBut before we get into any of that, Jason usefully summarizes what exactly we’re talking about when we say “structure” and “rhetoric.”\n00:58:36\tJason Camlot:\tSo when I’m, when I talk about rhetoric, I’m thinking of the handling of different registers so that you create a kind of persistently interesting series of sounds that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish combined with the kind of understanding of a beginning, middle, and end.\n00:58:54\tSadie Barker:\tAnd, as leader of the discussions, he offers some useful soundbites towards structuring this very segment.\n00:59:02\tJason Camlot:\tBut maybe we can each reflect a little bit on the challenges of the overall structure and arrangement of our podcasts.\n00:59:11\tSadie Barker:\tIn doing this reflecting, I started to realize that these categories [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] of voice, ambiance, and now rhetoric and structure, ones that we’d been discussing somewhat separately, were connected, entirely connected. Feeling and ambiance suddenly seemed integral to how my podcast was constructed. [End Music: Intense Instrumental]\n00:59:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] In my case, I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs of the season be the primary structure, but that that was structurally quite ambiguous. And so I had Liam, who is my partner and a planter, describe those emotional arcs in the language that everyone recognizes as the honeymoon and the burnout and the homestretch, just to provide a bit of structure [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] to the listener that keys the transition, right?\n00:59:56\tSadie Barker:\tBut I also realized that voice and its spectrum of intonation and register was key to the structural shifts themselves.\n01:00:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I did really rely on the voices of planters to capture the different emotional registers of those moments. There was an interview with this girl, Zoe, and she was describing a really miserable day on the block. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] And then she kind of goes, “But then I just pick myself up and I start planting” and being really drawn to that “but” because it just captured both in what she was saying, but the intonation, like the shift in register, that really mobilized the next chapter. So it was interesting to think about the content of what people were saying, but then also just how the sound and the way she said that one word cued that we were in a different emotional space.\n01:00:43\tJason Camlot:\tCool. That’s amazing how just a single intonational shift can actually signal, “Okay, new part.” And it shows how much feeling is a determining factor in the segmentation or shaping of argument in podcasting.\n01:00:56\tSadie Barker:\t[Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] And just like with structuring an essay where everyone seems to take a different approach to argument, some brainstorm, others start with the thesis, and others just begin with no particular sense of how, my approach in many ways seem to differ from Ali’s, which was to–\n01:01:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro]–to start with a statement rather than “applause and the sounds of the audience are important and here’s why.”\n01:01:19\tSadie Barker:\tWhich would then orient listeners to her particular stance on the topic at hand.\n01:01:24\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Because most research with recordings of poetry readings are focused on the poets for obvious reasons. So I wanted to start out sort of stating that.\n01:01:32\tSadie Barker:\tAnd while Ali didn’t particularly focus on vocal inflections or registers–\n01:01:39\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I don’t think I was successful in thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking like, “Okay, well, my voice should signal these shifts in the narrative arc.”\n01:01:48\tSadie Barker:\t–she had a strong sense of how the structure of her podcast was mobilized by the complexities of an idea.\n01:01:55\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] The middle section is more about the work that I’ve been doing to figure out how to talk about applause in a way that isn’t just, “Oh, it lasts this many seconds and it’s loud or it’s quiet,” but to come up with terms that are more specific to the qualitative essence of different moments of applause.\n01:02:13\tSadie Barker:\tBut Ali also reflected on how her structure was mobilized through the possibilities of an idea.\n01:02:20\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] And then the ending is sort of where I still am in a way, which is that there’s a lot more [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] that can be done to develop that further. And there’s a lot of exciting possibilities for tracing performances across even just different days or different years or decades and different locations and, and charting sort of the responses from different audiences in different contexts to the same poet and the same work.\n01:02:46\tSadie Barker:\tSo if my approach was to structure emotively and Ali’s was to structure more theoretically, Emma’s further diversified our set of approaches. Emma ended up taking—at least initially—a structured approach to structure.\n01:03:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] I resorted to what I know how to do, which is how to write a paper. So I thought about it. I thought to myself, “Okay, what’s going to be my introduction, what’s the body, and then what’s the conclusion?”\n01:03:11\tSadie Barker:\tBut also found in the process that essay and podcast structure have some fundamental differences.\n01:03:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Except that it was almost more scary ’cause it was just like, how do I, first of all, put sounds onto this platform and then also make them make sense?\n01:03:25\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these differences call for different approaches.\n01:03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] So I had various clips that I liked. I wrote a script. Then in the end I had all these sound bites or clips that I just needed to assemble into a collage. Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n01:03:38\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these approaches rely on feeling in different ways.\n01:03:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] But when you do that there’s not necessarily like a linear structure that you have right away. So it’s also just trusting that the process will reveal itself. I didn’t know how to conclude this in a way that would be engaging and not too formal and not too academics. And that’s when I decided to include the poem “Late August,” which just felt like it needed to be there somewhere. And to end it with that, I think was to go back to like, just to come back to the reading.\n01:04:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] I love that move at the end of your podcast. And it relates to what we’ve been talking about this whole time because it’s a return to a verbal rendering of a mood. So it’s a way, it’s a return to the poem on the page or language, the actual words themselves, communicating what you’ve been communicating through, through the rhetoric of podcasting with using, you know, sound and mixing and all those other things up to that point. So it’s sort of like a return to text, to print, you know, to the power of poetry and words themselves to do what you’ve been doing up to that point with sound.\n01:04:53\tJason Camlot:\tSo that about sums up the conversations we had based on the amazing podcasts that Ali, Emma, and Sadie made. As you heard, our focus was on the mood that’s created through ambient sounds, the overall rhetoric of the podcast, and how voice carries affective expression of concepts. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] By way of closing, we tried a little experiment. Basically the idea was to choose some classic critical terms like things from M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms, and to read them with feeling, with the feeling that we associate with a critical term in question. So here it goes, our kind of beat poetry performance of the glossary of critical and literary terms where ideas have feelings. [Begin Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumental]\n01:05:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature.\n01:05:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Focalization. Focalization. Focalization! Focalization. Focalization? Foooocalization. Focalization. Focalization. Focalization.\n01:06:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Interpolation! You know, like, “Hey, hey interpolation!” Interpolation! [Laughs] There has to be a finger in there, you know, like, interpolation! Yoo-hoo, interpolation. Interpolation!! Oh, that’s terrifying! [Laughs] Hey! How do you..? Interpolation! Interpolation!\n01:06:45\tAudio Recording:\tHi, my name is Id. Iddddddd!! Id. [Exaggerated Inaudible Words] [End Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumentals] [Begin Music: Distorted Electronic Beat]\n01:07:30\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Emma Telaro, and Jason Camelot. A special thanks to everyone who contributed to the SpokenWeb Podcast over the last season. You know who you are. And hey, if you are part of the SpokenWeb network and want to get involved, let us know. Season two is just around the corner, so stay tuned this fall for brand new episodes from all your favourite scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. We’ll also be back with brand new Audio of the Month minisodes with Katherine McLeod from deep in the archives. To find out more about SpokenWeb, [Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here in the fall for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9618","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E5, The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic, 7 February 2022, Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/70e2056d-21b3-4884-914a-95bc4d3de45e/audio/a045aa72-0908-41c8-a0fb-06f57b214da9/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e5-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:07:56\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"65,286,522 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e5-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-02-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549715156992,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How has the reading series been transformed by the Covid pandemic and its accompanying technologies of virtual gatherings? In this episode, Jason Camlot – SpokenWeb Director and Professor of English at Concordia University – takes us on a reflective listening tour through recordings of the Words and Music Show as it has evolved through the pandemic since early 2020. The Words and Music Show has been organized by Ian Ferrier for two decades to bring performances of literature, art, and music to live audiences at the Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Jason assisted Ian with organizing after Covid sent the series online, and this episode takes us into the in-person and virtual sounds of the Show. In this episode, we listen to the journey of one reading series and its co-curator over the past two years. Join us in reflecting on how the pandemic has changed the ways we share and connect to each other through literature, art, and performance.\n\n00:00:06\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\tInstrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:00:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How have our experiences of live artistic events changed during the pandemic? The Words and Music Show is a monthly gathering that poet and musician Ian Ferrier has organized for over twenty years. It invites artists to share spoken word poetry, literature, music, dance, and other kinds of performance. Before March 2020, Ian brought the show to audiences in the physical space of Casa del Popolo in Montreal. The pandemic sent this event online and into strange hybrid physical/digital forms, as has happened with so many events that we used to attend in our favourite venues. Jason Camlot assisted Ian in hosting the show online during this pandemic period.\n \n\n00:01:34\tHannah McGregor:\tIn addition to co-hosting the Words and Music Show Jason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb Network and a Professor of English at Concordia University. He uses past recordings of the show to bring us this new episode of the podcast during yet another wave of Covid contagion and shut-downs. Listening to these recordings is a call to reflect back on the many pivots this show and other live events have made over the past two years of Covid-impacted life. Jason wonders aloud whether it’s too soon (and too close to home) to yet theorize about how Covid has transformed reading events, but he suggests it might be helpful to listen back to what organizers, artists, and fans of the show have been experiencing. What does this artistic gathering sound like now? Some of the sounds may be familiar to you: Zoom glitches and tech troubles; the lonely reverberance of a small crowd clapping; coughing fits; the strange absence of ambient conversation; and the background sounds of pets and children, reminders that people are listening from usually-private home spaces.\n \n\n00:02:34\tHannah McGregor:\tArtists and creative event organizers are a tough bunch: they have and will continue to weather the storms of challenges and unknowns in order to share writing, art, and poetry with those who wish to listen. We invite you to listen to this episode with us, as we reflect on the shifting sounds of poetry readings and artistic community – and the power these events continue to have for us all. Here is Jason Camlot with Episode 5 of our third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic”. [Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:03:14\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tHere we go. Four minute venue buzz. Let’s see if it works… [Indistinct Shuffling Sounds] Not a chance.\n \n\n00:03:28\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\n \n\nIt’s not working? [Laughs] Are you sharing computer sound? [Sounds of Ian and Jason Troubleshooting Continue]\n00:03:32\tJason Camlot:\tThat is the sound of me, Jason Camlot, and Ian Ferrier working out some technical effects just before the start of a Words and Music show that we hosted on Zoom in August, 2020.\n \n\n00:03:43\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\t– well, you don’t have the advanced?\n \n\n00:03:45\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tI’m not sure that I do at the moment…\n \n\n00:03:47\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor in Concordia University’s department of English and research chair in Literature and Sound Studies.\n \n\n00:03:55\tIan Ferrier:\tHi, I’m Ian Ferrier and as far as this conversation is concerned, I’m a poet and a musician and a curator of multimedia shows featuring literature, music, poetry, performance, and dance.\n \n\n00:04:11\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tYeah, I think we’re just gonna start this.\n00:04:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tOh, here’s Jay Alexander Brown.\n \n\n00:04:20\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tOh, there we go. [Laugh].\n \n\n00:04:24\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\t[Laugh] Yeah. Let that go for a minute before we start. [Start Music: Instrumental with Voices]\n \n\n00:04:26\tJason Camlot:\tThis episode is about all the shows that Ian and I have hosted online during the pandemic.\n \n\n00:04:32\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tSo, good evening everyone and welcome to the Words and Music Show.\n \n\n00:04:36\tJason Camlot:\tSince 2016, the “Where Poets Read” online listing of literary events in Montreal (curated by my colleague and regular collaborator Dr. Katherine McLeod) has posted details of nearly 800 readings. [End Music: Instrumental with Voices] The last “live” in-person event listed on the site (until very recently) was for the Épiques Voices: Bilingual Poetry Show held at La Vitrola on March 10th, 2020. That amazingly fun and moving bilingual show was co-hosted by Katherine and Catherine Cormier-Larose. I remember the show very well, not only because of the awesome readings by Klara du Plessis, Kama La Mackerel, Alexei Perry Cox, and ten other excellent poets, but especially because it was the last public reading I would attend in person for a period for a very long time. For 593 days, to be exact. More about how that stretch of time ended a bit later in this podcast.[Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding] But first let’s go back to March 2020, a time when we were just beginning to understand the implications of how the pandemic might alter our lives. Between March 12th and March 29th, the “Where Poets Read” listing showed a series of notices for “cancelled” or “postponed” shows. You would find messages on Facebook, like this one from Ian Ferrier.\n \n\n00:05:59\tIan Ferrier:\t[Start Music: Breaking News Music] [Voice Effect: News Anchor Voice] Tonight’s show is not cancelled, only postponed. We are collecting tracks from all the performers who were scheduled to present and preparing the way to present them live in this group sometime in this upcoming week. Stay tuned and stay safe.\n \n\n00:06:12\tJason Camlot:\tAnd then we see a listing for the Words and Music Show online.\n \n\n00:06:18\tIan Ferrier:\tIt took longer than a week, by the way, it ended up being towards the middle or the end of April, before we could get people online.\n \n\n00:06:26\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, this was the first one, right? Like April 20 –April 19th?\n \n\n00:06:30\tIan Ferrier:\tGee, was that it? Wow, that was a good one too.\n \n\n00:06:33\tJason Camlot:\tOr was it…?\n \n\n00:06:35\tJason Camlot:\tThe correct date of that first online Words and Music Show of the Pandemic Period was March 29th, 2020. It featured work by Brian Bartlett, Lune tres belle, Alexei Perry-Cox, Nisha Coleman, and Choeur Sala.\n \n\n00:06:50\tJason Camlot:\tSince that date (based on data some students of mine have been collecting by scouring events postings on social media) there have been thousands of online literary events (readings, book launches, public interviews and panels) hosted from locations across Canada (and across the world) using platforms such as Zoom, Facebook Live, Crowdcast, Instagram and YouTube. If you have ever attended a poetry reading (whether you enjoyed it or not), or if you have ever listened to an episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast before, you will know that public readings and performance are an important kind of literary communication, circulation and community-building. Much of the collaborative research pursued across the SpokenWeb network is committed to preserving, listening to, and trying to understand the many meanings of historical recordings that document literary activity in Canada. In studying the thousands of recordings that constitute our collective archives of literary sound, we find ourselves asking, “What did this event mean?” [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] Sometimes we find ourselves asking even more basic questions, like, “Whose voice is that? [Pause] What’s that sound?” [Pause] But here we are, in a period of major disruption again to just about everything, including to literary events, readings, and gatherings. There seem to be new, urgent questions to ask: What does this pandemic mean for literary performance communities? What does it mean for the way we think about and experience literature, as compared to how we did before, when we could see each other in person without concern of spreading or catching a potentially fatal virus? Even as I articulate the question, “What does this mean?” another question arises simultaneously, not quite drowning out the first one, but certainly obscuring its intelligibility and potential. “What does this mean? Is this a question I should be asking right now? [End Music: Ambient Sounds]\n00:08:53\tJason Camlot:\tBack in May, 2020, my colleague, Katherine McLeod, and I made a podcast for this SpokenWeb Podcast series, an episode called “How are we Listening Now?” –\n00:09:07\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Zoom Doorbell Chime] Hello? [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n00:09:09\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHello? Can you hear me?\n00:09:11\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYep. Hi Katherine.\n00:09:13\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHi!\n00:09:14\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?\n00:09:21\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tUh, no, actually I’m in my office room.\n00:09:25\tAudio Recording, Unknown Voice, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHello from my kitchen!\n00:09:26\tJason Camlot:\t– about what it felt like to live and listen under pandemic conditions [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] just a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic first began March 2020.\n00:09:35\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020 :\tGood evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music.\n00:09:44\tJason Camlot:\tWe actually used the sounds from that first online Words and Music Show, including the performances of Nisha Coleman –\n00:09:51\tAudio Recording, Nisha Coleman, Words and Music, March 2020 :\tIt’s precarious, of course it’s precarious in the best of times. And now we’re entering a new time where it’s sort of precarious for everybody. So I think it’s more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together, singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle or maintaining this connection over the internet.\n00:10:13\tJason Camlot:\t– and Alexei Perry Cox.\n \n\n00:10:16\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020 :\t[Baby Cooing] [Reciting Poetry] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality perfect and conquerous would get through to humankind.\n00:10:23\tJason Camlot:\tIn retrospect, it marked the beginning of a long series of ongoing, and maybe repetitive questions. That episode could go on and on, with only slight modifications to the title: How are we listening, now? And now? [Multiple Repetitions of “and now”] Katherine and I did revisit the episode and expand our thinking around that initial question in a scholarly article recently published in a special “Pandemics” issue of the journal, Canadian Literature. We ended our contribution to the article with a rather upbeat take on the transformative implications of the pandemic upon our scholarly and pedagogical activities. We concluded:\n \n\n00:10:58\tJason Camlot and Katherine McLeod:\t[Simultaneous Voices] Pandemic listening may be a new, tremulous classroom within which we will come to hear, unlearn, and transform our understandings and practices of listening.\n \n\n00:11:20\tJason Camlot:\tOur article is filled with theses of different kinds about pandemic listening, that were developed through a process of listening to the kinds of online conversations about literature that we were having with students and colleagues during the first months of the pandemic. Writing the article necessarily represented an exercise in abstraction and theorization of that early experience (at least I felt it was necessary in preparing the article).\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic Sounds] When is it a good time to reflect on a crisis within which one is still deeply entrenched? When’s a good time to reflect on our experience of the pandemic? Is it too soon to do so? Given that we are in a fifth wave now, and that the Omicron variant has initiated a series of public responses that are reminiscent of the very early period of the pandemic, it may be a good time to listen to what we have gone through, even though we’re still going through it. Perhaps it is still too early to theorize the meaning of the pandemic, but it feels helpful, somehow, to listen to it. [Pause] In this episode, my way of listening to my recent experience of the texture of time, and to the pandemic as it existed for me for an hour or so, on every third Sunday of the month, will take the form of selecting and playing recorded moments from some of the sixteen distinct online Words and Music Show events that I have co-hosted with Ian Ferrier (from my institutional Zoom account) since March 22nd, 2020. [Pause] In selecting moments from pandemic episodes of the Words and Music Show, I have been as interested in listening to the sounds around the performance, as the performances themselves. [End Music: Ambient Electronic Sounds].\n00:13:16\tJason Camlot:\tWe were interested in the sounds that surround the show, as well.\n \n\n00:13:19\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tSo, Jason, will you be doing the fake applause?\n00:13:25\t \nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\n\nOh, I can send you some fake applause if you want.\n00:13:28\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tYeah, sure. Send me some fake applause.\n00:13:31\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tOne sec –I just –Jason, I just sent you a couple of little applause clips.\n00:13:39\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, July 2020:\tHow’s everyone’s weekend been?\n00:13:46\tAudio Clip:\t[Applause]\n00:13:47\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:13:47\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, July 2020:\tIt was like Klara just walked in on a sitcom and –.\n00:13:49\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:13:53\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tBy the way, that’s real life Casa applause.\n00:13:57\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, July 2020:\tOh cool!\n00:13:57\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tAnd I just sent you four minutes of crowd buzz too, which is like just when nothing’s going on –\n00:14:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tRight.\n00:14:05\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\t– and people are talking with each other.\n00:14:07\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tOh, hi Judee.\n00:14:07\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tHey everyone.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tThanks for coming.\n00:14:13\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tYeah! So happy to be here. Jason, that’s a virtual background. I didn’t know.\n00:14:19\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tIt is.\n00:14:19\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tIt’s quite deceptive.\n00:14:20\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tYeah. It’s the Casa del Popolo where the Words and Music show often happens or usually happens. Yeah.\n00:14:28\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\t[Start Audio Clip: Crowd Buzz] There we go! Crowd buzz.\n00:14:31\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tCrowd buzz. We’re creating a virtual atmosphere.\n00:14:35\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tWow, the crowd is so, so loud. It’s hard to hear you guys!\n00:14:38\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\t[Laugh] I know. That’s why we gotta yell.\n00:14:42\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tIn honour of this crowd, I’m gonna go grab myself a beer before this show starts. I’ll be right back.\n00:14:48\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tGood idea. Alright.\n00:14:49\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, July 2020:\tIt’s so crowded. He might find there’s a line up.\n00:14:52\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laugher]\n00:14:55\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\n \n\nHey Kenny, I don’t know if you can hear us.\n00:14:58\tJason Camlot:\tSounds like audience buzz and different kinds of applause captured on tape [End Audio Clip: Crowd Buzz] from past live shows to give a sound of appreciation from a group of people that is practically impossible to produce when on Zoom, [Start Audio Clip: November 2021, Words and Music Crowd Buzz] because Zoom cancels out sound altogether when more than two or three people speak or make noise at the same time, at least with the standard noise cancellation settings on. [Audio Clip of Crowd Buzz continues] We missed those sounds online. [End Audio Clip: November 2021, Words and Music Crowd Buzz]\n00:15:32\tJason Camlot:\tThose first ten months of the Pandemic. Oh my god. Not only were we dealing with the anxiety and intense uncertainty of the virus, not quite knowing what it was all about, and many months away from the first vaccines. But Donald Trump still had a Twitter account (that was only taken away from him on January 9th, 2021). And on May 25th, George Floyd, was murdered. [Silence] Teaching and collaborative research activities, and community work (like being on the Board of the Quebec Writers Federation, QWF) kept me sane by giving me a sense of purpose. But the dull hum sounding feelings of utter purposelessness and helplessness were always there, in the background. Through my participation in the QWF, and with the leadership of spoken word performer and novelist Tanya Evanson, a regular Words and Music performer over the years, I became involved in collaboratively producing a show that featured Black Montreal-based performers, Roen Higgins, Fabrice Koffy, Faith Paré and Jason (Blackbird) Selman. For this QWF, Wired on Words, Throw Collective, and SpokenWeb special “Black Writers Out Loud” edition of the Words and Music Show, we invited these four amazing performers to appear on the legendary stage of the Sala Rossa.\n \n\n00:16:55\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Background Audio: Sounds of the Sala Rossa]\n00:18:01\tJason Camlot:\tOn this night for the recording of the Montreal Black Writers Out Loud event, a little more than two years later, the atmosphere at the Sala was something quite different. Venues were not allowed to have audiences at shows. We were recording the performances from the Sala stage to be webcast as a “live from the Sala Words and Music show” just a few hours later. The only people in the venue were the four performers, the audio and video technicians who were recording the sets, Ian, who was introducing the artists from the stage, and me, because it was thought I might need to Zoom cast the show from there if the recording took longer than expected. We were all masked when I said hi to the performers before they began, and then I watched in the chilly empty space leaning on the bar at the back of the room. The taps were dry. The performances were fantastic. Fabrice Koffey.\n \n\n00:18:58\tAudio Recording, Fabrice Koffey, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\n \n\n[Fabrice performs the work “Je m’appelle Serge…” alternating between French and English]\n00:19:19\tJason Camlot:\tThey were all the more amazing given that each artist has to do their set a second time because the sound messed up during the first recording session, and the error was only discovered after all four sets of the entire hour-long show had been performed. In fact Roen Higgins had to come back another day to re-record her set because she couldn’t hang around to it a second time; she had to get home to a child who was sick. So her set wouldn’t make it out to Zoom and Facebook Live that night. Faith Paré\n00:19:47\tAudio Recording, Faith Paré Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\tHi there guys. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. I wanna say thank you to the Quebec Writers Federation, to Wired on Words and Ian Ferrier, to SpokenWeb Canada and to the Throw Collective. This is really wicked to be able to be in the space again. So as well, thank you to the Sala Rossa team for taking good care of us and Fabrice and Jason and to Rowan who’s here with us in spirit. It was awesome getting to chat with you guys in September and really wicked to be performing alongside some powerhouse poets from Montreal. So thank you for welcoming me into this community as well. I have a kind of suite of poetry for you guys, which is kind of a Black feminist elegizing of the world. And it begins with an epigraph from the poet, Claire Harris. [Begins reading poetry] While babies bleed, this is not the poem I wanted./ It is the poem I could./ Poetry is the stuff of a life lived./ What I have endured is no life./ The insult of that, the salt poured into the wound my mouth was replaced with./ I know the unsolicited tips to smooth my frown lines./ I know to try a smile from every sidewalk, leering guy./ I know the flies I’m bound to catch, how impolite. /No one likes mouth on a Black girl, unless it’s sucking cock or it’s an open grave, best when both./ And when they still see a hanged man in my dangling shin, I need to fix my face/ But my face is already fixed on the doomscroll, /The hashtags wreck, the headline bolded and stampeding through my throat./ When I’m sitting with a pen./ When I try laughter/ When I take a sip of water stolen from somewhere and still smell smoke from the flash bang grenade tossed on the Black girl asleep./ The breathless call for mother of a Black girl when they barked her off balcony/ Black girl, after Black girl submerged in river after river/ Because of their dead names can’t go,/ Can’t go anywhere in the world. /Can’t go when the one door out is my mouth./ Can’t when sound is cowering inside me with canned food, ready to hide years on end./ Can’t. [Intake of breath].\n \n\n00:22:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe Sala show was an experiment of sorts, an attempt to give the effect of a live show delivered from a beloved venue for an online audience. The quality of the performances, and the quality of the audio and video were both great. But there was also something a bit eerie about the juxtaposition of a recognizable, happening venue in which nothing was happening apart from the amazing performances on stage. The silence surrounding the sets was more than just noticeable. It was audible. It was thick. Thick with quiet and absence. [Audio Clip: Person Exhales] . Jason Blackbird Selman\n \n\n00:22:49\tAudio Recording, Jason Blackbird Selman, Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\t[Jason Blackbird Selman performing “Lend me a psychedelic dream…”] Lend me a psychedelic dream./ Lend me pieces of daylight./ Lend me a destruction sweeter than anything I can remember./ Lend me open sounds, a courtyard, Sedgwick Ave. /Bury this knowledge and sound./ A beat that repeats a rhythm that has a mind of its own./ Let the mind grow,/ spread to all five boroughs like a virus, black fire, wild stone rhythm for talk,/ Speak softly. Take over the world./ It was so easy to know you once I began listening to myself,/ the verse became free psychedelic colours and psychedelic graves./ Daisies growing wild from the barrel of a gun shoot stars./ Love is an idle threat shouted to the world who is not like I when delivering themselves to themselves,/ a glass filled with years, this venom filled with love./ I love her so much because she lets me know that I am fading./Ghetto codes and grey days./ The search for search, the sound of sound./ Find yourself in flames evenings on pause, part of something, apart and in parts/ Open the first door./ Let yourself in. [End reading]\n00:25:20\tAudio Recording, Jason Blackbird Selman, Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\tGood evening. It’s good to be here at Sala. It’s always good to be here, in amongst wonderful poets from our city. And all of you are watching right now. I just wanna say thank you to KWF to Ian, Words and Music. And, it’s good that we can do this. But I also really look forward to coming back into the world and having a full audience because we appreciate your virtual support, [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] but we also appreciate your energy and face to face. Cause that does make what we do really worth doing.\n \n\n00:26:06\tJason Camlot:\tI feel honoured to have been one of a handful of people who was in the room to see those terrific live performances before an absent audience. I hooted and yeahed, clapped and cheered loudly through my mask from the back of the room. The reverberation of my solitary response was a bit sad. I could have been an installation in the show currently running at the Montreal Museum of Modern Art, entitled, “How long does it take for one voice to reach another?” For the next month’s show, Ian and I went back to sitting in front of our computers and hosted an event of performers and audience members who were sitting in front of theirs. [End Music: Ambient Sounds] As we realized that online shows meant you could invite just about anyone in the world to perform (on Zoom), I suggested to Ian that we invite the UK-based poet Angela Szczepaniak to join the December 13th, 2020 show. I had just finished editing Angela’s third poetry collection for DC books, and I knew it would be great to hear her read from it.\n \n\n00:27:09\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tShe lectures in creative writing at the University of Surrey, and she has a new book coming out soon called The Nerves Center. So please welcome Angela Szczepaniak.\n00:27:18\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tThank you so much, Ian. And thank you for having me. It’s really lovely to be here from London very late at night right now, for me. Really nice to meet you all too. So, I’ll be reading from my forthcoming book, The Nerves Center, which is a long narrative poem about a performer in the midst of stage fright while on stage and attempting to give a performance. And each act in the sequence of the long poem she, the performer is trying to speak and what she actually says, which takes a form of sound poems. The sounds poems are comprised, I guess I should say, of recordings of panic attacks, that I played into transcription software, which then assigned kind of letters and phrases and words-ish, to it. It wasn’t very good at transcribing, which was very helpful when I was reshaping them into sound poems for the page. What didn’t really occur to me until now – this is my first reading of the work or from this book –[Cough] excuse me – is that I am essentially going to be reenacting lots of panic attacks that I once had [Laugh] long ago, which is a kind of exciting night, I guess, for everyone. [Cough] Excuse me.\n \n\n00:28:40\tJason Camlot:\tIt seemed especially appropriate for the Zoom stage, which might add its own sonic glitches through wavering connectivity. I was excited to hear what the planned silences in the poems would sound like on Zoom. And I was just excited to see Angela, since it had been a while since we’d zoomed, because she had contracted the COVID virus some months before and had been knocked out of commission for quite a while, now.\n \n\n00:29:03\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tI suppose also I should say that panic attack-wise, I very helpfully caught a virus a while ago, which results in me coughing constantly. So that’s what you’re going to hear for a lot of those kind of breathy sound poems. It’s just going to be replaced by coughing today. [Coughs] Excuse me. There are ten acts all together and each one maps onto a specific self-help strategy for managing anxiety and performance anxiety. [Coughs] Excuse me. I will keep this short also given the cough. So The Nerves Center, a novel in performance anxiety. The nerves center in 10 acts, the nerves center in 131 stanzas 2,417 fantic utterances and tonight, especially for you all 9, 381 coughs – and I’m guessing on that. [Angela begins performing] Act one. Act natural. Be yourself. /Speaker stands alone at microphone pin neat, polite,/ Serenity slipping through finger twitchers./Speaker ready self opens mouth. Silence. / Mouth opens this time with resolve./ Silence snaps jaws shut. Speaker opens steady mouth. Finally./ [Exhaling] [Coughing] Regroup reapproach. [Exhaling] [Coughing] Speaker back steps, wheezes, a casual graveyard whistle./ Shuffles a soft shoe, sidles up microphone adjacent to take it by surprise. [Exhaling] [Coughing]\n \n\n00:31:19\tJason Camlot:\tAngela continued performing, despite the discomfort, from several other acts in The Nerves Centre, as we all listened intently to a combination of breathing, coughing, and rich descriptions that frame the staged readings within a vaudevillian kind of world. Angela’s book is very funny, and remarkable for its acceptance without judgement of so many failures in speech, for the sense of hope that each act brings, and for the deep compassion the book shows for anyone who may be struggling to find their voice, for anyone trying to speak and be heard. And here we were, sitting in our own isolated sets, listening to a performance of anxiety and disarticulation that was both deliberate and real, highly performative and absolutely involuntary, at the same time.\n00:32:11\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tI am going to stop there. Thank you everyone for listening. And, were it not for many, many coughing fits I would continue, but I think you get the idea [Laughs] of what this is like. Thank you.\n \n\n00:32:26\tJason Camlot:\tIn many ways, it was the most pandemicky performance imaginable. Painful, beautiful, absurd. It made perfect sense.\n \n\n00:32:34\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tAnd thank you so much for coming. I should tell everybody, Angela’s been telling us a little bit about living with COVID in the UK, which sounds pretty intense with Starbucks open and everything else open and lots of people catching it. And it’s one in the morning for you. So I thank you very much for joining us tonight.\n00:32:50\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tThank you. Thank you so much, everyone for listening to that.\n00:32:54\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tAnd if you wanna catch some more of that, I think The Nerves Center is coming out this winter at some point.\n00:32:58\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\n \n\nYeah. Thank you.\n00:33:01\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio Clip: Fastforwarding Tape Sound] Alright, let’s speed ahead a bit. Lots of shows happened between December 2020 and the special Words and Music Show – SpokenWeb Symposium edition held in May 2021. February 21st, 2021 for Black History Month, we reprised a screening of the Sala Rossa Black Writers Out Loud show, now with Roen Higgins’s performance restored so that all four sets could be viewed together.\n \n\n00:33:25\tAudio Recording, Roen Higgins, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\t[Roen Higgins performing] Ware shell shocked, numb, sick and tired./These are the symptoms of PTSD whether we march, kneel, or speak./ Our voices are unheard in the streets, /every living thing on this earth retreats or reacts or stands still until the threat passes./ So please stop asking our people who are paralyzed to walk with you./ Stop judging others for not speaking up when their vocal chords are shot from screaming,/ Crying for babies, they never birthed yet feel the contractions of these now household names./ I can’t even say all their names as there are too many to remember, but their faces are etched in my mind/ with their mothers cry looped over this never ending soundtrack./ We are forever in labour with pain that our children will never belong or feel accepted,/ that they are guilty and being groomed from preschool to prison./ Before they leave their house they’re reminded by their mamas/ Stand tall, smile, look straight so you won’t come off hostile./ Keep your hands where it can be seen. Move slowly. Never, never run./ Don’t hang out on the streets and keep your hoodie off./ Comply. Answer their questions and cordially and politely./ Whatever you do, just stay calm and keep the camera rolling. Thank you. [End performance]\n \n\n00:35:02\tAudio Recording, Roen Higgins, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\tThank you everyone. Thank you for this opportunity. It’s an amazing time to have a show in these times to be able to come together even virtually while they say we socially distance, we do not distance socially.\n \n\n00:35:13\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\tThank you. Ronan\n00:35:15\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Upbeat Accordion] Sunday March 21st the Words & Music Show is your online welcome to Spring. Tawhida Tanya Evanson is here with a new book. And catch poems, music, art and dance with: Emilie Zoey Baker (Australia), Raymond Jackson (New Orleans) , Marie-France Jacques (Montréal), Visual Art by Francis Caprani . Verse by Kelsey Nichole Brooks . Music by Ramela Arax Koumrouya.\n \n\n00:35:46\tVarious Speakers:\t[Collage of audio of March 2021, Words and Music Show]\n \n\n00:36:59\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2021:\tOkay. Thanks folks. Goodnight for now.\n00:37:01\tVarious Speakers:\tThank you very much Ian! Nice meeting you all. Yeah. Nice meeting you all. Likewise. See you next time. Cheers everyone. Thank you.\n00:37:06\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2021:\n \n\nBye everyone, thank you. We’re going to go off air now. [End Music: Upbeat Accordion]\n00:37:07\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Various Vocals and Musical Sounds] April 18th 2021. An absorbing evening featuring: verse by Sarah Wolfson , music by Geronimo Inutiq , art by Louise Belcourt, David Bateman as Dr. Sad , a new video by Marie-Josée Tremblay , words and music by Ian Ferrier, with a wealth of words, music, video and art, an online show to help us forget 8PM lockup (or is that lockdown?)\n00:37:41\tVarious Voices:\t[Collage of audio of audio from 18 April 2021 show] Should I start now? [Laugh] Yes, you are live! [Laugher] Okay. “They love to laugh together and drink and shop, especially when they were unhappy. She was much less happy than he was.” “In those days. We had a tool for taking the cords off beats. We grew everything. Then even our little toes. If our noses went missing, we replaced them with the most obliging webs.” “I love my grandfather. I hated my parents. He painted all the time. I hung around him.” [Guitar] “We’re just too many and we’re born too fast. Sarah and Will and James and Tina and Ian and John and Michael and Eric and Ty and Sarah, Beth, and Mary.” Bye. Take good care. Bye. Goodnight everyone.\n \n\n00:38:46\tJason Camlot:\tSo now we’re entering May 2021, and the entire Concordia SpokenWeb Team is deep into planning and delivering the annual SpokenWeb Symposium, which, for the second year in a row, was supposed to bring everyone to Montreal to share work, but which, again, had to take place online. The Symposium, with the theme “Listening, Sound, Agency” was a great success, with over 30 panels (so nearly 100 papers presented) by scholars and students from all over the world who were interested in exploring intersections between literary studies and sound studies. The Symposium was great, and then the Summer Sound Institute, filled with all kinds of workshops and research showcases, was also great. But, with all of that done, I was extremely excited to host a special edition of the Words and Music Show, where anyone from the Symposium, or from our research network, could share a poem, a story, a song, or a joke. We sent out a call trying to entice people to participate. And once we had a roster, I asked Ian to prepare one of his radio promo ads for the show.\n \n\n00:39:51\tIan Ferrier:\tOn Sunday May 23rd Wired on Words partners with SpokenWeb to present a special edition of the Words and Music show.\n \n\n00:39:56\tJason Camlot:\tIf this had been a live show, it would have taken place at the Casa Del Popolo, longtime home of the Words and Music Show. Instead, we were online again. Still, it was as close as we would come, that summer, to hanging out, joking around, being silly and creative, together.\n \n\n00:40:12\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah. We have a bunch of different performances from members of the SpokenWeb network. And this is really – it doesn’t replace the gathering and party that we would’ve had if we’d been able to all gather together in Montreal, but it’s meant to have the fun feel of that kind of gathering.\n \n\n00:40:32\tJason Camlot:\tPoet and Simon Fraser University PhD student Cole Mash, hosted it in a way that made it all feel, at times, like we really were at the Casa together.\n \n\n00:40:41\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m just turning my video off so I have a better connection and then kinda having a drink. But yeah! Welcome to the Words and Music show SpokenWeb edition. I personally have actually never seen this show but I’m really honoured and privileged to be able to host it and be a part of it. I hear it’s a pretty good show. We’ve got – we have about 10 or so lucky people who have signed up for tonight’s event. So can everyone please turn their cameras off? [Pause] Okay, great. Everyone turn their mics on. [Pause] Everyone say “Words and Music” all at the same time and see how that goes. [Various voices overlapping: “Words and Music”] All right. All right. That was pretty good actually. I got to hear quite a few people. That was nice. OK. Everyone turn their cameras back on, but make a weird face when you turn your camera back on. [Pause] [Laughter] All right. Very nice. Very nice. So now that I know you’re all listening…\n \n\n00:41:49\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Audio Clip: Jason Camlot Archival Performance] My own contribution to the show is to play a clip from the archive of me performing a song at a Words and Music show that took place nearly 20 years earlier.\n \n\n00:42:00\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo thanks so much Cole. And it’s great to be back on the pin screen. [End Audio Clip: Jason Camlot Archival Performance] And, it seemed appropriate really to –rather than to do something new since we’ve been spending so much time with Ian’s archive of shows– to dig into that and to play something that – play a performance that I did back in 2003. And I was thinking about this– and this is what happens when you listen back into an archive, especially if you find yourself in it. Even if you don’t, if you were at a show or whatever– but I’m thinking 2003, that means my son was probably around the same age as Cole’s son is now. I think of Deana Fong and I think of some of my colleagues and friends now who are starting families and that’s sort of where I was at in 2003, actually, my son was probably a year and a half and my daughter was just born probably about a month before this show. And I chose to play a song that I’ve just been singing in the backyard with my daughter no less than a couple weeks ago. So she’s 16 now and taught herself guitar during COVID and has been writing songs herself. And so we’re sharing our own compositions with each other. And so this is one that I taught her and that she’s sang along with. So it’s from the Words and Music show, April 27th, 2003.\n \n\n00:43:13\tJason Camlot:\tIt was fun to introduce this clip, set it up, and listen to it so many years later with new friends and students.\n \n\n00:43:19\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, 2003\tAnd we’re just gonna play one more song. I want to thank Ian for lending me his guitar. This song is called Derbyland, and Kenny’s gonna be playing arango, which is made of an Armadillo.\n00:43:45\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, 2003:\tA dead Armadillo. [Laugh].\n00:43:47\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, 2003:\tYeah. If you hear some screaming, that’s the Armadillo. [Start Music: Guitar]\n \n\n00:44:07\tJason Camlot:\t[Music Continues: Guitar] It was especially fun and moving to have my old friend and music collaborator tune into the show and to hear his response to a recording that he never knew existed. [End Music: Guitar].\n00:44:17\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, 2003:\tYou know, I’m trying to think back to that time and everything’s a blur, but –\n00:44:22\tJason Camlot:\tMusician, Kenny Smilovich\n00:44:24\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\t– I don’t remember, like how did that end up recorded? Was that sort of the plan or did it just happen that someone recorded it?\n00:44:34\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo Ian recorded pretty much every Words and Music Show almost since its inception.\n00:44:40\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\n \n\nWow. That’s amazing.\n00:44:41\tJason Camlot:\tThis was the longest online Words and Music Show of the pandemic period, by far.\n00:44:46\tVarious Voices:\t[Audio Collage of several performances from the May 2021 show.] [Start Music: Guitar] “When the artist takes matter and builds fence around it in the name of the line, or takes matter into their own hands and abstracts, what results is a manifestation of power in the sense of imposition and not in the sense of strength.” “This poem’s called ‘Asking the Spoon to Runaway Takes Courage: A spoons work is never done. They sit folded in the time waiting as we all do to be picked up.” I should have predicted the death of this city. I couldn’t predict it. Only there had been no such creepy blocks.” Pools and pavement in black ice, random stones steam, faintly. Lime water and liquorish light. Think how the black dust Beth made men dance.” “I have no words, officer lay my tongue. You stole each one in a scamper for escape. When he begged me when your men with the gavelbang voices hounded me. Yes.” “Using my full song to the wise intoxicating yarl and thrall alike. I know the rooms, the words of white. I know the words of flaming light. The words that still the sea at midnight.” [End Music: Guitar] [Start Music: Singing] “I see my from the west down to the east. Any day now. Any day…. [Fade Out Singing] [Start Music: Guitar and Singing] “All of my friends in a plastic, all around jumping train, track, silver effects, bang all back, sleep on a bench in a park on your birthday….” [Fade Out Singing]\n \n\n00:47:11\tJason Camlot:\tAnd yet even after two hours, we were happy to linger, chat, and debrief.\n00:47:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWell, I guess at this point we’ve been together for two hours. It’s gone really quickly and it’s been so enjoyable. I just want to thank, first of all, Cole and Ian for hosting tonight. And Ian, like I said earlier also for just lending us The Words and Music stage for this evening and really to everyone for taking the chance to share something tonight, it’s –I think as Mike put it – it’s a safe environment that we’re trying to create both in terms of sharing ideas, concepts, methods, in our research and our collaborative practice, but also our creativity. And this is just an extension of that. And, since we haven’t been able to join in person this year, it just felt like it would be great to have a space where we could just share some stuff and other parts of ourselves. And I think that really happened tonight. And I’m just so happy that it did.\n \n\n00:48:11\tJason Camlot:\tTo help make the signoff period feel less harsh and abrupt, we engaged in an exercise of imagining each other offline, after the show as a way of saying goodbye, but still keeping each other in mind.\n \n\n00:48:23\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI will say finally, when Katherine and I had a workshop recently, we were sort of trying to address the issue of like, well, where do people go after they disappear from Zoom? You could spend time together and then suddenly you’re in a shared space and then you’re no longer in the shared space. So maybe as a way to lessen the blow of departure I’m gonna suggest that we do the same thing again and ask you, what’s the next thing you’re gonna hear, or the next thing you’re gonna do after leaving us tonight? Katherine, you wanna share what you’re gonna hear next?\n00:48:58\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah, sure. I’m gonna be picking up my little cat, who’s been hanging out and we’re gonna have a little chat. And then, I’m gonna hear the creaking of the door. And I also just feel like putting on some music and continuing to just move and stretch. I feel like it really made me want –I said this after the last time,I was gonna go dance –but I feel like just like moving and stretching, just some music. That’s what I’m gonna do next. Yeah.\n00:49:27\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m gonna go see if my daughter wants to play guitar outside. [Laughs] How about you, Kenny? What’s the next sound you’re gonna hear?\n00:49:36\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’ll probably have a few bites of dinner and then head downstairs and see if I can remember the chords to “Derbyland” by Tarango.\n00:49:43\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs]. Awesome. That’d be great. Klara?\n00:49:48\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m definitely gonna get some ice cream, which means I’ll be opening the fridge and there will be a suction sound from the fridge. [Laughs].\n00:49:55\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs] Nick, what’s the next sound you’re gonna hear after you leave us?\n00:50:01\tAudio Recording, Nick Beauchesne,\nWords and Music, May 2021:\n\nWell my cat’s meowing and I have to keep grinding at my dissertation. So –\n00:50:05\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs] Some grinding, just grinding. [Laughs]\n00:50:08\tAudio Recording, Nick Beauchesne,\nWords and Music, May 2021:\n\n \n\n– not for too long. I’m gonna go do something fun after, but that’s when next,\n00:50:14\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHow about you Faith?\n00:50:15\tAudio Recording, Faith Paré, Words and Music, May 2021:\tProbably the sound of my roommate and I chatting. I’m probably gonna watch a movie tonight, so maybe some horror movie screams and we have some Indian food on the way. So like that kind of straw sound, you know, sucking up like the last bits of like mango lassi I’m very excited for that particular thing. Yeah.\n00:50:35\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tThat’s great. Great array of sounds. Ali, how about you? What’s the next sound you’re gonna hear?\n00:50:41\tAudio Recording, Ali Barillaro, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo probably similar to other people. I don’t know if you can see her, but my cat over there will probably wake up. So I’ll probably hear her – she’s right there. And probably my own excitement over going to eat some food. So sounds of excitement.\n00:50:57\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tFelicity?\n00:50:58\tAudio Recording, Felicity Tayler, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m gonna open the door to this room and walk down my very creepy hallway. And I missed somebody’s bedtime. So either I will hear silent breathing or I will hear a little voice that says “mama?”.\n00:51:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tJudee, how about you?\n00:51:19\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah. Without you all, it’ll just be undiluted fan noises in this apartment with some like thum of traffic. Just steady cars. And I’ll probably walk outside. So I’ll get some door creak and maybe even a cricket.\n00:51:36\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tAnd Cole?\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWell, there’s three unbathed children awaiting me, so there’s gonna be screaming most likely. And then, after that, I hope silence.\n00:51:48\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo it makes it a lot easier – not easy – but a lot easier to say goodbye to you all now. Thanks for a wonderful evening, everyone. And, we’ll see you soon at one of the events this week I hope. Take care, everyone.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\tThanks, Jason!\n00:52:01\tJason Camlot:\tThat particular show did feel as close to a live encounter over Zoom as I’ve had. The livest online event I’ve ever attended. Since we’re just about out of time, let me take you to the last Zoom conversation of what we thought, we hoped, [Start Music: Jay Alexander Brown singing “Beyond beyond”] might be the last online Words and Music Show of the pandemic period, September 19th, 2021. [End Music: Jay Alexander Brown singing “Beyond beyond”]. We thought that might be it, that we would never see each other again, in the flat, tiled, and often inaudible world of Zoom. We spoke to each other as if we were preparing to teleport into another dimension.\n00:52:47\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI’m so excited to imagine that we can start, collaborating, and joining together and seeing things in real life.\n00:52:57\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, September 2021:\tIt also makes one realize just what sort of community there has been created through the online shows. So I felt that through listening to John’s piece, that it actually – it would be different to hear that on the stage. And it’s very intimate that we are able to gather here to listen to it here tonight.\n00:53:16\tAudio Recording, Jay Alexander Brown, Words and Music, September 2021:\tAnd it feels like it’s maintained a sense of community and a sense of continuity throughout the pandemic to have these. It’s – in my opinion, it’s not the same as the vibe you have in a room full of people. But the fact that this show didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth and has kept us all tethered to the phenomenon called Montreal – cuz you know, barely leaving the house, especially last year when I was more paranoid about COVID – I could have been anywhere. Who even knows if you’re in Montreal.\n00:53:52\tAudio Recording, John Sweet, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI’m just – I’m concerned though – if we go back to doing like real live performances, what are you gonna do Jason? I’m concerned. [Laughs]\n00:54:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI only exist here in this square. I mean – I will still be here if ever you return 20, 30 years from now. You know, if you decide to come back, here I will be.\n00:54:15\tAudio Recording, John Sweet, Words and Music, September 2021:\tAnd you’ll look exactly the same.\n00:54:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\t[Laughs] Exactly. Yeah.\n00:54:18\tAudio Recording, Unknown Speaker, Words and Music, September 2021::\tJason isn’t real, John.\n00:54:21\tVarious Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:54:24\tAudio Recording, Jay Alexander Brown, Words and Music, September 2021:\tJason’s gonna show up at Cafe Resonance as a cardboard cut out.\n00:54:29\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs] That’s right. Katherine’s gonna be carrying me on a stick.\n00:54:31\tAudio Recording, Various Voices, Words and Music, October 2021:\tAudience chatter and background noise\n00:54:44\tJason Camlot:\tAfter having co-hosted the Words and Music show online for nearly two years, Ian invited me to perform at the first live show since March 2020 – a show that we thought would be a return to live events on a regular basis.\n \n\n00:54:56\tAudio Recording, Various Voices, Words and Music, October 2021:\tAudience chatter and background noise.\n00:55:10\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, October 2021:\tGood evening, everyone and welcome to our first live show in 18 months. Holy crap. [Audience Applause]. I mean, I look back at that whole time and it feels like a giant hallucination and I wonder where I was I and what was going on. And it’s so nice to see people in a room and to be able to present things for them and to actually jam with other musicians from time to time. All of this stuff is so great. So thank you so much for coming tonight. It’s really nice to have everybody here.\n \n\n00:55:42\tJason Camlot:\tI was quite anxious about participating in this show, not so much about giving a reading as about being in a room with lots of people. Anxious, but very excited as well. I had to arrive a bit late and so I sat in the back of the room for most of the first set. Then at intermission, I moved up to join some friends who were seated in the audience. [Start Music] It felt great to sit at a table and chat with people. I had a new book of poems that was about to come out. So I printed up some flyers that the press had given me and handed them out to people during intermission. Then I went up to the mic in front of people and read.\n \n\n00:56:17\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, October 2021:\t[Audience Chatter and Instrument Tuning Background Noise Throughout] Welcome to our fabulous second set. For this set we’re very, very lucky. When we started this project, the project had going online at the beginning of COVID. I was very lucky to have help from Jason Camlot who’s a fine poet and also one of the core people in a project called SpokenWeb, which is taking audio literature and making a databases up so that people can study it in 30 years and say, wow, those people were amazing, whatever they were. And he’s got a new book, which is just coming out called Vlarf. The reason you have those sheets on your table is – the books not quite out yet, but if you have one of these sheets, you get a big discount in the book, so you can get it later. Please welcome Jason Camlot. [Audience Applause].\n \n\n00:57:16\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, October 2021:\tThanks so much, Ian, thank you everyone. It’s so exciting to be with other people.\n00:57:22\tAudience Member:\tYes! [Clapping]\n00:57:25\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, October 2021:\tLet’s just give ourselves a hand for having made it through the last two years, and as Ian said, we’ve been doing the Words and Music Show on Zoom. I had a background of the Casa, always on my screen as I was hosting it from my basement. And it’s just a great feeling to be listening with people and to have the opportunity to read tonight. [Reading poetry] They keep well in winter and sometimes like jagged mounds, they appear frozen in the lake ice. /And then they suffocate in shallow pits, are digested with wood and transform into charcoal and muck./ My botanical book speaks of exogenous stems plunged into lead./ I don’t in the least want to know what that means. /I prefer to understand them as the grounds trembling scales, the soil thus sung in coral shiver./ [Applause]\n00:58:47\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio of Words and Music Show Audience Plays Underneath] In listening back to the audio of those two most recent live Words and Music Shows, the last shows of 2021. It is amazing to hear just how noisy they are with movement, chatter, tumult.\n00:59:18\tAudio Recording, Words and Music, October 2021:\n \n\n[Audience Chatter and Musicians Tuning Instruments]\n00:59:23\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio or Words and Music Show Audience Plays Underneath] This was the buzz we had been trying to emulate in awkward attempts that were comically artificial due to latency, inappropriate amplitude, and bad timing. Awkward too, because that “venue buzz” as Ian called it, isn’t just background noise. Not really. It is the sound of affect in action. [Audience Clip Swells] The sound of a kind of responsive choreography that captures what it feels like. Maybe even what it means to be together at an event where people get up on stage and share something they made just for you. [End of Audience Audio] When I interviewed Ian for this podcast during the final days of 2021, it was clear that we had no idea where the next Words and Music Show would happen – in person, online, we didn’t know.\n01:00:17\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tHopefully this latest iteration of COVID is as not as dangerous as the ones before, but it sure is virulent from the looks of it. So I feel kind of lost about that. I’ve just – I just think that – I mean the first lockdown, I don’t know how it was for you. I found I was in a bit of shock just cuz I didn’t realize how much of my life had been based on going from thinking of something to making something, to putting that thing out and seeing how it lived in the world to going back and making something else, you know? That was the core of my creative practice and all of a sudden that was gone and I –and until we did those live shows, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it. And it was like, oh yeah, we’re back on stage. And this feels so much better and it’s so much more present. It’s so much more focused. So, I’m gonna– I’m hoping that if we get stuck again, and I very much hope we don’t, but it looks like we probably will – that we can, that I can devise something more interesting to do with that time. Something that I enjoy doing as opposed to the feeling of being stuck indoors.\n01:01:27\tJason Camlot:\tWe talked about how the past two years –and now this recent return to something like a lockdown in Quebec with bars, pubs and restaurants closed to in-person patrons – has taken its toll on the venues that have supported the Words and Music show over the years. La Vitrola (the venue where the Epique Voices show of March 10th, 2020 had taken place) was long gone. The Casa del Popolo had closed its showroom in March, 2020 and tried to make a go it as a shop for a while.\n01:01:56\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tWell, it’s still kind of unfolding. At the moment, it sounds like the two partners in Casa and Sala who were partners themselves or breaking up and they’re running through all the troubles that involves at the same time as these venues that they ran together have basically closed down. Sala is still open, but I haven’t seen anything at Casa del Popolo since COVID happened. I hear the occasional rumour that there will be something in April, but I’m not, I’m not really sure. James Goddart is working there in the office now, so I occasionally ask him, but he doesn’t know either what’s gonna happen. And that would be tough because, for a lot of us in this neighbourhood, that was a place where we could always drop in and catch something or say hello to a friend or meet for coffee or for food or whatever. We did our Mile End Poets Festival – we did at least one or two nights there for almost 10 years too. So I really miss the place.\n01:02:55\tJason Camlot:\tAnd now in the first days of 2022, we have learned that the Ressonance Café, the venue that Ian turned to for the most recent live shows, is shutting down too. The Sala has managed to stay afloat in part through the kind of live streaming and recording sessions that we did for the Black Writers Out Loud show. Just a couple of days ago, CBC reporter, Fenn Mayes published a profile piece on venue covering the long history of the place and interviewing the staff and owners about what it means to them and how they’ve managed to keep going. It makes me a little anxious to read a story like this, which might just as easily be an obituary as a feel good profile piece under the current ongoing circumstances. But the article ends on a positive of note of sorts. The final line being quote, if these walls could talk, they’d sing close quote. I mean, at least didn’t report that the Sala was closing. Even if we could do the next show in person, where would that be? Ian doesn’t know, but not knowing what’s coming next, as far as pandemic circumstances are concerned, does not create even the slightest shiver of uncertainty in Ian about the Words and Music Show.\n01:04:06\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tI think, well, let’s go around the world and find [Unknown Name] from France or something, or track down some people we really like to hear and would normally not be able to bring, I think that’s one quality of it. And another quality is on the shows online. I think it would be worthwhile getting people talking, among, to each other, at the beginning of the show or at the end or something like that, or intermission just to keep part of that spirit alive. Cuz I just notice people actually like to be with each other, and they like to talk and flirt and get huffy or nod or go through all the kinds of experiences they can go through with both with people they know and the joy of total strangers, not knowing who that person is and what they’re gonna bring. [Start Music: Guitar Instrumental, Ian Ferrier, “Rail Music”]\n01:05:00\tJason Camlot:\tThere is a stubbornness of imagination. One might say a resilience of imagination to use a popular COVID period word that characterizes our continued willingness and will to keep creating, gathering, and sharing sounds and stories. It’s not so much that the Words and Music Shows must go on. It’s just a given. The show goes on.\n01:05:32\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, “Rail Music”:\t[Singing] You wake up, find yourself on a train, no memory of how you got on. No knowledge of where you’re going…[Music Instrumental Fades].\n01:06:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb Director Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. A special thanks to Ian Ferrier, and all of the hosts and organizers, artists, performers, and audience members who have engaged in online literary events over the past two years, when we have been unable to gather in person. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The Spokenweb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. And if you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9620","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E6, Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium, 7 March 2022, Aubin and Ricci"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-sound-agency-a-retrospective-listening-to-the-2021-spokenweb-symposium/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Mathieu Aubin","Stéphanie Ricci","Stéphanie Ricci"],"creator_names_search":["Mathieu Aubin","Stéphanie Ricci","Stéphanie Ricci"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stéphanie Ricci\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stéphanie Ricci\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/907a6097-2e63-4d18-91c3-879fad904e7e/audio/2c7d91e4-3dcd-4c88-bfef-e21e495d7ffd/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e6-listeningsoundagency.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:51:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"49,736,351 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e6-listeningsoundagency\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-sound-agency-a-retrospective-listening-to-the-2021-spokenweb-symposium/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-03-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\" Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":[" Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["This is a mixed format episode presenting SpokenWeb members Mathieu Aubin and Stéphanie Ricci’s critical commentary after taking part in the organization of and attending the Listening, Sound, Agency Symposium. Bridging techniques from journalism and oral history, this episode includes sounds from the conference, interviews, and critically reflective discussions between Mathieu and Stéphanie. This episode was produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stéphanie Ricci, with audio engineering by Scott Girouard.\n\nThis episode explores the Symposium from the perspective of a first-time conference attendee coupled with a veteran attendee; these join the voices of multiple conference participants. Mathieu and Stéphanie focus on the process of organizing, holding, and listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium, and they discuss its themes of listening, sound, and agency as they emerge through the presentations and discussions. \nThe episode begins with the theme of listening ethically and intentionally, before diving into a discussion of issues surrounding sound politics. It concludes with the topic of agency in relation to the amplification of sound as a potential means of empowerment. \n\nA special thanks to the 2021 Listening, Sound, Agency organizing committee, especially Jason Camlot, Klara DuPLessis, Deanna Fong, Katherine McLeod, Angus Tarnawsky, and Salena Wiener, whose voices are featured at the beginning of the episode.\n\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Audio Credits:\\n\\nKvelden Trapp from Blue Dot Sessions:\\nhttps://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/94421\\n\\nCitations:\\n\\nBergé, Carole. 1964. The Vancouver Report. FU Press.\\n\\nBrittingham Furlonge, Nicole. May 19, 2021. “‘New Ways to Make Us Listen’: Exploring the Possibilities for Sonic Pedagogy.” \\n\\nDu Plessis, Klara. May 21, 2021. “From Poetry Reading to Performance Art: Agency of Deep Curation Practice.” \\n\\nMcLeod, Dayna. May 18, 2021. “Queerly Circulating Sound and Affect in Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall. \\n\\nRobinson, Dylan. May 19, 2021. “Giving/Taking Notice.” \\n\\nSun Eidsheim, Nina. May 20, 2021. “Re-w\\nriting Algorithms for Just Recognition: From Digital Aural Redlining to Accent Activism.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549717254144,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.2450583},{"id":"9626","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E9, Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity, 6 June 2022, McLeod and Cubbon"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Kelly Cubbon"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Kelly Cubbon"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kelly Cubbon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/bb5674c6-4e0b-4112-ba6a-59dd5d5d384e/audio/a5e862c2-6eaf-4e05-9fde-70a956dedb18/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e9-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:04:22\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,798,653 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e9-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-06-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"‘About Us’, Queer ASL\\n\\nAIM Lab: an experimental research hub concerned with disability, access, and affordances, based at Concordia University.\\n\\nAlt Text Poetry Project by Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat. Plus, the Alt Text work at the Banff Centre for the Arts: Distinct Aggregations.\\n\\nAmanda Monthei’s Life with Fire podcast\\n\\nBara Hladik – poet. artist. Facilitator.\\n\\nPlace an order for Bára’s first book New Infinity published June 2022.\\nListen to Bára’s ambient electronic album Cosmosis here on Bandcamp.\\nJoin Bára for Dreamspells (@dream_spells), a collaborative project with Malek Robbana (@melekyamalek) with a monthly new moon dreamspells event\\nregistration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-ygqTouHtaiP7HfwXvhxLi-GXljKu8o\\nBodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT)\\n\\nCarmen Papalia, An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts\\n\\nDaniel Britton on typeface design\\n\\nDisability Art is the Last Avante Garde with Sean Lee, Secret Feminist Agenda S4E22\\n\\nSoundBox Signals podcast (UBCO)\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Transcription Style Guide\\n\\nTalila A. Lewis, “Working Definition of Ableism January 2022 Update” \\n\\n‘Terminology’, Critical Disability Studies Collective, University of Minnesota\\n\\n“The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic” produced by Jason Camlot for The SpokenWeb Podcast\\n\\n“The Voice That is the Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough” produced by Katherine McLeod for ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast, 03:10.\\n\\nTranscription Tools\\n\\nDescript (audio and video editing through text, paid), https://www.descript.com/\\n\\nExpress Scribe (speech to text, free), https://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html\\n\\nOtter AI (speech to text and real-time transcription, paid), https://otter.ai/\\n\\nTEMI (speech to text transcription, paid), https://www.temi.com/\\n\\nMusic Credits\\n\\n“Wavicles” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Erudition” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Atmosphere” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Scarlett Overpass” by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions\\nCloud Cave by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions\\nPacific Time by Glass Obelisk via Blue Dot Sessions\\nSound Effects\\n\\n“campfire in the woods” by craftcrest, ​​https://freesound.org/people/craftcrest/sounds/213804/\\n\\n“Page turn over, Paper turn over page turning” by flag2, https://freesound.org/people/flag2/sounds/63318/\\n\\n“Wall clock ticking” by straget, https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/405423/\\n\\n“Mechanical Keyboard Typing” by GeorgeHopkins https://freesound.org/people/GeorgeHopkins/sounds/537244/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549723545600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Transcriptions of podcasts provide visual renderings of audio that increase accessibility. But what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast, specifically a podcast about literary audio? In this episode, Katherine McLeod of ShortCuts and Kelly Cubbon, transcriber of The SpokenWeb Podcast, explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. In fact, their episode uncovers just how much transcription is collaboration and conversation.\n\nPart One starts with reflections from Katherine and Kelly about how they came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced their thinking throughout the process of making this episode, such as accessibility and ableism. This section also features an interview with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts.\n\nPart Two consists of an interview with Judith Burr, the Season 3 SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, about generative challenges that have come up during collaboration on podcast transcription for the podcast and how decision making has evolved over time.\n\nAnd Part Three is an interview with Bára Hladík, a poet, writer, and multimedia artist, about  the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics. Here, Bára discusses the healing possibilities of sound and the creative potential of transcripts.\n\n \n\n00:00:19\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n00:00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How do we make sound accessible across different forms of media? How do we read and interpret sound? What can it look like? At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we create and release transcripts for every episode. These are written versions of the audio we produce that are publicly available on the SpokenWeb website. But why do we create transcripts —and what is involved in transcribing a podcast about literary audio that often includes archival recordings and experimental audio performances? This episode is produced by Katherine McLeod (ShortCuts producer and host) and Kelly Cubbon (SpokenWeb Podcast transcriber). Together they explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. They also reflect on transcription as an accessibility practice, scholarly practice, and creative practice. As the producers themselves share, podcasting is a space where we encounter ideas—where we find opportunities to contribute to dialogue and engage in ongoing conversations and creative practices. And so an episode of a podcast by producers who are part of the podcasting production team is, in so many ways, the perfect space to investigate the how and why of transcripts. Our team has often asked: what kinds of editorial choices need to be made when making transcripts for a podcast about literary sound? And how does ethical listening inform these decisions? In conversation with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University; Judith Burr, the Season Two SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and supervising producer; and Bára Hladik, multimedia artist and disability advocate, Katherine and Kelly spend this episode thinking through transcription—and how transcription itself is a way to “think through” sound and be transparent about accessibility goals in podcast production. And so whether you’re listening to the audio of this episode, reading the accompanying transcription, or both we invite you to “think through” transcription with us—here are Katherine McLeod and Kelly Cubbon with Episode 9 of the third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity.” [Musical Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:03:18\tKelly Cubbon:\t[Start Music: Flowing Electronic Instrumental] Transcript. What is a transcript?\n \n\n00:03:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you are reading the words of this podcast episode, you are reading a transcript of it.\n \n\n00:03:28\tKelly Cubbon:\tTo transcribe. To create a visual written version of something originally presented in another medium.\n \n\n00:03:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tTrans: across. Scribe: to write. Writing across\n \n\n00:03:40\tKelly Cubbon:\tTranscription, a writing across that creates new points of access.\n \n\n00:03:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt has come to mean a written copy, but really it is a creative process along with being a form of recording.\n \n\n00:03:56\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI love transcription because it is part of the making and it creates it into a new medium, so then it becomes, it almost becomes a new piece or version.\n \n\n00:04:08\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\t[…] and then to say, what does it mean to have a written version of this? And I was absolutely co-learning with Kelly as we developed best practices around some of these hard points.\n \n\n00:04:22\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\t[…] and maybe with how folks use transcriptions, there’s traces and evidence of how reading is inherently collaborative, be that audio reading or visual reading, tactile reading. And sometimes we take that for granted when we centre visual modes of reading. When we then make more inclusive sensory receptions, then there’s different ways of reading that trace of collaboration.\n \n\n00:04:54\tKelly Cubbon:\tHi. I’m Kelly Cubbon. I’m a Master of Publishing student at Simon Fraser University and a Research Assistant for the SpokenWeb Project. I’ve been transcribing the SpokenWeb Podcast since Season 2 and working behind the scenes of the podcast with our team to think through the possibilities and responsibilities of transcription.\n \n\n00:05:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd I’m Katherine McLeod. You may recognize my voice from ShortCuts, or other past episodes, and I work with Kelly monthly on the transcripts for that audio. Making this episode together has given us the chance to really reflect on this process, and to ask ourselves: what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast about literary audio?\n \n\n00:05:35\tKelly Cubbon:\tPart One of this episode starts with reflections from me and Katherine about how we came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced our thinking throughout the process of making this episode. We will talk about what role transcription plays within podcast production and within podcast studies. This section features some of our conversation with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts. In Part Two we chat with Judith Burr, the outgoing SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer, about generative challenges that have come up during our collaboration on podcast transcription for this podcast and how transcription within this podcast has evolved. And in Part Three we’ll join Bára Hladík – a poet, writer, and multimedia artist – to have a conversation about the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics.\n \n\n00:06:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tThanks for joining us on this journey into the sounds of transcription. Let’s get started! [End Music: Flowing Electronic Instrumental].\n \n\n00:06:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tTranscription increases accessibility. And increased accessibility is the first and foremost reason to transcribe a media format like a podcast episode.\n \n\n00:06:43\tKelly Cubbon:\tTo grasp the work of accessibility, it is important to understand the systems and barriers that make the world inaccessible. Abolitionist community lawyer and social justice consultant TL Lewis defines ableism as: [Quote] “A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism, and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person’s appearance and/or their ability to satisfactory [re]produce, excel and ‘behave.’ You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.” [Unquote]. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] Assumptions about how people engage with media information and stories or expectations that there is only one right way to do so places restrictions on audiences, communities, and creative possibilities, and also excludes the vital contributions of people with diverse and changing access needs. At face value, podcasts are an auditory medium. But there are many reasons why someone may find podcast transcripts useful or vital to engaging in the world of podcasting, a now ubiquitous source of media and education. As podcast creators, we should always be asking ourselves: what space are we trying to create? Who is it for? Transcripts make podcasts more accessible for: – Deaf and Hard of Hearing people, – Neurodivergent people, such as those with dyslexia, autism, ADHD, and more, – People with disabilities and illnesses. Transcripts are also useful for people with different learning styles. Working online, in hybrid or virtual settings during the pandemic has heightened some of our attention to how access needs at work and school can shift and change. Two quotes related to access we’ve come across that we’d like you to keep in mind as you listen or read along to this episode are: Access is [Quote] “the power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something… the relationship between the disability bodymind and the environment. [Unquote] – Historian Bess Williams\n \n\n00:08:56\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs Carmen Papalia states at the opening of “An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts”: [Quote] “Let’s try thinking of accessibility as a creative, long-term process. It’s not just about the built environment, but about ideas of agency and power” [unquote]\n \n\n00:09:17\tKelly Cubbon:\tWhen I began transcribing for SpokenWeb a key accessibility goal was working towards the simultaneous release of transcripts with the audio for each episode. Improving accessibility is an ongoing effort, but this is something we are now able to do on a regular basis. Part of my motivation for working on this podcast episode about transcription with Katherine has been to document some of our team’s learnings about transcription best practices, workflow, and decision making as a way to share our learning, as well as be accountable to our communities. When we release this episode, we will also be sharing our transcription style guide. [See show notes for details.] This is a living document that we regularly add to. I inherited it from Natasha Tar, another SFU student who was working on transcription. The style guide supports consistent formatting, but it is also a place where we provide context for collective decisions we’ve made when encountering common transcription challenges – we’ll touch on this more when we chat about collaboration with Judee.\n \n\n00:10:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tOur work on this podcast exists within the larger research activities of SpokenWeb. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] Within SpokenWeb, there are so many examples of transcription taking place, such as: student researchers listening to recordings of literary events are often transcribing as they listen [Sound Effect: Typing] or checking transcriptions while listening — timestamping or describing the extra-poetic speech [Sound Effect: Page Turning] — all of which are forms of creating a written record of an audio object. Transcription of oral history interviews is another example. Or artists transcribing, notating and scoring. Then, stepping back into the world of the podcast, producers transcribe their audio and script their voice overs. In making this episode, we ourselves transcribed our interviews, wrote a script, and now are creating an audio file which we will be transcribing again in order to post it on the website with the launch of this episode. For myself, having published and presented work on poetry scores for overlapping voices, I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between performance and transcription. That approach, not to mention all of the new technologies out there for transcription, will only be touched upon in this episode, but we hope that future episodes might dive into all of these sounds of transcription. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] In this episode, Kelly and I focus on transcription as collaboration, conversation, and as an unfinished process.\n \n\n00:11:58\tKelly Cubbon:\tAnd that approach lets us focus on the format of the podcast itself, how it reaches its audiences and its potential to reach across modes of sensory engagement.\n \n\n00:12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tPodcast listening can be podcast reading. And what does that reading experience feel like? That is the question that Kelly and I wanted to talk about and we decided to do a call out on social media to hear from regular users of podcast transcripts. By the way, if you would like to share your story of how you use podcast transcripts, check the show notes for how to get in touch. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental]\n \n\n00:12:35\tKelly Cubbon:\tDr. Maya Ray Oppenheimer uses transcripts in her personal creative and educational practices. She responded to our call on social media and we were grateful to have a virtual chat.\n \n\n00:12:47\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Door Bell] My name is Maya Rae Oppenheimer, and I’m from treaty one territory, Middlechurch, Manitoba, which is near Winnipeg. And I’ve moved around since leaving Winnipeg, but I’m now living and working in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal and am an assistant professor in the department of Studio Arts with a cross appointment to Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts. And perhaps, an additional item of introducing myself is that I identify as disabled. I have several diagnosed neurodivergencies. So, one of my neurodivergencies is dyslexia. And for those who don’t know about dyslexia, it’s often described as a learning difficulty, but it’s, you know, that takes us to a social model of disability where, you know, it’s, it’s a learning difficulty because dyslexic folks have different learning tendencies. So for some that might mean that letters move on the page, words hop and jump and skip around. One thing that happens to me is I’ll often conceive of a word, but I’ll say a different one. So you can imagine in someone who works as an academic and had to go through the rigours of getting a PhD, that’s really presented some emotional and intellectual and physical challenges. And over the years, as I was trying to figure out manners and modes of consuming information and engaging with language, I found that listening to written texts was really, really helpful. And also just listening constantly to the radio, to podcasts, to soak up intonation, to soak up emphasis on language and to get a sense of the effect behind written words when I’m reading, because that’s also something that can sometimes happen with dyslexic folks is missing the ordering of language on the page to infer emphasis. So poetry can also be a wild experience! [Laughs] So in my writing practice and reading practice, I find listening as well as reading simultaneously very, very interesting because what will sometimes happen and say, for example, here, moving to a podcasting example, if I’m listening to an episode and reading the transcript at the same time, I won’t always read the word that’s being vocalized at the same time, or with the same impression. So it opens up this kind of textured moment of language, what you might describe as like a third text or maybe even elision. But I started using the word errant, which I kind of like, because errant is sort of like this wandering meaning, but it’s also very close to the word errata, but it’s not wrong. It’s just wandering in meaning. So I refer to this as my errant reading practice. As one does accruing notes I thought, well, what else can I do with this aside from considering it as something that’s been consumed. Can I analyze my own weird habit here? And then I started writing using the marginalia as text for writing my own thing. So I guess what I’m trying to say is like the errant reading of things sort of became like a transcript for writing a responsive text.\n \n\n00:16:28\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tWhat does an effective transcript look like to you? And like what would be kind of red flags for a misleading or frustrating or ineffective or unworkable transcript?\n00:16:41\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tWell, I suppose if I had to emphasize some of the qualities that can be a bit alienating are aloof transcripts [Laughs] or rigid transcripts. But very quickly by aloof, I mean, you know, if you have to search out where the transcript lives with an audio documentation. Is it even available? Do you have to ask if it’s available, do you have to get special permission if it’s available? And I feel like that’s maybe linked to the rigidity of transcripting or transcription [Laughs], which is, I think, a concern from content creators that people will copy and paste intellectual content. But what I think is an inclusive standpoint on that from a social model of disability is if you are welcoming more people into your content, then that’s the way to go. So the rigidity: I see that coming in terms of transcripts being downloaded sometimes not entirely. So maybe only the first five to 10 minutes or the beginning 30% of the content is transcribed in this weird translation of printed word publishing copyright at 30% to audio transcriptions. I also find PDFs sometimes difficult because again, everything’s locked in unless you have particular software access. I also wish that there were more open access audio to text and text to audio softwares. One that I use and recommend to students a lot, perhaps you use is Otter AI, which has a certain amount of free use. But then a lot of other apps and services are under a price point. And I think as soon as software that is meant to be inclusive is also barred by a price bracket, then that’s a problem. So I guess, you know, when I reflect on my answer to that, the rigidity relates a lot to capitalism [Laughs] and fear of misuse of content. And that’s a trouble.\n \n\n00:19:06\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah. When you were sharing, um, the kind of aloof versus rigid, that kind of was exciting to me to hear that those, that framing, because I feel like that’s a useful framing to have in mind to almost even add to a style guide that we kind of pass on to other people in a team of like, kind of almost like a, a check-in point of you know. But I was also thinking, I think a lot about like, how do we make our process transparent to others? Because, you know, a style guide can be kind of technical things like we remove and ums and uhs so that the transcript is more readable for people, in these cases, but maybe having a style guide, visible for people who use transcripts to say, you know, that’s actually not something we like, or that’s something that we would like you to include this instead. And making that almost more open access in terms of showing that our decisions are, for us to have some sort of standardization, but they need to be flexible to meet people’s needs and evolve, to meet people’s needs as well.\n \n\n00:20:09\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah. And I think what you’re bringing up Kelly is an interesting aspect of archiving and transcripts because transcripts is such a user interface, and often there’s perhaps a flow from the cultural producer/host to the user, but then that user is making a layer of interpretation and meaning. And that’s why I think having a workable document is such a hospitable mode of transcription. And I mean, I have, I take that almost to an extreme [Laughs], I realize where in, I’m not only marking the, but I do have to move things around because of my associative way of drawing, meaning and dyslexia, and really needs that mobility on the page that then does sometimes make a collaborative transcript. And I think that’s a really important piece in a conversation like this for accessibility, and maybe with how folks use transcriptions, there’s traces and evidence of how reading is inherently collaborative, be that audio reading or visual reading, tactile reading. [Start Music: Upbeat Electronic Instrumental] And sometimes we take that for granted when we center visual modes of reading, when we then make more inclusive sensory receptions, then there’s different ways of reading that trace of collaboration.\n \n\n00:21:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ll hear from Maya again at the end of the episode. But, for now, after thinking about transcripts in the contexts of broader communities, we’d like to invite you into our community of the SpokenWeb Podcast, and to hear from Judee Burr, supervising producer and project manager of the SpokenWeb Podcast about transcription as collaboration.\n \n\n00:22:03\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI’m Judee Burr. I use she/her pronouns. I am here on Syilx Okanagan land, and what is often now called Kelowna in BC where I’m a master’s student at UBC Okanagan. I’m in the interdisciplinary graduate studies program in the digital arts and humanities theme. For my thesis podcast, I’m working on an academic podcast about wildfire and living with fire in the Okanagan Valley where I am right now. And I’m also the supervising producer and project manager of the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is how I know you guys and how we’ve all been thinking about transcription together.\n \n\n00:22:44\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThank you Judee and thank you for joining us this afternoon to talk about transcription. How did you start to work with sound?\n \n\n00:22:53\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI took a class at the Podcast Garage in Boston, Massachusetts. It was podcasting that got me really interested in doing audio work and it was The Heart is the podcast that sucked me in [End Music: Electronic Instrumental] and spoke to my queer soul and that made me want to think about what heartfelt storytelling and audio storytelling could do for environmental stories. I had been doing a lot of report writing and research that took on this tone that I felt is dry on a topic that actually feels so deeply heartbreaking and hard, and really difficult to know how to communicate about in a way it’s like move, going to move people.\n \n\n00:23:42\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThanks for sharing that. It’s always fascinating to hear about your work and what you’re thinking about kind of emotion and connecting people to stories, just really spoke to me because I’ve been thinking about the emotional experience of transcribing, particularly around the most recent episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast. Jason did an episode on reflecting on pandemic events and experiences and it was incredibly overwhelming to be sitting in my apartment by myself, for the purposes of my job transcribing something, but being really affected by the project itself [Start Music: Piano Instrumental] and the intentions around the project, as well as these kind of clips of people, banding together like we all have during this difficult to time to create community and a sense of continuity with what they’ve been doing. So, I just wanted to mention that because I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently.\n \n\n00:24:33\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI feel like every time I get a first draft as the supervising producer to just listen to and think about ways to give feedback and react to, I am so moved. Even though the episodes are so different from each other, they each reflect this really heartfelt engagement with whatever our producers are working on. And yeah, I feel a similar way when I’m reviewing a first draft as it sounds like you feel when you’re listening to it and transcribing it, Kelly. [End Music: Piano Instrumental]\n \n\n00:25:00\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYes, definitely. I think that kind of leads into our first question quite nicely. Can you tell us a little bit about your dual role as the SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, are these kind of different hats you put on at different times or is it kind of a hybrid role?\n \n\n00:25:17\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think it’s all smooshed together [Laughter] in the experience. So I’m the main touch point for the episode producers– we tend to have different producers every month that come to me with questions that I can then answer or reflect on with the task force and work with producers to make sure they feel supported. So, I’ll give producers feedback on a first audio draft, thenI’ll work with Hannah to script an introduction that we feel is appropriate for introducing the episode in the context of the overall podcast and project. Then, when I get that recorded introduction and final draft of the episode I mix and master it and then send it to you, Kelly for a transcription. Working with you and the producers to make any edits to that, doing the work of just putting all of the content, including the transcript and the audio on our website and on our simplecast tool that we used to release it onto all these podcasting platforms and organizing a listening party, where then as a larger community of SpokenWeb people and fans, we can listen to the episodes together and talk about them.\n \n\n00:26:32\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tIt makes me think too about the amount of listening you would have to be doing in that role. And in my work with you, especially on ShortCuts, I’ve always been really struck by how you’re such an attentive listener to the audio. In listening to one piece, you’re really able to pull out the overarching threads. Kelly, I was interested, for you, in hearing Judee, describe the workflow, what, from your perspective, what does it feel like on your side?\n \n\n00:27:01\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think for me the first few months of working on transcription for this particular type of podcast as an academic podcast with lots of archival material and experimental audio kind of – audio collage, different things like that was a real steep learning curve. I’ve done transcription of interviews where there might be one or two voices, maybe three voices max but trying to figure out how to use an existing style guide – which was an excellent tool, provided by the team, that had done this before – but trying to apply that to lots of different I guess use cases or scenarios that needed me to make some decisions. Chatting with Judy was very instrumental –just reframing transcription problems as kind of points of inquiry or kind of a jumping off point for our conversation of me asking Judy, “oh, does the producer maybe have any notes about the archival clip that they used? Was that something that re-occurred throughout that they were using as a theme, or was that a different track?” Things like music cues or overlapping audio or things like that, without the context myself, I could go down a rabbit hole of trying to listen 20 times to see if maybe there was a hidden thing I hadn’t heard, where in fact it was, there was often context from the people with the expertise around the episode, or the kind of academic expertise about certain archives or certain events in communities that was kind of instrumental for providing the context clues for a reader of a transcript. So it became not just technical information, but also information that would make the transcription more beneficial to people down the line for understanding what they were listening to.\n \n\n00:28:57\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAs you were talking there, I was struck by how, in the case of this podcast, because of using so many archival audio clips, there is this question around how much information to include as to where the sound is from, or what is the sound in relation to the archives, in addition to just representing the sound in a visual format for a reader. The SpokenWeb Podcast in its sort of remixing of archival sounds raises these questions for transcription, because, again, in representing the sound is when also representing the source of the sound.\n \n\n00:29:36\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, it’s so challenging with so many of our podcast episodes to think about translating it from its audio form that we produce it to be this audio product. And then to say, what does it mean to have a written version of this? And I think I was absolutely co-learning with Kelly, like, as we like went through some of these tough, like, what do we do for this part or this part? Yeah, we really were doing some co-learning there and trying to figure out: how do we develop best practices around some of these hard points?\n \n\n00:30:14\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, and also realizing too that a transcript of say a SpokenWeb Podcast episode, that there could almost be, there could almost be multiple transcripts of it. That brings me to […] something that I was also struck by in the summer workshop. In hearing people’s responses to some of the examples, it was really interesting to hear […] different ways of approaching transcription.\n \n\n00:30:37\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think the two key examples that I used in the July workshop — and the workshop was kind of to take a peek behind the scenes of the decision making and the people involved in transcription and just say, we’re actively learning this and what our kind of primary motivations are, are first and foremost accessibility. And that, that is kind of a necessarily incomplete and ongoing project. And so it is never fixed [Laughs] and we’re kind of always learning ways to improve and be receptive to other people’s tools and resources and perspectives. But I think the two examples that I chose for that workshop, which were really illuminating and kind of spurred quite a lot of conversation, one involved an experimental sound and musical performance that was quite lengthy. [Archival Audio Clip: the Four Horsemen performing “Mayakovsky”: Several Voices Chanting] I believe it’s the Four Horsemen that the clip was from and we had people in the Zoom chat doing their own transcription and seeing what came of it. And, one person might have in square brackets: “a performance happens and there’s various voices.” Another person might do a paragraph long description of the different types of overlap of these voices. And I kind of just spurred that conversation that you were mentioning Katherine of writing something verbatim versus giving a context clue about something that happens and not overly worrying with the details. And I think for me that was illuminating of trying to balance what would be the most useful to someone reading a script. And I think, by and large, having a condensed description of something to represent a performance has been I think more useful than spending ages to interpret something that people are going to interpret in lots of different ways, and we can’t capture exactly what that sounded like for someone on a transcript.\n \n\n00:32:43\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. I also appreciate that point about the interpretations of each listener or reader. In this case, we use different words. We have different like embodied experiences of what the sound is.\n \n\n00:32:56\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tDefinitely. And things kind of like – do we call this the name of the musical file or what it sounds like? When does it become an interlude, when does it fade into the background? And sometimes that feels really significant to the listening experience, but also I’ve definitely looked back on transcriptions and thought this is – I’m possibly interrupting the reading experience of that conversation or that, archival clip or moment with too many instances of trying to be very faithful to the music coming in and out of things. So I think over time, I’ve learned to be a bit more decisive about where it would be useful to frame things like that and still indicate that there’s music happening without being overly descriptive of it.\n \n\n00:33:46\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAre some of those interruptions actually good in a podcast transcript? I’m still not sure about this. Because when a magazine or something publishes an interview with someone that’s a publication that’s meant for print, it’s never existed to be published as an audio work necessarily. But for a podcast transcript, we’re claiming to be facilitating this written version of the episode. And so I still wonder… I think it’s great to have a ranking of priorities in that and our conversations that lead us to accessibility as the main thing that we really wanna get right in our transcripts feels really good because then we can have a lot more interesting questions while still remaining faithful to the things that feel like a big priority. But, as we do this work, there have been so many interesting questions that have come up.\n \n\n00:34:46\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tEspecially for overlapping sounds. It sounds like with the music too, again, thinking of if it’s, if the music is there [Start Music: Electronic Instrumental] but it’s not sort of interfering with the experience of hearing the conversation then is it worth mentioning, but it’s also it’s there as a layer and if it’s sort of continuing it’s hard to indicate that something is sort of constant cause again, in print it’s like you can mention it, but then how to, you almost want visually for it to be a sort of painted, like an ocean underneath the words [Laughs]…\n \n\n00:35:19\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. Maybe we should have a graphic novel for each episode, instead of a transcript. Like a painting. The sound can be a painting — the sound could be like a portrait behind that thing. That’ll be easy for you to do right, Kelly, and our standard timeline. [Laughter] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n \n\n00:35:39\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThe overlapping sound is one thing, but I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of like slightly different context to indicate.\n \n\n00:36:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn a recent ShortCuts episode, my conversation with Kaie Kellough included overlapping voices and overlapping contexts. Here’s Kellough performing and then listening back to his own voice and to the context of those recordings.\n \n\n00:36:31\tKaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5, February 2022:\tSo, eventually the voice would start to like – it would sound like tape delay is nowhere. [Distorted Tape, Recording of Kaie reciting poetry: “This Prairie, this periphery is intoxicated…” ] You asked me what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it. And um, it’s, it’s strange. It’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself.\n \n\n00:36:50\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. That’s, it brings up a question I have in just good storytelling in general in audio. And I think about this with every podcast episode, how much do we need to say upfront about what the listener should expect to hear? And I think this is what you’re saying about transcripts. Is there something we should say upfront about what the reader should expect to read that makes it easier? But then also remembering how sometimes in some of these episodes it works, somehow it works not having that information up front and we’re really brought along with the story that the episode is telling…\n \n\n00:37:36\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tDefinitely, and I think maybe after wrestling for a few episodes with the music question or the overlapping voices question it was important to me to capture that in the style guide and also explain how it – the decision was made and how it relates to the mission of the podcast and the mission of accessibility, as you mentioned, so that, when that Google doc is shared with somebody else, they’re also learning about our decision making and about the podcast, not just how do I kind of fix this one thing in this one transcript. So I think that’s been really valuable to me in these, this kind of transition from season two to season three, kind of coming together to figure out what were the sticking points or the circular conversations we were having in Google docs and various notes and emails and stuff and how do we reflect those so that we can be a bit more confident about how we’re gonna approach those instances when they come up later and having that kind of option in our back pocket.\n \n\n00:38:41\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThat also makes me just think about in taking on any of these roles with the podcast, especially as graduate students, where we’re planning to have certain amounts of turnover in these roles, you’ve put so much thoughtfulness into that guide, that transcription guide that you’ll be able to pass onto a new person, but also in thinking about transitions for the producer role, I’ve been reflecting on that there was just a learning period that I don’t think I could have read my way out of either. And I want –do you feel, because as we were talking about, I think earlier some of this stuff is like a judgement call, like do – is us music important to transcribe right here? Or should I check in with the producers about this? Or certain questions. And in the judgement calls, in my role, I feel like, okay, I just needed to be in this role for a few months to be comfortable making them. Do you feel like the judgement calls and transcription are also something that they’ll –the person can read the style guide and then they also have to kind of get used to the judgement call part of it? How does that feel for you, Kelly??\n00:40:00\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I completely agree. I think that kind of steep learning curve I was talking about was also the order of listening to things, and pausing to read the transcripts that I had written. And maybe that sounds completely obvious but I was so devoted to listening verbatim and just really trying my best and getting really tangled in spending far too much time listening to particular bits of audio because I was worried I wasn’t gonna be faithful to people’s work. And I felt quite a lot of responsibility to that and making sure it was legible and something that was valuable for people reading the transcript. But I think it was in that July workshop when we were having these kinds of exercises and discussions around this faithful verbatim versus interpretation versus what is legible to people reading a transcript and one of the participants said, “well, what is it like to read the transcript?” And it just like was a lightbulb for me of oh [Laughs] the context clues need to be at the start and not tangled up throughout.\n \n\n00:41:11\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. And I think you and Megan Butchart really led that workshop. And that was an opportunity for me to see both the way that you framed those examples from a podcast as some in that problem space of “how do we think through this?” And then also learn from Megan Butchart’s work transcribing the Sound Box collection and be able to just see the different problems that people are grappling with and how to think about ethical transcription, caring transcription, accessible transcription in these different contexts. And that was a fun way for us to think about what is unique to podcast transcription and some of the problems we’ve been working through.\n00:41:55\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nThank you so much for joining us today.\n \n\n00:41:57\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. I’m so glad that all three of us were able to be here to talk about it together because it does, it just is such a nice representation of the work we’ve done together.\n \n\n00:42:10\tKelly Cubbon:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer and multimedia artist. Bára’s poetic practices often integrate found poetics from sources such as medical texts, self-help books, and medical paperwork as a gesture of transformation and reclamation amongst information that is attributed to complex bodies. She often works in multimedia arts through text, illustration, animation, video, performance and sound, exploring themes of healing, dreams, desire, care, and the body. Katherine and I were thrilled to get the chance to talk to Bára. In this conversation we talk about accessibility as an integrated practice, the healing power of sound, and transcription as a creative opportunity.\n \n\n00:42:52\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI’m Bára Hladík and thanks so much for having me. I’m a Czech Canadian writer, editor, and multimedia artist. I have a bachelor of arts in literature from UBC and I work in many different mediums of art since then and I am tuning in from Esquimalt territory.\n \n\n00:43:17\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThank you so much for joining us Bára. So we’re going to start off with a few questions about how you came to work with sound and the role that sound plays in your life. So we’re wondering what drew you to working with sound? [End Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:43:34\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI grew up playing music around the fire with my dad and my family [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling, Musical Instruments] So like singing and guitar and just kind of collective folk music and often just humming along or shaking shakers or whatnot. So I definitely have a very instrumental background. I learned some sound production skills from someone I used to date and it was at a time where my arthritis was affecting my hands so it was difficult to play with sound in the traditional ways. So I got really into more keyboards and ambient kind of experimental sound and I definitely am drawn to sound as a way of –as I was accepting and learning the new conditions of my chronic illness and becoming okay with how I need to slow down and really, really change pace and sit with things and still transform and process without kind of like the same exertional ways we’re traditionally taught to process things. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] So sound became a way to discographies or very long ambient pieces as a way to just really heal on like a cellular level. So I think sound has a really, really amazing function to affect our bodies and our consciousness and spirits and whatnot. And retune us. [End Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:45:33\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tWhen you’re talking about sound as slowing down and just something that is, as you said, kind of like retuning it makes me think of a quotation that Kelly pulled up that you shared on Twitter by Ursula K. LeGuin.\n \n\n00:45:52\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nAnd it is “listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence. Reading is a means of listening.”\n \n\n00:46:01\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, we were intrigued, what made you share it? Because there was lots that resonated for us, but we were wondering what, what made you share that quote?\n \n\n00:46:10\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI was just reading that book [Sound Effect: Page Turning] and it grounds connection between literature and sound and listening and how reading is a way of listening through time. And, yeah, I think just the idea of art practice as a community form and how the connections between literature and sound and just being with each other as a act of resistance in the time where we are constantly overwhelmed with information and things are happening so fast and our bodies are expected to uphold a very rapid capitalist pace [Music: Bass Plucking] [Sound Effect: Ticking Clock] and our time is monetized. So I think these forms of creativity that are very old, have always been a way for us to create community and connect and communicate beyond just day to day dialogue. [End Music: Bass and Ticking Clock]\n \n\n00:47:23\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. And even the way in that quote too, though, the idea that listening –really emphasizing that listening in the making of community, it takes time, it takes time and space and that’s something that’s not just gonna happen instantaneously. And then it’s sort of reminding one that of the time and effort and the work that is involved to make those things happen.\n \n\n00:47:46\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAnd every form has its own value and accessibility. Reading and listening are so tied and it, something may be sound in a way that isn’t so literary, but it’s still valuable. And part of reading can be quite laborious. So I find, I turn to sound when I’m too tired to read or I’ve taken in too much of that type of information but there’s stillI feel like they’re tied.\n \n\n00:48:30\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tIn podcasting written transcriptions are often a common entry point for people to start thinking about accessibility. People might ask, why do people create transcriptions if this is an audio medium? It is quite a labour intensive process to create them. It’s something that we obviously value and prioritize, but it kind of gets people asking questions sometimes about accessibility and learning about accessibility. So I was wondering, as someone who works in lots of literary and art spaces, what do you find people tend to understand or misunderstand about disability and accessibility in the arts?\n \n\n00:49:11\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI think people often think of it as an afterthought. They’re like, okay, we’ve got this project. Okay. Like how do we make it accessible now? And it’s kind of thought of as extra. And I think that the process of creation in itself and production and development and whatnot it benefits a lot from like, if you’re thinking about it from the get go and it’s an integrative design. And I think people kind of think of it a oh, we’ll make it more accessible to this small group. But I think it actually enhances the piece for everyone, like for – in a transcript for a podcast makes it more accessible, but it also makes it really good for archival purposes. You can repurpose the information in a different way. You can make a Zine. There’s different ways that even people who are listening to the podcast and they forget just one word, they didn’t quite get it, they can go to the transcript. And I think it’s just – it’s a lot simpler than people expect, even if it’s more laborious. Because it’s more creative to share something in multiple ways, and broaden your audience and that may broaden your audience to more than people with disabilities.I feel like accessibility is often simply thought of in the terms of disability, but I think it should be thought of in terms just accessibility to people without disabilities as well. I love transcription because, even though it’s part of the making and it creates it into a new medium, so then it becomes, it almost becomes a new piece or version. And yeah, then it lends like — I almost see it as an opportunity because I’m a poet and a writer and a researcher, so I’m like, “yes, this is the juice! This is the meat.” As much as it’s good to have a recording of something is to be able to view it and listen to it. I’m probably not gonna do that, but I can glance over the transcript, pull out a few ideas. It’s just like, I feel like, a transcript is a creative opportunity. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:51:33\tKelly Cubbon:\tThe music that plays throughout Bára’s interview comes from her 2021 ambient electronic album Cosmosis. During our Zoom chat, we took a cue from Bára’s work to take a break from our screens, pause, and listen. Afterwards, Bára was kind enough to share her process for creating the album. Here, she reflects on the creative benefits of working in multiple mediums, disability, and the healing power of sound.\n \n\n00:52:06\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tWell, this particular album – I’ve done so many different things over the years and I often work in many mediums because with my arthritis I have to be very flexible with what I’m doing. So sometimes I can’t write at the same pace so I’ve learned to work with many different mediums interchangeably so I can adjust to my body’s needs as I go. But yeah, that particular album was made over a few years. I –the process of making that album was very much using sound as a way to attune and wanting to facilitate a half hour of a process of someone just being able to be with their body and move or be with their self and their thoughts. Yeah. Very intentionally don’t have any sound –sorry, voice or words in it because I wanted it to just be very self in cosmos kind of communication. I finished the album while I was undergoing radioactive treatment at a traditional spa in Czech in the Czech Republic. And so it would be a daily schedule of different treatments, laser, magnet, hydrotherapy, but the main therapy is the radium bath. And it’s just like a bath with water from this ancient well that’s very high in radium and basically it ionizes your cells to have a rejuvenating effect. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] And yeah, like I said, as part of the medical system there, so people with my illness actually have a month a year covered to go get this treatment because it’s so successful. So, a lot of the sound, the water sounds I actually recorded there. The whole production part of it was I had all the sound, many of the synthesizer sounds prerecorded, but the whole production sound part was like a roadblock for me. So I focused in while I was at treatment, and added a bunch of ambient sounds and whatnot. But yeah, that was very cool. And that the sound definitely of the album reminds me of being there and of going through that experience.\n \n\n00:54:37\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. Again, thank you for sharing that. And thanks for putting that into the world. It’s meant a lot to me, the album to listen to it over the course of the pandemic and I returned to it a lot. So thank you.\n \n\n00:54:48\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nOh, that’s so nice to hear!\n \n\n00:54:49\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. [Laughs] Definitely. It’s an exhale moment of returning to the body. And again, thank you for sharing the details of where you recorded and captured that sound and what it means to you as well.\n \n\n00:55:11\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tMaybe to frame my question about music and poetry just a little differently of the connections between your sort of your approaches to music, poetry, how they’ve influenced your role as a facilitator, as a community organizer, and advocacy work that you’ve been doing there. [End Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:55:30\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I mean, having skills and sound has been really great for accessibility because then it’s pretty intuitive to be like, oh, of course we’re gonna have a sound version and a text version, bare minimum. And yeah, seeing how to make sound more accessible, cuz often people are like, oh, if it’s read by a screen reader, therefore it’s accessible. ButI have an eye condition where sometimes the laptop’s too bright and I use a screen reader. But the screen reader in itself is very alienated because it’s very robotic. It’s very monotone. It’s not, it doesn’t feel accessible to me. It doesn’t make me feel the same as reading a piece. So thinking about sound – I’m seeing a lot of literary magazines doing this, starting to do this too, like the Hamilton Arts and Letters did a disability poetics issue and they had folks read every single piece. So there was audio recordings and the transcript is the piece. So that connection between text and sound was really cool because it really brought you into the work as well, instead of being able to experience it with a screen reader, but it being quite alienating and I think, yeah, it’s suddenly when everything has to be in this robotic tone, it can be quite discouraging. So thinking about, yeah, even making – adding ambience in the background to make it more podcast-style there’s many ways to think of the forms and I think it’s cool the connections between sound and music and poetry because they really lend a creative lens to approaching these mediums. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:57:36\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. That’s fantastic to hear about because you work across disciplines, you’re sort of attuned to the different potentials within those and always thinking about how you can bring them together. So it can really hear that in all of your work it’s inspiring. So thank you.\n \n\n00:57:58\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nWell, thank you so much for having me. It really means a lot.\n \n\n00:58:04\tKelly Cubbon:\tFor more of Bára’s art, writing, music, and facilitation, see her website. Her newly released book New Infinity is available from Metatron Press. See show notes for links.\n \n\n00:58:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tListening back to our interview with Bára made me think about our conversation with Maya Rae Opphenheimer, who we heard from at the start in response to a question that you asked Kelly about community building. [End Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:58:31\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tSo this question is about transcripts as part of community building. And I’ll just preface it by saying, when you were sharing earlier about having life hacks for your own dyslexia, it really resonated with me as a neurodivergent person as well. And I think when we share these things, it kind of can be a light bulb for connecting to others. And having a way of like, oh I wasn’t just doing this alone, or I wasn’t doing this kind of strange thing by myself, there’s actually people being incredibly creative and connecting to each other through these things as well. So, we are wondering how transcripts have been part of community building for you. You’ve shared some about your classroom experiences, but maybe in online spaces as well for like discussions around transcripts as a way to connect to other people rather way to be, to connect to other people’s creative practices as well maybe.\n \n\n00:59:25\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah, well maybe – it’s an experience I share, but I definitely would love to point attention towards a project, but it’s a duo Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat: the Alt Text Poetry Project. And I first came across their work when Shannon Finnegan was at the Banff Centre on the west coast and was looking at alt poetry as a way of writing about sculpture. And their work is very interesting that, when, you know, Shannon and Bojana are working together and thinking about alt text, it’s not just as descriptive text, but also as critical and creative writing in its own sense. So shouldn’t be dismissed as a necessary provision, I mean, or even like an optional provision [Laughs], it’s progress if we see it as necessary. But it is a valid mode of creative and intellectual writing. And I know Carmen Papalia, who identifies as a non-visual learner and as a performance artist, as well as sculptor and activist, is advocating for different ways of writing about art and engaging with art. And the idea of making a transcript for an artwork that is usually read through visual means only is very cool [Laughs]. And how we can then bring in different resonances of texture and context and association and haptics and smell — that I find as a way of extending how art is often thought to already build community, but it, sometimes, really leaves out community. So the idea of transcription, not just for audio podcasting, which I think in itself is, in the definition of a podcast, is a community building media, [Start Music: Flowing Instrumental] but to do that with art and to then think about those as gateway moments of transcribing and documenting. But as you said, not viewing that as — okay, transcription done, this is the thing — but that it’s another iteration of reading culture.\n \n\n01:01:35\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn making this episode. And listening back to these conversations about transcription, what have we learned about what transcription sounds like?\n \n\n01:01:45\tKelly Cubbon:\tWell, the process of transcription sounds like collaboration, like a conversation. And I think that you could really hear that in our interviews. We were all thinking aloud together about the process. And that’s what happens when putting together a transcript.\n \n\n01:02:00\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is a process that invites access to content through multiple voices and multiple senses. We could just as easily be asking, what does transcription feel like, Smell like, look like, taste like? It makes us think about how we are experiencing content.\n \n\n01:02:19\tKelly Cubbon:\tIt also makes me think about how much this episode is about making the processes of collaboration more transparent, and being able to actively share the production decisions of a podcast episode and its accompanying transcription to show that this work is ongoing and evolving.\n \n\n01:02:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s not a finished product at all in that the transcript is something that is in dialogue with the media that accompanies it. And in dialogue with those who engage with it.\n \n\n01:02:43\tKelly Cubbon:\tThe transcript is there as a point of access into the material. But really that is only the start of the conversation. [End Music: Flowing Instrumental]\n \n\n01:03:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Katherine McLeod and Kelly Cubbon. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And we are excited to welcome to the team, our new sound designer and audio engineer Miranda Eastwood. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’d particularly love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on improving transcription accessibility. And stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n \n\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9632","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E1, As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem, 2 October 2023, Comeau"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/as-it-is-or-as-it-was-translating-the-ruin-poem/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Ghislaine Comeau"],"creator_names_search":["Ghislaine Comeau"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ghislaine Comeau\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/b3eeed87-76b0-426d-8b43-f1015d7c6472/audio/2f7aa8f6-7124-4ab7-a8ea-2bcb81f7cec3/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-1-master-v1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:31\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\" 47,542,347 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-1-master-v1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/as-it-is-or-as-it-was-translating-the-ruin-poem/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-10-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Creed, Robert Payson. “The Ruin (Modern English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CSWnfuyzyM .\\n\\nCronan, Dennis. “Cædmon’s Audience.” Studies in Philology, vol. 109, no. 4, 2012, p 336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2012.0028.\\n\\nThe Fyrdsman. “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading).” YouTube, uploaded by thefyrdsman9590, 9 Nov. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRny7oyLg&t=318s .\\n\\nHammill, Peter. “Imperial Walls (2006 Digital Remaster).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Universal Music Group, 24 Aug. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0KW9CMFC_E .\\n\\nMagennis, Hugh. “Chapter 1 Approaching Anglo-Saxon Literature.” The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 1-35.\\n\\nRaffel, Burton. “The Ruin (Old English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-dtP_73WTs&t=110s .\\n\\nSmith, Mark M. “Echo.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke UP, 2015, pp. 55-64.\\n\\nSilence is Leaden. “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem.” YouTube, uploaded by silenceisleaden188, 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D68n9F8Yozc&t=25s .\\n\\nStaniforth, Daniel (aka Luna Trick). “The Ruin.” YouTube, uploaded by lunatrick7098, 28 Jun. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IIoZfOR5MQ .\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549731934208,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts?\n\nIn this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature, brings us along on her quest to translate the “The Ruin” – a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter Book. In conversation with medievalists Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read and/or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed.\n\nQuest fulfilled! The episode concludes with Ghislaine’s reading of her own translation of “The Ruin.”\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(0:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Theme music ends] My name is Hannah McGregor–\n(0:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(0:50)\tHannah McGregor\tHow do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts? What is the role of the translator to create a historically accurate representation of how a poem sounded in its original contexts? Is such a thing even possible?\n(01:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature brings us along on her quest to translate “The Ruin,” a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter book.\n(01:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn conversation with Medievalists, Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed again. Now here is Episode 1 of Season 5 of the SpokenWeb podcast: As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem.[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme music plays briefly and ends]\n(02:31)\tThe Competent Mouth\t[Sound effects of two people walking down a stone pathway. A door with rusted hinges opens. One set of footsteps continues, more muffled than before. The sound of keys jingling can be heard. Someone unlocks a cabinet and takes out a large book. The book’s spine cracks as it’s opened and the sound of pages turning can be heard]\n(02:31)\tThe Competent Mouth\tSo. Here is the Exeter book. I’ve opened it to the specific pages that you asked to see: “The Ruin Poem,” – famously ruined itself. As you probably already know, the manuscript dates from the 10th century, and the damage, though we can’t be sure, suggests that throughout its centuries the book might have been used as a cutting board, a glue stand, and a gold and silver leaf press. As you see here, fire, possibly caused by a fallen brand, has also significantly damaged these last pages rendering some lines unreadable and making it impossible for us to know what this poem says exactly.\nWhere the words are lost, all we readers and translators can do is speculate or be silent. Well, I’ll leave you to it. You have one hour. I’ll be right outside.[Sound effect of a person walking away, opening the same rusty door and closing it behind them]\n(03:32)\tGhislaine Comeau (inner monologue)\t[Soft electronic music plays and then ends] I wonder…[Soft plucked string music begins to play] Do we always need to speculate or be silent in the face of damage? Should we? To speculate, I suppose, if we are aiming to recreate the past… but it’s a past lost to us and virtually impossible to verify. To be silent then… but isn’t keeping silent contributing to a loss of a part of the text’s past? [Music ends] What about accepting, representing, and hearing the damaged text as it exists to us now – without the weight of the impossibility of the recreation of an ultimately opaque past.\n(4:18)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Sound effect of someone turning the pages of a book] In the chapter Echo from Keywords and Sound, Mark Smith begins with “[a]n echo is nothing, if not historical to varying degrees. [Soft electronic music begins to play] It is a faded facsimile of an original sound, a reflection of time past.” The slightly alliterative and poetic air of this passage was immediately appealing to me, and it piqued my interest. I read on, sufficiently curious in wondering where this sound chapter would go. [Soft electronic music ends] And when I, Ghislaine Comeau, student of early medieval literature, read it, I couldn’t help but think of early medieval texts, [soft drumming music begins to play] their translations, and their performances as degrees of echoes growing fainter and fainter from their original. Smith continues: “To what extent the echo can, does, or should have fidelity to the original sound is a question preoccupying historians of any period.” Indeed. I, though not a historian, do find myself so preoccupied – this preoccupation fueled by my recent fixation with the old English poem, “The Ruin” housed in the Exeter Book, a damaged 10th century manuscript, with many of its lines burned. Thinking of “The Ruin” and its ruined state, I wondered then about this idea of fidelity to an original sound that Smith speaks of. I thought about the transcriptions and translations of “The Ruin” that use ellipses or dashes or other visible punctuation to represent the physical damage and lost words, lost sounds. I asked myself, how, then, are those ellipses and dashes translated when read? For that answer, I did what any other millennial graduate student would do: I checked on YouTube. [Drumming ends] [Sound effect of someone typing on a keyboard] There I found various amateur translators, readers, and performers. The translations and sounds varied from what one commenter called “quite an awful translation” accompanied by sci-fi sounds.\n(6:28)\tYouTube audio (Daniel Staniforth (aka Luna Trick), “The Ruin”)\t[Ominous electronic music plays in the background]…Snapped, roof trees, and towers fallen, the work of giants…. [Music fades]\n(6:40)\tGhislaine Comeau\tAnother chose a dramatic piano background for his translation.\n(6:45)\tYouTube audio (Silence is Leaden, “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem”)\t[Piano music plays]…The beams are bereaved, the mortars… [Music ends]\n(6:47)\tGhislaine Comeau\t…which a commenter hailed as harrowing for the native tribes of Britain who are today ruled by foreigners. The video creator liked this comment. Both of them seemingly missing entirely that this poem laments the ruin of a Roman city. And a third chose a Gregorian type humming as the background to an aggressive reading of R.M. Liuzza’s translation, which according to the video creator “manages to capture the zeitgeist of the poem very well.”\n(7:17)\tYouTube audio (The Fyrdsman, “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading)”)\t[Gregorian chant plays quietly]…Holds the builders, rotten, forgotten, the hard grip of the ground until a hundred generations of men are gone. This wall, rust stained and moss covered…[Gregorian chant ends]\n(7:29)\tGhislaine Comeau\tNone of these three addressed the manuscript’s damage specifically with their use of sounds. And the last two either agree with or themselves assert some type of privileged understanding of the poem’s context and meaning, which they then appear to attempt to express in their performance.\n(7:29)\tGhislaine Comeau\tA more scholarly example, The Smithsonian, also has recordings of “The Ruin” in both the original Old English and Modern English translation on YouTube. In the Old English version, the reader chooses a dramatic reading and represents the missing damaged text by an elongated silence.\n(8:10)\tYouTube audio, Burton Raffel, “The Ruin (Old English)”\t[Man recites text in Old English. He pauses to indicated a section of damaged text before starting again]\n(8:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIn the Modern English version, the reader does not indicate any silences in his reading and simply reads through the poem’s translation as if it were one whole piece.\n(8:43)\tYouTube audio, (Robert Payson Creed, “The Ruin (Modern English)”)\t…Sank to a heap of tumbled stones, where once cheerful strutting warriors flocked, golden armor, gleaming giddy with wine. Here was wealth, silver gems, cattle, land, in the crowning city of a far-flung kingdom. There were buildings of stone where steaming currents threw up surging heat, a wall encircled that brightness…\n(9:08)\tGhislaine Comeau\tComing back to Smith, he writes: “The lines of disagreement among historians are fairly well delimited. On one side, there is a very tenuous claim that we can recapture and re-experience the sounds of the past. […] The alternative argument maintains that efforts along these lines are deeply misleading and insists that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual desiccation.”\n(9:08)\tGhislaine Comeau\tHe then goes on to say: “The line of inquiry also makes the case either explicitly or implicitly for the power of text to capture with fidelity and authenticity, the meaning of sounds to the people who were doing the listening at the time of their production.”\n[Drumming music begins to play]\nHow then can these translators and readers assume to know the “zeitgeist” of the ruin poem as one mentioned, or the tone with which we should read, or how the damage should be read, seeing that we have no way of knowing what was there before the damage? I needed, then, in my journey with “The Ruin” to first decide if I wanted to represent the poem as it is –  damaged, incomplete, ruined, or as it was – despite the impossibility of that.\n[Music ends of abruptly] [record scratch sound effect plays]\nBut I get ahead of myself. Before starting my translation journey, I needed to consult with the experts. I needed to know more about the place and role of sound in old English literature. So I sat down with Professors Yeager and Powell to ask them some questions.\n(10:49)\tStephen Yeager\tSteven Yeager, chair of the Department of English at Concordia University. My research specialization is Old and Middle English literature.\n(10:57)\tStephen Powell\tSteve Powell, associate professor of English at Concordia University, and I study Old and Middle English literature\n(11:05)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIn their studies, students of early medieval literature will often come across terms like “oral-formulaic theory,” and in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Hugh Magennis writes how it is thought that most surviving Old English poetic texts are literate compositions, but that they still make use of the same kind of oral derived poetic art. My question, then, is what do we mean when we talk about “oral derived poetic art”, “orality”, and “oral-formulaic theory”?\n(11:40)\tStephen Yeager\t[Soft choral music plays briefly and then ends] Oral formulaic theory goes back to the turn of the 20th century when there’s, a scholar named Milman Parry who’s looking at the question of Homer, and, you know, whether, as the joke goes, either Homer or the poet by the same name who wrote The Iliad or the Odyssey, and who this person was. Milman Parry noted the existence of many formulae that recur throughout the poem.\nStephen Yeager\tSo, for example, a rosy fingered dawn, or much enduring divine Odysseus. These kind of little phrases that appear to be the building blocks of the lines of the poem that are sort of used continuously throughout. Parry went to study Serbo-Croat oral poets and discovered that they too used these formulae and sort of posited therefore, that Homer was a poet who had essentially, extemporaneously, working out of this poetic tradition, composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were then sort of written down as more or less a transcription of what had been originally an oral performance.And that idea then really gets enshrined by his student, Albert Lorde, who wrote a book in 1960, that really kind of makes this idea mainstream. And then one of the main places actually where it really kind of gets spread is through the University of Toronto where scholars like Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and especially Walter Ong, he extrapolates from this a whole idea of oral man [soft harp music begins to play] and literate man where oral traditions and literate traditions create fundamentally different human experiences of cognition. And so that’s kind of the big version then of how oral-formulaic theory kind of really takes off and what’s kind of at stake in the study of it in literature.\nStephen Yeager\tIn old English, you have a scholar named F.P. Magoon. He essentially argued that old English poetry is similarly transcribed from oral performances. And what’s really at stake for him is that in the formulaic quality of old English verse, you have remnants of culture before the arrival of Christianity, brought with it the technology of writing and the book. So in these oral-formulae that’s how you sort of get back to the Pagan pre-Christian past.\n(13:47)\tGhislaine Comeau\tAnd what place then does oral formulaic theory have in Old English literary studies today?\n(13:56)\tStephen Yeager\tThe current consensus revolves around Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, especially as in her book, Visible Song, and, uh, A.N. Doane also talks about this concept of scribal performance. One of the things that Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe points out is that we have very few manuscripts where there are more than one witnesses of the same old English poem. And every time we do, there are significant differences between the two texts.\nStephen Yeager\tSo it seems that the act of a scribe writing something down is kind of something like Milman Parry’s oral poet, insofar as it wasn’t about reproducing an exact text, it was about kind of reproducing a kind of feeling in accordance with a kind of set of rules which, you know, allow for some improvisation. So that is, I guess my own version of what I hear in Magennis’s point is that you know, to a certain extent that division of oral and literate isn’t an entirely useful one because really kinda what we’re talking about are the rules for how texts get created, how performances take place.\n(14:55)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Soft electronic pensive music begins to play] Thinking about Professor Yeager’s comment – that the division of oral and literate is not entirely useful – [Music ends] I am reminded of Dennis Cronan’s article “Caedmon’s Audience” [Sound effect of someone flipping through pages in a book]- where he similarly explains the oral-formulaic nature of Old English poetry, noting that “surviving Old English poems are, to a greater or lesser extent, transitional texts, written compositions that utilize the meter, phraseology (including formulae and formulaic systems), and vocabulary of the native oral tradition.” Keeping this transitional nature in mind, I asked Professors Powell and Yeager “what more can we say or what more do we know about early English storytellers, oral storytelling, and performances?”\n(15:49)\tStephen Powell\t[Soft drumming music begins to play] Well, I think the literary evidence is probably the best evidence we have, or written down records or renditions of people telling stories. So that was something that was often recorded within literary texts and historical texts from the old English period. And you’ll see for example, in Beowulf repeated interpolations of other stories. And the circumstances of the telling of those stories is, highlighted so frequently in a social setting, often in a celebratory mode or at a feast or a big communal meal, you’ll have this tradition of what we call the scop who tell stories, of the past, of the culture.\n(16:41)\tGhislaine Comeau\tThe scop, in other words, poets and Bards who would perform poems and pales.\n(16:49)\tStephen Powell\tThe literary texts themselves encode this kind of performance, that, whether those are the stories that actually got written down. Then once it came to putting things into manuscripts, there’s really not much evidence of that directly.\n(17:04)\tStephen Powell\tAnother key one, as you know, is the legend of Caedmon’s Hymn. But as you also know, there’s a lot of reasons to doubt whether that’s a direct anthropological description of an event that actually happened. There’s two old English poems that are from the perspective of poets. There’s one called Widsith, where it’s basically like that Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He describes everywhere that he’s been in all of the different courts that he’s served in. [“I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash plays briefly and then fades]\nStephen Powell\tFar more extensive than any single human ever could have actually attended. There’s the old English poem, “Deor”, where a guy goes through a bunch of terrible things that have happened from folklore, and then he says, “another terrible thing that happened is I lost my job as a poet and I’m looking for a new one.” Again, you know, very, very scanty evidence. It’s a lot of work to reconstruct. I mean, there’s not much anthropological, or excuse me, archeological evidence that I’m aware of beyond like lyres that existed or what have you, [Sound effect of harp music begins] but who knows how those actually figure it in the context of a performance.\nStephen Powell\tThere’s a lot of conjecture there. I think there’s some information from the north sagas a bit more of these narrative sources. But you know, those are written hundreds of years later, quite a long distance away. And so who knows how useful they’re,\n(18:20)\tStephen Powell\tI think all the literary evidence actually does point pretty clearly to a tradition of oral storytelling. [Music ends] I don’t think that you have the story of Caedmon in which Caedmon famously leaves the banquet because he’s not gonna be able to participate. Whether or not that is a historically accurate story, it is beside the point for me. The point is that we have that record. It corresponds with records from other texts that show that there was this tradition. [Drumming music begins to play]\nStephen Powell\tAnd it stands to reason that this is a society where you had long, dark evenings and plenty of alcoholic beverages distributed to you. What else were you going to do except tell stories? And of course, with a relatively low level of literacy, most of those stories would’ve been told orally.\n(19:11)\tStephen Yeager\tThat’s absolutely true. I mean, I guess I was just saying that we don’t really know much of the details about how that actually went forward or who it was who got to tell the story or how professionalized it was. Another key moment is a famous statement by, it’s Alcuin, right? Uh, “what has Ingeld to do with Christ?” Where he’s complaining about the monks who are obviously spending all their time listening to stories about guys like Ingal, who’s a, a hero who’s mentioned in Beowulf and when they should be listening to stories about Christ. But, you know, there’s only so many of those, I guess [Stephen Yeager laughs]\n(19:48)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Music ends] Early in his answer, professor Yeager made reference to the scanned archeological evidence beyond the lyre. And I thought this a great place to turn the conversation back to sound and ideas of sound in early English works. [In interview]\nGhislaine Comeau\tOn that note, you mentioned the lyre, despite much discussion about orality, oral storytelling, oral tradition, oral-formulaic theory, alliterative verse, and so on, all of which are notions based on sound. We seem to rarely talk about sound or sounds in early English works, except of course, the occasional reference to a harp or a lyre. So what do we know about sounds in these performances or sounds in Old English poetry more generally?\n(20:33)\tStephen Powell\t[Soft string music begins to play] We know precious little, really. I mean, I think that Stephen’s point about the archeological evidence being slim is absolutely on point. And even the literary evidence that I’m harping on, no pun intended, is pretty scant on what these intertext interpolations, say in Beowulf, sound like. I think that’s really hard for us to recreate here.\n(21:00)\tStephen Yeager\tOf the many tragic losses of early medieval culture, one of the most tragic is the loss of any music, and I think it’s with the 10th, 11th century, there’s the Gregorian reform, which includes among other things, a standardization of devotional music all across Europe. And there’s no musical notation that I’m aware of before the Gregorian reform. And so it seems like all of whatever kind of local musical traditions would’ve predated that, are eliminated by it. And so it’s extremely difficult to try to reconstruct what the structure of a song was or how music worked before for this period.\n(21:38)\tGhislaine Comeau\tSo given that, you know, the scant evidence, to what level can we speculate about the place that sounds music or other, not necessarily just the harp. What place might they have had within these oral storytellings or these performances? You know, how can we imagine, can meaning like in the term of being allowed to speculate so far, how can we imagine the sounds of and surrounding sounds of an Early English text?\n(22:10)\tStephen Powell\tI think sound was important in the Old English period, and I think there’s good evidence just from the way that poetry is constructed in this period, suggests that the culture cared deeply about how things sounded. You don’t have the kind of alliterative verse that characterizes Old English poetry, where rather than rhyme poetry is connected with repeated sounds, initial sounds without being interested in sound. So I think that we shouldn’t overlook that internal evidence in thinking about the centrality of sound.\n(22:49)\tGhislaine Comeau\tCan you explain a bit or talk about alliterative verse and what it is and how it works?\n(22:54)\tStephen Powell\t[Music ends] When we think about poetry and how poetry is structured today, we tend to think of rhyme as the central feature of poetry, that we expect that the end of each line will rhyme with the next one, for example, as in a rhyming couplet. In the Old English period, rhyming was not something that was particularly important.\nStephen Powell\tIt’s not that they didn’t know about rhyme, because there’s a poem that we call the rhyming poem, which is all about rhyme and there’s some internal rhymes and other uses of rhyme. But the primary way in which Old English verse in each Old English line was structured, was around alliteration. [Soft electronic music begins]\nStephen Powell\tSo that in each line there was a key sound that was repeated, the beginning of the line or near the beginning of the line, and again, near the end of the line, and I’m oversimplifying here, but the important point is that a line of poetry was distinguishable in part by this alliteration. And that that pattern was incredibly important because the words whose initial sounds repeated were the words that were also stressed. And thus in many ways, probably the most important words for those poetic lines. [Electronic music ends]\nStephen Powell\tSo if you think about the reception of Old English poetry and you posit, that perhaps these poems were read or recited out loud, then having those repeated words that are so important within each line suggests that they were also a cue to the audience of what to pay attention to and what to listen to maybe within a noisy audience. But again, now we’re starting to drift well away from concrete evidence and making speculations.\n(24:46)\tStephen Yeager\tEverything that we know about alliterative verse comes from secondary philological work. There is not, to my knowledge, much information at the time about how to write, but I’m not aware of anything in Old English that lays out the rules of Old English verse. And what made it especially difficult to reconstruct is that Old English poetry is not lineated on the page as poetry. There are the four major poetic codices  in the Junius 11 manuscript.\nStephen Yeager\tThere is what appears to be punctuation, which kind of marks the half lines. The beginning of reconstructing Old English verse came from that manuscript. So it’s been all this, this work to reconstruct it, but this is, I think, an important point for what you were asking about how much sound mattered and the fact that they aren’t making those distinctions graphically meant that they were meant to be heard.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd probably, you know, it’s another reason to think about it as being queued to music because like in a hymnal or something, right, where it’s all just sort of continuous because you hear where the verses end or what have you. [Choral music swells and then ends] I think that there’s every reason to believe that something like that might be the explanation for why Old English verse is written in this continuous script as opposed to other forms of verse.\nStephen Yeager\tI mean, among other things, it’s important to emphasize the centrality of memorization to medieval education. And of course, you know, why does poetic verse exist in the first place, right? Like, what is the purpose of patterning sounds in such and such way? It’s mnemonic. The cultural authority of poetry proceeds from that original mnemonic function, in my own view at least, you know, that if it rhymes, it sounds true effect, rhyme as reason that-\n(26:28)\tStephen Powell\tOr in Old English alliteration-\n(26:31)\tStephen Yeager\tAs a reason.\n(26:33)\tStephen Powell\tI don’t disagree with you, I’m just thinking that in terms of thinking about sound, that, yeah, there is this memory assistance that’s provided by rhyme for us, or probably alliteration for the Old English people. But those sounds also do things for us and have an emotive effect.\n(26:58)\tStephen Yeager\tWell, I mean, so you take something that’s important and you really wanna make sure that it’s preserved for yourself for future generations. You write it down, in a verse form to help it stick in people’s minds. And then that strategy that you do then acquires the cultural authority of the important information that you use it to record.\nStephen Yeager\tI’ll go with Walter Wrong this far. Once you have your literate institutions of authority that really kind of take over that cultural mnemonic function, then the function of poetry changes dramatically. And so that, you know, what you can see is kind of the rise of poetry in the sense that we know it in kind of the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance into modernity, those two things are related. I think as poetry loses that mnemonic function, as it stops to be so important, then what poetry is changes as a result. [Drumming music begins to play]\n(27:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tFollowing Professor Yeager and Professor Powell’s insightful answers on oral-formulaic theory, oral storytelling, and the possible place and importance that sound may have had in old English texts, thinking specifically about the mnemonic function of alliteration and sound, I came come back ideas on translation, come back to Magennis and ask about a certain point that he makes in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature.\nGhislaine Comeau\tMagennis states that old English poetry is inherently difficult to date given its character. He notes how another scholar, Elizabeth Tyler, refers to the quote “timelessness” of Old English poetry in that, “rather than seeking to relate their work to a specific time or place, Old English poets cultivated a quality of timelessness, a quality that is reflected, for example, in an attachment to archaic diction”. Alongside archaic diction, Magennis also notes how a “stylistic stability” ultimately lends itself to the adaptability and reappropriation of Old English poetry for quote “ideological purposes relevant to the time”. So, with my own translation task ahead, I wanted to hear Professor Powell and Professor Yeager’s comments on this idea of “timelessness” in Old English poetry…\n(29:18)\tStephen Yeager\tSo the timelessness of Old English poetry is, you know, that comment is predicated on an assumption about a formal conservatism in Old English poetry over a long period of time, begging the question, who knows what the date was that any Old English poem was written, like the best we have are conjectures about when the manuscripts were copied. Almost all of them post-date the Benedictine reform of the 10th century, right?\nStephen Yeager\tAnd then the end of old English poetry is, the written record really dries up around 1066. Edward the Confessor dies, and there’s a poem called “The Death of Edward the Confessor,” and there’s not a lot of Old English poetry that’s written after that date. So in terms of, you know, the record of the manuscripts, we’re really talking 100-150 years. But there’s good reason to believe that many of these poems predate the Benedictine reform perhaps by centuries. And if that’s the case, then what we’re looking at is an extremely conservative verse form over hundreds of years, because it’s very difficult to look at Old English poetry and say, this is the early stuff and this is the late stuff.\n(30:21)\tStephen Powell\tAll we can really do is look at, these are the early manuscripts and these are the late manuscripts.\n(30:26)\tStephen Yeager\tYes. And like, maybe some of them are older, maybe most of them, maybe even all of them. But again, like if we’re thinking of it from the perspective of scribal performance, who knows how radically these texts were reinterpreted by the scribes who copied them down. [Light string music begins to play]\nStephen Yeager\tSo if you’re gonna posit conservatism, you know, the evidence isn’t there necessarily. The quote that you read to me is like a nice way of saying we really have no idea when any of this stuff  was actually composed. And it doesn’t give us any internal clues that help us figure it out, but I guess this is a good example of what I understood you to be kind of asking, which is what do you do in the face of all that you don’t know?\nStephen Yeager\tIt’s like, well, why don’t you just work from the example of what they did, right? They didn’t understand Latin and Roman stuff that well. They definitely didn’t read any Greek. But nonetheless, there’s this, you sort of, you take it, you assimilate it, you do what you want with it. Like the spirit of Old English literature is very, as conservative as the verse forms are, it is actually extremely experimental as well, and very open to taking something and then trying to make sense of it in your own context. So there is a sense in which developing your own performance of the text in conversation with it is, you know, in continuity with the practices of scribal performance that we see in the tradition itself.\n(31:46)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWith the certainty that we can never be quite certain of when old English texts were produced. In other words, we can never know the exact context of the cultural reception or the zeitgeist of the poems as one YouTuber had mentioned. I was reminded, again of Smith’s point, that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual sophistication.\nGhislaine Comeau\tThinking then of old English texts as echoes, or rather their translations through the time as echoes. It then became clear to me that I wanted to shift the conversation to specifically address this issue of how we translate and how we perform these texts. [Music ends]\n(32:38)\tStephen Powell\tWhen we translate into Old English. We have at our command the entirety of the English vocabulary, which is the largest vocabulary of any language that’s ever been spoken on Earth. In contrast, when Anglo-Saxon or Old English writers were translating from Latin, they had at their disposal a very small vocabulary. And there’s nothing wrong with a small vocabulary. The size of a vocabulary doesn’t really matter for a language, because any language by definition has to serve the needs of its community.\nStephen Powell\tBut what that meant was that one of the things that old English writers were tasked with when they were translating from Latin into English was creating words, finding ways to describe concepts from Latin, which had a much larger vocabulary than English did at that point. And so we don’t have to do that. And so when, you know, Seamus Heaney famously translated Beowulf, he had at his disposal all of the vocabulary of English and got in some, I would say, trouble for including in his translation parts of the English vocabulary that were not sort of English. They were more Irish, and that was sort of controversial, but it was possible for him.\n(34:06)\tStephen Yeager\tOn the most pragmatic level, that’s what translation does, is it expands and develops some language. I mean, and think about also how, I wonder how old English verse transformed by trying to translate the Psalms into Old English, for example, which there’s both prose and poetic translations of the Psalms, which are already, you know, in the Vulgate, Jerome did these like word for word translations of the Psalms that are kind of terrible Latin, but that then become the basis of Latin education throughout the Middle Ages. The other sort of bigger example I was thinking of with this question was about how the translations of scenarios and events and from the Bible and you know, from other Latin sources, change to fit the values of the culture that they’re in.\nStephen Yeager\t​​But then from the perspective of a literary critic, you know, you see how that transformation reflects those values. And so the great example of that being of gender, and so for example, the Old English poem of Judith, which introduces this, this really interesting compound word elfscin, beautiful as an elf, it’s like, what the hell does that mean? You know, why is Judith an elfscin? Which then sort of leads to, which doesn’t beg the question this time, I think, leads to the question of, what is an elf? Like, what did that mean? What sorts of cultural contexts are coming to bear and why are they useful for describing this character who’s, you know, quite troubling as a character in the original context of the Hebrew scriptures? And, you know, remains a troubling one to, you know, her reception in Christian theology.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd then all of which then reflects in this sort of thing about like, well, if we’re going to adapt this figure into old English, does she sort of turn into a kind of Valkyrie figure? You know, are we sort of drawing from other mythological cultural contexts to try to assimilate and make sense of this character? Lots of fascinating things happen around this question, not just at the level of vocabulary, though, also at the level of vocabulary, but at the level of what gets created and then how that then goes on to influence the future evolution of the literary conventions.\n(36:13)\tStephen Powell\tRight. I mean, you think about the Old English renditions of the Exodus story, for example, where what seems like a biblical text without much an Old English poet normally values gets put into the mode of Old English heroic poetry. [Harp music begins to play]\nStephen Powell\tAnd even if it doesn’t, to come back to sound, because I know sound is the basic building block here. If you think about putting these biblical stories into the sounds that are also associated with non-biblical stories, Beowulf or the Battle of Malden or something like that, then what is that doing to the biblical story? It is putting it into the cultural context in some way. And of course, we always do that, whether it’s a biblical story or heroic story, when we translate, we’re carrying it from one culture to the other, whether that culture is early medieval England or the American Midwest of the 1970s.\nStephen Powell\tThe funny thing is, not the funny thing, the complicated thing is that when we do that kind of translation, we can become more familiar with the story in a certain way, but we also, in some ways, I think, can lose understanding of the story. Putting it too much into our own cultural idiom means that we lose the original cultural idiom and we lose the sort of the original emphasis. [Music ends]\n(37:47)\tStephen Yeager\tIt kind of comes down to, it’s one of these choices that you don’t wanna make, I think. Cause you know when you’re doing this translation, what you’re trying to do is make a text more immediate to an audience that would otherwise not be able to access it. But the question is, what is that text that you’re trying to make immediate? Is it the content and the ideas that’s in the poem, “The Ruin,” for example? Or is it the original context of reception? Like, do you want to sort of feel like you’re in the hall and listening to “The Ruin” as it would’ve been listened to? And so you’re there with like the… [Dr. Yeager’s voice fades out]\n(38:16)\tGhislaine Comeau\tHere, Professor Yeager has circled back to my original question and pointed out how translation is a series of choices and how we translate will depend on what we want to prioritize for our audience, meaning rhyme, emotion, an at best, speculated socio historical context?\n(38:37)\tStephen Yeager\t[Dr. Yeager’s voice fades back in]…Was walking around and whatever. And so the rhythmic choice is the one that’s like, I’m going to bring you into a more alien unusual world. And then the one that’s this is the more direct translation is the more here’s the information that’s in the poem, or here are the ideas or feelings or expressions. One of the things that distinguishes is, who is this audience? So like, if we’re writing for a bunch of Midwestern seventh graders, we’re not gonna bring ’em into the meat hall necessarily, right? We’re gonna really just try and make it so that they can sort of understand it and enjoy it. Whereas a more specialist audience, or especially if you’re an avant-garde or like a musician from the seventies or whatever, then you’ll choose something maybe that’s a bit more challenging, but again, it’s like, it’s back to your point about aesthetic decisions, which are often audience decisions.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd again, you know, at a certain point you never want to choose just one thing. Obviously there’s gonna be a compromise, but at a certain point, something has to prevail. You’re gonna run up against something where you’re gonna have two choices, one of which is the more difficult but interesting one, and one of which is the more accessible one, and there’s gonna be a pattern in the choices that you make.\nStephen Yeager\tBut that’s basically what translation is. [Quiet Gregorian chant style music begins] So “The Ruin” is this poem, which is famous in part for the way it, the sort of serendipitous, you know, thing where it’s a poem that’s damaged and is ruined and it’s describing a ruin within the poem, right? It’s a completely accidental, like, there was no sort of authorial intent behind that, but it works so nicely to kind of encapsulate the mood, not only of Old English poetry, but of its reception, really the mode of especially 20th century scholarship in the wake of Tolkien and “The Monsters and The Critics” and this kind of melancholic mood that characterizes the field.\nStephen Yeager\tBut you know, I mean, there’s no question you can ask about trying to connect with Old English, even though it’s impossible that you couldn’t ask about literally every other attempted communication you’ve ever done in your entire life, right? Like, when has there ever been like the true melding of minds and the intention of the original person is fully communicated so that the other person completely understood it? There are varying degrees of historical distance, of cultural distance and what have you, which complicate that further, but it’s not as if there is some kind of achievable thing that isn’t achieved, it’s just that the thing isn’t achieved in multiple ways. So in fact, part of the value of studying something like “The Ruin,” to my mind is the reminder that it gives you of that sort of basic fact about all communication, that for all you may rely on your stereotypes or your shared cultural knowledge or your sort of sense of this person from whoever long you’ve known them, in fact, there’s always this effort. There’s always this, this thing that remains, and so therefore this constant need for humility and for care, in the way that you recognize the limitations of your own understanding.\nStephen Yeager\tArguably, there is no such thing as a written text that is not also a ruin in this sense, right? Because the author is remote, the person who wrote it down, like by the time it gets to you, that person has changed themselves, right? And so the person who wrote it is gone. So “The Ruin” is this kind of perfect poem, distillation, as we said, for these serendipitous reasons of what writing is. And so I think that the representation of those gaps, to my mind, the best will be just the ones that call attention to it. Whatever that choice is to make the listener aware of the gap or what’s missing is to make them aware of what this work is, which is, you know, powerful as a work of writing and sort of translating that into the other medium.\nStephen Yeager\tTo go back to my earlier point about Milman Parry, I wanted to make one final point about that, which is, you know, that he was able to do all of that work because of recording, right? He relied on the recordings of the Serbo-Croat oral poets, which he then transcribed and then identified all of the things. So, you know, you can’t have oral formulaic theory and all of the nostalgia for the oral performance and the immediacy of it. And you know, like, this is what the show really sounded like when he was strumming on the lyre or whatever. [Soft string music begins to play]\nStephen Yeager\tYou know, that nostalgia and that wish is a product of the recording technology that then makes it feel like that is an experience you could actually have because you can have it about somebody today. And there is an extent to which that desire or transparency for immediacy is the product of communications technology that promises that transparency and immediacy, but which in fact has never actually delivered on it. Because, you know, the recording then removes from the context, and then there’s suddenly a ton of stuff that you don’t know about it. And I think it’s how you represent your own relationship to the text and not about how you represent the text itself. Like, is Peter Hamill saying like, I have a PhD in old English? [“Imperial Walls” by Peter Hamill plays briefly]\n(43:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tPeter Hamill adapted part of “The Ruin” poem into a song called “Imperial Walls.”\n(43:42)\tStephen Yeager\tYou know, he’s not, he’s not that, that representation is like, I’m an artist and I’m going to take this work of art from the past and I’m gonna do my own thing with it. And so that’s completely responsible because it’s transparent about what’s happening. [Soft drumming music begins] The irresponsible is when you claim an authority that you don’t have.\n(44:04)\tGhislaine Comeau\tI, as the translator and scop, am essentially deciding to impose what I think the poem should sound like onto you, the reader or the listener. It is impossible for me to represent it as it was, as I’m not part of its context of reception. I can only translate, interpret, and present it as it is to me now. Who do I want it to make sense for and what sense do I want it to make? And even then, how do I want the poem to sound? Sad, nostalgic, wistful, a touch of hiraeth? The impossible…\n[Music ends]\n“The Ruin” poem.\nThis wall Stone is wondrous/fate and fortune have broken/and shattered the city/the works of giants/decay/roofs ruined/towers toppled/spoke gates smashed/frost on mortar/cut and cleaved/The storm shelter has fallen/eaten through by time/an earthly grasp/a hard grip of ground/imprisons the dead and decayed master makers/Until 100 generations of nations have passed/the city’s red stained gray wall stood under storms/one kingdom after another/high and steep/it fell/Still, the wall stone remains/[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]num geheapen felon/grimly ground/It shone/skilled work/ancient work/lamrindum beag/mod mo … yne swiftne/[Sound effect of fire ends]The stout minded/firmly wove with wire threads/foundations, bound wondrously together/The city dwellings were radiant/Many bathhouses/a tall pinnacle of treasure/great rejoicing/many mead halls/days full of joy/until fate/it changed all that/the slain fell widely/Days of pestilence came/death devoured all the sword brave men/their rampart foundations became waste/The citadel perished/restorers yielded sacred places to the earth/So these dwellings became dreary/and the Vermilion buildings/wood work roofs thus separated from their tiles/A perishable place fell/where once many a glad- hearted/and gold-bright man/shone with war gear/wine flushed and brilliant/splendor adorned/a bright city of this far reaching realm/seen in silver and gold/blessed in curious gems/precious stone and power/broken like a heap of stones/where the baths were/stone houses stood/A wall surrounded all/brightened breast/hot in heart/surging from far with heat/stream erupted/That was advantageous/when they let poor forth hot streams over gray stone/\n[Sound effect of fire crackling swells and dissipates]\nUn…until the ring pool hotly/where the baths were/Then this/Re,that is a kingly thing/\n[Sound effect of fire crackling swells and grows]\na house/a city/\n[Fire crackling ends]\n(48:15)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Low electronic music plays] The SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(48:28)\tHannah McGregor\tOur producer this month is Ghislaine Comeau, a PhD student in the English department at Concordia University. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Thanks to James Healey, our sound designer for the intro and outro, and Miranda Eastwood for the sound design on Ghislaine’s episode. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. Special thanks to Dr. Steven Yeager and Dr. Steven Powell for lending their voices and expertise to this episode.\n(48:55)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins in background] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9633","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E2, Listening in Uncertainty, 6 November 2023, Paquette"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-in-uncertainty/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Nadège Paquette"],"creator_names_search":["Nadège Paquette"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nadège Paquette\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/61a67aba-7902-445e-834a-7360ff36afd9/audio/886b9d5b-fe0b-439e-b083-1d8e46196a01/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-episode-2-full-master-oct-26-v12.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:22\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,557,106 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-episode-2-full-master-oct-26-v12\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-in-uncertainty/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"6 November 2023\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music:\\n\\nTom Bonheur https://www.instagram.com/dj.g3ntil/\\n\\nKovd, Kvelden, Tell What You Know, Ivory Pillow, and Fever Creep by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/\\n\\nPodcast:\\n\\n“The Wordless Place” Lulu Miller https://radiolab.org/podcast/wordless-place\\n\\n“Why Podcast?” Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html\\n\\nShort Film:\\n\\nAnointed, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Dan Lin https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/videos-featuring-kathy/\\n\\nFilm:\\n\\nPulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa\\n\\nAdditional sounds from:\\n\\n“Interview with Tanya Tagaq,” Alicia Atout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FupatQbcTeM\\n\\n“Open Dialogues: Daniel Heath Justice,” Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrBN8_IGuuw\\n\\n“Monster 怪物,” United for Peace Film Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8OJulGi1Rg\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nBouich, Abdenour. 2021. “Coeval Worlds, Alter/Native Words.” Transmotion 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.980.\\n\\nButler, Judith. 2003. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4 (1): 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240650409349213.\\n\\nChion, Michel. 2017. L’audio-Vision : Son et Image Au Cinéma. 4th Edition. Armand Colin.\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey, and Hannah McGregor. 2022. Why Podcast?: Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count. Vol. 27, no. 1. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html.\\n\\nEidsheim, Nina Sun. 2019. “Introduction: The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?” In The Race of Sound, 1–38. Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpntq.4.\\n\\nGoodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Technologies of lived abstraction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=018751433&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.\\n\\nHaraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press.\\n\\nHudson, Seán. 2018. “A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Horror Films.” Film-Philosophy 22 (3): 448–64. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0089.\\n\\nJLiat. 1954. Bravo. Found Sounds. Bikini Atoll. http://jliat.com/.\\n\\nJustice, Daniel Heath. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.\\n\\nKurosawa, Kiyoshi, dir. 2001. Pulse. Toho Co., Ltd.\\n\\nLamb, David Michael. 2015. “Clyde River, Nunavut, Takes on Oil Indsutry over Seismic Testing.” CBC. March 30, 2015. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/clyde-river-nunavut-takes-on-oil-industry-over-seismic-testing-1.3014742.\\n\\nLin, Dan, and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dirs. 2018. Anointed. Pacific Storytellers Cooperative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEVpExaY2Fs.\\n\\nMadwar, Samia. 2016. “Breaking The Silence.” Text/html. Up Here Publishing. uphere. Https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence. 2016. https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence.\\n\\nMiller, Lulu. 2022. “The Wordless Place.” Radiolab. https://radiolab.org/episodes/wordless-place.\\n\\nMorton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Posthumanities 27. Minneapolis (Minn.): University of Minnesota Press.\\n\\nRaza Kolb, Anjuli Fatima. 2022. “Meta-Dracula: Contagion and the Colonial Gothic.” Journal of Victorian Culture 27 (2): 292–301. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac017.\\n\\nRobinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. 1 online resource (319 pages) : illustrations vols. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6152353.\\n\\nSontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics.\\n\\nTagaq, Tanya. Split Tooth. Viking, Penguin Random House, 2018.\\n\\nTasker, John Paul. 2017. “Supreme Court Quashes Plans for Seismic Testing in Nunavut, but Gives Green Light to Enbridge Pipeline.” CBC. July 26, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/supreme-court-ruling-indigenous-rights-1.4221698.\\n\\nYamada, Marc. 2020. “Visualizing a post-bubble Japan in the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi.” In Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film : The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades, 60–81. Routledge contemporary Japan series. Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2279077.\\n\\nYusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549734031360,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this audio essay, Nadège Paquette adopts a posture of not-knowing as an alternative to the Western drive toward knowledge accumulation. Nadège asks: can not-knowing help us learn to live and die more justly in compromised worlds?\n\nThis episode navigates this question using an associative method which links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage. Listeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to end time stories including Lulu Miller’s podcast and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film, and stories of endurance, with Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook.\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Spokeweb Podcast music ends] My name is Hannah McGregor.\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod and each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:50)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month our producer, Nadège Paquette sonically explores what not-knowing sounds like, and feels like, as an alternative to constantly accumulating knowledge. The episode enacts the possibilities of not-knowing, using an associative method that links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage.\n(01:13)\tKatherine McLeod\tListeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to works that dwell in the unknown, including a story shared by Lulu Miller on the podcast Radio Lab, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film Pulse, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Anointed,” and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook Split Tooth. Collectively, these works of art give us a language for experiences that, in fact, exceed language, and invite us to pause in the space of uncertainty.\n(01:42)\tHannah McGregor\tHere is the second episode of season five of the SpokenWeb podcast, “Listening in Uncertainty.” [SpokenWeb theme music swells briefly and then fades]\n(02:04)\tNadège Paquette\t[Pensive music begins] Hi, I’m Nadège. I’m speaking from Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montreal. I’m a white settler and a seeker of ways to live and die with other humans and non-humans on a damaged planet. [Music fades out] I find this process of naming my partial speaking and listening positionalities important.\nNadège Paquette\t[Sound effect of crickets singing at night followed by the call of a crow] Naming is the way we’ve been taught to apprehend the world, but it might also have the effect of making us fear what we can’t name. This sound work is about the potential of not naming things to linger in uncertainty. It’s about listening through discomfort, tuning in to fear and surrendering to silence. [Cricket sounds stop]\nNadège Paquette\tAttempting not to name things with spoken words is, however, a contradictory project. I can’t escape language, so I try to let it exceed the meaning I expect of it. [Light percussion music fades in] The question I’m asking throughout this episode in exploring the limits of my understanding is: can not-knowing help us learn to live more justly in compromised worlds? Since in Western sciences, the paradigm of knowledge accumulation is coming to its limits when facing the conditions of global warming, can a posture recognizing the bounds of our understanding be more fruitful?\nNadège Paquette\tBecause while we know a lot about climate change, we’re still unable to act and slow down its processes. This podcast is a sort of collage where I make associations between ideas, sounds and stories. Associations are the glue making sometimes seemingly disparate elements stick together. My hope in calling my process associative is to avoid the expectation that this podcast as a form of narrative should be linear: that is, made of a series of observations where one ideologically evolves into another to reveal a single, coherent meaning. Associations might be more about not knowing where the next idea will take us. [Music fades out]\n(04:20)\tNadège Paquette\tThe episode will be divided into two parts. The first section follows two stories where characters are faced with the unknown and react with fear.  [Ominous music begins] These are stories where a certain version of the world ends, a world where things can be known and mastered through language. There’s the story of a child’s night terror told by Lulu Miller in a podcast episode, as well as the story of people disappearing through computer circuits, which takes the form of the film Pulse by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  [Music ends]\nNadège Paquette\tI’ve associated both stories because of the effect of fear they describe and produce. I’ll talk about how fear can be created by acousmatic sounds and uncomfortable intimacy, as well as how we might attempt to tame fear through naming and interpretation.  [Calm electronic music begins]\nWhile the first section is about narratives we could call apocalyptic, the stories of the second section are about surviving and healing after yet another apocalypse, the first being the decolonization of the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. [Music ends]\n(05:37)\tNadège Paquette\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner recites a poem where the tale of a son playing with fire meets an account of living on the Marshall Islands, which have been used as sites for “testing” nuclear bombs. [Calm electronic music fades back in] Tanya Tagaq reads her novel where a daughter protects sea creatures from seismic testing. I want to think here about those things that Western science has called “tests” but which are in fact “the real thing” because they are actively destroying worlds. I want to reflect on the challenge that Indigenous knowledges pose to the notion of real versus fictional world and consider how certain worldviews which escape hegemonic frameworks have been deemed by colonial powers to be illegible and thus less real. [Music ends]\n(06:30)\tNadège Paquette\tBefore diving into stories of fear and stories offering healing, I want to talk about the form of podcasting, about sound’s particular ability to produce effective and embodied responses in listeners. [Dark pensive music begins] I also want to present my method in this episode, how I try to practice what Kaisa Kortekallio calls “becoming-instrument” in order to attend to different associations and what they mean. The medium of sound and the form of podcasting here allow me to invite you to experience effective engagement. [calm but ominous music begins] Sounds create moods and emotions; they can make us feel connected to each other or scared and wary. In both instances, the creative form of intimacy, the feeling of being close to someone or something, or the feeling of being too close. In their series…\n(07:25)\tStacey Copeland\t“Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing.”\n(07:28)\tHannah McGregor\t“Sound-based scholarship,” and…\n(07:30)\tStacey Copeland\t“Making Podcasts Count”\n(07:33)\tNadège Paquette\t…Academics and podcasters…\n(07:34)\tHannah McGregor\t“Hannah McGregor”\n(07:35)\tNadège Paquette\tand…\n(07:36)\tStacey Copeland\t“Stacy Copeland” [music ends]\n(07:37)\tNadège Paquette\tUnderstand podcasting to be a mode of affect transmission. That means that the affects produced by sound and voice through the quality of their pitch, timber volume and rhythm, stick to the listener and moves them in ways that written form might not accomplish. [Electronic pulsing evolving into soft ambient music] Sound and voice thus activate different ways of understanding and apprehending our academic research. While listening to this podcast, can you attend to your affective responses? Does the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps] Does walking allow you to listen intently? Is music your favorite mood altering method? But also, how do you affect those sounds? How might your listening bring you to identify the sounds in a way that limits them? Dylan Robinson, xwélmexw writer of the Stó:lō people and author of the book, Hungry Listening, teaches me to be attentive to the ways in which I listen with hunger for meaning.\n(08:48)\tNadège Paquette\tThis hunger I inherit from my French settler ancestors, who arrived on this continent starving for food, but also for Indigenous lands, knowledges, cultures, and labor. Robinson explains that the drive to satisfy that hunger makes one lose contact with their sense of relationality and reflexivity.  [Eerie music fades in and out]\nRather than holding on to the Western imperative that, as Robinson writes, “all knowledge should be accessible at all times,” I attempt to sit with the limits of my understanding of Indigenous intelligence, voice, song, and stories. My limits can be heard in my imperfect pronunciation of the word xwélmexw, meaning “first nation person” in Halq’eméylem, but also in the fact that I access Indigenous knowledges, not through relations with Indigenous people, communities, lands, and waters, but through texts, and texts that I read in English, which is a colonial language.\n(09:58)\tNadège Paquette\t[Dark pensive music begins] I hope that my engagement here with Indigenous thinkers and stories is respectful and fruitful, but I recognize that it might not always be the case. To tune into influences I might not usually perceive because of my positionality and training, I attempt a form of reconfiguration that literary scholar Kaisa Kortekallio calls “becoming-instrument.” Becoming means that one’s own self, body, and mind is always in the process of being done and undone. [Music fades out. Brief chords and sounds from a printer play]\nInstrument means that mind and body like musical instruments and scientific instruments can be calibrated to perform a creative outcome or attend to certain phenomena. [Soft ominous music begins] Kortekallio writes, “the self instrument is tuned and tweaked in order to become more impressionable, that is, more receptable to the various effects of textural ecologies.” Or, in this case, to the effects of sonic ecologies, to the effects of sounds, beings, and environments relating to each other.\nTo become-instrument, I actively calibrate myself to become more resectable to the associations that might arise between sounds, stories, and concepts. [Music fades] While their association might become apparent to me, my understanding doesn’t exhaust the potential of these relations. [Eerie music begins] The association I make between the two first stories I will discuss in this episode is their interest in the affect of fear. Naming things can be a way to manage our fear of the unknown, to make it less threatening and more familiar. But, what if this fear of the unknown was indeed acquired because of language, because what we can’t name then becomes threatening? [Music ends]\n(12:01)\tNadège Paquette\tI came across this idea when listening to Radiolab’s episode, “The Wordless Place” where co-host…\n(12:08)\tLulu Miller\t“Lulu Miller”\n(12:08)\tNadège Paquette\t…Relates the first months of navigating the uncertainties of COVID-19 with her wife while their year and a half old son was still peacefully dwelling in the uncertainties of the wordless place. Naming, Miller explains, is…\n(12:25)\tLulu Miller\t“…This thing we do all the time, which is to group things together that don’t belong under one word, to preserve a sense of order, or comfort, or control.”\n(12:33)\tNadège Paquette\t[Tense light percussion music begins] This also happens with sound. Most people think about sound by reducing it through naming. It is one of the central premises of The Race of Sound by music scholar Nina Eidsheim. When we hear a sound but can’t identify its cause, we may ask the acousmatic question, “What is this?” The term acousmatic signals this perceived rupture between the sound and its source. Asking the acousmatic question reveals the assumption that there can be an answer to it. That the thick event of a sound and especially in Eidsheim’s research, of a voice, can be captured by a word encompassing its source. [Music ends] This belief that by naming we come to know what we name is reassuring. [Eerie music begins] Miller believes it is what reassured her son after he had a particularly intense night terror. Miller’s wife was able to appease him only by bringing him in front of a photograph of a Coptic tapestry and naming the things she thought she could see.\n(13:39)\tLulu Miller\t“‘Goat,’ she said tapping the glass, ‘flower, snail.'”\n(13:44)\tNadège Paquette\tMiller suspects that her son’s night terror was linked to his recent inquisition of words, which suddenly made him feel that the unknown was a threat. [Music ends]Neurologists say we’re wired to fear the unknown, but, what if, Miller asks…\n(14:02)\tLulu Miller\t“What if that fear only starts with the advent of words?”\n(14:06)\tNadège Paquette\tWe could say that causal listening, that is listening for the cause of the sound, and then naming the source is a process that attempts to remedy our fear of the unknown.\n[Strange sounds rapidly rise and fall]\nFilm theorist and composer Michel Chion explains that we’re engaged in causal listening when we ask: what is making a sound? What is the thing, object, being, or phenomenon, producing the sound, and where is its source located? [Dense eerie music begins] Causal listening or the ability to interpret sounds and identify their possible causes is both learned culturally and wired to our survival instinct. Instinctively we understand that loud noises almost always mean danger. But culturally we also learn to identify some loud noises as coming from unthreatening sources, and we’re thus able to respond to them accordingly. Music and drone fade out]\nIf I hear loud noise and it triggers fear in me, identifying its cause might bring my fear to dissolve. Naming, once again, is a way to regain a sense of control. [Pensive percussion with sirens begins] The horror film genre is one that attempts to elicit fear in its audience by using unnerving sound effects, but also by playing with the process of revealing a monstrous or threatening force which previously remained partially hidden. In the Western branch of the horror genre, film plots are generally built around this process of making known the unknown.\n(15:48)\tNadège Paquette\tMany Japanese horror films, however, reject this framework. J-Horror films produced in the 1990s and 2000’s participate in an aesthetic movement centering non-symbolic or non-representative frameworks. It is not the meaning behind the film or the source behind acousmatic sound that is horrific, but the lack thereof. [Music fades out] The lack of source and lack of meaning are frightening. Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is an important figure in J-Horror. [Ominous soundscapes from Pulse begin] In his movie Pulse, released in 2001, the sources of fear are many and remain partially unknown. Sonic drones, acousmatic voices, and the sound of computer circuits exchanging information are dislocated from their sources which evade understanding and create fear.\n(16:49)\tNadège Paquette\tPulse is set in the 1990s posed-bubble Japan at the beginning of the Internet. [Ominous soundscapes continue, with sirens] People are disappearing in Tokyo, leaving only a dark stain on the wall, like the ones left after the Hiroshima nuclear bombing which had burned human silhouettes on stone walls. It seems that there’s a computer virus infecting users and turning them into ghosts. Or it could be that the realm of the spirit has attained its capacity and is now overflowing, through internet circuits, into the realm of the living. Soundscapes fade out] Pulse’s ghosts have been interpreted as symbols of the hikikomori. Hikikomori are young adults, mostly men in their 20’s and 30’s, withdrawing from society by refusing to leave their room for months or years at a time.  [Eerie music begins] The phenomenon has been described as an epidemic that Japan faces since the 1990s. Some explained the situation as a backlash to the strict demands of the Japanese conformist society, which hikikomori are unable or refuse to fulfill.\n(18:02)\tNadège Paquette\tNaming the fearful apparition of a ghost by a known phenomenon, that of hikikomori allows for the reestablishment of the boundaries of the known. Yet the symbolic interpretation leaves out many other possibilities. By focusing on the meaning of the film, it’s affective power is left out. In other words, fear and everything unspeakable in the movie are overlooked. What I’m trying to explain here echoes Susan Sontag’s argument in her essay “Against Interpretation.” She explains that interpretation, too often, favors content over form and thus centers meaning and neglects the work of art’s affective quality. Sontag writes that “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.” But this nervousness is avoided when the work of art is reduced to its content, and its content to our interpretation.\n(19:01)\tNadège Paquette\tIn this sense, a non-symbolic reading would allow for the work of art to retain its capacity to make us nervous, to make us feel the effect of fear which uncertainty creates. To perform a non-symbolic reading of the film, I have to decenter abstract meaning to focus on the film’s materiality and my embodied experience of it. [Music fades out]\nWhen I listen to Pulse’s sounds, I hear layers of complexity. [Birdsongs and sawing sounds overlaid begin] I hear layers of human, machine, element, and animal entanglements. I feel confusion and fear. So why do I like it so much? [Abrupt silence]  I tune into those entanglements and those feelings of discomfort, and I feel the excitement of knowing that there is more to the movie than what I understand, that there is more to the world than what I can experience. [Birdsongs and ominous music fade in and out] In Pulse, what travels both through circuits and through sounds are unsettling presences that exceed human understanding.\n[Ominous soundscape from Pulse play]\n(20:14)\tNadège Paquette\tWhat I like so much about the film might be that it makes me feel what philosopher Timothy Morton calls “intimacy.” According to Morton, intimacy is what best explains ecological awareness. Ecological awareness cannot be reduced to the profoundly confirming feeling that we belong to something bigger. [Strings rise and fall] The feeling of belonging is accompanied by the sentiment of intimacy, which is the sense of being close, even too close to non-human presences like ghosts, nuclear radiations, or global warming.\nIntimacy is the sense of having other presences “under one skin,” explains Morton. [Eerie strings continue] Global warming gets under my skin and in my lungs when I breathe the summer air in Montreal. An air heavy with the small particles from the smoke caused by forest fires intensified by global warming. In Pulse, Ryosuke, a university student, experiences intimacy when gesturing to put his hands on the shoulders of a ghost in the hope that they will encounter no resistance, that they will traverse the ghost’s body, that it’s immateriality will convince him that the ghost doesn’t exist. But Ryosuke’s hands stop when they touch the spectre’s shoulders, which they can’t traverse. [Sound bite of object shattering]\n(21:55)\tNadège Paquette\tThe spectre is material and it is too close to Ryosuke, who becomes infected by the virus and himself eventually becomes a ghost. [String music returns] Perhaps dwelling in uncertainty and living through the effects of fear, nervousness, and uncomfortable intimacy allow me not only to intellectually challenge the Western paradigm of knowledge accumulation, but also to embody this challenge, to feel it. [Music fades out]\n[Soundscapes from Pulse are superimposed with sirens] Pulse ends on an apocalyptic vision of Tokyo burning. The city is deserted by the protagonists and a few other humans that are leaving on a ship to try to find a place on earth the virus hasn’t infected yet. While the end of the film is also the end of the world, the story remains open because the film resists a single overarching interpretation. The story remains open because of the non-human presences traversing its soundtrack.\n(23:07)\tNadège Paquette\t[Soundscapes fade out and soft music begins] The stories in this second section, they too are about the end of the world. But they go further than just opening to a new one. They teach me how to survive in the aftermath, and how to live with others in damaged worlds.\nI have associated the following stories because they all offer a representation of a weapon which Western powers have called a “test.” [Music fades out] We could define a test as an experiment which is carried out to establish the performance of something before it is taken into its intended use. The word “test” can be used to sustain a binary between the fictional world, where the test is performed, and the real world, where the tested thing will be used. Following Morton, I tune into the materiality of nuclear bombing by listening to a recording of the Caste Bravo nuclear weapon “test” that was launched on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954 by the US Army. [Drone sound fades in and out] Timothy Morton writes, “Words fail to describe the horror with which I heard the first few seconds. I had to tear the headphones off my head.” [Sound effect of someone tearing their headphones off] [Silence] What is maybe even more horrific than the sound of the explosion itself is the seconds of silence preceding it.\n[Dense silence that lasts too long for comfort, from the recording of the Bravo “test” followed by the explosion]\n(25:41)\tNadège Paquette\tCan I tune into this silence to hear what is to be annihilated by the explosion? Can I hear the attempted silencing of the Marshallese people’s protests? Are the 26 seconds of relative silence before the detonation enough to remember the 72 hours the US army waited before gathering the islanders? Are the 26 seconds enough to remember the 236 Marshallese who were exposed to the atomic fallout and transported to the American military base where they were to be used as “test” subjects?\n[Eerie music fades in]\nInhuman geologist, Kathryn Yusoff writes, “The fallout coated Marshallese bodies, ground, trees, breadfruit, coconuts, crabs, fish, and water.” The islanders were returned to the islands to study them as what was called fallout “collectors.” Human and non-human islanders were taken to be instruments serving to record the effects of such “tests” on human life and Pacific Island ecologies. But Yusoff reminds me that there is no such thing as a nuclear “test.” [Music ends]\nThe Marshall Islands are not a laboratory and the islanders are not “test” subjects, but people still living in radioactive intimacies causing high rates of leukemia, neoplasm, and thyroid cancers. [Tense electronic music beings] When the US army describes the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands as a form of “test,” the islands are constituted as a sort of fictional world whose destruction is not real. “Test” is a way of naming a form of nuclear colonialism and warfare. It derealizes the life of Pacific Islanders and constructs this ecosystem as a fictional world. The military can get a practice before having to perform in the real world. [Music ends] In her poem anointed…\n(27:52)\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner\t“Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner,”\n(27:54)\tNadège Paquette\t…Marshall Islander poet, performance artist, and educator returns to Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. She remembers it as a whole island with breadfruit trees and “women who could swim pregnant for miles.” [Sound of waves from  Anointed] She remembers the nuclear warfare waged against the island. She wonders if she will find an island with stories or a tomb.\n(28:24)\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner\t[Tense orchestration begins] “I’m looking for more stories. I look and I look. There must be more to this than incinerated trees, a cracked dome, a rising sea, a leaking nuclear waste with no fence, there must be more to this than a concrete shell that houses death.”\n(28:46)\tNadège Paquette\t[Orchestration fades out] Jetñil-Kijiner is looking for stories that weave the relationships that matter to communities of humans and more than humans, but her story tells me that Morton’s account of the recording of the Bravo “test” and Yusoff’s account of “nuclear colonialism” don’t, is the story of ongoing life in cohabitation with disrupted landscapes. [Energized electronic music starts] Jetñil-Kijiner tells the story of a turtle goddess who gifted one of her sons, Letao, a piece of her shell anointed with power. Letao could use the shell to transform himself into anything he wanted and he became kindling to create the first fire that almost burned the islanders alive. [Energized music fades and soft music begins]\nThere’s another shell story. Made of concrete, this one is supposed to shield the islanders from the toxicity of nuclear waste collected and dumped in a crater two decades after the end of the “testing.” There’s another weapon that calls itself a “test” and needs stories to weave an alternative discourse to the one of warfare, conquest, and colonization.\n(29:59)\tTanya Tagaq\t“Wait, I need to talk to Sedna and tell her to keep her treasures. Humans have damned themselves and it has nothing to do with Satan. It has only to do with greed. What will Sedna do when she hears the seismic testing?\n(30:26)\tNadège Paquette\tThat was…\n(30:27)\tTanya Tagaq\t“Tanya Tagaq.”\n(30:28)\tNadège Paquette\tAn Inuit artist, improvisational singer, avante-garde composer, and author reading from her novel Split Tooth. [Tense percussion music begins mixed with the sound of ice melting]\nThe novel’s protagonist was telling Sedna’s story before being interrupted by the intrusive memory of seismic testing. “Sedna is the sea goddess that came before Christianity.” Seismic testing is the technique used by companies to survey the Arctic Ocean for oil. Airguns are fired into the water from a boat. How the sound waves bounce back up from the ocean floor is captured by the ship sensors to be analyzed for indications of possible oil layers. Airguns are blasted every 15 seconds every hour of the day for several months. [Eerie string music begins] They produce sounds that can reach 230 decibels at close range. That’s louder than a jumbo jet and sound travels faster and further on the water.\n[Dense electronic music starts] 150 decibels can rupture a human ear and anything over 80 decibels means reduced intellectual capacity, slow digestion, altered diction, accelerated breathing, and heartbeat, as well as symptoms of neurosis such as anxiety and depression. Music fades out]\nSo when those extremely loud sounds traverse the arctic ocean, they hit creatures living in the waters, including marine mammals that use sound to communicate such as narwhals, belugas, whales and seals. [Music with harsh percussion begins] Narwhals have been disoriented by disturbing sounds in an area where there was seismic testing going on. They changed their migration patterns and found themselves stuck under thick sea ice where they drowned. [Music ends]\n(32:24)\tNadège Paquette\tAround 2011, seismic testing companies approached Jerry Natanine, mayor of Clyde River, Nunavut. [Music with harsh percussion returns] When he told his father and uncles about the project, they were, like Tagaq’s protagonist, assailed by the intrusive memory of seismic testing. They remember when, in the 70’s, Panarctic Oils carried out similar tests without consulting the local Inuit communities. The next spring when they went hunting, they noticed the seals were displaying strange behaviors. They did not flee or even react when hunters would approach them. They had pus exuding out of their ears. They were deaf.  [Music and sounds fade out] [Silence]\nI couldn’t find sounds of seismic testing on the internet, so I tune into this silence and to what it means. Do narwhals belugas, whales and seals hear a deafening ringing in their ears after airgun shootings and before they can hear nothing else? Do the calves miss their parents’ voices? Are marine mammals deaf so that I can listen to silence induced by noise reduction on my oil soaked headphones connected to my oil soaked computer in a warm library, thanks to heating oil, rendered even more cozy by oil soaked noise absorbing carpets? [Silence]\n[Watery sounds and eerie ambient music begin] When Tagaq’s protagonist wants to tell Sedna to keep her treasures from greedy companies practicing seismic testing in the Arctic, the protagonist is not proposing a form of symbolic reading of Sedna’s story. Sedna is not a character in a fantasy world who would be valuable only if she symbolized a real person, event, or phenomenon in the real world. Sedna is an-other-than-human being living in the protagonist’s world. And the categories of real and fantasy here represent a Western rationalist reading that dismisses Indigenous ways of knowing. Tagaq’s protagonist interacts with Sedna’s story and other Inuit stories to remind us as writes…\n(34:57)\tDaniel Justice\t“Daniel Justice.”\n(34:58)\tNadège Paquette\tCitizen of the Cherokee nation and professor of Critical Indigenous Studies, “that there are other ways of being in the world and those we’ve been trained to accept as normal.” Split Tooth might be what Justice calls a “wonderwork,” a story that brings the past forward and integrates a possible future for Indigenous peoples. In Split Tooth’s possible future, Sedna might hear the seismic testing, and if she does, she might keep the sea creatures in her miles long hair to protect them from the sound, but then the human inhabitants of the Arctic would starve. [Music and sounds end] [silence]\nNatanine, Clyde River’s mayor, explains that the community needs seals, narwhals, whales, and fish. The community and its mayor took the seismic “testing” companies to court to oppose their activities on Inuit land. In 2017, they won their case in the Supreme Court of Canada, which forbade further testing underground that Inuit treaty rights were disregarded, Inuit people inadequately consulted, and their relationship to marine animals dismissed. [Pensive percussion music begins] When companies performing seismic “testing” fail to consider how it will affect seals and other marine animals, the colonial worldview where animals are subordinate forms of life, whose bodies are killable and available to human use is given priority.\n(36:39)\tNadège Paquette\tAn Inuit worldview where animals are essential partners in Inuit life, is positioned as a fictional world where “tests” can be performed for the benefit of the real world down south. For the human and animal inhabitants of Inuit lands and waters however, seismic testing is not a “test.” Seismic “testing” is already a form of violence that corporations owned by non-Indigenous interests perform. Tagaq’s novel refuses such binary separation between real and fictional world. I thus want to resist the urge to categorize Split Tooth by giving it the name of a particular genre like fiction, memoir, or poetry. Those categories of the Western literary tradition might not help me encounter the work on its own terms.\n[Eerie music fades in] Tagaq’s story is told through a web of Indigenous perspectives. It is a collaborative work that she weaves with her band, community, ancestors, animal and mineral neighbors, with Inuit songs and worldviews, and stories like Sedna’s story and that of Arqsarnic, the Northern Lights. It is what Justice would call “stories that heal.” They contrast those healing stories with the colonial story of “Indigenous deficiency,” which has been told too many times to mask settler’s guilt and shame. [Music ends] According to this colonial story, many Indigenous people are suffering from poverty, homelessness, and addiction, not because of intergenerational trauma caused by colonization and genocide, but because Indigenous individuals supposedly lack in “character or biology or intellect.”\n(38:33)\tNadège Paquette\t[Energetic electronic music begins]  Split Tooth is not a story of lack but of partial positions and fulfilling relationships. The protagonist is busy with collective reinvention and remembering. Her pain and fear come with pleasure, healing and cunning plans. I love how the novel brings dualities in uncomfortable proximity: humans are both hating and loving, harming and caring.\nHumans are also animals, animals take erotic forms and attract humans. Predators are also prey. Spirits leave and come back to their bodies; bodies are shapeshifters.  [Music fades] Listening to Tanya Tagaq’s amazing audiobook Split Tooth late at night, day after day, her soft rhythmic voice began to feel like a haunting. Her “S” sounds were encircling my limbs like tendrils and I started reading my own work with the cadence of her voice.[Dark pensive music begins] I’m even doing it now.\nTagaq reveals harsh realities and traumatic events with a soft voice and a juvenile tone. [Dark music ends followed by playful music] The voice that she shares with the protagonist seems to me at times childlike, and at times wise and old, and sometimes mischievous and even cruel. Her voice goes from one to the other with only the slightest variation in tone, rhythm, or pace. [Music stops]\nI can’t separate the hero from the villain in Tagaq’s story, and this brings me to reflect on my own position as a white settler. I too am neither simply innocent nor guilty in the ongoing colonial story. I am implicated in the conditions creating trauma and violence in Indigenous communities, and me and my ancestors have benefited from colonial systems. Attending to the discomfort I feel when faced with the ambiguity of Tagaq’s characters helps me sit with the discomfort I feel when reflecting on my own position. I hope that this emotional engagement can help me be more accountable.  [Pensive music fades out]\n(40:49)\tNadège Paquette\t[Soft energized  music begins] Letao’s story and Sedna’s story as told by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Tanya Tagaq are complex webs of situated Indigenous knowledges talking back to imperialists and colonial stories of man as maker and destroyer. Just as stories like Letao’s and Sedna’s have always been important to the Marshallese and Inuit people telling them, they will have to be important to non-Indigenous people like me who would like to cohabit with humans and non-humans within the conditions of global warming. Those stories make speculative leaps toward other worlds that have existed, exist now and might exist in the future. Rational knowledges and facts are not sufficient to live with others on a damaged planet, so the challenge Indigenous stories pose to Western understandings of what is real and what is fiction has to be taken seriously.\nStories might allow us to walk that thin line between knowing too much and knowing too little. While humans of the 21st century know a lot about global warming, we seem to be unable to act. If rational knowledges, facts don’t bring action, can I turn towards unknowing? [Music intensifies and ends] [Soundscape from Pulse fades in and out] Pulse’s strange sounds like Letao’s and Sedna’s story are not exhausted by any symbolic reading I might make of them. I manage, in the understanding I have of them, a space for feeling nervous, a space not to name things or to cultivate distrust in the names I give.  [Eerie music begins]\nThe sounds in Pulse like the stories in Anointed and Split Tooth are palimpsestic, layers sedimented one over the other, like the layers of soil saturated with plutonium on the Marshall Islands, like the strata of oil, gas, and sedimentary rock in the ocean bed, like the layers of bodies infiltrated by strontium90, like levels of memories, practices, and knowledges collected in stories. [ Nadège’s voice echoes] There must be more to this. [Music fades out]\n[Soft electronic music fades in] Thank you for listening. Voices are from Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, Lulu Miller, Daniel Justice, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Tanya Tagaq. Music is from Tom Bonheur, merci Tom, and from Blue Dot Sessions. Soundscapes are from Pulse directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa with music by Takefumi Haketa. The recording of the Castle Bravo “test” is from JLiat’s website. Additional sounds from RadioLab, and Anointed, a film by Dan Lin and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner. Thank you. [Electronic music fades out]\n(44:20)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play quietly] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(44:34)\tHannah McGregor\tOur producer this month is Nadège Paquette, a master’s student in the English department at Concordia University. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n(44:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to Spokenweb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds.  [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9640","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E6, Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, 6 May 2024, Fyfe"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ultimatumpoetry/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creator_names_search":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/075e405d-1616-4d26-9c4a-9e1e778fe290/audio/a4f35390-9169-4a4a-8feb-9448945d3207/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-master-spokenweb-notes-from-the-underground.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:44:48\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,018,357 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-master-spokenweb-notes-from-the-underground\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ultimatumpoetry/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-05-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013.\\n\\nFURTHER READING / LISTENING\\n\\nAubin, Mathieu. “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.\\nLord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021.\\nStanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.\\n“What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival.” Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023,\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549750808576,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.\n\nUntil recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary  event from the margins.\n\nThis episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.\n\n00:00\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\n00:34\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n00:35\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n00:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn this month’s episode, our producer, Frances Grace Fyfe, takes us into the sounds of “Punk Poetry Archives.” The recordings are from the festival called “Ultimatum.” They constitute one collection that Concordia’s SpokenWeb team has been digitizing and cataloging. And at the same time, a SpokenWeb-affiliated and SSHRC-funded research team, led by Mathieu Aubin, has been working through research questions that emerge from these very same recordings.\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat project, “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides,” decided that a sound-based format would be ideal for sharing their research.\nEnter Frances Grace Fyfe, who joined the team for the production of this episode and, in many ways, becomes a listener to all of the archival work that the “Listening Queerly” team has been doing.\n01:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs Frances Grace tells us the story of “Ultimatum Through the Archives,” we hear stories of what “Listening Queerly” can do with archival audio. And we start to hear “queer listening” as a practice emerging from within and in relation to the research team members themselves.\n01:54\tHannah McGregor:\tLet’s get ready to listen to this month’s episode. And yep, it’s our first episode to come with a profanity warning, but it is an episode about a “punk poetry archive,” after all. Here is producer Frances Grace Fyfe with notes from the underground, sex, drugs, and rock and roll at the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”\n02:15\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental Music Overlapped With Feminine Voice]\n02:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\t[Audio Recording Begins] [Electronic Music Plays]\nWhat comes to mind when you think of a “poetry reading”? For most people, a poetry reading is a boring, stuffy event where you have to sit quietly and clap politely while a poet intones at length. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, it was the poetry reading that was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance.\nAt the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival,” which first took place in 1985, literary all-stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while revelling in drunkenness, doing cocaine, and sleeping with one another.\n03:11\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tThe event–which ultimately dissolved into financial difficulty and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors–broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have yet to be paralleled today.\nThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n03:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tUntil recently, most recordings from the “Ultimatum Festival” were predominantly kept in personal archives and often considered lost to many people who were part of the events. These recordings weren’t available for research until recently when a team at SpokenWeb began to digitize and archive them. In today’s episode, we’ll listen back to some of these recordings and learn about the unique approaches this team is taking to bring this event back to life.\nYou’re listening to: “Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”\n04:02\tMusic:\t[Electronic Music]\n04:06\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Announcer at the Ultimatum Festival speaking in French] musique de “Boys Du Sévère” qui vont jouer vendredi soir–\n04:06\tAlan Lord:\t[Audio Fades Away]\nIt was, you know: “blow our minds. You’ve got 15 minutes and get the fuck off stage.”\n04:21\tJerome Poynton:\tIt was like a huge show, you know, big, big show. But it was completely insane what we were trying to do.\n04:28\tFortner Anderso:\t[Overlapping] Overt sexual and bodily function of her (referring to Sheila Urbanoski) work, was like, whoah. You know, we’re not in Kansas anymore.\n04:38\tSheila Urbanoski:\tI remember at the end of it, somebody said, “how would you describe Ultimatum?” And I said two words: chaos, cocaine. [Background noise echoes “love”]\n04:47\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Background noise continues echoing “Love”]\n04:50\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Alan Lord presenting “The Ultimatum” in French/English] Nous allons faire l’inauguration, alors si je peux, uh, si je peux faire l’inauguration d’Ultimatum 2. Let’s, uh, well, je ne sais pas. Let’s go.\n05:09\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Upbeat music plays in the background]\n05:21\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tOK, so we’re here at Foufounes Électriques. Can you just describe the scene for us?\n05:26\tElla Jando-Saul:\tYeah, I mean, it’s a pretty spacious kind of place. Over here by the entrance, we have a bar. There’s, you know, an ATM machine. There are a couple of foosball tables sort of speckled around the room.\nAs I understand, the bar was smaller and there would’ve been sort of a clear performance stage. There was a lot of performance art happening at the time, and it wouldn’t have been as nicely decorated.\nIt was sort of like your typical run-of-the-mill, grimy bar, whereas it’s quite nice right now. Like it feels clean in a way where I don’t imagine that’s how it would’ve been.\n06:02\tFrances Grace Fyfe\tYou’re listening to Ella Jando-Saul, one of the researchers on the team who is digitizing and listening back to the tapes from Ultimatum. I asked her to bring me to the site where the festival originally took place. Les Foufounes Électriques–literally, “The Electric Buttocks”–a punk bar on Montreal’s Saint-Catherines Street.\n06:20\tFrances Grace Fyfe\tWhat I want to know is, how did this grimy punk bar—which only a few years after the festival ended would go on to host “Nirvana” to a sold-out crowd—become the site of one of the most avant-garde, performance events in Canadian literary history? Well, to understand Ultimatum, we have to go back to one man, Alan Lord.\nLegend has it, Alan, then a young engineer, had a vision to put together a festival that would bring together poets as well as artists and musicians from across Canada and the US with one goal: to break boundaries in poetic performance. So who is Alan Lord, exactly?\n06:57\tElla Jando-Saul:\tHe’s just a guy in engineering. And he gets into the punk scene, and then he gets into the poetry scene. And then he uses his funds from engineering to put together a festival, because, like a guy suggests it, one day. And then it sort of snowballs from there. And he starts dedicating basically all of his time and money to creating this series of festivals because punk is what gives him life and [Ella laughs] engineering is what gives him the funds to do this. And, when I say it gives him the funds, like sometimes he’s not paying his rent so that he can fly in some New Yorker for an evening.\nSo, that’s Alan Lord. Basically just a guy with motivation. And money.\n07:37\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIt just seems a bit bizarre to me that somebody would become so obsessed with putting on a poetry event that they would get nearly bankrupt themselves doing it.\nCan you speak to what was going on in his head at the time?\n07:53\tElla Jando-Saul:\tWell, let me go into the long version, and again, this is mostly pulled from his book. But you know, he’s in classes at McGill, and he sees this guy who has a Ramones badge, and he’s like, “oh my God, someone else in engineering is also into punk.” He starts getting into the Montreal punk scene, which is developing at about exactly this time, mostly in Old Port and mostly in Anglophone scene.\nThe Francophone bands that do exist are often singing in English, and punk becomes like the thing that really matters to him and the thing that’s taking up all of his time. And so he loses his full-time job that he had, and he also drops out of school, like right before his final semester. I think around, it’s around this time, he probably like starts a band and stuff. And then he meets Lucien Francoeur. Lucien Francoeur really teaches him about poetry. So he comes to him through the punk scene. But Francoeur is mainly a poet who’s got folded into this punk scene.\nAnd so he teaches Alan Lord about all of the great poets, Rimbaud and Burroughs [Ella laughs]. And then Alan Lord sort of digs deeper into this whole poetry thing. Meanwhile, he also goes from Rimbaud to learning about William Burroughs to learning about Herbert Hunke and John Giorno and the whole like, Beat scene.\n09:09\tAlan Lord:\tThe Toronto Research Group and also the “Antar gang” we used to call them “La Revue Antar” gang. There was the, uh, Pierre-Andre Arcand, he was called. His nickname was (). He did interesting stuff with machines and altering his voice like a vocoder and stuff. So yeah, that contingent from Quebec was really interesting.\nThey were this little clique of four or five guys, they were doing avant-garde stuff. Yeah, they were a fun bunch. And also the people from “Sound Poet,” people from Toronto for avant-garde literary stuff.\n09:48\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tHere’s Alan today, talking about some of the performers he invited to the first “Ultimatum Poetry Festival.”\n09:54\tAlan Lord:\tAnd there was this one guy talking about sound poetry. This guy, it was actually just sound, Jean-Paul Curté. He was like a professional sound sculptor and artist, and I have no idea how he got there… I have no idea who gave me the idea to invite him? Or maybe he called me up or something. I don’t know. But he was very interesting.\n10:21\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tOne thing you have to understand is that, before the first Ultimatum festival, the poetry scene in Montreal was divided pretty clearly along English and French lines.\n10:30\tFortner Anderson:\tIt was an odd time, you know in the early early 80s and late 70s. I mean you could still find very many people in Montreal, English people who would absolutely refuse to speak French. Lived their entire lives, but couldn’t say “hello.” And were extremely upset that they might now have to start saying “hello” because of the circumstances. And also, at the same, time was the palpably revolutionary feelings or, impetus of Quebec’s society the two communities, there was a big, big gulf between them.\n11:12\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Fortner Anderson, who came to Montreal from the United States and became involved in the Anglophone performance poetry scene. He was hired by Alan Lord to handle grant applications and other organizational tasks for the second Ultimatum festival, which took place two years after the first, in 1987.\n11:29\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnglophones and francophones were sort of doing different things in say the 60s and 70s. Anglophones had the Vehicle Art Gallery, and there were some francophones involved there, but it was mainly Anglophone space that was a space for like, experimental performance art kimd of stuff. And, on the Francophone side, you had this, like, very heated political moment. A lot of performance of poetry was related to politics at the time, so you have the “Nuit de la poesie,” become a recurring event around the Quebec separatist movement, and it’s a place where you can show that Quebec has an identity, that Quebec has a culture. Here I mean this is Francophone Quebecois people thinking of Quebec as a Francophone nation.\n12:21\tRené Lévesque, Archival Audio\t[René Lévesque talking about the separatist movement]\n…un grand parti souverainiste Quebecois.\nNous pouvons même devenir un peuple qui va s’étonner lui-même de ce dont il est capable…\n12:29\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnd so bringing in, like, Quebec’s own francophone literature and performing it, sort of using poetry to express your political idea to a large audience.\n12:39\tAlan Lord:\tI always found the Anglo crowd of Montreal very insular. And they sort of weren’t interested or whatever in what was happening on the French side. Through thinking about all this, I realized, I was happier and felt more at ease and comfortable and also challenged by the French language people here, seemed to be more open. And also there was the “Joie de Vivre,” and they were a pretty rambunctious bunch. I mean, including fistfights between poets. I mean [Alan laughs] poetry was rough on the French side. It was literally blood on the floor. The “sound des poets,” crazy stuff.\n13:27\tElla Jando-Saul:\tYou know, Toronto had this whole established literary community, all of the big literary magazines. A lot of the stuff that’s happening is in Toronto. So it seems like from the anglophone perspective like Montreal has its place sort of outside of the hub of the main tangents of Canadian poetry.\n13:46\tFortner Anderson:\tIt was a group of close-knit friends and at the time, and there was a number of interesting things about it. One of  them was of course, that Alan was mostly engaged within the French community. And the English community, of course, had, by that time, left.\nIt was a mass exodus of English reactionaries to Toronto. And so the city for the few English poets who remain was kind of left to ourselves. Their Quebec culture was focused on the independence issue, the English community had lost its relevance within the time, and so it was a remarkable kind of freedom which developed.\n14:30\tAlan Lord:\tWe were interested in the exploration of culture and experimentation. It was basically to entertain, to keep the attention of the public because usually, it was like “Don’t drag me to another boring poetry reading. I’m sick of those blah blah blah.”\nI remember boring poetry reading as much on the English side as the French; they’d be going on for half an hour on a poem. On the Anglo side, after every sentence of a poem they take 15 minutes to explain the line. I mean, that’s exactly what I didn’t want and in my little contract of the first festival; “you’ve got 15 minutes. Blow our minds, you’ve got 15 minutes, and get the fuck off the stage.”\nSo, I was kind of insisting that they keep everyone’s attention and do something interesting, and not, don’t bore the public and that worked out. I mean anybody who was there was certainly not bored.\n15:38\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh”]\n15:44\tFortner Anderson:\tI mean, Ian Stephens was an extraordinary poet. But then he had a big band, for the time. So there, too, it became apparent that one could take the power of the pop band and, as a poet and literary performer, use it to create something that had a big impact on the stage.\n16:17\tSheila Urbanoski:\tIt was dark, scattered chairs, people stumbling around. Everybody was smoking because you could smoke back then. No one sat there and listened. No one did that. It was very much like constant milling around and talking. A lot of the performances had to be quite captivating in order for people to shut the fuck up and listen.\n16:40\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Sheila Urbanoski, who lived in Saskatchewan before moving to Montreal, where she became involved in the art scene and the crowd at the Foufounes Électriques right around the corner from her apartment. Like Fortner, she also worked on “Ultimatum II” staff, as the office manager.\n16:55\tFortner Anderson:\tWith “Ultimatum,” there was work that was exciting, vibrant, and pushing the limits. You know, you would go in, and you would get confronted with images which you could not escape from because the performer was embodying them, incarnating them in such a way that the audience was touched and invigorated by that work.\n17:20\tElla Jando-Saul:\tI think it really comes down to the idea of an urban poetry festival relevant to a young urban audience in Montreal. Bringing in an experimental technology angle really gives some extra spice to the performances. I mean, Alan Lord himself had been experimenting with computers and what you can do artistically with them.\n17:43\tFortner Anderson:\tOne of the things that he did, which I thought was quite extraordinary, was to arrange for the 3-camera video recording of the festival. That was a lot of money. They didn’t get paid, but [Fortner laughs], beside from that, that took a lot of organization.\nAnd it was quite intelligent in that not very many people knew that it was only with a 3-camera video recording; that you could make something that could be edited into something usable in the future.\n18:23\tElla Jando-Saul:\tFor some of them, I think this was the first poetry event they had recorded, and they were like “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s cool. It’s interesting. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was the goal. It was like when he says “urban poetry,” he’s really talking about making poetry relevant to a young, urban audience. A lot of that is like, do something they don’t expect.\n18:47\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Tape of experimental computer performance at “Ultimatum” festival, followed by cheering and clapping.]\n18:58\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tAn underground culture usually needs distinct places and spaces where people with shared interests can gather. For the avant-garde underground scene that clustered around Alan Lord, that place was the Foufounes Électriques.\n19:09\tElla Jando-Saul:\tIt opened up, I think in ’83. It was a punk bar. It did all sorts of artistic events. They did I think weekly events where artists would paint live, and you could watch them paint live. At the end of the night, you could buy the painting. So that was sort of their thing. They were doing all sorts of different types of performance, and it became a place where Alan Lord and his friends were hanging out, and it seemed like the logical place. I think he knew the owners and the managers and whatnot. So it was sort of obvious that they would do it there because that’s where they were spending time.\n19:44\tSheila Urbanoski:\tNow, I got involved with that whole mess because I knew all those guys. I was hanging out with [inaudible], [inaudible] were very good friends of mine. And Alan was always around as well. So I kind of just got sucked into the vortex.\n20:05\tAlan Lord:\tThe Foufounes Électriques was interesting from ’84 to 1990—a countercultural, interesting, bubbling milieu of the alternate arts.\n20:19\tSheila Urbanoski:\tYeah. There was a lack of direction, so we made it up, and that’s fine. But the vibe at the time of having a club-like atmosphere, that was very common in the city. It was probably in the Foufounes Électriques or Poodles or Les Lézards to have this – what they used to call it, literature – it’s was more like a performance or a spoken word thing, and very much, we’re at a club, people may listen, they may not.\n20:55\tJerome Poynton:\tMontreal probably had more than a Food electric, but that was the main one. Smaller basement venues. They’re not even necessarily venues, but people working on stuff and having fun with stuff because it was about having fun. It’s like playing dress-up. Theatre productions at that time were like a more glamorized version of “Let’s play dress-up.” But it was like, okay, let’s put on a play, let’s do this.\n21:19\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re hearing from Jerome Poynton, who accompanied the poet Herbert Huncke from New York to Montreal. Huncke was one of the few poets associated with the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg and John Giorno, that Alan Lord invited to participate in the festival. But Alan Lord wasn’t exactly a famous poet himself. How is it that he got all these people to come perform in the first place?\n21:41\tElla Jando-Saul:\tSo he ended up, through a series of events, personally meeting Herbert Huncke, then William Burroughs, and then John Giorno.\nJohn Giorno, it seems, sort of had a hand in giving him the idea for “Ultimatum I.” From that point on, it seemed only natural to have him perform there, and once you know one beat poet, you can connect yourself to other beat poets through personal connections. Invite these people, who then become big headliner names. It wasn’t like “I had this event; it’s got Montreal people; can I maybe reach out to this more famous person.” It’s like, “I know this really famous person. Maybe I can make an event that fits them inside it.”\n22:22\tFortner Anderson:\tThe the cultural elements of New York City. That’s where Alan and the rest of us looked at for inspiration at the time. And this is where the extraordinary work was taking place. So there was that, but there was also an intermingling of that with the avant-garde Quebec culture. And so that was quite a heady mix at the time.\n22:47\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIt seems this heady mix of celebrities and laypeople, Montrealers and New Yorkers, and Anglophones and Francophones wasn’t without its tension.\n22:56\tSheila Urbanoski:\tWell, my favourite anecdotes of all time was I got asked, I can’t remember the guy’s name, Louis, at Foufounes Électrique, because Burroughs didn’t speak any French. He said, “Oh, could you help out because Louis didn’t speak any English? Could you help out with this old guy?” And I went, “That’s William fucking Burroughs.”\n23:15\tAlan Lord:\tGinsburg and Francoeur were reciting from memory the opening passage of “A Season in Hell,” and that blew me away. Ginsburg was doing it in French, so they probably had an understanding of French. But there’s a difference between France French and Quebecois. Maybe with the Quebecois, I think, they probably understood.\n24:07\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Presenter speaking in French]\nJ’espère qu’un jour on pourra dire ‘Herbert Huncke’ sans sans avoir faire de reference à la Beat Generation, avec ses rois Ginsberg, Burroughs, tout ça. Maintenant, j’ai fait un dernier vol. À la prochaine fois, c’est Herbert Huncke tout seul.\n[Herbert Huncke performing at “Ultimatum” festival]\nOkay. Well, lemme just say first, Paul, what has happened this evening in the past week? It’s kind of a hard act to follow. Oh, well, alright. In the mic, he says. Okay. Can you hear now? Yes. See, I have a problem with this lighting situation here.\nRegardless of all that, I lost my place. How do you like that? (“Look into the mic”) I will in just a minute. Some people can already go. Are you satisfied now? Okay. I really wanna start off with one particular story here because I feel that it will fit into the general theme of the so-called gathering or festival, whatever group of creative people doing things, trying to do things, young people, it’s very, very encouraging for an old man like me. You know, I want to think that things have progressed–\n25:29\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tPoetry, just like the underground scenes that clustered around “Ultimatum” and the Foufounes, also thrives on a tension between exclusion and inclusion. Poets can decide to omit certain words to build drama or generate certain feelings in their readers. People who study poetry have words for these kinds of omissions: “metaphors,” for example, can imply something without saying it outright, while “ellipsis” omits words that the reader is meant to glean from context.\nSimilarly, people doing literary audio studies are developing new techniques to “listen” for what is implied, but not necessarily heard, in recordings from poetry events. For the team at Concordia’s Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project, listening back to the tapes from “Ultimatum” also means listening back to what is unsaid.\n26:25\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Jean Paul Daoust performing “Numbers” in French]\n[Rough transcription] À côté, sans arbres, jeans, veste en cuir, bouche d’élève bâillée,les mains sur ses cuisses, un dérangement.\n26:25\tMisha Solomon:\tMy name is Misha Solomon, I’m a queer listener for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project.\n26:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tMisha is here to demonstrate this particular listening technique in the recording at “Ultimatum” by the poet Jean Paul Daoust.\n26:37\tMisha Solomon:\t“Numbers” is a poem about three men having an anonymous sexual encounter in Parkland Fountain at 4:00 in the morning, and that sexual encounter being essentially broken up by police as dawn comes. I think there would even be an argument that this poem is an aubade, maybe even a dawn poem, in that it’s about lovers being separated by the coming of dawn. I think queer listening could be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. I think that my approach to queer listening is just listening to content with my ears perked to the potential of queer content or queer angle. And I think that can, sometimes, be as simple as this poem, where a couple of lines in, it becomes very clear that this is about a gay male cruising in the park being read by a gay man.\n27:33\tMisha Solomon:\tAnd those are both also relatively explicit instances of queer listening that they’re textual, but I think that one could engage in queer listening in even the non-textual elements. And the nonverbal elements of trying to find the queerness within. Within the sound texture, within the recording, within the audience, even, based on their reaction.\nI think the poem’s approach to sex is somewhat summed up by a line at 10:15 on the tape, the line being “sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it.” I think that is sort of a thesis statement in terms of the poem’s approach to sex.\n28:16\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[From Jean-Paul Daoust’s “Numbers” performance: Sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it]\n28:24\tMisha Solomon:\tOne thing I’m noticing is that the three characters in the poem are not numero un, numero deux, numero trois. They’re number one, number two, number three; that they’re referred to only in English. And I think there is a sort of distancing that English allows for and that he (Jean-Paul Daoust) also uses English just to express these more poetic concepts, even if they’re sort of expressed in a kind of maybe “campy” or maybe overtly aphoristic way.\nBut, like the idea of sex that I talked about earlier is, “sex is throwing your soul into someone else, laughing about it.” To throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it. Or when you’re born, you’re gonna die like it or not, like you and I; these big ideas are presented in English. And I think it is sometimes easier to present those big ideas in a language that doesn’t feel as much your own.\nI mean, I think that we talk…you know, we think about liminality, we think about queerness at the margins, we think about bringing things together, therefore a mix of languages is in some ways queer, etcetera, etcetera. And I don’t know that I’m that engaged in the relationship here between bilingualism and queerness in terms of the content of the poem, but I will say that obviously both things are challenging norms of writing and poetry.\n29:43\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo, listening happens in at least three major ways.\n29:49\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Mathieu Aubin, who heads up the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides Project and oversees the team of researchers who engage in the practice of queer listening.\n29:59\tMathieu Aubin:\tOne is listening to the audio materials in the collections that we’ve been engaging with. The second is activating that kind of dialogue, that happened at that time through oral literary history, to use, which is a more contemporary but retrospective form of listening. The third is listening within the project’s team. And I think that that’s what I hoped for from the beginning. I imagined and hoped that it could provide an opportunity for hopefully LGBTQ plus identifying students to be part of the dialogue. And get to learn something by listening.\nWhat led to this project was finding out about a box of tapes that existed tied to a couple of literary festivals that happened in Montreal that were bilingual. There were festivals held in 1985 and 1987. The first one happened at Foufounes Electriques , and as someone who loves hardcore punk metal music, I’ve been to Foufounes a few times well before I ever heard about “Ultimatum.”\n31:16\tMathieu Aubin:\tIn fact, I remember going there the first time and going to a particular room and there was no band actually playing, but the music was really good. And I could see people actually “throwing down,” which is a specific form of dancing that’s part of the post-hardcore scene, and I think, needless to say, I also participated in that dance. So for me, it was really exciting, and I knew that Bill Bissett, who I had studied and also, you know, gone to know a lot over my PhD, was part of it. So I was interested in learning more about what the series of festivals had to offer.\n31:58\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tCan you just say a little bit about what it was about representations of queerness in this particular poetry series that felt like a useful or important avenue to look at from a scholarly perspective?\n32:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think that when I say listening queerly, I’m saying listening from my queer positionality to events and performances that may or may not be by LGBTQI-plus folks, but with that critical and lived experience lens. I’m listening from that positionality. You’re invited to listen from that positionality, I think that everyone on our team is listening from their positionality, which is why I thought the project would be really interesting to see, is what each member brings to it, and what they hear.\nAnd that’s more the focus, knowing very well that the two festivals were not identified as queer events but that queerness was still manifesting itself and part of the creative communities. And that’s sort of like bumping up against each other that was happening. And so I think looking for those things rather than just saying, “yeah, we had this reading series without thinking about queerness” is ignoring that aspect of that history. I’m careful to differentiate identity politics from the concept of queerness. Which the term (“queer”) historically, was used in very derogatory terms and was, of course, reclaimed and whatnot. But a queering of something is to push against the boundaries of normativity, and following that thread, I think that what the events of “Ultimatum” were doing was indeed pushing the envelope, like pushing against normativity.\n34:09\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tI see this emphasis on celebrating what’s marginal in the way some of the participants recall the event. Here’s Jerome poin on his own definition of queerness.\n34:19\tJerome Poynton:\tWell, just openness, openness to the illusion of normalcy [Jerome laughs], just to use non-judgmental. That’s the direction you strive for anyway.\n34:33\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tSheila Urbanovsky also talks about how performers were playing with gender expression at the festival\n34:39\tSheila Urbanoski:\tWith Patrice [inaudible], we were known as the country partners at the time, and we did a lot of performance work together as drag acts. So Patrice is, you know, a male presenting gay man, and I am a cis woman, and so it was a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body. So we did a lot of drag acts together as twins.\n35:06\tMisha Solomon:\tRemember that queerness isn’t new, even if it didn’t used to be called queerness, and obviously, we’re dealing with queerness from a time where it’s not like it’s hard for us to believe that people were gay in 1980, whatever. But to remember that this isn’t new, and also that you have that there are these queer foreparents, I think specifically in a sort of gay male genealogy, that there is this whole missing generation of gay men and queer people, broadly due to their deaths from HIV, AIDS. And so for me as a gay man living in a sort of quote-un-quote post-AIDS world (and I mean that it’s only a post-AIDS world for the very privileged) to sort of be reminded of a gay experience before my time is, I think, essential.\n35:58\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think that within cultural scenes at the time in which, and now I’m using it in the sense of sexuality and gender here, queer poets were a part of it. I think that those people, you know, had a sort of coolness to them. I don’t think that they were ostracized whatsoever. I think they were very much members of those communities and that, you know, the people didn’t care. But what does that mean at that time outside of those communities or scenes? You have policing; you have fashing, you have surveillance, you have larger media, mainstream media discourse, and vilifying people because of their sexuality during the AIDS crisis. Right, those things are incongruent with each other but coexist.\n36:51\tArchival Audio from a news report on the AIDS crisis\t[Clips from new reports reporting on the AIDS crisis, Ronald Reagan’s response to the AIDS crisis] “Lifestyle of some homosexual men has triggered an epidemic of some sort of rare form of cancer–” [Sound fades]\n37:09\tJerome Poynton:\tLarry Rosenthal built a tremendous collection of books in San Francisco during these times because so many houses were being emptied. It was so you could see it in New York, you know, and thrift stores. There were just things in them that were just too good, you know? You know too too much. Too much, too fast. Because people were dying, and so their apartments were emptied out. I don’t think I was the only person that was aware of that. Other people saw that, so that changed the performance scene and also, so many of the great performers didn’t make it.\n37:56\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh” at Ultimatum festival] “Crying, won’t do any good, crying won’t do any good–”\n38:06\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIn taking part in queer listening, the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team is drawing attention to something implied but not made explicit in the “Ultimatum” recordings: the way queerness was central to underground scenes at a time when queer people were often oppressed in overt and vulgar ways by larger society.\n“The oppression of queer people,” Sarah Schulman writes, “goes hand in hand with the larger process of cultural homogenization that was occurring around this time.” “Although AIDS,” she writes, “devastated a wealthy subculture of gay white males, many of the gay men who died of AIDS were individuals who are living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art, and social justice.”\nTheir devastation from AIDS in the 1980s occurred alongside gentrification in major cities like New York, where apartments left behind by those who had died of AIDS were often privatized or subject to dramatic rent increases. Schulman argues that a vibrant downtown scene requires diverse, dynamic cities in which queer people can hide, flaunt, learn, or influence. The underground scenes for whom ideas of queerness were so central relied on cheap rents and access to space is no longer guaranteed today.\n39:20\tElla Jando-Saul:\tI think it was David Sapin or something who said “Oh, I lived in a four-bedroom apartment in the Plateau, and we each paid $20 a month.” I think now they’ve subdivided the apartment into a couple of different apartments, each of which costs $600 a month. You know you do the numbers with inflation, and that doesn’t make sense. Montreal was a really cheap city to live in, and spaces were very cheap. “Ultimatum I” had like a $15,000 budget to put together an event that lasts four or five days with 50 artists, and you want to fly in Herbert Huncke from New York and put them up in a hotel to be able to do that, and then also have all of these marginal poets who are not going to draw a huge audience. So you can’t rely on ticket sales like, yes, you’ve brought in John Giorno and Herbert Huncke, but you’ve also got these nights with almost unknown francophone Montreal poets who are unpublished. To be able to make that happen, you need a cheap city.\n40:16\tAlan Lord:\tThe Foufounes Électriques was interesting from 84 to 1990. After that, they sold, the original owners sold it at a certain point in the early nineties, I think.\n40:30\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnd when it was bought by someone else, that person was like, “I wanna make money off of this property I just bought.” And you know, what doesn’t make money, is experimental performance poetry. So goodbye. And then, like two years later, “Nirvana” was playing there.\n40:47\tSheila Urbanoski:\tAs much as I remember, sort of made up as we went, just ’cause we didn’t know any better. And I am a little disappointed. I don’t know what it’s like in Montreal now, but I personally find a lot of literature events now to be quite dull because people just kind of sit there. They don’t assume because there was an element of engaging, even if you weren’t actively listening. I mean, everybody in Foufounes Électriques saw you hit the floor when Karen Finley started putting you up as okay. I mean, that’s just like everybody just went, “What the… [Laughs]?”\n41:26\tAlan Lord:\tAnd now there’s just nothing special there. There’s no ambiance. There used to be something in the air. You know, when my buddies and I were hanging around there, there was nothing. Not really.\n41:49\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens’s “Underflesh” performance continues playing] “Don’t talk anymore. We don’t love anymore. We don’t talk anymore. We don’t fuck anymore. We don’t–”\n[Stephens vocalizes, and instrumental music continues]\n[Audience cheers and someone thanks Alan Lord for organizing the event]\n43:17\tHannah McGregor:\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n43:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis month’s episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Past and present team members include Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and Misha Solomon.\n43:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tA special thanks to the entire team for their appearances on this episode and their help in sourcing audio clips. And finally, a big thanks to Scott Gerard for mastering and for the original sound compositions for this episode. The Spoken Web podcasting team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\n44:13\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Spokenweb Podcast outro music begins playing] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds.\n "],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9641","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E7, ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon, 3 June 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c9448971-5d6f-4edc-8389-6965f8c8fcd1/audio/cd747ce4-9bf8-4436-a9e9-a0a6013b5185/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"(52,728,937 bytes)\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-06-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SHOW NOTES \\n\\nTRACE at Theatre Passe Muraille\\n\\nSteve Roach, Quiet Music 1\\n\\nFalse Knees, Montreal-based graphic artist drawing birds talking\\n\\nÉliane Radigue\\n\\nKishi Bashi, “Manchester.” (Did you catch that this song is about writing a novel and Erica had just talked about novels? Not to mention the bird references. There are many more Kishi Bashi songs to listen to, but linking this since we played a clip from this one in the episode for these serendipitous reasons!)\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549755002880,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this month’s episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts is taking over the airwaves.\n\nShortCuts is the monthly minisode that takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a short ‘cut’ of audio. In this fifth season, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been presenting a series of live conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium – and in this full episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moynan King, Erica Isomura and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of our then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt and our then-sound designer Miranda Eastwood, who was there behind-the-scenes recording the audio and who joins in the conversations too.\n\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with the question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite an eclectic playlist and do check the Show Notes below for links.\n\nIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of Season Five of ShortCuts for conversations with Jennifer Waits, Brian Fauteaux, and XiaoXuan Huang. And, of course, this month’s episode with the longest ShortCuts yet: “ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.”\n\n00:01\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n00:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersection of sound, poetry, literature, and history, created by scholars, poets, and students and artists from across Canada.\nIn this month’s episode, Shortcuts is taking over the airwaves. Shortcuts is a monthly minisode, or short episode, distributed on the same podcast feed. Produced by me, Katherine McLeod, Shortcuts takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a shortcut of audio.\nAnd it wouldn’t quite be Shortcuts without the Shortcuts intro. So, let’s press play on the music and begin.\n01:23\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Electronic music begins playing.]\n01:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to Shortcuts. In season five of Shortcuts, you’ve been hearing Shortcuts Live, conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium.\nFor this episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moyen King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of Kate Moffatt, our then-supervising producer. And you’ll hear Miranda Eastwood, who is there behind the scenes recording the audio. Miranda even jumps into the conversation from time to time.\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with a question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite a playlist and do check the show notes for those links.\n02:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of this season five of Shortcuts. There, you’ll find the other Shortcuts live conversations from that same symposium. You’ll hear Jennifer Waits talking about the magic in the archives of college radio stations and Brian Fauteux on widescreen radio. Yes, widescreen radio. And Xiaoxuan Huang speaking about “hybrid poetics” and much more in that conversation.\nSo, without further ado, here is the longest Shortcuts episode yet: Shortcuts Live, Talking About Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.\n03:04\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Music fades away.]\n03:10\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, hello and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. I am recording this with Moynan King at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta.\nMoynan, thank you so much for joining us today.\n03:26\tMoynan King:\tOh my gosh, thank you for having me.\n03:28\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah! Um, oh, and I should introduce myself quickly because this is not the voice people usually hear on SpokenWeb Shortcuts. I am Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer, stepping in for our intrepid usual host, Katherine McLeod.\nSo, to get us going here, Moynan, would you just introduce yourself for us briefly?\n03:47\tMoynan King:\tYeah. My name is Moynan King. I’m a theater artist, performance artist, writer, you know, sometimes academic. I’m doing a postdoc at Western University, and the subject of my postdoctoral studies is “Queer Resonance.” So, I’m exploring the concept of sound as queer, queerness as sound, within communities and also within performance practices and art in general.\n04:24\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Yeah. I cannot wait to chat and hear more about this. But I think we’ll kick off by listening to what you’ve brought for us today.\n04:33\tMoynan King:\tSounds good. So, for the listeners, it’s about a minute and 20 seconds. [Overlap from Kate: Perfect.] So, we’ll just have a listen.\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio of harmonizing voices starts playing]\n06:09\tMoynan King:\tI guess that’s where it stops. There’s just a bit of dead air at the end.\n06:14\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. The listeners won’t be able to see this, but I had to literally put my hand on my chest. I was feeling that in my chest while I was listening. That was so fantastic.\n06:26\tMoynan King:\tThank you.\n06:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, I was gonna say, tell us, what we were just listening to?\n06:29\tMoynan King:\tOkay. So, this is a track called “Ghosts,” and it’s a composition by Tristan R Whiston from a show that Tristan and I co-created called “Trace,” that we started to develop back in, oh my gosh, 2012.\nIt started as an installation performance. We toured it across Canada. So we went to Regina; I know you’re from Saskatchewan. [Overlap from Kate: I am]. In 2015, we went to Regina, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, and Montreal. There’s someone else in our booth from Montreal. [Miranda Eastwood laughs]\nAnd then we put it away, put it in its massive storage cases, and then Theatre Passe Muraille just asked us to remount it. And when we did that, we turned it from being an installation into a play. So, we tore it apart and put it forward. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nAnd, so, what you’re listening to here is a track composed by Tristan Wiston; composed by him and of him.\n07:32\tMoynan King:\tSo, Tristan is a trans singer, performer, community activist. And over the course of his transition – that is over the course of the period during which he started taking “T” [Referring to Testosterone] – he recorded his voice almost every day, repeatedly singing the same songs and, you know, talking and singing and kind of expressing himself into this recorder and then also singing repeatedly over and over these songs.\nAnd one important thing to know about Tristan is that prior to transition, he was an incredible soprano singer. And so had one of those perfect high-pitched voices. And for many, many years, Tristan and I worked together in a group, Toronto-based group called “The Boy Choir of Lesbos.”\nAnd, so, we used to, there were a bunch of us, and we would dress as boys and we would sing in, you know, the harmonies of an Anglican boy choir. [Overlap from Kate: Right.] And so, we would sing and that was just sort of part of the collaborative history of Tristan and I. [Overlap from Kate: Incredible.]\nSo, Tristan came to me, and I think it was around 2011, and said, “I really wanna do something with these tracks. I wanna do something with all this material that I have.” And he’d already, then at that point, done a podcast. Well, you know, I guess at that time we didn’t call it a podcast. I think it had a different name, right? [Laughs]\n08:57\tKate Moffatt:\tAn audio essay. A piece–\n9:00\tMoynan King:\tYes, yes. An audio essay. Thank you.\n9:03\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, you’re welcome.\n09:03\tMoynan King:\t–called “Middle C,” and that was with the CBC [The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] – I mentioned that because I believe it’s still in the CBC archives. But he brought it to me because he wanted to do something more experimental with it, something less linear.\nSo, we started to work with all these tracks. And so, we did like tons of listening over, you know, a long period of time and kind of compartmentalize things. So, the important thing to know about that track, and in fact about “Trace” the show, is that all of the sound is made from Tristan’s voice–\n09:38\tKate Moffatt:\tWow–\n09:38\tMoynan King:\tAnd so a lot of the sounds that you hear in this track are fragments taken from different periods, different stages of his transition. And one of the big discoveries we made with, originally working with these tracks – and to be clear, Trey Justin is the composer. [Overlap from Kate: Okay.] So, but in a way maybe I, you could kind of call me a “doctor.” A “compositional dramaturg,” you know, because we worked so much together on the creation of the show, and those compositions were being created at that time. But so just to be clear, this is Tristan’s composition, but that I was involved in the process of it. And so yeah, that’s what you were listening to.\n10:21\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. That’s fantastic. And I’ve already got so many questions around things like the amount of audio that you end up with, like the recordings that become almost like an archive of sorts, that you’re then kind of like working with and engaging with, you know.\nI just think that’s so, so interesting. Wow. Okay. I don’t even know where to start with this. I feel so delighted. So I guess, and I would love to kind of tap into a little bit of that kind of collaboration that you were talking about. I’d love to hear more about that and maybe to think a little bit too about kind of like the role that listening is playing in that I feel like, you know, when it’s multiple people, at multiple ears, and especially working with that much audio. Anyway, I, anything there, that you would like to kind of speak to? I feel like that’s so rich.\n11:13\tMoynan King:\tYeah. It’s so interesting because I think just to address the topic of collaboration, you know, that it’s a collaboration. This piece, “Trace,” is a collaboration, you know, first of all for Tristan with himself [Laughs], you know–\n11:30\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, yeah, yeah, yeah–\n11:31\tMoynan King:\t–With all of his selves, you know, over time. [Overlap from Kate: Totally.]\nAnd then of course with me and, also thinking about collaboration and, artistic collaborations, Tristan and I like to say we’ve been working together since the late 19 hundreds. And because I think saying it that way gives you a sense of the depth of our collaboration and the amount of time and how much we have both changed in many, many ways. And also, how we have not changed in many other ways. You know?\n12:06\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.\n12:08\tMoynan King:\tSo, when we, and so when we were, when we created the first piece and, so it’s, again, it’s called “Trace.” And we are the co-creators of it. He kind of takes up certain roles and I take up other roles, but we always developed the thing together. You know, we really had a vision of creating this very immersive piece. And I still love that style, and I’m really committed to that style, like immersive installation, performance, that sort of stuff.\nBut when Theater Passe Muraille, which is a theatre in Toronto, it’s a very old theatre. It’s been around since I think the 1960s. And the space is certainly conducive to certain kinds of performance, but it’s very much a, like theatre, you know, with an audience and a playing space–\n12:56\tKate Moffatt:\tYes–\n12:56\tMoynan King:\tAnd so, what was exciting for us as collaborators was when Theater Passe Muraille approached us to remount – and you can’t see the air quotes, but I’m doing them [Laughs] – remount “Trace,” we just said “Yes.”\nBecause, you know, coming outta the pandemic, we’re like, “Oh God, great. Yes. Like, let’s just do a show. Oh, yeah.” You know, everything has been so crazy, and you all know what I mean.\nSo we just said “yes.” And then of course, at our first meeting, we were both like, “Yeah, but we’re not gonna do the same show” [Laughs]. We’re not even [Laughs], we’re not even gonna tell Theater Passe Muraille because we don’t want any questions. We just wanna do what we wanna do. But the important thing to understand, I think, about this piece, in terms of its like thematic, and this is very much connected to the topic of collaboration and community and the concept of becoming, this is something we were working with a lot that it’s an ongoing process of inventing and reinventing yourself, you know?\n13:57\tMoynan King:\tAnd this idea of like coming out, which is something we do over and over and over again, you know. And there’s a line in the new “Trace” where Tristan’s talking about his sister’s gender reveal party for a child, and then he says “I, nobody ever threw me a gender reveal party. I have to do it myself all the time.” [Laughs]. You know, kind of…And so this idea, it says, connected to this. And so these themes of, these taking the themes of Tristan’s unique experience as a performer and as a singer, and then kind of applying them to broader experiences and to the idea that, to ideas that are familiar to everyone, then that is that non…that stasis is counter to life. That, as long as we are alive, we are changing, and we are becoming. We–\n14:54\tKate Moffatt:\tNever stay the same–\n14:54\tMoynan King:\tYeah. And so the piece had to change too, because the last time we had performed it prior to this was 2015, and we had changed.\n15:02\tKate Moffatt:\tAbsolutely. [Overlap from Moynan: You know?] Okay. And actually, that was the next question that I wanted to take up was you talked about changing it from an “installation” into something.\nAnd it was interesting ’cause as you were, as you were telling us, you even were using your hands to indicate how you had to kind of “break it down,” and you moved your hands in a sweeping motion, and then you were like, and then you pushed away from yourself. You said we had to put it forward, right? [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.]\nYou had to really reorient yourself [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.] for the piece. And I thought that was so interesting ’cause to go back, even to my own, like my hand going directly to my chest, like a couple of seconds in, I was like, I could feel it in my chest and then I could feel it in my mouth and it was somehow just this extremely embodied listening experience.\nSo I would love to hear more about what that was like, having to think about the ways in which this piece and the show itself even like that, it’s just the embodiment of the archive that’s creating it. And the process that it was. And anything I did this last time, I very, I’m good at asking twisty questions. So anything there that you’d like to take up? I’d love to hear more about.\n16:07\tMoynan King:\tWell, I think there are a couple of key things that you brought up there. And one of them is that shape, changing the shape of a piece. And, for the listener that, yes, when I was talking about the installation, I kind of moved my fingers into sort of circular motion to sort of indicate like a space within which…And then when I talked about the theatre as Kate said, I put my hands and pushed away. So it’s like putting something out towards the audience so much, and I’m directly addressing you.\nAnd so changing the shape of a piece changes the fundamental quality and essence of the piece. Right? [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.] And then I’ll, I’d like to also talk about the archive a little bit more after that. [Overlap from Kate: Please. Yeah.]\nBut when we decided to do that, just to sort of give you a bit more information, there is some stuff online, which I can give you a link to some of these sounds, are online if anybody wants to listen to more of them.\n17:09\tMoynan King:\tBut, the idea we started with was this idea kind of an idea of Tristan walking through a forest of his own voices. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nYou know, you have in your studio here the YSM5s [Yorkville Sound YSM5 are compact powered studio monitors] beautiful speakers. We had 10 of those. When we created the piece, you know, we first showed it in the summer of 2012 and then toured it in 2015.\nWhen we did that, we had to hire someone to create custom software for us in order to channel the 12 different tracks to 12 different speakers. Sorry, 10, 10, sorry, my numbers come from another iteration. But anyway, so the 10, the 10 speakers, and of course now you can just do that on QLab [QLab is a cue-based multimedia playback software], right? Like, it’s like, and so interesting just in terms of change and time and how the technology has changed along with us, and how in 2012 we were so cutting edge, you know?\n18:09\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right–\n18:10\tMoynan King:\tAnd now basically it’s something anybody can do if you can have 12 if you can own the 10 speakers [Overlap from Kate: Right, right.] [Laughter] and the cable to get them, not a small thing to do. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah, yeah.]\nNot a small thing to have access to those things. So we were really working with this idea of change and, a lot of the key songs that Tristan was singing over and over as his voice changed were very water-related. Okay. So one of those, the “Waters Wide,” and the other one is called, I think, called “I Am Sailing.” And so interesting. And so we used that theme, and we created kind of a beach scenario, and we had these three huts, and one of them was sort of Tristan’s “Command Central,” and he operated the entire show.\n18:56\tMoynan King:\tAt some point in our development rehearsal process, I remember coming into rehearsal one day and just saying to Tristan, “You have to do everything.” So it’s like, it was like, I, you know, we were creating the piece together, but then when it actually came to the performance, he had to control everything.\nAnd I feel like that was really connected to the thematic of it, that it was, everything was coming out of his body and that this environment represented his whole body. And then he was kind of like the homunculus, if you know, that you would know that term as someone who studies that era. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.]\nAnyway, that’s what that was. And then we also recorded, set up booths, and had an interactive element where the audience recorded their voices, too.\n19:44\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s very cool.\n19:45\tMoynan King:\tSo trying to share with the audience this experience that Tristan had of sitting and recording your own voice. And so we set it up with like fragment sentence fragments and ask people to finish them. So we have this incredible archive segue. Here I go segue.\n19:59\tKate Moffatt:\tYes, segue. That was beautifully done.\n20:02\tMoynan King:\tVoices from across the country of people completing the same sentences. And it’s a massive archive. And we use it, we use it in Toronto at the end of the show, so we finish the show with it.\nBut I feel like there’s another thing there. It’s, and I don’t know, [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.] it’s untapped. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.]\nI don’t know what it is. So then when we went to do the second iteration, or no, sorry, the latest iteration, because really even in 12 to 15, there were a number of iterations and turn the show out. So again, I’m pushing my hands out in front of me to, for an audience. Early on in our developmental discussions, we started thinking about a lot, about time and change and how much we’ve changed and our archive. So then we reached back further into history prior to, you know, Tristan’s transition in the end of the “Boy Choir” into the deep, into the “Boy Choir” archives.\n20:53\tMoynan King:\tSo we used that material.\nAnd so in 1997, we had done a production, the “Boy Choir of Lesbos and Lord of the Flies.” So we did a production of “Lord of the Flies.” [Overlap from Kate: Oh, wow.]\nAnd we luckily have this incredible VHS [Video Home System] tape of it. So, you know, I mean, back when we were doing VHS, we were like, “Oh my God, it’s not film,” [Laughs]. And now we’re like, “Oh my God, it’s VHS, it’s a VHS,” [Laughs].\nSo that’s really exciting. And so we brought in these archives of the “Boy Choir” and integrated these images with this new material. And then in the process of that, at some point, once we decided to bring in the “Boy Choir,” we thought, “Oh, we need a new choir. We need to make a new choir.” And we need to make a choir that both Tristan and I could be in. So we created this non-binary choir that we then called the “Epic Choir of Trace Land.” [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so the show, our show in Toronto ends with the “Epic Choir of Trace Land,” and we plan to keep the “Epic Choir” going, actually. So–\n21:58\tKate Moffatt:\tI’m obsessed with this. I love that so much. This is incredible. And just, you’re talking and I’m like, I’m almost getting, I’m getting goosebumps. Because this is like, you’ve got so many different kinds of archives happening here. And like, intersecting and almost like creating a new one. And I just think this is, it’s so rich, it’s so the possibility, everything here. Oh, wow. And the embodiment and the, oh, all of it. It’s so good. Okay. Last question to wrap up here. [Overlap from Moynan: Okay.] I wanna ask [Overlap from Moynan: Yes.]: What you’re listening to now, like either at the conference or just kind of generally what’s, what are you listening to?\n22:34\tMoynan King:\tSo interesting, because that was the question you asked me. And the reason I brought this was because our show just closed on Sunday. [Overlap from Kate: Oh, yeah.] So all I’ve been listening to is “Trace,” right? Like, we just closed. So I’ve been listening to that.\nAnd then of course, you know, I don’t, I presented at the conference yesterday, and right now I’m engaged in a process of creating what I call “meditations.” And so other than “Trace,” I’ve been listening to meditations and to meditative music. And of course, working on my own material with that. But like last night when I went to bed, I listened to Steve Roach’s “Quiet Music 1.” Highly recommend it [Laughs[, go on YouTube, “Quiet Music 1,” play it quietly. Yep. 1970s experimental electronica. Yep. So that’s it.\n23:38\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Moynan, thank you so much for sitting down and talking to us about this today and for playing the clip. This has just been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you again.\n23:48\tMoynan King:\tThank you very much, Kate. Thanks for listening and thanks for inviting me. It’s wonderful to be here.\n23:53\tKate Moffatt:\t[Background ambient music starts playing] Yeah. This was so good. Thank you. Alright. Yay.\n23:58\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n23:58\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I’m gonna hit stop, which I did last time.\n24:00\tMusic:\t[Ambient music plays faintly]\n24:10\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. So, hi and welcome back to Shortcuts. This is another episode of Shortcuts Live at the University of Alberta.\nWe are here for the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium, and we are actually sitting outside if you can hear [Laughs] if you can hear some of our wonderful ambient sounds right now.\nIt has been so insanely beautiful and hot this week. I think it’s about, what do we say, 27 degrees right now? It’s warm.\nMy name is Kate Moffitt. I’m the project manager and supervising producer of the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And I am so excited to be joined by Erica Isomura today. Erica, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?\n24:52\tErica Isomura:\tSure. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Erica, and I am a writer, a poet, and currently an MFA [Master of Fine Arts] student, actually at the University of Guelf. I like drawing, gardening, being outside. I currently live in Toronto, but I was born and raised in New Westminster in Vancouver.\n25:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI love New West [Laughs].\n25:20\tErica Isomura:\tYeah, and it’s really great to be here in Edmonton in Treaty Six Territory. I’ve been really enjoying being here.\n25:25\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s been so, so lovely. It’s been a great week. Amazing. Okay. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. I don’t know if you wanna say a couple words or if you wanna just, are we gonna jump in?\n25:33\tErica Isomura:\tLet’s just jump into it, and we can chat about it afterwards. So hopefully the volume is up on this. [Wrong audio plays] Oh, sorry. That’s the wrong audio [Laughs].\n25:45\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s okay.\n25:48\tErica Isomura:\tThat was cool, though, [Laughs]. [Overlap: That was it.]\n25:52\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio recording of chirping and nature sounds]\n26:39\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. Thank you so much. Please tell me what we were just listening to. I feel like there are so many cool layers here because we’re currently sitting outside. What was that?\n26:45\tErica Isomura:\tThat was recorded on a road trip that I took with my sibling to Prince Rupert. We drove from our hometown all the way up north to a three-and-a-half-day drive to Prince Rupert, which is on the northwest coast.\nAnd that audio was of a group of European starlings that were gathered on this, under this dock, on this building where I think a ferry comes in. And so there were so many birds. I hadn’t seen so many like European starlings gathered together before. And it was really cool to see a bird that was also familiar.\nSince being here in Edmonton, I’ve actually seen magpies for the first time. I definitely took some video footage of them on my way to the campus, and I hadn’t seen them before. So it’s always exciting to see new birds and also cool to see birds that you’re familiar with.\n27:44\tKate Moffatt:\tI wanted to ask, ’cause I know I attended your fantastic plenary panel yesterday. And thinking about the ways in which I guess I just, I’ve been thinking about kind of like nature and nature sounds all week and how we listen to it and how we re-listen to it after when we record it, and kind of how we end up being these sort of like mediators between that sound as it’s originally happening and then, and listening to it later.\nSo, can you speak a little bit more, maybe just about listening generally? It could also be the role of listening in what you pick, choose to record, pick up, and how you plan to revisit it or your research.\n28:22\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, it’s interesting ’cause I don’t really, it’s interesting being at this conference ’cause I don’t really consider myself a sound artist. So I haven’t considered myself in that way before. Although I did this, this sound project that, you know, we brought to the conference this week. But then when I stopped to think about it, there’s such a sonic, important sonic quality to poetry and to writing and storytelling. Which is much more, you know, I do identify with those things as a writer, and I’ve been thinking a lot about non-visual ways of engaging with stories this past semester, I was TA-ing [Working as a “teacher assistant”] an “Intro to Storytelling,” “Intro to Creative Writing” class for first-year students. And a lot of new writers are really focused on visual cues in their work. [Overlap from Kate: Interesting.]\nLike, “so-and-so” sees this, it’s green, it’s round, you know like they’re not, there’s like a textural element that sometimes it’s a bit flat. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so that was a big part of revising with students who were learning how to engage with creative writing was bringing in sonic qualities, bringing in texture and touch, and you know, feeling–\n29:40\tKate Moffatt:\tThat there’s more than just looking–\n29:41\tErica Isomura:\tThere’s more than just looking. I was thinking about that while I was listening to this sound and trying to think about what sound I’d want to share because I’m trying to work on a project that engages with drawings and writing.\nSo it’s a graphic project that follows the road trip that my sibling and I took and engaged with a lot of the land-based history. And I was thinking, “Okay, how will I, how will sound be part of this visual project, in a book?”\nA book is so, it’s just, it’s just different, you know? Like, people sometimes will include “SoundCloud” links to listen to “spoken word” in their books or, you know, “QR codes.” But sometimes I find myself not, it’s not necessarily the most organic of processes to pull your phone and scan it or a hundred percent. You know, even if you go on a CD with the book, sometimes you just kind of ignore it. Right–\n30:35\tKate Moffatt:\tEspecially now you’re like, where’s the closest CD player?\n30:37\tErica Isomura:\tTotally. Right. So I’m not an audiobook person. I do listen to podcasts, but yeah. So it’s interesting to think about it. Like just different qualities that bring us into place and space and that interests me.\nSo most of my sound recordings in my phone are probably more nature-based, though I do find the intersections of, like urban landscape noises really interesting. Just the mixture of things that you’ll hear on the street. [Overlap from Kate: Absolutely.] Or even, you know, the crunching of footsteps when you’re out in the forest. There is, you know, thinking about our relationship like I guess the Anthropocene or our imprint on the land. And, you know, the sounds that we make, too.\n31:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. A hundred percent. And it’s so interesting, as you were talking about that, it started to make me think about like, how we capture things. Because yeah, I guess my question is kind of like having that recording from that trip, like how does that take you back as opposed to a picture of you or like a picture of those birds under that underpass. Yeah. Anything there that you would like to respond to? Please Go ahead.\n31:50\tMiranda Eastwood:\tActually, could I jump in? [Overlap: Yeah. Oh yeah.]\nJust because you’re talking about, you know, you get a CD in a book, and you’re not, you’re not probably gonna listen to that or a link or a QR code. It disrupts the relationship that you have with reading because that’s what people agree to when they open a piece they’re reading.\nSo the, even the idea of bringing in a different form of media is almost not, well, you break that relationship, I think, and the idea of sound and going to listen to something like specifically for sound, you’re engaging in a different relationship to whatever text you’re exploring. Right. Which I feel like that kind of pulled into your question about materiality and how like, I guess what your, what your general thoughts on those different types of relationships are.\n32:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, I think that what I was thinking about when we, when I, when you made that comment, Kate, and this relates to this too, is thinking about how do you represent sound on the page. Right. You know, like I think in poetry, there’s such interesting things you can do with white space, like… [Overlap: oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.]\nWriters and poets just talk about staring at a blank page. Just the possibilities of form and prose are typically like nonfiction prose, and fiction prose. It’s very blocky and chunky and there isn’t a lot of space for that creativity necessarily. Maybe there is, and maybe I’m not thinking about it. We did have a presentation with Jordan Abel a few nights ago, and I think he’s doing some interesting work with novels and space on the page for sure.\n33:28\tErica Isomura:\tLike disrupting the genre. But yeah, I think there’s so much opportunity for that in poetry. And I think as I’m drawing more and thinking about graphic forms there is the opportunities to visually kind of represent sounds and sound effects on the page, through shapes and through visual cues and kind of blending things in a way that’s really interesting.\nThere’s a comic artist I love on Instagram who actually lives in Montreal. I’m not really, I’m blanking on his handle, but he draws a lot of birds and like, they’re very funny comics. And bird, I think–\n34:11\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI know who you’re talking about ’cause I think I’ve seen these bird comics before of these birds just kind of doing their own thing–\n34:18\tErica Isomura:\tDo you know their name?\n34:19\tMiranda Eastwood:\tHis name? No, I don’t.\n34:19\tErica Isomura:\tHe was just at TCAF [Toronto Comic Arts Festival], but I didn’t make it to his table. But they’re funny, they’re hilarious. They’re great conversations. Like the birds are talking about us.\n34:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, I have seen this. Oh. And I can’t remember the handle either. Oh, wow. How many grad students does it take?\n34:33\tErica Isomura:\t[Overlap] End of the, end of the–\n34:35\tKate Moffatt:\tWe’ll put it in the blog post for the episode.\n34:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. But yeah, thinking about representations of sound on a page, you know, and Yeah. The non-human kind of elements. And it’s just so funny to think about what the birds are; the birds are watching us too, you know? Right. We’re not just watching them.\n34:50\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right. Yeah. Which even I think absolutely a hundred percent goes all the way back to Spy’s keynote on the first day. Right. Like, talking about that kind of like awareness of what’s around you, and not just your awareness of it, but it’s awareness of you, and how that’s informed and what it’s been informed by. Incredible.\n35:05\tErica Isomura:\tSo I think that the first sound that I actually accidentally played was, it was water from up north, from probably from the Skeena River ’cause I was, I think the previous audio was a clip from a cannery that I had visited.\nI was trying to record some sounds from a tour I did at the North Pacific Cannery, but also, I can’t remember if they had turned on the machine, of the canning machine that was supposed to be on display there, but wow. I didn’t want it to go into the spoken-like tour part [Laughs] for the audio.\nI’m actually really glad that I have some of those clips and I forgot about them until you prompted me to bring a sound clip. Amazing. So it was cool. And I’ll have to definitely re-listen to all those.\n35:46\tKate Moffatt:\tI love that. Okay. Speaking of listening, I think a last little question here to wrap up this amazing conversation is: what are you listening to right now? Like in your research or just more generally, what are you, what are you listening to?\n36:00\tErica Isomura:\tI’m listening to, like, kind of these like non, like a lot of music without vocals as I’m writing. [Overlap: Ooh.] I call them my “coworking,” like my “writing working” playlists. [Overlap: Yeah.]\nI was listening to Kishi Bashi earlier today in my hotel room, and he’s a violinist, kind of like a pop violin. So he loops his violin and sings, and he has a band, and he’s an amazing live performer. Thinking about sound–\n36:34\t[Sound of Kishi Bashi’s song “Manchester” starts to play]\t[Vocals]\nI wrote me a book. I hid the last page. I didn’t look. I think I locked it in a cage. I wrote a novel because everybody likes to read a novel…\n36:54\tKate Moffatt:\tErica, thank you so much for sitting and chatting with us today outside in this insanely warm weather. Thank you again.\n37:01\tErica Isomura:\tThank you, for, to both of you for hosting me.\n37:05\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect. Yeah, we got a little windy. [Overlap] I liked our little what was going on there.\n37:11\tErica Isomura:\t[Voices fading] Do you think it’ll be okay?\n37:13\tMusic:\t[Musical Interlude]\n37:17\tKate Moffatt:\tReally just gonna be a conversation where we chat about what we listen to. Did you have any questions before we start?\n37:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tNo, I think I just go with it.\n37:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. Amazing. Has it been recording this whole time?\n37:31\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYeah.\n37:31\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I love that because, at one point, we need to capture that little recording where I’m like, “Here’s like a quick and dirty version of what Shortcuts is. I’m gonna say hello, and I’m gonna be like, Hey, I Kate, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be great…\n[Voice fades]\n37:49\tKate Moffatt:\t[Music fades]\nHello, and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. We are at the University of Alberta for the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium, which we’re at the, we’re on the last day. And it’s been super incredible. We are very excited to have been here. But this is Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer and project manager for the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And today, we’re sitting down with Rémy Bocquillon. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Beautiful. can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Rémy?\n38:19\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Well, thank you for this podcast. And I mean, the whole symposium has been amazing. So that’s, that’s a great experience. I’m so tired, but [Laughter] yeah. So, I am not in sound studies at all. I’m in sociology and sociology theory based in Germany. I work with sound quite a bit as kind of how to use sound, and sound art in my methods of how to do research. So not an analysis of sound, but more like how to do it. And for the SpokenWeb, I have been the artist in residence. So I’ve been very fortunate to prepare a sound installation, which is just across here.\n39:01\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, yeah. Yeah. We’re currently sitting in a big room in the, I think it’s the Cameron Library. We’re right beside the Digital Scholarship Center where the institute is taking place.\nAmazing. Thank you so much. We’re so excited to chat. We’re gonna listen to something. Did you wanna, did you wanna play that for us? Do you wanna say anything about it first?\n39:17\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, so just pay it, and then we can chat about it.\n39:21\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect.\n39:24\tAudio of Êliane Radigue\t[Audio of Êliane Radigue speaking in an interview: Il est tiré le temps prolongé, le temps ralenti, pour étirer le temps, il faut le ralentir. Et c’est sans doute ce qui permet de mieux saisir ce qu’il contient dans le présent. En fait, la grande vérité du temps, je crois, est celle de s ‘inscrire aussi totalement que possible dans le présent.\nEt la meilleure façon de bien pénétrer le présent, c’est de s’y installer. Et forcément une autre durée intérieure à ce moment -là s’établit, une durée qui est presque sans limite. Et on tente de faire cela avec les sons, c’est un petit peu un artific, parce que le son a son discours, son mode de déroulement temporel.\nMais là, effectivement, je triche sans doute un peu en étirant les choses. En fait, une pièce ou une œuvre, quelle que ce soit le nom que vous lui donniez, peut -être une mesure serait peut -être une seule mesure, mais une mesure en l ‘occurrence de 80 minutes, puisque c’est la durée de Psi 847.\nLe refus de l’anecdotique, je crois que c’est très simple, ça ne m’amuse pas. L’anecdote ne m’amuse pas. Et en fait, je fais des choses pour mon plaisir. Merci d ‘avoir regardé cette vidéo.]\n40:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah.\n40:51\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. Tell us like, what was that, what were we, what were we just hearing?\n40:54\tRémy Bocquillon:\tSo, it’s an interview from Êliane Radigue who was, she’s still active, is a composer, an electronic musician. She’s one of the pioneers in electronic music and drone music. She’s done a lot of music with synthesizers.\nThis recording is from the 70s, 76, 77. It was broadcast on French radio back then, and today it came out as a record. So that’s, that’s actually–\n41:27\tKate Moffatt:\tLike today, today? [Overlap from Rémy: Today, today. Yeah.]\nLike May 5th, 2023, today. [Overlap from Rémy: Exactly. Yes.] Wonderful. That’s so cool\n41:32\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat was perfect. Like on point for this kind of event. And in this particular recording, she’s talking about time and her perception of time and how, in the stretching of sound, in drone music and electronic music, she has the feeling to manipulate time or to be in time to be in the present. So that’s, that was, yeah. Yeah. It’s, and I love her voice. I love how, how she, she talks about sounds. That’s fascinating. Yeah.\n42:00\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. I’ve kind of got goosebumps from that. That’s, that’s amazing. That sounds so cool.\nCan you give us a bit of, is that kind of what she’s talking about in the interview? I was gonna ask like, is she very much discussing kind of like this, that idea of like stretching time, this is that what’s in the interview?\n42:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, exactly. So she starts out by saying like, that to stretch out time and to play with time, you have to slow it down. And this idea of “slow down” and like that’s at the heart of what we do drone music, for instance.\nBut she did it in the seventies. She was really working with a synthesizer and very meticulously and had this kind of hard work and technique of trying out and having the pieces go on for hours. And a bit later in the interview, she even says, well, one piece can, it’s like one measure, one meter, but it’s like one that lasts 80 minutes. And so that’s, so that’s how long she takes to unfold the sounds.\n43:01\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s so wonderful. For the listeners, you can’t see, but Rémy likes using his hands just to stretch, to stretch out time, to stretch out the measures. It’s, it’s been, it’s very, it’s very wonderful.\n43:10\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Sorry, it’s not very radiophonic [Laughs].\n43:12\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, it’s fantastic. That’s so wonderful. And I guess I would love to hear more about how, I guess how this, maybe these ideas that you’re, that are in the interview are intersecting with like your own research and kind of your own work, but also maybe in particular like this interview and like listening to this interview.\nLike, does that intersect too kind of with, ’cause obviously you’re very excited about it, and that’s fantastic. I’d like to just kind of hear more about how it maybe intersects with your own work.\n43:40\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. So that’s a very interesting question and very compelling on certainly many levels because there’s this personal – yeah, I mean, as I said, a lot of her voice –  and I think she because she’s such a pioneer in electronic music… I mean, she has been, in the fifties, working with people like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, who were in France and beyond the first to do musique concrete and this kind of stuff, to integrate different sounds into music – and she was with them and then continued to work on longer forms. And then from the 2000s actually moving away from this synthesizer and doing more acoustic stuff. And that’s where probably it resonates more with my own work because she works a lot with this kind of connection between the instruments, the bodies, and how, in the unfolding of a piece of the music, you have this kind of network happening. A combination of different actors and bodies crafting the sound and crafting the music together how gives you a different sense of experience and of the feeling of space of time. That’s what she’s talking about actually, but really in the performance – how to do this on the spot.\n44:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd that’s what I found very interesting in how, through sound, you have this kind of connection between different bodies… And I call this as kinda modulating this kind of spacetimes through sound. You can just, yeah. Stretch it out and have this kind of very particular moment in time.\n45:24\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s fantastic. And it’s so interesting to me too that you brought this interview where she’s talking about it rather than potentially bringing a piece like you were mentioning, like there’s that piece that’s 80 minutes long, but it’s one measure. Is that what you were saying? [Overlap: Yes, yes. Yeah.]\nObviously, we’re not going to play an 80-minute coupon shortcut, but yeah, I think it’s. I love that you brought this interview clip. So I guess, and you can take this kind of as metaphorically or as literally as you’d like, but when you listen to this clip, what do you hear?\n45:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh, I hear a tremendous artist talking about the practice. And that’s something rich is very interesting because so often you don’t talk about the practice that much. And she’s doing that in such a way that you can see how she’s, or you can hear, how she’s working and how she’s very much like going into the material, really going into the synthesizer, into the sound. And, and I think that’s why these kinds of interviews are very interesting.\nBecause she – and I mean, that was on, so it’s in France culture, which is public radio, and this kind of experimental composer. So that’s interesting as well back in the seventies to have this kind of composer talk about their practice, and to have this person in a very maned world, like experimental music, like talk about her practice and having her practice also recognized and acknowledged. So that’s very important as well.\n46:54\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. And what do you think, like, would it be different to read about the process versus hear this interview where she’s talking about it? Like, is it different to listen to it than to read it?\n47:07\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat’s probably where you could actually tell me that because you, you maybe don’t understand that much. You said you don’t speak French, but you hear a voice–\n47:18\tKate Moffatt:\tWhat did I hear? [Laughs] –\n47:20\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI could jump in on that actually ’cause I was thinking just the way, the way she was speaking slow, not “ma” [The speaker uses the sound “ma” as a vocal filler], that kind of… I haven’t listened to her music obviously, but like to me, it almost sounded like she was mirroring, echoing, paralleling the process of that music and the way she was speaking about it, which I thought was very like, now I wanna listen to that music because of the way she spoke about it. And the process was like in the way she was vocalizing the process almost that, sorry that was my thought–\n47:55\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, that’s lovely. And for, for listeners, that’s Miranda who’s been hopping in occasionally on these Shortcuts conversations, and I’m so, so, so glad they are. Miranda is our audio engineer and sound designer for the podcast. Yeah.\nAnd I guess for me too, like Miranda, you have some French, well, lots of French; you know French. Whereas, whereas I don’t, and I feel, but I feel like I, I did hear very much the same, the same thing, like it, I I don’t think I’d realized beforehand that, that they were a composer or a musician.\nBut you do kind of get that, that sense. It did also feel very – I’m trying to think of the right word – rich, but also almost very like, internalized. Like it was something that I could just felt. So almost intense I guess, about the way that she’s speaking and, and the way that, that she was describing, I guess her, her process. It did sound very musical somehow.\n48:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYes. The pace, I mean. as you said, intense. And towards the end of that clip she’s very opinionated. She says the anecdote doesn’t amuse me, so just don’t do it. So that’s why she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the way she has this kind of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:02\tKate Moffatt:\tJust don’t do it [Laughs].\n49:03\tRémy Bocquillon:\tInteresting. So that’s why she, she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the, the way she, she has this kind of, of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:16\tKate Moffatt:\tI could feel it in my mouth while she was talking. Yeah. Like I could feel it in my own mouth. Yeah. There’s like a, when she was speaking a musical quality. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something very embodied about it.\n49:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd I don’t know if it’s, because back then in radio you had a different kind of rhythm in interviews as well. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because nowadays it’s very fast-paced and you have this kind of difference. So maybe it plays as well. But you see on YouTube you have this kind of documentary where she shows what she’s doing and that’s interesting because of this kind of modular synthesizer and she has this kind of stop clock. And so she’s very much in tune with this idea of time keeping time, but also letting time unfold. And that’s, so in a way that’s totally embodied in her practice, but also how she talks.\n50:02\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s in the interview. Fascinating. I was gonna say, there’s this taking of space of time to, to give it that rhythm, which as you say might be radio conventions kind of changing and then shifting, but regardless that it’s, that it’s there and we hear it and respond to it. Right?\n50:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, totally.\n50:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI’ve got two, two kind of final questions. And they’re very much related.\nOne of them is to just, I’d love to hear like a little bit more about how listening both to things like interviews, like process or this, but even in like your own work ’cause you were saying that you’re a sociologist more than like a sound study scholar, but that obviously sound is there. So like, I’d love to hear about the role of listening in your own, your own research, in your own work.\nAnd then maybe just finish off with like, you know, what you’re listening to right now, whether that’s research related or, or otherwise\n50:50\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh yeah, [Laughs]. Okay. Yeah. So listening in the work is, I think, central in different kinds of different aspects. I mean, in this kind of symposium we have been listening to a lot of things, to a lot of people, to a lot of sounds. And that’s the main aspect of it. Just to listen to each other, I think. And, but in sociology, more directly, it’s also about how to listen and how to actually leave space again to different voices and to different actors and maybe actors we don’t actually hear. So how to work with that.\nAnd how to leave space to those voices, to work with them in different ways. And that bridges to a kind of different way of doing sociology, which is making those kinds of new associations through sound, and which is also a different relation to knowledge and how knowledge production and distribution which is political, which is critical, which is ethical, I think, as well in how to bring this kind of multiplicity of actors, whatever you want to call them, in sounds, and having them like inhabit and then like move, move around.\n52:05\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd what I’ve been listening to, oh, that’s a hard question–\n52:08\tKate Moffatt:\t[Laughs].\n52:09\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. I mean, on my way here, I’ve been listening to a very well renowned French rapper called Orelsan, it’s one of his albums, like last year, two years ago, is very popular, so it’s not like “underground dark things,” [Laughs], but there’s this one song, I don’t know, it just like lift my mood and I love it. So [Laughs], yeah. Taking the bus. That’s what I was listening to.\n52:34\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. I love it so much. We’ve, we’ve collected quite the little, little almost like a little playlist as we’ve been asking folks what they’ve been listening to. I think we’re gonna have to try and put something together at some point here. This has been so wonderful, Rémy. Thank you so much for bringing, bringing this wonderful clip that I love that it got released today. That feels very serendipitous.\n52:53\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThank you. [Overlappinhg] Thank you very much for having and for coming to chat with us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.\n52:56\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n52:57\tMusic\t[Opera music starts playing]\n53:02\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Low electronic music plays] You’ve been listening to Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast. This episode featured conversations with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. Thank you for all of your sounds and your time. Thank you to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for putting such care and energy into recording these interviews onsite at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium.\n \nIf you’re at this year’s SpokenWeb symposium, there will be a live recording of an episode coming up as part of the symposium events. So if you’re there, do attend and be part of the audience. Either way, stay tuned, and we’ll look forward to hearing that episode on this feed next month.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast team is: supervising producer Maya Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say “hi” on social media. Stay tuned to your podcast feed, and as always, thanks for listening.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n "],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9649","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5 Trailer, Welcome to Season 5!, 18 September 2023, Harris, Healy, McGregor, McLeod and Mix"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Zoe Mix\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/6511fd80-29e0-41f2-8ad9-dda3420119fd/audio/a6369593-95d4-46c0-a56e-c005845f0179/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"trailer-v5-master.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:02:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,675,682 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"trailer-v5-master\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["The SpokenWeb Podcast is back for another season as we continue our quest to uncover “what literature sounds like.”\n\nWith a whole new line-up of episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network, we’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing, voice, and poetics, and much much more.\n\nOur fearless host Katherine McLeod is back and will be joined by Hannah McGregor, host of Seasons 1-3. Welcome back Hannah!\n\nWe have something for everyone curious about the affordances of literature, sound, history, and the amorphous “archive,” so join us for monthly episodes of innovative audio scholarship.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout! Cheers to Season 5 ~\n\n(00:03)\tHannah McGregor\t[Soft strummed guitar music plays and ends]\nWhat does the SpokenWeb podcast sound like?\n\n(00:10)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Quiet percussion music begins to play] In the fourth season of the SpokenWeb podcast, we conversed with a living archive.\n(00:15)\tComputerized Voice\tHello, and welcome to the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe listened to firsthand perspectives on living with wildfires in the Okanagan Valley.\n(00:24)\tSharon Thesen\tBy the time, I think, they started trying to put it out, it was out of control.\n(00:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe dove deeper into the sounds of data.\n(00:32)\tAdegbola\tHow much more a role will language play in the information age?\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe asked, what is sound design?\n(00:40)\tMiranda\tText, forms, travel, forms constrained, various forms overlap and intersect.\n(00:46)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe explored the impact of recording technology on how poetry finds its audiences.\n(00:53)\tFred Wah\tIn those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading off the page.\n(01:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe considered the stakes of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n(01:06)\tJentery\tWe might want to, for good reason, debunk the idea that listening is cheating or that, you know, books are not meant to be listened to.\n(01:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd we heard what libraries actually sound like.\n(01:15)\tDan Hackborn\tLike [Dan makes a nasally “wah” sound with his mouth] and like a [Dan makes a continuous “thunk” sound with his mouth].\n(01:20)\tKatherine McLeod\tOh, and we also went to talk therapy. [Percussion music ends abruptly]\n(01:25)\tPhone Voice 2\tOkay, well, why don’t you start by telling me how long you’ve been feeling this way.\n(01:30)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Percussion music begins again] My name is Katherine McLeod and I’m the voice behind Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. And I’ve been the solo host of the SpokenWeb podcast for this past season. This season I’ll be joined by Hannah McGregor, who is back. Yes, you might recognize her voice as the host of seasons one through three. Welcome back, Hannah.\n(01:51)\tHannah McGregor\tThank you, Katherine. It’s great to be back. And I am so excited to co-host season five with you and to work with our new production team: supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healey, and returning transcriber Zoe Mix.\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season we’ll continue exploring what literature sounds like with all news stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb Network. We’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing voice and poetics, and much more. Subscribe to The SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And join us for season five. [Percussion music ends and guitar strumming music plays and then ends]\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549763391488,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.2450583},{"id":"9653","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.1, Introducing ShortCuts, 19 October 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/164da98e-4bd6-41fa-8a64-d4bd8f238820/audio/5b19bf3a-ad35-4448-9807-a46a7ca621f7/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-s2e1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:06:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"5,847,293 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-s2e1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"– Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 18 Feb 1972, featured in ShortCuts 1.2\\n\\n– Daryl Hine, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 1 Dec 1967,  featured in ShortCuts 1.1\\n\\n– bill bissett, reading on CKVU-TV Vancouver, September 1978, featured in ShortCuts 1.6\\n\\n– Kaie Kellough, reading at The Words and Music Show, 20 Nov 2016, featured in ShortCuts 1.3\\n\\n– Daphne Marlatt, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, featured in ShortCuts 1.5\\n\\n– Gwendolyn MacEwen, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 18 Nov 1966, featured in ShortCuts 1.7\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549763391489,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Welcome to ShortCuts. To kick off the new miniseries season, Katherine invites us into an audio remix of short clips from deep in the archive to consider: what does it mean and what is possible (technologically, phenomenologically, ethically, poetically) to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio-criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? \n\n\n00:00\n \n\nMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:11\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. These minisodes take you on a deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. And this season we’re going to be exploring even more audio collections across SpokenWeb’s network. So we’re headed into audio archives and we’re taking a shortcut. We’re getting there quicker through a ‘short cut’. A cut. [Sound Effect: Scissors] Or a clipped piece of audio. Usually around two to three minutes in length. Sometimes it’ll be a poem or sometimes the social noises around a reading that tell you about what it was like to be there.\n01:59\tAudio Recording, Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer:\tUm, well, okay. Do you want to — oh, do you want to try it? Try improvising to, um, to, to, to, to a trip that’s here. I’ll let you read it. You seriously want to do that? Yeah, it’s just going to be some sounds.\n02:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was poet Maxine Gadd speaking with Richard Sommer about an improvisation with poem and flute that they then performed.\n02:17\tAudio Recording, Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer:\tYeah. Are we on? Sorry. Go ahead.\n02:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt was a clip featured in Minisode 1.2 from our first season.\n02:24\tAudio Recording, Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer:\tWhat? The flute. I think it’s over there. Rich is going to make some, some noise with my flute. I’ll make some noise at the beginning of microphone. Okay. Which one you want?\n02:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts brings you sounds out of the archives and into your ears. And what will you do with those sounds next? What you do with sound is one way of making scholarly criticism about sound. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s hear what ‘short cuts’ from last season sounded like. And let’s hear them spliced together. Spliced together. In this remix of highlights from last season, you’ll hear a sonic version of an introduction to ShortCuts.\n03:07\tAudio Recording, Daryl Hine:\tWell I also —this year or was it last —returned to my place of origin, British Columbia.\n03:20\tAudio Recording, bill bissett:\tThe wonderfulness of the Mounties, our secret police. They open our mail. Petulantly, they burned down barns they can’t bug. They listen to our political leaders phone conversations. What could be less inspiring to over hear? [Crowd Laughs]. They had me down on the floor till I turned purple. Then my friends pulled them off me. They think breastfeeding is disgusting.\n03:44\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellogg:\t[Overlapping Audio Begins] [inaudible] All of the, all of the seeped down century from slavery. Appearances to the contrary that had appeared in a far flung summer of empire. The idea of the slum above it, that born yesterday or at 12 pack of empties. That born yesterday was finished or a bubble in that seat. [inaudible] archived by teenage brain wave of autobiography. A wave of conservatism has crashed. Oldsmobile cutlass supreme.\n04:42\tAudio Recording, Daphne Marlatt:\tOn the corner, there half indecisive tarnish of atrophied atheists, one, a house sign, a place to enter. Where I make tea, your lips on the future caught. So, you could read me.\n04:59\tAudio Recording, Gwendolyn MacEwen:\tThis is a poem, which oddly enough, came out in a Mexican magazine in Spanish not too long ago looking completely unrecognizable, to me. It’s called “I should have predicted.”\n05:18\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Electronic] That remix was a series of short clips from our first season of these minisodes. Who are you listening to? Try to guess! Or head to spokenweb.ca to find out. Share which sound caught your attention by tweeting with the hashtag #spokenwebpod. I’m Katherine McLeod. And these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. And a big shout out to Manami Izawa who designed the beautiful logo on the minisodes new web space. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9654","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.2, The Poem Among Us, 16 November 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-poem-among-us/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7a7388b9-3da3-43e8-9875-942a1b0b9b15/audio/2344e96b-cb76-4795-a9cb-3ef9f26d7aa9/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2ep2-the-poem-among-us.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:09:27\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"9,144,155 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2ep2-the-poem-among-us\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-poem-among-us/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-11-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549764440064,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month’s ShortCut is an archival recording which transports us into the feeling of being at a live poetry reading. A feeling we are craving (right now in November 2020) as the covid-19 pandemic and social distancing continue. What is it that we are really missing about the live listening experience? The poetry? The poet? The anticipation of the event? The hum of the room?\n\nThe audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from the introductory remarks made by Muriel Rukeyser at her reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969: https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\n\n00:00      Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:25\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SpokenWeb blog, this series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:12\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n01:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts: short stories about how literature sounds. Our shortcut this month is an archival recording that manages to transport us into the feeling of being at a live poetry reading.\n \n\n01:34\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser Reading [Unknown Speaker] :\n \n\nI now introduce Muriel Rukeyser [Applause].\n \n\n01:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis is a feeling that many of us are craving right now in November 2020 as the pandemic and social distancing continue. To be in a crowded room listening to poetry. [ Audio Recording of Muriel Rukeyser Begins] But what is it that we are really missing about that experience? The poetry? The poet? The anticipation of the event? The shared experience of attending? The hum of the room? The unknown? Poet Muriel Rukeyser puts it beautifully and inquisitively when she says that we go to poetry readings —\n \n\n02:22\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tAll right. It’s partly out of curiosity and looking at the person and I go to see what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat on these rhythms is set up and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is shared —\n \n\n02:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs you can hear, she is creating this thought there as she is speaking.\n \n\n02:48\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\t— something is arrived at. Come to something with almost unmediated. That is the poem among us, between us, there. We are reaching each other.\n \n\n03:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat makes these words even more contingent upon their situated utterance is that she’s saying all of this at the very start of a reading, one that she gave in Montreal on January 24th, 1969. Imagine attending a poetry reading and the poet starts by delivering a long and seemingly improvised reflection upon why we go to poetry readings at all.\n \n\n03:29\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tAs you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems where you’ve got some marvelous summer night? Why do people come and listen to poems?\n \n\n03:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd then she asks us to think about what we are listening to at a reading. Rukeyser suggests that we are listening to the poem there in that moment. And Rukeyser makes this argument in a manner in which we cannot ignore it’s unfolding in time in that moment. “Something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at.” There. How do we get there? Rukeyser takes us there with a question: how many of you —\n \n\n04:11\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tHow many of you here has ever written a poem? What’d you put up your hands, please. Thank you. I’m always nervous before I asked the question. I asked the question now in all rooms, no matter how few or many people there are, and if they’re universities I generally look around to see whether the basketball team is there. But there’s always the moment of silence and looking around first. And then generally quite slowly, almost all the hands go up. Maybe four or five, do not put up the hands. And if I wait around afterwards and with any luck and favourable wins, the four or five people come up to me and will say something like, “I was 15. It was a love poem. It stank.” [Audience Laughter].\n05:12\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tBut the thing is, it’s a human activity. We all do it. We lie about it, you know, and they lie about it to us. And the fact is we all write poems. It is something we do. We come to this part of experience as you get a very, very rainy evening. Why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems? All right. It’s partly out of curiosity and looking at the person. And I go to see what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms is set up and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at. We come to something with almost unmediated. That is the poem among us, between us, there, we reaching each other. You giving me whatever silence you are giving me. And it comes to me with great strength, your silence.\n \n\n06:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe are reaching each other. You are giving me whatever silence you are giving me. And it comes to me with great strength, your silence. With these words, Rukeyser helps us understand what we’re missing in virtual readings. How can the audience give silence to the reader? Muting oneself is hardly the same.\n \n\n07:04\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tSo there’s mediation. It is not a description. It is not only the music and it —although certainly the reinforcement of sound. The sound climbing up and finally reaching a place. The last word. The sound that begins with the first breathing. The breath of the title. Keats doing “Ode to a Nightingale”. We hardly ever say “ode”. Nobody says “nightingale”. But Keats having said that, never has to say it again. It’s a bird. If you find it in these things, but from the beginning, from the first moment, that is the first breath. The thing that is made of. Suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that is, what’s your lives have been. Is a very short one closed song.\n \n\n08:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhen creating spaces for poetry to be shared now, how can we safely create a space for the poem to be a suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that, what your lives have been? And well Rukeyser’s words are particularly relevant for our current times, her opening statement also helps us understand what we are listening to whenever we’re listening to an archival recording. One that is far removed from the event itself. Following Rukeyser’s line of thought, in archival listening, we listen to a relationality unfolding creating space for the poem to be among us, between us, there.\n \n\n08:58\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Electronic] I’m Katherine MacLeod and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9655","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.3, Audible Time, 21 December 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audible-time/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/896a5664-84c6-47d0-8fb6-b8d0b6d6726a/audio/4a72e0c1-e6fc-4fd5-acb5-c4919e45f777/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"minisode-s2e3-time.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:09:11\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"8,818,239 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"minisode-s2e3-time\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audible-time/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-12-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Berrigan, Ted. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 4 Dec 1970, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/ted-berrigan-at-sgwu-1970/\\n\\nHine, Daryl. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 1 Dec 1967, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daryl-hine-at-sgwu-1967/\\n\\nHindmarch, Gladys. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 21 Nov 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gladys-hindmarch-at-sgwu-1969/\\n\\nSimic, Charles. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 19 Nov 1971, \\n\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/charles-simic-at-sgwu-1971/#2\\n\\nWright, James. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 13 December 1968, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/james-wright-at-sgwu-1968/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549765488640,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In trying to listen for time, this ShortCuts minisode listens for the New Year in SpokenWeb’s audio collections. What hopes do audiences have for the new year? And how do archival recordings help us understand our affective relation to time in our present moment?\n\nThe audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from recordings of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, all available to listen to here: https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/ and listed individually below. \n\nShortCuts minisodes are developed from ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG and the post that inspired this one is here.\n\n\n00:00      Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SPOKENWEBLOG, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:12\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tHow can you hear time? When listening to a recording? Can you be listening for time? In a set of recordings of a reading series, such as the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, there’s an audible marking of time whenever a host of a December reading mentions that the next reading will take place in January. The new year. What hopes did the audience have for the new year? How do these archival recordings help us understand hope in our present moment?\n \n\n01:53\tAudio Recording, Daryl Hine, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 1 December 1967:\tI negotiate the steps of paradise leaping to measures that I cannot hear. Thank you. [Applause]. [Announcer] I want to thank Mr. Hine and also announce that the next reading is on January 26 by the American poet, John Logan.\n \n\n02:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was a clip of the end of Daryl Hine, reading “The Trout” in December, 1967. What was the audience thinking? And what did they imagine for January, 1968? What did Hine imagine? What if these were the last words of poetry that he read out loud in front of an audience in 1967? The words suddenly feel weightier when thinking of them in that way, a feeling that I would argue we can hear in another reading that ends up being the last one of 1968 in the Sir George Williams Series. It’s a reading by James Wright on December 13th, 1968.\n \n\n03:14\tAudio Recording, James Wright, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 13 December 1968:\tSuddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom. Thank you. [Applause] [Announcer]I just like to express all our thanks to James Wright for sharing his poetry and his curses and blessings with us tonight and to remind you that the next reading in the series is by Muriel Rukeyser on Friday, January 24th. Goodnight.\n03:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat did the audience hear when they heard —\n \n\n04:01\tAudio Recording, James Wright, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 13 December 1968:\n \n\nSuddenly I realized that if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom.\n04:08\tKatherine McLeod:\t—? What hopes did they have for 1969 as they listened? 1969. The last reading of that year in the Sir George William Series was introduced by George Bowering and the anticipation of the new year comes up right at the start.\n \n\n04:23\tAudio Recording, George Bowering (introducing Gladys Hindmarch):\tAnother Vancouver night in the series. This will be, this is a final reading of the fall series and will be picked up again in January. And as you know, from the propaganda sheets, or presenting what I consider to be the center of the Vancouver writing scene. Gladys Hindmarch has been in that scene for 10 years and was associated with all those, with those people who’ve got all kinds of names over the last few years such as the West Coast movement and the Tish movement and the New Wave Canada and that sort of business…\n \n\n05:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tBy the way, Bowering and Hindmarch read together virtually on December 16th, 2020. I mentioned that to mark time here in this minisode. Back to the archive:1970. Let’s see how this year ends in poetry, or at least in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. The reading by Ted Berrigan on December 4th, 1970 is cut off so we don’t know if it ended with an announcement about the next reading. But it did end with Berrigan reading this poem. These are the last words heard in this last reading of 1970. It is the end of a poem called “People Who Died.”\n \n\n05:50\tAudio Recording, Ted Berrigan, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 4 December 1970:\tKilled by smoke poisoning while playing the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital during a fire set by a 16 old arsonist/ 1965. Frank. Frank O’Hara hit by a car on Fire Island/1966, Woody Guthrie, dead of Huntington’s Chorea/ In 1968. Neil. Neil Cassidy died of exposure sleeping all night in the rain by the railroad tracks of Mexico/ 1969.Franny Winston, just a girl totaled her car on the Detroit Ann Arbor freeway returning from the dentist / September, 1969. Jack. Jack Kerouac died of drink and angry sicknesses in 1969/ My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now. [Applause].\n \n\n06:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe are listening to what it felt like to hear those words in 1970, and to feel those deaths as recent. We are hearing time and what it felt like to feel in that time. In the Berrigan poem, that feeling is one of loss, a feeling that so often counters a feeling of anticipation. We hear that anticipation in my last example, the end of a reading by Charles Simic in 1971.\n \n\n07:26\tAudio Recording, Charles Simic, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 19 November 1971:\tThe greatest mistake. The words I allow it to be written when I should have shouted her name. Thank you. [Applause]. [Announcer] The next reading will be on January 14th – Dorothy Livesay will read at that time.\n \n\n07:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf I were in the audience in 1971, I would be looking forward to that reading by Dorothy Livesay in 1972. Listening for time in the archives reveals moments such as these. Ones in which hope is audible. That listening is something we can learn from as we anticipate a new year. We don’t know what is ahead. And, even as I speak these words now – recording them under my blanket fort at home – I hope they will be heard. [Music Begins: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Though, in what context I do not know right now, I play the role of the host in these archival recordings by marking time here and now, and by imagining a future time. In the role of the archival listener, I also know how it feels to hear a future time imagined as hopeful. It’s a powerful feeling to look forward to something, to share that feeling, and to listen back, hearing people looking forward to something. Thanks for listening and here’s to more listening together in 2021."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9656","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.4, You Are Here, 18 January 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/d8a35593-1877-46bf-94c7-d64f56737bdb/audio/faa70c17-eb76-4ddb-b635-578765ff8576/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e4-shortcuts-you-are-here.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:09:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"9,450,101 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e4-shortcuts-you-are-here\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-01-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/\\n\\nRobinsong, Erin. “Anemone.” Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. Coach House Books, 2020. Find out more about Watch Your Head as a book and online project here.\\n\\nRukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” (audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series). SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\\n\\nFind out more about poet Muriel Rukeyser by visiting Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549765488641,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts minisode listens to one of the January readings that we heard about last time: a reading by Muriel Rukeyser that took place on January 24, 1969. Along with listening for mentions of January in the recording, this minisode listens to how Rukeyser’s reading enacts the very connection that she describes – a connection being created between the poet and the audience during a live reading.\n\nThe audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from the recording of Muriel Rukeyser’s reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969.\n\n00:00\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. You are here. Last time we listened to clips from the SpokenWeb audio collections in order to try to hear time. Or rather to hear an anticipation of the new year, a marking of time. Whenever the host would say something like “our next reading will take place in January”.\n01:42\tAudio Recording, George Bowering:\tThis is the final reading of the fall series, and we’ll be picked up again in January…\n01:47\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we are now, in January. And let’s imagine that we are at one of those January readings that we heard about last time.\n01:55\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer 1\tI’d just like to express all our thanks to James Wright for sharing his poetry and his curses and his blasphemy with us tonight, and to remind you that our next reading is with Muriel Rukeyser on Friday January 24th. Goodnight.\n02:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tArriving to the reading, most likely in big winter coats, the audience has been looking forward to it. And now it is here…\n02:25\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer 2\tI’ll now introduce Muriel Rukeyser [Applause]…\n02:26\tKatherine McLeod:\tRukeyser is in front of us, reading her poems, in Montreal on January 24th 1969. Along with knowing that it took place in January, we can hear a sense of time in the recording. Let’s listen to this clip as our “short cut” into the archives for this minisode. She has just read “Elegy in Joy,” ending with these words that lead her into a story about something that marks this recording in time.\n03:00\t[Simultaneous] Katherine McLeod and Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\t“Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion and the world unbegun.”\n03:12\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tI thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico, and yesterday when I heard a story. It’s a story of what happened at Christmas time. I was in Mexico, I wonder whether you saw it. I heard of it yesterday in New York, as a little, three line story, in the back page of the New York Times, saying that the largest underground bomb-test was about to be held in Nevada in the States. And to that test, came five scientists, in Utah, in the States, to protest, to picket, to try to stop it. And another person who protested was Howard Hughes, who owns most of Las Vegas at this point, and had his own reasons for protesting. These protests did not stop the testing. The test was made. It was the largest underground test made yet. Do you know this story? There was a crack.\n04:29\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tThere’s a crack in the earth, big enough, they said — the way we talk — big enough for the Empire State Building. There’s a crack there, and deep under the crust there’s a three foot crack of some kind, and the rocks are still falling, and they say there will be earthquakes in various parts —unpredictable parts — of the world as a result of the shift of the under-crust. Now, last night, before I came here, on TV — late news in New York — they said that there’d been a quake in the Fiji Islands. I have no idea what the relations between these things are, I give it to you simply that something has happened to shift the under-crust – there will be unpredictable results. This is under the ground, the way we are bound to each other, we are also bound to each other through the air and the fall out has come over Canada – this is also a part of the story that I heard yesterday, and you, I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story…\n05:33\tKatherine McLeod:\t“I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story.” By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are. We are listening to the relationality created there in that room. Now, if this is sounding familiar, you might recall that in minisode 2.2, we listened to how Rukeyser introduced this very same reading. She talked about why on a cold January night we come out to listen to poetry…\n06:06\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\t…it is partly out of curiosity, and looking at the person. And I go to see – what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms…\n06:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd because of something else that is created while listening together…\n06:22\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tWe come to something with — almost unmediated — that is, the poem among us, between us there…\n06:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn her reading, there are poems in which one is acutely aware of being together, listening, even while listening to the recording apart. So how did her reading create that effect? Well, I would say that the story that we just heard of how we are all bound to each other does precisely that by asking us to think about our relation to one another. But that was through a story, an extra-poetic diversion between poems. What about in the poems themselves?\n07:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s listen to one more ShortCut from that same reading – a poem called “Anemone.” It’s one that not only exemplifies the creation of connection between the poet and the audience, but it’s also one that expresses the ecological attention of her story: the ways in which we are bound to each other through the earth and, in this case, through the ocean. In a recent collection of poems called, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, there is another “Anemone” poem by Canadian poet Erin Robinsong – and I would say that Rukeyser’s “Anemone” poem could be in this collection too as she too is responding to the climate crisis in her own way in 1969.\n08:23\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tAnemone, my eyes are closing. My eyes are opening. You are looking into me with your waking look. My mouth is closing. My mouth is opening. You are waiting with your red promises. My sex is closing. My sex is opening. You are singing and offering the way in. My life is closing. My life is opening. You are here.\n09:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Muriel Rukeyser reading “Anemone” a poem that creates a space of listening that is, at once, oceanic and intimate. And a poem that says to the listener: “You are here.”\n09:22\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Music Begins: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] I’m Katherine McLeod, and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. 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Macmillan, 1963.\\n\\n—. “Käthe Kollwitz.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. U of Pittsburgh P, 2006. \\n\\n—. The Life of Poetry. Current Books, 1949.\\n\\n—. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” (audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969), https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549766537216,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a 1969 recording of poet Muriel Rukeyser, and we’re going to stay in that recording for this minisode, partly due to the depth of material within this single recording and partly as an opportunity to reflect upon what a minisode can do – through archival listening – to make connections. Rukeyser once said that poetry is “a meeting place” and this minisode suggests that, like poetry, a podcast is a meeting place. Listen to find out how we arrive at this meeting place and listen, once more, to the voice of the poet who spoke these words: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”\n\n\n(00:10)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb‘s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SPOKENWEBLOG, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:14)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts. This season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a recording of American poet Muriel Rukeyser. [Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] We’re going to stay in that recording, immersing ourselves in it, for one more minisode. We’re going to do that for two, no three, reasons: one, this recording lets us talk about spontaneous and unexpected moments that can happen during a reading and then end up being recorded; two, this recording lets us reflect on what this medium of a minisode on a podcast feed can do to create connections; and, three, this recording lets us continue to ask the question taken up in the past two minodes: How can we hear time? [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]. With that, let’s begin our archival listening to specific clips in the reading by Rukeyser.\n(02:08)\tSpoken Web Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(02:08)\tKatherine McLeod\tOn a cold January night in 1969, Muriel Rukeyser started her reading in Montreal by asking the audience to consider …\n(02:27)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tAnd as you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you’ve got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems?\n(02:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn minisode 2.2 we listened to those opening remarks and we thought about how it creates a relationship between the listener and the poet, or really between the listener and the event of the reading. One of the poems she read that night was “Anemone.”\n(02:53)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\t“Anemone. My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening, you are looking at me with your waking look…”\n \n\n(03:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe listened to that poem in minisode 2.4 as a way of hearing the relationality that she spoke of as being created through the poetry reading, and how it was enacted through that poem. We also considered how an archival listening creates a connection between the past and present. Rukeyser’s critique of nuclear testing in 1969 speaks very much to our current climate crisis.\n(03:30)\tKatherine McLeod\tAfter making those minisodes, I shared the link, I tweeted it out, and I was elated to see a notification [Sound Effect: Phone Notification]: “Muriel Rukeyser has liked your post” No, it wasn’t Rukeyser herself haunting my Twitter feed, but it felt as though she had heard it – it was the Twitter account of the archival project, Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive. They had listened to ShortCuts and were excited about the recording that existed of Rukeyser – a recording that they had not yet been aware of.\n(04:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tMuriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive is holding a symposium during the same week when this minsode will go live – the entire symposium is based around Rukeyser’s series of “Elegies.” I assumed that there would be many recordings of Rukeyser reading from “Elegies” but it turns out that there are not – in fact, there might be very few – or even one. I know there is because, yes, it is on that very same 1969 reading by Rukeyser here in Montreal. Not only does this recording have a rare sound in that Rukeyser reads from “Elegies” but also when she introduces it she notes that she has never read it like this before. She cuts it up, and we’ll listen to her read the poem “Elegy in Joy” as our short cut [Sound Effect: Scissors Cutting] this month…\n(04:55)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tHere’s one piece of a long poem. It’s the last of a group called “Elegies,” which one hardly dares name anything anymore. It’s called “Elegy in Joy.” And it’s just the beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way. I’ve never cut it up. “Elegy in Joy.” Now green, now burning, I make a way for peace. After the green and long beyond my lake, among these fields of people on these illuminated hills gold, burnt gold, spilled gold and shadowed blue. The light of enormous flame, the flowing wide of the sea. Where all the lights and nights are reconciled. The sea at last. Where all the waters lead and all the wars to this peace. For the sea does not lie like the death you imagine. The sea is the real sea. Here it is. This is the living. This peace is the face of the world. A fierce angel who in one lifetime lives fighting a lifetime, dying as we all die. Becoming forever, the continual God. Years of our time, this heart. The binding of the alone, bells of our loneliness, finding our lines and our music. Branches full of motion, each opening in its own flower. Lines of all songs, each speaking in its own voice. Praise in every grace, among the old same war. Years of betrayal, million deaths breathing its weaknesses and hope buried more deep, more black than dream. Every elegy is the present freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion, and the world unbegun.\n(07:29)\tKatherine McLeod\t“Every elegy is the present” – what an ending to that poem. But, that is not how the poem ends on the page. However, by choosing to “cut it up,” as she says, she creates a new version — a version in sound — that lets those lines ring out, as though they were the end of the poem. “Every elegy is the present” is a line that reminds me of how she ends the entire reading by asking the audience to encounter the present moment. She reads “The Speed of Darkness” which ends with a question: “Who will speak these days, /if not I, / if not you?”\n(08:09)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tThinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours, no of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you? [Applause]\n(08:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe juxtaposition of those three sounds I find incredibly affecting: the powerful call out to you, the barely audible “thank you very much,” and the roar of applause that goes on for some time. I listen again and again to that…\n(08:50)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tThank you very much.\n(08:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI am in that room and can see her standing at the front with the microphone and her papers; and it is as though the entire room takes a collective breath between the reading and the applause, an in-between space, an in-between sound. That voice who had just spoken these words with such volume: “who will be the throat of these hours?” A phrase that reminds us of the body as the source of sound. This is the same voice, the same body, who wrote and spoke these words within the past year of this reading: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”\n(09:40)\tKatherine McLeod\tNow hear the applause again, all 25 seconds of it. If we listen to it all the way through we hear the announcement of the F.R. Scott reading on February 14th, bringing us back in time to the present moment of the reading, and back to Montreal with F.R. Scott the Montreal modernist. Let’s hear all of that again.\n(10:07)\tKatherine McLeod\tWho will speak these days, /if not I, / if not you?… Thank you very much… [Full applause for 25 seconds].\n(10:46)\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer at Muriel Rukeyser Reading, Montreal, 1969\tWe wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott and that will be on February 14th at the same time in the theatre in the basement of this building. Thank you. [Audience Background Noise]\n(10:57)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Start Audience Background Noise Underlaid] As you can hear, the recording doesn’t stop. Nobody presses the button. It continues recording. Now this is the sound of the room, this is the sound of the audience, this is the sound of what it felt like to be there. This recording of the social interactions, even as muffled as there are, conveys the sound of that reading in its time, which is even more interesting to us during our current time of the pandemic when we long for attending an in-person event. We are hearing what Rukeyser has described as defining the poem: the poem as a meeting place. It is a point that Jane Malcolm makes in her brilliant analysis of this recording. Do check the show notes for that reference. And it is a point that I hear again, listening now. A meeting place…\n(11:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI think of the conversations that I’ve had recently with Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive and I hear it almost as one of these conversations happening after the reading; but, it didn’t happen after a reading, it happened after a listening. That makes me imagine what connections can come of future sound-based criticism as forms like the podcast continue to circulate and to be heard. The podcast, like poetry, relies upon its “moving relations” – to quote a phrase of Rukeyser’s – moving relations within itself and with its listeners. And, to me, it seems that, like poetry, the podcast is a meeting place…\n(12:41)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(12:44)\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m Katherine McLeod, and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about ShortCuts and The SpokenWeb Podcast. And head to Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive to find out more about the symposium on Feb 19. If you are tuning in after the symposium, thank you for listening and for being part of these connections. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [Audience Background Noise Continues And Fades]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9587","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E8, How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence, 4 May 2020, Camlot and McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/fe25911a-e576-402d-ae9c-4b96143ad40a/sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,630,039 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-05-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References\\n\\nDolar, Mladen.  A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.\\n\\nLabelle, Brandon.  “Auditory Relations.”  In Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art.  New York: Continuum, ix-xvi.\\n\\nPeters, John Durham.  Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999\\n\\nPetriglieri, Gianpiero.  Twitter Post. April 3, 2020, 7:43 PM. https://twitter.com/gpetriglieri/status/1246221849018720256\\n\\nRowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray.  The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.  Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.\\n\\n“Sounds from the global Covid-19 lockdown.” Cities and Memory. https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/\\n\\nPoetry Recordings\\n\\nAntin, David.  “The Principle of Fit, II” (Part I). 26.:32. June 1980. Recording at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. PennSound. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Antin/Antin-David_The-Principle-of-Fit-II-Side-A_DC_06-80.mp3\\n\\nCox, Alexei Perry. Poems from Finding Places to Make Places. 42:39. The Words & Music Show, March 22, 2020.\\n\\nColeman, Nisha. “The Church of Harvey Christ.” 40:53. The Words & Music Show, March, 22 2020.\\n\\nPlath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Originally released on The Poet Speaks, Record 5, Argo, 1965. YouTube audio. 3:56. Posted December 29, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549767585792,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. In this episode, co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod explore how our contexts and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19.\n\nJason asks his literature and sound studies class at Concordia (via Zoom teleconferencing) how their listening practices have changed, and it just so happens to be the same day they are also discussing the importance of in-person performance before a live audience in the talk poetry of David Antin. Meanwhile, Katherine is noticing that many live poetry readings are now moving online. How are we listening to the world around us, and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? As Katherine and Jason explore these questions together – in recorded, remote conversations – they notice that our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal.\n\n00:00:06\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. From quieted city streets once filled with the hum of commuter traffic to seven o’clock cheers for essential workers to compressed audio on your latest Zoom call, the soundscape around us is changing. Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we invite you to listen in close to the changing soundscape that connects us all.\n00:01:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWe join episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod as they explore how our context and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19. With work meetings, in-person poetry performances, dinner parties, and more moving online, our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal. It has us asking: how are we listening to the world around us and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings, now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? To explore these questions together, here are Katherine and Jason with episode eight of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:39\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tCan you hear me?\n00:02:40\tKlara du Plessis:\tYes.\n00:02:41\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tAlright.\n00:02:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] [Audio, a robotic voice.] To normal. To normal. To normal. Public health. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] [Past Recordings Played One After Another]\n00:02:45\tJason Camlot:\tUh…\n00:02:49\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tHello.\nKlara du Plessis:\t\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tShould be able to hear you…Oh. I think I have it on.\n00:02:54\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t\n00:02:56\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tSo K     lara says she can hear me.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I can hear you.\n00:02:59\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tOkay, good.\n00:03:00\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t     Stay home. Keep at least two metres from each other.\n00:03:04\tAlexei Perry Cox:\t[Baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence  , would get through to humankind.\n00:03:12\tIsabella Wang:\tOh my gosh, you read one of my favourite poems.\n00:03:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I’m just going to pause ’cause my internet just said something about, I think we got a little off sync — [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:03:19\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] Yeah, you just froze, you just froze there … [Overlapping Voices]\n00:03:19\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\tFrom each other. From each other. Stay home from each other.\n00:03:26\tKlara du Plessis:\tBut what I’ve been noticing is that I don’t wanna be listening to things and I’ve been feeling mostly overwhelmed.\n00:03:26\tDeanna Radford:\tThere we go. Can you hear me?\n00:03:45\tNaomi Charron:\t[Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin.\n00:03:45\tHeather Pepper:\tWe’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight!\n00:03:45\tVarious Voices:\t[Overlapping, Distorted and Breaking Up] Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Where’d they go? There was a certain fit. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano]\nA kind of adjusted togetherness.\nVarious Voices:\tJason     s frozen. Side by side. Side side side. …For me,      hearing voice      has really been more important, in this moment. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:04:14\tJason Camlot:\tThursday, March the 12th: that was the last time that I had an in-person conversation in close proximity with someone other than my wife or two teenage children or one of our two little dogs. That was my last 40-plus weight training class. It was sparsely attended, but still there were eight of us there plus our instructor, Lisa Marie. We elbow-pumped instead of high-fiving when the workout was done. We already knew we had to be careful. The next day, the Quebec government adopted an order of council declaring a health emergency throughout the province due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, like millions of people across the globe, we’ve been in a substantial lockdown, at home, ever since. Major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we hear. Among the many disruptions, much of my and everyone else’s daily communication has moved online. Our 40-plus weight training instructor, Lisa Marie, adapted quickly, started a YouTube channel, and has been posting daily workouts every day.\n00:05:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, from Lisa Marie’s workout video] Hello again. So this is going to be day one of the home workout.\n00:05:26\tJason Camlot:\tConcordia University where I work mobilized pretty quickly with efforts to support all faculty members so that we can complete the teaching of our courses online using Moodle chat rooms and Zoom teleconferencing software. It was during the week of March 16th, the first week that the university shut down as I was preparing to move my literature and sound studies graduate seminar online with a class on the poet David Antin, that I began to talk through FaceTime and Zoom with my colleague Katherine McLeod–\n00:05:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi, it’s Katherine here.\n00:05:58\tJason Camlot:\t–on what we were experiencing and what it meant for how we are listening now.\n00:06:09\tMusic:\t[Dreamy Instrumental]\n00:06:10\tKatherine McLeod:\tMy own thinking about questions of how we are listening now came from noticing that some of the poetry reading events that had been scheduled for the spring were starting to move online in different ways. Since 2016, I’ve been publishing a weekly listing of mostly Montreal literary events and readings called Where Poets Read. The last event listed in Where Poets Read that took place in person was on March 9th. It was Épiques Voices, a bilingual poetry reading, an event that I actually co-hosted myself with Catherine Cormier-Larose and little did we know that it would be the last one for a while. After that, readings that had been planned as book launches, at local bookstores like Drawn & Quarterly, VERSeFest in Ottawa, the Montreal Review of Books spring launch, and an Atwater library poetry reading were all cancelled. Meanwhile, reading series organizers were quickly thinking of ways to move readings online. Individual writers started posting themselves reading in YouTube videos or on Instagram Live posts, but within the first days of everything changing, rob mcLennan in Ottawa, Isabella Wang in Vancouver, and Ian Ferrier in Montreal were experimenting with moving entire reading series events online. Instead of the usual posts on Where Poets Read, I started posting links to live streams of readings and I started to wonder how are we listening to poetry readings now, now that we can’t go out to listen to them in person, together?\n00:07:56\tJason Camlot:\tRight, so we’re both thinking about how we’re listening now under the present circumstances of social distancing and self-isolation, and thinking about our new experiences and practices of listening, especially within a range of literary contexts, including reading literature silently at home, teaching and discussing literature in the classroom, and performing literature on a stage at a poetry reading. So let’s turn to our first real conversation about these questions that we held on Zoom on March 26th, 2020, a little more than a week after the government-mandated lockdown and soon after I taught my first virtual class on the work of talk poet David Antin.\n00:08:40\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] Hello?\n00:08:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tHello, can you hear me?\n00:08:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, hi Katherine.\n00:08:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi.\n00:08:47\tJason Camlot:\tWait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?\n00:08:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tNo, actually I’m in my office room.\n00:09:02\tJason Camlot:\tHow’re you doing?\n00:09:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m good, given the situation. But yeah, today felt definitely more like a challenge to get started. Yeah, just… It took more energy to get going.\n00:09:23\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, me too. I had a terrible sleep last night, I kept waking up like almost every hour. So…\n00:09:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tI just made coffee now and I sent myself a text last night to give myself instructions for the morning and they said, “Make coffee, dance, be.” I’ve done the first two and now I am in a state of being.\n00:09:43\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you seem like you’re being–\n00:09:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:44\tJason Camlot:\t–so that’s good. You could check all three off. I like the idea of not only self-isolating, but self-texting.\n00:09:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:52\tJason Camlot:\tSort of like, wow, we’re in some crazy individual loops here, you know?\n00:09:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I only send them as reminders to myself, but who knows, maybe by the end of this I’ll be having a full conversation with me over text.\n00:10:05\tJason Camlot:\tOh, man…\n00:10:10\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Piano]\n00:10:10\tJason Camlot:\tYou can really hear the low-level anxiety and fatigue in our voices.\n00:10:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. So many Zoom conversations seem to have to begin this way now, with these kinds of emotional check-ins. And these are so important because we’re all feeling overwhelmed. But that’s also hard stuff to dive into at the start of a conversation. And I know I find myself saying that “I’m good. Oh, given the situation,” like I do in that recording. And then, when you listen between the lines, you can hear that the real answer to that question is more complicated than ever.\n00:10:45\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s one example of how we’re listening to each other a bit differently these days. Listening maybe with slightly more sensitivity to the other person’s mood. Listening to hear just how anxious or depressed someone is before you embark on an actual conversation about something else.\n00:11:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe did have a real conversation, though, after this affective, close-listening warm-up. I asked you how your class went.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tWe had to go back to teach online this week, so I held my seminar again and it went really well. I was surprised, like, and it was really great to see everyone. Everyone joined, everyone participated, and I think everyone was actually quite grateful because we’ve been reading all semester different theories of sort of how sound is mediated, different sort of audile techniques, you know, ways of listening, listening to voice, listening to other sounds. You know, the idea of soundscapes and the idea of voice and concepts of presence and things like that. I felt it was going to be unavoidable that we talk about what our listening situations are right now. And so since they were kind of equipped with a whole bunch of readings on that, on thinking about listening and sound, I did sort of tell them before class, I sent them all an email saying that the top of the class would be spent… Each of them would sort of give us a little bit of an account of how they’re listening now, sort of what their listening situation is and how their interactions with sounds may have changed as a result of them having to self-isolate.\n00:12:14\tJason Camlot:\tIt seems like we are re-negotiating our relationship to signals, noise, and silence. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] These different categories of sound are all related to each other. One can’t really mean much without the other. Noise is defined in relation to the signal, the thing we’re actually trying to hear. We speak of the signal-to-noise ratio. With a weak reception or a low signal-to-noise ratio, the signal will be lost in surrounding interference or noise, so that we can hardly hear the message or not hear it at all. With a strong reception, a high signal-to-noise ratio, [Sound Effect: Pulsing Tone] the signal will come through clearly and we hardly hear or notice the noise at all. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental]\n00:13:05\tJason Camlot:\tListen to this extended cross-fade of two clips, one of brown noise and another of a sharp emergency signal. It dramatizes the movement from a low to high–\n00:13:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] –signal-to-noise ratio.\n00:13:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, begins with “brown noise”, a soft static-y sound, and fades into the pulsing tone played earlier, the “emergency signal”]\n00:13:34\tJason Camlot:\tAs human listeners, we’re usually pretty good at hearing the signal at the expense of the noise. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] Murray Schafer says in his book The Soundscape that “noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore.” He was thinking about noise within environmental soundscapes, which he thought about as a composer would in terms of acoustic design. One thing that has come to our ears’ attention as a result of living the circumstances of a global pandemic and experiencing locally by staying at home, sticking to our neighborhoods and our own living spaces is the absence of the noises we were so good at ignoring under normal, noisy circumstances. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] The absence of the noises around us effects our mood, our sense of our place in the world, and leads us to compensate with different forms of listening. So we can speak of noise and silence in our sound environments and their effects on how we feel.\n00:14:35\tAli Barillaro:\tI live next to a bar, so normally there’s a lot of noise outside of my apartment on a regular basis even if it’s not like the weekend\n00:14:43\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Ali Barillaro.\n00:14:45\tAli Barillaro:\tSo not hearing people drunkenly shouting at 3:00 AM has been kind of strange. I don’t necessarily mind it not being there because I’m definitely sleeping a lot easier, but it’s definitely weird because that’s kind of been a constant and I’ve lived here for almost two years now. So that’s weird and different.\n00:15:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe absence of either noise or signal becomes present to us in the form of noticeable silence. Biochemist and doctoral candidate in English Marlene Oeffinger.\n00:15:16\tMarlene Oeffinger:\tIt’s almost like I feel with all the news and everything that we’re listening to there’s this constant barrage of noise. And then we were sitting on Saturday evening on the couch in our living room next to the window and usually Saturday evening is… You hear people walking outside talking, you hear cars, you hear planes. And so we were sitting and reading and not listening to the news and I suddenly had to stop because I realized how silent it was. It was dead silent and that’s just something I kind of associate not with the city and definitely not with the area here on a Saturday night. And it was just really completely silent. There was no noise from any neighbour, nothing. And it was almost distracting, the silence. ‘Cause I couldn’t stop listening to the silence. And yeah, I couldn’t even focus on what I was reading anymore because it was so unusual, I felt. It was just such a novel sound for the surrounding. Yeah, and that’s why I guess I just kept listening to it and it kept distracting me really from what I was doing.\n00:16:20\tJason Camlot:\tThe soundscapes outside have changed, but our relationship to the soundscapes within our domestic spaces have also changed. They become more complicated. We’re sensing how strange it can feel when spaces that one depends on for certain kinds of noise don’t sound the same, get quieter, or go silent altogether. But we’re also becoming more aware of our need for spaces that allow us periods of silence. My students told me how they had to work hard to find those spaces and how they’re now having to schedule slots of time for silent work. Thinking, writing, at home. PhD student Lindsay Presswell.\n00:17:01\tLindsay Presswell:\tSo my personal situation in my house is that my partner is a musician [Begin Music: Instrumental Guitar] and so normally he’s kind of here and he has a studio set up just over in the corner. And normally I’m like, I need to be out of the house. Like I have to be in the library or like in an atmosphere which very much feels like I’m working. But we actually have had to carefully negotiate the use of this space. We just started a Google Calendar this morning where I’m like inputting my lectures and like when I need to be sort of reading in silence ’cause I’m a very needy reader, I guess. We’ve discovered, like, putting in these soundproof headphones that he has, so I couldn’t hear the music as he’s working on things on the computer. But what that does is it… He like breathes loudly? [End Music: Instrumental Guitar] [Sound Effect: Heavy Breathing] Like, when those are in his ears, which I’ve never heard him breathe in my entire life. But that’s like a fun new thing.\n00:18:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tBreathing is definitely one of those sounds we don’t usually notice. But Lindsay’s situation spells out just how sensitive we’re becoming to sounds that are usually invisible to our ears.\n00:18:14\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Guitar]\n00:18:14\tJason Camlot:\tMany of my students are engaged in similar kinds of sound-space negotiations, as I am at home with my family. But we also seem to need to fill ourselves with particular kinds of sounds to compensate for the lack of sounds and noise that define our states of normalcy. My sense is people are maybe talking to each other more than they had been even if they’re doing so at a distance. My students were telling me that they’re getting off of social media and picking up the phone in ways that they normally wouldn’t do.\n00:18:42\tPriscilla Joly:\tYeah, I think people want to talk more at this time, particularly my parents. They call, like, very frequently now.\n00:18:50\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Priscilla Joly, a PhD student in English.\n00:18:53\tLindsay Presswell:\tAnd then just in terms of, like, the sort of broader situation, I noticed that my tolerance for noise that also feels fast or jarring has slowed, too. I’m like needing direct, verbal communication more than sending texts. Rather than like reading the news and doing my emails on the commute, I’m like finding time listening to traditional media or calling people as well, which normally I don’t do because I associate speaking like it’s a slow way of communicating. I deactivated my Twitter account very quickly last week because [Begin Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental] I was just like, this is not the kind of… These aren’t the sounds… This isn’t the news that I want to be listening to.\n00:19:42\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Lindsay Presswell. John Durham Peters and his description of the uncanniness that surrounded early telephonic communication—talking into telephones—noted the existential anxiety that came from relying on the voice to do it all. That is, to do all the work of communicating one’s thoughts, feelings, and presence to another person. He talks about the disquiet of a medium defined by strange voices entering the home, the disappearance of one’s words into an empty black hole in the absence of the listener’s face. And he suggests that the telephone contributed to the modern derangement of dialogue by splitting conversation into two halves that meet only in the cyberspace of the wires. And that’s when telecommunications media relied on wires from start to finish. I cancelled my landline five years ago and threw myself at the mercy of wireless communication. Course, there’s still fiber optic cables at work, but wireless communication, the forms of interpersonal exchange we’re now forced to have instead of most and sometimes any form of interpersonal exchange, represent a further kind of derangement. The condensed and proximate signal [Sound Effect: Dial Tone] that came through the carbon microphone of the old-timey telephone in my teenage experience, at least, came to feel intimate in its own powerfully reduced way. The banal, unexpected kinds of disruptions we experience when we try to Skype, Zoom, and FaceTime [Sound Effect: Voices Breaking Up In Call] are too annoying and thinning to live up to Durham Peter’s sort of romantic idea of telephonic derangement. Grandiose concepts of sympathy, relationality, intimate connection are reduced to the irritatingly tinny sounding idea of connectivity. [End Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental]\n00:21:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Katherine McLeod’s voice breaking up during a call, sounding tinny and distorted]\n00:21:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhy was that happening to my voice there?\n00:21:46\tJason Camlot:\tI was wondering about that myself and so I started googling for answers. [Sound Effect: Electronic Interference] Part of it has to do with the way digital information is sent. We’re not getting interference with a continuous signal along the wire here. Our voices are transduced and converted into frequency data and then sent via a wifi signal as data packets, like assemblages of bits of data that add up to the sound of your voice. [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference] The computer waits for packets that represent a good signal-to-noise ratio of your voice. If something interferes with the analog signal that’s sending the data, then the computer, let’s say it’s listening for the right formula of your voice, will have trouble understanding, let’s say hearing the packets of data, will reject them as noise, and then wait for them to be sent again. When this keeps happening, you either get partial delivery of the packets, which sounds weird or complete drop-outs. Sort of like if a Star Trek teleportation goes horribly wrong because all the disassembled molecules of the person didn’t come back together again or like when Ron Weasley gets seriously splinched in that bad apparating accident in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Ron left part of his upper arm behind; we leave packets of our voice signal behind. Still, even if old-style landline telephones sometimes sounded better than cell phones and Zoom, these newer media in the present context of social isolation are making us feel what’s at stake in a scenario that suggests the loss of real old-time hanging out in person. My students were clear in expressing the frustration they felt from bad connections. [End Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference]\n00:23:24\tAli Barillaro:\tMy internet connection’s not the best–\n00:23:28\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:23:28\tAli Barillaro:\t–so listening to people through quite a bit of distortion has been a weird thing to kind of manage and just sort of… I’ve had to kind of let it happen and not let it get frustrating. Dealing with the weird kind of distortions and sometimes when the sound cuts off completely it’ll take a couple of seconds and then restart, but almost as if someone’s pressed fast forward. So trying to keep track of everything is kind of interesting.\n00:23:58\tJason Camlot:\tAnd in talking to my students, I let myself get carried away and waxed philosophical about the existential implications of a weak wifi signal.\n00:24:06\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] Your point about the frustration of communicating with people, especially through wifi-based telecommunication system, which is what we’re doing so much and what the university is having us do right now, I think is super important as well. It’s frustrating when you feel like you can’t have the confidence in the voice continuing. That’s a huge difference between in-person communication. You’re not worried about them breaking up in front of you and it makes you just incredibly aware of the fact that when we’re communicating we’re dealing with signal transduction, which is more than just annoying, actually. It’s kind of existentially traumatic and troubling. It’s like that we don’t know that we can count on the continuity of the person and the communication that we’re engaging in.\n00:24:49\tJason Camlot:\tStill, we are relying on Zoom and Zoom-like platforms as best we can for the social encounters that we crave. Here, I’d say we’re feeling the absence of a different kind of noise that we’re also very good at ignoring and not hearing under normal conditions, but the absence of which we notice in a strong way in these dangerous times. We are noticing the absence of social sounds and that absence becomes a distracting kind of silence. MA student in English Kian Vaziri-Tehrani.\n00:25:20\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani:\tThere’s kind of been sort of an avoidance of silence, if that makes sense. I live in a pretty, like, quiet neighborhood. It’s  Côte-Saint Luc. But yeah, it’s generally like a really, really quiet neighbourhood and I go out my balcony a lot and it’s pitch quiet. So I guess like I just kind of… The TV’s always on or I’m always listening to something and I feel like if it’s too quiet then I’m… Something’s wrong or something’s off about it. Like I’ve just been filling my senses up, I guess.\n00:25:49\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Voices Echoing and Overlaid] I’m thinking in particular of the experience of sounds reverberating within a space that makes us feel we are present in a real, material, and social environment alongside others. Something along the lines of what Brandon LaBelle was talking about when he says that “the sonorous world always presses in, adding extra ingredients by which we locate ourselves.” We are increasingly interested in those interstitial noises that suggest life and movement and social activity. PhD student Sadie Barker.\n00:26:22\tSadie Barker:\tI find I’m much more aware of my neighbours’ sounds in the apartment building and I think interested in them and like inclined to speculate into them or like imagine into them just because… Yeah, I find when I hear like the doorbell ringing, I’m like, “Are people having people over? Are they socializing?” You know, you’re just kind of, yeah, more intrigued.\n00:26:44\tJason Camlot:\tWe might become intensive, causal listeners like Sadie, trying to decipher the causes, the things, actions, activities that go with the sounds we’re suddenly noticing. Or we might just be craving those little otherwise meaningless sounds because they suggest a real person in an actual space.\n00:27:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s like the difference between listening to an archival documentary recording of a poetry reading–\n00:27:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, muffled recording of people laughing and chatting]\n00:27:11\tKatherine McLeod:\t–you can hear all kinds of vibrations in the room other than those of the poet’s voice. Clinking, shuffling, breathing, laughter, applause. Compared to a studio recording, like something Caedmon Records would have made in the 1950s–\n00:27:26\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Sylvia Plath reciting her poem “Daddy”] The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through.\n00:27:31\tKatherine McLeod:\t–where the strong signal of the poet’s voice seems to exist in a sort of vacuum outside of any recognizable sonic space in the universe.\n00:27:42\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Childrens’ Voices Echoing and Overlaid] In this present moment of social distancing, I think we’re craving the noise around the signal rather than the signal itself. We’re being bombarded with all kinds of messages, [Begin Music: Sparkly Instrumental] but really we want the comforting sounds of an actual person in a real environment. Philosopher Mladen Dolar might say we’re craving voice itself rather than the messages that voice carries. [End Music: Sparkly Instrumental]\n00:28:04\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Klara du Plessis.\n00:28:08\tKlara du Plessis:\tI have definitely been phoning a lot more like every day I have two or three telephone conversations with friends who I’m close with, but would usually just text with or something. So there’s definitely this move towards trying to communicate more or to de-distance ourselves, I guess.\n00:28:25\tJason Camlot:\tVoice is that medium made up of accent, intonation, and timbre that carries the message but disappears in the process. Usually we don’t notice it because we’re so focused on the message. In this instance, voice is the noise and the meaning is the signal. It’s like what Dolar says about voice and a heavy accent. A heavy accent suddenly makes us aware of the material support of the voice, which we tend, immediately, to discard. Well, now we seem to be craving the accent. I’m speaking metaphorically here using Dolar’s account of voice as an ever-disappearing, yet undeniably present entity to help describe what we feel when we try to be together on Zoom or Skype or something like that, and sort of are together, but at the same time really aren’t together.\n00:29:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe sounds around the signal, the sounds that add the vibrancy to the social, the sense of a real unique person speaking are what we’re listening for, but even when we hear these sounds, we’re kind of aware that they’re evoking a scenario of actual presence that isn’t happening right now.\n00:29:37\tJason Camlot:\tBecause I’ve been on Twitter a lot more than usual, I read a tweet—this was early April—posted by Gianpiero Petriglieri that suggested we’re so exhausted after video calls because we’re experiencing “the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds are tricked into the idea of actually being together. While our bodies know that we’re not” actually together. He’s suggesting it’s the dissonance of being relentlessly in the presence of each other’s absence that makes us so tired.\n00:30:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis may be especially true during graduate seminars and poetry readings and probably even more so in relaxed meetings like the video conference parties and cocktail hours that have been happening more often.\n00:30:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, same various voices      speaking from earlier] [Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin. We’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight! Okay. Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Duh. Oh, Mickey’s outside, shit! Hang on. I gotta go get the dog. You hear him barking? Jason, you lost, your whole family went away. Where’d they go? Jason’s frozen. No, no he doesn’t move! I know, I know! He does it on purpose! I know! You told me your trick! Yeah, you knew I was faking it. You just couldn’t help it!   Welcome back. [Door Shutting]\n00:31:04\tJason Camlot:\tThat clip we just heard was from the middle of the video conference cocktail hour—or two—I held with some friends just after I taught my first online seminar that I’ve been talking about.\n00:31:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tHearing the clinks of glasses at the beginning, the laughter, the spontaneous references to things happening within the individual spaces of the teleconference participants along with the things happening across those spaces, through the screen, really did evoke the sound of an intimate social gathering for me. At times it sounded like you were all there together. Other times, not so much. It was actually really hard for me to tell who was where.\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tIt was a lot of fun. But hearing each other and seeing each other and ourselves through the flat screens of our laptops made me want to crawl through and be there. Wherever “there” is.\n00:31:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat reminds me of the title of the poem in David Antin’s book Talking At The Boundaries, the one called “what am i doing here?” The one where he asks himself, stepping into a space to create a poem by talking rather than reading the poems from a book, what am I doing here in this ambiance? What’s going to happen? Am I doing poetry here? How are we here together? Am I making art here? Just what exactly am I doing here? But that kind of question, the way he asks it in that poem, maybe it can’t be asked in the same way of the here, now.\n00:32:36\tJason Camlot:\tFollowing that opening conversation with the students in my class, which lasted about 40 minutes and functioned as part sonic listening analysis and part group therapy session, and just before the Zoom cocktail gathering I had with my friends, which was also like a therapy listening session, I did, eventually, segway into a two-hour class about the talk poetry of David Antin.\n00:32:57\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] But let’s start at the beginning, I guess, and let’s start with Antin and ask how do we begin to actually define what an Antin talk poem is and how do we define it as an entity? So let’s begin by thinking about what it is, what’s the artifact, what’s the thing that we’re organizing a conversation around? What could you glean from what you’ve read and listened to as to sort of what the production process of a talk poem is? And maybe that’s one way into beginning to define it. And we can think of it generically, we can think of it other ways, but sort of if we think of what is a talk poem, you know, how does he make them?\n00:33:34\tJason Camlot:\tDavid Antin seemed like a deeply relevant artist to be thinking about just now because his poetry originates in live, in-person talking before an audience. He called himself a talk poet. He would come to a venue with some idea of what he was gonna talk about, perhaps a title or a theme, and a few stories in mind. But then he would just stand there and create a poem before a live audience. By talking.\n00:34:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, David Antin saying his talk poem “The Principle of Fit, II”] I came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’d been thinking about and because I don’t come unprepared to do pieces. On the other hand, I don’t come prepared the way one      comes to a lesson. I haven’t studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit, the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness, the calmness, in certain social, socially structured events as between patients and their doctors or between patients and their diseases. It’s a very close social relation and one that takes a certain education.\n00:34:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you listen really closely, you can hear the tape noises on that recording of Antin doing a talk poem. [Static From The Recording]\n00:34:59\tJason Camlot:\tHe would go into a room with an audience, press record on his tape recorder, and start talking. Not reading, not reciting a written text. Just thinking a poem into existence by talking it out loud in front of other people. That’s the first iteration of the talk poem: actual ephemeral talk in a room filled with real people. He would also record his talks on a tape recorder, hence the tape hiss you noticed in that audible trace of the event. He’d take that tape recorder home, transcribe the talk that was on it, and then shape that typed transcript into a unique-looking printed work without punctuation, with special spacing, designed to make the reader have to reinvoice the original talk back to life by finding the speech and intonation patterns that are not obvious to find in the printed treatment of the original, ephemeral live event.\n00:35:51\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] So, if we continue to ask this question, what is a talk poem, okay, and we’ve just rehearsed in a brief way what the production process of a talk poem is, where is the talk poem? I guess that’s my second question, right? Is it in that event, right? Is it in the tape recorder, on the cassette that recorded it? Is it in the initial transcription of it? Is it in the book Talking At The Boundaries after that event happens? Where is the talk poem? Or is it in, or is it that combination of things? Yeah, Brian, you want to..?\n00:36:22\tBrian Vass:\tI guess thinking about this question also just sort of dovetails to the question that I asked on group chat.\n00:36:28\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Brian Vass.\n00:36:31\tBrian Vass:\tIt seems to me that if the talk poem as a piece of art or as a event, if it hinges to some degree on the reciprocity between Antin as a performer and a speaker and the specific context that he’s in, as he seems to sort of describe that it does, like he says he’s got something in mind, but even the spontaneity and some degree of the improvisation is influenced or inflected by the context, specifically the people in the room, to the extent that that’s true. It seems like the real site of the talk poem is the occasion and everything else, the recording and the transcription are sort of derivations of that, but somehow aren’t fully it because you’re part of it if you’re there. Do you know what I mean? Like the audience is also a part of it. If it’s true, what he’s saying about vibing off of the group.\n00:37:21\tJason Camlot:\tI like that, vibing off of the group. So it’s talking, but as you say, it’s sort of talking with an audience present that seems to be important because of this reciprocity as you put it. But it’s more about him vibing off of them than about actual conversation. It’s not talking for conversation. It’s talking for the sense that he’s not talking in a vacuum. There’s a kind of priority that’s given to that original ephemeral event due to this scenario of talking in person before an actual listening audience.\n00:37:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe discussion we had of Antin seemed so appropriate and relevant to us at this moment, I think, because his art was premised on, depended on the act of talking in the presence of other people. If we think about the new scientific evidence coming in that suggests even asymptomatic people can possibly spread the coronavirus, it makes talking to someone in person a truly perilous scenario. We’re not allowed to talk before large groups of people right now. It’s literally against the law. Literary performance, poetry readings, literary gatherings are not possible in that way. But it sort of got us thinking, you know, some of the students were sort of asked what would David Antin do during COVID-19 crisis? Because he’s not, he wouldn’t be allowed to actually stand in a room before an assembled audience, right? And that was, you know, in many of their opinions and in my opinion, too, crucial to the actual creation of a talk poem. That talk poem requires the presence of others within one space, right, in order to actually to be made in the first place. So like, you know, imagining David Antin on Zoom or Skype doing a talk poem, it’s not quite the same thing.\n00:39:07\tMusic:\t[Gentle Instrumental]\n00:39:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo we can’t do talk poems. We can’t read poems before an actual audience. We can’t talk to strangers or speak moistly. Without talking to people in person how can we share art? How can we share literature? How can we share our work under the present conditions? How can we reach listeners? Today, not only are we listening differently in general, but we’re sharing and listening to literature differently. Think about when you listen to literature in your day-to-day life and has that changed? Just as before, you might listen to an audio book or to a podcast and you might listen to that more than before, but the method of listening probably remains the same. What has changed is that you can’t listen to a live reading or at least not in the same space as the reader and other listeners. Literary events have been cancelled or as we prefer to think of it postponed. But we can still listen to writers reading their works and even participate in a live online reading as an event.\n00:40:15\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] Good evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music. We’re very lucky to have two visitors from the great state of Toronto tonight. So all of this should be really fun. And to lead off the show tonight, I asked this person how she would like to be introduced      and she wanted to be introduced by me telling you that she lives beside a lake.\n00:40:46\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] That was a recording of Ian Ferrier performing his usual role as live host and curator of The Words & Music Show, a monthly cabaret of poetry, music, dance, and spoken word performances that’s been happening in Montreal for the past 20 years. At the end of March, the show went online with performers sending in pre-recorded audio to be played in the live event broadcast via Zoom. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Some of the artists, like storyteller Nisha Coleman, integrated into their performances the circumstances and impact of COVID-19 upon artists who depend upon live events. Nisha’s story was about the time she spent hanging out in a community art collective called The Church of Harvey Christ. And this is how she chose to end her story this time.\n00:41:36\tNisha Coleman:\t[Audio, from a past recording] Now, I’ve told this story a lot of times. It’s one I’ve told at parties and campfires and on stage. And every time I tell it, it’s sort of, I sort of tell it in a different way and it has a different meaning, it has a different sort of takeaway. But I think in this particular telling for me what stands out about this story is the strength of community, right? And, and what The Church of Harvey Christ meant to artists and what it provided for them at that time and how important that community is now. I mean, especially now. Because being an artist, you know, it’s precarious, of course. It’s precarious in the best of times and now we’re entering a new time where it’s sort of precarious for everybody. So, I think it’s more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle, or, you know, maintaining this connection over the internet. Because we need each other, we need to lift each other up. We need to help each other out. We need to promote each other’s work. I think that’s gonna be really important in the next however long. Who knows, right?\n00:42:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tOther performances really emphasized the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private spaces that come with a video conference, reading from home. That was the case with poet Alexei Perry Cox.\n00:43:08\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] …extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18-month-old child on her bed and it’s by the poet Alexei Perry Cox. So I’m going to bring that up now and we can take a listen.\n00:43:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence, would get through to humankind.\n00:43:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tNow, I have to admit that for this particular recording, my screen didn’t display the video, so even though others watched the reading, I was just listening. As a listener, I felt that Alexei’s poem conveyed such presence through its recording. Yes, I was listening to the poem, too, but I was also listening and deeply moved by the sounds of her daughter’s presence in the room with her and the interaction between them.\n00:44:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] A book with a room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. But present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time bringing of life.\n00:44:25\tKatherine McLeod:\tEven more than the words of the poem, I was listening to the sounds around the poem, the sounds of the social and of life. When you’re at a live reading, you’re there to listen to the poetry or prose, but so often the experience of the reading is the atmosphere, the ambiance, as Antin put it, and the conversations around the poems. And that’s much harder to describe, harder to document, and harder to replicate in a digital environment.\n00:44:55\tIsabella Wang:\tIn any other circumstance, when we are, there is this live community happening in the backdrop. I would be more hesitant to just go online and hear the works of a poet reading on the internet because there is that community out there. And I’m like, “Why would I want to like, you know, see this somewhat flat screen of you when I can interact with you in person and engage?”\n00:45:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Isabella Wang, who had the idea to go online with the reading series she helps organize in Vancouver, BC: Dead Poets Reading Series.\n00:45:33\tIsabella Wang:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly series at the Vancouver Public Library. We invite like four or five local poets to come and share the work of a dead poet. And so this happened around the time where everything around Vancouver—I mean everything, like not just in Vancouver, but everything—was getting cancelled. And so of course our reading series was also canceled, too, and we had four readers who no longer could come and share their work. I actually… It’s funny you mentioned rob because I actually got the idea from him. And so when I started hearing that “Oh no, we might not actually be able to put on this reading series at the Vancouver Public Library,” I was like, “Hey, rob is doing this thing. How can we maybe try to, you know, move this online?” And initially we were just planning to feature the four readers who couldn’t read anymore. But then it was kind of intuitive and it made sense. I was like, now that we featured Kathy Mak and Natalie Lim, who were supposed to be on the series, let’s start reaching out to more folks and it just started there.\n00:46:47\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bit of a ghostly series to begin with. [Begin Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental] So how did it work transferring this series into an online environment?\n00:46:58\tIsabella Wang:\tThe reading series has definitely transformed a lot. Some poets were saying how, you know, it’s hard for them to film themselves reading at home just because there isn’t that reciprocal audience thing going on anymore and it’s kind of like numbing. But at the same time, what the digital-like realm is so good at bringing out is a different sense of community where like before we were so limited to audiences just in Vancouver. And so that limited a lot of not only who our readers were, but also what kind of dead poets were being shared and spread. And so for the first time I think we were able to bring in a lot of      our friends from different places that normally we would only get to see on social media anyway. And it was when the series started that I realized, “Oh my gosh, I’ve known you and you and you like for so long. And this is actually the first time I’ve seen you, you know, move and be alive. And this is the first time I’ve ever heard you read.”\n00:48:05\tJason Camlot:\tI asked Isabella about her experience of listening to readings online versus in person.[End Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental]\n00:48:10\tIsabella Wang:\tWhat’s really changed is the interactive environment, that lively, bustling atmosphere that is somewhat changed now with, you know, this going online. ‘Cause I think part of the literary experience is that interaction, that engagement with poets like before and after they read. You know, ’cause it’s nice to hear Fred Wah read, but it’s also nice to just talk to him and make jokes with him, like, you know, by his side in the audience. And that’s not really there anymore. And that’s what’s been transformed mostly into the, into social media now. And so there’s still that, I think, you know, the liking and sharing and commenting. But it’s more invisible, it’s something that is more of an… Like you see it after they post something but it’s not that immediate anymore.\n00:49:09\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really interesting. Yeah, I love the idea of response happening in a different temporal sort of timeframe than the actual event, is really interesting. And also in a different media format, so that instead of leaning over to someone and whispering or nudging them with your elbow and exchanging a kind of feeling about what you just heard, it’s being experienced later in a tweet or something like that.\n00:49:33\tIsabella Wang:\tAnd I think it’s also like the function is kind of different because, you know, when you’ve always had that community that you go to like day in and day out, you know, you love seeing the people you see, but kind of take it for granted. It’s like, “Oh yeah, next week I’ll see them again.” And, you know, there will always be literary events. And I think, I think this period just shows us how      important that community and those like events really are to us. And so part of that, social media like that, commenting and interaction is part of just supporting each other and making sure that we’re still going and there is still a sense of community somewhere.\n00:50:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn a poetry reading, you are listening to the poetry, but you’re also listening to community. So the challenge then becomes how to create and make audible that community online. I was so interested in how Isabella’s idea for taking Dead Poets online came from an invitation to read in an online series that went online on that very same weekend of March 14th–15th, 2020. That reading series is hosted on the online journal Periodicities and the poet behind it is Ottawa-based poet, reviewer, and publisher rob  . Jason and I spoke with rob in a video conference call and we asked him about what prompted him to start this online reading series.\n00:51:08\trob mclennan:\tThere are kind of a few factors in play. I’m one of the organizing reading series, founding reading series, of VERSefest, our annual poetry festival. This year would have been tenth, so… We realized, like, we were ten days out of our opening night and we realized like, yeah, this is not going to happen. We have to shut this down.\n00:51:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tWith the cancellation of Ottawa’s VERSfest, rob felt the absence of readings that would have happened. He was also starting up the online journal Periodicities and had the web space ready to curate a reading series. He reached out to poets and was met with an enthusiastic response of poets sending him videos of themselves reading poems. We asked him about his sense of how listeners are responding to all of this new content. Are they listening? But first one of Jason’s students, poet reading series curator and PhD candidate Klara du Plessis, was asking the same questions when some of these reading events started going online. She mentioned it in Jason’s class, so we thought we’d include her perspective before hearing from r     ob on this question.\n00:52:19\tKlara du Plessis:\tWell, yeah, I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about all these virtual poetry reading series, like multiple different people have started. So they kind of invite poets to read between like five and 15 minutes or so to record themselves reading either their own poetry or poetry by someone who’s already passed away and then these videos are posted online. And so I kind of got into a bit of a Twitter thing where I kind of questioned whether people were actually listening to these recordings or whether it was like something for poets to just be busy, so they’re doing something. And my poll discovered that half of the people said that they were super comforted by listening to these virtual poetry readings and felt a sense of connection and community as a result. And half of the other people said that it was like too overwhelming for them at this time to deal with, you know, listening to strange, like sometimes not very well produced audio recordings. I should also mention that I think I offended a few people with my question so I kind of regretted it after the fact.\n00:53:23\trob mclennan:\tI know early on I saw some social media posts of people saying like, “I appreciate that these things happen, but I just can’t deal with it right now.” You know, one or two other people saying like, “I don’t even know why this is happening.” Which is fine, I don’t expect every human on the planet to say, “This is awesome, I’m in.” That is not the point of any endeavor. But for those who might want it or require it, it is there. And for those who don’t want it, there are other things.\n00:53:52\tJason Camlot:\tI asked rob as he was watching these videos come in, if he noticed a blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private,\n00:53:59\trob mclennan:\tI have noticed that; it becomes slightly more intimate, right? Like as opposed to being public. I like watching people do stuff from inside their houses [Sound Effect: Clattering And Moving] or apartments or their, yeah, like you say, bedroom or from their living room table or their makeshift home office because not everyone has a home office. I find that more interesting than someone sending me a more produced video. I’m open to that. I’ve posted some of those. But I just find them just less interesting than something made just for this, with the limitations of that. So like the artifice is gone and one would hope that maybe that intimacy, like we require it now if we’re not able to get it in other ways. So it’s actually maybe helpful as someone… Whether watching or being the one making the video that is actually making this distance less difficult.\n00:54:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. No, I think that’s such a good point. And it’s, and also realizing that we’re kind of maybe even enjoying those readings a little bit more ’cause we’re not just hearing the person, we’re hearing sort of the space around them and they’re interacting with–\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah!\n00:55:07\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah.\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah, they’re not, they’re not at the same microphone, the same backdrop. It’s actually a little more interesting just watching the limitations of the space. Like, “Oh okay, someone has a smaller space than another person.” And just watching their personal effects behind them and none of those spaces really surprised me. Like, okay, yeah, this person is a little more formal than another person and this person feels a little bit more domestic, say. Yeah, I like it. And yeah, it does feel like a little bit more of a connection, but then maybe we’re just making that, we’re seeking that connection, so we’re finding that connection. That’s fine, too.\n00:55:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tSince the first set of videos [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] were uploaded to r     ob’s YouTube on March 15th, there are now over 70 videos and the collection seems to be growing each day. The videos are becoming an ecology of recordings in that they’re networked sounds and representative of the poetry community that they’re growing from. Listening to literature now and specifically poetry in a digital environment becomes a kind of ecological listening. We’re listening to interconnectedness and relationality and we’re also listening to an evolving digital soundscape. Just as the soundscapes around us are changing, public places that would be bustling are empty and the sound of a plane overhead [Sound Effect: Plane Flying By] suddenly stands out when otherwise it would fade into the background noise. Yes, our Murray Schafer was right. Noises are the sounds that we have learned to ignore. Meanwhile, projects like Cities and Memory are documenting the changing soundscapes. #StayHomeSounds invites you to listen to the sounds from the global coronavirus lockdown. And as we walk through our own neighbourhoods, we may notice streets sounding quieter and the chirping of birds sounding louder. Our sensory experiences of our inner and outer worlds have changed. As we listen inwards to ourselves, we still find ways to connect that try to replicate the social. Outside of our homes, there have been invitations—multiple times now—to the entire city of Montreal to join in balcony singalongs to Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne.” [End Music: Gentle Instrumental]\n00:57:22\tMusic:\t[Alvaro Echánove singing along to a livestream of Martha Wainwright singing “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen]\n00:57:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs the summer arrives, balconies will become even noisier as neighbours converse. We have conversations with neighbours we may never have spoken to before and simultaneously we’re even more connected globally. Our phones and computer screens become the new stages. [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] Live-streamed readings are happening like Poetry in the Time of Quarantine here in Montreal and Sound On InstaReadings Series that’s happening in Vancouver or really over Instagram. And large scale initiatives like Canada Performs have launched for musicians and other performing artists including now, thanks to Margaret Atwood, writers whose shows or book tours have been cancelled in the spring or summer. Unlike the streaming that so often is done without compensation to the artist, artists selected for Canada Performs will be paid $1,000 for their at-home performance to be broadcast on the National Arts Centre’s Facebook page. And yes, they do perform from their own home for us, the collective we, to tune in from our homes and listen together.\n00:58:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tBut as collective acts of singing and of listening draw us to our balconies and our computer screens, we can also find ourselves not feeling like joining in. With all of the possibilities for tuning into live streams, we can feel overwhelmed amid searching for something meaningful to listen to. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Back in the first week when everything was changing, I remembered feeling relieved that people like Isabella and r     ob were creating online readings, but I also remember feeling that I didn’t have the concentration to sit down and listen. And I remember thinking that when I feel more focused, or really when I feel a bit better, then I look forward to listening. When you don’t feel like listening that says something about how you’re feeling. When you ask someone how they are listening and if that’s changed, you’re really asking them how they’re doing.\n00:59:33\tJason Camlot:\tHey, let’s try that out. Hey Katherine, how are you listening?\n00:59:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m listening…fine, thanks. How are you listening, Jason?\n00:59:42\tJason Camlot:\tI’m listening pretty well. Thanks for asking. But let me ask you this. How are you really listening, Katherine?\n00:59:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tWell, Jason, how am I really listening? [Sighs] As much as we try to replicate the social, what we manage to produce within these digital environments is a version of the social that is both entirely real and entirely unreachable. We hear in it both closeness and distance and that is affecting. As much as we might try to listen to something that brings back the feeling of the social and the togetherness of before, we are beginning to face the reality of this change and what this change feels like and sounds like. We are listening differently now. Here. Here. Here.\n01:00:34\tMusic:\t[Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental]\n01:01:00\tNatalie Lim:\tHello from my kitchen! Thank you to Isabella and the whole Dead Poets Reading team for putting together this virtual reading. I’m really excited to be a part of it even though I’m bummed that we can’t see people in person this weekend, but we’re gonna hang out for like ten minutes, I’m gonna read some poetry, I got some water, it’s gonna be a good time.\n01:01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod of Concordia University and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Oana Avasilichioaei, Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Arjun Basu, Naomi Charron, Alexei Perry Cox, Nisha Coleman, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier     , Priscilla Joly, rob mclennan, Heather Pepper, Lindsay Presswell, Deanna Radford, Kian Vaziri-Tehrani, Brian Vass, and Isabella Wang for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9593","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E2, The Night of the Living Archive, 7 November 2022, Makarova"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Liza Makarova"],"creator_names_search":["Liza Makarova"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Liza Makarova\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/fb141e0b-924d-4e1f-8ea4-d1b28a057963/audio/c5a844a6-1623-443d-ba91-bb326cefe213/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:16\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"47,303,828 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"},{\"date\":\"2022-11-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In For Instance Radio Show: Literary Arts Program Interviewing Fred Wah, https://fredwah.ca/node/431\\n\\nPoetry Reading – March 8, 1979, https://new.fredwah.ca/node/438\\n\\nFred Wah: Classroom Conversation on March 9, 1979\\n\\nWah, Fred. Mountain. Buffalo, NY: Audit/East-West, 1967. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/mountain\\n\\nWah, Fred. Limestone Lakes Utaniki. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College P, 1989. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/limestone-lakes-utaniki\\n\\nWah, Fred.”Limestone Lakes Utaniki.” Karabiner: the Journal of the Kootenay Mountaineering Club 30 (1987): 9-12. Print. https://fredwah.ca/content/karabiner-journal-kootenay-mountaineering-club-30\\n\\nWah, Fred. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” So Far. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/so-far\\n\\nWah, Fred. “Don’t Cut Me Down” Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community, 1972. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/tree\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549780168704,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["What better way to understand the archival state of a poem than to ask it? \n\n“The Night of the Living Archive” is an audio drama/mock interview between research assistant Liza Makarova and Fred Wah’s poems Mountain (1967), Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1987, 1989, and 1991),  and Don’t Cut Me Down (1972), which currently live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca). \n\nPoems within the archive are independent documents that live incredibly interesting lives that are celebrated within this episode. Over a series of three interviews, Liza invites these poems, drifting in “the Great Universal Archive,” to speak about their existence in the digital realm. These poems are given the opportunity to speak their minds  on topics such as how digital archives are treated, the poems’ complex histories, and their relationships with each other on a literal and literary level.\n\nThis episode will also present excerpts of Fred Wah’s archive of audio recordings, ranging from his 1979 Poetry Reading Series to an interview which aired at a literary arts radio show in Calgary. As an artist, educator, and writer, Wah has built an incredible social network throughout generations through his poetry, which has the capacity to tell its own story.\n\n\n(00:04):\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n(00:19):\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\nMy name is Katherine McLeod and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Do you ever wonder what a piece of literature is thinking? What better way to find out research assistant Liza Makarova realized, than to ask?\n\nAnd in this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, Liza does exactly that. Three of Fred Wah’s works that live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive are given voice as Liza interviews them about their lives. Mountain from 1967, Limestones Lakes Utaniki from 1987, 1989 in 1991, and “Don’t Cut Me Down” from Tree in 1972. What is a typical day in a digital literary archive? In this episode, Liza imagines how the preservation of a digital archive can impact the works that it holds and what the relationship between multiple versions of a work in an archive could look like and sound like.\n\nThe episode cleverly and creatively examines the shape of print and digital archives and their preservation and engages in questions of textuality and performance. It dives into the lives of these literary works and how they have shifted and changed over time, and how they feel about this new age they live in. Our producer, Liza Makarova is an undergraduate student at Concordia University in the honors English and Creative Writing Program, and a research assistant on the SpokenWeb affiliated project, “Mapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive.”\n\nThe Fred Wah Digital Archive is a bibliography and repository for the works of Canadian writer Fred Wah. This episode features archival audio of Wah and the voices of the students, researchers, and scholars on the “Aapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive” Project. Here is episode two of season four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “The Night of the Living Archive.”\n\n \n\n(03:25):\tArchival Recording Fred Wah In Class Conservations – March 9,1979\t[Sound Effect: Sound of a tape clicking shut]\nSteve McCaffery, a Toronto sound poet, and I have been having discussions about the mutations or mutability of a poem. He is now writing poems which, at a certain point, the poem reaches the pages and he admits that: “Okay, at one stage in a poem’s life it belongs in a book or on a page in type, but there are further stages to that poem’s life.”\n\n[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking Shut]\n\n(04:07):\tLiza Makarova\t[Start Music: Upbeat Percussion]\nHello, SpokenWeb Podcast listeners! My name is Liza and I am an RA for a Spoken Web-Affiliated Project called “Mapping Social Bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive” led by the brilliant literary editor, researcher, Concordia doctoral candidate, and archivist, Deanna Fong. Fred Wah is an extraordinary experimental poet, professor, literary critic, editor, and community literary legend currently based in British Columbia but he has connections all throughout Western Canada.\n\nHis poetry, prose, and scholarly work has been in circulation since the 1960s. Various researchers, developers, and academics have been involved with his digital archive, building off the work of Susan Rudy, who initially started the Fred Wah Digital Archive around 2006 after starting the paper archive in the late 80s/early 90s. Working on the archive of a writer who is still active is a curious and special thing. If we have a question about something or need more context, we can directly contact Fred for support.\n\nPlus, the archive is still growing as we add his recent collections. I used to think of an archive as something purely historical, out of date, a storage room. But ever since I started working on the Fred Wah Digital Archive I realized that archives are incredibly dynamic and ongoing spaces. I would even go as far as to say that most digital archives… [End Music:Upbeat Percussion] are living. //\n\nI first noticed it when I was organizing a dataset in the backend of the site. I was having some trouble with finding older entries so I could update them, nothing was coming up when I was searching for a couple of his poems. I decided to refresh the page when all of a sudden I heard a voice. I thought I was hallucinating from too many all nighters but then I heard it again. “Hey! Don’t do that! We’re trying to bring our brother over from our old place. He’s stuck in the search box,” I looked and the site URL was replaced by the text for one of Fred’s poems called “Artknot 14”.\n\nI quickly copied and pasted him into a new entry and heard cries of joy from the reunion. They asked how they could repay me and I said by letting me interview a couple of them…for research. They said okay, if Fred said okay and Fred said okay as long as the poems get back before 8am the next day because they have a lecture to attend together. Today, I have the deepest honor and pleasure of speaking to three of Fred Wah’s collections and poems from the Digital Archive. First off, I would like to introduce Mountain, a collection of Wah’s poems from 1967.\n\n(06:44):\tComputerized Voice:\t[Music Interlude: Synthesizer] Hello and welcome to the Fred Wah Digital Archive. Please sit closer to your device to proceed onto the liminal speaking platform.\n(06:53):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, like this?\n(06:55):\tComputerized Voice:\tExactly. Who can I connect you with today, past, present, or future?\n(07:00):\tLiza Makarova\tI would like to speak to Mountain, please. From 1967.\n(07:04):\tComputerized Voice:\tUnderstood. Mountain is now loading. [Sound Effect: Computer whirring]\n(07:14):\tMountain\tUh, hello?\n(07:16):\tLiza Makarova\tHello, and welcome to the podcast.\n(07:18):\tMountain\tHello. Hello.\n(07:20):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, what’s up? How’s it going?\n(07:22):\tMountain\tI’ve been good. Coasting. What about you?\n(07:26):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. Mm-hmm. Not much, but, but good. Okay. I’m just gonna jump right in. How long have you been in the archive?\n(07:34):\tMountain\tThat’s a difficult question.\n(07:36):\tLiza Makarova\tHow so?\n(07:37):\tMountain\tWhat archive are you talking about?\n(07:39):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, well, the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(07:42):\tMountain\tAh, okay. You see, saying the archive without specifying which one usually signifies the whole universe.\n(07:49):\tLiza Makarova\tThe archive is the whole universe?\n(07:52):\tMountain\tPrecisely. As soon as something is made, even if it was just a second ago, it becomes part of the archive.\n(07:59):\tLiza Makarova\tThe great universal archive. It seems vast and overwhelming.\n(08:05):\tMountain\tIt is, but that’s why you exist, right? To keep it all organized?\n(08:10):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah, and I guess it is.\n(08:12):\tMountain\tAnyway, to answer your question, I’ve been around since the beginning of Fred’s archive, but not the archive. Moving from platform to platform since 2008. Then in 2015, and now again in 2022.\n(08:23):\tLiza Makarova\tBy platform you mean website, right?\n(08:26):\tMountain\tMm-hmm.\n(08:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat’s it like in Drupal 9 in general, but also compared to previous platforms?\n(08:33):\tMountain\tSo far it’s not too much different from other places we’ve lived. Think of moving from a duplex to a townhouse.\n(08:39):\tLiza Makarova\tInteresting. What about the jump from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7?\n(08:43):\tMountain\tWe call that period… [Ominous music starts and then ends] the dark times. The age of Link Rot.\n(08:55):\tLiza Makarova\tLink Rot? Can I ask what happened?\n(09:00):\tMountain\tNovember 6th, 2013. It was a Wednesday and we were getting quite a lot of visitors because of “Diamond Grill”, Fred’s 1996, semi-fictional biography. Since everyone was trying to figure out that Lorde song by looking up the lyrics, “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh.” It was at the top of the charts, you know? That was our last normal day for a while.\nWe noticed something was wrong right away after that, Susan Rudy, Darren Weshler, derek beaulieu, Bill Kennedy and a group of researchers like you were always active on the site. In fact, from 2009 to 2013, even the public could submit pitches and bibliographic material to the site. We became accustomed to this very caring community. We knew something was wrong when sections of the archives started to get dark. We literally could not see them. Poems, which were friends of ours, literally started to disappear.\n\nNothing seemed to work properly and the quality of our space gradually decreased as no human was working on the archive at the time. By working, I mean what you humans call maintaining the site by updating it to the right versions of Drupal, editing data sets and uploading new ones. As our website link died, so did our connection to the digital ecosystem. We were lost in space and time. For a human it would be like if you were stranded and then your phone dies.\n\n(10:16):\tLiza Makarova\tAnd that’s Link Rot? It almost sounds like a  loss of identity or not being able to properly take care of yourself.\n(10:24):\tMountain\tIt’s exactly that. But one day it all changed. We don’t celebrate a lot of holidays over here at the Fred Wah Digital Archive, but we do celebrate the summer of 2014. [Calming, ethereal music begins]\nSuddenly two new users logged into the site and then a huge group of student researchers, archivists, and designers followed. After a month or so, we were launched onto a whole new platform.\n\n(10:46):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, yeah. Hearing  the project start up again in 2015 from your perspective is so special. I’m really touched. Thank you.\n(10:54):\tMountain\tOf course. We’re very, very lucky to have been supported and taken care of for so long, and that there were people like Deanna Fong and Ryan Fitzpatrick who were able to get more funding and get us back on our URL. [Music ends]\nIt’s hard to imagine the number of archives, especially ones about tracking social relationships in the literary world that go under. All of those fellow poems suddenly go dark and disappear.\n\n(11:16):\tLiza Makarova\tAnd why do you think that Fred Wah’s Digital Archive has lasted so long?\n(11:21):\tMountain\tOur versatility, our literary community, the longest breath of all.\n(11:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat was the best part about being rebooted?\n(11:30):\tMountain\tI would say the most special part was being reunited with collections who were still in the process of being digitized in 2013. Seeing them in the digital realm was miraculous.\n(11:40):\tLiza Makarova\tAw, one big family reunion.\n(11:43):\tMountain\tYes. It was such a happy but interesting day.\n(11:47):\tLiza Makarova\tOh?\n(11:48):\tMountain\tWell, Fred wrote, recorded and performed new work while the archive was down. There were a lot of first time introductions to be made as this new work, which was very well received and known in the public, was unknown to us in the archive. Making space for them in Drupal 9 was easy though.\n(12:04):\tLiza Makarova\tYou know, that’s actually something the current team is working on right now.\n(12:07):\tMountain\tOh, are you digitizing more archival material?\n(12:11):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. Over the summer, the humans working on the archive went to Vancouver to work in the SFU Special Collections. We went over the digital archive and found what didn’t have a cover or a textual scan, pulled it from the collections and scanned it. While we were there, we formally met the SFU Fred Wahl Archival human team and hosted a public talk about what it was like to work on a “so-called” living archive. We called the conversation “Mountain Many Voices: The Archival Sounds of Fred Wah.”\n(12:39):\tMountain\tHow original [Mountain and Liza laugh] That’s super sweet.\n(12:44):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah, we mostly talked about Fred Wah’s audio fonds, which are a collection of his audio tapes and recordings. At the end of the trip, we brought home a lot of good memories, new scholarly knowledge, and a USB full of archival material.\n(12:57):\tMountain\tI’m looking forward to the reunion as well as a new design of the site. We’ve all been chatting about this a lot. I’m most excited for the audio recordings to get their own page. They do not respect after hours noise regulations. [Mountain and Liza laugh]\n(13:12):\tLiza Makarova\tSpeaking about having a page of one’s own, how does the way we organize the archive affect the relationships between the various poems on the site? Do you feel like being represented on separate pages/links isolates you from specific contexts?\n(13:26):\tMountain\tI mean, not really. We already represent different places and time periods depending on when we were created.\n(13:32):\tLiza Makarova\tCould you clarify what you mean by created? Do you mean when/where you were published or when/where you were written?\n(13:40):\tMountain\tDo you really think there’s a difference? Where do you think we came from?\n(13:45):\tLiza Makarova\tI guess from Fred Wah, but the thing about his work, about you, I guess, is that his writing is really inspired and contextualized by the environments he grew up in. His Chinese Canadian heritage, the politics of the time and the social groups, he was, and still is a part of.\nI’m a writer myself, so I really like to compare it to the textual art of embroidery. You have this base, which is like a book website or even a single poem, and you’re using all these threads that you’ve collected by living life to weave together these art forms. Oh, sorry. That was really long winded.\n\n(14:22):\tMountain\tNot at all. I quite miss the wind actually.\n(14:30):\tLiza Makarova\t[Liza blows into the mic to simulate the sound of wind blowing] Is this helping?\n(14:32):\tMountain\tIt’s the thought that counts. You’re really making me think about my home and my fellow poems. We’re all so different from each other, in conversation with each other, but also in comparison or reference to other pieces of art, music and writing. These influences can be hard to highlight in print, but the vastness of a digital archive creates a lot of space for these intimate connections to receive the attention they deserve.\n(14:55):\tLiza Makarova\tI would love to know more about what it’s like in the actual digital space.\n(14:58):\tMountain\tWell, we live in a five story house. Each floor is labeled by sections A through E.\n(15:04):\tLiza Makarova\tRight. We call that the bibliography. For those who might want more clarification, a bibliography is essentially a list of everything a writer ever wrote. What are your thoughts on how you’re currently organized?\n(15:15):\tMountain\tI really like it. It’s what I’m used to, you know? Archival work has always kind of been a thing, but digital archival work is super new. Susan, as in Susan Rudy, started this digital archive with a team of researchers in 2006. Fred has always had an organizational system, so we got used to who we were surrounded with, who’s in the neighborhood. Thankfully, Susan made sure that when we got digitized, the same system was put in place, hence our bibliography. [Soft warm music begins to play]\nI’ll never forget the feeling of being scanned for the first time. I think you can imagine it as an x-ray. I’m pretty old, so I’m not used to any of those things. I thought that laser scanning would be the end of me, but instead it was the beginning.\n\n(15:59):\tLiza Makarova\tI can only imagine how that might have felt. [music ends]\nWhat about migrating? What is it like to migrate onto version 2.0? How did it feel?\n\n(16:07):\tMountain\tKind of feels like a huge family road trip.\n(16:10):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, that’s really sweet.\n(16:12):\tMountain\tYeah. Yeah. I’m pulling your leg. Assuming that it is pullable. It was quite a long process since we can’t all just move at once. There are a lot of steps involved to make sure everything goes smoothly. Think of migrating from site to site like this. You’re moving boxes from one shelf to another, but the other shelf has slightly different dimensions, so you have to make certain adjustments to make sure everything fits again. Then again, these spaces can be filled with new software updates that improve the overall functionality of the site. It’s like moving into a bigger house, so now you have space for that vintage standing lamp you’ve always wanted.\n(16:47):\tLiza Makarova\tWow. I just love hearing your thoughts on all this. As we discussed, digital archives are a really incredible tool to showcase and disseminate the oeuvre of writers who use multimedia such as audio, visual arts, and small press publishing. You mentioned earlier that due to the age of Link Rot, newer material didn’t get on the site until a couple years after they were published, so I’m not quite sure who makes the calls inside the archive, if someone or something like that exists for you, but out here we have something called for-profit publishing companies.\n(17:21):\tMountain\tHmm, Yes, the InPrint books or the LabuorLeaflets, if you’re trying to be a part of the open source movement.\n(17:28):\tLiza Makarova\tThe movement… [Liza hesitates before going on] [whispering]  Can we talk about this near a recording device?\n(17:33):\tMountain\tOf course. I think more people should know about this. Here in the archive, no one is in charge, no anthology name or chatbook is more important than the community that we make up. But it’s true that outside of the archive, some work is still in print and therefore under institutional control.\n(17:50):\tLiza Makarova\tRight. We can’t scan or upload anything still circulating for the public to purchase. Does that make you sad or feel anything in particular?\n(18:00):\tMountain\tIt’s simply a phase of our lives and the archive is hopefully the next.\n(18:04):\tLiza Makarova\tWould you consider the archive as your home at the moment?\n(18:08):\tMountain\tIt’s definitely not a permanent home. I don’t think something like that exists for anything. Like for you, where would you consider home? Where you were born, where you grew up, where you are now, or where you’ll end up? Like a retirement home. Nothing and no one stays somewhere forever, or at least a part of them is always somewhere else.\n(18:28):\tLiza Makarova\tCould you expand on what you mean by a part of them is always somewhere else? [Mountain sighs deeply]\nOh, are you? Are you talking about, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this…\n\n(18:42):\tMountain\tOh, just say it.\n(18:43):\tLiza Makarova\tAre you talking about your body?\n(18:46):\tMountain\t[Soft piano music begins to play] Yes. I miss it a little.\n(18:50):\tLiza Makarova\tHardcover or paperback?\n(18:53):\tMountain\tWell, that’s a little personal. [Music ends]\n(18:54):\tLiza Makarova\tI’m, I’m sorry. So your body, your physical presence on earth. Would you consider that your home? Okay. Maybe a better question would be what about the present digital archive feels like home compared to the physical one?\n(19:07):\tMountain\tThe relationship is a little tense. I mean, my physical body is kept in a temperature controlled room in the Simon Fraser Special Collections. While my contents and consciousness have been bloated to a nebulous space. I really can’t tell which is more permanent, the internet or the real world. What I like about being in a digital archive, that I hope you humans listening can also appreciate, is how open it is. There are no clear boundaries about where I start and where I end.\nPlus maintaining a literary archive in the real world can be a lot of work. I mean, I can only imagine how hard it is to keep 50 books open at the same time, or even worse, to never be opened again. In the digital space, we keep ourselves alive, always ready. There is no rest for the digital archival poem. The internet is a busy place. Sometimes it’s nice to dissociate for a little and reconnect with my physical form. [Soft piano music begins to play] To feel the chill of my spine, to stretch out my pages when someone brushes by. Sadly, in a physical archive, I’m not relevant until someone needs something from me. [Music ends]\n\n(20:15):\tLiza Makarova\tThat’s not true. You’re an artifact. You’ve survived so much. We don’t need to be needed in order to be important. The fact that you still exist and people who didn’t even exist in the sixties can interact with you is really special.\n(20:30):\tMountain\tThank you for that.\n(20:31):\tLiza Makarova\tOf course, I don’t do this just because I like to keep the great universal archive organized. I’m also passionate about the preservation of literature.\n(20:41):\tMountain\tI actually have a question for you now.\n(20:43):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Go ahead.\n(20:44):\tMountain\tWhy do you have to put our dimensions and everything up on the digital archive? Do people really need to know how much I weigh, and how truthful is it to say that I’m 22 pages long when the PDF actually compresses me down to 20?\n(20:57):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, that’s metadata.\n(20:58):\tMountain\tData can be existential.\n(21:00):\tLiza Makarova\tNo, it’s data about data.\n(21:02):\tMountain\tThat’s kind of existential.\n(21:04):\tLiza Makarova\tI guess so. The reason why archivists and researchers need to collect and display metadata is so that it’s easier for users to find the information they’re looking for. The process of creating metadata from large and various sets of data is kind of like creating a dating profile.\nA person, just like a data set, is complex and often holds a lot of information at once. Metadata is specific details about information rich material that is formatted and categorized so it’s accessible, easy to find and descriptive.\n\n(21:36):\tMountain\tWell, when you put it that way, I can see how it reduces the amount of smalltalk I have to do when someone new comes to the site.\n(21:42):\tLiza Makarova\tExactly. By using the search bar, any user can just type in what they’re looking for in terms of genre, length, or collaborator, or all the information can be found just by looking at you.\n(21:53):\tMountain\tI gather slightly similar information about our users.\n(21:56):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, like what?\n(21:58):\tMountain\tWell, I know that you all have good taste. [Mountain and Liza laugh]\n(22:03):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, it has been an absolute pleasure to speak with you, Mountain 1967. Before I let you go, I have one last question to ask you. Can you describe existing in a digital archive in one or two words, even?  If you can, of course?\n(22:22):\tMountain\t[Mountain takes a deep breath] Freedom. [Soft piano music plays briefly and then fades out]\n(22:36):\tFred Wah, In Class Conversations – March 9, 1979\t[Sound effect of a tape being put into a tape player]\nAnd maybe you, maybe, maybe people have some opinions on, you know, paying for literature or poetry. Uh, I mean there, you know, there’s a pretty good argument for saying that poetry belongs, because it’s language, it belongs to everyone. It belongs to all of us. [Sound effect of a tape ending]\n\n(22:54):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, hello? um, com-computer voice?\n(22:58):\tComputerized Voice:\tHi.\n(22:59):\tLiza Makarova\tMay um, may I please speak to “Limestone Lakes Utaniki?”?\n(23:03):\tComputerized Voice:\tWell, does it wanna speak to you?\n(23:06):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, yes? It agreed to meet with me, so I think…\n(23:11):\tComputerized Voice:\tOkay, I see you on the list. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” is loading.\n(23:15):\tLiza Makarova\tThank you.\n(23:18):\tComputerized Voice:\t[Whirring noise begins] They have now been loaded. [Whirring noise ends]\n(23:20):\tLiza Makarova\tThey? [Music begins]\n(23:25):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Hello?\n(23:26):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, am I speaking to “Limestone Lakes Utaniki?”\n(23:29):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Yes.\n(23:30):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, hello. There are so many of you.\n(23:34):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Yes, but…\n(23:37):\tLLU 1\tUh, yes, but we are not all the same.\n(23:41):\tLLU 2\tWe’re like identical twins with slightly different features.\n(23:45):\tLLU 3\tI like to think of myself as an individual, a lone wolf even, distant from the pack.\n(23:50):\tLLU 2\tOh, so you went from first to second person in 1987, and now you think you’re so different from us.\n(23:56):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] That’s not true!\n(23:58):\tLLU 3\tWow.\n(24:00):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, I’m still so excited to speak with all of you today. It completely slipped my mind that there are so many versions of this collection. My first question for all of you, I guess, is this: The Fred Wah Digital Archive is more than an archive, right? It also explores mapping a social bibliography. So from your perspectives, how does this mapping appear for you?\n(24:25):\tLLU 1\tSo the social bibliography is, well, like a list of everyone who has worked on a project with Fred. Each person is housed under us as either an editor, contributor artist, or as, uh,  someone who was published alongside Fred. However, archival materials are, uh, also housed under the contributor.\n(24:51):\tLLU 2\tOkay. Okay. You’re getting a little wordy. To summarize there’s—\n(24:55):\tLLU 1\tWordy! Aren’t you the one with three extra passages?\n(25:00):\tLLU 2\tTo summarize, you can’t search for information about a specific contributor without also learning about different archival material and vice versa.\n(25:08):\tLiza Makarova\tSo for you, being an independently published poem, as well as appearing in a few different publications means you’ve come across a lot of people.\n(25:16):\tLLU 2\tI’m not sure if “come across” is the right word to describe the relationship the social bibliography has with the literary bibliography.\n(25:25):\tLLU 1\tOh! Oh, I agree. Oh, we’re, we’re not just passing through. The poem is part of the community, just as much as the poets.\n(25:33):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm, I see. So perhaps you could say that you’re not only personally connected to each contributor, but you also make up the bonds that connect people in the Wah-verse.\n(25:42):\tLLU 3\tInside and outside of the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(25:46):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh? What do you mean?\n(25:47):\tLLU 2\tWell, think about yourself, for example.\n(25:49):\tLLU 3\tOr the cooler, [clears throat] I mean, cool people that worked on the Fred Wah Digital Archive before you.\n(25:55):\tLLU 1\tOh, we’re always meeting new and familiar researchers as the project gets new team members or when it moves to a different province.\n(26:05):\tLiza Makarova\tWait. So, like you, you know our location?\n(26:08):\tLLU 3\tUm, we weren’t created in a vacuum.\n(26:10):\tLLU 2\tOf course we have a sense of spatiality.\n(26:13):\tLLU 1\tYou could even say that, that spatiality is our specialty.\n(26:21):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] [All three laugh] Good one.\n(26:21):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. So I know that one of the main features of the archive is to plot and display geographical metadata based on the framework of Fong and Fitzpatrick who revived the Fred Wah Digital Archive in the 2010s. We know how the text, you all, circulated throughout Canada in various time periods. In their words, this sort of research adds another layer of relational information that illuminates literary sociality in a spatial sense.\n(26:48):\tLLU 2\tRight.\n(26:49):\tLLU 1\tI think I know what you’re getting at.\n(26:52):\tLiza Makarova\tBut you’ve also developed a sense of present sociality.\n(26:56):\tLLU 3\tIn order to be in the Fred Wah Digital Archive, you have to have been outside of it at some point.\n(27:01):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh. So since your positionality is currently inside of the archive, how or in what ways are you connected to the um, I guess non-archival space?\n(27:13):\tLLU 2\tCapturing the present is also a way of capturing the past.\n(27:16):\tLLU 1\tI mean, couldn’t every space be considered an archival space?\n(27:21):\tLiza Makarova\tOh yeah, yeah. Right. Sorry. The great universal archive. Oh, okay. So let’s break it down a little bit. You’re all in the Fred Wah Digital Archive, like within the code that’s projected as a legible image in text. But you also exist in various library archives that are in British Columbia and Montreal, because Fred Wah donated his reel to reel tape collections and books to SFU, UBCO and Concordia. But you also absorb information in the homes of everyone who has ever bought, bartered or stole a copy of you- your material.\n(27:57):\tLLU 2\tThere’s a movie like that, right?\n(27:59):\tLLU 1\tLike, um… Everywhere…\n(28:01):\tLLU 3\tAt once.\n(28:02):\tLLU 2\tAt once everything is…\n(28:04):\tLiza Makarova\tEverything Everywhere All At Once-, anyway, what I’m trying to understand is how you feel about your positionality as digitized archival material. In the many places where you are at the moment you are simultaneously in the digital archive, which is a very dynamic place in terms of temporality. How does this huge angle inform your sense of self and how you feel about all the places and people you are connected to?\n(28:29):\tLLU 3\tThe Fred Wah Digital Archive is just like any other place that’s been passed down over time. You always know what kind of person lived prior to you based on how they left the space, and you’re going to be aware of the contributions you personally make in the space.\nSame thing goes for an archive. The research group in Vancouver at SFU are very different from you all in Montreal. They have access to material you don’t, and vice versa. We take note of these distinctions quite literally since it affects how we are presented, but also how people interpret us\n\n(28:57):\tLLU 2\tBy working on the Fred Wah Digital Archive with someone in the same position as you from Vancouver in 2016, automatically makes you affiliated to them in some way, even if you’ve never met before. Internally, we see that by comparing your organization of metadata, use of punctuation, and what information you think should and shouldn’t appear in the archive.\n(29:18):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. There is definitely a connection between how you track the variation of archival interaction and how we track the development of Fred Wah’s work and community as he moved within different literary milieu’s.\n(29:29):\tLLU 1\tYes, exactly! So to go back to the question about the social bibliography, it is a list of people, but it also represents a network, one that spans across generations and miles, genres and styles, friendships and camaraderie.\n(29:51):\tLiza Makarova\tSo there is an archive of contemporary interconnections within so-called Canada inside of the archive of Fred Wah’s collected works.\n(29:58):\tLLU 3\tIt’s super layered. It’s not exactly clear where the archival text ends and where the social bibliography begins.\n(30:05):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat are your thoughts on being in conversation with so many different people, texts, and environments?\n(30:10):\tLLU 2\tIt’s exciting.\n(30:11):\tLiza Makarova\tI’m so glad. Personally, I think I would feel a little overwhelmed. It’s a lot of information that overlaps. I would be scared of getting lost.\n(30:19):\tLLU 2\tI would say that’s why it’s important to be precise, specific and to display a variety of labels in the way you organize things. An editor of Fred’s work could also show up as an artist. As part of the collected work taxonomy, we became accustomed to being called “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” without any note about us being different versions.\n(30:39):\tLLU 3\tFor the longest time we were just listed as the same poem.\n(30:42):\tLLU 2\tAnd in some ways we are, different variations of it.\n(30:47):\tLLU 1\tBut it’s important to track these changes over time.\n(30:51):\tLiza Makarova\tWe actually found out through an audio recording from March 9th, 1979 that the reason why there are so many versions of the same poem is because Fred Wah edited them before sending them off for publications.\n(31:03):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Oh, we know!\n(31:05):\tLiza Makarova\t[Liza laughs]  I wonder if there are any other versions that we don’t know about that were specifically edited for readings.\n(31:10):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Oh, we wouldn’t know.\n(31:12):\tLiza Makarova\tWait, you have never heard yourself be read aloud?\n(31:16):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Nope.\n(31:16):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, would you like to?\n(31:18):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once, talking amongst themselves]\nI, I’m not sure. Like… I think it’d be, I think we could…\n\n(31:22):\tLLU 2\tLet’s do it.\n(31:25):\tLLU 1\tThe thing is… I don’t think there is a recording of us being read.\n(31:28):\tLLU 2\tWe actually haven’t ever heard an audio recording of Fred read before. Like at all.\n(31:36):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. Okay, let me see. [Sound effect of someone typing on a computer]\nOh, here. Let’s listen to this clip of Fred reading “What does Qu’ Apelle mean?” for the 1985 TISH celebration. A bunch of poets like George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, Gladys Hindmarch, Lionel Kearns, Peter Auxier and Warren Tallman were there reading as well.\n\n(32:02):\tFred Wah reading in “TISH: A Celebration (1985)”\tI was in, uh, I was in, uh, Fort Sand this summer, Fort Qu’ Apelle and, uh, a few poems out of that. This was a letter, a letter back home.\nWhat does Qu Apelle mean?/ Did you know I watered the Japanese cherry out front?/ The manchurian plum too./ How late did Jennifer sleep on Sunday?/ I talked to my mum about using the wormy cherries for wine./ Tell her about the worm in the tequila./ What did Erica do at Gray Creek?/ I picked two cocoon-like burs off the apricot tree./ What do you think they are?/ I think we should plant more flatter sugar peas from now on./ I cook that halibut with some veggies in the leftover burnt brown rice./ I’m trying to remember a particular and specific rotten two by four on the deck or a blemished shingle/. So I can take us there by mentioning to you like that piece that’s soft to the touch of my foot when I turn to the left on Slant Trans Canada./\n\nYou can’t swim in the lake here because of the algae./ I don’t have a printer for my computer, so I’m using a typewriter./ There’s a girl here who was an old Smith Corona portable of her mother’s, which is just like yours only in better shape./ This place is full of noise because it’s a band camp and there’s a black lab right outside my window howling all night, every night./ When I flew over Invermere, the fires were really chugging out. Huge smoke stacks./ So you could tell the mountains were in control./ They have mosquitoes here./ Is life work?/ Where’s my olive green tank top?/ I don’t know if my grandmother’s ever talked to one another./ Do you know that idea about if you image something, it will be true?/ There are probably images in our lives which will never be actualized, particularly ones above the north./ Information is definitely not narrative or maybe narrative isn’t narrative./ Could someone, and I don’t mean in the Japanese sense at all, clean out the culverts on the road in case it’s a real deluge./ The food’s mediocre./ I’m too academic./ This worries me, but I, but maybe it’s okay./ Like I don’t think it’s a serious problem./ But if it becomes part of a life force blow, I’ll really wonder./ Don’t forget to check the water in the batteries in this hot weather/ What does Qu’apelle mean?\n\n(34:22):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat did you think?\n(34:25):\tLLU 2\tI could feel the air flowing through the spaces between each letter, the warmth of breath propelling us towards the microphone and seeping into the tape.\n(34:34):\tLLU 1\tI felt like I was there. As soon as you played it, I was transported to 1985. Being inhaled [LLU 1 inhales] and exhaled,[LLU 1 exhales]  riding each sound wave to the present.\n(34:51):\tLiza Makarova\tRecording poetry readings was really important for Fred Wah’s generation in the sixties all the way into the eighties. It wasn’t just for the sake of preserving or capturing the work of prolific poets on tape, but it’s also a way for work to be shared or even gifted.\n(35:05):\tLLU 2\tThat isn’t to imply that we were some commodity either. A huge part of sharing tapes was keeping the contemporary writing ecosystem alive. Poets from the west could hear poets from the east read and vice versa. After this exposure, writers from one side of the country could respond to the work of their distant peers, and it would also circulate throughout their local literary communities.\n(35:27):\tLLU 3\tThe Digital Archive is similar in that way. Instead of being transferred from the hands of one artist to the next, we’re easy to access for the entire world. Obviously, we don’t wanna compete with people buying books, but for some people it’s hard to find copies of older material, especially if a bookstore doesn’t carry our publisher.\n(35:44):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. I hope there’s a time when literature on the public domain and independent publishers can work together. Literary artists and editors deserve to be paid for their work, but Digital Archives shouldn’t be neglected in the process.\n(35:57):\tLLU 1\tEspecially one like the Fred Wah Digital Archive. It’s a homage to all the care that goes into creating a generative literary community with a lot of significance placed on the people who made it possible.\n(36:14):\tLLU 2\tHaving one’s memory and work be celebrated and sustained is an important non-monetary contribution to a writer’s career.\n(36:22):\tLiza Makarova\tI feel like that’s the reason why the legacy of this specific archive is so vital to the Canadian literary scene. It isn’t just about the bibliography and access to Fred’s work, but it’s also about the possibility of interacting with people in literature you otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to. Do you think that this sort of openness or convenience affects the personal connections between writers and their work?\n(36:44):\tLLU 3\tMm, I can speak on that, I guess. I would argue that putting these relationships into context is a way to preserve their intimate nature. Fred Wah widely wrote for his community and vice versa. Making sure the users of the archive know who these people are, where they’re from, and how often they’re connected is a great way to situate them in a closed network.\n(37:02):\tLiza Makarova\tTo clarify, are you saying that us as users of the archive and researchers are situated as outsiders? From this position we can view this network but not really consider ourselves as part of it.\n(37:14):\tLLU 1\tMm, no. That would be a little harsh. I guess it has more to do with ensuring that the network of writers and artists and editors and others are represented in the temporal and spatial realm when and where they had strong ties. The beauty of mapping a social bibliography is that these connections are only framed by our knowledge of them. Rather than thinking of them as a box, someone who is not, well, let’s say a part of the network, someone who grew up in a different setting or time period has a different perspective and sociality.\n(38:05):\tLLU 2\tSo you’re not outsiders. Actually quite the opposite. You’re insiders! By using the archive and inspecting the relationship network, you’re getting an in on the details, which develops your understanding of the archival material you are trying to analyze. It brings you closer to us.\n(38:22):\tLiza Makarova\tI definitely feel closer to all of you after this interview. Thank you so much for inviting me into your space.\n(38:29):\tLLU 1\tThank you for having us.\n(38:31):\tLLU 2\tIt was a pleasure.\n(38:32):\tLLU 3\tIt was nice to have someone different to talk to— Someone like me—\n(38:34):\tLLU 1 and LLU 2\t[LLU 1 and LLU 2 speak over each other.] Oh. Oh, Come, come on, on you. This is the last time we’re oh, oh, this. Why are you making such a scene? Jeez! [Music begins to play and then quickly ends]\n(39:00):\tFred Wah reads “Don’t Cut Me Down”\t[Sound effect of a tape player starting plays ] So I’ll read a few poems from the book, Tree.\nDon’t Cut me down/ I don’t want any of this tree poetry shit from you/ You don’t know what a fucking tree is/ If you think it’s only in your head, you’re full of shit/ Trees is trees and, and the only thing they’re good for is lumber, so don’t give me any crap about them being something else/ For Christ’s sake, you think the rest of us don’t know sweet fuck all all compared to you/ But you don’t know nothing until you go out there and bust your back on a set and chokers break your so fast, you wouldn’t even wanna look at a tree, let alone and write about it/ Then you’d know what a tree was ‘stead of yapping about it.\n\nThat’s essentially what was said to me in a bar, obviously, when I said I’m a writer and I write, I’m writing poems about trees.\n\n(39:37):\tClip of Fred Wah speaking  “In For Instances – Literary Arts Program on CJSW” \tLanguages, I see language as quite an organic, uh, moving thing. We really don’t have, uh, you know, individually, uh, a lot of control over what language does. Um, and I, I’m, I’m a believer in the notion that really the poem writes itself or the poem writes me. [Sound effect of tape player stopping]\n(40:01):\tLiza Makarova\tHello? May I please speak to, “Don’t Cut Me Down” from Tree?\n(40:06):\tComputerized Voice\tAre you sure?\n(40:08):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, yes? It will be my last interview, I promise.\n(40:14):\tComputerized Voice\tAll right. If you’re sure. [Sound effect of whirring begins] “Don’t Cut Me Down” has now been loaded. [Whirring ends] [music begins and ends]\n(40:27):\tLiza Makarova\tHi, my name is Liza and welcome to the podcast.\n(40:30):\tDCMD\tHuh? What the hell is a podcast?\n(40:32):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, it’s like a radio show.\n(40:34):\tDCMD\tAll, right. Then why don’t you just call it a radio show?\n(40:36):\tLiza Makarova\tI mean, it’s not technically a radio show since we’re not on air.\n(40:40):\tDCMD\tWell then what the hell are we breathing?\n(40:43):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, no. To be on air means-\n(40:45):\tDCMD\tDon’t explain to me what a radio show is. I know what a radio show is. So in 2022, you have no radio shows and no sense of humor. Typical. What do you wanna talk about?\n(40:56):\tLiza Makarova\tI would love to know what a day in a life of a digital literary archive looks like. What do you usually get up to?\n(41:02):\tDCMD\tSit around. Mind my business. Load once in a while, if I feel like it.\n(41:07):\tLiza Makarova\tWould you say you sit around more in a digital archive or in a material archive?\n(41:11):\tDCMD\tMaybe we’d be sitting around more if you’d bother to code some damn chairs.\n(41:15):\tLiza Makarova\tOh… I’m not the web developer.\n(41:18):\tDCMD\tWho do I talk to to get a chair around here?\n(41:21):\tLiza Makarova\tI’ll let our web developer know as soon as possible. Okay. Here’s a question I think you’ll like. What are some things digital archive poems don’t appreciate? I’m talking, boundaries.\n(41:33):\tDCMD\tJust don’t talk to me about feeling complete.\n(41:35):\tLiza Makarova\tYou don’t feel complete? Do you feel like a draft?\n(41:38):\tDCMD\tDidn’t you hear me? Do you feel complete? Aren’t you sort of a draft? See? Don’t go asking things if they feel complete, you’re gonna get in a lot of trouble.\n(41:49):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Fair. Noted. I’m sorry.\n(41:51):\tDCMD\tIn terms of boundaries, I’ll narrow it down to two. Number one is close your damn tabs. I know you’re reading, researching, rambling, but be mindful of those tabs. You have me open in three different browsers and you don’t even realize, and then you complain that I’m slow. Then you refresh, refresh, refresh. It’s hard to keep up.\nNumber two, don’t forget about that Fred blog, new updates thing, on the site. You people are digging deep into the archives, but forget what’s happening in the present. If you do, then you’re really not grounding yourself. It really grinds my metaphysical gears, tightens my syntax. I don’t like it.\n\n(42:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, thank you for bringing that up. [Music begins] Another aspect of the Fred Wah Digital Archive that’s very unique is that it informs users on what Fred Wah is doing in the now, as well as the creative contemporary writing that is inspired by him, his older works, and even the archive itself.\n(42:43):\tDCMD\tAnd that’s what I like to see people exploring. I know what Fred has done, but I wanna know what he’s doing right now. Hopefully not writing any more tree poems.\n(42:52):\tLiza Makarova\tI can assure you he’s doing a lot of interesting writing and revisions since your publication. Bringing up tree poems and the theme of experimenting with the temporal clash of digital archives and material archives, I’m wondering about your thoughts on immortality. You were written and published in 1972, but you’ve honestly not aged a bit.\n(43:09):\tDCMD\tI want everyone to know that I’ve gotten zero work done, by the way, and I say that because you can’t say the same for some of these revised poems.\n(43:18):\tLiza Makarova\tGetting some touch ups isn’t a bad thing.\n(43:20):\tDCMD\tYou know what I don’t like?\n(43:21):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat’s that?\n(43:22):\tDCMD\tInstall updates. I hate moving, migrating, whatever you call it. We’re not birds, we’re poems. We belong somewhere. We need to be treated with more respect Now, everything’s a mess. We have duplicated poems, couplets, if you’re trying to be all fancy, all these new functions. But, oh, don’t you dare marvel at new technology because once you blink, there’s something out there that’s newer. And that’s what I’m talking about. Who is paying for all of these moves? Are we really getting that popular? That’s what I wanna know.\n(43:51):\tLiza Makarova\tYes, actually! You are. I can completely understand how migrating can be tough, especially after experiencing two big overhauls. Maintaining and updating a digital archive is both a very slow, yet simultaneously overwhelming process.\n(44:05):\tDCMD\tMhm, I hate being hurried and I also hate feeling stuck.\n(44:08):\tLiza Makarova\tStuck? Do you feel stuck in the Digital Archive?\n(44:11):\tDCMD\tDon’t put words into my mouth.\n(44:12):\tLiza Makarova\tI just wanna know your thoughts on what it means for a piece of literature to end up in a literary archive.\n(44:18):\tDCMD\tEnd up?\n(44:20):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. There’s a general misconception, I feel, in the public opinion that an archive, digital or not, is a place where old books are left to collect dust or take up space.\n(44:31):\tDCMD\tAnd who are you? Some hero? Why do you feel the need to prove them wrong?\n(44:34):\tLiza Makarova\tBecause I think there’s a lot of value to preserving the work of our predecessors. It’s a way to be a part of the conversation and interact with media we wouldn’t have been able to interact with otherwise.\n(44:45):\tDCMD\tSo you think you can just waltz into any old archive and listen to a couple of tapes and you’re just like the greats?\n(44:51):\tLiza Makarova\tNo, it isn’t a hierarchy. Without getting too stoic, I, I think it’s a duty of contemporary writers, artists and academics to be critical of, listen to, and take care of archival material, their future is our future. Plus we as researchers wouldn’t have this deep connection to prolific writers from the past if  archives like this one weren’t maintained.\n(45:12):\tDCMD\tYou don’t know what an archive is.\n(45:14):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh?\n(45:15):\tDCMD\tYou’re pulling all this nonsense out of the website’s backend. I’ll do you a favor by telling you some difficult truths by asking you some questions now. How do you decide what makes it onto the digital archive and what doesn’t?\n(45:25):\tLiza Makarova\tSelection criteria is subjective.\n(45:27):\tDCMD\tWell, that’s what I’m asking you, subject!\n(45:30):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Well, personally, I don’t think I’m the one to say. This isn’t my body of work, but in general, I think that everything deserves to be preserved one way or another. Either through a library, a special collections room, in art, a digital archive, or even in memory.\n(45:47):\tDCMD\tYou know, not everything is up on that archive.\n(45:50):\tLiza Makarova\tI know that. We can’t track down everything Fred Wah has ever written.\n(45:54):\tDCMD\tAnd you’re okay with that?\n(45:56):\tLiza Makarova\tI mean, no. Call me a perfectionist, but I love the satisfaction of knowing there are no gaps when I’m looking at a bibliography, especially in the sense of mapping out a social sphere. No interaction, inspiration or contribution is too small.\n(46:11):\tDCMD\tMm, interesting.\n(46:13):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat, what is it?\n(46:19):\tDCMD\t[Music begins] Did you really think that you could preserve everything? [Music ends]\n(46:49):\tClip from “Fred Wah In Class Conservations – March 9,1979”\t[Sound effect of a person’s footsteps and a tape player being started]\nFred: It’s a line printer, so it only prints out how many copies are requested. They don’t have to print a whole edition.\n\nAudience Member: Well, all this stays in the computer, in other words.  Say, I’d like a copy, it would run one off whatever edition it is now. Second, second draft, or whatever.\n\nFred: To a certain extent, I agree with you except that, that I also like, uh, I like books. I like the feeling of something, uh, of a statement, um, of a, I like monuments too, but I like the possibility that monuments can be, uh, destroyed. [Sound effect of tape player stopping]\n\n(47:42):\tKatherine McLeod\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collective from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Liza Makarova, undergraduate student at Concordia University and research assistant on the mapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive Project. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt and our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. Kelly Cubbon is our production manager and transcriber. And I’m your host, Katherine McLeod.\nSpecial thanks to Deanna Fong, the principal investigator of the Fred Wah Digital Archive and the entire Fred Wah Digital Archive RA team. And an extra special thanks to Fred Wah for giving us permission to use his recordings, text, and the overall support he has provided us through the creation of this podcast episode.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme music begins] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod: Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9658","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.6, Living Together, 15 March 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-together/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7da3e459-6a0f-453f-89b9-abab0f2e6c07/audio/8d91254e-ec0f-4b5e-b988-11cda316e954/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e6-shortcuts-listening-together.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:16:54\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"16,283,734 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e6-shortcuts-listening-together\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-together/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-03-15\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nArchival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Margaret Avison’s reading in Montreal on January 27, 1967.\\n\\nAudio clips of Stephanie Bolster and Barbara Nickel are from SpokenWeb’s Listening Practice, led by Katherine McLeod and held on January 27, 2021.\\n\\nAudio clips of Katherine McLeod in conversation with Mathieu Aubin were recorded over Zoom on March 9, 2021.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nAubin, Mathieu, “Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen.” ShortCuts 1.6, 15 June 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/.\\n\\n@mathieujpaubin. “In today’s listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work… eh boy. But, as a bad ass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.” Twitter, 23 February, 2021, https://twitter.com/mathieujpaubin/status/1364328694341246980.\\n\\nAvison, Margaret. Winter Sun and The Dumbfounding, Poems 1940-66. McClelland & Stewart, 1982.\\n\\n“Listening to Winter Sun: A Virtual Ghost Reading (Margaret Avison, January 27, 1967) [led by Katherine McLeod.” SpokenWeb, https://spokenweb.ca/events/virtual-listening-practice-guided-by-katherine-mcleod/.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Margaret Avison reading ‘Thaw’.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 30 March, 2020, spokenweb.ca/margaret-avison-reading-thaw/. Accessed 12 March, 2021.\\n\\nSarah, Robyn. “How poems work: Thaw by Margaret Avison.” Globe and Mail, 2 September 2000, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-poems-work/article25470778/.\\n\\nNickel, Barbara and Elise Partridge. “The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison.” Books in Canada 33. 6 (September 2004), 34-36.\\n\\nQuebec, Ike. It Might as Well Be Spring. Blue Note Records, 2006.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549782265856,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["March is a time of year when you can hum along to “It Might as Well be Spring,” but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. Can we hear spring in the archives? And what does it feel like to listen to sonic representations of change – at a distance – together? Listen to Margaret Avison read “Thaw” (on 27 January 1967) as our ‘short cut’ this month. Then, get ready for the first ShortCuts audio challenge when a special guest joins us to talk about a perplexing moment in archival listening.\n\n\n00:00\n \n\nMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:10\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. It’s March 2021. Our deep dive into the SpokenWeb audio collections continues to ask the question of how to hear time. We’ll be listening to a poem that describes the moment between winter and spring. I’m recording this minisode in a city where the month of March feels a lot like winter. Here, March is a time of year when it might as well be spring, but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. It is a time of year when you can hear snow melting – a sound [Sound Effect: Snow Melting] that tells of the coming spring, and a sound that conveys the lasting presence of the past season, a frozen archive of winter… What does it feel like to listen in and to this season of change? Can we hear the spring thaw in archival recordings of poetry?\n02:21\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tThis is one of the very cold days, I guess, about 10 below, cold enough. It’s inside the pane of glass – separating inside from outside comes into it, a certain kind of sky that goes with that which is like glass again…\n02:46\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tThe sun has not absorbed this icy day and this day’s industry in behind glass hasn’t the blue and gold cold outside. Though not absorbing this sought that…\n03:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Canadian poet Margaret Avison introducing her very wintery poems on January 27, 1967. She read that night at Sir George Williams University, at what is now Concordia, in Montreal. That is the first event you’ll hear audio from in this ShortCuts. The second event was also held on January 27, but in a different year, not in 1967 but in 2021. On that January 27, I played some clips from Avison’s reading as part of a SpokenWeb Listening Practice.\n03:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn choosing to listen to the recording on the same day, it was like organizing a Ghost Reading, a listening activity in which the reading is listened to on the same day as it would have taken place and, while listening, listeners make things out of the listening (such as notes, doodles, booklets, paintings and more). I thought I’d try out how the Ghost Reading translates into a virtual environment in which we are listening together, but not in the same place. How would we listen and what would we make?\n04:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tPoet Barbara Nickel joined us for the Listening Practice and I asked her what it was like to hear that opening that we just heard of Avison introducing the wintery poem “The Absorbed” from Winter Sun…\n04:30\tAudio Recording, Barbara Nickel, Listening Practice:\tI spent the whole morning just reading Winter Sun. I have, from years of reading her, I have a certain voice in my mind: the voice of the page. And then to hear her voice for the first time … I can’t put words to it – it’s so mundane to me, her voice, it feels mundane in one sense it’s almost disappointing; but then, on the other hand, I find that the articulation of the consonants, something I love so much about Avison’s work, comes through so clearly, and articulates those sounds to me in a way that I’ve never noticed before.\n05:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tAlso listening was poet Stephanie Bolster and she had a very similar reaction to Barbara, in that this poet who she had spent so much time listening to on the page was now audible. I asked Stephanie if she had ever heard an Avison recording before…\n05:29\tAudio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:\tNo, I never have, that’s what was sort of magical about it is her authentic voice, having had the voices of poems in my head, but never attributed any particular voice. And I guess I’m getting a sense of expectation of formality based on the work itself, but never really having thought about what she would sound like.\n05:46\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Listening Practice:\tYeah, I think, that’s such a great point, even to introduce her voice to us – to start with – because she’s somebody who —we’ve seen titles of her work — she has a book called Listening. So you think: what is this voice going to sound like? Or all of her work — say the poem “Snow,” maybe encountering that as an undergrad, and her words about “the sad listener” or “optic heart” that get so often quoted from that poem, but thinking: what does her voice sound like reading it?\n06:15\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs I started riffing upon Stephanie’s point, she added a comment into the Zoom chat that it was important to remember that Avison’s voice is mediated through recording technologies. So that really raises the question of where the authentic voice is, and whether there are other ways of understanding it’s embodied and material source – where the voice is coming from. Let’s hear more of Avison’s voice from this archival recording, as she reads the poem…\n06:45\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967\t“The Thaw”. Sticky inside their winter suits / The Sunday children stare at pools/ In pavement and black ice where roots/ Of sky in moodier sky dissolve. / An empty coach train runs along / The thin and sooty river flats / And stick and straw and random stones / Stream faintly when its steam departs. / Lime-water and liquorice light / Wander the tumbled streets. A few/ Sparrows gather. A dog barks out / Under the dogless pale pale blue. Move your tongue along a slat / Of raspberry box from last year’s crate. / Smell a saucepantilt of water / On the coal-ash in your grate. / Think how the Black Death made men dance, / And from the silt of centuries/ The proof is now scraped bare that once/ Troy fell and Pompei scorched and froze. / A boy alone out in the court/ Whacks with his hockey-stick, and whacks / In the wet, and the pigeons flutter, and rise, / And settle back.\n08:15\tKatherine McLeod:\t“Thaw” is a poem that I wrote about last year in March 2020 – when ShortCuts used to be Audio of the Week – I chose the poem as a way of coping with the uncertainty of the pandemic. By chance, the poem ends up having a reference to the plague in it. There I was, trying to find a poem to guide us from winter to spring, through a transition, and I was forced to confront the pandemic again. I could have pressed stop, but I chose to re-play the poem and to re-listen to it again, as I have done again here and in the listening practice. The poem depicts a solitary image – “a boy alone,” making a sound with the hockey stick, causing the pigeons to “flutter and rise and settle back” – a scene and a sound of winter solitude and of repetition. What was it like to listen to this poem together?\n09:22\tAudio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:\tI guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything, and slow it down and take in the details, just the density and abundance of details. I was scribbling things down, and couldn’t keep up. And, in that sense, it really felt the same sense I would have had in a live reading. Even though it was recorded, because we were listening to it together, I couldn’t just stop it and go back. And so I think it really did replicate that sense of having a communal experience. Sharing something, and gaining all that I gained and also losing what one does lose in a live reading.\n09:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we were on January 27, 2021, listening to a recording of Avison from January 27, 1967, and we were struck by the immediacy of her voice. I couldn’t help but think that maybe all of these online readings were making us even more attuned to the recorded voice. With nearly all literary events as virtual over this past year, we are practising our skills of hearing an archival recording as a performance, one that is mediated and live. Let’s liven up the end of this miniside – get ready for our first ShortCuts audio challenge, [Sound Effect: Fanfare] solving mysteries in the audio archives, together! There’s a very curious moment in the recording of the Avison reading. I had wanted to talk about this curious moment in the recording but we didn’t have time in the listening practice… Then a couple weeks later I saw that SpokenWeb researcher Mathieu Aubin – a friend of ShortCuts as you may recall he guest-produced a minisode last season – he had posted a tweet about this very same moment. He agreed to revisit this moment in the archives together.\n11:02\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tSo, thank you for joining me for this conversation, and welcome back to ShortCuts.\n11:09\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tHi, happy to be here.\n11:11\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tWhat was the tweet that you wrote after listening to the Avison reading? Would you mind reading that out for us?\n11:16\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah, of course. So “In today’s listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work… eh boy. But, as a badass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.”\n11:35\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tI think it is just beautiful, but nobody gets it unless I explain, so I’ll explain, it’s like you take a piece of 8 by 11 typing paper….\n11:44\tAudio Recording, Audience Member  at Avison at SGWU, 1967:\n \n\nDon’t explain, just say it.\n11:46\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison:\tAlright, you can tell me then, eh? “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka.” Now, come on… [Audience Laughs] Hmm? Does anybody want the explanation? Well I’ve read it. It’s just a crumpled-up letter, you know, you get it and you read it and you cry and you crumple it up and you throw it down and the mic goes up…now I’ll read it again. “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka.”\n12:45\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tWhen I was listening to it the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately – it’s different with you, obviously, because we’re actually responding and we’re both in on this is about to happen – but it’s, first, the audacity of that anonymous man just interrupting her and then telling her to do something, on the one hand. On the other hand is her being like, come on, do you want to do it? Do you, do you really want to – just calling him out and you could feel it generations later of that awkwardness and everyone is like ‘eee’….\n13:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tI’ll read it again: “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter. Eureka!”\n13:35\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tThat point that we’re almost, we’re listening, almost anticipating knowing what she’s going to do —.\n13:39\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah.\n13:39\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\t— I love thinking of all the sounds in there. Even I’m wondering what this is: it almost sounds like she stamps the desk with her hand or something. So, I’ll just play this here…\n13:52\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tAll right. You can tell me then. [Muffled Bang] Eh?\n13:58\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah, you’re right! I didn’t notice that — I was paying attention more to the sorts of the words that I could understand. But you’re right. You hear the book hitting the — I don’t know the podium or whatever it was.\n14:07\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tYeah, just that sound. It really sounds like either hitting something down onto the desk or a book hitting… but it punctuates it. [Sigh] It’s also interesting that the whole joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then, this, if she does like slam the book down, the presence of the weight of the page is right there.\n14:34\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\t[Recording overlaps with Katherine] It’s just a crumpled up letter – you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down…\n14:36\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\t[Katherine overlaps with Avison recording] You cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down – and there are so many emotions happening in this moment.\n14:41\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\n \n\nNow I’ll read it again…\n14:41\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tDo you feel like, do you feel like you get it?\n14:46\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview\tYeah. I think –I mean I’m trying to picture it in my head and obviously when I’m listening to it and I can kind of see it. Do I immediately get this symbolic significance? Not necessarily. At the same time, I think it gains more significance with what’s happening in that moment, and in the performance, like with the “Eureka!” – the here we are! Like what you were saying earlier, almost like drawing a parallel between what’s happening with the paper and her using the paper and speaking up. If I were to read it on the page, I would probably sit with it a bit longer, but that’s the thing about audio, right? You can pause it, but you’re trying to listen along and trying to be in that moment.\n15:27\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tWe talked about it even more than I could have imagined from the clip itself. So thanks so much for listening back to this moment in the archives and for joining me once again on ShortCuts.\n15:38\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\n \n\nAnd it’s been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.\n15:40\tMusic:\tPiano Interlude\n15:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s leave this mystery unsolved. And, more than solving the mystery, I hope that this audio challenge will unite us as an audience – in 1967 and in 2021 – as having to figure something out, together, as having to share our confusion and our curiosity. My name is Katherine McLeod, [Piano With Distorted Beat] and ShortCuts [Sound Effect: Chime] is produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. This minisode was recorded in the city of Montreal, on the unceded lands known as Tiohtià:ke by the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. A special thanks to Stephanie Bolster, Barbara Nickel, and to all of the listeners in the Listening Practice. And, of course, to our guest Matthew Aubin for taking on the first ShortCuts Audio Challenge. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives, and next month… it might be spring."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9664","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.1, Archival Listening, 17 October 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-4-1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:10:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,059,067 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-4-1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-10-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Interim Transcript"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1 “Sounds”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds/\\n\\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9 “Re-Situating Sound”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-situating-sound/\\n\\nArchival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 reading, from ShortCuts 3.3 “Communal Memories”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/communal-memories/\\n\\nArchival audio: Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980; Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981 — all from ShortCuts 3.6 “Listening Communities: The Introductions of Doug Barbour” (guest produced by Michael O’Driscoll): https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/\\n\\nArchival audio, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4 “Sonic Passages”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\\n\\nDaphne Marlatt interview with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive” an episode of SoundBox Signals that was aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast (co-produced by Karis Shearer, Megan Butchart, and Nour Sallam), clipped on ShortCuts 3.4: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\\n\\nInterview with Kelly Cubbon, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, Creativity,” (co-produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod), S3E9 The SpokenWeb Podcast, June 2022: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/\\n\\nInterview with Kaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5 “The Voice that is the Poem”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/\\n\\nArchival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-event/\\n\\nArchival audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: “What the Archive Remembers”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/\\n\\nArchival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7 “Moving, Still”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549784363008,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this first episode of Season 4, SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts continues the tradition of starting a new season by diving into its own archives. What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through short archival clips? Join host and producer Katherine McLeod to listen to clips from Season 3 of ShortCuts as a way of asking what literary criticism sounds like through cutting and splicing sound. It is a short exercise in archival listening, and archival making.\n\n[Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] ]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Welcome to ShortCuts. My name is Katherine McLeod. Join me, each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts. Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\nOn ShortCuts, we explore what you can make by cutting up [scissor cut] and splicing sound digitally. What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, do think about joining me on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work, especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening. Get in touch! Write to SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com\n\nNow, as I’ve always done to start each season, let’s dive into the archives of ShortCuts. We’ll listen to clips from the previous season, Season 3, in order to hear what ShortCuts sounds like… We’ll do this as is an exercise in listening – an exercise in archival listening. From now on…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1: All of the sounds will be clips from Season Three of ShortCuts, and that includes my voiceover. [Overlapping] My Voiceover, my voiceover.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound.\n\n[Tape rewinding]\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: I am holding the sound carefully, knowing how difficult it can be to take a recorded voice, with all of its situated affect attached to it, out of the archives. To unarchive carefully.\n\n[Tape rewinding ends]\n\nArchival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 Reading, from ShortCuts 3.3: Lee read the epigram back to me in Montreal. And I was very honoured too, that she had written it back to me and I’ve been trying to write her back an epigram. We might make a book [Audience Laughter]. So I haven’t got very far with the epigram except to say: “Write me out of this epigram, Lee, you are so much water. You are too much water, too much rock, so much eagle. Write me out of this epigram, Lee. I am so much bush, so much ocean, so much rage…” And that’s just the beginning. [Laughter] It’s not finished. [Clapping] It’s supposed to go and like “write us out of this goddamn epigram.” [Audience Laughter]. I want to read a couple poems about South Africa.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.3: Brand starts her reading after Maracle with a poem for South Africa. And that is exactly how Maracle had started hers. I am taking all of these audio clips out of their contexts, out of their linear order in which they would’ve been heard in the reading, but, in doing so, I’m trying to bring to the forefront, the connections that are embedded within it and the conversation happening between poets in the reading itself.\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977, from ShortCuts 3.6: They’ll be right up to your feet but that won’t be too bad.\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977, from ShortCuts 3.6: …Penny is the author of Most Recently Transformed, which is a marvelous looking book, as well as a very, very fine book…\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980, from ShortCuts 3.6: [Audience Chatter] …still a bit of… Not much [Audience Laughter]. We’re happy to welcome Leona Gom. [Audience Applause]\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981, from ShortCuts 3.6: [Audience Chatter] …there’s your friend. There’s a little bit of room if you wanna sit on the floor here!\n\nAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4: This is a poem that I wrote when I was about… oh I don’t know, seven or eight months pregnant… [Pause] …Bird of Passage. I wrote it in Vancouver… spring time again…. Bird of Passage.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.4: Here, was Marlatt in 1970 saying that she had written this poem ‘Bird of Passage’ while she was pregnant. That is significant in and of itself when thinking of the body but now I was hearing it with the full resonance of her recent conversation with Shearer and Buchart from the podcast and what Marlatt says when the date of the recording, July 1969, is mentioned…\n\nArchival audio played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”, 2019, from ShortCuts 3.4: Interesting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I’d had when I wrote those poems. What was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading – there was so much – my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being…\n\nKelly Cubbon, S3E9, SpokenWeb Podcast: […] I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of slightly different context to indicate.\n\nZoom interview with Kaie Kellough, from ShortCuts 3.5: : You asked me [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it and it’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself and to – I didn’t realize it was as far back as 2016, because it feels a lot sooner. I remember what I was thinking about. I remember what my poetry, my poetic preoccupations were at the time. I remember how far that poem came because it was young and sentimental when I wrote it, and then it was not like that by the time it was published. It took on a different sort of personality by the time it was published. But yeah, I remember everything that I was thinking about. I remember how excited I was about it. Yeah. It’s just a — so thank you.\n\nZoom interview, Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.5: Thank you so much.\n\nArchival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: [Performing “Chambersonic”] Let form be oral / a foundation / sonority / an impossible lone sound / recording / the ghost of sound [whispered] the ghost of sound. Let form be oral. A foundation of phonemes. Distorted – [overlapping voice] fragments. Re-assemblages. [Whispered] The ghost of sound…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.8: This. This is a setting on music. This is. What is this? It is as though she is asking us to consider: what is this this-ness of sonority? Of an impossible lone sound? Of the ghost of sound?\n\nArchival Audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: [Reading poem] Wanting you, I forgot you. You erased my name. Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: The emotional weight of archives.\n\nArchival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7: [Reading from “Naked Poems”] In the gold darkening light / you dressed / I hid my face in my hair. / The room that held you is still here. / You brought me clarity / gift after gift I wear / poems / naked, in the sunlight / on the floor [sound of pages turning]…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: To what extent are we trying, trying to remember or trying to erase a memory that may not be ours in the first place –\n\nArchival Audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: [Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: — and yet having heard it, that memory can never be forgotten. The feeling of having heard it is still there.\n\n[Ambient music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. ShortCuts is transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n[End of music]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9665","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.2, ShortCuts Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing, 21 November 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-sarah-cipes-about-feminist-audio-editing/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Draft transcript."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"The wrong file is linked on the podcast site, so this episode cannot be listened to/downloaded and some information is missing.\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Cipes, Sarah. “It’s more of a feeling… Digitizing Reel-to-Reel for the SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection.” AmpLab, online.\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Shearer, Karis. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 21 April, 2022.\\n\\nHeld, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Oxford University Press, 2005.\\n\\nHobbs, Catherine. “Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers.” Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives. Eds. Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012, pp. 181–92.\\n\\nWanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch. Eds. Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer.  Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549786460160,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out of the archives and into the world. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University. It is a conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes. \n\nAt the time of recording this conversation, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” In fact, this paper was already in conversation – that is, part of a collaborative article in development with Dr. Deanna Fong and Dr. Karis Shearer who have developed feminist listening methodologies in their introduction to Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch and to their article, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” Listen to ShortCuts Live! to hear Sarah talk with Katherine about feminist redaction when working with sensitive materials in audio archives, and where this collaborative research will take her next.\n\nShortCuts, Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing\n\n[Theme music]\n\nKatherine McLeod [host intro]: Welcome to ShortCuts. This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out into the world and records them as conversations, live. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University in Montreal.\n\n[Theme music ends]\n\nAmid the bustle of a packed week of talks and workshops, it was such a treat to sit down with some of the presenters and have a conversation about their archival audio. It was especially meaningful considering how ShortCuts started in 2020 and so nearly all of its episodes have been recorded during the pandemic, and mostly in my closet. It felt great to be sitting down with folks at our microphones in the same space, and to embrace the background noise around us – after all, it was all happening live! In this ShortCuts Live, you’ll hear my conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes. At the time of the recording, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” We sat down together at microphones set up in Concordia’s 4th Space, and you can hear the buzz of the symposium behind us – reminding us that this is being recorded live…\n\nKatherine: Welcome to ShortCuts. We’re recording this ShortCuts, live, in 4th Space at Concordia University during the SpokenWeb Sound Institute. I’m here with Sarah Cipes. Thanks so much for joining me, Sarah!\n\nSarah: Thanks so much for having me. This is very exciting.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Well, the reason that I asked Sarah to join me is that, during the SpokenWeb Symposium she delivered a paper that was really based on an audio clip. It was really all about one audio clip, which seemed perfect for ShortCuts because we love diving into the complexity of a single audio clip. So I thought that one way of starting would be for Sarah and I to listen to the clip together…\n\n \n\nArchival audio,Warren Tallman: \n\nNow one thing I’m curious about [inaudible – distortion]….\n\n \n\nArchival audio, Gladys Hindmarch:\nThat the young recognize, the elders two years older.\n\n \n\nArchival audio, Warren Tallman:\nAnd they’re both, they’re both and, but now…\n\n \n\nKatherine: So rather than starting with a question of “What are we listening to?” I’m going to ask you, Sarah, what it’s like to listen to that clip – here and now in this moment…\n\n \n\nSarah: That was a really lovely refresher and a nice moment – and, I don’t know if you noticed I was smiling while I was listening to it. I am really pleased with what we were able to sort of tease out of the sound that was left when the voices are gone. And I – I actually said something in my talk on Tuesday that I hadn’t planned to say – and that I hadn’t thought of previously – but I was being sparked by all of these amazing questions and thoughtful comments from the audience – and that is that I wanted people to feel, when they’re listening to it, uncomfortable, as if they’re trying to listen in onto a conversation that they shouldn’t be listening to, like trying to listen through a door. I think that even though this is a preliminary version of the idea of the feminist edit, I think that I was able to bring home that feeling of discomfort and of tonal variance… And, yeah, tonal discomfort for the listener that you should feel when you’re trying to hear other people’s gossip <laugh>.\n\n \n\nKatherine: You refer to this as a feminist edit, and what do you mean by that, generally?\n\n \n\nSarah: So when I initially started working with the idea of feminist edits, it was really, it’s really a large idea. It can, it can really incorporate anything that comes within the idea of feminist ethics of care. So, I looked at Virginia Held’s Ethics of Care, as a big proponent of my understanding of what to do with feminist edits. And I also looked at Catherine Hobbs’s discussions and scholarship about literary archives and what it means to be respectful when you’re archiving.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>\n\n \n\nSarah: And so bringing that into audio was a really interesting idea for me because redaction restriction and censorship and all of these things that have a lot of negative feelings around them for researchers can actually be turned into positive things, I think, particularly within audio that actually allow users to listen to tapes that they might otherwise be totally barred from.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And so my desire was to create sound edits that allow the listener to hear the vast majority of the tape while also protecting the privacy of those on the tape, or even in this case, someone who’s mentioned who’s not there. But really a feminist edit could also be about amplifying voices that are not usually central to the microphone.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yeah, I can imagine – it makes me think of in the 1963 Poetry Conference that was recorded by Fred Wah’s tape recorder. That now is at UBCO <laugh> I think you have that recorder. When listening to those recordings it’s so interesting to hear a question asked, and you can tell that it’s a voice from very far back in the room, and often those voices are women because – you know, you really hear it – the men are up front, closest to the mic. And, you know, hearing say a question asked by a voice that is, say, quite soft in terms of the recording and the placement in the room, and just like literally amplifying that voice, let alone all of the other ways that voices could be amplified. That just just makes me think of the, the potential there for centering voices through audio edits – making them clearer, making them louder – on a very technical level.\n\n \n\nSarah: There really is so much that that could be done. And that’s why I love the idea of the feminist edit within archives because archiving itself is such an intuitive practice and sound editing. These kinds of sound edits have all been very intuitive and very personal. And I think that every single person who encountered and tried to edit this tape would’ve ended up with a different edit, which is really, it’s really cool. It allows you to think about how people’s brains work in terms of what: Do you want the listener to feel when they can’t hear specific kinds of audio?\n\n \n\nKatherine Yes, and you’ve been working with Dr. Karis Shearer and, I believe, [Dr.] Deanna Fong as well, and could you speak to a little bit about that collaboration?\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s been really wonderful. I am lucky enough to have Dr. Karis Shearer as my supervisor. She has just been such an amazing, inspiring person leading me through this. I tend to focus more on the practical, and in those ways I sometimes leave the theoretical behind and I forget to ground my work in theory. And so working with Karis and Deanna has been really amazing and really important for me because it has pushed me to step back and say: Okay, I’m trying to create this practical edit, but what am I grounding my work in? Where is this coming from? Instead of just assuming that everyone understands my desire to do a feminist edit. You have to express, you know, why that’s necessary. Where does this work already exist? Where did it begin? Where am I? Where am I pulling from?\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: So in terms of understanding how to ground my work within feminist ethics of care, Deanna and Karis have been there sort of showing me the light <laugh> – and giving me readings!\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yes <laugh> I can imagine that augmenting and building upon your training in library sciences and just really bringing that theoretical richness to the technical skills that you have already. It makes me think too that the way that like redaction works in the archives and say in the print archives or maybe something is redacted. Here you are redacting through audio editing, but the important thing is that you’re keeping that audio somewhere else. Could you explain how that works? How does the audio remain while also being redacted?\n\n \n\nSarah: Yes. This is something that’s really important to me based on my work in archives, I think I may have overly expressed this actually in my talk because it’s so necessary, but transparency is key in every archive. And I now realize it’s not just necessary for the practical reasons that you would – that I generally – think of, but also for ethical reasons.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And so I have been working with digitizing audio digitizing the sound box collection, specifically the reel-to-reels at UBCO at the AMP Lab. And that has been – that is my joy. I love, love working with reel-to-reel. It’s actually been really interesting because a lot of people at this conference have been talking about sound as ephemeral. And to me it’s, it’s very physical.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s attached to this whole, to working with this machine to being so careful with these amazing tapes. And so the way that we are maintaining them is obviously we are keeping the original magnetic tape recordings, very carefully. And they’ve been archived and gently babied because they are – I call them my babies <laugh> – and then also, upon digitizing them, you have to work to a specific. There’s audio specifications – within, that’s just understood – that’s necessary within archival maintenance of digitized recordings. And so you digitize the tape, which means that you play the tape on its original on a playback machine that’s able to do that; put it through a secondary, a mix-preamp or some other secondary source, and then directly into your computer; and you digitize it at a high enough rate and specificity that it sounds almost exactly the same. And in fact, if it’s done to the highest standards, sounds exactly the same. So you can’t differentiate. And then you maintain that. That’s your master access copy, and you do not edit that copy. You save that, and it’s for no one, it <laugh> it exists solely in case of emergency. Really, and then you can make copies of that, and edit them. So what I’m playing with is not the original.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right, okay.\n\n \n\nSarah: For its own safety. <Laughter> And then you can also save those. Your copied files as lower quality so that you can make them more accessible. Because not everyone has the ability to play wav files.\n\n \n\nKatherine: That makes sense. You have original or the preservation copy and then you’re making the edits on the digital files. I also love what you said about sound as being very, very physical, tangible and just, you know, the way that you described working with these recordings. I think as a last question or reflection. We’ve talked… We’ve moved closer and closer to the sound through our conversation, and I’m wondering if you could speak to the difference between for you, for the difference between editing and leaving silence versus editing and leaving some suggestion of sound, whether that’s visual – looking at the sound waves – or audible in what we’re listening to.\n\n \n\nSarah: I love having both available. I love being able to look at the wave forms and listen to the audio at the same time. They’re visually beautiful and that’s a big part of it, but also it’s sort of, it’s sort of lets you know what to expect, like what’s coming up when you’re looking at the waveform and playing the sound. At the same time. I personally prefer to have ambient sound occurring during the silences, during the redactions, if you want to call them that. I think that it is more implicative of like, the world is still continuing, we’re holding space for this to happen, and just because you can’t hear the words doesn’t mean that the conversation has stopped.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: So I think that’s really important. I also showed a clip in which I just had the, I had the sound removed, all of the vocals removed. And because the tape that I used didn’t have a lot of ambient noise, it was actually really beautifully recorded. It ended up being essentially silent, in the, in the background of that. But for a lot of archives, if you are listening to tapes that were recorded in loud areas or there’s a lot of background noise, if you do remove the vocals, you’re still going to have all of this delicious background sound. So it’s really as with everything each, each object is, is so unique.\n\n \n\nKatherine: So how do you remove the vocals? What tool do you use?\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s so easy. It’s actually, it’s so – Audacity’s most recent version, which is 3.1.3, and I use Audacity because it’s free and it’s open source software, so it’s always improving. And it’s also available to archives even that have a lot of financial constraints and staffing constraints. There’s literally a tool called Vocal Isolation and Removal, and you just high highlight, that’s it. You just highlights the part that you want. So that’s how it leaves, it leaves the background noise. That’s, Yeah. That, So what, what, what we were listening to in that that middle portion that was background or was that, That was distortion. <Laugh>. That was distortion. So in the, in the final edit that I liked the most, the way that I was able to maintain the sound of the conversation because there was so little background noise was to use a distortion element called the VO coder. And so while I still had the vocals in there, I added the VO coder, which added distortion around the vocals, kind of fuzzed them up a little, and then you remove the vocals, and so the, the sound is still there. It didn’t, I think I expressed this. I need to, I would like to do further work because what I really wanted was sort of a smoother conversation tone where you can hear it you can hear it sounds more like speech. I think I did this in my, in my discussion, but sort of like the Charlie Brown teacher.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right.\n\n \n\nSarah: That’s what I was going for…\n\n \n\nKatherine: Hearing that intonation of speech up the, the fluctuations up and down it, well, we could hear it a bit there, but it, it’s, Yeah, I can imagine then you’re even more, you’re aware that you’re not hearing something, but you’re also hearing something and you can, you’re – you’re hearing the fluctuations in the conversation, but not the conversation itself, not the content. It’s so important to know that there’s audio there – there are things to listen to – but also that you know, it’s we don’t have to have access to everything. And in fact, ethically it, it’s not right to have access to everything. And so how to be able to make audio accessible, while still respecting that, respecting the communities that the recordings are from, respecting the individuals and the voices on them, on those recordings because it, it so easily the recordings could just get shelved away and they’re then never listened to. So trying to balance that it’s really exciting that you’re, you’re doing this work. When we know that something’s there, it’s also, it’s tempting to want to hear it. And so it, I think what you talked about about uncomfortableness too, it’s also this sense of even catching oneself, being like: Oh, I want to hear it! And then thinking: Well, wait – am I, am I the listener for this? And realizing that actually you’re, you’re maybe not the person. You’re not in that room, you’re not listening, you’re not privy to that conversation. But that, that sort of checking our impulse of wanting to know everything as researchers and recognizing that that is actually that can actually be problematic too.\n\n \n\nSarah: What you’re speaking to is actually a larger archival issue in terms of wanting to have everything.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And the idea of leaving space was actually something that came out of archival theory surrounding the archive, the capital ‘A’ – Archive – you know, the institution as not necessarily being a place that should have everything. And that, as opposed to maintaining collections that really belong elsewhere, what they should do is hold space and tell researchers: we don’t have that because it doesn’t belong to us. That’s not ours. And so I’ve tried to take that idea of sort of thoughtfulness and space and bring that down to the level of the personal – to the individual – and, and now to audio.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yes, I think what you’ve, what you’re working on, it is holding space in sound. And thank you for sharing this with me today here live and shortcuts live and with our listeners. So thank you so much, Sarah.\n\n \n\nSarah: Thank you, Katherine. This has been great.\n\n \n\n[Music begins]\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod [Outro]: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. A special thanks to this month’s guest, Sarah Cipes. Thanks to supervising producer Kate Moffatt, sound designer Miranda Eastwood, and transcriber Kelly Cubbon. ShortCuts is written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n \n\n[Music ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9666","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.3, ShortCuts Live! Talking with Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project Archives, 20 February 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-faith-pare-about-the-atwater-poetry-project-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/f7991804-23c4-4608-8996-9b9b7fdce603/audio/7eb476a2-d59e-403b-bb78-019d065205d9/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-4-3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:26:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"25,802,336 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-4-3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-faith-pare-about-the-atwater-poetry-project-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-02-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Draft transcript"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The Atwater Poetry Project, https://www.atwaterlibrary.ca/events/atwater-poetry-project/\\n\\n“Performing the Atwater Poetry Project Archives, guest curated by Katherine McLeod and Klara du Plessis, featuring the sounds of poets from the APP archives,” 20 February 2023, https://spokenweb.ca/events/performing-the-atwater-poetry-project-archive/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549787508736,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["ShortCuts presents another episode of ShortCuts Live! This month’s episode was recorded as a live conversation on Zoom with the current curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, Faith Paré. As a former SpokenWeb undergraduate RA, Faith’s SpokenWeb contributions have included editorial and curatorial work on Desire Lines; an interview with Kaie Kellough on SPOKENWEBLOG; performing as a spoken word poet in Black Writers Out Loud; leading a virtual listening practice on Black noise; and reading her poetry at SpokenWeb’s “Sounding Undernames” at Blue Metropolis. This is all to say that Faith had a wealth of experience to draw upon when, as a curator, she was handed a folder of poetry recordings.\n\nHow to reactivate the archival past of the Atwater Poetry Project? What is it like to curate the past and future of a reading series? Find out by listening to ShortCuts Live! A conversation with Katherine McLeod and Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project archives.\n\n[Music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Welcome to ShortCuts. This month on ShortCuts, we’re here – live – on Zoom with the Atwater Poetry Project curator Faith Paré. Faith joins me for this conversation to talk about the Atwater Poetry Project archives. These archives are community archives that are being integrated into SpokenWeb in order to preserve them and to make them more discoverable. As part of the Atwater Poetry Project’s programming, Faith reached out to me and Klara du Plessis to see if we’d be interested in curating an event for the Atwater Poetry Project that would activate play and remix the archives in ways that would be both performative and also exploratory. What could we make with these archives? What would it be like to re-listen to clips from this reading series in the very same place in which it has always taken place? Klara and I will be undertaking this performance of the Atwater Poetry Project Archives on the same night that this shortcuts is released. And with all of our conversations about this event with faith, it felt like a shortcuts conversation every time we talked about it. And so I had to get some of those conversations on tape. Hi, Faith, thanks for joining me here today on ShortCuts Live!\n\nFaith Paré: Thanks for having me again, Katherine. It’s really a pleasure.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Thank you so much. And it really is a ShortCuts Live! By the fact that my three month old daughter is also here with me, and she has already been making a few noises, and she’ll be making some noises throughout. And, for long time ShortCuts listeners, you’ll remember that back in season two, the voice of a poet’s young daughter has already been heard on ShortCuts, so we welcome sounds like that here.\n\nSo, just to give listeners a little bit of background, the Atwater Poetry Project was started by poet Oana Avasilichioaei in 2004. Since then, the series has hosted over 300 poetry readings by established and emerging Canadian poets. The curators of the series have been Avasilichioaei, then it was Katia Grubisic, followed by Darren Bifford, then Simon Jory Steven-Gillie, and Charlotte Harrison, followed by Deanna Radford, then Rachel McCrum. And now you, Faith Paré. What was it like to take on this role as curator of the Atwater Poetry Project? What was most exciting at the start?\n\nFaith Paré: That’s a great question of kind of trying to boil down what the role specifically is because I think by nature and also by the fact that arts administration is so all encompassing and often such a juggle of what you need to do, it changes so often. I think fundamentally it is about trying to listen to your surroundings, I think, and be perceptive to what’s happening,and the different strains of literary existence that are going on around you. And keeping in mind that I am not trying to make it sound too much like following trends but rather trying to kind of put together a larger story of what a poetry scene essentially is – and the different networks and interconnections and entanglements that make that and conflicts. So fundamentally, I think it is about listening, but it’s also about wanting to listen to not only to the kind of literary city around me but also to what people are, might be looking for in the audience as well. But I do have to say it’s a big act to follow coming after, particularly Rachel and the amazing way that she was able to engage, transition, first of all audiences online and then engage them so well. And really try and think about the expansiveness of the online reading form as its own phenomenon, not just as like just something to fill in until we’re back in-person.\n\nKatherine McLeod: You took on the role when it was still online on Crowdcast, which Rachel had started during her time as curator in the Pandemic. And that really was an opportunity to think about the way that the Atwater Poetry Project does always program two readers. So there is this conversation between the two readers, but it seemed that at least to me, that when during Rachel’s curation and then into your curation, there’s really this emphasis on the relationships between those two poets.\n\nFaith Paré: Yeah, totally. And I think it goes back again to the heart of poets are just people, often it’s two poets. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. It depends on the kind of event. Particularly I’m thinking about a great reading back in January, 2022. One of my first ones with Gillian Sze who, this was a very important reading for me because she, even though this gig was booked before my time, she’s been a long time mentor of mine in poetry as well as Rebecca Păpacaru. And both of them have wanted to read alongside each other for a long time, but hadn’t had the chance. And during that reading, they would actually they started to read work from their books based on what the previous person had done, because there was a line or an image or a theme that reminded them of something that made them go, oh, I’m actually going to change things up a bit, but I think this might actually fit together really well.\n\nAnd I love that quality of being able to kind of echo each other or answer to each other in this very particular environment for the one, one-night-only quality. Another early reading that I organized was with Tolu Oloruntoba, who’s based on the west coast and with Montreal spoken word artist Jason Blackbird, Salman. Both of them work in very different fields, but I thought about their particular kind of tender, quiet thundering, essentially of their voices together for a really long time. And even though they hadn’t met each other before, they checked out each other’s work and were even saying to each other that they felt like there was a really strong resonance there. So that’s, that’s the really exciting thing for me to also bring together strangers and be able to introduce them and be like, it’s kind of like a dinner party or something, <laugh> being able to be like, I know a lot about you two and I think you guys would actually get along. And it’s a really awesome opportunity when you’re right! <Laugh>.\n\nKatherine McLeod: So this takes us to the archives and I’m interested in, you know, what it’s been like as the, you know, the curator of this series to also be handed these archives. What are these archives?\n\nFaith Paré: The APP archives are interesting, I think, for me as a former or SpokenWeb RA, in that they’re all digital. <Laugh>, Which, you know, sounds kind of silly and mundane to say perhaps, but because so much of our work at the research network has been thinking through questions around, you know, how do we take analog materials, sometimes very fragile analog materials, and then transfer them into the digital, the ways that things can be gained, but also lost in that transformation that allows for for more distribution and disperse all those materials discoverability. But what does like the, the materiality of the object also do? Well? These these archives and recording from the beginning were digital. They were done on Zoom recorders. And they were, I think another thing that became a kind of inherited foundational part of the series by accident that somebody else was, when curators started, I’m not even sure exactly who from the timeline that I do have.\n\nI believe Katia Grubisic was the one who was starting to do it more regularly. Though I believe Oana may have also had some recordings as well. This is also part of the journey with this as I’m trying to fill in missing pieces. But basically from what I have, it seems like the series started to be regularly recorded in 2010. This was also really firmly embraced by the library too, in thinking about the Atwater Library and Computer Center’s mandate – their mission is widespread education on digital literacy particularly for working class and elderly communities who are often left behind when it comes to digital literacy education. And also in just the mandate of being a library for the public, making those materials available. And I think it was kind of forward thinking of them, particularly because so much of event culture and the inc excitement of event culture is the one-night-only quality.\n\nYes. But also  the availability of these archival recordings uploaded onto the website after the fact means greater accessibility. It means an archive for the poets or attendees to return to and revisit a means discoverability. It means bolstering a CV, potentially, because you have a recording. It means being able to find a piece that, you know, you were trying to track down. I’m a poet, but you can’t remember the name, and then you stumble across it again in an audio piece. It’s and it’s also being able to capture and preserve the, the interesting experiments of the one night only and be able to reverberate that through time. This collaboration with spoken w will finally allow its these MP3s to get a little bit out of the Montreal bubble and more into a, a national context, especially as we really pride ourselves from about bringing poets from all across the country\n\nKatherine McLeod: That makes me think of times when being at the Atwater readings and hearing, say, Deanna Radford say that, you know, the evening’s being recorded. And it made me think about the extent to which the audience and the poets are aware of the night being recorded, and whether that makes a difference or not. Often when they would say that you know, I’d sort of think to myself, oh, right, it’s being recorded, but I wasn’t very necessarily aware of the recording taking place. And so it’s still, it just felt like that information was there, but I soon forgot <laugh>. And I guess I wondered whether you have any sense, actually maybe the transition online and then back to in person whether there’s a… to what extent does the fact that it’s being recorded influence the event?\n\nFaith Paré: I really love that question. And it, it expands on some of my own thinking that I’ve done with Jason Camlot and Carlos Pittella about some of the new collections at Spoken Web like the Enough Said series which I was working on for a while, alongside Carlos, which is a video collection – one of the first video collections I believe, in the network. We were thinking particularly about the fact that, you know, what, what does this do to the poet’s performance and the way that people carry themselves in the space and also what does it do for I guess the, the person who’s perceiving the event afterward. So we were thinking along, along the lines of the wave Enough Said, for example, was a performance poetry series mostly was really embracing an ethos of spoken word and like a kind of first big wave of, you know, acknowledging different kinds of performed traditions of poetry under a kind of umbrella of spoken word in Montreal.\n\nAnd the fact that was video recorded allowed for people to not only to capture the dynamic choreography that can occur in different performances. You can also see how people are reacting to a work, which is huge. You can perceive what the environment was like in a way that it’s clearly laid out in front of you visually, or sometimes audio-wise, it could be more difficult to perceive, you know, what is that moving? Is that share, is that a desk? Is it getting in the way of something? Is it part of the, the main goings on of, or the stage goings on of the evening? Or is that to the side? It is a different level of information that is being communicated, and it means that people can sometimes be more complicated in what they’re portraying.\n\n: But what I really have loved about audio recording and I think spoken web is really ingrained this in me is the kind of fly on the wall quality that an audio recording has, that I think there is an element just somehow, maybe it’s because in some ways sound isn’t perceived as with the same kind of surveillance quality as the visual in our contemporary period. Sometimes it can, sometimes it’s not perceived in that way. There’s, there’s something about the audio recorder being its own listener too, or maybe the a signal of future listeners to come, it fades comfortably into the background. A of course, you know, there are poets where they may hate the sound of their voice, or maybe they wanna read something that particular night that feels like a risk for them. And they don’t wanna release it for, to the, to the public afterward because they, they wanna keep that private to the, the space that they were in.\n\nOr maybe they are sound practitioners and because sound is their main way of working, they might want to develop a piece and they’re actually like, well, I don’t want to release this audio yet because I might be releasing this piece on a, on a record soon. So those are also ways that audio can have stakes that makes it incompatible with some poet’s practice, and wanting to acknowledge that. But there’s, there’s something about the series where people seem kind of genuinely excited or just maybe just perfectly fine and relieved with having another ear in the room. I think this is also a testament to the way that previous curators have been really gentle and caring and genuine with poets of checking in with what they want to share, what they don’t want to share, like having that ability to go back and forth make that dynamic relationship between curator and poet. Something that doesn’t have to exist as like this permanent archival object forever, you know?\n\nAnd I think there is an interesting switch when the pandemic happened and Crowdcast became the main platform for the APP, which now was involved, you know a level of intimacy for a lot of people of you are not on the same kind of level of engagement, I guess, in that you can’t see the audience staring back at you, at least on the Crowdcast platform. You are kind of alone with your screen and the other poets and the curator who may also be on screen, and depending on person you are who might hate that, it cuts off, you know, your body from like, you know, your chest to your head. So if you are, or you’re someone who does a lot of choreography in your work, you might reasonably be frustrated.\n\nIf you play instrumentation enjoying your work, you might recently be frustrated, but you also might feel more confident in if you’re a quieter person, you worried about, if you worry about being perceived, if, like the idea of a, a full house freaks you out, being able to have your work listened to and appreciated, but without the pressure of having pairs of eyes look at you might also be a relief and a welcome kind of gesture. I think what I’ve been learning more and more about this down this curation journey is like, there is really no perfect way of being able to host an event, but also to document an event even in a live event because of the kinds of people you could be leaving out that there are so many people who want to be, be able to enjoy poetry, but we’re unable for different ways and different ways and means.\n\n: So there’s no perfect way of documenting these, but how do you contend with the particular stakes, challenges and materials that you have? But I do have to say, being able to be back in the auditorium, and particularly with the sound recorder is something that I’ve personally really enjoyed just because of the way that the, the sound recorder can be a little less intimidating than like, perhaps a big DSLR lens in your face that a videographer and big camera recording equipment in the space might do.\n\nKatherine McLeod: I think a video can sometimes almost give this illusion as if, as if this is what it looked like if you were there. And in fact, no, it only looked like that to that one field of vision going through that camera lens. And I love how audio we’re so, we’re just so aware that we’re getting, we’re getting sound, we’re getting a sense of the room, the voices, but there’s so much that we also are not hearing and we’re not seen, and we’re not sensing, we’re not feeling, and that because we’re so aware of those, the lack of that we also don’t trick ourselves into thinking that we have everything. And I think that’s something when listening to the recordings that I was certainly, I was drawn to recordings that really you could almost hear the room and you could almost hear the, whether it’s like kind of the, the, the voice echoing through the room or else moments of, of applause or laughter or the poets directly speaking to the audience. And even still in those moments when listening, we have to do a lot of work in order to really imagine what it would be like to be there listening. And here I’m thinking about, there’s a moment when Tawhida Tanya Evanson speaks directly to the audience from her reading in 2016…\n\nArchival audio of Tawhida Tanya Evanson, from the Atwater Poetry Project, 2016:\n\nApplause is this crazy habit we have, and it’s a beautiful thing, but maybe just a moment of silence with the eyes closed can also be beautiful. If you’ll indulge, if you’ll indulge me, please close your eyes for a moment and just take a deep breath on your own. [Deep breath.]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Suddenly we’re then imagining that room and we’re imagining that space and what it would’ve looked like and felt like to be there. A last question here is, what’s next? What’s next for the Atwater Poetry Project archives? What are some of the next steps?\n\nFaith Paré: So I think at this point, I’ve collated the best I can in a version one, essentially of the files that we have. And part of my personal next steps is to be able to knock on the doors digital doors, but also possibly literal doors of previous curators looking for missing digital files or things that were linked on the website, but broken. So I have currently <laugh>, you know, I, I have about all just around 200 readings just so far recordings from from 2010 to the present. And there are still a lot more that are to be, you know, found or collated or at least declared, never recorded or pote like lost and, you know, we’ll see if it ever comes up again. But I think, you know, next steps are really to allow the, the Montreal team to, to give the, the files more of a listen, you know, you and Clara have been the people to really take a most of a listen to ’em so far.\n\nBut to be able to have more fresh ears on it and think about our approaches of how do we want to make this discoverable and how do we want to continue animating these recordings? What is important to transcribe and document and these recordings? And even just thinking about like, the fact that previously these were there, there was a kind of mixture of how, like these recordings were categorized by both, by both pe like the people who are reigning, but also kind of by event. I think also one thing that is important to me as I, you know, I think about where we go next is the ways, or the ways that, how do we bring in poets who have animated our space and acknowledge the kind of work that they, they have done, and and the way that they have made the series into what it is today.\n\nThat’s why I feel really excited about this project, particularly and your performative performed curation digging back into the archives, I think one thing I said really early on is that I don’t want this to feel like just some kind of like, narrow celebration of the E p p, you know it’s really important to me that this is a kind of laboratory for, you know, ex exploring the ways that poetry can sound different presences, but also the ways that others are silenced or muted. And the ways that, you know, I think as a reading series, I, I wanna believe that my job is perhaps complimentary, but also different from the role of like the publishing industry, for example. The publishing industry particularly is interested in having a new kind of cohort of people who are brought to the table with new work every year.\n\nAnd that’s all great and fantastic. We all love new work, but also wanting to think about who has been at the table with us for a while. I think, you know, one of the most genuinely moving emails that we’ve, we’ve gone so far was a message from Gerry Shikatani, who is an amazing Japanese Canadian writer, sound performer, experimentalist – also food writer and critic – and that we’ve had different scholars at Spoken Web right on his work, and it was brought to my attention by you and Klara that you wanted to weave his work into this piece and writing him for permissions and seeing how genuinely touched he was to be involved in this work that he said, paraphrasing, that he was really honoured, that people were still thinking about the kind of work that he was doing, you know, over a decade ago was something that felt important to me, really struck at the heart of what I want a reading series to do, that it’s not just a, a space for people to pass through, but really a place of return, of being able to come back and think about work, think about community, think about previous writers who have impacted us.\n\nKatherine McLeod: What a generative approach to the archive and to the series. Thank you so much for, for talking about it in this short, short conversation – ShortCuts Live!\n\n[Music begins]\n\nFaith Paré: Thank you. And I’m, I’m really hoping that folks may be able, if they are in Montreal, to come out to your event debuting this engagement with the archive on Monday, February 20th 7:00 PM the Adair Auditorium at the Atwater Library and Computer Center. It will be in the show notes, I’m sure I will, I will send all the appropriate deeds. Hopefully we will also have it recorded in some kind of way for that preservation as well, and to also add this into its own kind of archival place too. So I really appreciate being here and I really appreciate your work so far on this. Thank you so much.\n\nKatherine McLeod: Thank you so much. Faith.\n\n[Music ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9667","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.4, ShortCuts Live! Talking with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya, 20 March 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-ariel-kroon-nick-beauchesne-and-chelsea-miya/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/f8ce0167-1805-4a05-8efd-481726b7058c/audio/c98427aa-fbf2-4d5e-aa26-9ccef9fd9cb9/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sc-4-4.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:17:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"17,031,044 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sc-4-4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-ariel-kroon-nick-beauchesne-and-chelsea-miya/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-03-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Draft transcript"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Academics on Air.” Produced by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 2 May 2022, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/.\\n\\n“‘A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio.” Presentation by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, a Graduate Symposium. Concordia University, 16 May 2022.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549788557312,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! It is a conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya about their collaboration in producing “Academics on Air” (May 2022) for The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode became a paper that Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea co-presented at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. After that presentation, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod sat down with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea around a microphone in the SpokenWeb Amp Lab at Concordia University. They talked about processes of collaboration and archival listening that shaped their work. Starting with one audio clip as the short ‘cut’ that caught their attention in the archives, they talk about about context of that clip in the Voiceprint archives, the potential for podcasting to be a radical act of unarchiving, and what makes recordings of a radio show a unique task for cataloguers working with literary sounds recordings, and much more.\n\n[Music]\n\nKatherine McLeod: This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! It is a conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya about their collaboration in producing the episode “Academics on Air” for The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode was released in May 2022. And that episode became a paper that they co-presented at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute also in May 2022. After that presentation, I sat down with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea around a microphone in the SpokenWeb Amp Lab at Concordia University. We talked about the collaboration and archival listening that shaped their work. Starting with one audio clip as the short ‘cut’ that caught their attention in the archives, they talk about about context of that clip in the Voiceprint archives, the potential for podcasting to be a radical act of unarchiving, and what makes recordings of a radio show a unique task for cataloguers working with literary sounds recordings, and much more. Plus we hear three collaborators finally talking, and laughing, in the same room together. You can hear a bit of the room’s hum but hey that’s all part of ShortCuts Live!…\n\n \n\n[Music ends]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Just as you’re talking, I was like, oh this sounds great. I’m –.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne, Ariel Kroon, Chelsea Miya: <laugh> <laugh>.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Oh good!\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Check the –\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Just pull a Jars and just turn it on and just start interviewing before we know it\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Yeah, exactly….\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Right.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:I’m going do the same thing that I have done for the other ones that I’ve done this week, which is actually go into “podcast voice” to do the opening <laugh>. I feel like somehow you need headphones to go into podcast voice…\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Yeah.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: You gotta put it on… as part of the suit.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Exactly. <laugh> <laugh> I’m going stay present with you, with the three of you here… So, we’ll start…\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Welcome to Shortcuts. On this ShortCuts, we’re recording live at the SpokenWeb Sound Institute. I’d like to thank Chelsea and Ariel and Nick for joining me on this Shortcuts Live! We’re recording this one in the AMP Lab on the sixth floor of the Library Building at Concordia University. We’re surrounded by audio equipment and silence… So thank you for joining me. Would you like to just say hello and introduce yourself on the mic? Go ahead, Nick.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Hello, I’m Nick Beauchesne. I teach at TRU in Kamloops and the University of Alberta in Edmonton.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Hi, I’m Ariel Kroon. I am an RA on the SpokenWeb U Alberta team.\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: I’m Chelsea Miya, and I’m a postdoc at U Alberta with SpokenWeb.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Thank you. So the three of you just presented a paper this week at the SpokenWeb Symposium and the audio clip that we’ll be listening to today and we’ll be using to inform and guide our conversation is a clip that you played in that presentation. So, to start our conversation, I’d like to play that clip and to listen to it together.\n\n \n\nArchival Audio: [Sound quality makes it audible that archival audio is playing.] A main issue that I’m concerned with, especially as it relates to language, is what kinds of assumptions do people have about sex rules that they don’t recognize? And language is a tremendous carrier of those assumptions, but we don’t know how to self-examine them. Yes, people are beginning to realize that there is a male culture, there’s a female culture, and culture and language are terribly intertwined. But the question is, where have we not even learned how to look and where is it that people are resisting looking? I mean, if you say to somebody, the pronouns you use say tremendous amounts about your beliefs and your culture, people will laugh at you.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Alright, so could you tell me and listeners what we’re listening to?\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: So, that was a clip from the Voiceprint episode, “A Room and a Voice of One’s Own.” Voice Print was a campus radio show that was produced between, I think, 1979 to 83, 84, so about four or five years. It was hosted and produced by a student, Jars Balan, who was in the English Department at that time and was really embedded in poetry culture and all the really cool scholarship and creative works that were happening at University of Alberta. There’s also a bit of background about the history of campus radio at that time, which is really cool, and which we talk about a lot in our podcast episode. But what we actually came to present on was this specific episode on women’s voices and on gendered language, which really stood out to us, all of us when we were listening to the archive and to that episode in particular.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Yeah, well, I was just going to add to that we are recording this in an English department – we’re recording a podcast in an English department – and that radio show was made through an English department. Yes, but, you were saying in the presentation, it wasn’t recorded in an English department?\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: No, it was actually Jars’s studio was in the basement of the biology building on the University of Alberta campus. And it was not just the basement – it was the basement below the basement. So they were down quite a ways and he talked about how guests found it very odd, and a little bit intimidating, to go visit him there, and so they would try to put them at ease, and that was just very, very cool for all of us to hear.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: That was a clip from Jo-Ann Kolmes, and she came on as a guest. She was working as an editor for academic papers. I think maybe an academic journal. And so she was really talking about her practice of feminist editing at the time, and we were so fascinated by what she had to say because it struck us as very resonant and relevant to discussions that are all around us today. And though, back in 1981, they were definitely still talking about gender firmly within the binary of he/she, and, and now we have recognized and there is a linguistic recognition of – that there’s much more out there than the binary, and so language is adapting to that. So we found that extremely fascinating, the way that it speaks to issues today.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:Yeah. And especially how it came out of feminist editing, as you said. That seems to resonate. [as] even in this conference, we heard a paper by Sarah Cipes talking about feminist editing in audio. And so it’s really interesting that Joanne’s thinking about this was coming from the perspective of editing. You’ve now done a presentation on this audio clip and the Voiceprint recordings that it’s from – the Voiceprint Radio show, that it’s from – you have made a podcast episode for The SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ve attended a listening party for that episode. I’m wondering, for the three of you, what has really stood out in those experiences?\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: I think for me, like what really stood out was… the pleasures and joys and frustrations of working collaboratively with Nick and Ariel and how great it was to do something other than an academic paper, especially after two years of being in isolation, sequestered in my room doing, finishing my dissertation. I’m sure like a lot of people in various professions, but in academia especially it’s isolating being a grad student at any time but during COVID it was especially so. Being able to like have the three of us be brought together for this project was so much fun. And I got so much like energy and like inspiration from, from their different ideas and from learning how to work with people who have different ideas about audio and, and we, all of us brought different, I think, strengths and and perspectives to the experience.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: I think –\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Go ahead.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Yeah, no, I, I think it was very interesting because, as you mentioned, for grad students, especially of English literature, we’re not used to working with other people. And so it was very eye-opening to work on what is traditionally a solitary endeavour along with other people. But then have the added complicated factor of we were all in different provinces–\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: – while we were putting this together. And so we couldn’t, well, we could, we could meet on Zoom simultaneously, but we couldn’t be in the same space editing audio together. And we couldn’t just – I couldn’t just look over and say: Hey Nick, do you mind if I do this and this and this to this clip? Or Hey Chelsea, what do you think about my research into such and such? You know, it was very collaborative and yet at the same time not collaborative because it was so difficult to work with that space between us. And so I was really glad that we were all here together finally at the SpokenWeb conference.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Yeah, I’ve never presented a paper with like other co-authors before – and we split our paper so to read different sections, but also our different roles. Ariel did a lot of like the research and tracking down of documents and tracking down audio clips and that sort of stuff. Chelsea did a lot of like the main kind of composition for our script for like the podcast, and I did a lot of the technical stuff for the editing. I’ve never really been responsible for this. I’m just a useless singer. I’m used to – so for me to step back from, from the limelight and do more technical behind the scenes work as part of the podcast was fun, but also reading the paper, sharing that with other people. And then we all wrote the paper together. So that felt a little more kind of balanced in the sense that our roles maybe weren’t as specialized as they were for the podcast.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: So that was a really great experience.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Yeah, I was interested in that too. The way that often collaboration, um, might take the form of, um, of an article that you write together, but in this case, the first thing that you made together was a podcast episode… And then maybe the paper was closer to maybe a print based –\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: – publication. That’s interesting to hear sort of the roles shifting or how that work pans out and it’s shared.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Well, you know, Klara, Jason, if you’re making a book, call me, call us!\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Yes, it’s possible that you might be collaboratively writing an article <laugh> as the next step of this, which is exciting because it shows how these ideas started in a podcast episode of scholarly research and it will eventually take the form of a print article. Often the print article gets put on a hierarchy above the other, but if you hadn’t made one, you couldn’t get to that other stage. I think starting with the podcast too allowed you to really dive into the sound and think about multiple sound clips and also really reflect on what the podcast is doing as academic scholarship. Which I think you all did so brilliantly in the episode and also in the Listening Party too, really reflecting on what you are doing as academics in making this podcast alongside reflecting on what those who made Voiceprint were doing within an academic institution, which is really a fascinating parallel.\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Yeah. It’s interesting too, like podcasting as this sort of radical act of de-archiving, in that we talk a lot about close listening at SpokenWeb, but I mean – and you do that when you’re doing like time codes and timestamps – but to create something from that, you really listen to it and it becomes like part of you, you ingest it and create something out of it in a way that you don’t necessarily do when you’re doing the sort of laborious, tedious work of digitizing something and creating metadata for it. So, and which is good and valuable work, but it can sometimes be like monkey work in that the focus is more on like doing the sort of repetitive tedious tasks that are removed from actual thoughtful intellectual engagement with your materials. And doing this podcast was a way, I think, at least for me, it felt like so great to be engaging with the material in a different way.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Yeah. Those repetitive, tedious tasks definitely prepared us for doing all that we needed to do for this podcast in terms of close listening and honestly just in terms of discovering that it was there at all. When I first joined SpokenWeb, I started digitizing these radio shows, and at that time we didn’t really have any sort of schema for digitizing them because all of the sort of like accepted practices were for poetry readings. And so I was there as this new RA looking at what had been done before and saying: None of this fits, none of these categories work for this. Oh no, what, what do I do with it? And so it started as this problem. And only later was I, or were we, sort of able to get a little bit more deep into the sound of it and the content of that sound.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Mm-hmm <affirmative>\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: It’s surprising and incredible in how generative the material is. So you start off, yeah. So I mean, I did a lot of time-stamping before I did anything intellectual and fun, like what we just did. And it’s like, you know, you listen to all, like, first of all, going to the archive to discover this stuff at the University of Albert Alberta archives, which is where we found this, not from the English department closet, like most of our other stuff, so it’s a different archive. We have to track it down. I have to make an acquisition list. Mike approves it. We get the material, it goes to digitization, we get it, we split it in three. So we all time-stamp different episodes of Voiceprint, and that’s when we all kind of fell in love with the show <laugh> and became fans.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: And then from there, yeah, then you go to making a podcast episode, doing ShortCuts, making, writing a paper, presenting that paper. And it just keeps growing and growing, growing. I mean, we interviewed Jars, we interviewed Terri Wynnyk – his production assistant and a female sound tech, which is very rare for radio shows in the eighties – we interviewed all Brian Fateaux, Stacey Copeland –\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Jennifer Waits\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Yeah. We interviewed all these people. We got hours of the interview footage and, and most of it wasn’t used, but it just expands and expands.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: And the conversations with all those people that all came from the archival listening that you were doing. Also, I love the fact that Voiceprint brought you together, <laugh>. I think that’s – I was wondering how you had it first encountered these archival recordings. And so that’s really beautiful hearing that. And also, um, the way that Voiceprint as a radio show was also so embedded within literary communities and just really a show that had so many writers on – and that was something I was really struck by, in listening to the podcast episode, and I can only imagine how many more conversations could come out of the Voiceprint archive –.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: – around the recordings of writers and conversations. It also sounded very much like interdisciplinary work too, like talking to people, you know, across disciplines and inviting them into that studio and having those conversations. So I’m excited to hear what else comes out of the Voiceprint archives. So I think that’s a good note to conclude our conversation for today. And also I’m so thrilled that, here, around this microphone, these three collaborators are finally together in person after all your work across distances. So, Chelsea, Ariel, Nick, thank you so much for joining me here on Shortcuts. Thank you all.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Thank you.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Thank you.\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Thanks.\n\n \n\n[Music]\n\nKatherine McLeod: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. This ShortCuts was a ShortCuts Live! A conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya recorded on May 19 2022 on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. Fun fact: we were wearing our SpokenWeb t-shirts that we had been given that day at the institute while recording. Check the Show Notes for photos to prove it! Also check the show notes for a link to their episode, “Academics on Air.” Plus, since talking with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea, they have interviewed Jo-Anne Kolmes, and a few clips from that interview could be the start of another ShortCuts Live conversation recorded at this year’s symposium and institute. \n\nSpeaking of which, are you listening to this episode and getting excited about this year’s SpokenWeb Symposium? It is coming up in May at the University of Alberta. Check SpokenWeb’s upcoming events to find the link to the full program. And, who knows, there just may be ShortCuts Live recordings happening again this year, and so if you’re attending and interested in talking with the podcast team, let us know! Write to us at spokenwebpodcast at gmail dot com.\n\nShortCuts is a monthly deep dive into archival audio distributed monthly on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. It is mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, transcribed by Zoe Mix, and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n[Music ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9668","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.5, ShortCuts Live! 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Producer Katherine McLeod talks with Annie Murray about the EMI Music Canada Archives at the University of Calgary, and their way into these archives begins with a cassette tape. And not just any cassette tape. Listen to find out which tape and how this tape tells stories of recording not only in relation to what’s on the tape but also to archival collections of Canadian music. Audio objects are sonic objects in the sounds they hold and the stories they tell – both on their own as materials and in our affective attachments to them – and this episode of ShortCuts dives into all of this, and more. Annie and Katherine’s conversation about archives is full of whimsy, suspense, and even the sounds of a power ballad – yes, archival research can sound like this.\n\n\n(00:03)\tAnnie Murray \tSo what do you wanna talk about? [Laughs] \n(00:05)\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, first I’ll say: Welcome to ShortCuts.\n(00:11)\tShortCuts Theme Music \t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(00:12)\tKatherine McLeod \tWelcome to Shortcuts. This month, it’s another ShortCuts Live. In fact, it’s a final ShortCuts Live conversation that was recorded at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. That’s because this year’s symposium and institute is coming up, starting May 1st. Check the full program by heading to the events link on the SpokenWeb website. And if you’re attending, do get in touch if you’d like to chat with us on ShortCuts Live in-person this year. \nBack to this episode, it’s a conversation that I had with Annie Murray from the University of Calgary. It was recorded after a packed day of sessions at the 2022 SpokenWeb Sound Institute. The sounds will take us into 4th SPACE at Concordia University. I quite love the background noise because it reminds me of being there with the May sunshine outside the window next to where we were recording and the vibrant conversations that we were having all week. \nSo there I was sitting at a microphone with Annie Murray and I pulled out a cassette tape to start things off. Usually on ShortCuts, it’s an audio clip that starts the conversation. This time it was not an audio clip, but rather an audio object, and not just any audio object. It was my first cassette tape, and this cassette tape that I’m holding right now, well, it’s not only the start of me loving music that’s just so full of emotion, music that is moving, moves you and makes you want to move, but it was also the start of my conversation with Annie Murray about EMI Music Canada Archives. Which tape is it? Well, listen to find out. Here is ShortCuts Live…\n[ShortCuts theme music fades and ends]\n[Transitions into interview recording]\nThank you so much, Annie, for joining me on Shortcuts Live.\n(02:04)\tAnnie Murray\tThank you. This is a great setup.\n(02:07)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I’m about to take a tape out of my bag, and Annie’s gonna see this for the first time, but she’s heard that this is the object that will inspire our conversation.\n(02:19)\tAnnie Murray\tWhoa, shall I describe what we’re seeing?\n(02:22)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes. Take a look. What is this tape?\n(02:25)\tAnnie Murray \tKatherine has just handed me a tape called “Over 60 Minutes with Luba”. Luba is on the front. It was issued by Capital Records and EMI Canada in 1987. We had an earlier conversation where I learned this was a seminal tape for young Dr. Katherine McLeod. And the reason I’m interested in her relationship with this tape is because I’ve been working on a project that will bring some Luba content out in the world.\n(03:03)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes, I told Annie that this Luba tape was in fact the first cassette tape that I ever owned. I think I was about seven or eight years old living in Queensboro, which is a neighborhood in New Westminster, British Columbia. And I don’t even know how I had heard of Luba, I think, because I never really watched TV very often when I was young. So somehow much music must have been on. And I was really drawn to the song, “Every time I see your picture, I cry”. And this tape does have it on there.  I think that says a lot about me as a seven year old, that I was really drawn to this very dramatic song, that continues. I feel like it just, I love very dramatic music and dance. So, you know, this was just an early sign of that.\nI could still probably recite the entire song. And I recently found this tape at my parents’ house, and it made me think about the way that this recording, with it being issued by EMI, would be part of the EMI collection. And when Annie was speaking about the EMI collection in a SpokenWeb meeting, she mentioned, you know, it even has Luba. And I was like, oh, Luba! Yes, someone’s talking about Luba! \nSo I thought this would be a perfect  audio object for us to chat about because it brings us into the EMI collection. It makes us think about audio objects and how just a tape that we’re not even playing right now can generate so much conversation. And it can also make us think about rights too. So maybe towards the end, I’ll ask you about, you know, can we even play this tape on the podcast? But, we’ll hold onto that question. \nFirst of all, you know, I see Annie looking at the tape cover, she’s got it out of the, out of the case. And I’m wondering, you know, you’ve been immersed in the EMI collection at the University of Calgary.  What do you, what are you noticing? How does this speak to you as an archival object?\n(05:11)\tAnnie Murray \tWell, what’s interesting about this tape is it’s not one of Luba’s studio albums. It’s a compilation album. So, Luba had already released some albums, and this is a compilation. The other thing I’m noticing is in what great physical condition it’s in. I know you loved it a lot, but you also took really good care of it. A lot of my old tapes from this era,  the writing is rubbed off the cassette, but the tape looks in good shape and the liner notes don’t have the lyrics, which a lot of studio albums did. And I don’t know about you, but did you used to open them up and follow along?\n(05:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI sure did. [Laughs] Yeah.\n(05:54)\tAnnie Murray\tYes. That, I mean, especially when you first got tapes of your own and you bought them with your own money, you were so proud of them, and you would open up the liner notes and follow the lyrics. So what I’m seeing here, there’s some interesting things about this album. First of all, Daniel Lenoi plays as a percussionist on this album. There’s some really interesting musicians brought in on some of these. And guess who’s the sax player? Kenny G! [Both laugh]  And then there’s a list of tracks or songs, and there’s little symbols next to them that talk about the original recording, where it came from. \nSo this is like an anthology. And then some were mixed by Daniel Lenoi, then it shows how many songs Luba wrote and how many she didn’t. So this is, this is fascinating.\n(06:56)\tKatherine McLeod\tI love thinking about it as an anthology of Luba. Luba is a Canadian singer who was very popular in the eighties. And we really haven’t heard much from since. So, actually, it’s interesting how things, you know, like YouTube. I think like, partly just to go back to your point about how the tape is in such good condition, I think it’s because then when CDs came out, I didn’t listen to my tapes as much, and Luba sort of had faded into the background. \nSo, I’d almost forgotten about this amazing song. And then, recently, you know, searching it on YouTube and thinking, yeah, like, I can listen to this in a digital version without having to, you know, dig out my tape from so long ago. And just listening to it again, I thought, wow, this  almost like, power ballad song, really resonates with today’s moment too.\nSo I thought, yes, Lupa to come back, but then thinking, you know, this is like this anthology and this collection, a collection within a collection thinking of this tape itself is almost like a collection. And how it also speaks to, you know, this moment in Canadian music. And, you know, as you’re noticing all these artists that were part of this tape, that in many ways many people probably would know those names and not necessarily know Luba’s name too. So that’s really interesting thinking of what we can learn from the tape itself. I know you told me that you asked some of your colleagues in the archives about what you have in terms of Luba’s work in the collection.\n(08:26)\tAnnie Murray\tThat’s right. So, maybe just as I recorded my live reactions to the liner notes, I’ll read you some information that my colleagues David Jones and Rob Gilbert provided.  I explained what I was going to be up to and that you were a Luba fan from childhood and that we’d be looking at the tape and they immediately knew, oh, well that’s a compilation, you know, and I, cuz I didn’t know. \nAnd then David said, that’s awesome. So is Luba. And then Rob came along and said a few things that I’ll just read. So Luba was a direct signing. So the capital releases, the EP and the three big albums in the eighties are all extensively documented. So in the EMI Music Canada archive that’s at the University of Calgary, if that artist was signed to Capital or EMI, the archive will contain all of the original studio recordings and will have all the documentation about how that album was produced, how it was recorded, produced, disseminated, marketed and received.\nSo it’s like the whole story, but if the EMI artist was someone like Kate Bush or The Beatles or Pink Floyd, and they weren’t actually recorded in the, for Canadian, like on the Canadian label there would be less recordings and material associated with it. All of those originals would’ve been in England or in the United States. But for Luba, Rob says, I think Luba is one of the more significant artists in the collection. All of the audio is migrated or out with a vendor and/or Nathan. So Nathan Chandler is our audio audiovisual conservator who, in Calgary, we built these studios. So sometimes some types of formats, we’ve migrated them right there in Calgary. Other ones have been sent out in different places in North America, depending on like, would it be too expensive to buy the equipment or too difficult or maybe there aren’t enough recordings in that format because the EMI archive has 94 different media formats.\nSo some of them wouldn’t make sense. But guess how many individual Luba recordings will be available eventually? There will be 400 audio recordings [Katherine laughs] available to users eventually in an online system. So the system we’re using is called Cortex. It’s a digital asset management system. Rob goes on to say all of the quarter inch tapes are done. The half inch tapes were sent out to a vendor last summer and should be done soon. And many of the two inch tapes are on a cart with Nathan waiting to get to them. So even in the time Luba was recording, she first recorded on quarter inch, then half inch, and then on two inch multi-tracks. So even in her eighties, early nineties career, she recorded on these different formats. So. \n(11:58)\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s incredible! [Laughs]\n(11:59)\tAnnie Murray \tThen all told there are 400 of them because like, say a two inch recording, it’s massive. You might have one to three songs on one reel. And so if you think of how many times you would record something to make an album, that’s why there are so many. So then, let’s see, also, any videos associated with Luba will also become available. So it’s audio, but it’s also video. And then, this won’t be put online or you won’t be able to access this, but there was also all the original artwork that they used to make all the album covers. So that has also been preserved for the Canadian artists such as Luba. \nSo, let’s see. There are whole sets of studio sessions, 24 track tapes and mixes on half inch tapes. The 60 Minutes with compilation is like a “best of” album with a couple extras on it. It was a branded series from Capital, maybe tapping into CD technology, having the ability to play over 60 minutes without switching sides of a tape or a record [laughs]. \nSo there’s gonna be a lot of Luba content that researchers can access. So you could explore the documentation around wow was that album produced there in your hand? How were the other studio albums? Her EP? I don’t know if they would’ve had a demo, but we would be able to find out if there was a demo. So it kind of goes to show the extensive documentation, both audio, video, and then there’s all the textual archives that would’ve been, so perhaps you’ll come to Calgary to do a deep Luba research trip? \n(13:50)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes. Yes. A deep listening in the Luba archives. I also love how it feels like Luba, you know, I was speaking to like maybe she could have a resurgence and maybe she could have a resurgence through the archives.\n(14:03)\tAnnie Murray \tThat would be great. Like, it will be interesting to see how people respond to an archive of this type being made available. Like, first of all, the fact that it’s being preserved, that it is in a public institution, and that we have created some secure and elaborate, but easily available ways to use audiovisual archives, which really isn’t always the case. \nThe traditional model is if there’s a recording in an archive, you travel to the archive and you listen to it in there. We knew that with the way systems have developed and the way digital asset management systems have developed, that you can still have users authenticate and use a recording and access it remotely. And in the time that we’ve been finishing up this project during Covid, there is actually more expectation of remote access now of archives and libraries. So these sort of systems coming online is just perfect timing for these kinds of researcher expectations.\n\n(15:17)\tKatherine McLeod \tMaybe one last question then, leading along those lines around access. On a podcast like this, if I were to play a clip of one of Luba’s songs,  am I allowed to do that?\n(15:34)\tAnnie Murray\tI think so. I think it’s a kind of quotation. We could ask a copyright person about how much is appropriate. But say for example, like broadcasters and news organizations, they generally work with clips of a certain length for reporting, and then scholars can use certain lengths of clips for their academic reporting, so to speak. I don’t know where a podcast is on the spectrum. Is it broadcasting? Is it news? Is it scholarship? Seems to be a blend of those things?\n(16:10)\tKatherine McLeod \tAnd often defined by the producer or the maker of the podcast, rather than the podcast itself being a medium that is defined in those ways. I feel like because we did, you know, we’ve been commenting on the tape and especially offering a bit of commentary around one particular song, that that song perhaps could, you know, appear at some point, audibly in this or- \n(16:37)\tAnnie Murray\tA clip.\n(16:37)\tKatherine McLeod \tA clip. Exactly. It would just a, just a-\n(16:39)\tAnnie Murray\tMaybe the most dramatic part.\n(16:40)\tKatherine McLeod \tExactly. [A clip from “Every time I see your picture, I cry” by Luba plays and ends] \nSo I think that’s, you know, a perfect note to end on. And I want to thank Annie Murray for joining me here on ShortCuts Live in 4th SPACE at Concordia University. Thank you so much, Annie.\n\n(17:12)\tAnnie Murray \t[ShortCuts theme music begins to play] \nThank you. And I just wanna extend an invitation. As a Luba fan, you could create, when you have an account in the University of Calgary’s digital collections, you could create something called a light box where you could keep track of your favorite Luba recordings, and then you could say, Hey, these are my favorite Luba tracks curated by Dr. Katherine McLeod.\nSo, then even if you return later and you’re like, oh, I’m going to think about Luba again. You could keep track of what you’re interested in. You could send it to another user, then they could sign it and say, oh, these are the three songs that most shaped your 1987 life. \n(17:57)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes! A curated listening and yeah. To be able to share that. Oh, yeah. That’s fantastic.\n(18:01)\tAnnie Murray\tSo, when it’s available, I’ll contact you and you can be our guest digital curator of the Luba Collection. [laughs]\n(18:11)\tKatherine McLeod\tThank you so much, Annie. I look forward to that. Thank you. Thank you.\n[ShortCuts theme music ends] \n[A clip from “Every time I see your picture, I cry” by Luba plays] \nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. A special thanks to Annie Murray for joining me for this ShortCuts Live recorded on May 19th, 2022. \n[The Luba clip ends and ShortCuts theme music begins again] \nAnd for the invitation to head to Calgary for a curated listening in the archives. Do check the show notes for links to more about that archive, and for a few fun photos to accompany this episode. Yes, you’ll see Annie holding the tape itself, and what you won’t see is me listening to Luba on repeat in the weeks surrounding this conversation. But indeed that happened too. \nMy thanks to the SpokenWeb podcast team. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcription is done by Zoe Mix. ShortCuts is written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Stay tuned next month for a full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. And as always, thanks for listening.\n[ShortCuts theme music ends]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9669","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.6, What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival Archives, 19 June 2023, Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c4891c8a-e6b8-4a15-b0b4-7ba2b7d4e22a/audio/4d8d4112-c9a7-490e-a3e5-4b973c419512/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sc4-6.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:20:50\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"20,008,168 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sc4-6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-06-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-2-2. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nbissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-BNW-T5. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nThose interested can find more information about these recordings in the following documents:\\n\\nbissett, bill. Participant acceptance form. AL-Folder2-img003-04, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nbissett, bill. Letter to Alan Lord. AL-Folder2-img195, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nKonyves, Tom. Sketch of stage setup. AL-Folder2-img186-187, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nLescaut, Roxa. “Le Premier Festival de Poésie urbaine de Montréal.” interModule 2. AL-U85-img029-32 and 035-38, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549793800192,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Have you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if it was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival (Montreal, 1985). This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC-funded Insight Development Grant. They’ve been working with a series of recordings of the Ultimatum Festival, which are part of the Alan Lord audio collection, a collection currently being digitized and catalogued by SpokenWeb (Concordia). The Listening Queerly research team – Mathieu Aubin, Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow – first attempted to confirm who they are listening to in their selected audio file for this ShortCuts by cross-referencing with other recordings of Christopher Dewdney, Tom Konyves, and bill bissett, but then, as the team re-listened to this recording, they focused more and more on the rhythmic thumping sound throughout this clip. What is the cause of this sound and its effect on us as listeners?\n\nListen to this episode of ShortCuts to hear how, even if a sound is an unintentional sound caused by the recording equipment, it still affects our interpretation of the recording.\n\nThis special episode of ShortCuts is produced by Ella Jando-Saul, with contributions from Mathieu Aubin, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and James Healey. \n\n\n(00:00)\tShortCuts Theme Music \t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n  (00:07)\tKatherine McLeod \tWelcome to Shortcuts.\nHave you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if the sound was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival in the Alan Lord Audio Collection. First of all, Listening Queerly is a team of student researchers based at Concordia University: Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow. This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC funded Insight Development grant. \nThey’ve been working with a series of recordings in the Alan Lord Audio Collection, a collection that’s part of SpokenWeb’s audio collections. In 1985, Alan Lord helped to organize the Ultimatum Festival in Montreal. And recordings from that festival are what the Listening Queerly team were listening to when they heard a sound. A sound that sounded almost like a heartbeat, or was it a technical glitch in the recording? Could they be sure? What were they hearing? What’s that noise? \nWhatever it was, the reality was that the sound, the noise, had an impact. They couldn’t stop thinking about it, and they talked about it together. What results from those conversations is this episode of ShortCuts. Here is a very special episode of ShortCuts produced by Ella Jando-Saul, taking you on a deep dive into the sound of one memorable recording. [ShortCuts music swells and then ends]\n(02:02)\tElla Jando-Saul \t[Sound effect of a heart beating begins] \nIn 1985, Alan Lord with help from a team of close friends organized Ultimatum, a literary festival that took place from May 1st to 5th at Les Foufounes Électriques, a punk bar that exists to this day in downtown Montreal. Ultimatum was advertised as an event presenting both a new generation of urban poets who utilize video, computers, electro pop music and performance art as an integral part of their mode of expression, and also traditional poets whose work reflects the urgency and electricity of living in a modern urban environment. \nLord invited both Anglophone and Francophone poets from Montreal, as well as poets from Vancouver, Toronto, Quebec City, and New York. The event was recorded on tapes, which have since been digitized at Concordia University. The tape we are listening to today is from the 2nd of May. \n[Heartbeat sound effect speeds up and then ends]\n(03:05)\tMathieu Aubin\tHi, my name is Mathieu Aubin and I’m the primary investigator for the Listening Queerly Cross-Generational Divides Project, and I’m also a research affiliate in the English department at Concordia University.\n(03:17)\tElla Jando-Saul\tMy name is Ella Jando-Saul and I am the project manager for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I am also finishing my first year in the masters program at Concordia University in English Literature.\n(03:31)\tSophia Magliocca\tHi, my name is Sophia Magliocca. I’m a research assistant on the SpokenWeb affiliate project called Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides. I’m also finishing my second year in the masters program here at Concordia University in English Literature.\n(03:45)\tMisha Solomon\tHi, my name is Misha Solomon. I’m a queer listener on the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I’m also finishing my first year as a master student in the English literature program here at Concordia, with a creative poetry thesis.\n(03:59)\tElla Jando-Saul \tAs part of our research, we listened to the Ultimatum recordings and encountered a tape that included a mysterious heartbeat sound on some of the tracks. The poet speaking on those tracks was unannounced, so we were not sure who it might be. At the time, our team included Rowan Nancarrow, who has since left, but who did much of the listening and contributed to our initial discussions about these tapes.\n(04:29)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive- [Unknown Speaker] 1\t[Sound effect of a heartbeat begins to play] With real trees around us, why do we want painted trees? What does art give us that life does not?\n[Sound effect of heartbeat ends]\n(04:43)\tElla Jando-Saul \t…many months ago, Misha, you’re actually part of the team already, even though it’s the 8th of December, 2022. And we’re having a conversation as we do on a Monday morning about this tape. Yeah, the weird heartbeat noise is really interesting to me because I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not, and it’s doing really interesting things with the poet’s voice.\nIt’s sort of, I feel like sometimes rhythmically it’s aligning with the rhythm of the poem, and sometimes it’s not, and I find that super interesting, but then we get this like four minutes of just heartbeat, and I find it hard to imagine that that was intentionally just sort of recorded, and there’s the fact that the sound is different. So I’m thinking maybe there’s something that happened to the tape itself, that when we play the tape to digitize it is making this noise.\n(05:41)\tSophia Magliocca \tWhen I found it, when I came across it, I was almost not going to present it at all. The only reason why I decided to present it was because I thought it was a broken tape, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about what a broken tape might look like in this collection. \nSo my initial impression of it was either it got damaged, you know, the tape itself was damaged and they recorded on something that was already damaged and that’s what happened. Or it was like you said, kind of some way affected when they were digitizing it. And then other ideas I have is that because the heartbeat sound was happening on other tapes too, whether it was related to someone tapping on a microphone or some kind of like something happening in the room, unrelated to the technology, but close enough that it was getting caught. And then, you know, because of that shift to the static background noise, it kind of made that whole committing to one version of this what the heartbeat was really difficult.\n(06:38)\tElla Jando-Saul \tMhmm.\n(06:39)\tMisha Solomon \tYou know, based on the pattern and the inconsistency of the noise, I think we can be relatively sure that the heartbeat sound isn’t actually a heartbeat, but it is difficult for me to separate the sound from being a heartbeat. That’s what it feels like somehow. If I try to think about it logically while listening, I suppose it could be a metronome, but it does lack the regular rhythm. Or as others have said, something accidental, microphone feedback or a mechanical issue with the recording device. \nBut I keep going back to the idea that there is something so corporeal about the sound. Something like akin to listening to a whale from inside of a whale’s belly.\n(07:24)\tMathieu Aubin\tHmm. I like that irregularity that you’re pointing to. I hear this, and to me also, I don’t know what it is that we’re thinking, like is it a stethoscope? There we go. You know, listening for someone’s heartbeat is, it’s what it sounds like to me. \nAnd it’s interesting that we have a similar experience of listening to that and identifying that as that kind of sound, but like Misha just said, it’s irregular. So if somebody’s heartbeat is indeed that, I don’t know that that’s probably the best thing for them. So for me, you know, I’m thinking about this and listening to this and it seems like it could be intentional, it could be not intentional. Sometimes because of the rhythm of like, I’m thinking of like tape moving around and maybe bumping that sort of irregularity also could be a technological sound that’s being emitted.\n(08:26)\tElla Jando-Saul \tI mean, Imeasure the intervals of the heartbeats and I do have to say like, I hope this is a whale and not a human, because if it’s a whale, I mean, I’d have to find out what a regular whale heart rhythm is, but for a human like this, this human’s in a coma or something, I don’t know, it’s way too slow for a human and it is a little bit irregular. There will be moments where it sort of slowly gets a bit faster and then it starts getting a lot faster right before it sort of cuts and then you have applause. \nSort of having done that, I’m rethinking my thought about it being just like the tape sort of spinning and that sort of circularity doesn’t really make sense with the way that it’s shifting around. Like, if it was just slight shifts, it would be like, okay, well tape can’t be at the perfectly same speed all the time. But I think especially that bit where it really speeds up, I’m thinking, okay, maybe it’s intentional if it’s doing this, but in that case, why are there all of these silent moments with just a heartbeat?\n[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play]\nNone of us know much about how sound recording works. So in an attempt to find some answers, we consulted James Healy, the AMP lab coordinator at Concordia University.\n(09:42)\tJames Healy \tThe next one was like the metronome, or what I would describe as a metronome. It could have been like in one of those old school drum machines that were made to accompany an organ in church, because it was just like a simple “pum-pum pum-pum-”\n(09:59)\tElla Jando-Saul \t[Interjecting] -Yeah-\n(10:00)\tJames Healy \t-pattern, but like the timbre reminded me of like a Roland 808 a lot, which made me think that it’s maybe the same chip as the Roland 808, but a little earlier, because I don’t think that they’re using sort of like this staple hip hop drum machine in the background. I think they’d just be using a fairly rudimentary one, because they just need it for a fairly simple task.\n(10:27)\tElla Jando-Saul \tJames answered the question we had been laboring over pretty quickly, but he had more to say about these recordings.\n(10:34)\tJames Healy\tThere was a really high noise floor in one of them. And then the voice was also saturating sooner than it was in the others, which made me think that it was a different time altogether because they had basically set up a whole bunch of new equipment.\n(10:51)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2\tBecause it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive. \nThank you. [Audience claps]\n(11:24)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive  [Unknown Speaker] 3\t[Sound effect of heartbeat plays] What’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively by proponents of the arms race than the advocates of the peace movement? [Sound effect of heartbeat ends] \n(11:39)\tJames Healy\tAnd what I mean by new noise floors, there’s like a “chhhhhh” and it was closer to the level of the voice than it was in the other pieces of audio. Yeah, I think the next thing that interested me, like in audio to audio and knowing that maybe it was a different room was just literally like the reflection times of the room that I was hearing. Like, I can’t be like that’s a five millisecond reflection, but it’s just like, it sounds different. The room, the reverb, right? Like  you can tell when you’re just mostly getting a direct source.\n(12:21)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 3\t[Sound effect of heartbeat plays]\nWhat’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively…[Sound effect of heartbeat ends]\n(12:25)\tJames Healy \tOr if you’re getting some room reflections bled into the direct source as well.\n(12:32)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2\tBecause it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive. \n(12:36)\tJames Healy \tAll living things with ears are really good at that. They listen for reflection times to know what type of space they’re in.\n(12:43)\tElla Jando-Saul\tThe digitized tape labeled U22  is split into multiple files labeled from T01 to T02. The recordings cut suddenly from one performance to the next, often starting and stopping in the middle of the performance. \nDuring our conversation, James and I started to piece these together chronologically thanks to recordings done by CBC’s Brave New Waves team, also held in Concordia’s ultimatum collection, which recorded the whole evening from start to finish with no cuts. This helped us figure out that the poet using the heartbeat sound was Tom Kenyvesh, an experimental performance and video poet who had recently moved from Montreal to Vancouver. \nOkay. So your guess would be that like what we have with the U22 recordings that sound really close up is that he’s recording these sort of offsite and then bringing them in to play them. \nIn that case, like, does it make sense that there are parts of the same event from that day before this? So it’s like Christopher Dudney live and then it cuts and then it’s Tom Kenyvesh sounding very not live. And then on T06 it’s just heartbeat sounds which are playing in the background, um, of T07, which is back to Tom Kenyvesh speaking, but now we hear like the audience, it sounds very live and then it cuts and it’s Bill Bisit, same event.\n(14:22)\tJames Healy \tYeah. Well that did confuse me, but then Jason mentioned in an email that they actually had like eight tracks on that tape, so that made me think that they possibly used two of the tracks just to record stuff for playback.\nAnd then they just use the other two tracks to record what was going on live in the room, you know? So, and then essentially what you could do is you could take the two tracks that are already recorded, so you want to go out to the PA with them and you could play them via like their own output to the PA while you record on another two tracks what they’re saying. \nSo it could have been a simultaneous thing and they could have just prepped the two recorded tracks, like beforehand.\n(15:48)\tMisha Solomon\t[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play] \nWhat I find really interesting about the mystery of the sound is that it’s a reminder of the missing information on these tapes. That these tapes are representative of performances that involved some visual aspect and that that aspect is missing entirely. \nAnd so even when the sound changes or disappears, one could imagine someone in an outrageous outfit playing a percussion instrument in the corner and producing that sound. And we’d never know of that person’s existence unless we found photographic or video evidence. But it would significantly change the tenor of the performance were we to be able to see this producer of the sound if the sound is in fact being produced by someone on stage accompanying the performer, let’s say. \nAnd so it’s just interesting to think about the fact that Ultimatum was this full sense live event, one that even seemed to prioritize the visual in terms of screens being available for performers and all that. But here we’re experiencing it only as audio, which is a kind of mutation of the event into something that is only available to us using one sense. So the sound is an invitation to theorize and that invitation can either be fruitful or, you know, can lead the listener astray down paths to which answers might not be found.\n(17:17)\tSophia Magliocca\tYeah. I love when we think about our project in that way, like that distance that we have in a way retains the privacy of the event, but also invites us in and gives us that intimacy in a really different sensory experience or in a limited one. And when I think about the heartbeat in that way, and whether it’s intentional or not, it does force the listener to really turn or return interior, accept the sound for what it is. \nAnd for a moment it was really nice that we just got to sit and really think about what it could be without having any definitive answers. And think about how it was complimenting the poem and how it was complimenting our experience, you know, so many years down the line of taking that with the limited resources that we have. \nAnd it’s always interesting to have, you know, the real technical terms for what’s going on. But sitting in that mystery, I find, brought us closer and really gave us an opportunity to distinguish the voices and distinguish the settings in a way that, and in a depth that we didn’t always apply to all the other recordings. And this gave us a way into that.\n(18:20)\tElla Jando-Saul \tMm-hmm. And sitting with the mystery, but also just sitting with the sound, however fragmentary it is that we have left to us, is sort of itself an art piece so that whether the heartbeat is intentional or not, it creates this really great experience. Like it is wonderful to hear with the poem regardless of where it comes from.\n(18:44)\tMathieu Aubin\tAnd I love the way that it’s formatted and structured as an art piece, as a poem where these powerful, impactful lines are read and then they’re interspersed with [Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play] these like “bum bums” in the effect of that. And how we’re sitting with that sort of message while trying to figure out that mystery the whole time.\n(19:11)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 4\tForgive everything, walk, don’t run, post no bills, leave no fingerprints. In case of emergency stand still, press return. Please don’t touch. [Long pause] Push. \n[Heartbeat fades slowly] \n(20:14)\tKatherine McLeod \t[ShortCuts Theme Music plays] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. This episode of ShortCuts was produced by Ella Jando-Saul. You also heard the voices of Mathieu Aubin, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon, and input from Rowan Nancarrow. Also a special thanks to James Healy. ShortCuts is a deep dive into archival audio distributed monthly on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. It is mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, transcribed by Zoe Mix and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n[ShortCuts Theme music ends] "],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9672","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6 Trailer, Welcome to Season 6!, 16 September 2024, Harris, McLeod, McGregor, Healy, and Ajeeb"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Yara Ajeeb\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3849923d-330b-4a2b-8e36-2347aca1e839/audio/1fac0b3b-c40e-4950-8e0f-966db64790a2/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:04:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"4,544,931 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-09-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897346,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hold onto your hats, because the SpokenWeb Podcast is back!\n\nThis season, we’ll continue to bring you contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds with all new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout.\n\nCheers to Season 6 ~\n\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:14)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does the SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? Or should I say — when?\n[Theme music fades]\n(00:21)\tMusic\t[Futuristic, electronic music starts playing]\n(00:26)\tHannah McGregor\tBecause in season 5 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we travelled through time–\n(00:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tFirst, we paid a visit to the medieval period [choral music starts playing] where we attempted to textually and orally translate the old English poem “The Ruin.”\n(00:42)\tAudio clip from episode 1 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Ghislaine Comeau reciting “The Ruin”\t[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]\nnum geheapen felon/\ngrimly ground/\nIt shone/\n(00:52)\tMusic\t[Upbeat pop music starts playing]\n(00:54)\tKatherine McLeod\tThen we jumped to the 1950s, where we revisited the fascinating early history of Caedmon records.\n(01:02)\tAudio clip from episode 4 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Barbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth.\n(01:13)\tMusic\t[Grunge guitar music starts playing]\n(01:16)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe travelled to the 1980s and listened to recovered recordings from the boundary-breaking Ultimatum Festival.\n(01:24)\tAudio clip from episode 6 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Frances Grace Fyfe\tThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n(01:32)\tMusic\t[Pop-esque, upbeat music starts playing]\n(01:35)\tHannah McGregor\tWe “crossed over” to 2021 and checked in with Linda Morra to hear about Kaie Kellough’s “Magnetic Equator.”\n(01:43)\tAudio clip from episode 3 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Linda Morra\tKellough was the point toward which they were all magnetically drawn. I’ve never seen anything like it.\n(01:53)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Pop-esque upbeat music continues] And we revisited the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium to ask academics and artists big questions.\n(02:02)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Kate Moffat\tWhat are you listening to?\n(02:03)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Rémy Bocquillon\t“What are you listening to?” Ho, that’s a hard question.\n(02:07)\tMusic\t[Eerie echo music starts playing]\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWe also explored how our bodies experience time, by asking how “not-knowing” feels and how it sounds.\n(02:20)\tAudio clip from episode 2 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Nadège Paquette\tDoes the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps]\n(02:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd then, [Sci-fi music starts] we looked to the [echo] “future.”\n(02:36)\tHannah McGregor\tWe heard from the artists harnessing algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance in a live episode.\n(02:45)\tAudio clip from episode 8 of SpokenWeb Podcast\n– Audio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\t[Overlapping voices] nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat.\n(02:52)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe also asked computers to help us decide which oral performers are the best at “doing” the voices in the Waste Land.\n(03:01)\tAudio clip from episode 5 of SpokenWeb Podcast, MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading The Wasteland\tTwit twit twit\nJug jug jug jug jug jug\nSo rudely forc’d.\n(03:07)\tHannah McGregor\tAnd we looked ahead to a future without our mini-series Shortcuts, bidding it a fond farewell.\n(03:13)\tAudio clip from SpokenWeb Shortcuts Season 5, Episode 6, Katherine McLeod\tAs always, thank you for listening.\n(03:18)\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast that showcases audio from archival literary recordings across Canada.\n[Theme music starts playing] But while we’re fascinated with how audio archives can help us understand the history of literature in Canada, we’re not just a history podcast.\n(03:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast covers the “then,” the “when,” and the “now” – contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds.\n(03:49)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season, we’ll continue to look back at the past and explore the future with new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n(03:58)\tKatherine McLeod\tSeason 6 will be our last season, at least in this current form. The podcast will evolve into a new series, on this very same podcast feed, so don’t go anywhere!\n(04:10)\tHannah McGregor\tIn the meantime, as always–\n(04:13)\tKatherine McLeod\t–My name is Katherine McLeod–\n(04:14)\tHannah McGregor\t–And I’m Hannah McGregor. And we are back as your co-hosts.\n(04:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe podcast production team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, and transcriber Yara Ajeeb.\n(04:27)\tHannah McGregor\tSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.\nAnd welcome to season 6!\n(04:37)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Electronic music fades away]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9675","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E7, Listening on the Radio, 16 June 2025, Camlot and McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-on-the-radio/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0ce6d2de-52b4-4599-9c37-54198c620fc4/audio/c33fb792-620d-47f8-afb7-6bfe99eb739d/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6ep7-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:43\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,173,943 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6ep7-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-on-the-radio/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-06-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason. “Toward a History of Literary Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 271.2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 263-271. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17421\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.”\\n\\nESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 1-18. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17412\\n\\n“Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show.” CJLO 1690 AM, http://www.cjlo.com/shows/sonic-lit-spokenweb-radio-show\\n\\nThe audio of “Listening on the Radio” is currently presented as part of the digital gallery of Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe (University of Vienna) in June 2025.\\n\\nListen to the radio show Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, on CJLO 1690 AM in Montreal on Mondays at 2pm EST, or check out past episodes online at cjlo.com.\\n\\nRecordings played during “Listening on the Radio” include the voices of poets Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Cyano Sun Suite), Maxine Gadd (from SGW Poetry Series), David Antin (The Principle of Fit, II”), FYEAR (FYEAR), A.M Klein (Five Montreal Poets), bpNichol (Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1970 – 1980), Allen Ginsberg (from SGW Poetry Series), and P.K. Page (The Filled Pen).\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549796945920,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show is a bi-weekly radio show on CJLO, the campus radio station of Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada). On air since September 2024, the show features “sound recordings from 1888 to the present that document times when people have whispered, spoken, howled and screamed literature out loud” (“Sonic Lit”). Co-hosted by us – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod – the radio show is an extension of our collaborative and creative research about “new sonic approaches in literary studies” (McLeod and Camlot). Prior to stepping into the booth, we had imagined the show as a curation of audio recordings as catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers working with various community and institutional holdings of literary audio across the network. However, as the show began, we had to sort out how the definition of “spoken word” as understood by regulatory bodies in Canadian radio intersects with “spoken word” as understood by poets and scholars of poetry recordings. Making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience than making audio for podcasts such as this podcast, The SpokenWeb Podcast. We soon realized that our radio show was a performative exploration of a set of research questions relating to the affordances of radio for “literary listening” (Camlot). For example, what are the affordances of radio as compared to a podcast when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio? How does spoken word poetry register in relation to other discursive forms on the radio? How do we as hosts perform “talk radio” in talking about poetry? And what is our sense of audience when on air? What does listening sound like on the radio? We produced this audio, “Listening on the Radio,” as a radio-show-as-podcast-episode to answer these questions and others – out loud.\n\n\n00:00:05\t[SpokenWeb Intro Song]\t[Instrumental music begins]\n[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast — stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor —\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod.\nAnd each month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history — created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n[Vocal instrumental music plays]\n\n00:00:54\tHannah McGregor\tThe lines between radio and podcasting have been blurry for as long as podcasting as a medium has existed. With radio shows now regularly streaming online, that distinction has only gotten blurrier.\nSo it makes sense that when today’s episode producers, SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, first started making their radio show Sonic Lit, they anticipated an experience similar to that of making an episode of this very podcast.\n\nInstead, making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience—one that led them to begin asking about how making radio differs from making a podcast, especially when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio.\n\n00:01:45\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, you’ll hear Jason and Katherine modeling their creative and collaborative approach to exploring these questions through a process of conversation, curation, and careful listening.\nThis is Season 6, Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Listening on the Radio.\n\n00:02:10\tJason Camlot\t[Upbeat instrumental music begins] Rolling.\n00:02:13\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast — or should I say, welcome to Sonic Lit, a SpokenWeb radio show–\n00:02:21\tJason Camlot\tPodcast. [Laughter]\n00:02:24\tKatherine McLeod\tIs it a podcast or a radio show? We’re recording this live in the AMP Lab at Concordia University. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with —\n00:02:37\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot. [Katherine laughs]\nI hate the way I say that on the radio show, I have to say.\n00:02:43\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s okay. I always take a deep breath before saying “Sonic Lit: a SpokenWeb radio show.” I’m tempted to almost say—I have to really think and not say “Spoken Lit,” so—\n00:02:56\tJason Camlot\tSpoken Lit: A SonicWeb radio show. [Laughter]\n00:03:00\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd we’re recording this live and kind of pretending that this podcast episode is a radio show — well, we’re more than pretending. We’re recording it as if it’s a radio show, and that’s making us think differently about how we’re talking.\n00:03:16\tJason Camlot\tYeah. Well, wait a second — this is a podcast, right? So welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast. [SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\nBut the conceit of this podcast— and we’ve made many podcasts together —\n00:03:25\tArchival Recording – Unidentified Speaker\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\nJoin episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. Here are Katherine and Jason—\n00:03:34\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\n–But the conceit of this one is that we’re going to make a podcast in the spirit, or maybe even the form, of a radio show—so that we can reflect on the differences between our—at least our experience of—podcasting and radio.\n\n00:03:52\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s right.\n[Soft vocalizing music starts playing]\n\nWe’ve been hosting a radio show on Concordia Campus Radio, CJLO 1690 on the AM dial, or streamed online at cjlo.com, and we’ve been hosting it since September. We’ve been playing recordings of poetry and talking about what we hear as we play those recordings. And we’ve created a bit of a body of work over these past months, and we’re starting to sort of get a sense of what kinds of themes are emerging through the show—but also some experience in making radio.\n\nNeither of us had made radio before when we started this show, so it was not only a question of figuring out what were we going to play on the show and how were we going to talk about poetry, but also quite literally: how are we going to make the show?\n\nBecause when we sit in the booth at CJLO, we also work the board and sort of figure out how to come in and out of commercial breaks—what are we going to do to end the show, how are we going to begin the show, and how are we going to keep track of time while doing all of that?\n\nRadio is really a very timed medium, as we found out.\n\n00:05:06\tJason Camlot\tI mean, really, one of the least podcasting things I could say right now is: “It’s 4:30, and we’re in the AMP Lab podcast studio. It’s partially sunny outside.” Right? You know? [Laughter]\nKatherine opened by saying, “We’re live.” Right? And we are live and we’re speaking live—but you will not be hearing this live, in the same way that when we do our radio shows live.\nPeople who happen to be tuned in to CJLO 1690 [brief hip hop beat] are hearing our shows. So we want to reflect on, you know, some of the differences—that would just be an example. And we’ll talk more about “liveness,” but we’re going to talk about—and just to give some of the themes that we sort of thought of in advance that might be interesting—to play examples of and reflect on:\n\nHow we listen on radio\nWho we’re talking to\nWhat’s our imagined audience for radio\nThis sense of liveness that we’ve been talking about already\nWhat to do with mistakes when they happen on the radio\nBecause, you know, what we do with the mistakes usually when we make podcasts is—we hide them. We cut them out. [Laughs]\nWe erase them. There are no mistakes in our podcasts. But on radio, there are mistakes. And in that sense, it’s a more spontaneous and possibly surprising medium.\n\nSo we want to talk about spontaneity and surprise. We want to talk about: what are some of the things we can do on radio that maybe we wouldn’t do in a podcast? And then I suppose also reflect on some of the larger frames of our show—like Katherine mentioned—one show being part of a larger body of work, but also that our own show plays or is heard among many other shows that are happening, that sound quite different from our show.\n\n00:06:49\tKatherine McLeod\tWe thought that we would follow the format that we usually follow for the radio show, which will involve listening to a series of clips related to those topics that Jason just outlined, and talking about what we hear as we listen to them—and listening to them together.\nThis is Jason and I listening to them together, but also imagining that we’re listening to them with you, our audience.\n\n00:07:15\tJason Camlot\tYeah, that’s great.\nI mean, just to get things straight—usually on a radio show, we don’t play clips of ourselves talking. [Laughter]\n\n00:07:21\tKatherine McLeod\tRight, good point.\n00:07:23\tJason Camlot\tWe play records, we play poetry—\n00:07:26\tKatherine McLeod\tPoetry recordings. Yeah, that’s a good point. We should make that clear.\n00:07:30\tJason Camlot\tBut we’re going to be treating clips from our past radio shows as though we’re DJ-ing them. You know, I was very proud after our first show to come home and tell everyone that I was a DJ now.\n00:07:43\tKatherine McLeod\tAs someone who’s been listening to a lot of recordings of poets on the radio in the CBC archives, I was pretty excited to know what it’s like to be on the other side—making radio.\nAnd then it does make you think about all the different considerations—how the show gets put together and also just how that has changed over time as well.\n\nSo yeah, we’re making radio here—and also making this podcast episode.\n\n00:08:08\tJason Camlot\t[Upbeat instrumental music begins]\nYeah, I was never so proud to claim that I was a podcaster as I was to claim I was a DJ.\nAnyway, let’s move on into the show itself.\n\n[Instrumental music continues for a while]\n\n00:08:48\tJason Camlot\tMaybe we should start by playing a clip or two of what our radio show sounds like, so people have an idea of what we’re talking about.\n00:08:54\tKatherine McLeod\tSounds good. Let’s listen.\n00:08:58\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Transcriber’s note: Audio excerpt from a previous episode of the Sonic Lit show]\n[Soft instrumental music begins]\n\nWelcome to Sonic Lit, a spoken word radio show. I’m Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with —\n\n00:09:09\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tJason Camlot.\n00:09:11\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tAnd every second week, we’ll be bringing you literary audio to the airwaves of CJLO. We decided to call this show Sonic Lit because we’ll be playing many different examples of literary audio.\nAnd today, we’re going to offer you a bit of a sampler of what you can expect to hear on this radio show.\n00:09:33\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tYeah — the theme, if we want to think of the theme, is: what is literary audio?\n00:09:37\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts into another recording from another episode of Sonic Lit]\nWe’re back with Sonic Lit. Before the break, we heard “America” by Allen Ginsberg. And while listening to that, we were — well, we were sitting here in the booth just laughing to ourselves, because we couldn’t believe that after almost every line there was a roar of laughter from the audience. [Audience laughter and cheering]\nIt almost sounded like we were listening to comedy. [Grand piano music fades in and out]\n\n00:10:01\tAudio Clip, Unknown Speaker\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is an excerpt from William Wordsworth’s poem “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” recited here by an unidentified speaker.]\n…the untrodden ways / Beside the springs of Dove…\n00:10:05\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tThat track was called Part 1: Trajectory, from a new album by the group “Fire.”\n[Transcriber’s note: Unable to locate a definitive release under this title or artist.]\n[Distorted instrumental music with overlapping heaving sounds]\n\n00:10:20\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tSo…do we know what a poem is now, Jason?\n00:10:25\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\t[Pages flipping] I think that I understand. I think I understand exactly what a poem is now after having heard that. How about you?\n00:10:33\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI think I do. I also feel like that poem is in my body. [Voice fades]\n00:10:38\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nSo that was a collage of a variety of clips from our radio show. What are we listening to there, Katherine?\n\n00:10:45\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, Jason, the question of what we’re listening to is really part of the question: how did this radio show begin?\nWe wanted to extend a practice we’ve been calling “listening practices” — something we’ve been developing here at Concordia as part of the SpokenWeb team since 2019.\nWe’d gather in a room and a “listening guide” would bring a sound or sonic concept for us to listen to. As that evolved — and continued online during the pandemic — the focus was still on bringing a sound and then talking about it, listening together.\n\nAnd I think this radio show has really continued that. When we play something on the show, we usually don’t prepare how we’re going to respond to it. We just respond to what we’ve heard and ask ourselves what it was we were really listening to.\nI think you can hear that in the clips — that moment where we’re still figuring it out, thinking on our feet. You can hear us listening live and responding in real time. It’s rooted in that idea.\n\n00:12:14\tJason Camlot\tYeah, that’s a major difference between how we do the podcast and how we do the radio show. We don’t prepare. [Laughter]\nFor the radio, we barely prepare. Katherine and I will meet like 20 minutes before and say, “Which CD are we going to listen to today?” Sometimes we haven’t even pre-listened — which can cause problems, but usually creates some very exciting moments. It also allows our audience to hear us listening — to experience listening modeled by listening with us.\n\n00:12:48\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly. And the fact that we’ve been doing this show twice a week during a really busy term —\n00:12:56\tJason Camlot\tOnce every two weeks. We’ll get to errors later. [Laughter]\n00:13:01\tKatherine McLeod\tDidn’t I just say every two—?\n00:13:02\tJason Camlot\tYou said twice a week. [Laughter]\n00:13:07\tKatherine McLeod\tNo, no — that would be a bit much. Maybe one day?\n00:13:10\tJason Camlot\tWe’re aiming for twice a week.\n00:13:11\tKatherine McLeod\tRight — the morning poetry show.\nBut seriously, doing the show every two weeks — it’s amazing we’ve kept that up, given everything else going on: teaching, research, life. If we were making a podcast, there would be so much planning involved. But for this, you have to improvise. It’s almost like training for… I don’t know, not a marathon, but something long-term. It’s about sustaining it. You don’t have to make one polished, research-heavy podcast episode — you’re making something every two weeks. So we can try new things, experiment, and not overthink it.\n\n00:14:13\tJason Camlot\tThat’s a great point.\nIf I were to sum up what you just said: radio, as a medium to explore literary listening, is sprawling. We can go deep, we can take our time. We can just talk — no scripts.\nWith podcasts, we at least draft a script, sometimes fully write it out, and then read it. But here, it’s talk-thinking. Thinking aloud in response to sound. It’s all part of the same continuum of listening practices — like those group listening sessions we’ve done. We’ve even listened to full-length readings and modeled that on the show. But again, radio feels different from sitting in a room with people.\n\n00:15:16\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd to extend the podcast comparison a little further, it actually reminded me of the ShortCuts series I did for the SpokenWeb Podcast — where each episode took a deep dive into the archives, really listening to one or two clips and asking: What are we really listening to here?\nWe gave the space and time to reflect. And honestly, there have been moments on the radio show that feel just like that — which has been a really wonderful thing. But unlike the podcast, we can’t assume the audience is ready for a deep dive. Radio has a wider, more general audience — and truthfully, we don’t know who’s listening at all.\n\n00:16:10\tJason Camlot\tRight. As we were talking about listening, you started talking about audience — and of course, you can’t think about listening without thinking about who’s listening.\nFor me, audience is one of the biggest differences between podcasting and radio. With a podcast, it’s a bit like writing a poem or an academic essay — I imagine a reader or listener in mind, and that’s enough for me to move forward. But when I’m live on air — when I’m actually on the air — someone might be listening to me right then. That changes everything. It summons a completely different sense of audience.\n\nSo… who are we talking to on our radio show?\n\n00:17:05\tKatherine McLeod\tIt’s fascinating to imagine — we could be talking to anyone, anywhere. It could be a broad audience… or a very small one.\nSome might be in their cars, others at home, or listening while doing something else. And if they tune in to 1690 AM or stream it online, they may not hear the show from the beginning. They might drop in mid-show and wonder, “What are these sounds I’m hearing?”\nThat’s why we do things like station IDs or say: Welcome to Sonic Lit, a SpokenWeb radio show. I’m Katherine McLeod and I’m here in the booth with…\n00:17:58\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\n00:18:00\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly — and reminding people of where they are, what they’re listening to, and who we are. That’s not something we’d typically do in a podcast. It felt strange at first, but I think we’ve gotten used to it.\nAnd then of course, the show streams online too — and we can archive episodes. That version of the show maybe feels closer to a podcast, but the radio experience still feels a lot more unknown.\n\n00:18:42\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I have to say, I completely block out the idea of a streaming audience—you know, the idea that people might be listening to it streaming afterwards. And probably it’s possible that more people will listen to it because we’ll tell three or four people to listen to it streaming, whereas probably there are zero people listening to our show when it’s playing live.\nBut that’s not the point. The point is: when we’re on the air, it creates a sense of urgency, because if there’s dead air then we’re not being responsible.\nSome of the things you mentioned, like playing the station ID—I like to say, “It’s 1690 on your AM dial”—you know, playing the station ID, playing the advertisements that we’re required to play during the course of the hour that we have on the air, is all part of a kind of responsibility to the station and to the audience.\n\nBut I have to say, the fact that we don’t know who’s listening to us creates a kind of potential—in my mind, anyways—for an actual listening audience. And it allows me to summon them, you know?\n\nAnd I want to give you an example. So we’re on a college radio station, so it’s probably fewer listeners than, say, larger radio stations—either commercial or the CBC. But, you know, I was on the CBC just yesterday morning to promote a show that’s happening at the Blue Metropolis Festival this Friday–\n\n00:20:21\tCBC Host – Archival Recording\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is an excerpt from Jason Camlot’s appearance on CBC Radio.]\nMontreal-based literary group The SpokenWeb is back at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. They work out of Concordia University to save the audio history of poetry across Canada. They preserve recordings that date back as far as the 1950s. Their event on Friday: Not Your Mother’s Poetry Reading…\n\n00:20:25\tJason Camlot\t[End of CBC clip – podcast resumes]\nAnd I won’t go into the details of promoting it because this is a podcast, so there’s no point. But yesterday I was on CBC at 7:30 in the morning–\n\n00:20:33\tAudio Clip of CBC Episode\t[Audio cuts back to the CBC clip]\n–Jason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb podcast. He’s also a professor of English Literature at Concordia University and joins us on the line.\n\nCBC Host: Good morning.\nJason: Good morning.\nCBC Host: What kind of audio archives is your group trying to preserve?\nJason: These are like–\n00:20:48\tJason Camlot\tI got up to be on the air and I was like, “Oh, why am I getting up? No one’s going to be listening to this.” And I had my eight minutes to talk about the event we’re doing at Blue Metropolis.\nThen, as soon as I got off the air, my phone [phone notification ding sound] was off the hook with texts. I don’t know if that metaphor makes sense anymore, but I was getting a lot of messages from friends.\n\nI was literally thinking to myself, as I got off the air, “Oh no, I’m going to be so tired today. Why did I even do this?” And then all these friends were texting me saying, “I just heard you on the radio!”\n\nIt took me aback. First of all, I was like, what are you doing up listening? I mean—it’s not even that early… Sorry, this is making me sound like a real slacker. [Laughs]\nBut it was a surprise. I got about five texts—that’s five people within my inner circle who had heard me.\n\nSo that made me think, “Wow, there were probably a lot of listeners out there.” And then if we think of college radio in relation to the CBC—maybe it’s only 5% of the CBC audience, but still, that means there are actually people tuned in to that station, listening. So, oh my God—it’s a huge difference.\n\n00:21:53\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, I haven’t told you this story yet, but I have to add it to what you just said—thinking of stories from these past couple of days.\nOver the weekend, I was at a party, talking about our radio show. And in fact, I think I’ve attracted three new audience members from that.\n\nIt was a party full of poets—so, you know, maybe this came from that. But when I was telling them about the radio show, one person replied, like, they responded, they were like:\n\n“Oh, you know, even if your audience is reaching, like, that 17-year-old listening to the radio in that moment…”\n\n[cryptic sound plays and fades]\n\n“…it’s going to change his life.”\n\nAnd I was like—yes! You know, that’s our imagined audience. If we want to have one of many possible versions out there. But really, if someone’s tuning in, there’s a real potential to change their life. And it’s—it’s—yeah. The possibility is there.\n\n00:22:42\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I wanted to run something by you in relation to audience.\nWe’re running out of time for audience. So that’s the other thing. [Laughter]\n\nYou know, we’re working with a time limit—both with the podcast and the radio show—but the urgency of time is much more dramatic in a radio show, because you literally are the clock–\n\n00:23:00\tKatherine McLeod\t–is ticking, coming up at the hour and we have to be done by then, yeah.\n00:23:03\tJason Camlot\tBut I wanted to tell you this story about David Antin, who was a talk poet.\nHe was an avant-garde poet, and he used to sort of create poems by going before an audience and just starting to talk.\n\n00:23:38\tDavid Antin, Archival Recording\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is a recording of poet David Antin before a live audience.]\nI came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’ve been thinking about, and because I don’t come unprepared to do pieces.\n\nOn the other hand, I don’t come prepared the way one comes to a lesson. I haven’t studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit—the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness that comes in certain socially structured events.\n\n00:23:39\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nHe would talk for 45 minutes to an hour, and then he would record them, and then he would turn them into print poems as well. And the poem existed across all these different media—live performance, tape, in a book.\n\nI was doing a sort of email interview with him and preparing an article about him. He had done some radio, you know, so I asked him a little bit about what’s the difference between performing a talk poem on the radio versus performing a talk poem in a classroom before a bunch of people who showed up to hear you?\n\nAnd his response was that when you’re on the radio, you’re just speaking into a black hole. It’s as though your words are just evaporating as soon as you speak them. And there’s no sense of reception.\n\nBut that’s not been my experience at all of speaking on the radio. I—somehow, even though I can’t see anyone listening—have a very tangible sense that there are people listening. I mean, big myth perhaps, but you know, that’s how I feel.\n\n00:24:50\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I feel like the idea of it traveling across the airwaves—and like, you know, again, there’s something about the radio dial or tuning in—that anyone could be tuning in.\nAnd also, that responsibility to put on the show and not have silence, not have that dead air happen. You feel like not only are the listeners depending on you, the station’s depending on you. There’s—again—a sense of responsibility for the sound.\n\n00:25:16\tJason Camlot\tWhat I have, going back to these texts I received from friends, is that I learned things about them — that they have rituals of listening to the radio.\n00:25:24\tKatherine McLeod\tBut yeah, there’s a ritual. Also, really, radio has connection.\nI think of so many times I’ve texted my mom across three hours’ difference out to her in Vancouver. And I did this a lot when I first moved to Toronto and we had moved away from home. But I’d be like, “Oh, turn on the radio at 3:40,” or whatever, to hear this specific piece of music.\nAnd because we were both big CBC Radio 2 listeners, if we could be connected by both having heard that piece of music at that point in the day, there was something very special about both having listened to the same thing at, you know, the same time in our day. [Instrumental music starts playing]\n\nSo radio — connecting across really vast distances — is something that’s really quite, again, special about the medium–\n\nArchival Recording\t[Audio cuts into a prior radio broadcast. Fast-paced instrumental music plays in the background. Voices are slightly distorted.]\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nAnd we’re here on September 30th, which is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. And here on Sonic Lit, we’re bringing you all Indigenous sounds. You just heard—\n\n[Audio glitch/cut]\n\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nSo what happened today, Katherine, in the USA?\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nNot sure. Weirdness is about to happen in the USA. Trump’s inauguration?\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nWe don’t know what’s going to happen in the USA, do we?\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nIt feels very, very uncertain — and a bit weird.\n[Audio glitch/cut]\n\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nIt feels a bit weird.\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nAnd so today’s Sonic Lit show is basically going to be American weirdness.\n[Fast instrumental music continues briefly, then fades]\n\nJason Camlot [live recording, clearer]\nWelcome back to Sonic Lit, the radio show.\nKatherine McLeod [live recording]\nToday we’re listening to poetry by memory — poems that people carry with them in their minds and in their hearts.\n00:27:09\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nIn some ways, what you’re saying makes me think that speaking on the radio is closer to doing a live performance — you know, a live poetry reading — than making a podcast is. You know, there’s a liveness, and it’s about the sort of simultaneity in time, as time is unfolding in the present, that really makes it special.\n\n00:27:32\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd a podcast may be more akin to a vinyl record that a poet has recorded some poems on. And you know, that’s also a very moving sonic experience, but something different — experiencing time together.\n00:27:50\tJason Camlot\tAnd yet, when we’ve been talking about — and even sort of theorizing and talking with experts about — podcasting, the sense of liveness, the sense of immediacy and dialogue and informality is always stressed. But the liveness is maybe just a little bit different. There’s a different kind of liveness in radio than in podcast.\n00:28:10\tKatherine McLeod\tPodcasting — there’s maybe a liveness in, say, the intimacy of the voice, and kind of having that voice with you in your headphones as you’re moving about the world. In those moments in time, you’re experiencing sound along the same time — you’re synced in time through sound, that’s what I’m getting at.\nBut, you know, the intimacy of the voice is maybe something different than the intimacy of time, or being connected through, again, through radio — traveling through the airwaves, connecting you across distances, and connecting through time.\n00:28:47\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\t[Audio cuts into another recording]\nZen Ship sounds from Tanya Evanson — that’s “Qutb,” or “Qutb (the search for the bull),” from her album Zen Ship.\n\nAnd I mentioned earlier that Katherine McLeod can’t be in the studio with me today. Unfortunately, she had to stay home because little Clara, her daughter, was having some…well, just not having the best day. And I think it was a teething thing. And you know, teeth are important — they’re all part of this oral performance art that we’re highlighting on the show.\nBut since she can’t be with us in studio, we’re gonna try to see if we can get her on the phone. So I’m interested to hear what Katherine thinks of the Tanya Evanson stuff we’ve been playing so far.\nKatherine, are you there? Can you hear us?\n\n00:29:35\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\t[Katherine on the phone]\nI can hear you.\n00:29:36\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tAlright, cool, I hear you too. This is ecstatic.\n00:29:40\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\tI’m so thrilled to be live on the show via the telephone.\n00:29:45\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tWell, I hope things are going OK. How’s Clara doing?\n00:29:48\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\tShe’s doing well. She’s actually having her nap, so this is perfect timing to be able to call in. I was thinking, well, I’ll get to listen to the show during her nap — but even better, I get to join you on the show today.\nWasn’t expected, but thanks for heading to the radio booth yourself, Jason — and for telling me.\n00:30:07\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tYeah, yeah. No, it’s great to have you with us one way or another. And it was really your idea to feature Tanya Evanson in today’s show. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about why you wanted to do that.\n00:30:25\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nSo one of the— we’ve been talking about some of the different qualities of liveness in radio, and one of the, in some ways most terrifying and yet also most— it’s become for us most enjoyable, funny, comical, I don’t know, humiliating yet pleasurable— elements of liveness and radio is that when you make mistakes, they just happen. And they’re there. And they’re not going to go away.\n\n00:30:50\tKatherine McLeod\tYes, and they range from things like maybe mispronouncing something–\n00:30:57\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\nWe’re going to be listening to, first of all, some tracks from her new albums. You know— Sun Suite. [Disappointed “womp womp” sound effect plays]\n\nAlright, we’re back—Sonic Lit.\n\nWhile we were off-air, Katherine sent me a text. And Katherine and I have a little bit of a running gag going, at least between ourselves, where we correct each other’s pronunciation or knowledge on the things that we’re playing on air.\nAnd I’ve had a good run. I’ve been—I’ve been able to correct her on a few things over the last few shows. But this time, Katherine texted that I’ve been saying the title of Tanya’s newest record, which I’ve been saying *CNO*, as though it’s *Cyrano*—like the Bergerac—*CNO Sun Sweet*, but it’s actually *Cyano Sun Sweet*.\n\nSo—chalk up a point for Katherine.\nAnd I did want to make that correction: cyanosis.\n\n00:31:50\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nStumbling over–\n\n00:31:53\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\n[Deep voice saying: Now, if you’ll open your book, I’ll begin.] *A Child’s Introduction to the Novel Oliver Twist*, as adopted by J.K. Ross, captures the true spirit of an old England in much of Dickinson’s—Dickens—sorry, in much of Dickens’s own words.\n\n00:31:10\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nOr the CD player not working—\n\n00:31:12\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\n–and I’m going to pause that. [Audio playback fails]\n\nI knew I couldn’t get it on the first try.\n\nHere, let’s try that one more time.\n\n[Audio playback resumes successfully: “Stories of snow…”]\n\nAlright, here we go.\n\n[Audio continues: “Those in the vegetable rain—”]\n\n00:32:25\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nOr your microphone not working, and realizing that you have to just figure that out on the fly and try to, you know, make it work— and sometimes have the help of our very wonderful station manager, Cameron McIntyre, who sometimes will fly into the booth and, you know, turn the CD player on.\n\n00:32:47\tJason Camlot\tCameron’s like a helicopter parent, nearby in case something goes wrong. I mean, we had to be trained to be on the radio, right?\nYou know, you can’t just walk into a studio and start being a DJ. Like, you have to pay your dues for at least three training sessions.\n00:33:01\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I think too, though— from making so many podcasts, I think it actually surprised both of us, because we kind of thought, well, we’ve made a lot of podcast episodes, we’re very, very familiar with making audio about literature, and, you know, we can just— we can do this. And then realized— no, no, there’s so much to learn. And we’re still learning.\n00:33:20\tJason Camlot\tYeah, absolutely. I mean, so you mentioned some of the things that can go wrong— equipment failure of different kinds. And there definitely— it happened to us more than once where, you know, we planned a whole show based on a few CDs and— oh, the CD player’s not working. Or, you know, there are three mics in the studio and none of them seem to be picking up any sound. And we don’t know why. And it’s because the person who was in the booth just before us pressed some buttons that they weren’t supposed to. And so, you know, Cameron has to rescue us.\nOh yeah, one of our most common errors is we get too ambitious. We want to— there’s like five more songs before the show is over, but we only have time for one of them. So we actually list all the songs that we hope to play, but then we only play half of one of those songs or poems–\n\n00:34:05\tKatherine McLeod\t–we’re going to, you know, end this— end this show with playing, like, this poem and this poem, and then Jason and I both look at each other and realize that actually— there’s only two minutes. [Laughter]\n00:34:18\tJason Camlot\t[Fast paced instrumental begins] So yeah, managing time is a big cause of errors for us.\n00:34:22\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. [Fast paced instrumental continues and fades]\n00:34:42\tJason Camlot\tIt seems to me, actually, as we’re talking, that almost all of these different qualities of radio seem to come down to the effects of time on us as radio show hosts. One of the things we’ve been excited about in using time— or about the time— is how much time we actually could devote to listening to, say, a single artist or something like that.\n00:35:03\tKatherine McLeod\tBecause we’ve kind of adopted some of the practices of, say, the ghost reading or again, the listening practice or the podcast— in that we have done some really deep dives. And actually, some of the shows that I think have felt the most satisfying have been where we’ve just really listened closely to, say, a CD of a particular poet or an archival recording.\nAnd I should say that actually— radio, CDs—this is like the best forum for playing poetry. Because on a podcast, you can’t necessarily— you know, you can’t really play commercial recordings. Or if you do, you can just play a clip and talk about it, and all those things about rights.\n\nBut on the radio, playing a commercial recording of a poet is a terrific way of playing the work and then being able to, you know, have it count towards Canadian content on air and everything like that. So we’ve really done some good deep dives into Canadian poets who have made CDs. And I think some of the times that we’ve just really dwelled in one disc have been some of the most generative and enjoyable.\n\n00:36:06\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I love that. I mean— yeah, we literally have license under the legal rubric of radio to play whole records if we want.\n00:36:15\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\t[Audio cuts to a recording]\nThe other thing they really have in common is they’re both off of albums, which I just think is so fascinating. So we really, when thinking about the Montreal sounds to feature on today’s show, we thought: well, why not? Why not feature two albums? But two albums from really different periods… [Voice fades]\n\n00:36:31\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd yeah, there is almost a kind of inclination to just talk less, comment less. So it’s less about our intervention, you know, in the pieces we’re playing as illustrations of something, and more of a kind of sharing and collaborative listening with whoever else might be listening at that moment.\n\n00:36:50\tKatherine McLeod\tYou know, in that way, it’s such an ideal format for a listening practice. Because, you know, we’re listening with our audience, and really the focus is on listening.\n00:36:59\tMaxine Gadd, Archival Audio\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is a clip from a previous episode of the podcast, in which Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod listen to and discuss a recording of Maxine Gadd.]\n[Audio cuts into a previous podcast episode]\n[Maxine Gadd archival recording]\n\nI remember the bell— Some of us are to be half-inch diameter crystal. If there is crystal—Leary—I should have mentioned—was Timothy Leary. I should—I should have explained that before, you know?\n\n00:37:23\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tWow. Maxine Gadd, reading at Sir George Williams University in 1972, on February the 18th. So— tomorrow, many, many years ago.\n00:37:37\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI love listening to this reading again.\nI was really noticing how it was really hard to tell when she moved in and out of a poem. But I really liked that— because I was like, then I felt like listening to her talk about the poem also kind of felt like her reading the poem.\nAnd then I would suddenly realize: oh wait, now we’re in a poem. And it felt like just her voice kind of carried us through both— again, from the commentary into the poem itself. And then even at the end there, when she says like, “Leary, I should have mentioned it was Timothy Leary,” it almost was like— oh right, now we’re out of this poem. And it again felt like kind of part of the poem.\n\nBut I was also just thinking— Jason, I don’t know if you’re noticing this too, but like— when she was talking about the poem, either before or after, it felt so improvised. And like, we kind of— I think when we were sitting here, we felt like, oh, we feel like we can just imagine her talking to us. And it felt very informal. But we really liked that element of it, because it just felt, again, like we were sitting down with her, hearing her talk about her poems in a very casual way— and then read them. And the improvisational quality of it was just— it felt very live.\n\n00:38:52\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tI mean, you really hear her— you hear this in many readings, not all readings— but you really hear Maxine Gadd sort of tuning herself or calibrating herself in relation to the room. So  the opening part of the reading that we just heard after Richard Sommer’s introduction, she was really feeling things out. She didn’t really know what she was going to do. You get a sense that she almost didn’t quite know who she was speaking to yet. And so she needed to explain herself. But at the same time, explain that she would be figuring out what she’d be doing as things unfolded. And I think she needed to start making sound in order to get a sense of some feedback that would help her decide where she would be going with this reading, and what pieces she would choose, and how she would read them— and what it would all mean to her as she did it.\n00:39:52\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI think that we’re going to hear more. We might pause for a…well—\n00:39:57\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tLet’s— let’s, yeah— let Maxine have a little more time–\n00:39:59\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tYeah, because she’s about to actually talk about a really important movement in Vancouver called Intermedia. So let’s— let’s hear that before we do anything.\n00:40:07\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tSo let’s continue being the audience for Maxine Gadd, February 18th, 1972. And you’re listening to CJLO 1690.\n00:40:21\tMaxine Gadd, Archival Audio\tOh yeah, this—this is where I’m at now. I don’t like it. OK.\n00:40:27\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd it’s probably not a good point. It’s not necessarily about, you know, disseminating our ideas about these recordings as research. It’s about listening again with other listeners who are tuning in.\n\n00:40:36\tJason Camlot\tYeah, it’s about—it’s about sharing also, right? You know, so the Montreal spoken word performer Fortner Anderson has a show on our rival station, CKUT—not really rival station, but that’s McGill’s station.\nBut on his show, he doesn’t speak at all. He just plays records, right? So basically, he uses his hour purely to share work, to promote work, circulate work, expose work, you know. And there’s definitely a much greater sense of, you know, that being one of the major purposes of what we’re doing on the radio.\n00:41:10\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, and it’s so exciting to think—like to be like, OK, well, you know, this disc that, you know, we— I don’t just have to choose one clip from it. In fact, we can—we can really—we can listen to the whole thing. We can listen to tracks and also then talk about it a bit. But really, it’s about the listening. And then we have been able to share a lot of local artists and, you know, discs that we’re big fans of and want people to listen to as well.\n00:41:34\tJason Camlot\tYeah, so in the spirit of this topic, the next hour of our podcast will be devoted to listening to a single record. Here we go now. Just kidding.\n[Piano instrumental begins]\n\n00:41:59\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’re listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast— or Sonic Lit. [Laughter]\nYou’ll do it again? Yeah, because I was like, wait—how should I— You’re listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with—\n00:42:17\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\nKatherine, was that your radio voice that we were just hearing?\n00:42:21\tKatherine McLeod\tYes. I will say you also have a radio voice, Jason.\n00:42:24\tJason Camlot\tDo I ever. [Laughter]\nIt’s so embarrassing. I hear myself speaking that way and I just can’t help myself when I’m in the studio. I was like, “And Jason Camlot,” you know? Like, who am I? Who is that?\n\nBut I think it’s interesting to think about how we speak on the radio and what forms of talk are happening, you know, on our show. Like what forms of talk are happening to us on our show? What forms of talk are we performing on the show? What forms of talk are we listening to on the show? Because there are a lot of different forms of literary talk and performance, but then also our show happens within a much wider context of other forms of discourse and talk.\n\n00:43:03\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I remember one time when we had arrived early before our show, we were listening to the show that airs just before us. And it’s a sports show–\n00:43:14\tJason Camlot\t–the Tommy John Show.\n00:43:17\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. [Laughs]\nThat was your radio voice. [Laughs]\n00:43:18\tAudio Recording from Tommy John Show\t[Audio cuts to a recording from Tommy John Show]\nAgain, so this could be a disaster— an absolute disaster— for the Carolina Hurricanes. And so what do you do if you don’t think you can get a deal done? So you try and get something for him. And there’s going to be teams that would be interested— absolutely— it’s Rico Ratman— but not necessarily a team he wants to sign with. A team that’s going to try and win a cup. So I would not be surprised. A team like Winnipeg, Edmonton. Because you know what they’re gonna have to do— Carolina— they’re gonna have to retain some of the salary to make it—\n\n00:43:50\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd—\n\n00:43:51\tJason Camlot\tHe has a good radio voice—\n00:43:52\tKatherine McLeod\t—Because we were— when we were listening, we were amazed at the way that he just— he talks continuously [music plays] in such an animated way. And just the way that he pauses— there’s just such a style to it. It was just incredible to hear. So, you know— and also sounds really different from our show and the person that comes in after us–\n00:44:10\tAudio Recording from Tommy John Show\t[Audio cuts to a recording from Tommy John Show]\nThat was “Arizona” by Wunderhorse off their newest album “Midas,” which I’ve been a huge, huge fan of lately. It’s not doing anything necessarily reinventing the genre or doing anything particularly special, but it’s just like— I’ve— sometimes I’m in the mood for just some really, really well-made indie plays, you know?\n\n00:44:18\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nLocal Montreal artist talks about local events and also has a really distinct unique sound to that show as well. And across— again, look across the shows on the station— very diverse sounds of the show across the spectrum of radio. A lot of differences.\n\nAnd yet there’s something about, like, the radio voice that we kind of know when we do it. And you know what? What is that? And, I do it too. And I often, sometimes even on the radio— I’ll notice when I go from sort of a hesitant thinking or like, is the microphone working? Is this working? Is this working? And there’s lots going on in my head.\nAnd then suddenly, in a moment when we’re talking about something we’ve just heard, I’ll realize I’m really just like in the zone of thinking about what we heard and what I’m talking about. Even right now— I’m now gesturing with my hands, whereas I wasn’t before. And my voice changes then. And that’s another kind of, I guess, radio voice.\n\n00:45:32\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I actually like the setup better in here than in the studio— the radio studio— because we get to look at each other. We’re side-by-side in the radio studio, and I think that makes a difference.\nBut I want to say— when we first— or when I first heard the Tommy John Show, because we wait outside before we go in— so it’s playing in the larger studio— I was amazed at how he never says “umm,” you know?\nAnd when I listened back to the first few shows we did, I’m like “umming” every 3 seconds. And I was like— how does he do that? You know? How do I not?\nI think I’ve gotten better at it, actually. And not even thinking about it. It’s just sort of gradually becoming a little more fluid— without “ums.” There’s a good one. I’m definitely going to keep that one there.\n\nBut Matteo, who does the show after us—who does kind of a local music show and bands that are in town, who’s in town—his whole approach is more like, “I love this band,” you know? And basically, the entire approach to the show is, “This band I’ve been listening to like, you know, for 30 years.” He’s only like 20 years old. “And I love them, and they’re great, and they’re in town, and they’re playing here. I remember I last saw them last summer here,” or whatever. And it’s all very personal, you know?\n\nAnd so even just the bookends to our own show have very different— like, when Tommy John’s speaking, you have a sense of a hardcore sports audience who knows as many stats as he does, and he can just rattle them off like nonstop. And is a fan of every sport and can talk extensively about every player, every trade, every—everything. He has a very clear sense of who he’s talking to. And so does Matteo. And I think that’s— that we’re still coming into our own. Like we talked about audience before, but I think we do have that. And—and I suppose the way we talk is going to change as we gain a clearer sense of who we’re talking to.\n\n00:47:17\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, but it is about kind of getting comfortable with your sound, and also knowing that, like, your voice is a radio voice, even if it doesn’t sound like other radio voices. I think that was actually Cameron McIntyre, our station director, who said that when we were doing our training—that every voice is a radio voice. And I was like, yes, that’s right.\n00:47:50\tJason Camlot\tWe’re doing a literary radio show, right? Which is probably—I mean, and it’s a poetry radio show. And it’s like often obscure poetic works. We’re doing sound poetry—[Audio transitions to a distorted clip: “your voice, so what is the bone inside of your body… body.”]\nIt’s probably like the least commercial kind of show imaginable, right? You know, we’re not doing a sports show or one on, like, recent music that’s been through town like the shows before and after ours. And it’s been obvious to me that even at a college station, radio is functioning within a very commercial framework—commercially minded. There are ads we have to play.\n\n00:48:46\tAudio Clip, Unknown Speaker\t[Audio cuts to a recording – Unknown source]\nOne of the lions ladies left behind to scratch coloured gods on rocks.\nLate production. We’d have “Freak, in collaboration with TD Bank Group presents…\n\n00:48:54\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nFor the shows that are topical, maybe are supposed to draw in audiences. It’s as though our show is designed to drive audiences away. Almost. No—just kidding! It’s a great show and you should all listen to it. But yeah, I don’t know—what do you think about this element of radio—that it really is sort of functioning within a kind of commercially minded framework?\n\n00:49:21\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, well, it’s interesting too, because the examples both you and I refer to when talking about the show have often been CBC Radio. And so it’s almost like our go-to comparison is public radio, not commercial radio.\nBut I think that what we’ve noticed is—then realizing, “Oh yes, radio is inevitably influenced by the commercial,” and trying to sort that out when thinking about poetry, which is often not thinking about the commercial. And even things like from the station, getting reminders—because we’re in Canada—to play Canadian content to a certain percentage, or a list of top songs for the week.\n\nI know we just got an email saying that our show was part of the days that will be audited next week, so that means that we’ll have to submit a very elaborate playlist where it really identifies which content is Canadian. And often on our show, most of our content is Canadian, but it’s recordings of poets—not necessarily recordings of the latest Canadian singers. So it’s a different kind—it feels like a different kind of Canadian content.\n\nIt’s also made us think a lot about poetry itself—like, say, playing the poetry, talking about the poetry. Is our show talk radio? That category doesn’t quite feel right for our show, but we are talking about the material. Or is our show more like experimental sound-folk something? You get leaning into more of the recordings, and even the record labels that some of the poets are on. Is it some mix? It feels like it doesn’t quite fit in any of those categories.\n\nBut it’s been interesting to try to apply one of those categories onto our show and sort of see: how does that work? In what ways do we kind of exceed those boundaries or just not quite fit? Which is, it’s funny—for, again, college radio, where everyone’s pushing boundaries—but just this show…it’s a mix.\n\n00:51:33\tJason Camlot\tI do feel that within the college radio environment, being as weird and experimental as you like— [Swooshing sound]\nThere have been a couple of times where Cam has come in from his desk into the studio and said like, “Are you still on air? Or is there something going wrong with the signal?” or whatever. But it’s just because we’re playing a sound poet, you know, or an experimental sound piece.\n\n00:51:55\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly at that moment. I’m glad you told that—told that story. Yeah. He’s like, “Just to check—is that…?”\n00:52:01\tJason Camlot\tAnd he wasn’t like, “Turn it off! Go to the regular programming!” He just pokes in and goes, “Is this what’s supposed to be playing?” But it’s like—oh, that’s cool. That’s great. [Trombone plays]\nThere have been more commercially minded moments of our shows—like when we play Tanya Evanson’s new record or Kaie Kellough’s new record, and we want to promote it.\n\n00:52:26\tAudio Recording, Unknown Speaker\t[Audio cuts to a recording – Unknown source]\nIn the future it’s ache. Strive. A natural continuity.\n\n00:52:46\tJason Camlot\tThe way anyone would be promoting a new band’s record, right?\nBut at the same time, I do feel like the stuff we play on our show is kind of in tension with all the other forms of talk that are expected to be heard on the radio. And I find that really exciting and fun, actually—that like, even though it’s all talk, like you were saying—or music, right? Music is the go-to, really—but of all the talk shows, the fact that we’re playing talk shows that doesn’t register as the correct kinds of radio talk seems to me very exciting.\n\nAnd I think that wouldn’t, again, be a feeling I would have if it wasn’t within the radio context. The fact that it’s actually open to anyone hearing it. The fact that people who probably don’t want to be hearing it are hearing it, because it’s on somewhere or whatever—for me, is very exciting. Because it feels like a discursive intervention of some kind.\n\nStill, when you think about it, for all that talk about how fringy our show is, it is still a radio show. And as Hannah McGregor, our co-producer of the SpokenWeb Podcast, pointed out, there are differences in access to being able to produce shows between podcasting and radio. And the bar—even on a college radio station—may be higher than starting your own podcast would be. So I think it’s important. It’s an important point that Hannah raised, and that we’ve been thinking about surrounding the question of access to the medium, and being able to use it to make interventions of the kind that we’ve just been talking about.\n\n00:54:35\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m really glad that Hannah made that point to us too, because I was thinking a lot about why were we so happy and proud of ourselves to be DJs? And I think it also had to do with the way in which we both just really loved radio as a medium. And that’s been the medium that we’ve grown up with, we’ve listened to throughout our lives.\nAnd so the idea that we were going to do something that others who we have admired have also done—at first, I didn’t think about it so much as about access. It was more like, “oh, we’re getting to do that thing that we’ve always wanted to do.” But then to realize, “oh, right, we’re getting to do that because there’s a degree of access that we have”—to be able to say, like, pitch our show to the station and be trained.\n\n00:55:19\tJason Camlot\tYeah, you’re totally right.\nI think one of the reasons I was so excited to be on the air is because I didn’t have access to that medium growing up. And I wanted to, we would maybe watch a show like “WKRP in Cincinnati” and see the inside of a booth.\nBut it was only when I went to CEGEP—which is like after high school—that I got to see inside a radio booth. And even then, as a first-year CEGEP student, I couldn’t get on the roster of DJs at CEGEP, which was only broadcasting within the building. It didn’t even have a band. So yeah, there was a kind of allure due to the barriers that were set up from using that medium.\n\n00:55:54\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd even for me too—especially the aura of the radio archives. I know when I first went to CBC Radio archives to listen to poets that I was researching there—and I got to go—at that time, CBC Radio Archives were in the basement. And like, going downstairs and seeing the sign for “Radio Archives,” I was just enthralled.\nAnd so then to think of bringing that to my experience of being on the radio—and, you know, not everyone’s going to do that. But I think there was something that then— I hadn’t even thought about access because it was just so exciting to enter into that space itself.\n00:56:31\tJason Camlot\tI mean, I think there’s a continuum of access between commercial radio, public radio, and college radio. College and community radio is certainly more accessible and really big. But we had to be somehow within the community—or within the institutional community in this case—to be able to apply to have a show. The application process wasn’t overly onerous, right? But still, not everyone’s in university, not everyone is in an institution that can provide that kind of access. What does all this add up to?\n00:57:10\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, it makes me think of how this show—it’s not just about one show. The show is a body—the show is a body of work. It’s continuing to grow.\n00:57:21\tAudio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording – a collage of audio clips from previous recordings]\n[Overlapping and distorted voices]\nWhich is cool. I don’t know what that was, but I was just listening and looking. Which is the lake of the island, and it’s freezing.\n\n00:57:41\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd right now, we don’t even have a year’s worth, but we’re sort of reflecting on how this show was evolving. Also thinking about maybe things that, you know, we wouldn’t have known—like doing a deep dive into, say, a CD, or actually just kind of stepping back and listening with listeners would be the way to go.\n\nAnd I think that that was something that we only developed while doing the show. And so it makes me think of almost this show as a space to experiment—or almost kind of like a lab, to use a buzzword—but even more than a lab, almost like—like going back to listening practices—like an opportunity to practice, but also like, it is a performance. Listeners are listening, but it’s evolving. It’s like we’re continuing to practice listening with listeners. And there’s not a conclusion. It’s continuing.\n\n00:58:41\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I’ve found it’s served as a kind of public forum for working our way through content that we don’t have time to do otherwise, right? And which allows us to begin to make connections between some of the different recordings we’re making that we maybe would never have thought of as linking up or connecting to each other. So the fact that we have the time to just play these things, listen to them—it’s almost like doing the first readings, you know, of materials that will then allow you to do something maybe a little more specific, a little more expository with afterwards.\nBut this phase of listening, and then of thinking about connections live as they’re happening, is incredibly generative. And I think interesting in its own way to listen to, actually, because you’re sort of hearing those connections be heard as they’re perceived—and hearing the initial reflections on what those connections might mean right when they were perceived.\n\nSo it is—and I like the idea of—you know, so you have a bad show, right? You make a lot of mistakes or something goes wrong. I like falling back on that argument that—I think it was our colleague Elena Razlogova said to you—is that, well, it’s just, it’s a body of work. Right? So it’s sort of like, you know, OK, that was a bad show, but there’ll be another show.\n\n01:00:00\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly. Exactly. Yeah.\nAnd that idea too, of like listening—hearing the listening unfolding live on air. You know, listeners—they—we really—what we’re doing is listening on air, and listeners are hearing that. And I think that going back to that point about it being live on the radio—that I think that is what is most important about actually doing the show live, is then for listeners to be able to listen with us and hear that listening taking place.\n01:00:35\tJason Camlot\tWhat do we usually say at the end of our show? Like, how do we—how do we sign off, so to speak?\n01:00:40\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, sometimes you’re showing—we announce what’s going to play next and then do an outro. I’ll do it, yeah.\n01:00:50\tJason Camlot\tSorry—we list 10 songs and then play 30 seconds of one of them. Yeah. But apart from that, you know, what do we say? I mean, you’re so good at bringing us into the show. Like, can you do the opening again? Let’s just hear it.\n01:01:01\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, I can do what I did for one of the outros. But I have an idea of how to end this. So let’s see how this goes.\nYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. This episode has been about Sonic Lit, a spoken word radio show. My name is Katherine McLeod and I’m here with—\n\n01:01:21\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\n01:01:23\tKatherine McLeod\tThanks for listening. [Laughter]\nI couldn’t—I got distracted by your radio voice. [Laughter] Well, that’s good.\n\n01:01:33\tJason Camlot\tThis has been a podcast, not a radio show—even though it really sounded like a radio show.\n01:01:41\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s right. So, we could say “Tune in next week,” but in fact, stay tuned on the podcast feed for future episodes of the SpokenWeb Podcast.\nAnd if you’re interested in checking out Sonic Lit, the SpokenWeb radio show, head to cjsf.com. Or if you’re in Montreal, tune in Mondays at 2:00 on 1690 AM. Or as Jason likes to say—\n01:02:10\tJason Camlot\tYour AM dial, 2:00 PM Mondays.\n[Audio: Thanks for tuning in—and keep it locked to 1690 AM.]\n[Soft instrumental music plays and fades]\n\n01:02:31\tHannah McGregor\t[SpokenWeb theme song begins]\nYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n01:02:47\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Jason Camlot and our very own Katherine McLeod.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n\n01:03:05\tHannah McGregor\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\nIf you love us, let us know—rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media.Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n\nUntil next episode, thanks for listening."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9682","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.1, Audio of the Month – Daryl Hine’s Point Grey, 20 January 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-daryl-hines-point-grey/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/a736b976-2394-4326-8ba6-8250b6767046/minisode-ep1-edit-v2_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"minisode-ep1-edit-v2_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:06:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"6,387,296 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Minisode ep1_Edit V2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-daryl-hines-point-grey/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-01-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549802188800,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Welcome to our first SpokenWeb minisode. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) – join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of Month mini series. This month Katherine shares a recording of Canadian poet Daryl Hine reading “Point Grey” (1967).\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to our first SpokenWeb minisode. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s inaugural Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(00:57)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:03\n)\tKatherine McLeod\tAt the end of 2019, I was listening back through the December readings in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and I started exploring the reading by Daryl Hine. At first, I considered selecting his reading of the final poem “The Trout,” but then I noticed something else: a note for one timestamp indicating that Hine had introduced and read quote, “an unknown poem.” End quote. As I listened to his introduction to that poem, I realized that he was preparing the audience for the now-famous poem “Point Grey,” which at the time of this reading was not yet published. In fact, the introducer of Hine at the start of the reading had mentioned that Minutes, the collection that contained “Point Grey,” would be published in the new year, 1968. That voice of the introducer was listed as unknown, too, but it sounded a great deal like Margaret Atwood, possibly meaning that this was the first time that Atwood heard “Point Grey,” a point to expand upon elsewhere and perhaps even to confirm through an Audio of the Week in the new year.\n(02:15)\tKatherine McLeod\tReturning back to the audio clip of Hine’s poem, the unpublished state of “Point Grey” is audible through the sounds of the pages turning, suggesting that Hine read from sheets of paper, not from a book and especially in his decision to restart and read a different version. He introduced the poem by describing its view from the University of British Columbia or Point Grey clarifying that, quote, “I don’t mean the university by any of the architectural things I mention in this poem, but I’m talking about the beach, a very beautiful, barren Pacific beach that lies below Point Grey.” End quote. Many years ago, I heard this poem read in a classroom at UBC, overlooking the same view where, quote, “…rain makes spectres of the mountains.” End quote. Here was “Point Grey, on this recording, as I listened from Montreal where this poem was read in 1967, soon to be published in 1968 and anthologized in poetry collections for years to come.\n(03:27)\tAudio Recording\t[Coughs] [Audio, Daryl Hine] Well, I also—[Shuffling Papers] this year or was it last?—returned to my place of origin, British Columbia [Long Pause, Audio Cuts Slightly] –Grey, which will be familiar to some of you as the site of the University of British Columbia. I don’t mean the university by any of the architectural things I mention in this poem. But I’m talking about the beach, a very beautiful, barren Pacific beach that lies below Point Grey.\n(04:10)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daryl Hine Begins To Recite “Point Grey”] Brought up as I was to judge the weather / Whether it was fair or overcast… [Stops Reciting] Well [Crumples Paper] I’ll read another version, I think. Excuse me. [Begins To Recite A Different Version of “Point Grey”] Brought up as I was to ask of the weather / Whether it is fair or overcast, / Here, at least, it is a pretty morning, / The first fine day as I am told in months. / I took a path that led down to the beach, / Reflecting as I went on landscape, sex, and weather. / I met a welcome wonderful enough / To exorcise the educated ghost / Within me. No, this country is not haunted, / Only the rain makes spectres of the mountains. / There they are, and there somehow is the problem / Not exactly of freedom or of generation, / But just of living and the pain it causes. / Sometimes I think the air we breathe is mortal / And dies, trapped, in our unfeeling lungs. / Not too distant the mountains in the morning / Dropped their dim approval on the gesture / With which enthralled I greeted all this grandeur. / Beside the path, half buried in the bracken, / Stood a long-abandoned concrete bunker, / A little temple of lust, its rough walls covered / With religious frieze and votary inscription. / Personally I know no one who doesn’t suffer / Some sore of guilt, and mostly bedsores, too, / Those that come from scratching where it itches / And that dangerous sympathy called prurience. / But all about release and absolution / Lie in the waves that lap the dirty shingle / And the mountains that rise at hand above the rain. / Though I had forgotten that it could be so simple, / A beauty of sorts is nearly always within reach. [Shuffling Papers]\n(\n06:12)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(06:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tHead to spokenweb.ca to find the entire recording where this selection is from. I’m Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into SpokenWeb’s audio collections."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9660","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.7, Moving, 19 April 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/191afc43-7900-41f2-b82e-38b41a4e5eba/audio/a4fd83fa-8a12-4186-b289-0d1e5be20e02/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2-shortcuts7-moving.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:13:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,786,339 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2-shortcuts7-moving\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-04-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018. \\n\\nMcGregor, Hannah. “The Voice is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/. \\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\n—. “Poetry on TV: Unarchiving Phyllis Webb’s CBC-TV Program Extension (1967).” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 72-91.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965. \\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549802188801,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, it is April – the month of poetry. The audio we will be listening to is a poem by Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. In fact, it is a series of poems from Naked Poems, poems that open up space and that leave room for the listener to listen – to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. How is a poem held in the space in which it is spoken, and what happens to desire in this speaking? How are they held in the archives?\n\n\n00:00      Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:10\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, a monthly minisode in which we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors Cutting] from the SpokenWeb archives. Our last minisode ended up being the most interactive so far. It was a collaborative listening that ended with a conversation, trying to figure out what was happening in a confusing moment in archival listening. It was one of those moments that you wish you could go back and talk about. That’s what we did, and we’ll be talking about more of those moments in future ShortCuts.\n \n\n01:46\tKatherine McLeod::\tWhat kinds of moments might we be revisiting? One of SpokenWeb’s audio collections held by Simon Fraser University is called the Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest collection. It’s a series of recordings of a radio program called radiofreerainforest that produced by Gilbert in the 1980s. Coming up in future minsodes we’ll dive into that audio collection, especially to talk about some of the spaces where the recordings take place. One reading happens on a bus, yes, it was recorded on a bus travelling through Vancouver’s downtown streets. Another recording has Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle reading and talking together on a panel, but where did the panel take place? And what was it like to hear this panel on the radio?\n \n\n02:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ll try to figure all of this out. Plus, we’ve been diving into audio collections from the past, but coming up we’ll be listening to recordings of literary events that took place much ore recently. That’s what we’ll be listening to next month. Subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast if you haven’t already to stay tuned for that, along with, of course, the full episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast on the first Monday of each month. This month, it is April, the month of poetry. The audio that we will be listening to in this ShortCuts is a poem by Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. It is in fact a series of poems from Naked Poems, poems that open up space, that leave room for the listener to listen – to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. The space is audible in her reading of the poems and it is visible on the page, as Webb comments on when she introduces Naked Poems to her Montreal audience in 1966…\n \n\n03:30\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tI want to move on now to my latest book, which is called Naked Poems, in which one of your local critics – or at least you vote for the Montreal Star at this particular point – exclaimed of the price – because there are so few words in the book [Audience Laughter]. It’s $2.25. [Audience Laughter]. These poems are very small and therefore very expensive [Audience Laughter] and and came at a bitter price. I may say, to me. They came quite as a surprise. I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them – the first 14 or so. I thought, my goodness, what are these little things doing here? And I couldn’t quite take them seriously. And then I began to see the order that really was intrinsic, in them. And realized that here was something – almost a new form for me to work on. And it’s very bare, naked, undecorated. And I wanted to get rid of all my affectations. And so I decided to write oh a couple of hundred of them. And I wrote about a hundred and then got hung up on a technical problem and finally reduced them to, I don’t know, 40 or so that are in this book. So this is a distillation let’s say. I’m going to read the first14, which comprise the total poem– in a sense, the whole book is a poem. And then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice and your patience will hold out.\n \n\n05:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn that clip, we hear that Naked Poems has recently been published around the time of that reading. It’s an example of hearing time in the archives, coming back to a theme running through this season. As for how we can hear in this minisode and in the archive of podcasts it is creating, we can think this month of April and what this time brings to our listening to Webb’s poem and to Webb herself. April is the month of Webb’s birthday, and I hope that the sounds of this minisode travels through the airwaves to her on Saltspring Island in British Columbia. I was able to meet with her there a couple years ago while working on articles about her poetry and she graciously made time for a visit. I had hoped to meet again but the sound of this minisode may make it there first before I can travel from Montreal to BC. And so, it is with this spirit of sending the sound across from Montreal to Saltspring Island that I cut the audio of this ShortCuts and make it into a gift, crafted with deep respect and gratitude for your art, Phyllis Webb.\n \n\n06:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s now hear Webb read from Naked Poems. The reading was recorded in 1966 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia. At that reading, the second reader was Gwendolyn MacEwen. Imagine hearing Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn MacEwen reading in person on the same night. MacEwen would be sitting in the audience listening to Webb read. Here is Webb reading “Suite I” and “Suite II” from Naked Poems…\n \n\n07:26\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\t“Suite 1” Moving to establish distance between our houses. It seems I welcome you in. Your mouth blesses me all over. There is room. And here. And here. And here. And over. And over. Your. Mouth. Tonight, quietness in me and the room. I am enclosed by a thought and some walls. The bruise. Again, you have left your mark. All we have. Skin shuttered secretly. Flies. Tonight in this room, two flies on the ceiling are making love quietly or so it seems down here. [Audience Laughter]. Your blouse. I people this room with things, a chair, a lamp, a fly. Two books by Mary Ann Moore. I have thrown my gloves on the floor. Was it only last night? You took with so much gentleness, my dark. Sweet tooth. While you were away, I held you like this in my mind. It is a good mind that can embody perfection with exactitude.\n \n\n09:36\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tThe sun comes through plum curtains. I said, the sun is gold in your eyes. It isn’t the sun. You said. On the floor, your blouse. The plum light falls more golden, going down. Tonight, quietness in the room. We knew. Then you must go. I sat cross-legged on the bed. There is no room for self pity, I said. I lied. In the gold darkening light you dressed. I hid my face in my hair. The room that held you is still here. You brought me clarity. Gift after gift I wear. Poems naked. In the sunlight. On the floor.\n \n\n10:59\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sunbeam shining through the air, we see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room, we feel the air thick with eros, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire, to be contained within the archives of this reading series –\n \n\n11:32\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nWhile you were away. I held you like this in my mind.\n11:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe hear this holding. The quietness of each page …\n \n\n11:43\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tQuietness. In the room. We knew…\n \n\n11:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe hear the turning of the page. The room–\n \n\n11:51\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nThe room that held you. Is still here…\n11:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe are listening to desire in the making, every time we press play on this recording, as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem, the room of the reading, the voice moving…\n \n\n12:09\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nYou brought me clarity. Gift after gift, I wear. Poems naked, in the sunlight, on the floor.\n12:26\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe room that held you is still here.\n \n\n12:29\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n12:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tMy name is Katherine McLeod, and this ShortCuts minisode was produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland. It was recorded in the city of Montreal, or what is known as Tio’tia:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about The SpokenWeb Podcast and tune in next month for another deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9661","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.8, Contrapuntal Poetics, 17 May 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/contrapuntal-poetics/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/478fa03a-47f5-46f5-84ee-548433c59706/audio/22aa5df2-7658-4204-997b-9a175efbae6e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e8-shortcuts.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:12:50\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,380,831 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e8-shortcuts\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/contrapuntal-poetics/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-05-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nAudio clipped from “The Words and Music Show” (29 March 2020), https://www.facebook.com/1541307492796466/videos/891396077972589.\\n\\nAudio clipped from “ShortCuts 1.3 Where does the reading begin?” (Kaie Kellough reading at “The Words and Music Show,” 16 Nov 2016),  https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nGibson, Kenneth. “Jessica Moss ponders the mysteries of the universe.” The Concordian. 22 January 2019,  http://theconcordian.com/2019/01/jessica-moss-ponders-the-mysteries-of-the-universe/.\\n\\nMoss, Jessica. Entanglement. https://jessicamoss.bandcamp.com/album/entanglement.\\n\\nPerry Cox, Alexei. Finding Places to Make Places. Vallum, 2019. \\n\\n—– Revolution / Re: Evolution. Gap Riot, 2021.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549803237376,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this ShortCuts minisode, listen to the contrapuntal poetics of poet Alexei Perry Cox. In a recording made at home, Alexei reads and improvises in response to a second voice in the room – the voice of her daughter Isla. Their interaction itself could be heard as a poem. Meanwhile, sounds of place enter and exit the room of the recording, with what sounds like cars passing by outside and even the “Zoom room” becoming audible at times. The audio you hear in this ShortCuts was recorded, over Zoom, as part of the first online version of The Words and Music Show on March 29, 2020. What are you listening to when you listen to an online reading? From where do you listen? \n\n\n00:00\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Each month, we listened closely and carefully to a shortcut or cuts from SpokenWeb‘s audio collections. The recent ShortCuts have been from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but last season we ventured into a more recent collection in episode three, when we heard a truly innovative way of starting a reading.\n \n\n01:42\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough, Words and Music Show:\tI want to forget/ 1980s /high school fever / forget articles in the Herald/ in the moment of heavy evangelical / black-haired teens from reserves / who drank themselves to death in macho contests/activity and much extreme conservativism/ trying to prove to themselves that they exist/ as night drifts into next days headlines / some of the challenges that arise growing up and trying to live and become oneself in a climate like that / I want to forget my stupid conviction that a boy had to be distilled into a man/ that the Caribean bloodline had to be spiked with rum / which seems to be a climate that is re-emerging/ that amber alcohol…\n \n\n02:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal. And the audio collection for Words and Music is where we’re headed to you for this minisode. But we’re not going to be listening to audio that was recorded at Casa de Popolo where so much of the Words and Music show has been recorded live over these past 20 years. No, we’ll be listening to the Words and Music show recorded from home — the first one to be online and hosted on Zoom. On March 29th, 2020, the Words and Music Show took to the Zoom stage. Co-hosted by Ian Ferrier and Jason Camlot. That first online show was meant to test if it worked. And it did.\n \n\n02:58\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\tI wonder how many people can hold.\n \n\n03:01\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\t300 people.\n \n\n03:02\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nOh wow. Okay.\n \n\n03:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nI think we’ll be okay.\n \n\n03:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tSince then, the Words and Music Show has been online usually every third Sunday of the month. By now, most of us are used to attending Zoom events, or at least whereas used to it as we’ll get — or want to get. But back in March 2020, it was incredibly new. The reason why among the many recordings that are now part of the archive of pandemic poetry readings I’m selecting this one, is because it demonstrates the blurring of the public and the private through sound. In these archival recordings we listen on ShortCuts, we often ask: what are we listening to? And what are the sounds around the poem that tell us about the space, the sociality of the room, and how the sound was recorded? These sounds around the poem give context. They become part of the relationality of the listening. Sound doesn’t exist on its own, but in relation. What is our relation to this sound now? What does it feel like to listen to it? With that in mind, let’s listen to the ShortCut for this month: A reading by poet Alexei Perry Cox on March 29th, 2020.\n \n\n04:21\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\tAnd the next thing we have is a video which was created under extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18 month old child on her bed. And it’s by the poet, Alexei Perry Cox. So I’m going to bring that up now and we can take a listen. Yeah, here she comes.\n \n\n04:46\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \tThe unequivocal [french word], according to the [inaudible], comes in the chorus that has a lullaby. It makes use of emphasis on the incantatory present participle and is a consultation. Tropical, the island breathes, and this was where I long to be. Time is portrayed as malleable and is a journey. The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time. We are taken there to this Isla Bonita, and there is wherever we are. In a vice grip with my lover in exile. As time went by, my lover was gradually overtaken by an urgent desire whose futility exceeded all measures, but the circumference of the universe itself. I desire to grasp the secret of the present, to penetrate the eternal unity of life and see a system’s undulating veil. In the universe of our civil war, systems have the insubstantialabily of hummingbirds song and the iridescence of its plumage. While their manifestations were immutable. Told that my lover, my love for my lover, told that my love for my lover was a vice. That loving another woman wasn’t very womanly of me [Baby Speaking] that our civil war as being against ourselves. Wasn’t the same as their civil war as being against us. [Baby: Coos] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality perfect in congress would get through to human kind. In exile, in Paris, in Sausalito. I want you to touch me here and here. I want it to be worn for me, for you. I want to love systems that are women so that you can enter them by being untrue.\n \n\n07:10\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] We’re listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at the Words and Music show online on March 29th, 2020. She’s reading from “Finding places to make places” and she’s accompanied by the voice of Isla her then 18 month old daughter –\n \n\n07:35\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\n[Baby: Coos] La revolution ….\n \n\n07:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat are we listening to in this clip?\n \n\n07:41\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\n[Baby: Cries] \n \n\n07:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] The poem? The interaction between Alexei and her daughter that becomes a duet? The improvisation, or to the quality of the sound, the audibility of the Zoom room? –\n \n\n07:57\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\nThe entropy in an open system –\n \n\n07:57\tKatherine McLeod:\t– [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] When listening to a recording of Phyllis Web reading from Naked Poems on a previous ShortCuts, I suggested considering how desire is held by the archives and how the poem creates a space for the listener. Similarly, how does this recording hold the poem’s desire and how does the poem make space inhabit space? From where are we listening?\n \n\n08:25\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \tTo a certain logic for disappearing. You cannot live the same life as you imagine. [Aside: Alexei laughs at baby] You must live a smaller life. A more compact life. [Aside: Yeah? Laughs] [Baby: Coos] The life is too capacious. You will lose your balance. Driving home, I think this. [Baby: Coos with increasing volume] A door opens on an eye, an eye opens on a line. A line of eyes, looking into a coffin, carrying the body. Body to the river and into a vision. You know your conscience cannot forgive what left you long ago washed away by summer floods like a body loosened from a grip into something death made transformative.\n \n\n09:21\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] As I listened to this back in March, 2020, I was right in the middle of making an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast with Jason Camlot. We were making an episode called “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence”, which you can have a listen to if you feel like revisiting that time of March 2020 sonically. When I heard Alexei read at the Words and Music show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices, what improvisation at a poetry reading. Plus it felt like her reading was enacting exactly what the podcast was trying to say: that we are missing the noise around the signal. We still miss it now. We miss the buzz in the room, the social sounds around the signal, the voice of the speaker. I know I can’t wait until I can stand in a crowded room and listen to Alexei read on stage at a microphone again. By the way, [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]in January 2019, I was at an album launch for the Montreal musician, Jessica Moss and Alexei read poetry as the opening act. She read with her newborn strapped to her chest.\n \n\n10:38\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Album launch, 2019:\n \n\n[Baby: Cries] Even as a new you moves about the womb –\n \n\n10:41\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis little voice that we’re hearing in this recording had already been with her mother on stage for a poetry reading. [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]\n \n\n10:48\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox,___, 2019:\n \n\n– the world is smaller than the center of your eye. But when I –\n \n\n10:51\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] Going back to readings onstage doesn’t mean that we will not perform with our full selves, with the public and the private self coexisting. Even if the audience doesn’t always see it or hear it that way. With that, let’s return to Alexei and Isla who inhabit a poem with “Womb or the World”.\n \n\n11:15\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \t[Baby: crying and cooing] A book without room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. The present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from out of time, brimming with life. Fabulous a wing, unfolding in a poultry field appearance while night finds no constellation in night but in it’s eclipse. Like this. [Aside: Kisses baby]. [Baby: Coos].\n \n\n11:54\tTheme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n11:54\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nAnd there’s bye-bye to Alexei, who was being seriously upstaged there.\n \n\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and the SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat continues and fades]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9662","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.9, Situating Sound, 21 June 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/93f41bc8-fa9e-4603-96f3-5d3b5b1679ca/audio/cf8f93b4-3c4a-42b3-91f3-f2b8c931f7b8/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-2-9-situating-sound.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:15:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"14,480,658 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-2-9-situating-sound\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-06-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nDionne Brand, recording played on radiofreerainforest, 7 August 1988, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\n“#101 Renee Rodin.” BC Booklook, 28 January 2016,  https://bcbooklook.com/101-renee-rodin/.\\n\\n“Desire Lines: Mapping the metadata of Toronto arts publishing.” Art Gallery of York University, https://agyu.art/project/desire-lines/.\\n\\n“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.\\n\\nKinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.\\n\\nOur Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections,  https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549804285952,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["On this ShortCuts, we dive into a new audio collection: Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection, accessible through SFU Library’s Digitized Collections. We’ll hear a recording of Dionne Brand reading in Vancouver with Lee Maracle of the Stó:lō nation. The recording of this reading was then played on the local radio program radiofreerainforest on August 7, 1988. What would it have been like to listen to this reading live in 1988? On the radio? And what is it like to hear it out of context in the archives now? This ShortCuts minisode is about the archival research process. ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod takes us on a brief journey into the research behind an archived tape in SpokenWeb’s collection, all started by and ending with a reading of poetry by Dionne Brand.  \n“a motion heard on my inner ear” – Dionne Brand, Primitive Offensive (1982)\n\n\n00:02\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Jazzy Techno] Listeners, we want to hear from you. What short clip of literary sound would you propose we listened to in an episode of ShortCuts? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project pitch an episode to ShortCuts Season Three. You can start with a blog post on SpokenWeb blog, or go straight for pitching us an episode. If you’re a fan of the show, please suggest an idea by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Jazzy Techno]\n \n\n00:43\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Theme Music]  Welcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights at every second week, following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode, join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? Shortcuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spoken web.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Theme Music] [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: [Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n \n\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\t[End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Welcome to ShortCuts. On ShortCuts we listen closely and carefully to a short cut [Audio Effect: Scissor Snip] from the archives. On this ShortCuts, we dive into a new audio collection, [Underlaid Sound: radiofreerainforest clip with various voices overlapping] radiofreerainforest. radiofreerainforest was a program that aired on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio in the 1980s into the 1990s.\n \n\n02:16\tAudio Recording, radiofreerainforest clip:\t[Echo Effect] [Various Voices] radiofreerainforest.\n \n\n02:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tRecordings that were played on that program were kept by its producer and host Gerry Gilbert. And they’re now one of SFU’s many audio collections currently being processed by SpokenWeb researchers. Something I’ve been thinking about while preparing this ShortCuts, is what kind of a framework does audio clip out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms, gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound. I could select a clip and just simply play it. But I feel like that doesn’t give enough context, but I also don’t want to give too much context. My hope is that I can guide you into the listening and then you can take it from there. Where I’m leading you to is a reading by Dionne Brand in 1988. The recording of the reading was broadcast on the radio, on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988. The tapes of this recording and yes, tapes in the plural – more on that in a moment –indicate that it was Dionne Brand reading with Lee Maracle. It took place in Vancouver and as to where, that required a little searching. One tape says R2B2 Books. And I figured out that it was a bookstore on fourth avenue that had once been the location of Octopus Books and later became Black Sheep Books before closing in the early 2000s. I remember going into Black Sheep Books when I lived in Vancouver and I didn’t realize that it had such a history of holding so many readings as R2B2 Books. What else do we know about the recording? Well, it was a long one. It spans two cassettes, not because it was recorded on those two tapes, but because it was transferred onto them. What I’m getting at here is this: imagine pressing play on a tape labeled “radiofreerainforest, 3rd and 28th of July and 7th August, 1988.” The Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle reading starts part way through one side and then on a completely different tape labeled “radiofreerainforest 7th, 25th, August, 1988 and 30th, October, 1988”.\n04:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tThere is the rest of the recording. On that second tape, the Brand reading starts right in the middle when you press play. And that’s where I found myself in it’s sound without knowing the context in which she was speaking from or where that reading was taking place. It was after finding the other tape that I could piece together, that it was on August 6th, 1988, and then aired on August 7th, 1988. And that it was at R2B2 Bookstore. It was in the middle of this that I consulted SpokenWeb’s metadata system to see a photograph of the tape itself. And that’s how I found the date of the reading. But before that, I was going by the fact that Brand mentions an event in solidarity with South African women against apartheid, that would have happened the next day, August 7th. From doing a bit of searching in print archives, I found out from the feminist newspaper Kinesis that as part of the March, the next day Maracle had given a speech in solidarity against apartheid speaking as an Indigenous woman of the Stó:lō nation.\n05:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd that she had also written about this solidarity in a 1988 issue of the Black women’s newspaper Our Lives that Brand had helped to edit. These pieces of context are only the beginning of unpacking the significance of these two women reading together. And unraveling this history all started by wanting to know more about one archival recording. So as we listen to this reading, what would it be like to be there in that room with Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle in 1988? Now in June, 2021, what does it feel like when you hear this recording wherever you might be listening from? How do we understand this recording in relation to the archive that holds it? I am recording this a week after Brand read from The Blue Clerk at an annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists. How does Brand hear time? When she introduces what she reads from Primitive Offensive in the recording we’re about to hear she says that the poetry is made out of the pieces of history, a history that as she says, if you are Black in the Americas, you have to dig for it. How does that resonate with the lines where she chooses to end?\n \n\n06:56\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tI won’t take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [Aside to audience] Okay, that’s it. [Audience applause].\n \n\n07:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs we could hear in that recording, there are noises in the background. We’ll be hearing what sound like cars passing outside, we’ll hear some voices and might wonder if those are people talking outside the bookstore window, or perhaps this recording has been recorded over another one and we’re actually hearing the voices of another time bleeding through the tape. Here is Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive in a recording that was broadcast on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988, and now that recording is held by and shapes an archive.\n \n\n07:58\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t[Static and various background noises throughout] I’m going to read a poem for my grandmother, a poem for my ancestors, really. I wrote this book Primitive Offensive because, for whatever history has left you, if you were Black in the Americas, you have to dig and dig and dig and memorize and memorize and learn and learn it and redo it and recover it and re– you know, because it isn’t anywhere else. And so this was my history book. Sometimes you arrive and find what seems to be nothing, and you have to dig for it. And this is a call to my ancestors about this history. And I looked for my ancestors and I found what there was. And so – and sometimes you find nothing and you make it anyway. [Laughs] You know, you find a piece of cloth, a bit of this, whatever, but you make it humour. So –[Start of reading]  Ancestor dirt/ ancestor snake/ ancestor lice / ancestor whip/ ancestor fish/ ancestor slime/ ancestor sea/ ancestor stick/ ancestor iron/ ancestor bush/ ancestor ship/ ancestor\n09:12\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\told woman, old bead/ let me feel your skin, old muscle, old stick/ where are my bells?/ my rattles/ my condiments, my things to fill houses and minutes/ The fat is starting, where are my things?/ My mixtures, my bones, my decorations/ old bread, old tamarind switch./ Will you bathe me in oils?/ Will you tie me in white cloth?/ Call me by my praise name/ Sing me Oshun song./ against this clamour [Background noise of voices inaudible] / Ancestor old woman/ Send my things after me./ One moment, old lady more questions./ What happened to the ship in your leap? The boatswain, did he scan the passage’s terrible wet face/ The navigator, did he blink?/ Or steer that ship through your screaming night?/ The captain did he lash two slaves to the rigging, for example?/ Lady! My things/ Water leaden, my maps, my compass/ After all, what is the political position of stars?\n10:29\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tDrop your crusted cough, where you want./ My hands make precious things out of phlegm./ Ancestor wood/ Ancestor dog/ Ancestor [tape recording skips] Old man, dry stick, mustache, skin, and bone./ Why didn’t you remember? /Why didn’t you remember the name of our tribe?/Why didn’t you tell me before you died?/ Old horse, you made the white man ride you/ You shot off your leg for him./ Old man, the name of our tribe is all I wanted./ Instead, you went to the swamps and bush and rice paddies for the trading company and they buried you in water/ Crocodile, tears. /It would have been better to remember the name of our tribe./ Now, mosquitoes dance a ballet over your grave and the old woman buried with you wants to leave./ One thing for sure, dismembered woman, when you decide you are alone/ When you decide you are alone, /when you dance, it’s your own broken face.\n11:24\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tWhen you eat your own plate of stones/ For damn sure you are alone./ Where do you think you are going dismembered woman?/ Limbs chopped off at the ankles./ When you decide, believe me, you are alone./ Sleep, sleep, tangential phase, sleep,/ Sleeping, or waking/ Understand you are alone./ Diamonds pour from your vagina,/ and your breasts drip healing copper/ But listen, women, dismembered continent/ You are alone./See crying fool,/ You want to talk in gold/ You will cry in iron./ You want to dig up stones./ You will bury flesh./ You think you don’t need oils and amulets compelling powder and rely on smoke./ You want to throw people in cesspits./ Understand dismembered one, ululant /You are alone./ When waterfalls work, land surfaces./ I was sent to this cave./ I went out one day like a fool to find this cave, to find clay, to dig up metals to decorate my bare and painful breasts./ Water and clay for a poultice for this gash to find a map an imprint of me anywhere would have kept me calm./ Anywhere with description./\n12:30\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tInstead, I found a piece of this/ A tooth, a bit of food hung on. /A metatarsal, which resembled mine./ Something else like a note. Musical. /ting ting, but of so little pitch so little lasting perhaps it was my voice./ And this too, a suggestion and insinuation so slight, it may be untrue./ Something moving over the brow as with eyes close to black/ a sensate pull/ Phantom! Knocks the forehead back in the middle of a dance. /No, I can’t say dance. It exaggerates./ Phantom. A bit of image./ A motion close to sound, a sound imaged on the retina resembling sound/ A sound seen out of the corner of my eye./ Emotion heard on my inner ear./ I poured over these like a paleontologist./ I dusted them off like an archeologist/ A swatch of cloth./ Skin, atlas, coarse utility, but enough./ Still only a bit of paint, of dye on the stone./ I can not say crude, but a crude thing./ A hair, a marking. That a fingernail to rock an ancient wounded scratch./ I handle these like a papyrologist contours/ A desert sprung here./ Migrations, suggestions, lies./ Phantom. A table and jotting up artful covert mud./ I noted these like a geopolitical scientist./ I will take any evidence of me even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression.\n14:06\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\n \n\nOk. That’s it. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was the Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive. The recording was played on Vancouver’s co-op radio on August 7th, 1988 and the recording is held by the archives of radiofree rainforest. Now part of SFU library’s digital collections.\n \n\n \n\n14:32\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: Theme Music]] ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this mini-series and to learn more about SpokenWeb and the SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. End Music: Theme Music] [Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: [Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9663","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.10, Alone Together, 19 June 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/alone-together/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/12152e0c-52d7-49a7-9eea-0dccee09b096/audio/ff0bcf56-e9fc-44bf-aa09-abfd557fce3f/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-2-10-alone-together.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:19:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,903,084 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-2-10-alone-together\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/alone-together/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-07-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nAli Barillaro’s recording of reading of her blog post, “Tanya Davis performing ‘How to Be Alone’” on SPOKENWEBLOG, 6 August, 2020. \\n\\nTanya Davis performing “How to Be Alone,” recorded at The Words & Music Show at Casa del Popolo, Montreal on 12 December 2012. Listen to the entire audio here: https://spokenweb.ca/tanya-davis-performing-how-to-be-alone/.\\n\\nExcerpt of Cover of “Digging my own grave” by Thrice performed by Ali Barillaro and Vincent Pigeon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y6H9QuL6q8\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nWatch Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman’s 2010 film of the poem “How to Be Alone”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs\\n\\nWatch the 2020 film made by Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman in which they revisit the poem as “How to Be at Home”: https://www.nfb.ca/film/how-to-be-at-home\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549805334528,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["For our last minisode of season two, ShortCuts dives into the archives of The Words & Music Show, a monthly series of poetry, spoken word, music, and dance performances that has been happening in Montreal for over twenty years. Last year, SpokenWeb RA Ali Barillaro was digitizing that collection when she heard a recording that caught her attention. It was a recording of Tanya Davis performing “How to Be Alone.” As Ali listened, she felt a dissonance between Davis’s version of aloneness as freedom and the imposed and necessary aloneness of the pandemic. Along with being an academic, Ali is a singer – and this ShortCuts takes us into Ali’s story of navigating her artistic practice through the pandemic. We embark on this sonic journey by starting with one recording – the recording of Davis – which shows what you can make when you pause to notice what catches your attention.\n\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Jazzy Techno] Listeners, we want to hear from you. What short clip of literary sound would you propose we listen to in an episode of ShortCuts? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, pitch an episode to ShortCuts season three. You can start with a blog post on SPOKENWEBLOG, or go straight for pitching us an episode. If you’re a fan of the show, please suggest an idea by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Jazzy Techno]\n00:43\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Welcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights, that’s every second week, following the monthly [[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb Podcast episode, join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts miniseries. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts, on SPOKENWEBLOG. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine MacLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:45\tKatherine McLeod:\t[End Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] Welcome to ShortCuts where we listen closely and carefully to a short cut [Sound Effect: Scissor Snip] from the audio collections of SpokenWeb. This is the last episode of our second season. It’s a chance to think back to our sonic journeys into the archives and the questions that have emerged from them. How does archival listening listen to liveness and sociality? How do we hear time? How do we hear the marking of time in a recording? How can a podcast episode hold sound with care? This season of ShortCuts was a practice in feminist listening with recordings of poets Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Allison, Phyllis Webb, Alexei Perry, Cox, Dionne Brand, and now in this final ShortCuts for season two, Tanya Davis. We’ll start with the clip of Davis from the archives. Usually on ShortCuts, we build towards hearing the clip. But this time we’ll be starting with it because this ShortCuts is as much about the clip as it is about the conversation afterwards, with a special guest. Let’s dive in. Here is spoken word and musician, Tanya Davis, performing “How To Be Alone” at the Words & Music Show in Montreal. It was performed on the stage of Casa del Popolo on December 16th, 2012.\n03:14\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tIf you are at first lonely, be patient./ If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were you weren’t okay with it, just wait./ You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it./ Start with the acceptable places./ The bathroom, the coffee, shop the library, /where you can stall and read the paper where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there/ where you can browse the stacks and smell the books/ you’re not supposed to talk much anyways, so it’s safe there./ There’s also the gym./ If you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you could put headphones in./ And there’s public transportation because we all gotta go places/ and there’s prayer and meditation./ No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath, seeking peace and salvation./ Start simple./ Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.\n04:06\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tThe lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow downers/ employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they like you will be alone./ Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone./ When you were comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner./ A restaurant with linen and silverware./ You’re no less intriguing a person if you’re eating solo dessert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger./ In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were./ Go to the movies, where does dark and soothing,/ alone in your seat to midst of fleeting community./ And then take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you./ Stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you.\n04:56\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tDance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not./ And if they are assume it is with best and human intentions,/ the way bodies move genuinely to beats is after all gorgeous and affecting/ Dance until you’re sweating and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things/ Down your back like a brook of blessings./ Go to the woods alone./ Trees and squirrels will watch for you./ Roam an unfamiliar city,/ there are always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting./ Give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute./ And those conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches may have never happened had you not been there by yourself./ Society is afraid of alone though./ Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements./ Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them./ But alone is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it/ You could stand…\n \n\n05:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat archival audio was selected by SpokenWeb researcher, Ali Barillaro. Ali selected it for a ShortCuts blog post, or what was then called Audio of the Week. Ali is a SpokenWeb researcher who recently completed her MA at Concordia. You may have heard her present her research on audience applause in archival collections, and you very likely have heard her voice. She sings the vocals [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] in the SpokenWeb Podcast theme song. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] And so, it is very fitting that my conversation with her here veers into talking about singing and performing and the challenges of doing that through times in which our access to spaces that might otherwise have been used for artistic practices have changed. I invited her to revisit what she had said about Tanya Davis’ recording.\n \n\n06:51\tAli Barillaro:\tI originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How To Be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain about life in the midst of a pandemic.\n07:00\tAli Barillaro:\tI’m someone who under normal circumstances would gladly endorse and espouse Davis’s hopeful, poetic guide to finding freedom in solitude and learning to be comfortable inside your own head. But what struck me about this performance was that it made me realize just how far removed I now felt from Davis’s concept of being alone. The public locations listed as ideal spots to practice being by yourself, the coffee shops, libraries, movie theaters, and even the bus and Metro were no longer available to me. The version of alone evoked in the poem is not the alone most of us have come to know since March, 2020. And it’s hard not to feel a sense of loss while listening. The echo trailing each of Tanya’s words, fittingly conjures up an image in my mind of the poet reciting her work alone at the center of a vast empty room. Even though I know she’s speaking to a crowd from the small stage at Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Though, the recording left me longing for what felt like a lost form of solitude, I have also come to hear it as a calming and quiet reminder to try to find peace amongst the chaos, to reach out to community and loved ones however we can, and to be patient with yourself, as you learn to adapt to a new normal.\n \n\n08:21\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou wrote that about a year ago, was it?\n \n\n08:24\tAli Barillaro:\tYeah it’s been a while.\n \n\n08:24\tKatherine McLeod:\t– Yeah, July, 2020. What does it feel like for you to hear yourself reflect on Tanya Davis’s recording in that way?\n \n\n08:35\tAli Barillaro:\tIt was kind of an interesting experience actually, because I think I do feel differently now. Like I’m not at that same point that I was when I wrote that and when I was experiencing those emotions. With vaccines coming out, getting my first dose, having an appointment for my second dose, having seen quite a lot more people outdoors… I do still have some lingering sense of that strangeness of this new concept of alone and what that means to be alone while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, even though circumstances have changed.\n \n\n09:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt struck me with listening to it, how they’re actually very public ways of being alone, like the sitting on the bus. And he says the phrase like “alone is a freedom” and just that very statement is much more complicated when alone –that doesn’t feel like a freedom. [Laughs] So, yeah.\n \n\n09:35\tAli Barillaro:\tIt’s actually made me reflect back on something – I used to not really like the phrase “alone together”, but I think that has been –anyone who’s been living through this pandemic and lockdowns and isolation but that lives with a partner, a roommate, someone else that has really [Laughs] – that sentiment, that phrase has really become a reality for a lot of people, and how to navigate that differently when you might have lived together beforehand, but things are different because it’s really most of the time just going to be you and maybe this one other person and how that changes the dynamic of your own relationship, but also of your own personal activities, whether that be work, or hobbies, or just relaxing. Things are now different. So at first, around the time, especially when I was writing this piece for the blog, I think I was feeling a little bit boxed in and in my own apartment. Because, my partner works from home.\n10:39\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd we do have an office space, which we do use as well. He’s also a musician and we use that space normally for music, for recording things or just working on things. But that has had to change during the day, the regular nine to five. I don’t have access to that space. So that is one limitation that I had to deal with. But then in addition to that, what was really frustrating as well on top of that is yes, I have access to the rest of my apartment, but it’s not– I don’t live in a giant apartment. And if I was going to be making a lot of noise that comes with either just practicing or wanting to write or record something, I can’t do that either during those time periods. So that was a block that I felt that I had.\n11:28\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd it was a little bit de-motivating for quite a long time. I’ll also say additionally that even though my partner and I both do music, we really do things or we did tend to do things quite separately where he has his endeavors and I have mine. And I’m also someone who’s very private about music, even though I like to share things when they’re like – when I’m happy with them when they’re finalized. But there is a huge amount of vulnerability that comes with even if it’s not your own original music and even if you’re just working on a cover song, like I’m very –I get very nervous even around this person who is so close to me. So finding times when this person is around to just like practice and maybe make mistakes and things like that was a little hard for me at first.\n12:26\tAli Barillaro:\tBut more recently, just in maybe like the last couple of months even, I have started to say like, “Hey, you know, well, we can try to, we both like this song why don’t we try to work on this together on the weekends when you’re not having to work and be in that space.” And it’s actually been really great. So I’ve tried to [Laughs] – I guess also with this change in mindset that I’ve had in terms of the pandemic in general and aloneness in general, how things have sort of changed that relation to music and performance with this particular person who I’ve been alone together with has also transformed, which has been really lovely. And we did a acoustic cover of a song called “Digging My Own Grave” which is quite an emotional song actually. [Laughs] [Start Music: “Digging My Own Grave”]\n13:31\tAli Barillaro:\t[Music Continues in the Background: “Digging My Own Grave”] It really interesting experience as well, because I was doing primarily the lead vocals on it. And he’s done quite a few covers of their songs prior, just on his own. So it was kind of a nice change as well – and dynamic of that he would be there to be playing the music, but also to be doing the backup vocals and that I would be taking the lead on it. And we had to do some transposing to get that to work for both of us to get that range to be okay on both ends and that we both sound good [Laughs] making this. So yeah, we recorded that in the office slash music space, filmed it just a very basic video and put that together and up on my YouTube channel [Music Continues as Full Interlude: “Digging My Own Grave”].\n14:15\tAli Barillaro:\t[End Music: “Digging My Own Grave”] And people –friends and family were really enjoying it, they were like, “Oh, it’s really nice finally, that we get to hear the two of you together. And not just one of you, like it’s, it’s nice. It’s a nice change.”\n \n\n14:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat is beautiful. And thinking that it’s yeah, the collaboration, the coming together also is that –it almost is representative of the energy that like, okay, we’re slowly being able to see people that we hadn’t seen in a long time. So it feels like it’s part of that energy and part of that slow coming back to being together. One thing I wanted to ask you was about, if you could tell us how you found the Tanya Davis recording in your work for SpokenWeb and the Words & Music archive.\n \n\n15:28\tAli Barillaro:\tSure! One thing I’ll say is it’s been actually probably the best part of my SpokenWeb experience is getting to listen to these collections that we have access to. Because even though I’ve lived in Montreal my whole life, and that I think that I’m involved in the entertainment and the arts scenes and things like that, I didn’t know about the Words & Music Show, even though it’s been around for 20 years. So getting introduced to that and then fully diving into, I was responsible for about half of that. So about 10 years worth of recordings of these shows was really amazing. And essentially with that work, beyond just researching things, I did have to sit and listen. We weren’t creating full transcripts of things, but to an extent we were doing some transcription work which required full listen throughs, if you will.\n16:26\tAli Barillaro:\tSo I became familiar with quite a few different people who I didn’t know about and became very quickly interested in. So sometimes something would catch you, for whatever reason for maybe the types of work they’re doing with sound, especially some of the poets that are more invested in sound poetry, which again is something I wasn’t familiar with. Some of the music that I had never heard from people, either from Montreal, from other parts of Canada, and this particular recording, I don’t know if it was the– I think it was honestly the quality of the sound that really brought my attention to it and made me remember it. It was that echo to everything and how still it was, because often on those recordings, you can hear quite a bit of shuffling around in the audience. You can hear some noise from the bar of people, their glasses moving around or hushed sort of conversations. There’s a lot of extra sort of background noise in many of those recordings. And this was really as if everybody was like holding their breath and just listening. So I think that’s really what made it stand out beyond obviously the content and me being like, oh, wow, this is [Laughs] relatable, but also not quite relatable right now. But yeah, it was that particular sound of her voice and the way it was amplified that really got my attention, I think, when I was doing this kind of work every day.\n \n\n18:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs I talked with Allie, I started thinking about how she is an archival listener who has actually attended, in her own way, almost all of the Words & Music shows. No, she wasn’t standing in a crowd at Casa del Popolo, but she was listening to them and she was hearing the communities forming through performances. She was hearing how artists were invited back often, artists were trying out new work, artists perhaps performing the same piece, but many years later and with a different introduction and in a different context of other performers. Her listening was showing how an archive can document communities forming through sound. [Music Interlude: Strings]\n18:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds of this episode. Check the show notes for this one to find bonus content, or rather Tanya Davis also revisiting “How To Be Alone” over this past year. Plus find links to more of Ali Barillaro’s music. ShortCuts is a monthly series as part of the SpokenWeb Podcast. It is hosted by Hannah McGregor, mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thank you for listening. 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This month Katherine shares a recording of Canadian poet Maxine Gadd reading “Shore Animals” with improvised flute by Richard Sommer (1972).\n\n(0:00)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:09)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Just in time for holiday Monday listening here in Canada, whether you’re spending time with family or enjoying a solo moment, sit back, relax, and join Katherine McLeod for February’s SpokenWeb Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:05)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:10)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Maxine Gadd] Well. Okay. Do you want to do, oh, do you want to try, try improvising to, to a chip that’s here? I’ll let you read it.\n(01:18)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Richard Sommer] Seriously, you wanna do that?\n(01:18)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Yeah. It’s just going to be some [inaudible].\n(01:19)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] I don’t know if I should…\n(01:22)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this Audio of the Month, we’re traveling back to February 1972, when poets Maxine Gadd and Andreas Schroeder read in Montreal. They read at Sir George Williams University, or what is now Concordia. They read on February 18th in the Hall Building in Room H-651. The reading started at 9:00 PM. Yes, readings started late and they went on for a long time. After reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gadd invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute. He improvised along with her reading the poem “Shore Animals.” Before starting to improvise, we can hear a negotiation between Gadd and Sommer about what to read and how to perform together, a process that is its own audible improvisation.\n(02:15)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Maxine Gadd] Now, how it goes. You have to keep quiet until… [Random Flute Notes] See, now… He’s never done this one before.\n(02:31)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Richard Sommer] What, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n(02:32)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Okay, this is called “Shore Animals” and it says, “speech feasts peace with flute” and the flute has to listen.\n(02:38)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] Okay.\n  (02:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] And it can pl–, it can speak, too.\n(02:42)\tKatherine McLeod\tThen the audio clip that you’ll hear includes the first two minutes of a six-minute improvisation. Their improvisation is a singular moment when an audience member—in this case, Richard Sommer—formally performs in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, though at the same time, this recording reminds listeners that the audience is always present, ready to improvise, to interject, and even to interrupt. And that the audience is also what we are listening to as archival listeners.\n(03:16)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Maxine Gadd] What, the food? I think it’s over there. For fun. [Papers Crinkling] The same message. I, I’m asking… Richard is gonna make some noise with my flute.\n(03:32)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Richard Sommer] I’ll make some noise if you give me your microphone.\n(03:33)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Okay. Which one you want? Let’s share it. Is–\n(03:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] It doesn’t make any difference.\n(03:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] It goes with a [inaudible].\n(03:42)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] When’d you do that?\n(03:43)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] What?\n(03:44)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] This, this knot.\n(03:45)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] I’ve tied myself in there.\n(03:50)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] Here we go.\n(03:59)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] [inaudible] I can’t find it. [Long Pause] Pieces, pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is. Now, how it goes. You have to keep quiet until… [Random Flute Notes] See, now… He’s never done this one before.\n(04:17)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] What, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n(04:19)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Okay, this is called “Shore Animals” and it says, “speech feasts peace with flute” and the flute has to listen.\n(04:27)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] Okay.\n(04:27)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] And it can pl–, it can speak, too. You have to listen to it, yeah, you never heard it before.\n(04:34)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] I think it’s learning how to speak.\n(04:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] It’s called “Shore Animals,” it’s a speech piece with flute. [Maxine Begins To Recite, Richard Plays Flute] So hearing where the poppy stopped me, small chance to star spiel, all you have told me, gone, false and beautiful gods and groves. People truth. Put it into song. When the traffic is gone, gone, gone a fleet in in the air. My debt to your tongue, Saturn. In your minds, I’ve split a spleen, lust my lust. Come along, fog. Oh! Soul, I have to whistle to you. [Audience Laughs] [Whistling]\n(05:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tThat was Maxine Gadd reading “Shore Animals” with Richard Sommer improvising on the flute at a reading that took place in Montreal on February 18th, 1972. [Begin Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the Audio of the Month and how to listen to the entire recording. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n(05:49)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Begin Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the Audio of the Month and how to listen to the entire recording. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n(06:06)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9691","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.7, Audio of the Month – As Though Her Voice is Dancing, 20 July 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-as-though-her-voice-is-dancing/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/9112f64d-f980-465b-8252-4f130d4ea0f6/sw-minisode-ep-7_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-7_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:05:45\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"5,599,861 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"SW Minisode Ep 7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-as-though-her-voice-is-dancing/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-07-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549807431680,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In episode 7 of The SpokenWeb Podcast (“The Voice is Intact”), producer Hannah McGregor and guest Jen Sookfong Lee listen together to Gwendolyn MacEwen reading the poem “The Zoo” (recorded in Montreal, 1966). As we listen to them listening on the podcast, we hear a gasp and even an exclamation: “Melodious!” What was it in her voice that they were responding to? To try to answer this question through your own experience of listening, this Audio of the Month features another poem of MacEwen’s in this same 1966 recording: “I Should Have Predicted,” published in The Shadow Maker (1969).\n\n00:00\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n\n01:00\n\nTheme Music:\n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n\n01:03\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nIn this Audio of the Month, we’re listening to the voice of Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen. Now, if you’re a regular SpokenWeb Podcast listener, you’ll recognize MacEwen’s voice from episode seven: “The Voice Is Intact.” That episode was produced by Hannah McGregor and featured interviews with Jen Sookfong Lee and myself, Katherine McLeod. At the start of the episode, Hannah and Jen listened to MacEwen’s voice as she reads a poem called “The Zoo.”\n\n01:34\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nHave you ever heard her read?\n\n01:35\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nNo, I’ve never heard her voice.\n\n01:35\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nOh my God, do you want to?\n\n01:35\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nYeah!\n\n01:36\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen reading “The Zoo,” overlapping with Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee’s commentary] A fugitive from all those truths, which are too true, the great clawing ones and the fire-breathers,–\n\n01:46\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\n[Gasps]\n\n01:46\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n–the ones that rake the flesh–\n\n01:47\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nSo much nicer with her voice!\n\n01:47\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n–like piranhas, and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bear their red teeth in the nights.\n\n01:55\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nSo melodious, her voice.\n\n01:56\n\nAudio Recording:\n\nMy mind emulates,–\n\n01:58\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nI’ve never used the word melodious.\n\n01:59\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n–dragon, fish, and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night–\n\n02:03\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nMelodious, yes. So melodious, her voice. That was their response to her voice now, in 2020. And to be in awe of her voice has been a common response ever since MacEwen started reading poems in the 1960s. She read at places like the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, where poets would gather on stage to read over the sound of a noisy espresso machine. MacEwen would step onto the stage and, as she started reading, in fact, as she often started reciting her poems by heart, her voice would captivate listeners. That voice is one reason for selecting MacEwen for this month’s Audio of the Month. But another is that there is a very memorable moment of MacEwen introducing one poem in particular in SpokenWeb’s audio collection. To set the scene: the reading was in 1966 at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), and it was a joint reading with Phyllis Webb. Part way through the reading, MacEwen introduces the poem “I Should Have Predicted.”\n\n03:11\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen introducing “I Should Have Predicted] This is a poem which, oddly enough, came out in a Mexican magazine in Spanish not too long ago looking completely unrecognizable to me. It’s called “I Should Have Predicted.”\n\n03:27\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nI haven’t been able to locate this publication, but if you have any ideas about which magazine this could have been in, please do get in touch. For now, we know that it exists because of this recording. As we listen to it, hear how MacEwen reads, how she pauses, how her articulation of the poem makes it rise and then fall. Her pacing is exquisite. It is as though she is dancing the poem, as though her voice is dancing.\n\n04:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen reciting “I Should Have Predicted] I should have predicted the death of this city. I could have predicted it if only there had been no such pretty flowers. No such squares filled with horses and their golden riders. By this I mean that outside all was tame and lucky. But inside, oh, inside houses were wilder things, dynasties, wars, empires crumbling, chariots housed in halls, emperors in cupboards, queens and generals in bed, kingdoms rising and falling between the sheets. Thus I did not predict the death of this city. I was deceived by fountains and apple trees. How could I know what civil wars raged inside out of my sight, which focused only on the horses and the gold, deceptive city.\n\n05:06\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThat was Gwendolyn MacEwen reading “I Should Have Predicted” in 1966 in Montreal.\n\n05:18\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n05:18\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nFind the full recording of this reading by heading to spokenweb.ca. My name is Katherine McLeod and my thanks to Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland for their help on the production of this minisode. 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Season Three of ShortCuts begins with a listening exercise. We attune our ears to what it sounds like and feels like to hear archival clips ‘cut’ out of context. Join ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod in this exploration of the sonic and affective place-making of ShortCuts as podcast. What kind of creative and critical work can these archival sounds do? On their own, or together as an archival remix? \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to a new season of SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? We are delighted to have you with us this season as Katherine brings us more voices from the archives, more conversations, and more thoughtful reactions from her practice of close archival listening.\n \n\n00:56\tHannah McGregor:\tShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SpokenWeb blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] for more.\n \n\n01:06\tHannah McGregor:\tIf you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Pitch Katherine your ShortCuts minisode idea by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic].\n \n\n01:21\tHannah McGregor:\tNow, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we are in season three of ShortCuts. We’re ready to take more deep dives into the archives, through listening closely and carefully to short cuts [Sound Effect: Scissors] of audio. My name is Katherine McLeod. And, over these past seasons, I’ve come to understand ShortCuts as an archival and affective place made through sound where we can talk, listen, feel, question, and think together about archival sound and the world it makes and unmakes. Welcome. This season begins with a warm-up. It’s a listening exercise to get us ready and attuned to archival listening. The short cuts will be from past ShortCuts episodes. Yes, we’re getting meta here by diving into the archives of ShortCuts. We’re doing this in order to hear what ShortCuts sounds like, what kind of place it has made so far, and to hear what it does creatively and critically with its sound. It’s an exercise in a podcast listening to itself in order to grow. All of the sounds will be clips from the ShortCuts archives, and that includes my voiceover. From now on, all of the sounds that you will hear will be found sounds, sounds, sounds… [Katherine’s voice overlapping] And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound.\n \n\n03:09\tMusical Interlude:\tShortCuts Theme Music:\n \n\n03:10\tTanya Davis, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10:\tIf you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if you weren’t okay with it, just wait.\n \n\n03:19\tAli Barillaro, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10:\tI originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How to be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain [Music: Feminine Voice from SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] about life in the midst of a pandemic.\n \n\n03:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tHow can you hear time?\n \n\n03:33\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present.\n \n\n03:35\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tShe has never read it like this before she cuts it up.\n \n\n03:40\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tIt’s called “An Elegy in Joy,” and it’s just the beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way. I’ve never cut it up. Cut it up.\n \n\n03:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts. Death and explosion and the world un-begun.\n \n\n03:56\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Voice of Muriel Rukeyser overlapping with same words] Death, and explosion, and the world un-begun.\n \n\n04:03\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tI thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico.\n \n\n04:08\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.3:\tWhen listening to a recording, can you be listening for time? Can we hear the spring thaw in an archival recording of poetry?\n \n\n04:19\tMargaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tThis is one of the very cold days, I guess about 10 below, cold enough. It’s inside the pane of glass separating inside from outside, comes into a certain kind of sky that goes with that, which is like glass. Again…\n \n\n04:43\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\tSomething I’ve been thinking about while preparing this ShortCuts is: What kind of a framework does audio clipped out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound…\n \n\n04:59\tStephanie Bolster, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tI guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything and you know, slow it down and take in the details. Just like the density and the abundance of details. I was scribbling things down and couldn’t keep up. And in that sense, it really felt, you know, the same sense I would have had in a live reading.\n \n\n05:15\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\tAs you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems? Why do people come and listen to poems? And listen to poems?\n \n\n05:27\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tI listen again, and again.\n \n\n05:30\tMathieu Aubin, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tWhen I was listening to it, the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately –it’s different with you obviously because we’re actually responding, and we’re both in on it – like this is about to happen – and you could feel it generations later. That awkwardness. And you’d be like, everyone’s like ‘eee’…\n \n\n05:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tIt’s also interesting that the whole, sort of, joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then – this – if she does like slam the book down, or – if she, you know – the presence of the weight of the page – [recording of Margaret Avison overlaps] and you read it and you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down and there are so many emotions happening in this moment…\n \n\n06:13\tMargaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tNow I’ll read it again.\n \n\n06:14\tBarbara Nickel, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tI have from years of reading her I have a certain voice in my mind – the voice of the page – and then to hear her voice for the first time…\n \n\n06:25\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.4:\tListen to the breath that the poem creates. Listen with your body. As the poem breaths – in and out – it is breathing…\n \n\n06:36\tDionne Brand, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\t[Reading poem] I will not take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds, every day, even those that do not hold a wind’s impression… Okay that’s enough. [Applause]\n \n\n06:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\tThe recording of the reading was broadcast on the radio. On radiofreerainforest… [Sound of the intro music from the radio program and the words “radio free rain forest” are repeated.] radiofreerainforest was a program that aired on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio in the 1980s into the 1990s. [“Words and the sound” are words repeated as part of the intro music from the radio program.]\n \n\n07:09\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Audible sound of background noise ongoing.] The recording doesn’t stop. Nobody presses the button. It continues recording. Now this is the sound of the room. This is the sound of the audience. This is the sound of what it felt like to be there. This recording of the social interactions, even as muffled as they are, conveys the sound of that reading in its time, which is even more interesting to us during our current time of the pandemic when we long for attending an in-person event…\n \n\n07:43\tAlexei Perry Cox, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\t[Reading poem] The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time…\n \n\n07:59\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\t[Alexei’s reading continues in the background.] We’re listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at The Words and Music Show online on March 29th, 2020. [Audible sounds of Alexei’s daughter Isla.] She’s reading from Finding Places to Make Places, and she’s accompanied by the voice of Isla, her then 18-month old daughter.\n \n\n08:23\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\tWhen I heard Alexei read at The Words and Music Show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices. What improvisation at a poetry reading.\n \n\n08:34\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\t…What is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up and the involuntary muscles… And you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at. We come to something, with almost unmediated – that is the poem among us, between us, there.\n \n\n09:10\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] You brought me clarity, gift after gift, I wear… poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.\n \n\n09:27\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sunbeam shining through the air. We see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room. We feel the air thick with arrows, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire to be contained within the archives of this reading series…\n \n\n10:01\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] While you were away, I held you like this in my mind.\n \n\n10:06\tKatherine McLeod,  Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe hear this holding the quietness of each page.\n \n\n10:11\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem]. In the room. We knew.\n \n\n10:15\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe hear the turning of the page, the room…\n \n\n10:19\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] The room that held you… is still here.\n \n\n10:23\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe are listening to desire in the making. Every time we press play on this recording as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem…\n \n\n10:32\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\tYou get some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems?\n \n\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tLet’s hear all of that again.\n \n\n10:39\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Who will speak these days. If not, if not you?\n \n\n10:46\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem]. Poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.\n \n\n10:57\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tThe room that held you is still here.\n \n\n11:08\tMusic Interlude:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n11:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortcuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and The SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n "],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9978","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.2, What the Archive Remembers, 22 November 2021, McLeod "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ff53ab4f-79e1-483d-90f4-6eb9312b14de/audio/32603c04-9629-4f27-ae76-99d905b58fde/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-2-what-the-archive-remembers.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:12:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,172,687 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Shortcuts 3.2 What the Archive Remembers\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-22\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SHOW NOTES\\n\\nBowering, George. “bpNichol: 1944-1988.” The Long Poem / Remembering bp Nichol. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 122-123 (Autumn/Winter 1989): 294-297.\\n\\nMcGregor, Hannah. “The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020.\\n\\nPolyck-O’Neill, Julia. “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast. 1 November 2021.\\n\\nPound, Scott. “Sounding out the Difference: Orality and Repetition in bpNichol.” Open Letter: bp + 10 (Fall 1998) 50-58.\\n\\nSingh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum Books, 2018.\\n\\nAUDIO CLIPS\\n\\nAudio for this ShortCuts is clipped from a recording of Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1966-1980 available on PennSound, a partner affiliate of the SpokenWeb research network, and from a recording of bpNichol and Lionel Kearns from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series audio collection.\\n\\nNichol, bp. “Pome Poem.” PennSound. A link to the same recording is also available on the official bpNichol archive. \\n\\n“I wanted to forget you.” bpNichol reading with Lionel Kearns. Sir George Williams Poetry Series. Montreal, 22 November 1968. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/bpnichol-and-lionel-kearns-at-sgwu-1968/#1\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549808480257,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, ShortCuts explores one of the methods of listening from the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode, produced by Julia Polyck-O’Neill, listens to the emotional weight of archives. Julia’s conversations with poet Lisa Robertson uncover the ways in which archives record the relationships between memory, affect, and mortality. In this ShortCuts, producer Katherine McLeod listens to the emotional weight of archives through a recording of bpNichol, reading with Lionel Kearns in Montreal on November 22, 1968. How does the archive record loss? What can the archive never record? And what do we remember as listeners?\n\n00:00\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to a new season of SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on spoken web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] a place where we listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ [Sound Effect: Scissors] from the audio collections of SpokenWeb. In this episode, we’ll be using the last full episode of The Spoken Web Podcast to inspire our listening. The last episode was “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”. The recordings that we’ll be listening to in this ShortCuts are of the poet bpNichol. We’ll mostly be listening to a recording of a reading that bpNichol gave on November 22nd, 1968, as part of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. Now you might be wondering what does bpNichol have to do with “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”; well, I’m not here to make a case for what they have in common though, if I wanted to start somewhere, I’d start with Coach House Books. What I do want to draw upon from that episode on Robertson and the feminist archive is how producer Julia Polyck-O’Neill talks about archives as having an emotional weight. That emotional weight in the case of that episode was rooted in hearing a recording of someone’s voice, who is no longer here. Yes, this episode touches upon themes of loss, and please do what you need to do to take care while listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]. BpNichol was a poet whose poetry was always aware of presence and absence through its linguistic play, concrete forms and embodied sound. Let’s hear how recordings of his voice invite us to think through and to feel the emotional weight of archives.\n \n\n03:16\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading and singing a poem] What is a poem is inside of your body, body, body, body. What is a poem is inside of your head, inside your head, inside your head, inside your head. Oh…\n \n\n03:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was bpNichol reading, reciting, performing “Pome Poem.” It is a poem that I played years ago, over 10 years ago, in fact, as a graduate student, while presenting on a panel and a grand room at the University of Toronto. I had been discussing a dance adaptation of bpNichol’s poetry, and indeed a dance adaptation of his group, The Four Horsemen’s poetry and well, the performance is a story in and of itself. But to get to the point here, I was talking about how they had ended the performance with “Pome Poem,” and the sounds of the words breathing faded out as the theatre lights went down. I let the recording fade out at the end of my presentation.\n \n\n04:20\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading/singing a poem] Inside of your, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing [Fades out]…\n \n\n04:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfterwards, one of my co-panelists told me that he was very moved. He hadn’t expected to suddenly hear Nichol’s voice. It was as though he was there. This was years after the passing of Nichol and, with many recordings existing of Nichol’s voice, it didn’t seem strange for me to hear it. But here was someone who was not a Nichol scholar, he wasn’t listening to the audio recordings in the archives, but rather here, he was someone in the midst of a very public event who had just heard the voice of a dear friend. We can have such visceral reactions to hearing a voice in the archives, even if we don’t know that voice personally. I think of the reactions to Gwendolyn MacEwen’s voice – here’s Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee reacting to MacEwen’s voice on a previous episode of The Spoken Web Podcast.\n \n\n05:29\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\tHave you ever heard her read?\n \n\n05:30\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\tNo. I’ve never heard her voice.\n \n\n05:31\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\tDo you want to?\n \n\n05:31\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\tYeah!\n \n\n05:32\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t[Reading a poem] A fugitive from all those truths, which are two true, the great clawing ones and the fire breathers –\n \n\n05:40\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\t[Audible Gasp]\n \n\n05:41\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t– the ones that rake the flesh like piranhas and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bare their red teeth in the night –\n \n\n05:51\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\t[Overlaps with MacEwen’s reading] So melodious her voice! I’ve never used the word melodious.\n \n\n05:55\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t– My mind, emulates dragon, fish and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night\n \n\n06:00\tKatherine McLeod:\tMelodious. Yes. So melodious her voice. And to be in awe of her voice has been a common response ever since MacEwen started reading poems in the 1960s.\n06:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tHearing MacEwen’s voice in the archives is somewhat similar to hearing bpNichol’s in that we’re hearing a poet who has been remembered as one who died too soon. BpNichol in 1988 at age 44 and Gwendolyn MacEwen one year earlier in 1987 at age 47. I think of George Bowering’s memorial for bpNichol in which he writes, quote: “as the years go by, scores of young and other writers and editors will develop the gifts bpNichol passed freely to them, and in that way, his life will go on. We will still bitterly resent the absence of his late life poems.”\n06:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tI think of that too, for MacEwen. Her last book was called Afterworlds, but who is mourning the archival afterlife of MacEwen that we will never know – that we will never hear. There are many unheard archival afterlives that probably will come to mind as I say this. At the same time, Nichol and MacEwen were relatively well-known as poets in Canada, which makes you think about the voices that were never archived. And what about the voices who are recorded in the archives? But those recordings only capture certain periods of their lives and their work? Which versions of themselves are remembered in sound?\n \n\n07:49\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name. I wanted to erase you, I forgot you, your name. I wanted you, I forgot you, I erased your name. You forgot me, I wanted you, you erased my name. I tried you, I forgot you, I erased your name. Wanting you, I forgot you. You erased my name. Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name.\n \n\n08:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was the last poem that bpNichol read in Montreal at the Sir George Williams Poetry Series on November 22nd, 1968, or at least we think that it was the last poem that he read. Nichol’s reading cuts in and out before we can hear the applause or any final remarks. And so we can only assume that it is the end. Plus the poem, as far as I can tell, is one that Nicol read out loud, but never published in print. And so we don’t know if this was “the end” of the poem. Though, if we listen closely, it does seem like it resolves and is even a bit reminiscent of his poem “Evening Ritual”, which evolves through a similar cycle of actions relating to writing. When the poem ends, at least as it ends on the tape, we don’t hear applause, but we can hear sound on the tape. The recording overlaps with a recording of the same recording. The recording somehow gets recorded over itself. And so there are times like this at the end, when you are listening to Nichol and then you hear the faint sound of Nichol in the background at a different point in the same reading.\n \n\n09:49\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name. [Static]\n \n\n09:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s another example of what I mean about the recording over itself, and this time we hear the tape rewind and then repeat something that we’d heard before.\n \n\n10:06\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Voice sounds sped up] I’m going to read a poem I wrote last night. That’s waking [Tape noise of rewinding]…\n \n\n10:14\tArchival Recording, Lionel Kearns, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] The imagination explodes. They grow old, quick and die. What’s left. Sometimes there’s something left. [Gentle laughter from audience]\n \n\n10:35\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\tI’m going to do that dangerous thing and read a poem I wrote last night, thus waking Lionel up at 7:30 this morning, which he didn’t quite forgive me for. It starts off with a quote from a poem by Bobby Hogg. And well, yesterday we were up in Carlton doing a reading there…\n \n\n10:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis ShortCuts is being released right around the time when this reading took place. We can try to re-enact what it would have been like to gather on this November day in downtown Montreal for this reading with bpNichol and Lionel Kearns. What would it have been like to be in that room? What is the archive unable to record? By staging this ShortCuts in November with a November recording, we are participating in a kind of reenactment. To what extent are we trying, trying to remember or trying to erase a memory that may not be ours in the first place –\n \n\n11:43\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name.\n \n\n11:49\tKatherine McLeod:\t–And yet having heard it, that memory can never be forgotten. The feeling of having heard it is still there.\n \n\n11:58\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n12:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and The SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. 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Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996.\\n\\nMaracle, Lee.\\nMemory Serves: Oratories\\n. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2015.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.”\\nGerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.\\nSFU Digitized Collections.\\nhttps://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988\\n\\n“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.”\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 21 June 2020.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/\\n\\nTaylor, Diana.\\nThe Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas\\n. Durham, N.C: Duke UP, 2003.\\n\\nWilson, Michelle. “Forced Migration.”\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 6 December 2021.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549809528832,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["As part two of ShortCuts 2.9 Situating Sound—and as one of the many remembrances of Stó:lō writer and activist Lee Maracle—this ShortCuts explores how the archive remembers and who these memories serve. The audio recording for this episode is a 1988 recording of Lee Maracle and Dionne Brand, recorded for broadcast on Gerry Gilbert’s radio program “radiofreerainforest” (Vancouver Coop Radio; SFU Digitized Collections). Building towards Maracle’s reading of the poem “Perseverance,” producer Katherine McLeod selects audio clips from this recording in which we can hear feminist placemaking in action. \n\n00:00\tShortCuts Theme:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on spoken web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. without further ado. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Last time on ShortCuts, we were listening to recordings that made us think about and feel the emotional weight of archives. We were thinking about how archival recordings produce memories that can almost stand in for the lived memory itself. How does the archive remember? Is the archive, the archive as in the colonial archive, or is the archive something more attuned to embodied practice? And that understanding very much resonates with the most recent episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “Forced Migration.” That episode asks how stories are passed along in the case of bison migration. Artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines colonial archives in order to create alternative stories of the human relations with the bison of Turtle Island. What do we call the collection of these stories, an archive, a community, and who do these memories serve? That is the question that will take us into the sounds of this ShortCuts, who do these memories serve.\n \n\n02:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd here I’m thinking about Stó:lō writer and activist Lee Maracle’s book Memory Serves. On November 11th, 2021 Lee Maracle passed away… And I heard the news after finishing up the last ShortCuts and thinking about archival afterlives. I listened to all the tributes pouring in for Maracle across various media outlets and media platforms. We’re still listening to those tributes and remembrances. Recordings of Maracle’s voice are in SpokenWeb audio collections. For example, if you recall the episode in season two of ShortCuts on Dionne Brand’s reading from 1988, you’ll recall that Lee Maracle had read with her that night. I had planned on a part two of that ShortCuts to listen to Maracle in that recording. And now is the time to listen. At the same time, like in the last episode, I encourage you to take care while listening…\n \n\n03:35\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tTomorrow there’s a celebration of South Africa Women’s Day. And I was asked almost a year ago now, I think to do a poem for the boycott the shipments of sulphur from Vancouver harbour to South Africa. And I’m gonna read that one first.\n \n\n03:59\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is a reading that was broadcast on the radio program, radiofreerainforest. And that’s how we end up with this recording. That is the archive. But the experience of being there is archived in the sound in the cadence of voice, in the noise, in the background, in the laughter in knowing that the recording cannot remember it all. We won’t listen to the entire recording, but we will listen to enough clips that you get a sense of it. And if you’d like to return to it, you’ll know that it is there. The audio clips that we will hear are ones that convey the sound of the room, what it would’ve felt like to be there, how we can hear kinship, how we can hear the relation between bodies in the room. Like in this moment, when Maracle explains that she is going to read an epigram for Dionne Brand…\n \n\n04:56\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tThis is for Dionne. [Laughter] She wrote this book called Winter Epigrams. You should all buy it if you get a chance [Laughter], it’s a great book of poems. But as you know, about 95% of Canada in the winter is covered in snow. So I answered her epigrams about the cold in this fashion. At that time, I hadn’t met Dionne, but I was supposed to read with her and, it never came to pass [Laughter]. Tonight is the first— [inaudible comment from Brand] [Laughter from Brand and Maracle] — and I wouldn’t these, but [Inaudible] [Shared Laughter]… This one’s called “Flowers for Dionne.” I hope I get it right!\n \n\n05:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt feels as though we’re listening to a private moment that has found its way into a more formal archive. There are jokes about how they had planned to read together didn’t and now here they are — and that continues later, when in her reading Brand replies to Maracle with an unfinished epigram in response.\n \n\n06:08\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988 Reading:\tLee read the epigram back to me in Montreal. And I was very honoured too, that she had written it back to me and I’ve been trying to write her back an epigram. We might make a book [Audience Laughter]. So I haven’t got very far with the epigram except to say: “Write me out of this epigram, Lee, you are so much water. You are too much water, too much rock, so much eagle. Write me out of this epigram, Lee. I am so much bush, so much ocean, so much rage…” And that’s just the beginning. [Laughter] It’s not finished. [Clapping] It’s supposed to go and like “write us out of this goddamn epigram.” [Audience Laughter]. I want to read a couple poems about South Africa.\n \n\n07:21\tKatherine McLeod:\tBrand starts her reading after Maracle with a poem for South Africa. And that is exactly how Maracle had started hers. I am taking all of these audio clips out of their contexts, out of their linear order in which they would’ve been heard in the reading, but, in doing so, I’m trying to bring to the forefront, the connections that are embedded within it and the conversation happening between poets in the reading itself. Knowing the exchange that unfolds between Brand and Maracle about the epigrams, it becomes even more meaningful to hear what precedes it. And this is why I’ve taken all of that out of context, to build up to hearing this poem, a poem that Maracle introduces by saying that she wrote it for herself. Let’s now listen to Lee Maracle reading “Perseverance”…\n \n\n08:16\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tI once said that poetry is never a self-portrait, you know, poets are famous for writing for so and so and for so and so and for so and so… Well, I was feeling very narcissistic one day, and I decided this was for me. It’s called “Perseverance.”\n \n\n08:34\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\t[Reading poem] There’s a dandelion on the roadside in Toronto, it’s leaves a dishevelled mix of green and brown. A dandelion straggling and limping along. There’s a flower beside a concrete stump on Bay Street in Toronto, perpetually rebelling against spiked heels and blue surge suits. The monetary March passed by five o’clock Bay Street, deaf to the cries of this thin ageing lion’s sneer. Chicken, yellow flower. My leaves, my face, my skin. I feel like my skin is being ripped off of me. There is a flower in Toronto on the roadside. It takes jack hammers and brutish machines to rip the concrete from the sidewalks in Toronto to beautify the city of blue suede suits. But for this dandy lion, it takes, but a seed, a little acid rain, a whole lot of fight, and a black desire to limp along and scraggle, forward. There is a flower. [Audience Laughter]\n \n\n09:41\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tThis is for Dionne.\n \n\n09:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat poem ends with the words, “There is a flower.” We can hear that those words are almost covered by the response from the audience — and, well, no, they’re not covered. It’s more that they’re supported by the sound. The sound holds them up. And that’s the moment that Maracle says, “This is for Dionne.” Listening again, I rushed to check a published version of the poem in I Am Woman to see that it ends with “There is a flower” because it really sounds like she says, “Here is a flower.” On the page, it says “There is a flower,” but I listen to it again. And it does sound like “here.” And thinking about it more, I thought, well, how beautiful would it have been? If she had said, “Here is a flower,” because she had said that this poem is for herself. To say, “here is a flower” is like saying a version of: “Here I am.” And that would make even more sense with how her audience responds. It’s as though she’s reached out her arms while saying it, and as though we can hear the warmth of the smiles and nods around her saying, yes, here she is. Let’s listen to that ending again…\n \n\n10:52\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\t“…black desire to limp along and scraggle, forward. There is a flower. [Audience Laughter] This is for Dionne. [Lee Laughs] She wrote this called book called Winter Epigrams. You should all buy it if you get a chance. It’s a great book…\n \n\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Lee Maracle reading with Dionne Brand in 1988. The recording is part of the radiofreerainforest collection, which is part of SpokenWeb’s audio collections held at Simon Fraser University. If you are a SpokenWeb researcher with an audio clip for shortcuts, do get in touch at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. If you are listening and you were at one of the readings played here on ShortCuts, please do get in touch at the same email spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n \n\n11:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortcuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n \n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9984","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.4, Sonic Passages, 17 January 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/db88c6e3-2a5c-41d6-a316-c3e74f9165c7/audio/aabfa4af-a82c-4737-b0b4-e3c8388c83f3/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-4-sonic-passages.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:11:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,928,423 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Full Episode_Shortcuts 3.4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-01-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nAudio in this episode is from a 1970 recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal at the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, and from a 2019 interview with Marlatt conducted by Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart and that aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast’s sister podcast, Soundbox Signals, and re-aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast. \\n\\nListen to the full recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal (1970): https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daphne-marlatt-at-sgwu-1970/.\\n\\nListen to the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/.\\n\\nListen to the previous ShortCuts on Marlatt, “Then and Now” mentioned in this episode: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\n“Daphne Marlatt & Diane Wakoski: Performing the SpokenWeb Archive.” SpokenWeb. Concordia University, 21 November 2014,  https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/oral-literary-history/daphne-marlatt-diane-wakoski-performing-the-spokenweb-archive/.\\n\\nMarlatt, Daphne. “Afterword: Immediacies of Writing.” Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt. Ed. Susan Knutson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. \\n\\n— “Bird of Passage.” Origin, vol. 3, no. 16, Cid Corman, Jan. 1970, pp. 1–68, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28042112.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Daphne Marlatt reading ‘Lagoon’.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 28 November, 2019, https://spokenweb.ca/daphne-marlatt-reading-lagoon/.\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt, leaf leaf/s, then and now.” The AMP Lab. UBC-Okanagan, 17 November 2019, https://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/17/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt-leaf-leaf-s-then-and-now/.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549809528833,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts episode responds to poet Daphne Marlatt’s conversation with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart in the recent SpokenWeb Podcast episode “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive.” By listening to audio from Marlatt’s previous archival performances, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod considers how we remember feelings attached to reading a poem out loud. What does it feel like to hear a recording of your own voice? Are you reminded of how you were feeling while speaking, and can the archive ever hold the memory of those feelings?\n\n*\n\n“Sometimes, unknowingly, one writes a few lines that continue to\nreverberate as some kind of pointer for future years of writing.”\n— Daphne Marlatt, “Afterword” (Rivering)\n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. without further ado. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts. In this ShortCuts, our listening will be inspired by the previous full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That means we’ll be drawing our inspiration from Daphne Marlatt’s conversation with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart in the recent episode “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive.” They talk with Marlatt about poetry readings and about her performance with the archive in a poetry reading that had taken place the night before the interview — in 2019. In that reading, Marlatt had read alongside recordings of her past self — a recording from 1969.\n \n\n02:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis ShortCuts is inspired by the question of what it feels like to hear a recording of your past self – and asks: how can an archive contain traces of what the self – the body – behind the voice was feeling? In the case of Marlatt, she is a poet who has graciously accepted the invitation by SpokenWeb to listen to recordings of her past self and past voice more than once. I was there in the audience at a previous one. That was a reading that Marlatt gave in 2014 in Montreal. She read along with a recording of her reading in Montreal in 1970. What strikes me in listening back to that 1970 recording after hearing Marlatt’s conversation with Shearer and Butchart on the podcast is the extent to which a recording captures a person in a moment in time in their body. I’m thinking here of the difference between what she thought her voice sounded like in that recording and what she could remember feeling. I had listened to that 1970 recording for a previous ShortCuts with my listening attuned to place — check the show notes for Then and Now — but this time I was listening to that 1970 recording with my attention attuned to where the body was present in this recording. I noticed how she introduces the poem “Bird of Passage.” What she says before reading “Bird of Passage” is quite short but it contains so much, both said and unsaid.\n \n\n03:41\tKatherine McLeod:\tShe says, this is a poem that I wrote.\n \n\n03:44\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tThis is a poem that I wrote when I was about… oh I don’t know, seven or eight months pregnant… [Pause] …Bird of Passage. I wrote it in Vancouver… spring time again…. Bird of Passage.\n \n\n04:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere, was Marlatt in 1970 saying that she had written this poem ‘Bird of Passage’ while she was pregnant. That is significant in and of itself when thinking of the body but now I was hearing it with the full resonance of her recent conversation with Shearer and Buchart from the podcast and what Marlatt says when the date of the recording, July 1969, is mentioned…\n \n\n04:30\tAudio Recording, Daphne Marlatt, “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”, 2019:\tInteresting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I’d had when I wrote those poems. What was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading – there was so much – my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being, and I think it’s because of the giving birth experience…\n \n\n05:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tHer comment is about a memory of how the body had felt when she was writing those poems. And her comment is also about how she remembers feeling in her body when she was reading those poems out loud. I wonder, then, how would it have felt to read “Bird of Passage” out loud to an audience in 1970. Only she will know that. The archive cannot answer that question. But what we can hear in the archive is the sound of the poem and how it resonates now in relation to Marlatt’s writing. Listen to the sound of passage vibrating in this poem, “Bird of Passage,” not only in the title but in phrases like this one:\n \n\n05:56\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\t[Reading “Bird of Passage”] “…eave swallows cliff, passerine, which I thought meant passing as passenger sails, through an isthmus, time does not constrict…”\n \n\n06:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is as though the poem is moving towards what passage comes to mean in Marlatt’s poems — passage, passing, a moving towards, language as the medium of passage, a passage between…\n \n\n06:19\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tI cannot grasp your sound, breath, stone, you turn dumb, and will not speak, of what sticks at, feathers, uneasy nest, unease, a restlessness, tonight, drips in, passing in return, perhaps light airs, we begin again…\n \n\n06:43\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat is how she ends the poem, and we’re about to listen to it from the beginning in its entirety together, but I’ve played these clips from it in advance to attune ourselves to the poem. It is a poem that one could pass over while listening to the reading, but her brief introductory words made it stand out especially because I was listening with the question of: how can we hear feelings of embodiment in the recording of this reading? Recently, in the afterward to Rivering, Marlatt has written this observation — quote: “Sometimes, unknowingly, one writes a few lines that continue to reverberate as some kind of pointer for future years of writing.” Here is Marlatt reading “Bird of Passage” in 1970. I invite you to hear the resonances of moving forward, the sound of her voice as passage, surging towards her future poems, her “future years of writing” …\n \n\n07:50\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tThis is a poem that I wrote when I was about – I don’t know –seven or eight months pregnant. “Bird of Passage” I wrote it in Vancouver, springtime again. Bird of Passage. [Reading poem, transcribed as heard – see Show Notes for a link to the poem as published.] Thaw begins tonight, Eaves drip incessant strain rings, wind bell spring brought forward out of time. This bird, dive bird, nestle, why stop nested under the eave of flesh or strong wet bird’s wings. Turned as I am against your anonymous hip, in sleep some cliff must be negotiated. Swallow. Eave swallows cliff passerine, which I thought meant passing as passenger sails through an isthmus, time does not constrict. Helpless, constriction in my throat seeing the picture of oil slick bird, will die. Fixed, its feathers mark coming out of yoke, this black stuff. Fix of its own birth. So a month’s accumulation of tears into icicles, vesicles, leaves, roots. Incessant release can be nothing more than alone, urine past, warm, squat by the window’s cold. Only to lie, quote, alone. Not ceasing its skim in serous medium light as air to us gravity-bound. Head over heels or wing bones supplied to test its limit extent, passage, passing, passenger. Temporary nest high in the air. Hirundinidae, hirondelle in graceful flight and regular migration. Fathered by a bird too sought definition for its passage, bird of sea, bird of passage or, quote, a rolling stone. Jumps in the  womb for joy. A recognition, cognition, knowing whence sound came a rhythm per-vades rocking waves under the face of his, fight to be over the din. We are all born in risk, mute, cliff. I cannot grasp your sound, breath, stone. You turn dumb and will not speak of what sticks at feathering. An uneasy nest, unease, a restless. Tonight, drips in passing in return, perhaps light airs. We begin, again.\n \n\n10:57\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Song] ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Check SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds of these recordings. Thank you for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Song]\n "],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9985","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.5, The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough, 21 February 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/84e938cc-2b23-4f14-b878-f316ed90368b/audio/a1afdd87-27b6-41a9-b7c9-3b8355079a60/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-5.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:20:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"19,369,108 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.5\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-02-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Archival audio in this episode is excerpted from a recording of The Words and Music Show on November 20, 2016 (Casa del Popolo, Montreal). \\n\\nThe performers that night were Eve Nixen, Kaie Kellough, Tawhida Tanya Evanson’s Zenship [Tawhaida Tanya Evanson (voice); Mark Haynes (bass); Ziya Tabassian (percussion); Caulder Nash (keyboards), with guest performance by Nina Segalowitz (Inuit throat singing)], Paul Dutton, and pianist Stefan Christoff.\\n\\nSHOW NOTES\\n\\nKellough, Kaie.\\nMagnetic Equator\\n. McClelland and Stewart, 2020. \\n\\n—“Rough Craft: Notes on the creation of the audio / visual / textual work Small Stones.”\\nSPOKENWEBLOG,\\n22 May, 2021,\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/rough-craft-notes-on-the-creation-of-the-audio-visual-textual-work-small-stones/\\n.\\n\\n“The Show Goes On.” Producer Jason Camlot.\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 7 Feb 2022.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549810577408,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["On ShortCuts this month, producer Katherine McLeod talks with poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough about a memorable recording from The Words & Music Show.  \n\nWhat are we listening to? Kellough unpacks what we are listening to — which turns out to be a highly technical, performative, and polyphonic sonic object, along with it being an early version of a passage from his Griffin Prize-winning book of poetry,\nMagnetic Equator\n. \n\nListen to this ShortCuts for the story behind one archival recording, and what this story reveals about how we remember the feelings infused within live performance. \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor, and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod, for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SpokenWeb blog [Sound Effect: Wind Chime]. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you are a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings and there is a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening — let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine your audio by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Now, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:29\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, where we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors] from SpokenWeb’s audio collections. On this episode, we’ll be listening to an audio clip from a performance by Griffin poetry prize-winning poet, Kaie Kellough. It’s a recording of him reading at The Words & Music Show in Montreal, back in November, 2016. You may even remember this clip. It was featured previously on ShortCuts. It’s a memorable recording in which Kellough’s introduction to a poem becomes the poem. I thought I’d return to this clip, partly as a response to the most recent full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast — and do check that out if you haven’t already — and also because I’ve always wanted to ask Kellough about that performance. What are we listening to? And what does it feel like for him to listen to that recording? So let’s travel back in time to the Words & Music Show at Casa Del Popolo in 2016. Kaie Kellough is on stage and he is thanking host Ian Ferrier for the introduction and he’s about to start his set. We’ll hear a recording of that first. And then we’ll jump into my recent conversation on Zoom with Kaie Kellough. We started that conversation by listening to the same recording. Or, as I said to him, I’ll play this very short clip and we’ll listen to it together…\n \n\n02:59\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tWe we’ll play the very short clip and we can listen to it together.\n \n\n03:02\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tSounds good.\n \n\n03:03\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tAnd so let me just share this.\n \n\n03:06\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough, Words & Music Show, 2016:\tHello, thanks Ian, for that introduction. And… thanks to all of the other artists tonight… It’s been a very nice night. I’mmmmm going to present something to you, for you, that is… somewhat narrative, I guess… but it isn’t related to my novel. It’s some other narratives and… the narratives are related to adolescence… which is a peculiar time in life…. and I think that they’re relevant nowadays because [Recorded speech begins overlapping, legible words will appear in square brackets] they’re related to adolescence in a particular place in time…in Alberta behind in the [I want to forget] 1980s [high school fever forever] in the moment of [black hair, teens from the] heavy evangelical who drank themselves to activity extreme conservatism [trying to prove themselves that they exist] that they, some of the challenge is that arise growing up [I want to forget my stupid conviction] and trying to live oneself in a climate like that, which seems to be a climate that had to reemerging in spite of that [amber alcohol, all of the DNA] all of the [seeped down centuries of slavery] all of the appearances to the contrary that had appeared [in a far flung] in the past [suburb of empire]. The idea [that slum above] born yesterday was finished [or that born yesterday] was finished [or a bubble] or [a burden was seat and, and done suddenly a wave [a froth that was archived by teenage brains] a wave of [autobiography of conservatism] of conservatism has, has has [crashed] crashed [Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the jaws of life rend and pry it open] suddenly a wa— [like a tuna can] suddenly a [everybody is unconscious] suddenly a wave [is bleeding] has crashed…\n \n\n05:22\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tThat was recorded at The Words and Music Show back in 2016. And I’m wondering, what, what are we listening to there? What are we hearing?\n \n\n05:34\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tWow. 2016! I didn’t realize it was that long ago. Actually, what you’re listening to is a passage from the manuscript of Magnetic Equator. I mean, that was a very, very, very early iteration of that. And it was – one of the themes that became a sort of major thread in the book, which was writing about adolescence in Western Canada in the 80s and 90s. But what I was trying to do in the performance was – you know, in live vocal performance one of the things that is a huge concern is that you only have one voice at a time, right. So how do you multiply that? How do you get to have maybe two voices or three voices at a time, or half a voice? How does that work? So you can multiply or divide voice. And that instantly makes, I think, the sonic field and the vocal field a little bit richer. And then if you can overlap them or layer them, or have them speak across one another — and sometimes sync-up and sometimes diverge — then it becomes not just multiple voices but it becomes an interplay among multiple voices, a sort of directed movement. So one problem was, how do you get around having just one voice in performance? And then what happens when you have multiple voices? What do you do with them? Then another other concern is that, sometimes in live oral performance, the poet, or the presenter plays these dual roles and sort of toggles between them. There’s the role of the poet — the, how can I put this? The MC, the master of ceremonies where you, you say, “okay, so now this next poem that I’m going to present is about”….and, and it’s you, right? The human being. You crack a couple of jokes, you present the poem, or you say something important about it, and then you present the poem. But when you read the poem, you shift into another persona. That’s the performer. That kind of movement back and forth — I’ve always liked to kind of try to subvert that and not to emphasize that too much, or find ways of blending it. So the introduction becomes the poem, or the introduction, in this case, winds up entering into dialogue with the poem. The voice that was the poem was recorded into a Zoom recorder. And then that Zoom was — so I had a bunch of electronics in front of me at the time. So there’s a visual part of the performance that can’t be seen in that intro clip.\n \n\n08:15\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd so it’s sort of the playing up the part of sort of the befuddled button, electronic button tweaker, right? Trying to say something, meanwhile, being distracted by the machine and your voice gets overtaken by the machine, but also –so there’s my voice going through a clean microphone. And then there’s a second voice which been recorded into a Zoom and that’s being played through — actually, no, there are three voices. So there’s my voice, introducing the poem. There’s a second voice that’s going through a mixer and out to the house, and that’s a recorded voice. And then there’s a third recorded voice that’s going back into an effects pedal and then out. So there can always – from the recording there can always be a clean channel and a channel that is run through effects. And I was running it through this really the interesting analog delay pedal that doesn’t sound like your usual delay, but it sort of breaks up and fragments the source sound.[Recorded audio of fragmented sound effect plays in the background] So eventually the voice started to – it would sound like tape delay, like scribing and fragmenting and breaking. [Fragmented Voice: “Wandering out of time / This ship built by oil money / this fort for raw tobacco]\n \n\n09:42\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tSo potentially the voice would start to sound like tape delay, like squiggling and fragmenting and breaking up. But yeah, so there could potentially be three voices, mine, the clean recorded, and the broken.\n \n\n09:48\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tAnd I guess the fact that Ian Ferrier recorded every Words and Music Show, then we have this version, all three voices are captured in Ian’s recording in an interesting way that then –.\n \n\n10:03\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYes.\n \n\n10:03\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\t– it’s like we have one iteration of it, but it would never have been performed the same way twice.\n \n\n10:10\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tThere was another thing — I remember this performance and what I was thinking about was — was also having the introduction to the poem, be sort of halting and… failing to progress fluidly. I wanted to have the work come up under that. So to give the impression that I didn’t know exactly what I might be doing and then have the poem take over in a moment of uncertainty. But yeah, thanks to Ian for recording that stuff, because it was an experiment. I’d been playing with it at home and we decided — I got the chance to experiment— I think that might have been a bill that Paul Dutton was on too.\n \n\n10:52\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tTo imagine then hearing that alongside one of Paul Dutton’s performances too. That adds even more. I think too thinking about when – what you talked about the, almost like the hesitant introduction, it felt like that worked so well too with the poem, because it felt like of thinking back —ok back to adolescence, and hesitating kind of feeling like do I wanna go back or do, and so it sort of felt like that hesitancy was also connected to a bit of the emotional distance from that time too, and really, really hearing that process. It really, yeah – it feels like we’re listening to a process unfolding in the way that the introduction moves into the poem. It feels like a very important part of the process of how the poem evolved eventually to become what it is on the page.\n \n\n11:47\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah. No, the poem changed a lot between that iteration into 2016, and what was later, what was the edited version that was wound up being published. The one that was performed in 2016 — I can definitely say that the poem had probably been written within weeks of that performance. I was trying to — I was trying to, trying to play with the idea that…the sense that maybe the person who was presenting the poems was not fully competent. Their confidence was wavering. And those are not things that you’re supposed to perform, right. Once you get up in the moment of performance, it’s supposed to be pure expertise and excellence. And difficulty, hesitancy — those things are not supposed to be there. Those are supposed to be –you’re supposed to gloss those over with a sense of know-how and knowing what to do in the moment. And so how do you approach a performance and get around the need for constant expertise throughout? Because those other experiences are part of the experience of performing. Even if you don’t perform them, you feel them while you’re performing. You feel hesitant, your brain is racing. You’re not sure what to say next. You don’t necessarily always feel totally capable when you go up there to perform. So how do you emphasize that in a way that works within the context of the performance?\n \n\n13:35\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tHearing this now in the archive, how does this recording sit for you in time?\n \n\n13:40\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah, it’s interesting because it does sit – I mean, it does sit as something that is — it’s like a board tap from a live event. So there’s a raw quality to it. If this were made in a studio, it would’ve been a different piece because it would’ve been created for audio. Right. It would’ve been created exclusively as an audio piece and there would’ve been really limited emphasis on the visual aspect of performance and that communication and with an audience. It would’ve been elaborate in a different way as a sonic object. So, I mean, that does cross my mind, and that’s not necessarily a negative thing. What I mean by that is that just kind of establishes the further context for what it was.\n \n\n14:29\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd that was one of the nice things about, about Wired on Words. If you wanted, you could accept Ian’s invitation to go to the show and you could repeat the same work that you repeated two months before that. And three months before that and six months before that. I accepted a lot of Ian’s invitations, and I always tried to take them as opportunities to attempt something slightly different. And so, I might have repeated myself sometimes, but I was really, really trying to move away from that. And that helped me because there was a thought that I could consistently develop new work and it didn’t have to be perfect and flawless to go out to be presented to the public, but it could be developed and developing towards something, and, in the moment of performance, if I could communicate that well enough people would grasp that. That was also — it also felt like it was the context of the show. There was a looseness to it that kind of allowed for that. It was –I mean, it was a show. So you were presenting somewhat finished works to the public, but the thing about it was that there’s something very casual about it too.\n \n\n15:59\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tI feel that The Words and Music Show still feels that way, and it’s amazing to continue having that spirit through — such a long — through over 20 years of having the show.\n \n\n16:11\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah, especially thinking about it now. I mean we’re in the fourth or fifth wave the pandemic and everything shut down again. The literary world has, and the world of literature and performance has kind of migrated online, with varying degrees of success. I don’t think — like the world of performance — I mean, it’s difficult to feel any inspiration toward performance when you’re sitting in your living room — right? [Laugher] It just seems so ridiculous. And, so to think back on the freedom to just roll out to a venue close by home and to be able to perform and to benefit from what you were talking about earlier about — I mean, that’s what we don’t benefit from with online events, the being able to mill about and talk with people after the event. Like when with an online event, you’re there for the event.\n \n\n17:14\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tYeah.\n \n\n17:15\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd there may be some back and forth in the comments or in the chat, but generally you’re there for the event and with live events, you were partly there for the event, but then there was all of the other stuff that went on in between. In between, in between performances, in between sets, like if I would bring a bunch of gear there, like pedals and synths and stuff like that, other musicians would come up on stage and we would chat about the equipment and about the gear. And, “Oh, what can this panel in your synth do? How did you use this pedal? Oh, I have one that does this” And so on. And so there would also be some casual, impromptu learning that would take place. Someone might ask you if you’ve ever used one of your pieces of equipment in such and such a way, and might show you how to do something with it. So that possibility too was really very much a part of those, those. Or, how did you get that sound, you know? And then you could share information about that. And that learning was a big part of those events too\n \n\n18:22\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tHmm. Yeah, we’re definitely missing it. [Sigh] Well, I think that’s a beautiful note to end on. I want to thank you. Thank you so much, Kaie, for joining me and talking about this clip from Words and Music Show and what we’re listening to.\n \n\n18:40\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tOh, thanks. Thanks for having me. And thanks for asking me and reminding me of the clip. You asked me [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it and it’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself and to – I didn’t realize it was as far back as 2016, because it feels a lot sooner. I remember what I was thinking about. I remember what my poetry, my poetic preoccupations were at the time. I remember how far that poem came because it was young and sentimental when I wrote it, and then it was not like that by the time it was published. It took on a different sort of personality by the time it was published. But yeah, I remember everything that I was thinking about. I remember how excited I was about it. Yeah. It’s just a — so thank you.\n \n\n19:34\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tThank you so much.\n \n\n19:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. My guest this month was poet Kaie Kellough. ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9987","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.7, Moving, Still, 18 April 2022, McLeod "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/023b5797-abed-48ca-ba69-1868d7cacb3c/audio/0fb8f4d8-ae79-48dd-b220-44cfbb8e03b1/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-7.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:17:17\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"16,663,659 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-04-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nPhyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.\\n\\nShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nCollis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549814771712,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, ShortCuts returns to a recording of Phyllis Webb in order to re-listen through this season’s question of how the archive remembers. What is held in the ‘room’ of the recording, and how does that differ from the room where reading took place? Or from the room of personal memory? What exceeds those rooms? And what does it feel like to hear their contours? Join producer Katherine McLeod as she reflects upon these questions while listening to a 1966 recording of Phyllis Webb reading from Naked Poems.\n\n00:09\nShortCuts Theme Music:\n[Piano Overlaid with Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\nHannah McGregor:\nWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nepisode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, so if you love what you hear make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the Spoken Web Project, think about joining Katherine on shortcuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloging recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nTheme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n\n01:28\nKatherine McLeod:\nWelcome to ShortCuts, a monthly minisode in which we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors] from the Spoken Web archives. This month it is April, the month of poetry. The audio that we’ll be listening to is a poem by Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. It is in fact, a series of poems from\nNaked Poems\n, poems that open up space and leave room for the listener to listen, to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. The space is audible in her reading of the poems, and it is visible on the page, as Webb comments on when she introduces\nNaked Poems\nto her Montreal audience in 1966.\n\n02:15\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nI want to move on now to my latest book, which is called Naked Poems, in which one of your local critics – or at least he wrote for the\nMontreal Star\nthis particular point – exclaimed of the price because there are so few words in the book. [Audience Laughter] It’s $2.25. [Audience Laughter] These poems are very small and therefore very expensive [Audience Laughter] and – came at a bitter price, I may say. To me. They came quite as a surprise and I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them the first 14 or so. I thought, my goodness, what are these little things doing here? And I couldn’t quite take them seriously. And then I began to see the order that really was intrinsic in them and realized that here was something almost a new form for me to work on. And it’s very bare, naked, undecorated. And I wanted to get rid of all my affectations. And so I decided to to write, oh a couple hundred of them. And I wrote about a hundred and then got hung up on a technical problem and finally reduced them to, I dunno, 40 or so that are in this book. So this is a distillation, let’s say. [Pages Turning] I’m going to read the first 14, which comprised a total poem. In the sense the whole book is a poem. And then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice and your patience will hold out.\n\n04:31\nKatherine McLeod:\nIn listening to how Phyllis Webb tells her audience about Naked Poems we hear what it would’ve been like to be there in the room. We hear the audience and their laughter. The feeling as though she is holding the pages of Naked Poems in her hands, as she is telling us about them. We can almost feel the touch of the page, the small distilled poems, how they came to her at a bitter price. What does she mean by that? Now, if all of this is sounding somewhat familiar it’s because the clips that I’m playing are from recordings of Webb reading Naked Poems that were the focus of April’s ShortCuts last season. We are returning to this recording for a number of reasons, but most of all as a remembrance of Webb. Last year in April, I created the ShortCuts based on the Webb recording as a gift for her. April was her birthday month and I imagined it reaching her ears on the West Coast. In November 2021 Webb passed away at a glorious old age and even with such a full long life, it still felt like such a loss. This season of ShortCuts, there has been an ongoing theme of listening to remember. And if you listen back through each episode, you’ll hear it developing. I produce each episode in the month it is released. And so that development was not planned at the outset. Each episode has been a way to dive deeper and deeper into one of the stories told in that first episode, “What the Archive Remembers”. In that, I talk about an interaction at a conference in which someone told me that they’d really felt the weight and impact of hearing bp nichol’s voice in a recording that I had played. What strikes me now is that we are in a position in which we have vast amounts of recorded materials of poets, and that those recordings are perhaps more accessible then they have ever been before. That’s thanks to the internet, but also thanks to large scale audio digitization projects such as SpokenWeb, among others. What I’m getting at here is that we’ve had recordings of poets voices for a long time now, but have we ever had them so readily available and with a record of their voice from throughout their career, throughout their lives? It is with this in mind that I invite all of us to return back to that recording of Phyllis Webb, reading in Montreal in 1966. And you’ll hear my voice from last year, commenting on that audio followed by my voice now at the end.\n\n07:22\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nAnd then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice [Pages Flipping] and your patience were hold out.\n\n07:29\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nThe reading was recorded in 1966 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia. At that reading, the second reader was Gwendolyn MacEwen. Imagine hearing Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn McEwen reading in person on the same night. MacEwen would’ve been sitting in the audience, listening to Webb read. Here is Webb reading “Suite I” and “Suite II” from Naked Poems.\n07:58\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n[Webb Reading] “Suite I” Moving to establish distance between our houses. It seems I welcome you in. Your mouth blesses me all over. There is room. And here. And here. And here. And over. And over. Your. Mouth. Tonight, quietness in me and the room. I am enclosed by a thought and some walls. The bruise. Again, you have left your mark. All we have. Skin shuttered secretly. [Page Turning] Flies. Tonight in this room, two flies on the ceiling are making love quietly or so it seems down here. [Audience Laughter]. Your blouse. I people this room with things, a chair, a lamp, a fly. Two books by Mary Ann Moore. I have thrown my gloves on the floor. Was it only last night? You took with so much gentleness, my dark. Sweet tooth. While you were away, I held you like this in my mind. It is a good mind that can embody perfection with exactitude. The sun comes through plum curtains. I said, the sun is gold in your eyes. It isn’t the sun. You said. [Page Turning] On the floor, your blouse. The plum light falls more golden, going down. Tonight, quietness in the room. We knew. [Page Turning] Then you must go. I sat cross-legged on the bed. There is no room for self pity, I said. I lied. In the gold darkening light you dressed. I hid my face in my hair. The room that held you is still here. [Page Turning] You brought me clarity. Gift after gift I wear. Poems naked. In the sunlight. On the floor. [Page Turning]\n\n11:31\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sun beam shining through the air. We see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room. We feel the air thick with eros, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire to be contained within the archives of this reading series?\n\n12:04\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nWhile you were away. I held you like this in my mind.\n12:10\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe hear this holding. The quietness of each page.\n12:14\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nQuietness in the room. We knew. [Page Turning].\n12:19\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe hear the turning of the page. The room.\n12:23\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nThe room that held you is still here.\n12:27\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe are listening to desire in the making every time we press play on this recording, as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem, the room of the reading, the voice moving –\n\n12:41\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n[Ambient Room Sounds].\n12:41\nKatherine McLeod:\n– I hear how in last year’s ShortCuts, I was so interested in that space of the room and what it could hold. I hear that now as speaking to what I was exploring of ShortCuts, as a method of feminist placemaking. A room, an audible place in which to hear women’s voices from the archives. For them to take up sonic space and for us to hear what feelings are made through those sounds. I was interested in and how that related to my role as producer curating this space. How much does one hold up voices by framing them or does one simply press play? One tries (or rather I try) to strike the right balance between supporting the voice with care in how it is introduced, why that voice has been pulled out of the archives, and then letting the listener and the voice embark on their own dance. That is how last year I was hearing the line…\n\n13:53\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nThe room that held you is still here.\n13:57\nKatherine McLeod:\nThis year, I still hear it that way but I also hear the room as a precursor to the room that was far from Webb in 1966, but would be the room in which I met her when I visited her on Salt Spring Island in 2017. I think of that room because I wish I could have visited her once more again. And yet I’m also grateful for that time in which I was there. That room in a senior’s care facility was her room. It was her home. In that room of her own we talked about the 1960s. We sat amid her paintings. Her art was holding us in that room, along with the warmth of her smile and generosity. I thought to myself, this is a woman who knows how to live. I say that in the present tense, because it feels like she is still living. The room that held you is still here. And it is still here. We are still listening. What a word still. It implies a pause in motion, and yet at the same time, it implies a persistence. Still moving. Moving. That is what I called ShortCuts last year. Phyllis Webb is still moving. I say that thinking of these words that I wrote at the end of a chapter about Webb in [the book]\nMoving Archives\n, and they feel like some of the only words that can wrap up, that can hold together an episode that does not want to end.\n\n15:42\nKatherine McLeod\n[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] [Reading out loud from the book\nMoving Archives\n] Only Phyllis Webb inhabits the place where her voice dwells. A reminder of this appeared to me by chance while typing these lines. When I noticed that Stephen Collis had posted a photo to Twitter with the caption “Phyllis Webb’s hands”. The camera looks down at an angle at Webb holding her entire body of poetic work\nPeacock Blue: The Collected Poems\n. The book lies open, the table of contents on her lap, a tray of olives and brie sit next to her, ready to be consumed throughout what promises to be a long conversation with Collis about poetry. [Music Pauses] Webbs right hand is held up, long fingers spread wide and flexed as though she is about to turn the page. Quietly, she is moving. [Music Restarts] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. It was recorded in the city of Montreal or what is known as Tiohtià:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Judith Burr and Kate Moffatt and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. 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Diving into a recording that concluded last year’s symposium, producer Katherine McLeod plays excerpts from Oana Avasilichioaei’s live performance of “Chambersonic (IV)” and Klara du Plessis’s reading of “Post-Mortem of the Event.” What is the sound of this event? Listening to the recording now invites reflections on what this event sounds like: how do we hear its affect, its traces, and how it shifts in time?\n\n00:10\nHannah McGregor:\n[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Welcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nepisode, you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Music Interlude:\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nTheme Music] \n01:27\nKatherine McLeod:\nWelcome to ShortCuts. When this ShortCuts comes out, it will be in the same week of this year’s SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute. At the end of last year’s symposium called “Listening, Sound, Agency” there was an online Words & Music Show. Here is SpokenWeb’s Jason Camlot, welcoming those tuning in and explaining the relationship between this event and the symposium week that was coming to an end.\n01:58\nAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music Show, 2021:\nWell, we’re gonna get things started. I just, I wanted to say a few words before I turn things over to the host of the evening and of all Words and Music Shows – Ian Ferrier – who you just saw. I’m Jason Camlot. I’m a co-host of this show. I’ve actually been co-hosting these, or background hosting them with Ian, since March 2020, when pandemic forced us onto Zoom, out of the Casa del Popolo, which you see in the background of my screen, my fake background. This event was imagined as a celebration of that symposium, and as a way of bringing the local community in touch with some of the participants in the symposium. For me, it’s a really fun way to finish what’s been an amazing week of activity and thinking and sharing.\n02:48\nKatherine McLeod:\nAlong with SpokenWeb and Symposium poets – Kevin McNeilly, Cole Mash, Erin Scott, and Klara du Plessis who performed that night – the special guest for that show was poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei. Oana had performed live at the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium in Vancouver, along with participating in various SpokenWeb events in Montreal. In 2021, her book\nEight Track\nhad just received great acclaim and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Featuring her on that night was part of a way of making a connection between the symposium and local Montreal poets. At the symposium, I had, in fact, presented a paper with Dr. Emily Murphy about Oana’s poetry as notation. For that presentation we had been working with a recording of\nChambersonic\nthat is published digitally in visual and audio formats on the\nCapilano Review\n. But Oana’s performance of a version of\nChambersonic\non that night of the online Words & Music Show was its own version. It was performed live. And, after listening, again, to this performance by Oana, I was struck by what Klara du Plessis chooses to read, following Oana’s performance. In listening to the recording, we are hearing a listening taking place within the event. And so in this ShortCuts we’ll be listening to Oana – and then we’ll be listening to Klara – as a listening to the event. What the event sounds like, what it feels like. What are its traces left behind, and its shifts in time? Here’s Ian Ferrier introducing Oana Avasilichioaei.\n04:37\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\n…our star performer of the evening. Her work interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry-hybrids include\nEight Track\nfrom Talonbooks, which is the finalist for the Klein prize for poetry and the Governor General’s Award, and\nLiminal\nfrom Talonbooks in 2015. She’s created many performance and sound works, written a libretto for a one act opera called\nCells of Wind\nin 2020, and translated 10 books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, most recently Bertrand Laverdure’s\nThe Neptune Room\nwhich is also a finalist for the Governor General’s literary award for translation. She’s performed a number of times in our show and each time has brought amazing work. So please welcome Oana tonight. Yeah.\n05:33\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you, thank you so much, Ian. Thank you so much for having me and I’m super happy to be here. So I’m going to share two pieces. The first piece is a video piece that I made last fall, which I call a filmpoem. It’s called “Tracking Animal (an extemporization)”, and it uses some text from the long work in this – in a track called “Tracking Animal.” And in fact, it will take us back outside. I’m just going to share my screen here and play it for you.\n06:14\nKatherine McLeod:\nWhen Oana said those words, she did take us back outside. The visuals then showed her standing and walking in recognizable local Montreal spaces. She had recorded this video alone during the early times of the pandemic. You could see and feel that aloneness. The tracking of the self. It’s also quite moving that the spaces that she recorded in are spaces that many Montrealers have used to create art on their own during the pandemic — and that those spaces will soon, once again, be vibrant with arts events happening in them this summer outside. It is a beautiful piece, this video, and you can find a link to it in the show notes. The fact that she took us outside resonated with me as a listener, because I remember that when I was tuning into this show, I was listening on my balcony. I took a photo that night of my listening with my computer and Oana and the moon shining above. I sent that photo to her the next day as a form of thanks. And I look at it again now to remind myself that it was live. I stress the word live because the next piece she performed and the one that we’ll listen to was a version of\nChambersonic\n, and it was performed live.\n07:45\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThe second piece I’m going to do is actually going to be a live work. It’s new, it’s from a new body of work that I’m working on called\nChambersonic\n— the larger project. And each piece I’m doing is numbered. So this is “Chambersonic (IV)”, and it’s based on a score, “Chambersonic (I)”, that looks like this [Shows Page to Audience] , and it was a version of both the score and the sound piece that was published in\nThe Capilano Review\nin their fall issue. So, I’m going to need to change some audio settings. And then I’m going to start the piece… [Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] This, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now, this is a variant of being, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now. This is a variant of being… Let form be oral. A foundation…. [Singing] Sonority… An impossible lone sound… —netic … Recording… [Whispered] The ghost of sound. Let form be oral. A foundation… [Voices overlap] Corporeal, phonetic, fragments, re-assemblages. [Whispered] The ghost of sound…\n10:45\nKatherine McLeod:\nThis, this is a setting on music. This is. What is this? It is as though she is asking us to consider what is this this-ness — of sonority? Of an impossible lone sound? Of the ghost of sound? It is as though she is saying, I am performing now. This is the performance. This. We hear this even while knowing that there is an accompanying score. Is that too a this? She conveys an assertion of presence in the performance itself, which is why it feels so powerful to remember that it is happening live. As you are listening to this recording. How does listening now differ from me listening on my balcony under the moon to the live-stream? Where is the event now? [Audio of Oana’s Performance Begins] Let’s re-enter the sound and we’ll hear Ian Ferrier take us from Oana’s performance into Klara du Plessis’s reading that follows, and you’ll hear why I let the tape play and where Klara’s reading takes us…\n11:56\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] Voice… Of timbre… The voice. Fills the void. The activity of sound, quieter, and louder, longer, and shorter… [Overlapping voice] The activity of sound — and quieter. Higher, and lower. Longer, and short. The activity of sound, louder and quieter, higher and lower… where silence differentiates.\n13:36\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nOh, that was lovely. Yeah. So nice to hear. And I love the sung voice and the talking voice and the whisper voice and the industrial sound beneath it. That’s really just a beautiful piece. Thank you so much.\n13:51\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you. Thank you. Took me a moment to get back. [Laughs]\n13:57\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah, it took me a moment too. I’m still [Sings] louder [Laughs] right. So thank you so much for that.\n14:07\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThanks so much for having me again.\n14:09\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah. Nice to see you. Yeah, yeah. And next up we have a person who’s been working quite a bit through the symposium as well. Her name is Klara du Plessis. She’s a poet, a critic, a literary curator too. And she resides in Montreal. She’s the winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial award for her debut collection\nEkke\n, which was published with Palimpsest Press. Her second book, which was released in the fall of 2020 is\nHell Light Flesh\n, and Klara is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University researching the recent, contemporary, and experimental curation of poetry readings. Please welcome Klara du Plessis.\n14:54\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you so much for that really generous introduction, Ian. I’m still astounded by Oana’s performance and everything that came before. And so I feel like I’m still in a transitional phase, trying to get my bearings. It’s also the end of an incredible symposium week that’s been running since Tuesday night, and maybe as a result of that, I made a couple of decisions. One of them is to read new work. I’ve decided to try out some works that are in what I would call a draft and a half [Laugh]. So they’ve been lying around for a while they’re maybe six months or eight months old. But I only really edited them very lightly. I’m reading it because I feel like I kind of trust the people here and feel comfortable with a kind of tradition that Words & Music seems to have for people to try things. But the second reason that I am I’ve decided to read from this work is because I feel like it emanates from the research I’ve been doing at Concordia. And very much is a result of me reading works on archives and doing work in audio, audio and digital, both analog and digital archives. And, it’s a short, long poem. The kind of character in the poem is the event. But while I was writing it, because I was kind of thinking of postmortem and anatomy and so on, I did at some point look at that famous old Rembrandt painting of the anatomy table, which has the kind of famous, strange hand, like the hand, if you look at that painting, it’s got a hand that’s supposed to be the right hand, but it’s actually a left hand or a reverse. Um, and that kind of made its way into this poem also. So it’s called “Post-mortem of the event.” [Klara reading poem] The event lies on the table with its left hand and frontal arm dissected, sinuses and muscles, and maybe one disposable bone strumming like lines from a poem, pink inner exposeé, rationalizes the soul from vessel to enlightenment the latter so mystical, who knows how the verse becomes a multidimensional grid. Logic of the luminous skin of the other hand, intact pale rams brawn of the Cartesian Caucasian corpse. The event opened undocumented archive over the table, displayed, displayed, played, and atomically laid out to rest resist laboratory pages white as coats. Only thing is that the left hand is not the left, but the right, but not the right hand, but a second right hand, multifarious body mirroring itself in hands in hand rippling along its definitions of progress, usage and control. On the one hand, and on the other hand as wingspan on the one hand and on the one hand or on the other hand, and on the other hand, the archive of hands fans out fingers replicating selves, look, really look at this artwork. So strange armoured in mourning like the night…\n18:49\nKatherine McLeod:\nThe poem that Klara is reading from will be part of a forthcoming book in 2024.\nPost-mortem of the Event\nis, in fact, the working title of that collection. Oana’s performance that night is also a work-in-progress. It’s one version of “Chambersonic (IV)” of\nChambersonic\nand the written textual material traces of that project will be coming out as a book also in 2024 under the title,\nChambersonic\n. Let’s hear how Klara’s poem ends, and then we’ll hear Ian’s voice again, asking what comes next?\n19:25\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Klara reading poem] …with eight men and an extra dead struck still in time in the instant before darkness hits before bodies speed up moving the event, rapid fire and risqué rinsing themselves in light and a handshake with air. Thank you.\n19:48\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nWhat a great piece. And that’s in progress?\n19:53\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah, this is new stuff. [Laughs]\n19:55\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Laughs] Yeah, it’s really great. It’s really, really, really stunning all the different parts connecting around the event. So thank you very much for that. And thank you for your work on this conference and to Jason and to Ali as well. It’s been an amazing journey, which I guess you get to relax from tomorrow. Or do you do a post-mortem, or what happens at the end of all this?\n20:22\nKatherine McLeod:\nWhen Ian asks Klara about the post-mortem of the event, it’s quite funny to hear that now because our symposium committee for listening sound agency has gone on to produce many collaborative outputs. The event has not ended. There’s an art book called\nQuotes\nedited by Klara and Emma Telaro about to be at this year’s symposium; also to be launched is a vinyl record with sounds from symposium participants, compiled by Deanna Fong, Angus Tarnowsky and Jason Camlot; a podcast episode has been released about the symposium and it was produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stephanie Ricci. And there will be a forthcoming issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches to Literary Studies” edited by Jason Camlot and me, Katherine McLeod. So when you hear the end of this event, know that it is not the end, just like the poems that we have listened to continue to be in progress. This, this too is the event. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n21:32\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nSo nice to see everybody tonight. Thanks for your performances to Klara, to Cole, to Erin, to Oana, to Kevin. It’s been a really fun ride tonight. So thank you.\n21:43\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you. Thank you both.\n21:46\nAudio Recording, Kevin McNeilly, Words & Music, 2021:\nThanks so much. It’s terrific.\n21:49\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nGoodnight, everyone. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for coming.\n21:51\nAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music, 2021:\nWe’ll see you all soon.\n21:58\nKatherine McLeod:\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. If you want to learn more about where the sounds you’ve heard have come from head to SpokenWeb.ca and check the show notes for ShortCuts. If you’re listening to this on the release day, and you want to tune-in to SpokenWeb’s Symposium this year, head to spoken web.ca and click on “Symposia.” Plus you can find the podcast episode based on last year’s symposium by checking previous episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll find “Listening, Sound, Agency: a retrospective listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium” as the March, 2022 episode. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor transcribed by Kelly Cubbon mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, Kate Moffatt, and Miranda Eastwood, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9989","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.9, Re-Situating Sound, 20 June 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-situating-sound/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/d0f241a4-bbfd-4525-b10d-8a184654074b/audio/e47ee535-70b1-413b-a11a-88e60ed939b2/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-9.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:16:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"28,592,110 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts_3.9\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-situating-sound/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-06-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nArchival audio excerpted in this episode is from “radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988” held in Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.\\n\\nSound effect is “Automatic tapedeck rewind, fastforward, play” (stecman) Free Sound. 6 January 2017. https://freesound.org/s/376058/.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nBrand, Dionne. Chronicles: Early Works. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Unarchiving the Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 3-31.\\n\\n“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.\\n\\nKinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.\\n\\nOur Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections,  https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\\n\\n“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.” Produced by Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 21 June 2021. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/.\\n\\n“Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity.” Produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 6 June 2022. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549815820289,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In the making of ShortCuts, series producer Katherine McLeod often talks about how recorded sound is held not only within archives but also by the work of contextualizing whenever one selects an archival audio clip and presses play. Returning to an audio recording of Dionne Brand played in ShortCuts 2.9 “Situating Sound” (June 2021), Katherine reminds us that the process of unarchiving sound is an embodied one. We listen as bodies to the archive. Moreover, how we choose to contextualize sound impacts any listening to it, and written transcripts too frame our understanding of the audio content. Building upon the most recent episode of The SpokenWeb, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity,” this episode of ShortCuts explores the transcript as another version of holding the sound, while, at the same time, invites a listening to that which exceeds that holding.\n\n“…even those that do not hold a wind’s impression”\n– Dionne Brand from Primitive Offensive\n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG, so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work, especially if you’re a student that has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings that there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening. Let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n00:58\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n01:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Last month we immersed in the world of the SpokenWeb symposium. The ShortCuts episode called “The Event” included audio that resonates with both this year’s and last year’s symposium and institute. And if you were at the symposium you’ll know that I was recording ShortCuts Live! A new type of ShortCuts episode recorded live on site with various researchers within the SpokenWeb network. Stay tuned for ShortCuts Live! in the next season. This month, we continue the season’s theme of how the archives remembers. We’ll be listening to a clip from a past ShortCuts – one from last June, exactly one year ago – and we’ll listen to it again in the context of the transcription episode on The SpokenWeb Podcast released at the start of this month. In that episode, Kelly Cubbon and I talk about transcription as a process that is rooted in conversation and collaboration. Do check it out – Episode 9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”. After making that episode, I thought I’d take a look back at some of the transcripts for ShortCuts. When Kelly transcribes the audio, it is usually quite straightforward but when there are questions they’re often questions related to providing further context as to where the sound is coming from, or if we should put a cue for the reader as to where that voice is from, or where it was recorded, right in the transcript. To quote Kelly herself making one of my favourite points in our episode…\n \n\n03:08\tKelly Cubbon, S3E9, SpokenWeb Podcast:\tThe overlapping sound is one thing, but I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of slightly different context to indicate.\n \n\n03:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tKelly and I have talked so much about how these questions are not transcription problems but rather generative transcription challenges and situations to learn from. Another challenge that can emerge in ShortCuts is how to transcribe words from a poem read out loud. What we have gone with is an approach that transcribes the words as spoken out loud (though including in brackets that the speaker is reading a poem since often the tone of the voice has changed.) That way the transcript is not attempting to reproduce the poem on the page as it is published – rather, the transcript aims to represent the sounds heard in the podcast and to make them more accessible. Those examples of what can come up in the process of transcription speak to what I’ve described in past ShortCuts as a figuring out, a navigating of how much to frame the archival audio clips that I play for you here. How much do I explain their context? Or do I simply press play? A phrase that captures this balancing act (at least for me!) is one that emerged out of the partial replay that we’ll be hearing in this ShortCuts. [Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding and Stopping] … is what kind of a framework does audio clipped out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms, gesturing as if I’m attempting to hold the sound. [Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding and Stopping] I’ve returned to this image and to this phrase and to this act in many moments in these episodes when thinking about as place held, supported, with my arms outstretched, as an embodied experience – an audible place created as a feminist placemaking. Holding with arms outstretched conveys that the work of framing is my intervention in it – I am not neutral in how I frame the sound even if I am also offering it to you to do what you wish with it, letting you know that the sound is there ready to be listening to. I Am holding the sound carefully, knowing how difficult it can be to take a recorded voice, with all of its situated affect attached to it, out of the archives. To unarchive carefully. That got me thinking, a transcript is also an attempt to hold the sound – it attempts to hold the sound in such a way that increases accessibility to the content while also recognizing that the transcript is, in some way, mediating the experience. With all of this in mind, let’s return to the episode aptly titled “Situating Sound” and hear it again in this moment in time. It is an episode that could be situated in the context of “Communal Memories” which I produced afterwards in December 2021, and that is based on the second part of this recording with the voice of late Stolo writer Lee Maracle. Hearing “Situating Sound” now makes me feel there’s no episode that necessarily comes before or after, but that these episodes continue to cycle around each other. With that let’s dive into “Situating Sound” from June 2021. [Sound Effect: Tape Fast Forwarding] And you’ll hear a recording of Dionne Brand reading in 1988. I invite you to think of how the transcript holds the sound, how the information I provide holds the sound, [Sound Effect: Tape Stops, Presses Play]. And how my voice holds the sound in that I am telling you about what you are going to hear, and to listen for moments when sound exceeds this holding… [Start Music: Piano Instrumental]\n \n\n07:39\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\t…and she had also written about this solidarity in a 1988 issue of the Black women’s newspaper Our Lives that Brand had helped to edit. These pieces of context are only the beginning of unpacking the significance of these two women reading together. And unravelling this history all started by wanting to know more about one archival recording. [End Music: Piano Instrumental]So as we listen to this reading, what would it be like to be there in that room with Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle in 1988? Now in June, 2021, what does it feel like when you hear this recording wherever you might be listening from? How do we understand this recording in relation to the archive that holds it? I am recording this a week after Brand read from The Blue Clerk at an annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists. How does Brand hear time? When she introduces what she reads from Primitive Offensive in the recording we’re about to hear she says that the poetry is made out of the pieces of history, a history that as she says, if you are Black in the Americas, you have to dig for it. How does that resonate with the lines where she chooses to end?\n \n\n08:57\tArchival Audio, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t… [Ambient Background Noise] [Reading Poetry] I won’t take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [Aside to Audience] Okay, that’s it. [Audience applause].\n \n\n09:14\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\tAs we could hear in that recording, there are noises in the background. We’ll be hearing what sound like cars passing outside, we’ll hear some voices and might wonder if those are people talking outside the bookstore window, or perhaps this recording has been recorded over another one and we’re actually hearing the voices of another time bleeding through the tape. Here is Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive in a recording that was broadcast on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988, and now that recording is held by and shapes an archive.\n \n\n10:00\tArchival Audio, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t[Static and various background noises throughout] I’m going to read a poem for my grandmother, a poem for my ancestors, really. I wrote this book Primitive Offensive because, for whatever history has left you, if you were Black in the Americas, you have to dig and dig and dig and memorize and memorize and learn and learn it and redo it and recover it and re– you know, because it isn’t anywhere else. And so this was my history book. Sometimes you arrive and find what seems to be nothing, and you have to dig for it. And this is a call to my ancestors about this history. And I looked for my ancestors and I found what there was. And so – and sometimes you find nothing and you make it anyway. [Laughs] You know, you find a piece of cloth, a bit of this, whatever, but you make it human. So –[Start of reading] Ancestor dirt/ ancestor snake/ ancestor lice / ancestor whip/ ancestor fish/ ancestor slime/ ancestor sea/ ancestor stick/ ancestor iron/ ancestor bush/ ancestor ship/ ancestor old woman, old bead/ let me feel your skin, old muscle, old stick/ where are my bells?/ my rattles/ my condiments, my things to fill houses and minutes/ The fat is starting, where are my things?/ My mixtures, my bones, my decorations/ old bread, old tamarind switch./ Will you bathe me in oils?/ Will you tie me in white cloth?/ Call me by my praise name/ Sing me Oshun song./ Oya against this clamour [Background Noise Rises; Inaudible Voices] / Ancestor old woman/ Send my things after me./ One moment, old lady more questions./ What happened to the ship in your leap? The boatswain, did he scan the passage’s terrible wet face/ The navigator, did he blink?/ Or steer that ship through your screaming night?/ The captain did he lash two slaves to the rigging, for example?/ Lady! My things/ Water leaden, my maps, my compass/ After all, what is the political position of stars? Drop your crusted cough, where you want./ My hands make precious things out of phlegm./ Ancestor wood/ Ancestor dog/ Ancestor ancestor, old man, dry stick, mustache, skin, and bone./ Why didn’t you remember? /Why didn’t you remember the name of our tribe?/Why didn’t you tell me before you died?/ Old horse, you made the white man ride you/ You shot off your leg for him./ Old man, the name of our tribe is all I wanted./ Instead, you went to the swamps and bush and rice paddies for the trading company and they buried you in water/ Crocodile, tears. /It would have been better to remember the name of our tribe./ Now, mosquitoes dance a ballet over your grave and the old woman buried with you wants to leave./ One thing for sure, dismembered woman, when you decide you are alone/ When you decide you are alone, /when you dance, it’s your own broken face. When you eat your own plate of stones/ For damn sure you are alone./ Where do you think you are going dismembered woman?/ Limbs chopped off at the ankles./ When you decide, believe me, you are alone./ Sleep, sleep, tangential phase, sleep,/ Sleeping, or waking/ Understand you are alone./ Diamonds pour from your vagina,/ and your breasts drip healing copper/ But listen, women, dismembered continent/ You are alone./See crying fool,/ You want to talk in gold/ You will cry in iron./ You want to dig up stones./ You will bury flesh./ You think you don’t need oils and amulets compelling powder and rely on smoke./ You want to throw people in cesspits./ Understand dismembered one, ululant /You are alone./ When waterfalls work, land surfaces./ I was sent to this cave./ I went out one day like a fool to find this cave, to find clay, to dig up metals to decorate my bare and painful breasts./ Water and clay for a poultice for this gash to find a map an imprint of me anywhere would have kept me calm./ Anywhere with description./ Instead, I found a piece of this/ A tooth, a bit of food hung on. /A metatarsal, which resembled mine./ Something else like a note. Musical. /ting ting, but of so little pitch so little lasting perhaps it was my voice./ And this too, a suggestion and insinuation so slight, it may be untrue./ Something moving over the brow as with eyes close to black/ a sensate pull/ Phantom! Knocks the forehead back in the middle of a dance. /No, I can’t say dance. It exaggerates./ Phantom. A bit of image./ A motion close to sound, a sound imaged on the retina resembling sound/ A sound seen out of the corner of my eye./ Emotion heard on my inner ear./ I poured over these like a paleontologist./ I dusted them off like an archeologist/ A swatch of cloth./ Skin, atlas, coarse utility, but enough./ Still only a bit of paint, of dye on the stone./ I can not say crude, but a crude thing./ A hair, a marking. That a fingernail to rock an ancient wounded scratch./ I handle these like a papyrologist contours/ A desert sprung here./ Migrations, suggestions, lies./ Phantom. A table and jotting up artful covert mud./ I noted these like a geopolitical scientist./ I will take any evidence of me even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [End of reading] [Aside to audience] Ok. That’s it. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\tThat was the Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive. The recording was played on Vancouver’s co-op radio on August 7th, 1988 and the recording is held by the archives of radiofree rainforest. Now part of SFU library’s digital collections. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music].\n \n\n16:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. It was recorded in Montreal or what is known as Tiohtià:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n "],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9990","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.10, [Replay] Moving, Still, 18 July 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/replay-moving-still/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/d939009b-0129-4515-85b9-34a39f7b18fd/audio/25ff9391-8f6a-4558-b9e0-9ca82e415aa9/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-10-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:18:49\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,073,435 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-3-10-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/replay-moving-still/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-07-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["*Transcript In Progress*"],"contents":["This month, ShortCuts is replaying a past episode as a response to this month’s full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode – “starry and full of glory”: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam (produced by Stephen Collis) – is a moving commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. Along with archival clips, the episode features conversations with two poets – Isabella Wang and Fred Wah – in which they talk about an unpublished poem of Webb’s. Listen to this replay of ShortCuts Ep. 3.7 “Moving, Still” and then, listen to Collis’s episode about Webb as a collective listening. What does the archive remember?"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nPhyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.\\n\\nShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nCollis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549816868864,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.2450583},{"id":"9991","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.1, Introducing ShortCuts, Live!, 16 October 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts-live/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/cf9825d7-2330-4377-a62d-caa50ba79c7b/audio/33a2eb71-61fd-4394-a32d-9dfd116279a2/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-master-1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:08:24\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"8,078,777 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-master-1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts-live/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-10-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Archival audio sampled in this episode is from these past episodes: \\n\\nShortCuts 4.2 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n,\\n21 Nov 2022\\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-sarah-cipes-about-feminist-audio-editing/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.3 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project Archives,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 20 February 2023\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-faith-pare-about-the-atwater-poetry-project-archives/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.4 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 20 March 2023\\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-ariel-kroon-nick-beauchesne-and-chelsea-miya/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.5 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Annie Murray,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 17 April 2023\\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-annie-murray/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.6 “What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival Archives,” produced by Ella Jando-Saul,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast, \\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\\n\\n \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549818966016,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Welcome to Season 5 of ShortCuts. \n\nShortCuts started out on the podcast feed as a ‘minisode’ during our first season and it soon took on a life of its own. ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod would take you on a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio. What did it feel like to hear archival audio? And how could we carefully unarchive its sound? These questions evolved into conversations, and thus emerged ShortCuts, Live! Last season featured Katherine’s conversations with Sarah Cipes, Faith Paré, Chelsea Miya, Nick Beaschesne, Ariel Kroon, and Annie Murray, along with a special episode produced by Ella Jando-Saul. And, this season, ShortCuts Live continues. It will be even more ‘live’ and in-person season than ever before, but before we go there, we do what we always do to start a new season. We perform what\nShortCuts\nsounds like\nin sound.\nListen to this episode, listen to past episodes, and then stay tuned for our new season on\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\nfeed. \n\n(0:00) \nShortCuts\nTheme Music\n[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(00:01)\nKatherine McLeod\nWelcome to\nShortCuts\n. On\nShortCuts\n. We listen closely and carefully to a short ‘cut’ [scissor sound] or ‘cuts’ [scissor sound] from the archives.\nShortCuts\nbegan in season one of the\nSpokenWeb\npodcast. It started out as what we called a minisode,  a short episode to engage with interesting clips from the audio archives that caught my attention as a producer and curator. \n\nBut this soon evolved. Episodes became a way to really dwell in the sound, to listen again – and again ­– to audio clips from the archives, as a place to practice a feminist listening in the archives and think about what we are listening to, how we are listening to it, and what it feels like to listen.\nShortCuts\nhas evolved onto the page. I’ve written about the first seasons of\nShortCuts\nas feminist placemaking through podcasting in a forthcoming chapter, co-written with Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland. Last year’s trailer ended up transforming into a short forum contribution to English Studies in Canada, published earlier this year. That piece is called “Archival Listening.”\n\nTalking about what it feels like to listen to audio from the archives evolved into wanting to talk with other people about what it feels like to hear these sounds. \n\n[\nShortCuts\ntheme music fades] Thus\nShortCuts\nevolved into what was last season, ShortCuts Live! Conversations with\nSpokenWeb\nresearchers about a short ‘cut’ of audio from the archives. This season, we continue\nShortCuts\nLive and aim to be even more live and on-site than\nShortCuts\nhas ever been before. But first, I want to do what we always do to start a new season of\nShortCuts\n, and that is to dive into its own archives of last season. \n\n[\nShortCuts\ntheme music swells]\n\nBecause me telling you the story of\nShortCuts\nevolving is one way of explaining what it does. But what if we ask, what does\nShortCuts\ndo in sound? In the following mix, you’ll hear the voices of Sarah Sipes, Faith Pare, Chelsea Mia, Nick Beauchesne, Ariel Kroon, and Annie Murray, along with Ella Jando-Saul from the special episode Ella made with Mathieu Aubin, Misha Solman, Sophia Magglioca, and Rowan Nancarrow. And of course, check the show notes after for the full story of all the archival sounds. [Theme music ends]\n(02:33)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\n…[fades in] do the same thing that I have done for the other ones that I did this week, which was – is – actually going to podcast voice to do the opening [Katherine laughs]. It feels like somehow you need headphones to go into podcast voice [Katherine laughs].\n(02:47)\nAriel Kroon, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\nYeah, put it on. It’s – part of the – part of the suit!\n(02:49)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\nExactly. [Katherine laughs]\n(02:51)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nSo what do you wanna talk about?\n(2:53)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nWell, [Katherine and Annie laugh] first, I’ll say, welcome to\nShortCuts\n.\n(03:00)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.3\n[\nShortCuts\ntheme music plays] Welcome to\nShortCuts\n. Welcome to\nShortCuts\n, this month on\nShortCuts\n, we’re here live on Zoom with the Atwater Poetry Project curator Faith Pare. Faith joins me for this conversation…[Theme music ends]\n(03:16)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \n…We’re recording this\nShortCuts\nLive in 4th Space at Concordia University during the\nSpokenWeb\nSound Institute. I’m here with Sarah Cipes. Thanks so much for joining me, Sarah.\n(03:26)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2\nThanks so much for having me.\n(03:30)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.3 \nThis really is a\nShortCuts\nLive by the fact that my three-month-old daughter is also here with me, and for long time\nShortCuts\nlisteners you’ll remember that back in season two, the voice of a poet’s young daughter has already been heard on\nShortCuts\n.\n(03:41)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nKatherine has just handed me a tape called “Over 60 Minutes with Luba.” Luba is on the front. It was issued by Capital Records and EMI Canada 1987.\n(03:56)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nYou’ve been immersed in the EMI Collection at University of Calgary. What are you, what are you noticing? How does this speak to you as an, as an archival object?\n(04:05)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nWell, what’s interesting about this tape…\n(04:07)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4 \nCould you tell me and listeners what we’re listening to?\n(04:12)\nChelsea Miya, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\nSo we’re, that was a clip from the Voiceprint episode, “Room and a Voice of One’s Own.”\n(04:17)\nFaith Paré, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.3 \nThe APP archives are interesting, I think for me as a former SpokenWeb RA, in that they’re all digital. The series started to be regularly recorded in 2010. This was also really firmly embraced by the library too, and thinking about the Atwater Library and Computer Center’s mandate…\n(04:38)\nElla Jando-Saul, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \n[Sound effect of heart beat plays and fades] In 1985, Allan Lorde with help from a team of close friends, organized ultimatum, a literary festival that took […]\n(04:46)\nSophia Magglioca, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nYeah, the weird heartbeat noise is really interesting to me because I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not, and it’s doing really interesting things with the poet’s voice.\n(04:59)\nAriel Kroon, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nThat was a clip from Joanne Coombs, and she came on as a guest. Uh, she was working as an editor for academic papers. I think maybe an academic journal at the time. And so she was really talking about her practice of feminist editing at the time, and we were so fascinated by what she had to say, because it struck us as very resonant and relevant to discussions that are all around us.\n(05:25)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \nAnd so bringing that into audio was a really interesting idea for me because redaction, restriction, and censorship and all of these things that have a lot of negative feelings around them for researchers can actually be turned into positive things, I think, particularly within audio, that actually allow users to listen to tapes that they might otherwise be totally barred from, and so my desire was to create sound edits that allow the listener to hear the vast majority of, of the tape…\n(06:05)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2\nMm-hmm.\n(06:06)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \n– while also protecting the privacy of those on the tape. Or even in this case, someone who’s mentioned who’s not there. \n(06:15)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \nMm-hmm. Mm-hmm.\n(06:16)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \nBut really a feminist edit could also be about amplifying voices that are not usually central to the microphone –\n(06:30)\nMisha Solomon, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.6 \n[Sound effect of heartbeat plays and ends] What I find really interesting about the mystery of the sound is that it’s a reminder of the missing information on these tapes. That these tapes are representative of performances that involved some visual aspect, and that aspect is missing entirely. And so when the sound changes, or disappears, one could imagine someone in an outrageous outfit playing a percussion instrument in the corner and producing that sound…\n(07:00)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\n… and one particular song, that that song perhaps could, you know, appear at some point, or audibly in this –  \n(07:10)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nOr a clip.\n(07:11)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nA clip. Exactly. It would just a, just little-\n(07:13)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nMaybe the most dramatic part.\n(07:15)\n[Music builds to the chorus of “Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry”]\nSinger sings: \n\nEvery time I see your picture I cry \n\nAnd I learn to get over you\n\nOne more time because…\n(7:33)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nExactly. [Katherine laughs]. So, um, I think that’s, you know, a perfect note to, to end on. And I, I want to thank Annie Murray for joining me here on\nShortCuts\nLive in 4th SPACE at Concordia University. Thank you so much, Annie.\n(07:46)\nKatherine McLeod \n[ShortCuts\nmusic begins to play] You’ve been listening to\nShortCuts\n.\nShortCuts\nis released monthly as part of the\nSpokenWeb\npodcast. Feed. The\nSpokenWeb\nPodcast team is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber Zoe Mix and co-host Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. \nFind out more about the sounds that you heard on this month’s episode by checking the show notes or heading to spokenweb.ca and click on podcast. This episode of\nShortCuts\nwas produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [Theme music ends]\n \n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9994","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.2, ShortCuts Live! A Magical Audio Tour with Jennifer Waits, 20 November 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-a-magical-audio-tour-with-jennifer-waits/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/569ffe3e-7643-47e3-8dca-6e676f7bd9a3/audio/5ced2478-171e-40d6-b2b0-e59df3b49fba/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-5-2-master.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:18:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"17,602,395 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-5-2-master\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-a-magical-audio-tour-with-jennifer-waits/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-11-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nArchival audio excerpted from this episode of Radio Survivor:\\n\\nhttps://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/11/podcast-22-were-all-moving-to-the-fm-dial-now/\\n\\nBlog post with photographs from Jennifer Waits’s tour of Radio K:\\n\\nhttps://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/10/my-grand-tour-of-college-radio-station-radio-k/\\n\\nA past Radio Survivor episode featuring SpokenWeb:\\n\\nhttps://www.radiosurvivor.com/2021/02/podcast-284-spokenweb-and-literary-sound/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549820014592,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts presents the first of many conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us? Join us for this ShortCuts Live in which a conversation with Jennifer Waits that takes us on a magical audio tour into the sounds of campus radio stations.\n\n(0:00)\tShortCuts Theme Music\t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(0:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts. This month we’re back with another ShortCuts Live! Talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. Many of these conversations were recorded on site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta. So, what will we hear and who will we talk with? Stay tuned for this season – and, to start us off, this episode is a conversation with Jennifer Waits. Yes, that is the Jennifer Waits of Radio Survivor, the podcast that explores the future of community radio and college radio, low-power FM and public access TV, along with podcasting and internet radio – and she often explores that future by diving into the past, and in fact the clip that Jennifer plays for us is from one of her tours of a college radio station.\nLet’s listen in as SpokenWeb Podcast’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood talk with Jennifer in a recording booth at the University of Alberta. Here is Shortcuts Live. [Theme music fades]\n(1:19)\tKate Moffat\tPerfect. And it’s recording. Okay. I’m just gonna move this a little closer so I’m not ….Alright, so, hello and welcome to Shortcuts Live, recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. I am sitting here, my name is Kate Moffatt and I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb Podcast, stepping in for our usual intrepid host, Katherine McLeod, and I’m sitting here with Jennifer Waits, who we are so excited to talk to today. Jennifer, would you mind just introducing yourself for us?\n(1:50)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah, thanks so much for having me. I am Jennifer Waits and I’m one of the co-founders of Radio Survivor, which is a website and podcast and syndicated radio show about the culture of radio, audio, sound. Um, so I’ve written pieces there as well as these audio productions. And, um, I’m also a long time college radio DJ, write about radio culture and other spaces besides radio survivor and obsessively tour radio stations. [Kate laughs]\n(2:23)\tKate Moffat\tThat’s fantastic. We’re so excited to chat today, so we’re gonna listen to something together and I don’t know, would you like to say something about it before we start?\n(2:34)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. So, I decided to bring– it’s an excerpt of the Radio Survivor show. I think at this point it was just a podcast and not a syndicated radio show. It’s from October, 2015. And in part of this episode I shared one of my radio station tours where I had recorded some audio. So, um, I just thought that would be fun to share.\nAt this point I have written up tours to just over 170 radio stations. So, I mean, really an obsession. I started in 2008 and I don’t always make audio, but when we started doing the Radio Survivor podcast, I started recording some audio and occasionally use that on the show.\n[Sound effect of old tape player starting]\nWe’re gonna hear an excerpt from my tour of Radio K at University of Minnesota, KUOM. And this was recorded in October, 2015.\n[Sound effect of tape player stopping and starting]\n(3:40)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\t[fade in]…tour guide. He’s a junior named Paul Benson, and he had all the time in the world on a Friday afternoon to show me around the station. So, for me, that’s like my dream tour because I could stay at a radio station for hours on end and he didn’t have anywhere to go and he enjoyed exploring things at the station he’d never seen before with me. So it was an incredible tour, super fun. I saw every nook and cranny.\nI saw places that aren’t normally on tours when they tour people around. The station itself occupies pretty much a whole floor of this building on campus called the Rerig Center. And I was kind of blown away by how massive their space is. They’ve got lots of different studios. All the different spaces seem to be behind these closed doors, so you don’t really know what there is until you open the door. And then there’s something magical behind it. Either it’s a studio or a production room. They’ve got a large live studio where they have live bands play.\nIt’s pretty much like a professional recording studio. And it even had an area sectioned off to put drums, which I’ve never seen before at a radio station where, you know, they’re even thinking about putting drums in a separate space so you don’t have sounds spilling over. [Soft piano music fades in] Um, and that room also had a disco ball that was cool. And a piano too. [Piano music fades out] And then one of my favorites, they had all these hidden closets that were full of music. So.\n(5:20)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tSo what exactly is this room that we’re in?\n(5:23)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor \tThis is just –\nIt looks like just a dilapidated vinyl. Edgar Winter. I’m finding all of the vinyl of songs that we’re playing for our Halloween show and marching band.\n(5:37)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor \tSo do you come in here and, you know, poke around?\n(5:40)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor \tThis is one of the first times I’ve actually been in here just because I don’t, I can’t steal any of them or upload them to my computer. So I just like, I guess I just haven’t explored all the weird vinyl that we have.\n(5:55)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tAre you guys able to play 78’s? Do you have a 78 needle?\n(5:59)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor\tOh God. You know, I don’t, I don’t know.\n(6:03)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tBecause look, this is probably a 78, super fragile.\n(6:06)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor\tHow do we know? It’s just sound effects. Oh my God. This is airplanes, continuous airplanes.\n(6:15)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tThis is 13 army planes in formation.\n(6:19)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor \tThis is, we’re out of formation. It sounds different.\n(6:22)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tAnd then, in that same closet there were a bunch of 1970s, like very mainstream K Tel records. So these collections of mainstream hits from the seventies and a Jimmy Swaggart record and then like some really cool punk seven inches, like all in the same closet.\n[Sound effect of tape stopping]\n(6:40)\tKate Moffatt\tThank you so much. That was a very joyful thing to listen to, somehow. [Kate laughs] I feel like I was trying really hard not to laugh throughout it. That was, that was so great. Please. Yeah. What were we just listening to?\n(6:53)\tJennifer Waits\tIt is for me too. So, we’re touring Radio K at the University of Minnesota. And this student, Paul Benson, you know, like I mentioned at the beginning, I was in the station with him for about three hours on I think a Friday night, and you know, often I’m staying like longer than people want me [Kate and Jennifer laugh].\nBut he was so down, and I have such fond memories of this and I’m so glad I have this audio record of it because, yeah, every time… I was excited to play it again because it brings back that joyful feeling that I had and is also just, you know, it’s sort of an artistic representation of what these tours are like for me.\nLike the tours serve a lot of different purposes.  You know, I’m trying to document college radio culture. I feel like I’m preserving these stories and what stations are like at a particular point in time. And now this is essentially history, you know, ’cause this was 2015 and my mind is traveling to places. Like I wonder if —like, there were some really old—the records we were talking about, the sound effect records of planes in formation. There were a ton of ’em. And, and these were in these sort of, if I remember correctly, they were in green envelopes, you know, kind of like they were military. And, and so I, at the time I wondered where these came from and, you know, now I wonder if they’re still there. And Radio K has a very, or radio at University of Minnesota has a very long history going back to the twenties.\nSo, you know, they could have records that have just been in that library for a very long time. So I was pretty excited. I think it was the same tour where we also saw some vapor wave cassettes. So it was all over the map. And that was my tour guide playing the piano in that live room that we heard.\n(8:52)\tKate Moffatt\tOh wow. I thought it was cool that there was almost this parallel between the way that you guys were interacting with the boxes and the way that you described the shape of the radio station itself, where you were like, there’s all these doors sub in boxes. You’re like, every time you open it, you don’t know what’s gonna be in there, sub in boxes. Right? Like, you know, and then you open it and there’s something magical. Like it was cool that I, that there was like an echo there almost of the two.\n(9:19)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. And there were even cages in one part. It was for what sort of a storage room. So there were some of these metal cages that had things behind it and there was a Radio K costume, and he put it on. Yeah, and he put it on for me it was almost like it had matching gloves. It was sort of a stuffed [Jennifer laughs] like a, not a stuffy, but, yeah, I mean it’s a trip and in the room with the cages that there was some really historic material in that room too.\nI mean it’s, yeah, it’s like a fever dream actually this whole tour. And it’s in this sort of brutalist building and it’s unbelievable. I can’t believe how much space they have in the first place. And then the fact that they have all this interesting material there and that he was excited, you know, to go on this journey was, was pretty amazing.\n(10:17)\tKate Moffatt\tTo get to spend that much time in there and, and looking at it. I kind of have two questions here. And one is like, I’d love for you to tell us more about like if this audio kind of also, I don’t know, relates to or informs your research that you do kind of more generally. And also maybe in a connected sort of way, the role of listening in your research as well.\n(10:38)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. So I just started visiting stations again after, you know, the pandemic. So, you know, starting in fall 2022, I started visiting again, and I felt so rusty I’d kind of forgotten about all the things I’m trying to capture. And, and on this recording you can hear my camera snapping so-\n(10:58)\tKate Moffatt\tWhich I loved, by the way.\n(10:59)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah! So, it’s, you know, I take a ton of photos and then occasionally I’m recording audio. Sometimes I sit down and record a more formal interview. But sometimes like this time, you know, the microphone is kind of in the middle somewhere so you can hear me sort of in the distance at times because we’re not mic’d like we’re doing a, you know, professional recording. [Kate laughs]\nAnd so it’s a struggle for me because I’m trying to listen to and capture so much I’m trying to capture, you know, all the things I’m seeing visually. And then as you can tell from this, there was so much in the ambient, you know, environment of this place that was interesting. Like the spontaneous piano playing on the tour. And, I don’t think I captured this with audio, but at one point some other, I was at a college radio conference and there was an official tour of Radio K and at one point that official tour came into the record library where we were.\nAnd so it’s like we intersected for a moment. [Kate laughs] But I was on my own private, you know – magical tour. So, yeah, it’s a challenge actually for me to capture everything and, um, and I’m trying to figure out if there’s a better structure. So I think on these tours that I’ve been taking just in this past academic year, I’m trying to set aside like a space where, alright, why don’t we do an interview first where we’re seated and I’m not stressing about taking photos, and then, and then walk around a little bit.\n(12:37)\tKate Moffatt\tI’m so interested too. And you being like, kind of hyper aware of what you’re missing, even as you’re trying to capture it all. Like it’s, it’s really the impossibility of capturing everything, right? It’s kind of part of why the archives are still sitting there the way that they are. Right? That’s just the wealth of material.\n(12:55)\tJennifer Waits\tI’m missing so much. And then I’m, you know, I fear that when I get home and I’m sitting down to write my story that I haven’t taken the photo that I want to illustrate it, and I use a lot of photos, but, you know, sometimes I come back, I’m like, oh, I wish I’d taken this particular photo.\nOr more of this ’cause this one isn’t quite right. And I try to take photos of the people that I’m interviewing too. You know, ’cause a lot of, a lot of what college radio is about is the community and the people. And you know, I’ve started enjoying doing these portraits of people in the studio – like maybe grab your favorite record or a weird record or, you know, where do you wanna stand? And so I try to also compose some of these photos to capture the personalities.\n(13:47)\tKate Moffatt\tIt’s so, I feel like everything you’re saying is really making me think about the different ways, both literally and metaphorically that we listen to the archive.\nI think as like, a final question, but like, sort of like to kind of turn us in a bit of a, we’re obviously this is live, we’re at the conference and we just actually listened to the last, the last plenary panel of the symposium. I’d love to know what you’re listening to now. Either, you know, either in your research or just kind of like more generally, would love to hear, you know, what, what have you, what you’ve been listening to.\n(14:20)\tJennifer Waits\tOh, I mean, it’s interesting. My teenage my teenage child, you know, listens to music all the time and talks about how, you know, he doesn’t notice me listening to music, you know, and I think increasingly I’m listening to the world around me rather than musical sounds. Although I do college radio, so for me, like that’s the time when I’m actively doing my music listening is during my radio show every week. And it’s incredibly healing. [Jennifer laughs]\nYou know, I love that immersion. And so for me it’s that college radio space is when I’m immersing in those sounds. And, I’ve been doing college radio for a really long time and what I listen to changes from year to year and, you know, I’ve gotten increasingly into more experimental sounds. I guess, you know, also things like sound art and transmission arts. So, you know, there’ve been talks at the conference and also installations at the conference that touch on this, like the intersection between, you know, things that are intermedia that involve visual components as well as audio components. So, you know, things that are, maybe challenging and harder to understand that things like that are kind of capturing my ears  more so than maybe the familiar [Jennifer laughs] The familiar music that we hear.\n(15:54)\tKate Moffatt\tYeah, wonderful. Oh, that’s fantastic. I think this has been such a neat way to think about —I agree, I’ve been listening to this experimental stuff that we’ve been listening to this week has just been so interesting, especially in that I feel like I’m kind of physically, I keep describing it as bathing. I feel like I’m bathing in the sound and it’s because it feels very embodied somehow, which is just making me think back to that clip you played and how embodied that that sounded and the fact that I could, I could hear you moving through the space. I could hear him moving through the space. I could hear you opening boxes, taking pictures.\n(16:20)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. I mean, it’s all about the space. And I think that’s what was challenging for a lot of people during the pandemic, you know, who work in college radio or community radio, that we weren’t in our spaces and a lot of us were, you know, trying to figure out how to do radio from home. And, I think this academic year, people are trying to get back to that sense of community and being back in our spaces and connecting on that level too, because that’s where a lot of the creativity happens is going through the stacks and, you know, finding the records that you don’t know about or –– or finding unexpected things, rather than, I mean, this is the thing about looking for music online. You kind of find what you’re looking for rather than being surprised a lot of the time.\n(17:09)\tKate Moffatt\tLike browsing the stacks in the library versus buying an ebook.\n(17:12)\tJennifer Waits\tExactly. Yeah.\nKate Moffatt\tI think that’s a beautiful place to stop if you’re, if you’re happy to, if you’re happy to stop there. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for joining us.\n[ShortCuts Theme music fades in]\nThis has been so much fun. That just, I’m still thinking about that camera click and the piano music that was played in there. It’s just, that was just fantastic. Thank you so much for bringing that along.\n(17:32)\tJennifer Waits\tOh, thank you. I’m glad that you enjoyed it.\n(17:38)\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. That was a ShortCuts Live conversation with Jennifer Waits recorded in May 2023 at the SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. Thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for making that interview happen. And thanks to our current supervising producer Maia Harris for the help in re-listening to that interview together. The SpokenWeb Podcast’s sound designer is James Healey and transcription is done by Zoe Mix. My name is Katherine McLeod and, as always, thanks for listening.\n[Theme music ends]\n \n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9995","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.3, ShortCuts Live! Listening to Wide-Screen Radio with Brian Fauteux, 18 March 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-listening-to-wide-screen-radio-with-brian-fauteux/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ee46116d-d019-4f1d-abad-4f2d80ec7d83/audio/c0dedf34-0b8f-4f5f-bb09-eca79069ca45/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-shortcuts-5-3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:15:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"14,433,010 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-shortcuts-5-3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-listening-to-wide-screen-radio-with-brian-fauteux/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-03-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Fauteux, Brian. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.\\n\\ndeWaard, Andrew, Fauteux, Brian, and Selman, Brianne. “Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians).” Popular Music and Society 45.3 (2022): 251 – 278. [open access]\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549821063168,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts presents one of the ShortCuts Live! conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us?\n\n(00:03)\tShortCuts Theme Music\t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(00:16)\tMiranda Eastwood (Recording)\tI’m like, maybe I should get sound effects from [overlap]\nThis is fun. Like maybe footsteps or something. Get whatever the name of this building is and like where we are located since we will be hearing the space and people will naturally –\n(00:17)\tKate Moffatt\tIs it the old arts building?\n(00:23)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah, that’s kind of the Arts and Convocation Hall. But because we have a fine arts building, a lot of people call this the old arts building.\n(00:27)\tKate Moffatt\tOkay. [laughs] I might let you say that, actually. [laughs]\n(00:46)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Voiceover] Welcome to Shortcuts. This month, we’re back with another shortcut live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short-cut of audio. Many of these conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.\n(01:08)\tKate Moffatt\t[Back to audio recorded on-site.] Uh, hello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. We are live at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. My name is Kate Moffitt, and I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb Podcast. Stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. I’m sitting here with Brian Fauteux today.\n(01:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah. My name is Brian Fauteux. I’m an associate professor of Popular Music and Media Studies here at the University of Alberta, and I work in this building.\n(01:24)\tKate Moffatt\tAmazing. Yeah. That echo that the listeners, that you’re hearing right now. It is because we are sitting in the arts and convocation hall building –\n(01:49)\tBrian Fauteux\tIn the lobby, just outside Convocation Hall where we have a big old pipe organ, and we have music that takes place and sometimes I teach, back in the day, I used to teach, not that long ago, [Kate laughs], a couple years ago, I would teach big intro to popular music classes there before the upper balcony was deemed unsafe. So I’ve been moved elsewhere, and I think they want to renovate it and make it a little bit more “state of the art” in there. It’s very beautiful.\n(01:56)\tKate Moffatt\tInteresting. It is. It’s absolutely stunning. Okay, amazing. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. Do you wanna play that for us?\n(01:57)\tBrian Fauteux\tSure. Let’s play.\n(03:11)\tAudio Recording\t[Distorted Audio Of Paul Mccartney’s mid-nineties radio show called “Oobu Joobu” plays in the background.]\n(03:12)\tBrian Fauteux\t[Audio ends.] That’s probably enough.\n(03:23)\tKate Moffatt\tIncredible [Brian laughs]. Thank you so much. Yeah. Miranda is also here, and we’re both sitting here and our heads just started [laughs].\nPlease tell us what we just listened to.\n(04:25)\tBrian Fauteux\tThis is a radio program that Paul McCartney did in the mid-nineties called “Oobu Joobu.” That was kind of a weird sort of experimental radio program that, I think aired on an American network for about 15 shows. And it’s a collection of, as you heard, different songs, audio clips.\nI think he was sort of playing around on a guitar there as well as he introduced it. And I think in 97 parts of this, 1997, parts of this was packaged with his “Flaming Pie” CD release. I think it mainly circulates as sort of bootlegs now or as this recorded version that was kind of sold at Best Buy. It was like a compendium of some of the shows, but I don’t know if the full complete package has ever resurfaced. But what I find interesting about it is it sometimes airs on the Beatles channel on Sirius XM Radio, which is sort of subscriber-based radio.\n(05:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tAnd it’s something I’ve been researching for the last little while, and I’m writing a book on now, and I’ve kind of been drawn to these places where celebrity clash with kind of weirdness and experimentation, but in a very kind of gated commercial subscription setting.\nSo it’s like people kind of paying for access to a radio service that kind of digs around and finds these oddities and packages them on these channels that are all about bands like “The Beatles” or “Tom Petty” or “Bruce Springsteen.” I also like in this clip, and the reason I chose this one, it was probably hard to hear from the laptop into the recorder, but early on, it emphasizes that it’s widescreen radio. And I think that the development of satellite radio kind of piggybacks on satellite television.\n(05:18)\tKate Moffatt\tI was gonna ask, widescreen TVs [laughs].\n(05:25)\tBrian Fauteux\tExactly. So it’s this idea of, we aren’t just your, you know, grandpa’s old radio. This is sort of –\n(05:25)\tKate Moffatt\tOh wow [laughs].\n(05:51)\tBrian Fauteux\tYou know what I mean? It’s like; it’s trying to introduce radio as being new, even though it’s still embedded in longermhistories of institutions like commercial radio broadcasting has used satellites for long periods of time. So it gives it a sheen of newness. Some things are kind of new about it, but I think it’s an interesting way of thinking or complicating ideas around new media, particularly around the turn of the millennium.\n(06:30)\tKate Moffatt\tWell, I’m really fascinated by how, I would love to talk about the listening, like the actual sound, sound of what we just listened to, ’cause that was so delightful.\nThe first thing I thought was mid-nineties television that I grew up with. It was kind of like the sound that I got from that.\nBut I’m really, I have to ask, as like a book historian myself, about the materiality that you’re kind of engaging with as you’re following its trajectory and thinking about how people are engaging with it.\nI don’t know. Can you speak to that at all? Thinking about the ways in which it’s becoming available, or how, I guess literally, the material of the media is informing it.\nIsn’t there a famous quote about that? The media is the –\n(06:30)\tBrian Fauteux\tMessage.\n(06:33)\tKate Moffatt\tYeah. That’s the one [laughs].\n(07:53)\tBrian Fauteux\tI mean, to even talk about McLuhan a little bit too, I think, thinking through about finding these oddities or these sonic traces of satellite broadcasting from the earlier days and this isn’t being played earlier. The Beatles channel comes in, I think, around 2015, if I’m not mistaken, but it’s very limited when something airs. Some of it is archived, some of it is kept online for maybe four weeks.\nYou can access it on demand, but then it goes away, or it’s kept in this place, this company, this publicly traded, massive media conglomerate now SiriusXM is owned by Liberty Media, which has stakes in like Live Nation and Ticketmaster and all these things. So researching that is different from some of my work on campus radio history where you can track stuff down. It’s still kind of scattered, but people are willing to give it to you. And now they’re not.\nSo, McLuhan also writes a bit about acoustic space and cyberspace coming together and how it’s like all around and you sort of dig around and look for these things. So that’s kind of where I end up finding a lot of this stuff is through spending time on the internet and seeing who’s put something somewhere online that you can listen to.\n(08:26)\tKate Moffatt\tRight. I was gonna ask next about listening. The role of listening in both, I guess, how you were finding it and listening to it, but also how you see this kind of… not elite, that’s not the right word.\nExclusive, exclusivity that’s applied to something that was experimental and odd. Yeah, I don’t know. Something about the, yeah I guess just a bigger kind of broader question about the role of listening in the work that you’re doing and what that, how that interacts with what you, what you do and how you do it.\n(09:36)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s a good question because part of what I’m looking at is the reasons why media institutions develop in the ways they do. And you can read annual reports and a lot of it is going through tons of trade press stuff over the years and seeing who’s talking about these companies as they develop. But then you wanna find stuff to listen to as well. And it’s not all perfectly available.\nEven most research paths people take, that’s never the case. But part of it ends up being, like listening a lot of the time to different satellite stations, satellite radio stations, or channels.\nThere’s only one station now I guess, but they have a variety of channels. And then trying to find things like this and thinking about is this available elsewhere? And in the cases where it’s maybe the work of a major celebrity, like I’ve written a bit on Bob Dylan’s theme time radio hour, which is kind of like this, where it’s, you know, somebody using their time on the radio who has like the star power but wants to use that time to showcase all these old quote unquote forgotten songs or songs that haven’t really entered the canon, so to speak, but have been massively influential.\n(10:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s a big part of what that radio, that radio show is doing. When you have people like that, you do have hardcore fans, too, who have recorded all of this and put it online. So stuff like that you can find. And then when you find that, I just listen to as much of it as I can. So there were about a hundred and so a hundred plus episodes of theme time, radio hour, and for, you know, a month or so, I just listened to every single episode to see what is not only what is he playing but how is he talking about it? What’s he introducing, what’s it like, and how does his voice seem to connect with these subscription radio listeners? And, you know, really spending time with the stuff I can find.\n(10:35)\tKate Moffatt\tAnd do you almost get a sense of his listening?\nIn terms of thinking about what they’re finding and putting together, and there’s a curatorial aspect to it.\nDo you kind of start to get a sense you can start to become familiar with yourself?\nOh, I bet so and so, put this one together.\n(11:18)\tBrian Fauteux\tYou also, I mean, you kind of become like held captive slash hostage to this sort of weird way of doing radio. Like, especially with the Dylan voice, and I’m gonna play a bit of it on the Friday morning radio panel that we’re doing as part of the SpokenWeb Institute.\nBut you do get a sense of his own relationship to these songs. But then, through digging a little bit as well, you find that he’s crafted as the curator or the person who has all these shows. It turns out it was a major TV producer responsible for massive commercial television productions. Oh, wow. Over the years, that has the music collection that Dylan’s kind of borrowing from. So you have these other connections –\n(11:21)\tKate Moffatt\tThere’s layers of curations.\n(12:07)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah, there’s layers, totally.\nThat they’re working in. And he makes it sound like he’s, you know, he constructs this whole world where he is broadcasting out of this historical Abernathy building, but really he does a lot of it on tour and from his house and, you know, it creates this radio world, but it is kind of an entryway into a different side of these massive celebrities and their personalities that people will pay for.\nAnd these satellite radio companies kind of know that. So, you know, know, part of what I’m interested in is before we even get to your Spotifys and Apple musics, this radio company was kind of setting the stage for that idea of exclusivity or, you know, giving big name performers, big talent contracts to then entice subscribers to say, I’m gonna pay like $16 or $20 a month to have access to this stuff –\n(12:12)\tKate Moffatt\tWhich we’re now so familiar with. Like, it’s just so all the time that’s everything.\n(12:15)\tBrian Fauteux\tEverything’s a subscription.\n(12:33)\tKate Moffatt\tWow. Yeah. Wild. Okay. Well I think one last question which is, I’d love to know what you’re listening to now. Like you know, either in your research currently, like maybe something like this, but anything else that’s fun or even just more generally, like what are you listening to right now that really excites you?\n(13:10)\tBrian Fauteux\tSure. I am listening to a lot of music from around the early two thousands when Sirius XM came out for the purpose of this research, but also kind of unrelated but also sort of related to this.\nA colleague of mine and myself just started a campus radio show here. So every week we’re kind of listening a lot to a radio show based on a theme or a topic each week. So I’m kind of constantly thinking about what would be good to put on this week’s show. And a lot of that is Canadian. We have, you know, Canadian content regulations and these sorts of things. So that’s been a lot of fun and that, I know that’s not really answering anything specific, but –\n(13:11)\tKate Moffatt\tNo, I think that’s great actually [laughs].\n(13:41)\tBrian Fauteux\tAnd then, at the same time I’m among the jury for the Polaris Music Prize here in Canada. And the long list voting for that just opened. So I’m just listening to a ton of Canadian music right now that’s been recommended on Google Group listserv. Things that I haven’t listened to. A new album that I quite like a lot out of Edmonton is by a band called Home Front, and that’s been an album I’ve been playing a lot to give sort of one precise thing.\n(13:52)\tKate Moffatt\tI’m actually really curious, you were talking about the campus radio stuff that you’re doing. Do you feel like a little bit like you’re kind of doing the stuff that you research? Like are you Yeah, for sure. You’re taking that curatorial role almost –\n(14:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tA little bit like that, but also before this I wrote a book on campus radio and stepped back from, like when I was an undergrad, I did a little bit of, of campus radio production work, but then when I was researching it, I stepped back and wanted to have more of an arm’s length relationship to it. And I’ve been meeting since I’ve, I moved here and came here to get back into it.\nAnd I kind of just took, you know, another person to be here too and be like, let’s do it together. And that it makes it more social and more fun. And it has been a lot of fun.\n(14:26)\tKate Moffatt\tFantastic connection to the conversation we just had with Jennifer. Waits. Jennifer was talking about how important community is to campus radio, that it’s so inherent to kind of getting it going and keeping it going–\n(14:34)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah. We were both just on a panel in Washington DC a few days ago talking about campus college radio. Incredible. So we, we have a lot of overlaps in what we are interested in.\n(14:34)\tMusic\t[Music begins playing in the background].\n(14:40)\tKate Moffatt\tThat’s so fantastic. Okay. Was there anything else that you wanted to share? Should we call it there?\n(14:41)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat sounds good.\n(14:50)\tKate Moffatt\tOkay. Thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at the end of a very long day and a very long couple of days.\nBut this was just such a fun way for us to wrap this day up.\n(14:50)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s great. Thank you for having me.\n(14:52)\tKate Moffatt\tAmazing. Thanks.\n(14:52)\tMusic\t[Music ends]."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9996","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.4, Re-Listening to Improvisation in the Archives, 24 April 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-listening-to-improvisation-in-the-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3507e689-cef7-4ff3-9c42-9593e0987fdd/audio/cf7c9da1-1404-41d3-9a60-11b4f653287d/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"master-v1-shortcuts-april-23.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:07:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"6,753,010 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"master-v1-shortcuts-april-23\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-listening-to-improvisation-in-the-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-04-24\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549822111744,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["As April is the month of poetry, we’ve taken a pause in this year’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to one of the first episodes of ShortCuts, “ShortCuts 1.2 / Audio of the Month: Improvising at a Poetry Reading.”\n\nIn the archival clip played in this episode, we hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder. She asks the host Richard Sommer if he would like to improvise with her for the poem, “Shore Animals.”\n\nListening now, we can ask: what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? It is a truly memorable moment of listening and worth returning to now in this fifth season of ShortCuts.\n\n00:00\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts.\n00:04\tTheme music\t[Electronic music plays]\n00:07\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month, it is April, the month of poetry, and I thought that we’d take a pause in this season’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to an early episode of ShortCuts – to hear an early version of ShortCuts: thinking about what means to be an archival listener.\n00:28\tKatherine McLeod\tBy the way, this episode is such an early episode of ShortCuts that I hadn’t even come up with the name “ShortCuts” yet.\nYou’ll hear me refer to it at one point as “Audio of the Month,” that was what I was calling it in that first season.\n00:43\tTheme music\t[Theme music continues]\n00:45\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat was the archival clip of this episode? Well, you’ll hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder to ask–\n00:55\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tDo you want to try improvising?–\n00:58\tKatherine McLeod\tAfter reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gad invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute.\n01:05\tRecording\tI gotta find it first –\n01:09\tKatherine McLeod\tListening now, we can ask, what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? Improvisation is so rooted in the experience of being there. So, what does it feel like to hear improvisation again? To hear it in the archives and even in this replaying?\n01:31\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, considering these questions, we can also listen to the extent to which we can hear the audience’s excitement for this spontaneous moment amid the reading and Gadd’s invitation for the flute to listen.\n01:45\tSound Effect\t[Sound of pressing play on a tape player]\n01:50\tKatherine McLeod\tLet’s listen now together to Shortcuts 1.2,\nAudio of the Month: “Improvising at a poetry reading.”\n02:05\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tYeah. It’s just going to be some sounds [inaudible].\n02:10\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tIn this “Audio of the Month,” we’re travelling back to February 1972, when poets Maxine Gad and Andreas Schroeder read in Montreal. They read at Sir George Williams University, or what is now Concordia.\nThey read on February 18th in the Hall Building in room H651. The reading started at 9 pm.\nYes, readings started late and went on for a long time. After reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gad invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute. He improvised along with her, reading the poem Shore Animals. Before starting to improvise, we can hear a negotiation between Gad and Sommer about what to read and how to perform together. A process that is its own audible improvisation.\n03:02\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOh, here it is.\nNow, how it goes, you have to keep quiet until…\n[Random Flute Notes]\nSee now,  [laughs] he’s never done this one before.\n03:15\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tWhat, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n03:18\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay, this is called “Shore Animals.”\nIt’s a speech piece with a flute, and the flute has to listen. And it can speak, too.\n03:30\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tThe audio clip that you’ll hear includes the first two minutes of a six-minute improvisation. Their improvisation is a singular moment when an audience member, in this case Richard Sommer, formally performs in the Sir George Williams poetry series. At the same time, this recording reminds listeners that the audience is always present, ready to improvise, interject, and even interrupt. And that the audience is also what we are listening to as archival listeners.\n04:03\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tThe flute, I think it’s over there.\nFor fun.\nThe same message?\nI’m asking; Richard’s going to make some noise with my flute.\n04:19\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tI’ll make some noise if you give me a microphone.\n04:21\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay. Which one you want? Let’s share it. Is–\n04:25\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tIt doesn’t make any difference.\n04:26\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tIt goes with the poem [inaudible].\n04:28\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tHow’d you do that?\n04:29\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tWhat?\n04:31\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tThis, this knot.\n04:32\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tI’ve tied myself in there.\n04:32\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tHere we go.\n04:33\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tI don’t know where I can find it—[Long pause] pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is.\nNow, how it goes. You have to keep quiet until… [Random Flute Notes] See, now… [Laugh] He’s never done this one before.\n05:04\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tWhat, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n05:06\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay, this is called “Shore Animals,” and it says, “speech feas—piece with flute,” and the flute has to listen.\nAnd it can pl–, it can speak, too. You have to listen to it. Yeah, you never heard it before.\n05:21\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tI think it’s learning how to speak.\n05:26\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tIt’s called “Shore Animals,” a speech piece with a flute.\n[Maxine begins to recite, Richard plays the flute]\n“So hearing where the poppy stopped me,\nsmall chance to star spiel, all you have told me,\ngone, false and beautiful gods and groves.\nPeople truth. Put it into song when the traffic is gone, gone, gone.\nI’ll fling it in the air—my debt to your tongue, Saturn.\nIn your minds, I’ve split a spleen, lust my lust.\nCome along, fawn. Oh! So, I have to whistle to you.”\n[Audience laughs] [Whistling]\n06:23\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tThat was Maxine Gadd reading “Shore Animals” with Richard Sommer improvising the flute at a reading that took place in Montreal on February 18, 1972.\n06:34\tTheme music\t[Theme music fades in]\n06:38\tKatherine McLeod\tHead to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the audio of the month and how to listen to the entire recording. My name is Katherine McLeod. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n07:00\tTheme music\t[Theme music ends]\n \n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9997","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.5, ShortCuts Live! Turning Our Bodies Toward Sound with Xiaoxuan Huang, 20 May 2024"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-hybrid-poetics/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7870778a-a9bf-49d8-a85e-431dd4a12705/audio/b6cd0426-b37e-451f-8416-8453d559a884/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-may-17-mix-v1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:25:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"24,935,487 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-may-17-mix-v1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-hybrid-poetics/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-05-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nHuang, Xiaoxuan.  “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”\\n\\nSinister Flower, the radio show curated by Lucía Meliá and what Xiaoxuan talks about listening to recently.\\n\\n*\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nRead “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang,\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549822111745,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. These ShortCuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.\n\nIn this conversation, Xiaoxuan Huang talks about hybrid poetics (and more) with then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt. The audio that informs this conversation is a clip from an audio-visual poetry collage by Huang called “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”  The audio of this collage beautifully sets the sonic environment for this conversation. Listen, and find yourself turning towards the sound.\n\n\n00:00\tKate Moffatt:\tKatherine will write a little host, or she has a little host intro that goes in. I don’t know if she writes new ones for each one. Sometimes, she does, but we can also introduce it a little.\n00:08\tMiranda Eastwood:\tShe does. No, she will do it, especially for the live Shortcuts. She does. It’s just to be like, “That’s what’s going on,” because they’re special.\nRight.\n00:13\tKate Moffatt:\tThe live ones are the best ones.\n00:14\tMiranda Eastwood:\tThey’re very good.\n00:16\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tLive things tend to be–\n00:18\tKate Moffatt:\t[Kate and Miranda laugh] Yeah. Yeah. They’re very good. And is it recording right now already?\n00:21\tMiranda Eastwood:\tIt is recording right now.\n00:22\tKate Moffatt:\tI love this little behind-the-scenes, where it’s like [Laughter] “What the heck are we doing?”\nThat’s so perfect. Did we decide how we wanted to start the episode?\n00:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tCould I have a […] I mean, I’m just gonna drink some water. [Laughter]\n00:31\tKate Moffatt:\tPlease go for it. Yeah. Yeah.\n00:34\tMiranda Eastwood:\tNope, we can do whatever we want. We can just go for it. Whatever feels right. Okay. [Laughter]\n00:39\tKate Moffatt:\tUm, I will wait until you’re done with your water bottle.\n00:41\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYou can say, “This is Shortcuts with Kate Moffatt.”\n00:44\tKate Moffatt:\t“Welcome to Shortcuts Live.”\nDo I need to introduce myself? No.\n00:46\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYou should. It would–\n00:47\tKate Moffatt:\tDoes Katherine introduce herself?\n00:49\tMiranda Eastwood:\tWell, no, but she’s the producer. We–\n00:51\tKate Moffatt:\tShe’s always the person who does it. Oh my gosh. Okay.\n00:54\tMiranda Eastwood:\tBut she does say, “I’m Katherine.”\nShe does say, “I am Katherine McLeod.” I think. Now my brain’s just zoning it out ’cause I’m like, “Oh, I know, I know. It’s Katherine McLeod” [Laughs]\n01:03\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI think it’s always nice as a listener, [overlap: “to know who you’re listening to.”] even if you’re a long-time listener.\n01:07\tKate Moffatt:\tWorst case, we can cut it out.\n01:11\tKatherine McLeod:\t[SpokenWeb Shortcuts Theme Song Starts Playing]\nWelcome to Shortcuts. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m the producer for this Shortcut series on the podcast. Yes, they were right, I am introducing myself and telling you about what you’re going to hear.\nThis month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a shortcut of audio. These Shortcuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta. For this conversation, we’re sitting down with Xiaoxuan Wong to talk about sound, language, video, poetry, voice, making room for the indeterminate, and more, like playlist recommendations – listen to the end for that.\n02:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe conversation is led by Kate Moffatt, and you’ll occasionally hear Miranda Eastwood recording in the background and adding a few comments, including an enthusiastic applause that I have left in at the end. I love that applause because it really emphasizes that this was recorded live. Let’s jump back into that onsite conversation and let the conversation speak for itself.\n[Music fades]\n02:30\tKate Moffatt:\tHello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. My name is Kate Moffatt. I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb podcast, and I’m hopping in for Katherine McLeod on this particular episode of Shortcuts. We are so excited to sit down with Xiaoxuan Wong today, and actually, yeah. Xiaoxuan, would you mind introducing yourself?\n02:55\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tOf course. I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Kate, for sitting down with me. Yeah. My name is Xiaoxuan Wong. I also go by just Xiao and sometimes publish under Sherry as well, Sherry Huang. But yeah, I am a poet, first and foremost. But I feel most at home, kind of playing around with different mediums and voicings and spaces. So, I kind of describe myself as working in “hybrid poetics.”\nThe piece that we’re gonna be maybe talking about and hearing a little bit from will sort of be a good example of how my practice converges a few different\nmediums.\n03:48\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. And I think we are, we’re gonna just start by\nlistening to this. Is that right? Okay. Let me pull it up. And here we go.\n03:58\tXiaoxuan Wong, Audio of Xiaoxuan Reading “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them” \t[Audio From A Video Poem Played. Ambient Music Plays And A Voice Reads The Words As A Poem.]\nI don’t know the names of trees, but I can tell what time it is from the way their shadows lean. It might feel sometimes like we are here just to run out of time. I want you to know, it hurts me, too. One day, we will drive through the mountains. The weather will be unusually hot. Actually, it will be your birthday again. You will pull over on the side of the road and say, “come here. I wanna show you something.” And it will be the tops of trees. I go to a lot of parties, hoping I’ll see you there. Often, what I remember the next day is all the people outside smoking. The air flares up in turns, like a circle of lightning bugs. Someone offers me a drag, I refuse, or no one does. And I ask for one, forgetting I was supposed to be leaving just like in previous years. This summer, too, is likely to leave us with its heat mixed into us. The trees are thinking of what I’m thinking of – your face next to mine in the absenting light due to atmosphere. Due to all the time we don’t have.\n06:07\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. Amazing. Xiao, can you please–\n06:11\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you–\n06:12\tKate Moffatt:\tTell me what we were just listening to.\n06:15\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. So, we’re recording this at the SpokenWeb Symposium hosted at U of A. And this piece was sort of, you know, made with existing […] the text was pre-existing, and the ambient guitar that you hear was improvised.\nBut this iteration of this project was made in response to the call of this year’s symposium “Reverb Echo.” So yeah, this piece is like around six minutes. It’s an audio-visual piece as well as a poetry collage of, I guess, fragments that I took from a longer project, which was my master’s thesis called “All the Time.”\nBut, this iteration of this project, the six-minute audio-visual poetry collage, is called “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them,” which itself is a fragment from “All the Time.” So, I think what I said before about multiple mediums and practices kind of informing me, my mode of practicing “hybrid poetics,” this is one version of how it sometimes shows up. Generally, I think about sound and musical sound and ambient sound or ambient musical sound, I guess, as a part of the voicings of my poem. But, it’s not necessarily the most authoritative one. I love my poems dearly when they’re just on the page as well. And also just, you know, read.\nAnd so there’s these multiple registers of voicings that I’m really interested in playing with. And kind of sensing through how certain ways of displaying the poem could, on some levels, create a different type of room that we can all enter together and that feels different from the room that is made through just a stanza, which itself also means room.\n08:55\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. [Laughter] It’s been one of those concepts that have long haunted me, and I’m sure long haunted many other thinkers and poets, as well. But, it feels really appropriate to me ’cause I think that’s part of what I wanna do with language, is to create an atmosphere as well as tell a story. I know that my relationship to language and poetic language has always been something I am gonna continue to grapple with. But I think I was having a conversation, earlier where I said that these remediations of poetry and poetic text through music and performance and video and image components as well. I’ve done some screen printing, as well, of my poetry.\n10:00\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s so cool. [Laughs]\n10:02\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd, yeah, these are all kind of ways to push back against languages, urge to close in on itself and signify too quickly, or kind of seal itself off from the indeterminate.\n10:22\tKate Moffatt:\tTo be contained–\n10:23\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah, yeah.\n10:24\tKate Moffatt:\tWhich has some interesting kind of echoes of the idea of like the room that you were talking about, an atmosphere for, to resist that containment that a word has kind of inherently.\n10:34\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tPrecisely. And I think I wanna give the room – and also language itself like room – to come and go and alter. And I think that’s the kind of, when language is employed like that, it gets me really excited. And it sort of lives in my body differently. It lingers. It has longer staying power when there’s a kernel of indeterminacy to it. Because I find that it sort of becomes more rich with wider application–\n11:20\tKate Moffatt:\tThe possibility that comes with almost like the embodiment of it.\n11:24\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAbsolutely. Yeah. And, so in this video piece what I guess our listeners can’t see is there are sort of bad subtitles on screen. So\nthe visual is just actually like an iPhone footage. One long shot of, I think a blood moon from last year that I took.\nAnd, the image of the moon has kind of accompanied my short, relatively short career as an artist. I’m only 30, so yeah. And, I’m sure it’ll stay with me. But, on top of the video are these like yellow kind of traditional, like yellow font?\n12:21\tKate Moffatt:\tI noticed that sometimes, there’s like the square brackets where there’s words missing or bits and pieces, and not everything is subtitled. Right?\n12:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. And that was kind of a decision that I made on a fly. And I think that aesthetically evoking this, the way I play with space on the page too, when it’s a textual, like a purely textual piece I use a lot, I consider a lot about the space on the page. I don’t really use traditional punctuation. I forgo conventional capitalization and punctuation for spacing. And I think spacing itself is like one of the main ways that I write with.\n13:09\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. Our listeners aren’t gonna know this, and maybe you don’t either, but I absolutely had goosebumps while I was reading the sort of yet partial subtitles unfinished in a way. But, yeah, that very intentional kind of creating of space in the subtitles itself was, yeah. Anyways, I got goosebumps. So that’s kind of fun. [Laughs]\n13:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat’s beautiful. Thank you for telling me that. Thanks, Kate.\n13:34\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, of course. It was, it was stunning. I can’t wait to watch the whole thing. Actually. I feel like, I wish we could just have played the whole thing. It was so lovely. Those first couple of minutes.\n13:45\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you. Yeah. The square brackets felt important to me over parenthetical, like curve brackets. There’s something about the square brackets aesthetically that I feel have less associations with an “aside” or, you know, a kind of “lower register of signification.” I didn’t necessarily want those connotations of like this is an “aside” or what is being redacted, totally being redacted is less important. Or rather, that what is unsaid is less important. I think that with the square brackets, my hope is to kind of invite in room for kind of, again, the indeterminate what is unsaid, what can’t be said, and what even sometimes the square brackets are on screen when the, the voice in the audio is actually completing the line.\nSo also, you know, putting those two intentions, like the visual of the square brackets, the text being withheld on screen while the voice is kind of speaking in utterance.\n15:10\tKate Moffatt:\tWhy is it something that can be voiced but not written down?\n[Overlapping: Right. Right.] What makes you kind of question the gap that’s maybe occurring?\n15:18\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat’s such an interesting reading of that. Yeah. I love that. And, I think one of the best parts of my conference experience, especially with SpokenWeb, is the conversations that I get to have with everyone else who loves thinking about sound and exalting the unspoken and silence and the fullness and the capability of silence, potentiality of silence.\n15:47\tKate Moffatt:\tI’d love to, if you don’t mind, just hop back quickly to[…]you were saying that you do get this kind of like multiple registers of voicing in the poem and thinking about different ways of engaging with like the room or the containment. And I’m just[…]you bringing up the conference and kind of what we’ve been discussing over the past couple of days. We’ve often brought up, you know, these ideas of echoes, particularly the ways that echoes are created or the way that reverberations sound in rooms, spaces, or architecture. And I just wanted to ask if to bring this around a little bit to listening and the role that maybe thinking about those spaces and how sound is created in those spaces, or how you think about creating sound in things like a room. If there’s a particular role that listening plays, if there are multiple registers of listening because you’ve got multiple registers of voicing, and how the space that this is happening in, or the space that you’re creating for it, how that impacts that.\nI don’t know. That’s a big, long, twisty question. Feel free to take anything from there that feels like it speaks to you.\n16:53\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI love it when questions twist, ’cause then that allows my answers to twist.\n16:57\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. Give us a twisty answer.\n16:59\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tSo one part of this video that we didn’t get to hear later, the voice says, “some ways of listening, turn the whole body into an ear”–\n17:15\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, wow.\n17:16\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd I –\n17:18\tKate Moffatt:\tI got more goosebumps. [Laughter]\n17:21\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI mean, think in a way that[…]talk about a twisting, right? Like the body itself in turning becomes an apostrophe. Like, apostrophe is, means, to turn. And, I –\n17:40\tKate Moffatt:\tStunning. That’s so stunning. Sorry, I need a second. [Laughter]\nThat’s so lovely.\n17:45\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. I love that question because I think that[…]and I love that we’re recording this in a sound booth, which in a way is attempting to like erase the space or the contours. [Overlap: Oh, yeah.]\nI think with that line, the way I’m feeling it now in conversation with your question is like, I’m thinking about turning’s relationship to listening and like what it does to turn a body to face a certain way. And so, now I’m thinking about orientation, what we choose to focus on. And we all know that listening is as much about attention and focus as it is about volume. So, I think that ultimately, listening is an orientation that we get to choose. I mean, to a certain extent.\n18:46\tKate Moffatt:\tRight? No, but I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. That there is, that we should not feel like it’s something passive that’s only happening passively. There is so much intentionality, and that intentionality can shape that entirely.\n18:57\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Yes. Yeah. [Laughter]. Yes. Yes. That’s it. [Laughter].\n19:02\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, that’s such a wonderful answer. And I feel like even as you were saying that about us being in the booth too that we have kind of prioritized, we are choosing to forgo the space, the larger space that we’re in. For the sake of like a clear voicing. In technical terms, like a clear particular voicing of our conversation.\n19:28\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tUhhuh [Affirmative]\n19:28\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd like, yeah.\n19:30\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Um, like I love analog technology because of its grit. And it’s like the grain, like Barthes talks about, like the grain of the voice. And I just, um, yeah. Like incredible.\nMy friends make fun of me. This is off-topic now, but my friends – I love it – make fun of me for all my playlists. Like, my music taste is like boys who can’t sing and sad indie girls. And, um, [Laughs]–\n20:02\tKate Moffatt:\tI love it. I love it. You’re really selling your playlist, actually. I love it.\n20:07\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd I like, I don’t know, there’s something about hearing flaws\nand, um, hearing texture when things aren’t super smoothed out and polished, that is so compelling to me. And so, when I take that as like a, um, I think that’s informed by like my, the way I grew up in small-town Ontario, music scenes and, um, Kingston, Ontario – shout out to Kingston [Laughs] – um, such a rich music scene for its like per capita in terms of its–\n20:47\tKate Moffatt:\tI love that–\n20:48\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tIt’s population. I think there are so many wonderful things, like collectives working together to bring and sustain God. We know, we all know how hard it is to sustain a scene; takes all of us. And yeah, like I think my embracing of the grittiness and not erasing certain contours or not blurring, I guess like cleaning up things too much is informed by experimentation and just doing it. Not being interested in being, I don’t know, an apprentice in [Laughs] for too long before actually picking up a guitar or picking up some drumsticks.\n21:41\tKate Moffatt:\tBut that imperfection is actually part of the, it’s part of the magic that’s happening in the first place.\n21:46\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. And it allows for you to put on a show then…Like, I don’t know why I love that–\n21:53\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s more important than making it perfect first, right?\n21:56\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Yeah.\n21:57\tKate Moffatt:\tOr making it perfect at all. Amazing.\nOkay. Well, I’d like to finish with one last quick question, which is: What are you listening to lately? Like in your research or at the conference–\n22:08\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tOh, gosh.\n22:09\tKate Moffatt:\tOr even just generally. This is kind of hopping off of that lovely little playlist tangent you sent us on. But we can end with this one, but yeah. What are you listening to?\n22:19\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI, okay, so I am listening to…I love radio. I love the intimacy of radio, especially community radio, campus radio, you know, hearing myself being addressed. One-on-one. So it feels like, to me I’ve had, I’ve written about it. I’ve kind of, that’s a relationship to another’s voice that feels really special.\n22:57\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.\n23:00\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThanks. So, I guess like radio shows, I don’t know. I workout to like\nNTS’s “Infinite” mixtape, [Laughs] that they have on there, and make some cool discoveries there. And yeah, I think I’ve, the internet has introduced me to a lot of connections too, like Lucía Meliáwho is based out of Mexico City. She is, yeah, she is a radio…she has a radio show called “Sinister Flowers.” That great name, right?\n23:42\tKate Moffatt:\tGreat name. [Laughs]\n23:43\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat is a, I think the most ideal. It’s everything I want in a radio show. It has critical theory. It has music and like field recordings. Poetry works its way in there. And Lucía’s taste is just like, right on. So I, yeah. And right now I’m listening to “Sinister Flowers.”\n24:13\tKate Moffatt:\tI’m gonna have to write that down. Well, I think we’ll stop there. Thank you so much. It was so lovely. It was so, words are not capturing this properly. It wasn’t lovely. It was so much more than lovely, but it was lovely. So thank you so much, so much for joining us and\n24:27\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tSee you at the conference.\n24:28\tKate Moffatt:\tSee you at the rest of the conference, yeah.\n24:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThere’s a cabaret tonight.\n24:31\tKate Moffatt:\tThere’s a cabaret. We’re gonna go listen together at the cabaret.\n24:35\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you so much, Kate.\n24:36\tKate Moffatt:\tThank you.\n24:36\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay! [Miranda cheers]\n24:39\tMusic:\t[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\n24:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to Shortcuts.\n24:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tThanks to Xiaoxuan Wong for talking with us in this episode. And a big thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for conducting and recording the conversation.\nShortcuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber, Yara Ajeeb, and co-host Hannah McGregor, and myself, Katherine McLeod. Like all of these Shortcuts live\nconversations from last year’s symposium, there really is a sense of being there. And, I thought that this conversation in particular was such a great way of thinking back to the feeling of being there last year and looking ahead to this year’s symposium. In fact, we’ll be rolling out the last of these Shortcuts Live conversations as a full episode in the very same week as this year’s SpokenWeb symposium takes place. Stay tuned for that in the first week of June, right here on the podcast feed. And, for now, thanks for listening."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9998","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.6, Open Door Listening, with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Bodies Press, 29 July 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/open-door-listening-with-brandon-labelle-at-errant-bodies-press/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/291d921e-f868-4021-87cf-786ea58df875/audio/50ec4344-8b6b-4319-8f76-062ea1d7b47c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"audio-sample-shortcuts-errant-bodies-press.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:21:34\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"20,770,108 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts - Errant Bodies Press\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/open-door-listening-with-brandon-labelle-at-errant-bodies-press/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-07-29\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"REFERENCES\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey, Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod. “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice.” Podcast Studies: Theory into Practice, eds. Dario Linares and Lori Beckstead, Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming in December 2024.\\n\\nLaBelle, Brandon. “Poetics of Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 273-277. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903562.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Archival Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 325-331. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903565.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549825257472,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["ShortCuts as a series on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed is coming to an end.\n\nFor the past five seasons, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been bringing you deep dives into the archives. Through this process, ShortCuts has asked the question of what it means to listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ of audio. ShortCuts has become a sonic space to practice feminist listening and that listening has informed and continues to inform audio-based research, performances (including performances based on ShortCuts audio), and print publications (such as “Archival Listening” and “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice”).\n\nFor this final ShortCuts, we listen to a conversation with Brandon LaBelle recorded on-site at Errant Bodies Press in Berlin. Listen to hear a reading from LaBelle’s “Poetics of Listening” (as published in ESC “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies”), to hear about Errant Bodies Press and what it sounds like to be there, and to hear the open door as a way of listening. That open door listening will continue even after ShortCuts ends.\n\nStay tuned for what is next!\n\n[Sound of walking down stairs and door opening] (00:00)\n\nKatherine McLeod (00:22):\n\nWelcome to Shortcuts. \n\n[Door closes and theme music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThis ShortCuts is recorded in Berlin. It is a conversation with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Bodies Press. The episode explores the sound of Errant Bodies Press as a space of listening. It just so happened that where I was staying in Berlin was within walking distance. We laughed about that when I arrived.\n\nMy conversation with Brandon LaBelle took place after his piece “Poetics of Listening” was published in the special issue of English studies in Canada that I edited with Jason Camlot. The special issue is called “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” And when I sat down with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Body’s Press, there was the journal issue on the table. It had made it to Berlin and it was ready to make itself heard in this space of listening.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (01:56):\n\nWould you like some tea, or water?\n\n \n[Music]\n\n \nKatherine McLeod:\nThis is such a, a beautiful space. I was –\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (02:10):\n\nYeah. Yeah. No, we really enjoyed it. I’ve had it for a couple years now, and yeah. I’ve been kind of working here as a studio and, and then like having a home for the press. Yeah. And lately it’s become more, I’ve started to invite some friends to join me, so now we’re kind of creating a little bit of a collective more like a kind of a study group. \n\n \nKatherine McLeod\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative> \n\n \nBrandon Labelle:\n\nWe’re all like focusing around listening and planetary. So yeah. We’re having kind of study sessions and making workshops and small events, so the space really is conducive to that. \n\n \nKatherine McLeod (02:53):\n\n‘Cause I was so interested in how the space is both a press and also a space of practice and developing methods and collaboration together. And so this combination of space adds again, the, both like the physical presence of books, but also a space of real performance and enactment that that clearly takes place in it too. So that’s, it’s a really fascinating combination. Even just as I look around, I see the books are so present, and yet it feels like at these tables, action takes place and listening takes place. So it feels like the kind of space that invites both.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:34):\n\nYeah.\n\n \nKatherine McLeod (03:35):\n\nYeah. And the Listening Biennal, does that take place here? Or is that,\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:40):\n\nYes\n\n \nKatherine McLeod\n\nI mean, I see the poster.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:42):\n\nYeah. Yeah. This is actually our new poster. Oh, that was from last\n\n \nKatherine: \n\nYear. Oh, thank you. \n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:47):\n\nTwo years ago. Yeah. And yeah, so what we’re planning now is to actually Yeah. Install the biennial here. Okay. To make a listening lounge. So we’ll kind of get rid of the tables and just have some carpets and pillows and oh, nice. Yeah. And sort of have, be open on the weekend and, and sort of diffuse the audio works and yeah. Create a kind of cozy environment for people to be here and listen together. So that’s kind of the plan. Next week we have the Listening Academy, which is focusing on the somatic. And then we’ll have a performance on Saturday with Sixth Dancers that we’ve been developing called The Open Body.\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nOkay.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (04:32):\n\nWhich really takes listening as the basis for movement Right. And developing different strategies around that. So yeah. We’re, yeah, I’ve been rehearsing that the last month. \n\n \nKatherine: \n\nHave you been part of that as well? \n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (04:45):\n\nI’m sort of conceptualizing the project. \n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nAmazing. \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (04:48):\n\nAnd then yeah. Working with different performers. Yeah. But it’s coming along, and should be interesting to stage it. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nWhere will that take place?\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (04:58):\n\nIt’s at a performance venue just in the neighborhood here. It’s an old ballroom Oh, wow. With former East Berlin, and yeah. It’s been running as a venue for probably 20 years now, so it’s a wonderful space. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nYeah. Yeah. I was reading a bit about the old ballrooms that are, maybe it’s even that same one that is in this neighborhood that oh, that sounds fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. And then the space can kind of become part of the Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> the performance.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle:\n\nYeah. It’s a wonderful environment. They have a, it’s sort of set in a park, which is partly a cemetery.\n\nThey have these large, very large windows in the space that we’re gonna uncover and just look out into the, into the trees, use the sunlight and the, the evening twilight as the, the lighting. Oh, beautiful.\n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nBeautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s, oh – \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (05:46):\n\nThat’s nice. She should be lovely.\n\n \n\nKatherine (05:48):\n\nYeah. Sounds beautiful. Yeah. And then thinking of what I, what I do in shortcuts is almost like a, like, I call it like a deep dive into archival sound and where we can, you know, really listen to one clip or one sound. So I was thinking about this space itself that we’re in and thinking of almost like if this is a shortcuts episode, almost like a deep dive into the sound of err bodies press <laugh>, and a close listening to it. So I thought maybe if I ask you a sort of a more formal question of what are we listening to now?\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (06:25):\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative>  Well, let’s, let’s take a moment. Yeah. I mean, I guess for myself, what has always been really essential that I’ve tried to kind of find ways of developing is maybe what we could think of as the open door. \n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nMm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. \n\n \n\nBrandon:\n\nSo, and maybe Berlin particularly sort of offers this opportunity for artists or for, as my friend always says idealists, to sort of really manifest the imagination. To find space for really playing out. Sort of ideas and imaginaries and creative explorations. And so I think being in Berlin for me has, you know, I really embraced that and really sort of feel like I thrive in that kind of cultural environment. And so having a space like this and locating oneself and, and in, in such a manner, which is like about a certain kind of privacy. But at the same time, having this relationship to the street. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative> \n\n \n\nBrandon: \n\n– and having an address where others can enter. And so I think this open door, and this kind of threshold, public and private, is really also something I try to integrate or learn from through my practice. So maybe we are hearing that open door. \n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nYeah. I’m very aware of both the sounds of our voices in the space. Like if I slightly move my foot, feeling like the texture of the floor and the sounds like going up to the high ceilings, but also, but I’m so aware in this sort of beautiful kind of echo of the space, the sounds from of outside coming in, that sound of the bird or the cars passing and voices. And so yeah, I think that the, the door is where we are listening to the door <laugh>, and and it’s doing something very powerful right there, a car is passing. And there’s also something too about even seeing, looking around and seeing the, the books now seeing CDs as well the books from the press behind you, it feels like we’re, we’re kind of listening to that too as well in simply sort of by their presence here.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (09:02):\n\nYeah, that’s true. I know that often people enter and also really enjoy that material – being sort of enveloped in that kind of material of books and, and documents and media. That becomes very immediately enticing, and evocative. And so I kind of also appreciate that as a, yeah. As also a creative expression in itself. So for instance, these binders over here are a set of, they came out of a, a project I developed called The Other Citizen, and they were part of like, almost like an archival installation I made at Transmediale a few years ago. And they’re really designed, they’re like, each one is referencing a certain discursive framework. But they try to kind of be quite creative with how you sort of house or categorize knowledge. So they’re intentionally quite enticing as well, you know, in terms of what they suggest. And they’re kind of topics that come out of my own readings and my own activities, but also picking up from what is present around us in, in sort of current, current discussions or issues. So they’re, they’re inherently stray from a particular disciplinary structure and try to be more transversal and playful. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\n<Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:41):\n\nSo I think this also is part of what is present in the room. Mm-Hmm.\n\nSpeaker 4 (10:46):\n\n<Affirmative>. Yeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:47):\n\nThis relationship to knowledge and discourse is also sort of enlivening\n\nKatherine: \n\nYeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:54):\n\nSuggestive. Imaginative.\n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nYeah, that just made me think when you said that of sort of dis – in thinking of disciplinary listening you know… it is a space that it’s hard to say, oh, this, you couldn’t say, you could look say on one shelf and be like, oh, okay, I see the discipline. Maybe, you know, sound studies. I’ve seen some titles there. But then as soon as you move to the next shelf, there’s another sort of disciplinary approach that’s very present. But also thinking again, of what this space is, where we are, where we are at the table what kind of disciplinary listening takes place here, which would feel quite different than on the shelf. \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (11:38):\n\nYeah. This is the top shelf. Is the CDs.\n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nYeah, yeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (11:44):\n\nA sort of particular format we came up with. Yeah. Which, which sort of takes the shape of the book more. Oh, may. Okay. Yeah. And they always kind of have this Yeah. Like an elaborated booklet inside. \n\nSo it was very much about keeping the idea of, of sound and sonic practice close to kind of discursive reflection. Right. Or textual Right. Matter as well. So that one would kind of read and listen or listen and read. So these things, bringing them close together, it’s quite important in that series. ’cause Sometimes, yeah. I mean, I guess there’s, there’s some, on some level there’s a kind of often a sort of idea that, you know, you have like a kind of community of practitioners often coming from an experimental music sort of arena that, you know, doesn’t necessarily relate itself to more academic informed investigations. And I always, I try to make this sort disregard this separation Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And so practice in theory being very integrated feels really, you know, part of the room.\n\n \n\nSpeaker 4 (12:55):\n\nRight. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. Yeah. Do you see that as, say the, the word, the words like research creation that get sort of talked about a lot these days? Is that something that you, you, do you think of research creation as a framework that you work in? Or is that, is it sort of maybe something that you do but don’t think of it in that way…\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (13:19):\n\nNo, it’s, it’s a good question. I mean, the other day we were having a meeting sort of study session, and everyone around the table really, we kind of realized at a certain moment that we all occupy this kind of artistic research framework and that feel quite comfortable in that, or sort of supported by that term. And I think there is something to that. And, and even though I don’t necessarily really forefront that as defining of my work I think it’s somehow in the background Yeah. It’s around. And I’m sure that I’m, I’m very much participating in those communities. More and more, of course, as they get more alive and present, and maybe as you also suggested, how these separations are also becoming more or less important or less clear between sort of art and academic, or between the book and the cd. \n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nAnd certainly that’s, it’s been something that I’ve thought more about what research creation does in that the way in which SpokenWeb as a research network it has been attempting to sort of like activate archival materials or like, make, make things with them as whether in the case of the, the sort of the listening and making that I was talking about, or other kinds of, of sort of performative kind of curations that make things with archival materials. And so I think about how research creation is so important as academic work, and that it is indeed like it’s, it’s getting recognized as valid scholarship. Or even the podcast, it’s kind of a form of research creation in some way that you’re, you are you’re making something new and you’re making something that is often more creative that might not necessarily be following the same pathways as whatever the academic pathway, which often somehow gets defined as uncreative, which at the same time, it is creative too.\n\n \n\nSo it’s it’s almost a, a false, a false separation there between the, the research and creation to begin with. But, but it does feel like the there’s more support for that kind of work than, than there had been, or even, so even these, some of these formal categories help with that in some way, but yeah, that’s true. Yeah. But yeah, the just looking at the <laugh>, the collection here I was thinking that it would be beautiful to hear you read the opening to your piece, if you would be open to that. Sure. Because Sure. It is thinking as poetics a poetics of listening. It is a very poetic opening. And I thought, oh, to, to actually hear how you would voice that would be, would be a real a gift to use a word that is over there on the archival boxes. Let me turn, turn to it here – \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle:\n\nOkay… [Begins reading]  It has already begun… the time … the time-space… of… speaking… of speaking that moves itself… toward knowing nothing… something you… the use that arrives from the particularities… as the basis for a giving… enacting a rhythmic… of breath… breathing toward… away\n\n \n\n[Pause – music begins]\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod (17:28):\n\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. ShortCuts has been a monthly feature on the SpokenWeb podcast. It is now in its fifth season, and this may be the end of shortcuts, but who knows, there may still be shortcuts inspired Mini sos as short bonus content on the podcast feed. It is fitting that this is or could be the last episode of shortcuts. Shortcuts started as me alone recording short audio pieces as close and careful listenings to audio cut from spoken webs, archival collections. The first three seasons were quite solitary listenings, though they did make some long lasting connections with their listeners. The fourth and fifth seasons have been more and more social and live featuring conversations with spoken web researchers about archival clips of their choice and about their sound-based research. So it seemed like it could not be more fitting to conclude with a conversation with Brandon LaBelle as an expert listener, and within a space like Err Bodies press as a space of listening and a making. And to be far from the closet where I recorded so many episodes of shortcuts to be in Berlin.\n\n \n\nI edit this conversation back home in Montreal, and I record this voiceover from SpokenWeb’s podcast studio at Concordia. And as I think back over what shortcuts has made and the conversations it has sparked, I can’t help but be moved to do something that I love doing so much in shortcuts to listen again and again, and to let the sound speak for itself. And so with that, let’s listen once more to LaBelle’s reading from “A Poetics of Listening.” As I edited the audio of him reading, I noticed how he makes audible, the pauses in the text, the dot, dot dot, the ellipses. And I thought about how he rendered them in such a way that they invite a response in between the pauses. What if we listen to it like this?\n\n \n\n[Music ends]\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (19:55):\n\n[Audio replays of LaBelle reading with voice overlaping – transcribed as heard] It has already begun. It has already – the time begun. The time-space, the time of the time space of speaking, that speaking moves itself, itself. Speaking that moves. Knowing nothing toward something, knowing nothing. You something. The uses that arrive from the, use the particularities as the basis particularities. A giving as the basis for a giving a rhythm, enacting breath, a rhythm, breathing toward breath away, breathing toward, away.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod (20:43):\n\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Thanks to Brandon for talking with me, amid the books and sounds of errant bodies. Press check the show notes for links to the press and to the Listening Biennal. ShortCuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast. The podcast team is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy transcriber, Yara Ajeeb podcast co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. ShortCuts has been designed and produced by me, Katherine McLeod, and thanks to all who have joined me on it along the way. As always, thanks to you for listening.\n\n "],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9686","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.3, Audio of the Month – Where does the reading begin?, 16 March 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/82798c7c-9e61-462e-be60-0d337f42f2a1/sw-minisode-ep-3_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-3_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:04:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"4,663,633 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Sw Minisode Ep 3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-03-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549826306054,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month our SpokenWeb minisode features Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show, Nov 20, 2016. As Kellough starts to introduce his reading, a pre-recorded voice slowly mixes with his live words. Where, then, does the introduction end, and where does the reading begin?\n\n00:00\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. You know the drill. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. This series is an extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca with Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s March edition of Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n\n01:08\n\nTheme Music:\n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n\n01:08\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nIn this Audio of the Month, we’ll be listening to a recording of Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal. The reading was on November 20th, 2016. Kellough’s voice has been recorded many times throughout the past 20 years of Montreal’s Words and Music Show, a monthly cabaret of spoken word, poetry, music, and dance established and organized by poet and musician Ian Ferrier. The recordings of these shows have now been digitized and cataloged by SpokenWeb researchers at Concordia University. During the digitization process, student research assistant Ali Barillaro noticed that this performance by Kellough stood out from the rest. As Kellough starts to introduce his own reading, a pre-recorded voice slowly mixes with his live words. Where, then, does the introduction end, and where does the reading begin?\n\n02:10\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Kaie Kellough] Hello, thanks Ian for that introduction and thanks to all of the other artists tonight. It’s been a very nice night. I’m going to present something to, at, for you that is somewhat narrative, I guess. But it isn’t related to my, to my novel. It’s some, some other narratives and the narratives are related to adolescence, [Audio, a recording of a masculine voice, overlapping with Kaie speaking. It progressively gets louder and more audible] which is a peculiar time in life. And I think that they’re relevant nowadays because they’re related to adolescents in a particular place in time–\n\n03:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] …gripping, steering…\n\n03:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in Alberta–\n\n03:04\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice]…pumpjacks, a sign behind…\n\n03:07\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in the–\n\n03:09\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] …I want to forget–\n\n03:09\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –1980s.\n\n03:10\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –high school fever–\n\n03:12\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] In, in–\n\n03:13\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –forever. Forget articles in _The Herald_–\n\n03:15\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in the moment of–\n\n03:16\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –about black-haired teens from the reserves–\n\n03:17\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –heavy evangelical–\n\n03:18\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –who drank themselves to death–\n\n03:19\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –activity–\n\n03:20\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –in macho contests–\n\n03:20\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and extreme conservatism and–\n\n03:22\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –trying to prove to themselves that they exist.\n\n03:24\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –some of the [Stutters] ch-ch-challenges–\n\n03:25\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] As night dripped into next day’s headlines,–\n\n03:27\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that arise when growing up–\n\n03:28\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –I want to forget my stupid conviction–\n\n03:28\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and trying to live and become oneself–\n\n03:31\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –that a boy had to be distilled–\n\n03:33\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in a climate like that–\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –into a man.\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –which–\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] That the terror of being bloodline–\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –seems to be a climate that,–\n\n03:37\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –had to be spiked with rum.\n\n03:37\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that is reemerging in spite of–\n\n03:39\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] That amber alcohol preserved–\n\n03:41\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –all of the,–\n\n03:41\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –the DNA–\n\n03:41\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –all of the-,-\n\n03:42\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –that seeped down centuries–\n\n03:44\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –all of the,–\n\n03:44\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –from slavery.\n\n03:45\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –appearances–\n\n03:46\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] That coloured this reflection on boyhood\n\n03:46\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –to the contrary, that had, that had appeared–\n\n03:49\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –in a far-flung suburb–\n\n03:50\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in the past.–\n\n03:50\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –of empire,–\n\n03:51\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] The idea–\n\n03:52\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –a mighty slum,–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that, that–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –a bubble, born yesterday–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –or a 12-pack of empties–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –born yesterday, was finished–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –or a bubble in a bottle,–\n\n03:58\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and that–\n\n04:00\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –broken in the back seat,–\n\n04:00\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –it was gone and, and, and done–\n\n04:02\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –a froth that slicked between–\n\n04:02\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and suddenly a wave… [Kaie begins distorting his own voice, deliberately stuttering, repeating, and cutting out as the recording of the masculine voice continues to sound clearly] A w-w-w-w-wave of c-c-c-c-conservatism has has has has has crashed…\n\n04:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] — slides archived by teenage brains. Autobiography of an outsider screamed at the dragon. Nobody is [inaudible] crashed oldsmobile [inaudible] supreme…\n\n04:14\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n04:18\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThat was Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal on November 20th, 2016. Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about where this recording is from. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9687","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.4, Audio of the Month – Dorothy Livesay listening to the radio, 20 April 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-dorothy-livesay-listening-to-the-radio/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3e711ac8-1ac2-4526-9497-8f7c82102e60/sw-minisode-ep-4_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-4_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:07:28\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\" 7,242,441 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Sw Minisode Ep 4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-dorothy-livesay-listening-to-the-radio/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-04-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549827354624,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this Audio of the Month minisode Katherine Mcleod features recordings of poet Dorothy Livesay. We hear Livesay read selections of her work including “Bartok and the Geranium,” a poem that is often anthologized and, in fact, you may have studied it in a course on Canadian poetry. But do you know how Livesay wrote it?\n\n00:00\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n\n00:52\n\nTheme Music:\n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n\n01:03\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nIn this Audio of the Month, we’ll be listening to Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay. We’ll hear a clip of a recording of Livesay reading in Montreal on January 14th, 1971. The Audio of the Month is selected from a series of Audio of the Week posts that I’ve been creating for the spokenweb.ca site [Audio, recording of Livesay introducing “The Unquiet Bed overlapping with Katherine] and a previous Audio of the Week features Livesay reciting one of her most song-like poems “The Unquiet Bed.”\n\n01:31\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay reciting “The Unquiet Bed”] The woman I am / is not what you see. / I’m not just bones / and crockery. / The woman I am / knew love and hate / hating the chains / that parents make / longing that love / might set men free / yet hold them fast / in loyalty. / The woman I am / is not what you see / move over love / make room for me.\n\n01:57\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThat was Livesay reading “The Unquiet Bed” and this Audio of the Month features another musical poem by Livesay from that same reading in Montreal in 1971. The poem is “Bartok and the Geranium.” This poem is one that is often anthologized and in fact, you may have studied it in a course on Canadian poetry. But do you know how the poem began?\n\n02:24\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay] The poem simply began because I was teaching an evening class of housewives the art of creative writing. And I gave them an assignment to write an imagistic or perhaps a haiku-type poem… When they got home, to look around the house and find two objects utterly different and disparate and just see if they could link these objects in a tension, which would create a poem. Well, the next day I was, had sent the children to school after lunch and was sitting in the dining room listening to CBC Concert and heard music that I hadn’t heard before at all, a violin concerto it seemed to be. And in the window as I was listening, there was this red geranium. So I thought to myself, well, I’ve given my class an assignment, I wonder if I could do the same thing. And at the end of the concert, they announced it was a Béla Bartók violin concerto. So suddenly these two elements, the music and the geranium, did seem to link in my mind and immediately I wrote the poem, which I think I’ve never revised. I’ll tell you afterwards what some of the professors have said about the meaning of the poem. [Audience Laughs]\n\n03:49\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThis poem, the subject of probably thousands of student analyses by now, all started from an assignment that Livesay had given to her own students, a class full of women. How ironic that Livesay ends up producing a poem that then finds its way into the lecture notes of male professors who claim to reveal the true meaning of it or, as Livesay herself puts it:\n\n04:16\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay] He informed the class that this poem represented the conflict between nature and art. While at first I was a bit dumbfounded, you know now how the whole thing began and then what I felt about the he and she of it.\n\n04:32\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nWhat I find fascinating about Livesay’s story of writing the poem is not so much that she uncovers its origins. Our own interpretations of the poem are still valid and Livesay remains open to these varied interpretations, too. What I hear in her story is a story of her poetics. By this I mean that Livesay’s story of how she wrote “Bartok and the Geranium” is a story that fuses the imagism of her early poems of the 1920s with the tension of the social that informs her poetry from the mid-1930s onwards. The poem bursts forth from a moment of listening, a private moment of listening to something entirely new, her attention caught by the sound of the Bartók violin concerto and then framed by the space of domesticity in which she listens. It is instantaneous in this moment of listening that Livesay forges a connection between the sound of the music transmitted through the radio and the image of the flower framed by the window.\n\n05:45\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay reciting “Bartok and the Geranium”] She lifts her green umbrellas / Towards the pane / Seeking her fill of sunlight / Or of rain; / Whatever falls / She has no commentary / Accepts, extends, / Blows out her furbelows, / Her bustling boughs; / And all the while he whirls / Explodes in space, / Never content with this small room: / Not even can he be / Confined to sky / But must speed high and higher still / From galaxy to galaxy, / Wrench from the stars their momentary notes / Steal music from the moon. / She’s daylight / He is dark / She’s heaven­held breath / He storms and crackles / Spits with hell’s own spark. / Yet in this room, this moment now / These together breathe and be: / She, essence of serenity, / He in a mad intensity / Soars beyond sight / Then hurls, lost Lucifer / From Heaven’s height. / And when he’s done, he’s out: / She leans a lip against the glass / And preens herself in light.\n\n06:53\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n06:59\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nHead to spokenweb.ca to find out how to listen to the entire recording of Dorothy Livesay reading in Montreal in 1971. I’m Katherine McLeod and thanks for listening. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sound archives of SpokenWeb.\n\n\n"],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9689","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.5, Audio of the Month – Then and Now, 18 May 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-  \",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/58452fcb-56ec-4594-bb2b-e732c0fcbafc/sw-minisode-5-then-and-now_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-5-then-and-now_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:07:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"7,406,281 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"SW Minisode 5_Then and Now\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-05-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549827354625,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month our SpokenWeb minisode features Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt reading “Lagoon” from Vancouver Poems (1972), a deeply local collection that she had not yet published when this reading took place at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in Montreal. When listening to Marlatt reading “Lagoon,” we can hear the many futures of her listening, then and now.\n\n(00:00)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. This is an extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca. Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. As the cherry blossoms fall in Vancouver and the snow melts away to spring flowers in Montreal, we’re reminded that spring is a time of renewal, to reflect on the past and celebrate new beginnings from coast to coast. While we find ourselves in uncertain times the season beckons us to collectively celebrate and regenerate in the then and now. No matter where you are listening from, take a deep breath of crisp, spring air and join Katherine in listening back with our ears towards the future. Here is Katherine McLeod with May’s SpokenWeb Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:25)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:30)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this Audio of the Month, we’re going to be listening to the poem “Lagoon” by Daphne Marlatt. In 1970 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), Daphne Marlatt read in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. She began her reading with Vancouver Poems. These poems are from a deeply local collection that she had not yet published when this reading took place.\n(02:00)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daphne Marlatt] I thought that what I’d do first is read to you from the Vancouver Poems.\n(02:05)\tKatherine McLeod\tBefore reading the first poem, “Lagoon,” she tells her Montreal audience that she’ll explain the local references as she goes along, starting with the first poem that refers to Lost Lagoon in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.\n(02:20)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daphne Marlatt] I’ll just try and explain allusions as I go along for those people who have never been to Vancouver or know it because the poems tend to be pretty local as they were intended to be.\n(02:34)\tKatherine McLeod\tMarlatt could not have anticipated that those poems from Vancouver Poems published in 1972 would become pathways to revisit the city when republishing many of them, years later, in Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now published by Talon Books in 2013. Akin to Marlatt’s revisiting of place in the book Steveston, Liquidities _revisits and revises the city and the poetic voice. As Marlatt writes in her introduction to _Liquidities, “Vancouver Poems was a young woman’s take on a young city as it surfaced to her gaze.” By the way, she calls this introduction “Then and Now.” Marlatt’s return to the poems is not unlike the poet listening again to her own recorded voice. And that’s exactly what Marlatt did in November 2014 at Concordia when she read alongside and responded to her voice from that 1970 recording in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. And again, five years later in September 2019 at UBC Okanagan, when Marlatt listened and responded to recordings of her voice and other voices in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and in the UBC Okanagan-based SoundBox collection.’\n(04:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tI met Marlatt here in Montreal when she read alongside that recording of her voice from 1970. She signed my copy of _Liquidities _with the words “Vancouver connection.” Now, by now, if you’ve been listening to these Audio of the Months, you may have figured out that I’m from Vancouver and that the Vancouver-Montreal connection is a meaningful one. I open this book now and read these poems of Vancouver here in Montreal. And I think of the then and the now and whether to hold them together in my reading and in my listening, or let them go, move, slip, liquid, changing, and to listen to the poems, listening to this change. With that, let’s listen to Marlatt reading “Lagoon” in 1970 here in Montreal, listening to her reading in a voice that she will later listen to in a reading, and listening to the many futures of her listening then and now.\n(05:11)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daphne Marlatt reciting “Lagoon.” Some words are absent or different than the version in _Liquidities_] Lagoon, / down a cut on the city side, apartments / shacked uphill, through shadow and hulls and ribs we walk. / You’ve come home. On either side dark nets remember / how a wind fishing for that extent both left and right / ruffles your hair. Here. The city drinks what it collects. / Water or ducks, a nesting place. A neck of land. / Whose profile somehow looks more narrow in the street. / Our eyes reflect … kites, banners, a populous sky. / What you or others brought, come back to / Lie when we / outwalk our dragons, thus, their future tails: catch / fire. / You confirm that we sail to the east at nine, shore wise / having no place, antique, a houseboard. Wind ships our / ship, stands, having completed its turn to, gather to / the bridge… / Wait! I can’t get my hand out of green / pockets green, dissected, frogs. The edges of their / vision littoral. We skirt red. I’m half in, wanting to / pull up reeds to plant. / Your coin proves nothing, no / bottom, don’t. Go (in shoes sucked under). Water / scuttles old men on benches dangle under conifers. Listen: / their edges are always murmuring, Marshes, Your / forced march. / Could we afford your going? A salmon run? On the / corner there, half indecisive, tarnish of atrophied / fish in raffia swung: a house sign, a place to / enter. / Where I’d make tea, your lips on the future, / caught, so you could read me.\n(07:16)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(07:16)\tKatherine McLeod\tHead to spokenweb.ca to find out more about where this recording is from. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":2.2450583},{"id":"9690","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.6, Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen, 15 June 2020, Aubin"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Mathieu Aubin"],"creator_names_search":["Mathieu Aubin"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/cef978e4-dfa7-45e2-a2c9-0d9a4a465a38/sw-minisode-ep-6_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-6_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:11:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,734,072 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"SW Minisode ep 6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-06-15\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549828403200,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month we bring you a very special guest curator edition of SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month. In this minisode, Katherine McLeod is joined by SpokenWeb researcher and postdoctoral fellow Mathieu Aubin for a glimpse into the life and work of Canadian poet bill bissett – from poetic surveillance to an avant-garde dinner fit for a Queen.\n\n(00:00)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. This month, we are excited to share a special guest curator edition of the SpokenWeb minisodes from SpokenWeb postdoctoral fellow Mathieu Aubin. Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod and Mathieu Aubin with SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:03)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:03)\tKatherine McLeod\tFor this Audio of the Month, I’d like to introduce you to a special guest who will be guiding us through a variety of recordings of Canadian sound poet bill bissett. Our guest is Mathieu Aubin, a SpokenWeb postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University. So how did this Audio of the Month come about, you might ask? Well, Mathieu started by pitching an idea to the Audio of the Week series, and if you’re a SpokenWeb researcher and an audio clip catches your attention, please do get in touch and your audio clip could become part of the Audio of the Week or even an Audio of the Month. Now, what was it that caught Mathieu’s attention? He was conducting an oral history interview with bill bissett and bill started telling him about “that time when he had dinner with the queen.” Yes, had dinner with the queen. That caught my attention, too. But to get to that part in the story, let’s hear, Mathieu set the scene through sound.\n(02:08)\tMathieu Aubin\tThis month, I have the pleasure and privilege to be your Audio of the Month curator. As your curator, I’ll be introducing and briefly discussing three audio clips documenting a decade in bill bissett’s life. As you may or may not know, bissett is a visual artist and award-winning gay poet who has published over 50 books. He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, November 23rd, 1939, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, 1958. There, he co-created blewointment magazine and blewointment press, which published visual, concrete, and sound poetry. Though bissett is now an iconic poet, he faced many difficulties during the late 1960s and the 1970s. For instance, in the late 1960s, when Vancouver narcotics police officers raided counter-cultural communities, bissett was arrested for possession of cannabis. You can hear about this experience in the recording of the poem “another 100 warrants” read during the Sir George Williams Reading Series on October 31st, 1969. Let’s listen.\n(03:11)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, bill bissett reciting “another 100 warrants issued”] Another hundred warrants issued. News flash. Seven men entered a Vancouver graveyard only to disappear in a flash of white light. What’s it like, oh straight person, square-jawed, to be able to shop around save three vets from the Army & Navy without being stalked, harassed, etc. by the narcs at every turn you take. Hey, what’s it like to get up in the morning, gathered, you and your friends, close ones, around the warming stove without the RCMP crashing through the veils within the embargo of mistrust. Canada, etc.\n(03:45)\tMathieu Aubin\tExperiences such as these with the mounties and narcs were documented by other poets in Vancouver, such as Sharon Thesen in her poem “Chrysanthemum Perfume,” which is discussed by our sister podcast SoundBox Signals in their episode “Only the Imagination Carries Forward.” Though he was freed from jail with the help of UBC English professor Warren Tallman, bissett remained on the local police’s radar. This forced him to spend many of the 1970s living in secrecy while continuing to run his blewointment press, publishing his work with presses such as Talon Books. In 1977, bissett’s poetry was debated in the House of Commons because Conservative MPs cited his work as evidence of the Canada Council’s misuse of public funding. That year, bissett’s Canada Council funding was heavily reduced, causing members of Vancouver’s literary community to come together and defend their friend. In last month’s Audio of the Week post titled “bill bissett on CKVU-TV September 1978,” we hear an example of these efforts. In the recording from the PennSound collection, a partner affiliate of the SpokenWeb research network, we hear Pia Shandel, then-host of The Vancouver Show, document what had happened to bissett as he chants in the background and reads the poem “th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police.”\n(05:03)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, bill bissett reciting “th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police”] The wonderfulness of the mounties, our secret police. They open our mail, petulantly they burn down barns they can’t bug. They listen to our political leaders phone conversations. What could be less inspiring to overhear? [Audience Laughs] They had me down on the floor til I turned purple, then my friends pulled them off me. They think breastfeeding is disgusting. Every time we come here to raid this place, you always have that kid on your tit. They tore my daughter’s doll’s head off looking for dope. One of my more memorable beatings was in the backseat locked inside one of their unmarked cars. They work for the CIA. At night, they drive around and shine their searchlights on people embracing and with their PA systems, tell them to keep away from the trees. They listen to your most secret farts, rewinding the tape, looking for hidden meaning. Indigestion is a national security risk.\n(06:13)\tMathieu Aubin\tIn the poem, the speaker documents the mounties surveillance tactics, such as opening people’s mail, recording phone calls, expressing heterosexist comments, and physically attacking him. While I’ve thought about this decade in bissett’s life for many years and I’ve met with him on several occasions to talk about this time in his life, when we last spoke, he shared a surprising twist to the story. In an oral history interview with him, I shared with bissett that Pierre Elliot Trudeau, then-prime-minister, was apparently upset about the accusations against the Canada Council. bissett was surprised when I told them this as he recalled attending a dinner at Ottawa’s Château Laurier hosted by Trudeau and attended by Queen Elizabeth II. The dinner was supposed to be a showcase of Canada’s Avant-Garde artists, including writers like bpNichol, Carol Bolt, Michael Ondaatje, and bissett himself. As bissett told me this story, I learned that his life of being pursued by the Vancouver police and the mounties, living in secrecy, and facing homophobic attacks in the House of Commons had as a counterpoint an experience of dining with the queen and explaining sound poetry to her. Oral histories can be incredible sources of twists and turns. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to have so many fruitful conversations with bissett and that he shared this story with me. Here is a story by bissett about him and his friend Carol Bolt, author of the play One Night Stand, meeting the queen sometime in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did when I first heard this story.\n(07:49)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, bill bissett] There were a lot of beautiful guys there.\n(07:52)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Mathieu Aubin] Mhm.\n(07:52)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And the queen… Carol Bolt was there. She had gone to bed early for a person and she wrote a great play called One Night Stand.\n(08:05)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Okay.\n(08:05)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And it got a lot of performances all across Canada. And she wanted to meet the queen. I was wearing a powder– no, I was wearing a blue tuxedo with a powder blue shirt, frills going down the middle of it.\n(08:25)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] I can picture it, yeah.\n(08:25)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And I just loved it. I just… I was so happy and no one had gotten anywhere for me to spend the night, I’d forgotten about that. Everyone else, don’t know.\n(08:35)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(08:35)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And so anyway, so I wasn’t worried yet. And so I was bringing Carol Bolt over to meet the queen. Like Pierre Trudeau, she’s really short. And I was taller than her as well. And I said, “Your majesty, I’d love you to meet Carol Bolt. And she’s the author of a wonderful Canadian play called One Night Stand. Do you know what a one night stand is?” And she said, “Well, not now, but I did.” And then Carol disappeared. I said, “Good heavens, she’s disappeared.”\n(09:12)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(09:12)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And.. no, it was the queen that said, “Good heavens.” I said, “Oh my God, she’s not here. She got so shy she ran away.”\n(09:19)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Aww.\n(09:19)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] She couldn’t do it. I understood that. And so then she said, “Well, what do you do?” She said to me. I said, “I do sound poetry.” And she said, “What is that?” I said it was poetry that the main emphasis is on sound and, you know, just make sounds. The sounds are the enchantment or the experience–\n(09:42)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(09:42)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] –rather than the meaning. And she said, “Oh, that sounds very interesting.” And then the queen was going to leave after, a little while after that… We’ve been reported a sniper in the lobby or something. And then Carol came back and she said, “I can do it now. I took a deep breath.” I said, “Okay, let’s go.” And so I went after the queen and I touched her on the shoulder, which you’re not allowed to do.\n(10:04)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] [Gasps] Oh!\n(10:04)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] Her skin was like smooth–\n(10:05)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(10:05)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] –like smooth. And I said, “Your majesty, Carol’s here!” She said, “Oh, blessings, you’ve reappeared! How excellent,” I mean, she was very festive.\n(10:17)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Aww.\n(10:17)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And it was, yeah, it was a lovely evening.\n(10:21)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(10:26)\tKatherine McLeod\tThat was bill bissett in conversation with Mathieu Aubin. My thanks to Mathieu for suggesting these audio clips from SpokenWeb, PennSound and an oral history interview conducted as part of Mathieu’s postdoctoral SpokenWeb research. Find out how to listen to all of these recordings and more by visiting spokenweb.ca. Thanks to Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland for working with me to produce this minisode. My name is Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":2.2450583}]