[{"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":2.9629161},{"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":2.9629161},{"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":2.9629161},{"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":2.9629161}]