[{"id":"9275","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E2, Sound Recordings Are Weird, 4 November 2019, Camlot and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Cheryl Gladu"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Cheryl Gladu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Cheryl Gladu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/d43444be-7bce-40fc-8a82-091032ea2dba/sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"1:01:28\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"59,075,231 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"128kbps\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-11-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford Universiy Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23893\\n\\n—. “Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21 (2015). https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.744/\\n\\nConnor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.\\n\\nErnst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording.”\\nFolklore Forum 32 (2001): 57-102.\\n\\nGitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.\\n\\nStanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.\\n\\nNaremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016.\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke\\nUP, 2003.\\n\\nUCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549461401600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In “Sound Recordings are Weird: Stories and thoughts about early spoken recordings”, SpokenWeb research Jason Camlot interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb Network to uncover the stories behind the making of Early Literature Recordings. Drawing from his recent book “Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings”, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological and personal meaning of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we are interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them? What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world? And What do they mean now?\n\n00:00:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n00:00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As we dive into episode two in the SpokenWeb series, I want you to picture the oldest recording technology you can think of. Oh, what are you picturing? Is it a cassette player? You can tell me if it’s a cassette player. Is it a phonograph and maybe a wax cylinder? In this episode spoken web researcher Jason Camlot, interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb network to uncover the stories behind the making of early literature recordings. Drawn from his recent book Phonopoetics, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological, and personal meanings of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we’re interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them. What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world and what do they mean now? Here is Jason Camlot with episode two: Sound Recordings are Weird: stories and thoughts at the earliest spoken recordings.\n00:02:08\tMusic:\t[Instrumental]\n00:02:19\tJason Camlot:\tPart one. Old Sound Recordings are Weird.\n00:02:44\tJason Camlot:\tNo, there’s nothing wrong with your device. Do not adjust your radio dial so to speak. What you are listening to is an early sound recording.\n00:03:06\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. A Victorian scholar, that’s someone who studies 19th century literature and culture, and a researcher who is interested in the relationships that exist between sound and literature.\n00:03:29\tJason Camlot:\tIf you listened to the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, you might recall that the sound you’ve just heard is what first got me interested in research about the history of sound recording and how people have read literature out loud since the 19th century. I was an undergraduate student taking a full year of Victorian literature class. We were studying the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson. And then one morning, my professor, John Miller,\n00:03:56\tJohn Miller:\tI’m John Miller, and I’ve retired from teaching Victorian literature at Concordia University in Montreal,\n00:04:02\tJason Camlot:\tWalked in with a boombox.\n00:04:04\tJohn Miller:\tThe classrooms weren’t equipped, so I had to get a boombox and trundle into the class and fiddle with the dials and so on.\n00:04:18\tJason Camlot:\tAnd played us that recording you just heard. I have to say the first time I heard the piece, I found it to be a bit off-putting and scary because of the way it sounded, but also kind of strange and wonderful, sort of magical.\n00:04:35\tJohn Miller:\tI think there was some fairly stunned silence because, of course, none of us ever expected anything like this.\n00:04:44\tJason Camlot:\tIt was exciting to know that this long dead poet we were studying was, all of a sudden, transported to us in our classroom through a boombox. Many years later, I asked John Miller if he remembered the first time that he had heard the recording.\n00:05:01\tJohn Miller:\tI first heard the recording when I was a graduate student in a full-year Tennyson and Browning course, and John Pettigrew who was teaching the course had a copy of it and wowed us one day.\n00:05:19\tJason Camlot:\tI asked him if he remembers what it sounded like to him when he first heard it.\n00:05:22\tJohn Miller:\tIncomprehensible.\n00:05:24\tJason Camlot:\tAfter a while, as you listen to an old recording repeatedly, you can get past the strangeness of the sound and begin to decipher the words and tune into the way the reader is delivering or performing the poem. You come to hear the reading as a form of interpretation, a manner of actually performing the meaning of the poem through the use of different kinds of intonation and other vocal techniques that shaped the sound of the text with and through the reader’s voice. There are lots of different interpretations of this same poem recorded by Victorian actors and elocutionists around the turn of the 19th century.\n00:06:05\tAudio Recording:\tHalf a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred. / “Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” he said. / Into the valley of Death\n00:06:24\tJason Camlot:\tThe recording we have of Tennyson reading his own poem is the first such recorded oral interpretation of this poem. It gets us thinking about how Tennyson interpreted his own poetry with his voice.\n00:06:37\tJohn Miller:\tIt’s, I think the term that we came up with was elegiac rather than heroic. Tennyson recites the poem so slowly, that any heroism is evaporated. And, really, I think his performance reverses much of the conventional wisdom about the poem at the time.\n00:07:13\tAudio Recording:\t“Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” He said. / Into the valley of Death”\n00:07:21\tJason Camlot:\tThe heroic sound of the poem that John Miller refers to is clearly audible in this torrential rendition of the poem by Victorian stage actor Lewis Waller known for what James Naremore has described as his ‘phallic performing skill.’ The interpretation that John Miller hears in Tennyson’s reading goes against that standard accepted idea about the meaning of the charge\n00:07:45\tJohn Miller:\tthat it was a kind of newspaper, a poet Laureate glorification of British foolhardy gallantry. Rather than a lament for the disaster that it was\n00:08:10\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:08:11\tJason Camlot:\tHalf a league, half a league, half a league onward. In the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Forward, the Light Brigade. Charge for the guns, he said. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Ellipsis. Dot, dot dot. When can their glory fade? O, the wild charge they made. All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made. Honour the Light Brigade. Noble six hundred. This translation of an unintelligible old recording into clear or at least clearer words that I have just performed, represents an act of demystification, an unweirding of this old recording. Old sound recordings like the one we just heard are weird, not just because we can’t always decipher what the actual sounds are, but because, well, firstly the recording has preserved the voice of a famous person from another century whose voice we may have thought was lost for all time. So it’s weird to have an emanation from that body assumed eternally absent, resonate again, vibrate through the air for us to hear. It creates a kind of vocalic body, evoking the physical body that’s no longer there. That idea of the vocalic body comes from Steven Connor’s book about ventriloquism. Secondly, the recording itself doesn’t sound normal to us. This is because we are listening to a digitized version of a different material medium; a late-Victorian brown wax cylinder. The particular cylinder behind this recording wasn’t preserved according to best archival practices. It lost some of its shape over time, distorting the voice of the poet, making it kind of warped or erie or creepy sounding to our modern ears and adding other sounds that are derived from the material medium itselfT from the wax. Those sounds become even stranger as the sound is migrated from one media format to another. In the case of this early Tennyson wax cylinder recording, it went from brown wax cylinder to a small flat disc record that was sold to the public by the Tennyson society. John Miller purchased that record and then transferred that to a cassette tape and played it through a boombox. Hearing odd cylinder noises through a 1980s boombox estranges the original sound from its source. Same goes for when we turn it into an mp3 file and listen to it through a computer or iPhone. There are a lot of additional sounds beyond the voice that we cannot identify in this recording. For example, starting from about one minute and 33 seconds into the recording, we hear a loud banging sound.\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\tWe can’t know if this is a feature of the recording technology or if Tennyson himself was simply getting carried away with his recitation, banging a lectern or a table as he performed the poem. This is what John Miller assumed the banging sound to be.\n00:11:55\tJohn Miller:\tI think there are points at which he is pounding his cane on the floor, points which he runs out of breath, and that does give an extraordinary sense of the life, I think.\n00:12:08\tJason Camlot:\tAn extraordinary sense of Tennyson’s sonic presence, of his vocalic body. There’s also the issue of context. We can’t always hear context in a sound recording, although there are sometimes clues that can be heard. In this case, it’s hard for us to understand what was going on at the time. Why was he even making this recording? What would that have been like for him? Where was he exactly? What time was it? Was he reading or reciting his poem by heart? These old sound recordings are like escaped fugitives from their original media and historical contexts. And yet, despite all this strangeness, even with all this missing information, when we hear a historical voice recording, when we listen to Tennyson read The Charge of the Light Brigade again, over 100 years after he recited it into a phonograph, there’s something very real about it. This sense of the realness of recorded sound seems to have been felt by listeners even at the earliest exhibitions of the tinfoil phonograph.\n00:13:17\tLisa Gitelman:\tI think there is something to that, that this was an experience of temporal continuity, that there was a slice of time that was being inscribed onto these sheets of tinfoil, in a way that when you write down what somebody said, you’re not putting down – you’re putting down the words, but you’re not putting down a slice of time. My name is Lisa Gitelman. I’m a professor at New York University where I teach in the departments of English and the department of Media, Culture and Communication. There were several ways I guess we could say that these recordings and these exhibitions became experiences of temporality, right? The, the kind of preservative nature of the tinfoil but also the kind of the temporal duration of the recording itself.\n00:14:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe realtime quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what philosopher Wolfgang Ernst has called the ‘drama of time critical media.’ I like the idea that something dramatic happens when we play with time by playing sound recordings. An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing. It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one is hearing is living in the present, replicating the live event of which it is apparently a real time reproduction. Sound recording works on human perception itself and on our perception of time in particular. So Ernst’s argument about the strange drama of sound recording is based on his idea that we’re not cognitively equipped to process events from two temporal dimensions at the same time. When we immerse ourselves in real time sound, we perceive it as live and this jars our awareness of time. So that’s another weird quality of early sound recordings: they give us the experience of feeling time as multi-dimensional. In that way, a phonograph is like a time machine and we’re the time travellers. As an aside, HG Wells published his story, The Time Machine in 1895 soon after the invention of sound recording and film media technologies. Maybe he was inspired by this weird drama of time critical media that Wolfgang Ernst just talking about\n00:15:51\tJason Camlot:\tPart two, what is an early sound recorder? How did recording sounds become possible and how did those early technologies work?\n00:16:05\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:16:06\tJason Camlot:\tMaybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As we just heard from Lisa Gitelman, wax cylinders weren’t even the first recording technology, just my personal entry into the world of recorded sound. Like a lot of innovations, in hindsight, it seems almost obvious that humans would record sound, including the human voice, and play this back for all the reasons we’ve come to expect. However, like a lot of human inventions, there was a certain degree of serendipity involved in the development of recording technologies and also some inventive talent. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, that one name kept coming up.\n00:16:52\tAudio Recording:\tThomas Edison, Thomas Edison, Edison, Thomas Edison.\n00:16:57\tLisa Gitelman:\tI have doctorate in literature, so I’m a person who’s interested in texts, interested in reading and writing. And after I went to graduate school, I got a job at Rutgers University in New Jersey, working with a team of scholars that have, for a long time, have been researching and publishing the papers of the American inventor, Thomas Edison.\n00:17:19\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:17:21\tLisa Gitelman:\tAnd I spent many years working with that team of scholars to educate ourselves and educate the public about this archive and what was it. One of the things in it was a lot of material about the invention of recorded sound and I just was kind of bitten by the buck and became fascinated. In particular with the kind of earliest moments in 1877 and 1878, when the idea recorded sound itself didn’t really exist. One of the most precious things there, were experimental notebooks. So we have the original experimental notebooks in which Edison and his team of inventors were playing around in the 1870s – let’s say, in the fall of 1877 or the summer of 1877 – with lots of telephone devices, basically trying to invent a better telephone. And there was a lot of work in this period by Edison and by many others on telephone and Telegraph work, and there were lots of telegraph systems that did involve paper tapes. Either a telegraphic messages printed on paper tape or paper tape used as a kind of repeating device for telegraph communication, to make telegraphy a little bit more automatic. So using paper was something they had around and it also locked into expectations about inscription. And we have documents that more or less show us a certain moment when Edison realized, ‘Look, the way we’re doing this, we could actually use this technology to not just, you know, sort of transmit sound, but actually save it up.’ So you can actually see this in the manuscript notebooks. And then of course there are lots and lots of pieces of correspondence and business papers, then some promotional materials, so the archive is just a kind of many-splendored collection of oddities in a way. But it’s filled with these stories that can be pieced back together by historians who go through the papers.\n00:19:44\tJason Camlot:\tI’m going to try to take you through a history of acoustic recording technologies from the pre-recording phonautograph of the 1860s to the invention of the tinfoil phonograph in 1877 to the perfected wax cylinder phonograph in 1888. And then, eventually, To the introduction of flat disc gramophone records and beyond. To give this early historical account of sound recording technologies. I’d like to introduce you to:\n00:20:14\tPatrick Feaster:\tMy name’s Patrick Feaster. I’m media preservation specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative at Indiana University and I study the cultural, social, and technological history of sound recording with a particular emphasis on very, very early sound recordings. When we talk about sound recordings today, we generally think of them as something that is intended mainly to be listened to. You record speech music…\n00:20:40\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:42\tPatrick Feaster:\t…some kind of sound, then you play it back again as sound.\n00:20:46\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tThe first person to record a sound out of the air and then play it back was Thomas Edison in 1877, But he was not the first person to record a sound out of the air. The first person to record a sound out of the air was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He was a scientific proofreader who, In about 1850 to 1853, was given a treatise on physiology, which included a section describing how the human ear and eardrum work. As he read this, he began imagining to himself an artificial eardrum that would vibrate in the same way that human eardrum does, but then instead of passing those vibrations along to the auditory nerve and the brain so that we could hear them, it would write them down so that, as he imagined, any sound that the human ear was capable of hearing could be written down in this way. The invention he came up with consisted first of all of a big funnel with the membrane at one end of it. And the idea was you’d direct sounds of speech, song, whatever it was, into this funnel, they would cause the membrane to vibrate, then a stylus attached to the other side of the membrane would move back and forth with the vibrations. Now underneath the stylus would be a sheet of paper covered with the soot of an oil lamp and wrapped around a cylinder, and as sounds were directed into the funnel, you’d rotate the cylinder and as the stylus moved back and forth, it would draw a wavy line in the soot. After you’d made your recording, you’d take the sheet of paper off the drum, you’d fix it in an alcohol bath, kind of like fixing a charcoal drawing, and then you’d have this visual record of sound. Now the wavy line on that sheet of paper contains the same kind of information as the wavy groove on an LP. In both cases, we’re dealing with a graph of sound vibrations, the amplitude of sound vibrations over time, but Scott’s phonautograms were not intended for playback, which hadn’t yet occurred to anybody as a possibility at this point. Instead, he thought of the phonautograph as recording sounds in the same sense that a seismograph records earthquakes, you would not expect to be able to take a seismograph record of an earthquake and use it to create another earthquake. In fact, if you could do that, seismographs would probably be a lot more tightly controlled. But at the same time, we don’t think of seismographs as not really recording earthquakes. They really do, they graph out the vibrations of the, uh, the earth tremors and so forth. And similarly, these records were records of sound. But they were intended to be looked at visually, not listened to. Scott wasn’t sure exactly what people would be able to make of these records. He had rather ambitious thoughts that people would learn to decipher recorded words from them. You could perhaps sit and look at a recording of a performance of dramatic oratory or an operatic aria sitting in your chair at home, and maybe if you learned to read these things well enough, you could imagine in your mind’s ear what their performance had sounded like. But again, it was to be strictly a visual record. That’s not to say that we can’t play them back today. In fact, we can, what we need to do is make a high resolution scan of the phonautogram use an algorithm to detect the position of the wavy line and then convert that information into samples in a digital sound file. Once we do that, we can listen to the recordings Scott made, even though at the time they were made, there was no mechanism available to turn them back into sound. There are a few more things we need to do to get intelligible sound out of a phonautogram. The cylinder on which sounds were recorded was turned by hand, so the recording speed was very irregular. If we were to play the sound waves straight off the paper as the appear there would be extreme speed fluctuations, so severe that you wouldn’t be able to recognize the melody of a tune – something like that. Fortunately, Scott recorded the vibrations of a tuning fork next to the trace of the voice, and the nice thing about that is that the tuning fork always has the same number of vibrations in a given amount of time. And so if we adjust the tuning fork so that it’s at a constant frequency, then we bring the voice in along with it, we can correct for the speed fluctuations from the hand cranking of the cylinder. When we do this, we can hear songs, recitations, very much as they sounded back in the day. The, the tambour was not recorded so successfully, but the pitch very much was\n00:26:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tScott’s recordings were all test recordings to one degree or another. He was really still trying to figure out whether his invention worked and what it could be used to do, so he didn’t go out and record the voices of famous people or famous singers, he pretty much just recorded himself, his own voice. But there was some variety in his recordings. Sometimes he is clearly conducting a dry scientific experiment. Maybe he’s pronouncing words very slowly and deliberately or, or singing a song like ‘O Clair de la Lune’, but holding each note for an uncomfortably long amount of time. The idea here was to see whether, looking at the trace afterwards, you could understand what was going on, you could tell one note from another, maybe different vowel sounds, different consonants would look different from one another. In these cases that’s the sort of thing he was trying to figure out. But sometimes he lets loose with something that really is a full fledged performance. A piece of impassioned, dramatic oratory, a lively rendition of a song from the opera. Here Scott is experimenting with another of his goals for the phonautograph, which is that it could record virtuosic performances. That is, you could have the celebrated figures of the theater and the music hall stand in front of the phonautograph, perform the works for which they were best known, once they were recorded as phonautograms perhaps the, the genius of these people wouldn’t die with them, but future generations could experience it. They could look at those phonautograms, they could hear the performances again in their mind’s ear.\n00:28:29\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, the real breakthrough I think was when they released themselves in a sense from the idea that paper was a recording medium, and started to try experiments with sheets of tinfoil. Um, so the first successful recording surface was sheets of tinfoil, which sounds weird. They are paper-like, right? They certainly come in sheets. But it was a slightly more durable material and it sort of proved useful for what they were trying to do, which is a very kind of crude acoustic recording. The original device was not electronic in any way, it was just mechanical, and in a sense the tinfoil was part of the machine. So in 1877, and then moreso in 1878, the tinfoil phonograph started to gain a lot of popular attention in newspapers, and eventually there were kind of worldwide demonstrations of this, then miraculous, device.\n00:29:36\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo what this machine looked like, it was basically a long cylinder with a handle or a crank at the end that you could sort of spin to make the machine revolve. It had a funnel attached to it that the speaker would speak into, and then the sound of their voice, the vibrations in the air, would create indentations on the tinfoil. And then those indentations on the sheet of tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder, that was sort of the first sound recording. My name is Matthew Rubery, I am a professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Theoretically, that sheet of tinfoil could be replayed again and again, taken off the machine and put back on another machine and played again. But in reality, it did not go so smoothly. Often these sheets of tinfoil tore, they were quite delicate. It was very difficult to rewrap a sheet of tinfoil around a cylinder again, once you’ve taken it off. And then you had to sort of get the rotation speed just right, so you had to have a real skilled operator to turn that handle at just the right speed to recapture the pitch of the original voice. But these tinfoil photographs were the first ones that were made and sort of scraps of tinfoil that were given out at the end of these exhibitions, I mean, what a souvenir, those would be incredibly valuable today.\n00:30:55\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, I mean, if I were to imitate this recording for a classroom it would be easy for me to, I mean, these sounded just terrible. I’m gonna, you know, fake it, but I think they would have sounded like this, [inaudible,] you know just lots of scrapey surface noise. So the real question there is not so much ‘What did we listen to?’ But the real question becomes, ‘How are people so excited about this new recording technology?’ That question takes you back again to this threshold, when things are really new and you need a way to think about them. Apparently available in 1878 was an intuitive sense of fidelity, that ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, that’s you!’ on the recording, because there was nothing to compare it to.\n00:31:58\tDavid Seubert:\tMy name is David Seubert and I’m the Curator of the Performing Arts Collection at the University of California Santa Barbara. And part of my responsibilities here are the management of the historical sound recordings collection, which notably includes one of the world’s largest collections of early cylinder recordings: about 19,000 titles at this point. And we also have the discography of American historical recordings, which is a large database project to document the output of the early North American sound recording industry. A wax cylinder is really the commercial product that resulted from Thomas Edison’s invention of sound recording in the 1870s, where he initially recorded onto a roll of tinfoil wrapped around a cylindrical mandrel in order to use it for mass production of audio content, whether that’s spoken or music or whatever else it might be. They developed a wax cylinder which is a hard metallic soap that allowed for people to both record onto it and then to play it back as well. So unlike flat disks, a wax cylinders are really a read-write medium like cassette tapes or like an mp3 file where people, individuals could buy commercially produced recordings or make their own. So we have some early interesting content there on cylinders.\n00:33:26\tJason Camlot:\tThe history of early sound recording technologies reveals a close connection between sound and visual text or script. As Patrick Feaster explained the original idea for sound recording, the phonautograph didn’t even imagine playing it back, but conceived of sound recording as a kind of sound to printed script technology. The sound goes in and produces a squiggly line that we might perhaps be able to read. Léon Scott wasn’t able to read the squiggles with his own eyes, but Patrick and his colleagues who work on the first sounds project were able to get a computer to read them as digital data and to make that play t`he sounds that were originally recorded in the 1860s. Pretty amazing. Amazing in part because acoustic recording technologies are so very basic. A simple mechanical approach to capturing the air pressure produced by sound producing events like a person speaking. There’s no electrical transduction of the air pressure in this acoustic process, just a horn or tube to direct the sounds toward a thin diaphragm that is sensitive to the changes in air pressure and a stylus or needle that records those changes in air pressure onto something paper – tinfoil, wax – for safekeeping, and then a reversal of just the same process in this case from recorded bumps or squiggles on a material surface, via a stylus, to make the diaphragm shiver and stir the air again and a horn to make us hear those air pressure movements as the sound that had stirred the air in the past. The connection between sound recording and writing was strong from the beginning. Thinking of sound as a kind of printed text may distort or limit our understanding, our apprehension, our hearing of what is spoken recording really is. What if we try to think of these recordings not as visual scripts to be played, not as spoken or sounded versions of print works, but as audio texts, as generic forms in sound.\n00:35:45\tJason Camlot:\tPart three what are the formal and generic features of early sound recordings? What does it mean to think of a recorded speech as a formal entity? What are the elements that constitute the shape and significance of the audio text? The sound of early speech recordings can help us think about how to answer these kinds of questions. They help us hear how the nature of the recording technology itself had an impact on the Sonic qualities of the audio text that could be produced. As we now know, the technological and material underpinnings of an audio text have a hand in shaping how it was produced, used, and consequently the social and cultural meanings it might come to have. This is a pretty typical argument of design theory, which suggests that the material substratum of an artifact informs the possible courses of action that can be taken with it and frames the practices and meanings that surround it. Now, I don’t mean to say that the capacities and limits of the phonograph as a recording and sound playing device, or the material affordances of a wax cylinder as a storage media format, completely determined the use and meaning of all of the sounds that were accorded in preserved with phonograph cylinder technology, but they did play a role in deciding what kinds of sounds could be captured and in the case of speech recordings, what kinds of spoken audio text could be produced. Two quick examples of this. One: acoustic sound recording required the speaker to speak loudly. You practically had to shout to make that diaphragm vibrate enough so the stylus would dig into the wax deeply enough for the recording to the audible when it was played back. This affordance of phonograph recording technology meant that you couldn’t be all that subtle in your recitation of a literary work. You couldn’t whisper a poem into a phonograph. It wouldn’t stick. So early speech recordings couldn’t rely on wide ranges in amplitude, that’s volume or loudness, to communicate the feelings of the speaker. Here’s a second example: cylinders could hold no more than a few minutes of sound. So the storage capacity of the wax cylinder as a preservation medium had some serious implications for what kinds of texts and speeches could be recorded.\n00:38:33\tDavid Seubert:\tYou know the format was short. I mean, it’s a cylinder up until 1908 or so, only held two minutes of content. And after then, after 1908, they introduced four minute cylinders.\n00:38:45\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s David Seubert again.\n00:38:47\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo Edison, when he invented his phonograph, the first sort of prototype made in December of 1877,\n00:38:55\tJason Camlot:\tDr Matthew Rubery.\n00:38:56\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo, going all the way back to the 19th century here he tested it out by reading or reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. And I think that’s an interesting choice, although there’s been a lot of speculation about, you know, why start recorded sound history with this particular example. A few reasons come to mind, one is it’s a very short verse, and the first recordings could only record, you know, I think this one was under 10 seconds, which was perfect for a test case. It’s also something that sort of sticks in the mind quite easily, so you don’t have to think about the words, they just sort of come effortlessly to you as many nursery rhymes still do. It’s also helpful for an audience when listening to these early recordings because even though at the time the recording quality was talked about as being incredibly lifelike, when you hear this today, they sound practically inaudible.\n00:39:51\tAudio Recording:\tMarry had a little lamb, his fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.\n00:40:00\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it helped to have a recording that was familiar, the Lord’s prayer, for instance, was another recording that was often used to sort of demonstrate the phonograph.\n00:40:13\tAudio Recording:\tIn the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Hallowed Father who art in Heaven…\n00:40:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tBut that was when people heard these verses read aloud, they could recognize them clearly. Whereas if they heard something unfamiliar, it’d be a lot more difficult for them to actually hear what was being said. So some of the earliest recordings then started out with just snippets of nursery rhymes, a verse or two of poetry, maybe a short speech from a play, and these all sort of fit the earliest sound recording devices, which could only record up to two or three minutes. But they work great, too, for public demonstrations where the phonographic knowledge had been taken around to places and debuted in different cities. And let’s say a scrap of verse might be read, a speech might be recorded as well, some funny noises by the exhibitor might be made, a little bit of music too, to get the sense of the variety of things that could be done with these, these phonographs. That was what happened in 1878 when the photograph first came out, and it wasn’t until about 10 years later that we get to send in the more literary recordings or serious exhibitions. So the phonographs sort of disappears for 10 years after that.\n00:41:24\tJason Camlot:\tYou weren’t wonna make a recording of paradise lost or a full length play or novel because it would have required many hundreds of wax cylinders to do so. Early on when he first introduced the phonograph, Edison had bragged in some newspaper articles about soon having Charles Dickens’ novel, Nicholas Nickleby, on a single audio record.\n00:41:48\tMatthew Rubery:\tThe main thing holding back audio books or full length audio books is what we talked about earlier. The fact that records could only hold two or three minutes of sound up until the 1930s. And it’s not until 1934 that the technology is capable of recording an entire full length book on a set of discs, let’s say nine or 10 records for an average novel. So that’s a big change from a few decades earlier when, you know, Mark Twain once tried to record one of his novels using these wax cylinders that could only hold a few minutes of speech, and he got up to I think about 40 or so and then just gave up because it just wasn’t going to work. There were way too many cylinders needed to make a literary recording. But in the 1930s radio, the radio industry and organizations representing blind people start collaborating to come up with a way to make the record record as much as 20 minutes of speech on each side of a disc. And once that breakthrough is made, that enables the first full length recorded books to be made. And interestingly enough, they’re not made for sighted people, the first recorded books are made for blind people beginning in 1934.\n00:43:04\tAudio Recording:\tTyphoons by Joseph Conrad written in 1903, recorded for the Talking Book Library for the blind by kind permission of the trustees to the estate of the late Joseph Conrad. Chapter one.\n00:43:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it’s a rare example of people with disabilities receiving a technology in advance of everyone else. And it’s not until about 10 years later, until 1948, that those LP records, long playing records, go on the commercial market.\n00:43:32\tJason Camlot:\tSo the forms of early spoken recordings were necessarily short and the audio texts produced were either abridged versions of longer works or ingeniously condensed synecdotal instances or scenes that evoked a larger work from which they came. What actual genres of spoken recording did these media constraints make possible? You couldn’t hear a whole Dickens novel on a cylinder, but you might hear a minor character addressing you as if you are a character yourself in such a novel, giving you the feeling that you were listening to a Dickens character as if he were a real person and as if you were a fictional character.\n00:44:08\tAudio Recording:\tAh, my dear [inaudible] come in come in. I am rejoiced to see you at this [inaudible] moment. Oh and my dear regal friend, [inaudible], now, welcome to this–\n00:44:25\tJason Camlot:\tOr you might get a key transformation scene taken from the play adaptation of a novel to stand in for the novel as a whole, as if somehow Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could be boiled down to the moment when the professional and respectable Jekyll or Jeekul, as the recording puts it, loses control and transforms into the atavistic monster Hyde.\n00:44:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Chiming bells.] … that terrible night when, transformed as I was into that fiend incarnate Hyde, I murdered the father of the woman I loved. [Organ music.] Ah, I must pray—Pray God to keep away the demons. Ah, God, look into my heart and forgive my sins. You were right. I was wrong. Ah, ah the fiend is coming. Yes. Hyde is here! [Shrill throaty noises.] Stop that damned organ! The noise offends me ears! [Cackling laughter.] [Knocking.] They come for me! They’re going to take me to the gallows! [High tempo organ music.] But I don’t die on the gallows…\n00:45:28\tJason Camlot:\tOr George du Maurier’s best-selling late Victorian novel, Trilby, could be summed up by the scene in which the treacherous and antisemitically-rendered musical genius and mesmerist Svengali mesmerises the innocent Trilby.\n00:45:46\tAudio Recording:\tThe day will come when I shall be the famous Svengali, and hundreds of beautiful women shall fall in love with me — Prinzessin and Contessen and Serene English Altessen. But Svengali will not look at them. He will look inward at his own dream. And that dream shall be all about Trilby — to lay his heart, his genius, his thousand francs at her beautiful white feet. And you shall see nothing, hear nothing, thinking nothing but Svengali, Svengali…\n00:46:20\tJason Camlot:\tWhile no sound recording offers a transparent or unmediated record of a performance event, early sound recordings demanded greater accommodation of the affordances of the recording technology and preservation media than those made after the widespread use of tape recording. So we can’t separate a discussion of the kinds of recordings made in the first decades of sound recording from the technologies and media formats that were used to make them. That said, there were a great variety of genres of recordings made during the acoustic era of sound recording. Looking back to the beginning and the kinds of recordings that were made can help us try to understand why people were interested in these recordings, why they bought them, when they became commercially available, and what they may have meant to the people who listened to them.\n00:47:07\tLisa Gitelman:\tWhen a recorded sound first came into existence. The way people had to understand it was on its merits, in a sense, in relation to older technology, right? When a new technology comes along and the only way you can grapple with it is to look backward., and looking backward from recorded sound in the 1870s was really to think about text, was really to think about reading and writing and what we now think of as all the alternatives to recorded sound.\n00:47:38\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:47:39\tLisa Gitelman:\tA bunch of people signed up with this company, this exhibition company. A lot of them were journalists. Again, going back to the idea that this was somehow about writing and reading. But they were entertainers too, and in my research I just became kind of fascinated with newspaper accounts of these demonstrations. And they all, I mean, weirdly, they all seem to take something of a similar form. When people were faced with this recording device in small audiences or even large concert halls they tended to mimic to the machine to recite nursery rhymes, little scraps of Shakespeare, little tidbits of things they already had memorized, lots of kind of mimicry and animal noises and, I won’t say farting into the machine, but so that kind of mentality, it was a kind of, you know, low brow bonding, if you will, over the potential of this machine\n00:48:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tHistories of the commercial recording industry tend to focus on music, but really the spoken word was a very important part of what it had to offer from the very beginning.\n00:48:47\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Patrick Feaster again.\n00:48:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tMoreover, there were a few different types of recordings that featured spoken language very, very prominently. Some recordings were relatively straightforward recitations of existing, often well-known literary works, somewhat more common than this where recordings in which a performer would take on some particular persona, often an ethnic character, and perform a monologue in that character, usually humorous. A number of different ethnicities were represented. A performer, Will N. Steel specialized in a Jewish character named Einstein.\n00:49:28\tAudio Recording:\t[inaudible] my boy Ikie is a bright boy. Some day he shall set the moon on fire [inaudible]\n00:49:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tFrank Kennedy had a German character named Schultz.\n00:49:38\tAudio Recording:\tChildren are a necessary evil. There’s many different kinds of children. For instance, there’s the good boy, who goes to Sunday school when it grows up he becomes cashier in a bank and he finally skips to Canada with all the money he can get a hold of.\n00:49:53\tPatrick Feaster:\tBest known example of this type was a performer named Cal Stewart whose character Uncle Josh Weathersby was enormously popular for about 20 years.\n00:50:06\tAudio Recording:\tWell sure, we’ve just had our annual camp meeting at Punkin Center.\n00:50:11\tPatrick Feaster:\tThis was a character from rural New England who would tell about his naive blunders visiting New York city. Or sometimes he’d talk about things that happened back home in Punkin Center.\n00:50:26\tAudio Recording:\tIt was a great affair. Wow. For several days we was pretty busy baking and cooking and making preparations.\n00:50:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tThen there’s a third category of more elaborate productions in much the same spirit as later radio drama or radio comedy where you have multiple characters performing sound effects, music, all fitting together to convey some story through sound.\n00:50:53\tAudio Recording:\tMorning [inaudible]. Morning [inaudible] Don’t you know me? Wait ’til I take off my whiskers. We’ll i’ll be darned if it ain’t the constable. What be ya doin’ up outside? Doin’ up? Detectivin’! That’s what I’m doin’ up.\n00:51:08\tPatrick Feaster:\tBut this was done with the phonograph, much earlier examples of this stating back well into the 1890s. Not all early phonographic audio theater was humorous. There were serious examples including a dramatization of the San Francisco earthquake, reenactments of battles in the Spanish American war, one piece by Ada Jones and Len Spencer called House Cleaning Time\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording:\tLet me in. [inaudible] don’t you dare come in without drying your feet on the mat. Why, woman my feet are so wet you couldn’t dry them on the stove! Well, come in then.\n00:51:41\tPatrick Feaster:\tIs really more of a sentimental piece, an old couple reminiscing about their lives together, but a majority of it is humorous and a very large proportion of it involves ethnic humour.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording:\tGood morning Miss Riley, how are ya this morning?\n00:52:02\tPatrick Feaster:\tThere were practical reasons for this, much the same as the practical reasons that made ethnic humour so popular in other venues on the Vaudeville Stage in high dialect pieces published as filler in newspapers. Invoking an ethnic stereotype meant you didn’t have to spend any time on character development.\n00:52:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Inaudible] for you Mrs Riley, my husband and I have been married for two long years.\n00:52:34\tPatrick Feaster:\tBy taking on an Irish stage dialect, a black stage dialect, a German or so-called Dutch stage dialect, any one of a number of different conventionalised ways of speaking, but as soon as you adopt one of these conventionalised dialects, you can take for granted that your audience will make certain assumptions about the character you’re representing and will understand what’s going on based on them. And if all you have to work with is a short slot on a Vaudeville schedule, a few lines of space in a newspaper or two to three minutes of sound recording, then this type of efficiency can be very valuable.\n00:53:22\tJason Camlot:\tPart four: why early spoken recordings are important for understanding of the longer history of audio books, sound recording, and performance today. When I say that early sound recordings are weird, maybe what I’m really saying is that recordings from the early period of the technology can teach us a lot about those of subsequent periods. The fact that we are estranged from the content media and methods of performance in early sound recordings help us see and hear the elements that are less obvious to us in the case of recordings and media that we take for granted today. When we think about literary history by engaging with sound archives, it requires us to think about how the recordings that document the performance of literary texts, conversations, and activities were made and used and how the media and methods of production shaped the audio documents we can hear today. When tape recording became widely accessible in the 1960s with people carrying portable Wollensak and Uher reel-to-reel tape recorders around, they still weighed like 20 pounds, so not quite so portable as an audio cassette Walkman, a mini disc recorder, or an iPhone still when they were carrying these Wollensak and Uhers around, suddenly live readings that lasted an hour or more could be captured and listened to in another time and place.\n00:54:55\tAudio Recording:\tIt’s the sort of thing we do in Vancouver, like we sit down and read the whole book and this was published the same day as Dan Persky’s The Day, a book called The Day and uh it’s about the same length, about a hundred pages and he read The Day and then we took a break and I read Autobiology and then we took a break of a couple of hours and then he read The Day again.\n00:55:17\tJason Camlot:\tWe know that literary readings lasting hours did take place in the 19th century too, there are newspaper reports about that. But there were no reel-to-reel tape recorders back then. Our audible history of the literary past is shaped, in part, by the material nature of the media and archives we have today. Early recordings help us understand that about all subsequent media recordings, even the seemingly invisible digital formats like MP3 files. The difference between digital audio media and the analog and acoustic media technologies is pretty significant. For one thing, analog media capture sound in one continuous stream, and in that sense represent a kind of material index of the original sound event, it records. Digital media, on the other hand, capture microcosmic slices, samples according to a bit rate or frequency data that allows us to rehear the past events, rehear the past events, the past events. They certainly sound as clear or clear to us than all previous analog media and they can record sound events for than any previous material medium, just depends on how much hard drive storage space you have. But there are missing spaces in the documented temporal event in digital audio files that aren’t there in analog recordings. Maybe that makes a difference. Born digital recordings or digitized recordings of the past, turn literary sound into a new kind of data with its own remarkable affordances. We can control, analyze and listen to such audible data in a greater variety of ways than we could with earlier audio media technologies. It’s now very easy to record, store, entire novels on portable devices and to replay them in a variety of places, in the kitchen, walking the dog at the gym, driving to work, and to replay them in different ways. For example, the difference in speeds without changing pitch of the reader’s voice. Speed listening has been around since the 1930s at least recent work by Matthew Rubery, Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills has shown this. But digital media make possibilities for the manipulation of the human voice, virtually infinite.\n00:57:33\tAudio Recording:\tA set of drum rondos from synth loops in the cyborg opera. [beatboxing]\n00:57:42\tJason Camlot:\tMe may admire an avant garde poet’s performance of synthetic sounds, like Christian Bök vocalizing drum loops in a movement from a cyborg opera, as evidence of ingenuity and virtuosity in performance\n00:57:56\tAudio Recording:\t[beatboxing]\n00:57:58\tJason Camlot:\tBut really, with digital media plugins, what can’t the human voice sound like or do? Since the end of the 19th century, each phase of media history, performance history, literary history, and socio-cultural history has come with audible recordings of the human voice for us to decipher. By Listening to these recorded voices and all their sonic historicity. We can begin to understand the meaning of human expression as an auditory phenomenon, which is to say as a relational human phenomenon.\n00:58:37\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:58:39\tJason Camlot:\tWhat methods of listening, what audile techniques – to use a phrase from Jonathan Sterne’s book, The Audible Past – have we developed to help us decipher this remarkable audible archive? That’s a big and important question that I’m going to save for a future Spoken Web podcast. In the meanwhile, why not hop onto LibriVox or Audible and have a listen to the complete works of Charles Dickens.\n00:59:13\tAudio Recording:\tA tale of two cities by Charles Dickens. Book one, ‘recalled to life.’ Book one, chapter one, ‘the period.’ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.\n00:59:46\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n01:00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Cheryl Gladu and Jason Camlot. Our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller, and Matthew Rubery for their candid interviews and continued contributions to Spoken Web. An extra special thank you to everyone who joined us for last months’ #spokenwebpod listening party in celebration of our inaugural episode. Add your voice to the mix on Twitter with #spokenwebpod. To find out more about Spoken Web visits, spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the spoken web podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Please rate and leave a comment on iTunes or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":5.215919},{"id":"9610","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E11, Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in podcasting, 3 August 2020, Barker, Telaro, Barillaro and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sadie Barker\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/418173666199007392824\",\"name\":\"Emma Telaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/255946fd-ceff-4b6b-a91c-4df32581bc15/sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:08:48\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"66,125,366 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-episode-11_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-08-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bender, John and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Ed. Bender and Wellbery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey.  “A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  209-225.\\n\\nLlinares, Dario. “Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  123-145.\\n\\nRapp, Christof, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan.  “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” CanadianJournal of Communication 36.2 (2011): 207-225.\\n\\nOng, Walter J.: Orality and Literacy–The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Routledge, New York, 1988.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549693136896,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How do concepts make us feel? What is the function of affect in the communication of ideas?\n\nIn this episode, three SpokenWeb graduate students – Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker and Emma Telaro – revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise that was assigned to them by SpokenWeb researcher Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, namely the functions of voice, ambience and the overarching media rhetoric of the podcast as a form. Comprised of recorded zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini-podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from Year 1 of the SpokenWeb podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself.\n\n00:00:18\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with high pitched voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do, eh?\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Relaxing ideas, anxious ideas, loving ideas, and even heated ideas. Feelings aren’t just for people; ideas have feelings, too. Or, at least, that’s what our episode contributors this month aim to explore. If ideas do have feelings, how are they communicated? And in turn, how do different ideas, concepts, make us feel? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, graduate students Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, and Emma Telaro revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise assigned to them by Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar at Concordia University. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma, and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, exploring the connections between voice, feeling, and rhetoric. Comprised of recorded Zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself. Without further ado, here’s the SpokenWeb Podcast season finale: “Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling, and Rhetoric in podcasting.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:23\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping multiple voices] We made a podcast!\n00:02:24\tEmma Telaro:\tUsing our podcast voices and other sounds.\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] And other sounds!\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] Who are we?\n00:02:29\tJason Camlot:\tBegin Music: Light Guitar] Who are we? I’m Jason Camlot, Professor in the department of English and Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound Studies at, well, Concordia University.\n00:02:41\tEmma Telaro:\tI’m Emma Telaro, a Master’s student in the department of English at Concordia University and a research assistant for SpokenWeb.\n00:02:48\tSadie Barker:\tI’m Sadie Barker, a PhD student.\n00:02:50\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd I’m Ali Barillaro, an almost graduated grad student.\n00:02:54\tJason Camlot:\tMaking a collaborative podcast is fun–\n00:02:57\tEmma Telaro:\t–but also challenging.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe logistics of who does what and how to bring everything together is one challenge.\n00:03:03\tAli Barillaro:\tBut perhaps the greatest challenge has to do with–\n00:03:05\tAll Speakers:\t–defining the voice that shapes the podcast. [Music Changes: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass]\n00:03:09\tEmma Telaro:\tIn an audio essay, there is usually a clear narrational perspective.\n00:03:13\tJason Camlot:\tAll the sounds presented are filtered and organized through a single voice, which represents a sonically particular perspective on all that is discussed and heard.\n00:03:23\tAli Barillaro:\tIn our case, we have aimed as much as possible to allow multiple narrational perspectives to be heard and to shape this podcast episode.\n00:03:34\tJason Camlot:\tSo this podcast, the final episode from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, is kind of a meta-podcast about making podcasts. [End Music: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass] In the winter semester of 2020, I taught a graduate seminar on the topic of Literature and Sound Studies. I’d taught courses on sound and poetry before, but this seminar, more than the ones I taught in the past, was committed to bringing interdisciplinary concepts and approaches from sound studies together with literary texts and sound recordings.\n00:04:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] We are [ ]. [Begin Music: Ambient Hum]\n00:04:04\tJason Camlot:\tAs my department’s annual required theory seminar for PhDs—although it consisted of both PhD students and MA students—it was heavy with critical theories and cultural studies about sound and listening. So we read and discussed together selections from R. Murray Schafer, Friedrich Kittler, and Lisa Gitelman. Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills.   Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith. John Durham Peters and Brandon LaBelle. Douglas Kahn and Dylan Robinson, among many others.\n00:04:38\tJason Camlot:\t[End Music: Ambient Hum] We read a few literary works that framed sound, listening, and voice in interesting ways, like Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. And we considered poets whose work moved between print and sound productions, including the talk poems of David Antin, the erasure poems and time-stretching sound collages of Jordan Abel, and the poetry scripts and [Audio, Overlapping, Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] audio-visual live performances of Oana Avasilichioaei.\n00:05:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] The subject is occurence. The subject is the eye that brutesSim      the sky…\n00:05:15\tJason Camlot:\tIn the context of a literature course that aims to think about sound, it’s difficult to do so without having one eye on the print world. It’s difficult to think about sound outside of the generic categories we use to think about printed texts. Podcasting about literary sound is kind of an interestingly messy place to be. Already, asking literature students to engage with sound rather than print works to trouble their relationship to their primary source text. Asking them to think through and present their ideas in a sound-based medium was a further exercise in estrangement. They would be required to learn a whole new media rhetoric, one that involved sound editing, speaking, and recording their ideas in a voice that seemed right to the purpose, possibly the use of music or ambient sounds to reinforce or frame the ideas and arguments they were making, not to mention arranging, balancing, EQing, mixing, and exporting the final product. The results were awesome in so many ways, students made podcasts about [Sound Effect: Siren] noise.\n00:06:18\tSima Meghadadi :\tAh, the hustle and bustle of the city.\n00:06:21\tJason Camlot:\tAnd silence.\n00:06:22\tMarlene Oefinger :\tSilence, then, is not really absent of sound, but the beginning of listening. And when there is nothing to hear, you start to hear things.\n00:06:33\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why most audio books aren’t satisfying.\n00:06:37\tBrian Vass :\tI generally dislike audiobooks. I wouldn’t listen to a recorded book if I could just read the book instead.\n00:06:43\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why Samuel Beckett’s radio plays are awesome.\n00:06:47\tRyan Tellier :\tNow to be somewhat self-reflexive, Beckett’s story is partially about the very need to find a voice.\n00:06:53\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry is as extra as a Lana Del Rey\n00:06:59\tPriscilla Jolly :\tIn this podcast, I’ll speak about the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration in relation to the confessional mode using the work of Sylvia Plath and Lana Del Rey.\n00:07:09\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how the running voice in your head talking to itself is kind of like a never-ending hip hop track.\n00:07:14\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani :\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Hip Hop] Some words just make me feel uncomfortable, like soot. Ugh. That fire debris thing or whatever? You can’t see, but I just shivered saying that. They should really make some kind of visual podcast, like a vodcast, you know? [End Music: Instrumental Hip Hop]\n00:07:31\tJason Camlot:\t[Overlapping, the voices and sounds from the beginning of SpokenWeb Episode 8] At the same time that everyone was working on their own podcasts, I was also at work on one with my colleague Katherine McLeod that eventually got released as episode eight of this podcast series, the episode entitled “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” And I’d already worked on my very first podcast in the fall, episode two called “Sound Recordings Are Weird.” It hadn’t occurred to me how difficult choosing and performing a voice in a podcast would be until I tried making [Audio, Throat Clearing] a podcast myself.\n00:08:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord Alfred Tennyson.\n00:08:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe complexity of voice as a performative and expressive factor in the context of a podcast is about authority, expertise, positionality… All of which Ali, Sadie, Emma, and I discuss later in this podcast. But it’s also about something else, something that for me at least is coming to define what a podcast does to ideas, concepts, and arguments. It has to do with affect and feeling, the proximity of the speaker to her ideas. The proximity of the listener to the speaker sharing an idea. The affective exchange that is inseparable from the conceptual exchange when a podcaster talks about something. Stacey Copeland explains this idea powerfully in a recent article when she observes that–\n00:08:52\tStacey Copeland:\tThere is an inherent intimacy in voice-driven sound work. That seems to be [Begin Distortion] soaking in affect. [End Distortion] The listener puts on her headphones, presses play, and becomes immersed in an affective discourse of human experience through listening and connecting.\n00:09:13\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] So one way in which ideas have feelings is through their expression and effective communication in voice. Another way that we came to realize how ideas have feelings, during the process of making our podcasts, is through the broader sonic affordances of the medium, [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] especially the way we come to obsess with the use of music and ambient sounds in presenting stories and ideas. Podcasting uses sound to help us experience how a concept feels. So that covers voice and feeling as we’ll be discussing those topics in this podcast. When we say the rhetoric of podcasting, we’re thinking of everything that Aristotle included in his definition of the concept of rhetoric as a means of persuasion, which encompassed a) the character of the speaker, [Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] b) the emotional state of the listener, and c) the argument, logos, itself.\n00:10:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe first two elements of rhetoric as a method are pretty well covered by our categories of voice and feeling. I would define the last element—that of argument, or logos—as including the first two, plus the overarching structure, genre, that we choose to use in arranging and shaping our podcast. And also the degree to which this form of communication engages in explicit kinds of reflection upon its own rhetorical affordances and strategies. We may come to feel ideas as tenets of authentic truth, but this is so because the modes of rhetorical persuasion we use have become normalized to a point that we just don’t notice them or think about them anymore. An ideology of rhetoric sets in and a sense of the “end of rhetoric,” as John Bender and David Wellbery had dubbed it, is felt. Sometimes rhetorical protocols can come to seem so useful, normal, so right to community that uses it, that the rhetoric of it seems to disappear altogether.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s through the migration of rhetorical protocols across communities that we can find rhetoric work, interestingly, at cross purposes with its original community. Like when biblical discourse or legal discourse is repurposed by communities of poets, novelists, cartoonists, comedians, it is due to this perpetual migration of rhetorical forms, media, and effects across communities that I think podcasting represents such a powerful tool for scholarly communication and humanities pedagogy at the present time. Podcasting, in practice, is a great way to make us see and feel the rhetorical and media assumptions we use to produce and share knowledge in our scholarly disciplines. A new kind of awareness of the rhetoric of thought has been another outcome of the experience of engaging in podcasting as a form of critical expression. [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] And this is an experience that we all seem to share. So, with these keywords—voice, feeling, rhetoric—briefly explained, and with the basic plan mapped out, first here is Ali Barillaro presenting her podcast on the meaning of applause in poetry readings.\n00:12:29\tAli Barillaro:\t[Theme Music] When I started working with SpokenWeb, I didn’t really know what I wanted to research. So Jason told me to start by listening through the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and to take notes on anything that caught my attention. That ended up being the sounds of applause and the frequently conflicted comments different poets made about the presence of applause in poetry readings. So I spent my first year as an RA trying to come up with better ways of talking about applause because just measuring duration and amplitude didn’t seem good enough to me. If I wanted to find the “why,” if that’s really possible, I needed to look at the wider context. I had already produced a five-minute talk, a one-hour workshop, and a 12-page paper on this topic. On the page, I had to describe the sounds of applause and use screenshots of waveforms and spectrograms. And none of that really does the sound justice. With the podcast, it was a lot easier to weave narration or argument and the source material in and out of one another, which I think makes for a more immersive listening experience.\n00:13:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] [Muriel Rukeyser] Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it’s said that way.\n00:13:53\tAli Barillaro:\tApplause, a sign of approval, an act of support, a cultural indicator worth listening to. In John Bulwer’s manual of rhetorical gestures Chirologia, he explains that “to clap the raised hands one against another is an expression proper to them who applaud, congratulate, rejoice, assent, approve, and are well-pleased used by all nations. This public token has been of old and is so usual in the assembly of a multitude when they cannot contain their joy in silence.” Bulwer’s contemplation of applause, however, quickly takes on a judging tone with concerns about decorum and the appropriateness of the gesture in particular artistic contexts. Addressing the inherent duality of applause, Steven Connor posits that “Clapping one hand on another dramatizes the fact that you are subject and an object simultaneously, a doer and a done to.” Applause, it seems, belongs to both the individual and the crowd. It can be deliberate or uncontained, disregarded or powerful.\n00:14:59\tAli Barillaro:\tIn the context of the archival sounds of reported poetry readings collected by SpokenWeb, we can hear not only poetic voice or textual content. We hear the sounds of interactivity and deception. We hear traces of the relationships between speaker and audience that ground the poetry reading as public, as event. Despite their potential significance, sonic manifestations of audience response, including laughter and verbal address, are not consistently present or consistently treated by poets, series organizers, recordists, and archivists. In 1966, acclaimed Montreal poet Louis Dudek was invited to introduce Henry Beissel and Mike Gnarowski’s reading as part of the poetry series at Sir George Williams University. Dudek attempts to set the tone and establish the appropriate reading series etiquette, as he reflects on his effective response to Beissel’s performance, stating,\n00:15:53\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Strongly, I was impressed and moved by that reading of Henry Beissel.\n00:15:57\tAli Barillaro:\tFrom a position as both audience member and poet, he explains:\n00:16:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Really several times after the poems, I wanted to applaud, only we don’t do that.\n00:16:06\tAli Barillaro:\tHmm. If applause isn’t universally accepted as a fundamental part of the poetry reading, why are there so many instances of applause heard throughout the Sir George Williams collection? Despite concerns of impropriety, applause can function as a demonstration of etiquette or a measurement and influencer of public feeling, as Sarah Balkin claims. Tanya Clement and Stephen McLaughlin frame applause is both enabling an audience’s ability to engage in dialogue with a poem itself and effect its mode of meaning-making, or as a signifier of structures marking the transitions between different elements of a reading. Most examples of applause can be labeled either procedural, referring to moments thought to be appropriate or expected in a reading series, or as purely spontaneous phenomenon. Those spontaneous applause appears to be more appreciative in nature; procedural applause is not exclusively formal or inherently removed from appreciation for the poet, the work, or the performance. Another key feature of applause is the concept of consensus, which implies a communal response from the majority or all of the audience to a given performance.\n00:17:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause]\n00:17:16\tAli Barillaro:\tA noticeable lack of consensus is often perceived as…uncomfortable. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:17:24\tAudio Recording:\t[One person claps] [Unknown Person says, uncomfortably,] Oh! Thank you…\n00:17:25\tAli Barillaro:\t[Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] Caused by what Tia DeNora describes as individuals or small groups of people lacking the skill and practical knowledge necessary for appropriate emotional responses in a given performative context. Moments in the Sir George Williams recordings can be used as case studies to examine consensus, procedural, and spontaneous applause and to begin to unpack what specific sounds of audience response might signify when listened to within the greater context of an entire reading and the series as a whole. Let’s listen to the response to Irving Layton’s “Confederation Ode” read at Sir George Williams University in 1967 as an example.\n00:18:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:09\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton was certainly no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night, “Family Portrait,” receives the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the poetry series collection, a 40-second auditory event so intense we could call it a wall of noise.\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Very Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:28\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton’s opening remarks draw attention to the makeup of the sizable crowd gathered to hear him.\n00:18:33\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my friends and former students in the audience.\n00:18:40\tAli Barillaro:\tA statement elaborated upon in a post-grad article that details the overcrowding of the venue that hosted the university’s then-poet-in-residence. Consensus, then, is not an issue for Layton. What is worth questioning is the spontaneity of the reaction to a poem like “Confederation Ode” that was new at the time of the reading, especially considering Layton classics, like “Misunderstanding” and “The Birth of Tragedy,” are met with no audible response. Beyond finding out who is in the audience, the location and timing of the reading is also crucial to the discussion. With Expo 67 scheduled to begin just over a month after this Montreal performance and with the poem’s bold sexual imagery and overt political satire, Layton correctly assumes he need not explain his intent further than a simple preface–\n00:19:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] My contribution to the centennial year, “Confederation Ode.”\n00:19:31\tAli Barillaro:\t–for the audience to receive his message and respond accordingly. The question still remains open, though. Why did this audience react so strongly to this Layton poem in that moment. The ephemerality of the event and lack of corresponding oral history work makes it hard to firmly pin down an answer, but further inroads can be made with the use of growing audio archives that could potentially allow scholars to trace a poet’s reading history, cross-referencing multiple performances of a given piece and documenting the range of responses from audiences over time and across space. For the “Confederation Ode” applause, further research into Layton’s biography and public sentiment about Expo 67 and the Canadian government more broadly may also elucidate some of the meaningful resonances the performance affected in Layton’s listeners. Thank you.\n00:20:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:20:34\tAli Barillaro:\tWhen Jason, Emma, Sadie, and I got together for a series of Zoom meetings to replay and talk about our podcasts a few months after making them, hearing the episodes quickly conjured up…a few feelings.\n00:20:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I said something to Emma and Sadie about how I realized I kind of sound like some weird robot presenter lady in my podcast. And I… It’s so cringy to listen to ’cause that’s not how I talk normally at all.\n00:21:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] It’s always embarrassing to hear your own voice back, right? You know, to some extent, especially when you’re like, “I’m trying to do my podcast voice.” Right? You know.\n00:21:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I think it’s… I’m trying to sound like a…informational guide. I think there was only one like one or two very brief, brief moments in my mini-podcast that I was trying to break away from that. I remember in one of your comments that one of the parts that you were like, “Yes! That! That’s what you should be going for more” was just me going, “Hmm” at something. You were like, “Yeah! Like that’s, that’s something we would want to hear.”\n00:21:36\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Yeah, it’s ’cause that “Hmm” was so Ali. Right? [inaudible]\n00:21:40\tAli Barillaro:\tOverall, I think the end result was relatively well-produced and that I managed to convey a general sense of the work I’ve done on applause within such a limited timeframe. But the thing that we all kept coming back to was my voice. What exactly was going on there?\n00:21:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] What does that mean, first of all, to be doing a podcast voice? What is it?\n00:22:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] It’s funny ’cause I remember when I was in CEGEP, I had an assignment where my friends and I made a video about composting and I decided to narrate it and it sounded exactly like that. So it’s been like a thing for like a long time. And I don’t know why, like why that’s my go to voice. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s very weird.\n00:22:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Could you do that voice right now? Like on command?\n00:22:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Let me pull up something that I could like read. ‘Cause I can’t do it just like speaking spontaneously. Because that’s not how I talk! Okay. Let’s see. “The contents field serves to describe the audible content, speech, and other sounds of the audio asset.”\n00:22:44\tSadie Barker:\tIt seems so kind of genre-dependent, like your podcast, content-wise was quite academic and it was funny ’cause like listening to it, I actually didn’t notice a difference in voice at all, but then just now when you performed your voice, I really noticed it. So there’s something about like the setting of… The content setting that… Where you kind of assume a certain voice and… Yeah, ’cause it really, it really stood out in this very more casual settings.\n00:23:12\tEmma Telaro:\tI think it’s hard not to do it.\n00:23:13\tAli Barillaro:\tMhm.\n00:23:13\tEmma Telaro:\tI mean, as soon as you have a device in front of you, like tense up and that’s, I think, more often than not what happens.\n00:23:23\tAli Barillaro:\tI guess it’s like, it also feels like a safer way of doing it. Like it feels less vulnerable to have that kind of voice and not just have people listening to what you actually sound like.\n00:23:35\tJason Camlot:\tSo you’re, you’re performing the voice of sort of pure information, would you say?\n00:23:41\tAli Barillaro:\tI want it to be straightforward. I want it to be clear. Yeah, I want people to understand what I’m trying to say to them and I, for some reason, in my head, that’s what that sounds like.\n00:23:52\tJason Camlot:\tWould you say that you’re trying to make your voice almost disappear in the communication of the information so that it’s like, it’s there, but hopefully won’t be noticed?\n00:24:01\tAli Barillaro:\tYeah, I think that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do ’cause for some reason, I guess like my own natural voice doesn’t seem like the best, the best possible option for doing that. And I… It’s, it’s often when it’s something that’s scripted and it’s not like, it’s not theater or something like that. It’s something that is like argumentative or analytical or theoretical. That’s what that voice sounds like in my head. So I’m trying to perform that rather than something that’s more conversational or more natural or more performative in a different way.\n00:24:38\tAli Barillaro:\tEveryone had a lot to say about their own decisions regarding the performance of the role of podcast host or narrator. And I’ll be back later in the episode to lead you through some of our major realizations about voice.\n00:25:04\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Emma Telaro.\n00:25:04\tEmma Telaro:\tThe podcast I created for Jason’s class I named “Conditionally Audible Heat,” though future iterations should have a punchier name. Broadly speaking, my podcast examines the sonification of heat in the archival recording of the 1974 Margaret Atwood reading from the Sir George Williams University’s reading series. The curiosity I felt for this particular tape begins in listening. On the occasion of this performance, the reading is upstaged by an unbearable and unlikely October heat. The introducers, Atwood, stumble over the heat, the crowd shuffles restlessly, and this frenzy infectious makes its way through the audio recording. I found this occurrence mesmerizing and in a fit of note-taking attempted to mark all the moments when heat, though constant, materialized and usurped the reading. And yet there wasn’t a specific quality or sound associated with this heat, but a convergence, rather. So I wondered what in the first place was I listening to? [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling] What does heat sound like? How does it manifest in audio recording and what sensations does it provoke? I listened and listened again. So, I inched towards my driving question: how do we hear heat? I felt that to answer this question, what does heat sound like, to attempt a podcast on the sonification of heat, I had to begin with the event itself. Heat announces itself from the very beginning of the reading.\n00:26:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Henry Beissel] Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system. The hall is going to be too hot.\n00:26:34\tEmma Telaro:\tAnd I wanted to give a sense of the temporality of the event, the time elapsed and distorted by heat as it presses languorously and anxiously onto the reading. I had to find a way to do this, to describe, engage with, and represent 35 minutes of audio in a six-minute podcast. The podcast really took off with the introductory audio collage. Once I decided that my primary task was to sound heat, I clipped elements from the beginning of the recording to create the collage and timed it to fit a sultry musical track I found online. It felt very much like I was assembling quotations. I treated the clips, whether of speech or exterior sound, as fragments and pieced them together. To get the sounds to hit at the right time was a minute task and the more I edged towards the effects I wanted, the more finicky I got. That first sound, the one moment you’ll hear, took ages to place on the right beat and significantly, I selected it because it’s the first voice you hear in the archival recording. I felt strongly about keeping it, that short phrase captures the mood of the reading, the disorder, the tension, and the sound and feel of the room. You’ll notice how the speaker, Henry Beissel, signals the overflow, the body’s mass in the room. And you’ll hear the humour, too, which recurs in the event as necessary relief.\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Sultry Instrumental] [Henry Beissel] One moment. [Music Changes: Bass Joins Sultry Instrumentals] [Henry Beissel] We did try to get a larger hall, but it was impossible to accommodate the overflow we have set up loudspeakers in the little gallery here, how it [inaudible] in the other one, too? [Unknown Person] Outside. [Henry Beissel] Outside there’s loud speakers. So please don’t all crowd into the room. Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system? The hall is going to be too hot. [Music Changes: Xylophone Joins] [Margaret Atwood] I don’t see any reason why this thing should resemble a steam bath. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] If everybody on the chairs would, would shift over this way, and sit on sort of as if it were a bench, then some more people could sit on the edges there. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] It’s fucking hot.\n00:29:06\tEmma Telaro:\tMontreal, October 18, 1974. [End Music: Sultry Instrumental] It’s hot, really hot, an unlikely hot autumn evening. Margaret Atwood is set to perform at the Poetry Series, a reading series organized by the Sir George Williams University’s English department, now Concordia University. The room is jammed. She begins to read.\n00:29:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] Is not one– Oh boy, is it ever hot in here, I can’t stand it, yeah, hmm?\n00:29:35\tEmma Telaro:\tAtwood’s performance is of peculiar interest for two reasons. First, she’s one of the few women invited to read at the series. Second, the reading is overwhelmed by this autumn heat wave. In the recording of this performance, we hear Atwood repeatedly referenced this oppressive heat, and we hear the audience members, too, shuffling and speaking excitedly as they crowd into the room. We hear this especially in the first few minutes of the recording and in the Q and A that follows her performance. The reading itself is cut short to accommodate the unusual weather, which is ironic, perhaps, given our first point.\n00:30:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] I think I better read just three more poems…before we all die.\n00:30:19\tEmma Telaro:\t[Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] In an article written for The Guardian called “Boiling point: why literature loves a long hot summer.” Aida Edemariam writes, “Novelists have used heat waves to create tension, erotic charge, and moments of possibility. It is a time when all the rules change.” Of course, we’re not speaking of a fictional heatwave, but of a real, historical and material manifestation of heat. And yet we might pursue literary analysis and say that the sweaty, hot room acts as a framing device for the poetry reading, or if we want to borrow a term from sound studies, we might include heat in a study of the reading soundscape. But how in the first place does heat sound forth? How do we hear heat? What is the significance of an audible heat? For the most part, we’re listening to the effects of heat. Heat acts on bodies, bodies contribute to heat, voice and movement manifest discomfort or pleasure, or…pleasure in discomfort.\n00:31:16\tEmma Telaro:\tThe audible manifestations of heat, Atwood’s humorous quips, her nervous laugh, the frenzied audience response highlight the sociality of performance. Heat dramatizes the encounter between audience and performer and despite the very real constraint material circumstances of the reading, heat provides a release from constraints. We sense the overflow in the room, which contributes to the sense of possibility that emerges out of close contact with Atwood and her poems. Later, she jokes about being called a “witch” by some critics, which adds fuel to her feminism and speaks to the disarming power of her poetics. In this heat, with Atwood, we anticipate something. Boundaries might be crossed.\n00:32:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy? Has anybody died yet?\n00:32:08\tEmma Telaro:\tHeat helps us imagine what it might’ve felt like to be there. And it is remarkable that we can retrieve the sensation, if only   through recording. Heat is a conjuring trick; it signals presence even in absence. We hear the spatial, temporal, and material circumstances of Atwood’s reading, we hear the body, and of course, we hear the poems. And it all feels quite sweaty.\n00:32:35\tEmma Telaro:\tWe’ve talked about the sociality of performance sounded through heat, but there’s also the various meanings that shift in reading. Heat alters the poems themselves. Where and how you listen matters to how you receive meaning in the poem. Imagine a late summer evening, or if you prefer, a blazing mid-August sun entering deep, deep into the pore of your skin. Can you taste the sweat, smell the humidity? Or is it a dry heat, red and sandy? Are you close to, far from other bodies? How does the clothes feel on your skin? What sounds are there around you?\n00:33:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] “Late August.” This is the plum season, the nights / blue and distended, the moon / hazed, this is the season of peaches / with their lush lobed bulbs / that glow in the dusk, apples / that drop and rot / sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands / No more the shrill voices / that cried Need Need / from the cold pond, bladed and urgent as new grass / Now it is the crickets / that say Ripe Ripe / slurred in the darkness, while the plums / dripping on the lawn outside / our window, burst / with a sound like thick syrup / muffled and slow / The air is still / warm, flesh moves over / flesh, there is no / hurry. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:34:13\tEmma Telaro:\t“Late August” felt like the most fitting and only close, a return to the poem that felt nostalgic and dreamlike. Throughout the podcast, I focused mostly on extra-poetic speech, but the quality of her voice and reading shifts tellingly to [Changes voice to mimic the cadence of Atwood’s voice in the reading] the anxious phonetic pace indicating unbearable heat, slows, when she reads. “Late August” is this langour, this culmination, this release. The beautiful yet dark aura of the plums, ripe. The seductive quality of late August heat that focuses heat as an affective and aesthetic experience. It’s a heat which makes its way through autumn cracks, [Sound Effect: Autumn Bugs] the kind of heat that sometimes surprises us here in Montreal. It’s the heat of the poetry reading, from the bodies in the room, giving grain to the voice, to the poem. I wanted to end here, in “Late August,” to return to the poem, to listening, to feeling. If I speak “Late August,” I think of the swarming of bees by the Lachine Canal, but also the humidity that hangs on, that persists despite the signs of fall. There are sounds to these feelings, to describing these images. It’s perhaps a matter of listening more closely, of finding the right vocabulary for them.\n00:35:36\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Sadie Barker.\n00:35:36\tSadie Barker:\tFor the last four years, I’ve tree planted in northern BC. I would do this between my schooling, where especially more recently, I’ve been thinking and learning about sound studies. And these interests came together last summer when I brought a recorder with me to camp with the intention of recording the day-to-day world of tree planting. So when I wasn’t planting trees, I was walking around camp, interviewing people,–\n00:36:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] Okay, Michelle, we’re recording.\n00:36:05\tSadie Barker:\t–collecting the sounds of camp life, [People Chatting] and just amassing various audio. So I was pretty excited when, in Jason’s class, I had the opportunity to assemble it. Because I already had several hours of tape, I was in many ways advantaged going into this assignment, but I was still apprehensive. I never made a podcast before. While I’d written lots of essays and could appreciate music and sound, I’d never attempted to tell any kind of audio story. As someone that studies multimedia and aesthetics, podcasting made me realize that while I research and write on these topics, I hadn’t really ever diversified or experimented with my own modes of expression. I hadn’t ever really tried to facilitate an aesthetic experience itself beyond formal academic writing. So this assignment made me reflect on [Beeping Alarm] the tendencies, comforts, and familiarities of my own academic modes.\n00:37:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beeping Ends] [Crackly Static]\n00:37:17\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s 5:45 AM, cold, and the clothes you pull onto your shivering body in the pitch black of your tent are damp, coated in dew and sweat from the day before. Outside, the sun has not yet risen, but the gravel pit bears its first signs of life nonetheless. The hum of the generator [Mechanical Clacking] and the few early risers sitting on the breakfast trailer steps, brushing their teeth, smoking cigarettes, chewin’ the fat.\n00:37:49\tAudio Recording:\t[Truck Backing Up] [Unknown Person Sings] Tree planters are giving the trees a newly [inaudible] life. [Laughter]\n00:37:55\tSadie Barker:\tThis is the stretch of calm before the day. In 15 minutes, the breakfast trailer doors will open and people will shuffle through, heaping scrambled eggs and oatmeal onto silver trays to eat in the tent, both anticipating the day to come and cherishing these moments of idleness. At 7:00 AM, everyone will board their trucks and leave for the cutblock  to spend the next 10 hours planting trees. [Wheels On Gravel I could try and describe these 10 hours and the world of possibility they hold, but Charlotte Gill’s book Eating Dirt does it much better.\n00:38:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Country Guitar] [Charlotte Gill] Planting trees isn’t hard. As any veteran will tell you, it isn’t the act of sowing itself, but the ambient complications. It comes with snow pellets or clouds of biting insects so thick and furious it’s possible to end a day with your eyelids swollen shut and blood trickling from your ears. They’re swaying fields of venomous plants like devil’s club and stinging nettle. The work has the bodily effect of a car crash in extreme slow motion. Besides that, the task itself is thankless and boring, which is to say, it’s plain and silent. What could compel a person to make a career of such a thing? I’ve always wanted to find out. [End Music: Country Guitar]\n00:39:16\tAudio Recording:\t[ ] I’m Behnke, I’m from Terrace, British Columbia, and I– My name is Belle –am a second year tree planter– and I’m from Vancouver– My name is Liam Hannah– and I’m a first-year planter– Oh, my name is Alanna– I’m from Toronto– I’ve been planting for seven years– And I’ve been planting for four years– Hey, I’m from Thailand– –for two years– My name is Clara. I am from Thornbury, Ontario– Hi, my name is Sebastian– –planting for a couple of weeks now –I’m from Northern BC– –so this’ll be my first, first year– –and I’ve been planting for, this is my second full season planting.\n00:39:52\tSadie Barker:\tThere are many different kinds of planters. People come from all sorts of places and plant for all kinds of reasons. But most planters will tell you that the happiest part of any season is May, before any of the real work has started.\n00:40:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] So they say there’s three parts to the planting season–\n00:40:10\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Liam.\n00:40:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –and they map onto each month. There’s May, the honeymoon month where everybody’s having a good time and they’re enjoying themselves. They just got here. [People Chatting] They’re partying a lot every night… [People Chatting] [Begin Music: Ukelele].\n00:40:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] You spend so much time with these people, so–\n00:40:30\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Kim.\n00:40:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] –yeah, It feels… Leaving and coming back, it feels like camp as a little kid, like seeing all these people that you’ve connected with.\n00:40:41\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] I think there’s like a creative energy.\n00:40:44\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Belle.\n00:40:45\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] Music and art, I feel like that is sort of always happening in the background of camp.\n00:40:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] People are just pretty cheerful. [Music And People Chatting] ‘Cause everybody’s quite happy, ready to get to know each other and [Michelle says “Wonderwall”] joke around and…\n00:41:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] When you’re around the fire and everyone’s laughing and someone’s playing guitar… And then, again, you just sit back and you just go, “Wow, this…. This is good.” [Michelle] Katie, It’s not, Katie’s all request hour. [People Laughing And Chatting].\n00:41:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:41:28\tSadie Barker:\tAnd then–\n00:41:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –June hits.\n00:41:30\tSadie Barker:\t–it’s the June blues.\n00:41:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And people are getting exhausted and they go downhill.\n00:41:36\tSadie Barker:\tThis is when reality starts to set in, but when the bodily effect of a car crash in slow motion that Charlotte Gill was referencing, starts to occur.\n00:41:46\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] It’s, it’s really hard to justify like the toll it’s taken on my body because I felt so–\n00:41:50\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Michelle.\n00:41:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] –physically able before coming.\n00:41:54\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] I have a huge gash in like the webbing between my thumb and my index finger.\n00:42:00\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Unknown Voices] My feet are regularly cramping– The [inaudible] hurts– Common tendonitis– And it’s like a charley horse in my foot– Drought– I don’t know what I’ve done to my back– Foot pain– Some ribs popped out– So two days ago I woke up and I barely could see out of– Basically my knee started swelling up– –my right eye– –and I took my first day off ever. –it was bitten from a black fly– And so I hobble around and struggle to get in and out of the truck and struggle to get in and out of bed…\n00:42:21\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think? Is it worth it?\n00:42:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle Laughs] I don’t know. [Laughs] I don’t know.\n00:42:33\tSadie Barker:\tThis also when the days start to feel long– [Sound Effect: Rain Falling]\n00:42:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] The time doesn’t fly enough.\n00:42:40\tSadie Barker:\t–really long.\n00:42:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] Well, the worst thing that I find tree planting is…definitely the loneliness\n00:42:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] There doesn’t seem like… No birds are singing or nothing. Everything is just grey and…\n00:42:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] If you have one bad thought on the block, then it can just stick with you all day long.\n00:43:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And it’s always been the hardest job I’ve ever done and probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.\n00:43:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] But like today–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –at some point I sat on the log–\n00:43:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –July hits–\n00:43:14\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I just started laughing–\n00:43:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam]–and it’s the home-coming stretch.\n00:43:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I was laughing by myself for like a big two minutes and then I just stood up again and…planted!\n00:43:27\tMusic:\t[Begin Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso]\n00:43:27\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think, will you be coming back again?\n00:43:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Yeah, see, that’s a hilarious question.\n00:43:35\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] People always say it’s the last season, then they come back.\n00:43:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Obviously I’m saying never again after this season.\n00:43:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] That’s the struggle now where it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll come back. No I won’t. Yeah, I will. No, I won’t.” Back and forth, back and forth. I think–\n00:43:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] I think this is my last year. I think this is my last year, but I said that last year. So. Who know? Everybody always says that.\n00:44:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] I said that—I think it was my third year—that I would never come back and now I’m at four years later so…I guess it does something right. [End Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso. Rain Sound Effect Fades Out]\n00:44:19\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s funny hearing your own voice and podcast, maybe, especially, when it’s your first. I remember at the time of making this not really having a plan, maybe because this combination of sound and text was a new medium for me, not having a deliberate sense of process. But maybe because of that, having a sense of freedom. I knew I wanted to capture the everyday-ness of planting and I was excited by the possibility that I didn’t need to directly argue for the everyday or pose it as a structured thesis necessarily, but that I could present it experientially to the listener. I remember gravitating to certain sounds almost impulsively and assembling them in ways that just felt intuitive. It’s interesting now to hear the sounds that came through and the ways in which they did the sound [Mechanical Clanking] of the generator for me is interchangeable with the sound [Beeping Alarm] of the alarm clock. Both mean early morning.\n00:45:17\tSadie Barker:\tThey mean that the cook is likely starting to make breakfast and you should probably be mobilizing out of your tent. These parallels, I think, was the underlying rationale for putting those sounds in almost overlapped proximity. The sounds of the beer can and the fire and the instruments and banter. Those sounds for me capture the social world [People Chatting] of planting and the sound of the rain [Water Splashing] on the tent in the morning, which is always the first thing you hear and notice because it cues exactly the kind of planting day it will be seem to perfectly sound the ways in which planting is almost always at the mercy of the environment. So, I wanted to forefront those visceral relations between planters and their everyday surroundings and I think podcasting allowed me to do that in ways that were more in accord and representative of planting as itself: an immersive and sensory and experiential medium. [Theme Music]\n00:46:31\tAli Barillaro:\tAs Sadie, Emma, and I talked about our podcasts together with Jason, we found ourselves coming back to three key themes, including what we’re calling feeling or ambiance and rhetoric. But we probably had the most to say about voice, about vocal performance, intent, effects and affect.\n00:46:52\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio Recording] Listening to your, to your natural voice recorded is also kind of scary.\n00:46:57\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:46:57\tAli Barillaro:\tHaving that option to sound like somebody else, I guess in a way, is, is like a safety blanket, sort of.\n00:47:06\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s a really interesting point. I think it’s a great point. And it’s… I find it really… I mean, I’m not surprised, but I find it interesting that clarity and authority means voice evacuated of emotional characteristics or traits, right? You know. Which is also protective ’cause it shows that you’re not vulnerable to emotion, right? So in this version of podcast voice we’re to evacuate our voices of emotion, to communicate authority, clarity, and to somehow twist our personalities into some kind of robotic version of ourselves, you know, maybe avatars against, you know, that more authoritative robotic version of self-performance, but actually is about putting yourself out there and being casual and being yourself.\n00:47:54\tAli Barillaro:\tA lot of that comes from also feeling like sort of inadequately prepared to be that authoritative speaker as a student and for an assignment for a class. The audience was all of us, technically, like the other students, but it’s also Jason. So it’s a little hard to step back from that, even though you’re aware that you can and we were encouraged to do so in the podcast form, it’s very hard to stop doing that.\n00:48:23\tJason Camlot:\tEmma, did you feel you were also engaging in a kind of a different version of yourself, a more transparent or, or somehow, you know, objective version of yourself in your vocal performance in your podcast? Or were you doing a different kind of voice?\n00:48:40\tEmma Telaro:\tI think on some level I was–\n00:48:42\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro.\n00:48:43\tEmma Telaro:\t–just because this was a podcast that was assigned to us within an academic setting. So, and I was talking about heat in my podcast and I, I realized how that can become quickly humourous. I think like you, Ali, I kind of feel like, “Oh, that was a little bit of a missed opportunity. I could’ve made a bunch of like really silly jokes about heat.” But also I was sometimes actively trying to avoid that because I was afraid that that wouldn’t make it not serious. I often do think about that idea of the authoritative voice and how, as a student, it’s difficult to ever feel like you have one. And also like as a woman, having like a high-pitched voice is not necessarily normally seen as authoritative. So it’s something I often think about on the daily, especially at school, because I also find that my voice at the university is not the voice I have when I’m at home with my parents or when I’m at a bar with my friends, it fluctuates so much. And it’s something I pay a lot of attention to. And I think for this podcast, I wanted to find like a medium, like how can I be myself, but also sound like better than I am? Which is maybe like a silly, insecure thought, but it’s a thought that I’m sure everyone has, as soon as they’re being recorded.\n00:49:56\tAli Barillaro:\tI think a lot of us are kind of self-conscious about sounding, not, not too shrill, not too loud, and like not too high-pitched. I think my voice is actually quite deep. Like even now, I’m realizing listening to myself that when I’m talking and I know I’m being recorded, I do often try to, to keep it to the lower registers with my voice.\n00:50:20\tEmma Telaro:\tI used to sing. So it brought me back to being like in a recording studio and it brought me back to that moment, like right before record like that, that sort of… The acknowledgement you have in your head of like, “Okay, well now I’m putting on this performative voice.” And that voice felt a little bit similar to my singing voice because I was trying to like, I think extend the words and circle around the letters in a way that I don’t when I’m speaking casually. So it’s also a fake casual voice, I think.\n00:50:51\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. A performed casual voice, which is a big part of the podcasting voice that we often hear. When’s it acceptable to have emotion like in… For a narrator to have emotion or host to have emotion in a podcast? Because I definitely don’t either in my narrations, at least the ones I’ve done so far, it’s been pretty, it’s been pretty much based on like my grade eight radio assignment, you know? I don’t think I’ve progressed very much in thinking about how I’m supposed to sort of project or what a narrator’s really supposed to be. I think I’m trying to be clear. So I totally get what Ali was saying earlier about wanting to enunciate well at the same time to sound casual or conversational so, so that the text I’m reading doesn’t sound like it’s being read. There’s this kind of attempt to, to strike a really impossible or unnatural thing, balance, between reading texts, so sounding like an actual text that’s being read, but being a voice that’s doing that text in a manner that sounds conversational. I think it’s, there’s a lot of that kind of communicating a sense of reception through how one speaks back to what someone said without always saying, “Yes, I understand. Yes, I like what you’re saying.” It’s coming across through these vocal modes of expression instead, in timbre and in, in register in the voice itself. Earlier in this conversation like Ali, when you’re laughing, you know, about yourself and everything like that, that’s all there. And it’s like, “Oh, that sounds like a podcast voice to me, like much more than the formal narrator’s voice that we all seem to sort of slot ourselves into.” Sadie Barker.\n00:52:34\tSadie Barker:\tThat’s true. The podcasters, like I’m thinking of even someone like Ira Glass, kind of walks this line between being kind of well-spoken, but also can kind of respond naturally and with emotion on the spot and how it’s a really fine balance.\n00:52:52\tJason Camlot:\tIf you were to perform a different podcasting voice to sort of give us an example of what your voice might sound like if you were to redo your podcast, having reflected a little bit on the voice that you did use, what would that sound like?\n00:53:06\tSadie Barker:\t“Wake up everyone, it’s 5:45–” no. I think maybe I would just try to adopt the shifts in energy more… Like I think the, the podcast starts with kind of a lower energy, but it does kind of rise. I would reflect maybe more on my own experiences, my own personal reflections, take less of a back position and come to the fore more.\n00:53:32\tJason Camlot:\tWhat about you, Emma? Would your, your voice change, do you think?\n00:53:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThinking about it now, it was a very literary voice I think I was trying to mimic and I think I was also trying to match it with Atwood’s knowing that I would be putting the clips together. Whereas like, if I were talking about pizza, which I’m also super passionate about, it would be a very different voice. And I’m also thinking like Sadie, I wouldn’t want you to lose that like rising, quiet quality, because it’s as much part of the story as is the other speakers or the content. It is like a question of matching tone or timbre to, to content in the same way that we do when we’re writing. It shifts. But there is always something there that, that speaks of the author, right? Whatever that is. I don’t know. I don’t know if that answers the question. I guess it wouldn’t change, it would, it would maybe change. I don’t know, depends what I’d be focusing on this time.\n00:54:24\tAli Barillaro:\tIf I had to respond to this question, I’d say it might sound something like this:\n00:54:31\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio, Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] Sir George’s then-poet-in-residence Irving Layton was no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night received the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the entire poetry series collection, [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental] a 40-second auditory event so intense I call it a wall of noise. [Thunderous Applause, Previous Music Returns] In his opening remarks, Layton proudly draws attention to the sizable crowd in front of him. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:54:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my…\n00:55:03\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro\n00:55:03\tEmma Telaro:\tIt seemed that the medium, we were dabbling in, podcasting ,demanded that we concentrate feeling, that it was part of the argument, content, and narrative voice of our podcasting selves. The relational, immersive, and affective experience of sound and of podcasting guided or thematic discussion on feeling. Jason asked us to recall moments from our podcasts that were soaking in affect and to reflect on the achievements and challenges of these. We all thought of Sadie’s very successful rendering of the ambiance of camp and in particular of her campfire clip.\n00:55:36\tSadie Barker:\t[Audio, Overlapping With People Chatting] I sampled the sounds of people jamming and then I sampled sounds of people conversing. I think it was really an attempt to describe the sort of social atmosphere of planting that really… It seemed much more informative to use these small sounds, as opposed to saying, “You know, usually there’s 12 people standing around a fire and there’ll be some people playing instruments.” And I don’t know, it just made me kind of reflect on how the smallest sound can be so telling and so much more telling than kind of a lengthy description. I chose this scene because I thought it really captured the ambiance of camp.\n00:56:16\tEmma Telaro:\tSadie aptly negotiates images through sounds so that we feel like we’re there sitting around the campfire. If Sadie sought to sample atmosphere of camp, I focused on the ambiance of a room. My podcast, in a sense, was about feeling the feeling of heat at the poetry reading event.\n00:56:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy?\n00:56:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThe goal was to transmit a listening experience that centred heat, in listening closely to the room, and from there eased into a discussion of the reading event that preserved its heated texture. The heat felt all-consuming, shares much with Sadie’s rain, calling forth sensations, [Sound Effect: Stormy Rain] images, and memories that are otherwise inaccessible. I’ve never been planting in Northern BC, but I can hear the rain on my tent regardless, just like I had not been present nor alive during the Atwood reading and yet I feel I know that heat from that October night. While Sadie and I focused on the field of our particular subject matter, the sound of camp and of heat, of tree planting and of the poetry reading, Ali asks, what does podcasting itself sound like? Ali, quite brilliantly questions the mood evoked by the genre and sets the tone for the experience of listening to an informational form of communication. What remains consistent across our podcasts and in our discussion of feeling is this focus on our affective relationship to sound. The affordances of the medium seem vast in this regard, how to translate, feeling, affect, how to tell. What rhetorical methods might be used.\n00:57:40\tJason Camlot:\tSadie Barker.\n00:57:41\tSadie Barker:\tOur approach with this podcast was to structure it around thematic discussions, voice, and ambience, too. But now we land at structure itself. How do we bring all of these components together to make one coherent, but also hopefully compelling narrative? Just like the structuring of this very podcast determined through brainstorming, zooming, and certainly some trial and error, our approaches to structure were varied.\n00:58:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] It was the same feeling of having to fill up a blank page and like, where do you start? Where do you end?\n00:58:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I wanted to start with a statement.\n00:58:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs be the primary structure.\n00:58:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n00:58:23\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I found it very difficult, found it very hard. I just had a lot to say.\n00:58:27\tSadie Barker:\tBut before we get into any of that, Jason usefully summarizes what exactly we’re talking about when we say “structure” and “rhetoric.”\n00:58:36\tJason Camlot:\tSo when I’m, when I talk about rhetoric, I’m thinking of the handling of different registers so that you create a kind of persistently interesting series of sounds that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish combined with the kind of understanding of a beginning, middle, and end.\n00:58:54\tSadie Barker:\tAnd, as leader of the discussions, he offers some useful soundbites towards structuring this very segment.\n00:59:02\tJason Camlot:\tBut maybe we can each reflect a little bit on the challenges of the overall structure and arrangement of our podcasts.\n00:59:11\tSadie Barker:\tIn doing this reflecting, I started to realize that these categories [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] of voice, ambiance, and now rhetoric and structure, ones that we’d been discussing somewhat separately, were connected, entirely connected. Feeling and ambiance suddenly seemed integral to how my podcast was constructed. [End Music: Intense Instrumental]\n00:59:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] In my case, I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs of the season be the primary structure, but that that was structurally quite ambiguous. And so I had Liam, who is my partner and a planter, describe those emotional arcs in the language that everyone recognizes as the honeymoon and the burnout and the homestretch, just to provide a bit of structure [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] to the listener that keys the transition, right?\n00:59:56\tSadie Barker:\tBut I also realized that voice and its spectrum of intonation and register was key to the structural shifts themselves.\n01:00:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I did really rely on the voices of planters to capture the different emotional registers of those moments. There was an interview with this girl, Zoe, and she was describing a really miserable day on the block. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] And then she kind of goes, “But then I just pick myself up and I start planting” and being really drawn to that “but” because it just captured both in what she was saying, but the intonation, like the shift in register, that really mobilized the next chapter. So it was interesting to think about the content of what people were saying, but then also just how the sound and the way she said that one word cued that we were in a different emotional space.\n01:00:43\tJason Camlot:\tCool. That’s amazing how just a single intonational shift can actually signal, “Okay, new part.” And it shows how much feeling is a determining factor in the segmentation or shaping of argument in podcasting.\n01:00:56\tSadie Barker:\t[Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] And just like with structuring an essay where everyone seems to take a different approach to argument, some brainstorm, others start with the thesis, and others just begin with no particular sense of how, my approach in many ways seem to differ from Ali’s, which was to–\n01:01:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro]–to start with a statement rather than “applause and the sounds of the audience are important and here’s why.”\n01:01:19\tSadie Barker:\tWhich would then orient listeners to her particular stance on the topic at hand.\n01:01:24\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Because most research with recordings of poetry readings are focused on the poets for obvious reasons. So I wanted to start out sort of stating that.\n01:01:32\tSadie Barker:\tAnd while Ali didn’t particularly focus on vocal inflections or registers–\n01:01:39\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I don’t think I was successful in thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking like, “Okay, well, my voice should signal these shifts in the narrative arc.”\n01:01:48\tSadie Barker:\t–she had a strong sense of how the structure of her podcast was mobilized by the complexities of an idea.\n01:01:55\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] The middle section is more about the work that I’ve been doing to figure out how to talk about applause in a way that isn’t just, “Oh, it lasts this many seconds and it’s loud or it’s quiet,” but to come up with terms that are more specific to the qualitative essence of different moments of applause.\n01:02:13\tSadie Barker:\tBut Ali also reflected on how her structure was mobilized through the possibilities of an idea.\n01:02:20\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] And then the ending is sort of where I still am in a way, which is that there’s a lot more [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] that can be done to develop that further. And there’s a lot of exciting possibilities for tracing performances across even just different days or different years or decades and different locations and, and charting sort of the responses from different audiences in different contexts to the same poet and the same work.\n01:02:46\tSadie Barker:\tSo if my approach was to structure emotively and Ali’s was to structure more theoretically, Emma’s further diversified our set of approaches. Emma ended up taking—at least initially—a structured approach to structure.\n01:03:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] I resorted to what I know how to do, which is how to write a paper. So I thought about it. I thought to myself, “Okay, what’s going to be my introduction, what’s the body, and then what’s the conclusion?”\n01:03:11\tSadie Barker:\tBut also found in the process that essay and podcast structure have some fundamental differences.\n01:03:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Except that it was almost more scary ’cause it was just like, how do I, first of all, put sounds onto this platform and then also make them make sense?\n01:03:25\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these differences call for different approaches.\n01:03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] So I had various clips that I liked. I wrote a script. Then in the end I had all these sound bites or clips that I just needed to assemble into a collage. Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n01:03:38\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these approaches rely on feeling in different ways.\n01:03:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] But when you do that there’s not necessarily like a linear structure that you have right away. So it’s also just trusting that the process will reveal itself. I didn’t know how to conclude this in a way that would be engaging and not too formal and not too academics. And that’s when I decided to include the poem “Late August,” which just felt like it needed to be there somewhere. And to end it with that, I think was to go back to like, just to come back to the reading.\n01:04:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] I love that move at the end of your podcast. And it relates to what we’ve been talking about this whole time because it’s a return to a verbal rendering of a mood. So it’s a way, it’s a return to the poem on the page or language, the actual words themselves, communicating what you’ve been communicating through, through the rhetoric of podcasting with using, you know, sound and mixing and all those other things up to that point. So it’s sort of like a return to text, to print, you know, to the power of poetry and words themselves to do what you’ve been doing up to that point with sound.\n01:04:53\tJason Camlot:\tSo that about sums up the conversations we had based on the amazing podcasts that Ali, Emma, and Sadie made. As you heard, our focus was on the mood that’s created through ambient sounds, the overall rhetoric of the podcast, and how voice carries affective expression of concepts. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] By way of closing, we tried a little experiment. Basically the idea was to choose some classic critical terms like things from M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms, and to read them with feeling, with the feeling that we associate with a critical term in question. So here it goes, our kind of beat poetry performance of the glossary of critical and literary terms where ideas have feelings. [Begin Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumental]\n01:05:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature.\n01:05:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Focalization. Focalization. Focalization! Focalization. Focalization? Foooocalization. Focalization. Focalization. Focalization.\n01:06:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Interpolation! You know, like, “Hey, hey interpolation!” Interpolation! [Laughs] There has to be a finger in there, you know, like, interpolation! Yoo-hoo, interpolation. Interpolation!! Oh, that’s terrifying! [Laughs] Hey! How do you..? Interpolation! Interpolation!\n01:06:45\tAudio Recording:\tHi, my name is Id. Iddddddd!! Id. [Exaggerated Inaudible Words] [End Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumentals] [Begin Music: Distorted Electronic Beat]\n01:07:30\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Emma Telaro, and Jason Camelot. A special thanks to everyone who contributed to the SpokenWeb Podcast over the last season. You know who you are. And hey, if you are part of the SpokenWeb network and want to get involved, let us know. Season two is just around the corner, so stay tuned this fall for brand new episodes from all your favourite scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. We’ll also be back with brand new Audio of the Month minisodes with Katherine McLeod from deep in the archives. To find out more about SpokenWeb, [Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here in the fall for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":5.215919},{"id":"9587","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E8, How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence, 4 May 2020, Camlot and McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/fe25911a-e576-402d-ae9c-4b96143ad40a/sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,630,039 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-05-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References\\n\\nDolar, Mladen.  A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.\\n\\nLabelle, Brandon.  “Auditory Relations.”  In Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art.  New York: Continuum, ix-xvi.\\n\\nPeters, John Durham.  Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999\\n\\nPetriglieri, Gianpiero.  Twitter Post. April 3, 2020, 7:43 PM. https://twitter.com/gpetriglieri/status/1246221849018720256\\n\\nRowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray.  The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.  Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.\\n\\n“Sounds from the global Covid-19 lockdown.” Cities and Memory. https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/\\n\\nPoetry Recordings\\n\\nAntin, David.  “The Principle of Fit, II” (Part I). 26.:32. June 1980. Recording at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. PennSound. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Antin/Antin-David_The-Principle-of-Fit-II-Side-A_DC_06-80.mp3\\n\\nCox, Alexei Perry. Poems from Finding Places to Make Places. 42:39. The Words & Music Show, March 22, 2020.\\n\\nColeman, Nisha. “The Church of Harvey Christ.” 40:53. The Words & Music Show, March, 22 2020.\\n\\nPlath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Originally released on The Poet Speaks, Record 5, Argo, 1965. YouTube audio. 3:56. Posted December 29, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549767585792,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. In this episode, co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod explore how our contexts and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19.\n\nJason asks his literature and sound studies class at Concordia (via Zoom teleconferencing) how their listening practices have changed, and it just so happens to be the same day they are also discussing the importance of in-person performance before a live audience in the talk poetry of David Antin. Meanwhile, Katherine is noticing that many live poetry readings are now moving online. How are we listening to the world around us, and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? As Katherine and Jason explore these questions together – in recorded, remote conversations – they notice that our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal.\n\n00:00:06\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. From quieted city streets once filled with the hum of commuter traffic to seven o’clock cheers for essential workers to compressed audio on your latest Zoom call, the soundscape around us is changing. Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we invite you to listen in close to the changing soundscape that connects us all.\n00:01:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWe join episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod as they explore how our context and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19. With work meetings, in-person poetry performances, dinner parties, and more moving online, our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal. It has us asking: how are we listening to the world around us and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings, now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? To explore these questions together, here are Katherine and Jason with episode eight of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:39\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tCan you hear me?\n00:02:40\tKlara du Plessis:\tYes.\n00:02:41\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tAlright.\n00:02:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] [Audio, a robotic voice.] To normal. To normal. To normal. Public health. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] [Past Recordings Played One After Another]\n00:02:45\tJason Camlot:\tUh…\n00:02:49\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tHello.\nKlara du Plessis:\t\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tShould be able to hear you…Oh. I think I have it on.\n00:02:54\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t\n00:02:56\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tSo K     lara says she can hear me.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I can hear you.\n00:02:59\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tOkay, good.\n00:03:00\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t     Stay home. Keep at least two metres from each other.\n00:03:04\tAlexei Perry Cox:\t[Baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence  , would get through to humankind.\n00:03:12\tIsabella Wang:\tOh my gosh, you read one of my favourite poems.\n00:03:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I’m just going to pause ’cause my internet just said something about, I think we got a little off sync — [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:03:19\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] Yeah, you just froze, you just froze there … [Overlapping Voices]\n00:03:19\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\tFrom each other. From each other. Stay home from each other.\n00:03:26\tKlara du Plessis:\tBut what I’ve been noticing is that I don’t wanna be listening to things and I’ve been feeling mostly overwhelmed.\n00:03:26\tDeanna Radford:\tThere we go. Can you hear me?\n00:03:45\tNaomi Charron:\t[Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin.\n00:03:45\tHeather Pepper:\tWe’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight!\n00:03:45\tVarious Voices:\t[Overlapping, Distorted and Breaking Up] Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Where’d they go? There was a certain fit. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano]\nA kind of adjusted togetherness.\nVarious Voices:\tJason     s frozen. Side by side. Side side side. …For me,      hearing voice      has really been more important, in this moment. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:04:14\tJason Camlot:\tThursday, March the 12th: that was the last time that I had an in-person conversation in close proximity with someone other than my wife or two teenage children or one of our two little dogs. That was my last 40-plus weight training class. It was sparsely attended, but still there were eight of us there plus our instructor, Lisa Marie. We elbow-pumped instead of high-fiving when the workout was done. We already knew we had to be careful. The next day, the Quebec government adopted an order of council declaring a health emergency throughout the province due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, like millions of people across the globe, we’ve been in a substantial lockdown, at home, ever since. Major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we hear. Among the many disruptions, much of my and everyone else’s daily communication has moved online. Our 40-plus weight training instructor, Lisa Marie, adapted quickly, started a YouTube channel, and has been posting daily workouts every day.\n00:05:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, from Lisa Marie’s workout video] Hello again. So this is going to be day one of the home workout.\n00:05:26\tJason Camlot:\tConcordia University where I work mobilized pretty quickly with efforts to support all faculty members so that we can complete the teaching of our courses online using Moodle chat rooms and Zoom teleconferencing software. It was during the week of March 16th, the first week that the university shut down as I was preparing to move my literature and sound studies graduate seminar online with a class on the poet David Antin, that I began to talk through FaceTime and Zoom with my colleague Katherine McLeod–\n00:05:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi, it’s Katherine here.\n00:05:58\tJason Camlot:\t–on what we were experiencing and what it meant for how we are listening now.\n00:06:09\tMusic:\t[Dreamy Instrumental]\n00:06:10\tKatherine McLeod:\tMy own thinking about questions of how we are listening now came from noticing that some of the poetry reading events that had been scheduled for the spring were starting to move online in different ways. Since 2016, I’ve been publishing a weekly listing of mostly Montreal literary events and readings called Where Poets Read. The last event listed in Where Poets Read that took place in person was on March 9th. It was Épiques Voices, a bilingual poetry reading, an event that I actually co-hosted myself with Catherine Cormier-Larose and little did we know that it would be the last one for a while. After that, readings that had been planned as book launches, at local bookstores like Drawn & Quarterly, VERSeFest in Ottawa, the Montreal Review of Books spring launch, and an Atwater library poetry reading were all cancelled. Meanwhile, reading series organizers were quickly thinking of ways to move readings online. Individual writers started posting themselves reading in YouTube videos or on Instagram Live posts, but within the first days of everything changing, rob mcLennan in Ottawa, Isabella Wang in Vancouver, and Ian Ferrier in Montreal were experimenting with moving entire reading series events online. Instead of the usual posts on Where Poets Read, I started posting links to live streams of readings and I started to wonder how are we listening to poetry readings now, now that we can’t go out to listen to them in person, together?\n00:07:56\tJason Camlot:\tRight, so we’re both thinking about how we’re listening now under the present circumstances of social distancing and self-isolation, and thinking about our new experiences and practices of listening, especially within a range of literary contexts, including reading literature silently at home, teaching and discussing literature in the classroom, and performing literature on a stage at a poetry reading. So let’s turn to our first real conversation about these questions that we held on Zoom on March 26th, 2020, a little more than a week after the government-mandated lockdown and soon after I taught my first virtual class on the work of talk poet David Antin.\n00:08:40\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] Hello?\n00:08:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tHello, can you hear me?\n00:08:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, hi Katherine.\n00:08:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi.\n00:08:47\tJason Camlot:\tWait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?\n00:08:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tNo, actually I’m in my office room.\n00:09:02\tJason Camlot:\tHow’re you doing?\n00:09:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m good, given the situation. But yeah, today felt definitely more like a challenge to get started. Yeah, just… It took more energy to get going.\n00:09:23\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, me too. I had a terrible sleep last night, I kept waking up like almost every hour. So…\n00:09:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tI just made coffee now and I sent myself a text last night to give myself instructions for the morning and they said, “Make coffee, dance, be.” I’ve done the first two and now I am in a state of being.\n00:09:43\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you seem like you’re being–\n00:09:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:44\tJason Camlot:\t–so that’s good. You could check all three off. I like the idea of not only self-isolating, but self-texting.\n00:09:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:52\tJason Camlot:\tSort of like, wow, we’re in some crazy individual loops here, you know?\n00:09:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I only send them as reminders to myself, but who knows, maybe by the end of this I’ll be having a full conversation with me over text.\n00:10:05\tJason Camlot:\tOh, man…\n00:10:10\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Piano]\n00:10:10\tJason Camlot:\tYou can really hear the low-level anxiety and fatigue in our voices.\n00:10:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. So many Zoom conversations seem to have to begin this way now, with these kinds of emotional check-ins. And these are so important because we’re all feeling overwhelmed. But that’s also hard stuff to dive into at the start of a conversation. And I know I find myself saying that “I’m good. Oh, given the situation,” like I do in that recording. And then, when you listen between the lines, you can hear that the real answer to that question is more complicated than ever.\n00:10:45\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s one example of how we’re listening to each other a bit differently these days. Listening maybe with slightly more sensitivity to the other person’s mood. Listening to hear just how anxious or depressed someone is before you embark on an actual conversation about something else.\n00:11:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe did have a real conversation, though, after this affective, close-listening warm-up. I asked you how your class went.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tWe had to go back to teach online this week, so I held my seminar again and it went really well. I was surprised, like, and it was really great to see everyone. Everyone joined, everyone participated, and I think everyone was actually quite grateful because we’ve been reading all semester different theories of sort of how sound is mediated, different sort of audile techniques, you know, ways of listening, listening to voice, listening to other sounds. You know, the idea of soundscapes and the idea of voice and concepts of presence and things like that. I felt it was going to be unavoidable that we talk about what our listening situations are right now. And so since they were kind of equipped with a whole bunch of readings on that, on thinking about listening and sound, I did sort of tell them before class, I sent them all an email saying that the top of the class would be spent… Each of them would sort of give us a little bit of an account of how they’re listening now, sort of what their listening situation is and how their interactions with sounds may have changed as a result of them having to self-isolate.\n00:12:14\tJason Camlot:\tIt seems like we are re-negotiating our relationship to signals, noise, and silence. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] These different categories of sound are all related to each other. One can’t really mean much without the other. Noise is defined in relation to the signal, the thing we’re actually trying to hear. We speak of the signal-to-noise ratio. With a weak reception or a low signal-to-noise ratio, the signal will be lost in surrounding interference or noise, so that we can hardly hear the message or not hear it at all. With a strong reception, a high signal-to-noise ratio, [Sound Effect: Pulsing Tone] the signal will come through clearly and we hardly hear or notice the noise at all. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental]\n00:13:05\tJason Camlot:\tListen to this extended cross-fade of two clips, one of brown noise and another of a sharp emergency signal. It dramatizes the movement from a low to high–\n00:13:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] –signal-to-noise ratio.\n00:13:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, begins with “brown noise”, a soft static-y sound, and fades into the pulsing tone played earlier, the “emergency signal”]\n00:13:34\tJason Camlot:\tAs human listeners, we’re usually pretty good at hearing the signal at the expense of the noise. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] Murray Schafer says in his book The Soundscape that “noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore.” He was thinking about noise within environmental soundscapes, which he thought about as a composer would in terms of acoustic design. One thing that has come to our ears’ attention as a result of living the circumstances of a global pandemic and experiencing locally by staying at home, sticking to our neighborhoods and our own living spaces is the absence of the noises we were so good at ignoring under normal, noisy circumstances. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] The absence of the noises around us effects our mood, our sense of our place in the world, and leads us to compensate with different forms of listening. So we can speak of noise and silence in our sound environments and their effects on how we feel.\n00:14:35\tAli Barillaro:\tI live next to a bar, so normally there’s a lot of noise outside of my apartment on a regular basis even if it’s not like the weekend\n00:14:43\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Ali Barillaro.\n00:14:45\tAli Barillaro:\tSo not hearing people drunkenly shouting at 3:00 AM has been kind of strange. I don’t necessarily mind it not being there because I’m definitely sleeping a lot easier, but it’s definitely weird because that’s kind of been a constant and I’ve lived here for almost two years now. So that’s weird and different.\n00:15:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe absence of either noise or signal becomes present to us in the form of noticeable silence. Biochemist and doctoral candidate in English Marlene Oeffinger.\n00:15:16\tMarlene Oeffinger:\tIt’s almost like I feel with all the news and everything that we’re listening to there’s this constant barrage of noise. And then we were sitting on Saturday evening on the couch in our living room next to the window and usually Saturday evening is… You hear people walking outside talking, you hear cars, you hear planes. And so we were sitting and reading and not listening to the news and I suddenly had to stop because I realized how silent it was. It was dead silent and that’s just something I kind of associate not with the city and definitely not with the area here on a Saturday night. And it was just really completely silent. There was no noise from any neighbour, nothing. And it was almost distracting, the silence. ‘Cause I couldn’t stop listening to the silence. And yeah, I couldn’t even focus on what I was reading anymore because it was so unusual, I felt. It was just such a novel sound for the surrounding. Yeah, and that’s why I guess I just kept listening to it and it kept distracting me really from what I was doing.\n00:16:20\tJason Camlot:\tThe soundscapes outside have changed, but our relationship to the soundscapes within our domestic spaces have also changed. They become more complicated. We’re sensing how strange it can feel when spaces that one depends on for certain kinds of noise don’t sound the same, get quieter, or go silent altogether. But we’re also becoming more aware of our need for spaces that allow us periods of silence. My students told me how they had to work hard to find those spaces and how they’re now having to schedule slots of time for silent work. Thinking, writing, at home. PhD student Lindsay Presswell.\n00:17:01\tLindsay Presswell:\tSo my personal situation in my house is that my partner is a musician [Begin Music: Instrumental Guitar] and so normally he’s kind of here and he has a studio set up just over in the corner. And normally I’m like, I need to be out of the house. Like I have to be in the library or like in an atmosphere which very much feels like I’m working. But we actually have had to carefully negotiate the use of this space. We just started a Google Calendar this morning where I’m like inputting my lectures and like when I need to be sort of reading in silence ’cause I’m a very needy reader, I guess. We’ve discovered, like, putting in these soundproof headphones that he has, so I couldn’t hear the music as he’s working on things on the computer. But what that does is it… He like breathes loudly? [End Music: Instrumental Guitar] [Sound Effect: Heavy Breathing] Like, when those are in his ears, which I’ve never heard him breathe in my entire life. But that’s like a fun new thing.\n00:18:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tBreathing is definitely one of those sounds we don’t usually notice. But Lindsay’s situation spells out just how sensitive we’re becoming to sounds that are usually invisible to our ears.\n00:18:14\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Guitar]\n00:18:14\tJason Camlot:\tMany of my students are engaged in similar kinds of sound-space negotiations, as I am at home with my family. But we also seem to need to fill ourselves with particular kinds of sounds to compensate for the lack of sounds and noise that define our states of normalcy. My sense is people are maybe talking to each other more than they had been even if they’re doing so at a distance. My students were telling me that they’re getting off of social media and picking up the phone in ways that they normally wouldn’t do.\n00:18:42\tPriscilla Joly:\tYeah, I think people want to talk more at this time, particularly my parents. They call, like, very frequently now.\n00:18:50\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Priscilla Joly, a PhD student in English.\n00:18:53\tLindsay Presswell:\tAnd then just in terms of, like, the sort of broader situation, I noticed that my tolerance for noise that also feels fast or jarring has slowed, too. I’m like needing direct, verbal communication more than sending texts. Rather than like reading the news and doing my emails on the commute, I’m like finding time listening to traditional media or calling people as well, which normally I don’t do because I associate speaking like it’s a slow way of communicating. I deactivated my Twitter account very quickly last week because [Begin Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental] I was just like, this is not the kind of… These aren’t the sounds… This isn’t the news that I want to be listening to.\n00:19:42\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Lindsay Presswell. John Durham Peters and his description of the uncanniness that surrounded early telephonic communication—talking into telephones—noted the existential anxiety that came from relying on the voice to do it all. That is, to do all the work of communicating one’s thoughts, feelings, and presence to another person. He talks about the disquiet of a medium defined by strange voices entering the home, the disappearance of one’s words into an empty black hole in the absence of the listener’s face. And he suggests that the telephone contributed to the modern derangement of dialogue by splitting conversation into two halves that meet only in the cyberspace of the wires. And that’s when telecommunications media relied on wires from start to finish. I cancelled my landline five years ago and threw myself at the mercy of wireless communication. Course, there’s still fiber optic cables at work, but wireless communication, the forms of interpersonal exchange we’re now forced to have instead of most and sometimes any form of interpersonal exchange, represent a further kind of derangement. The condensed and proximate signal [Sound Effect: Dial Tone] that came through the carbon microphone of the old-timey telephone in my teenage experience, at least, came to feel intimate in its own powerfully reduced way. The banal, unexpected kinds of disruptions we experience when we try to Skype, Zoom, and FaceTime [Sound Effect: Voices Breaking Up In Call] are too annoying and thinning to live up to Durham Peter’s sort of romantic idea of telephonic derangement. Grandiose concepts of sympathy, relationality, intimate connection are reduced to the irritatingly tinny sounding idea of connectivity. [End Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental]\n00:21:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Katherine McLeod’s voice breaking up during a call, sounding tinny and distorted]\n00:21:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhy was that happening to my voice there?\n00:21:46\tJason Camlot:\tI was wondering about that myself and so I started googling for answers. [Sound Effect: Electronic Interference] Part of it has to do with the way digital information is sent. We’re not getting interference with a continuous signal along the wire here. Our voices are transduced and converted into frequency data and then sent via a wifi signal as data packets, like assemblages of bits of data that add up to the sound of your voice. [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference] The computer waits for packets that represent a good signal-to-noise ratio of your voice. If something interferes with the analog signal that’s sending the data, then the computer, let’s say it’s listening for the right formula of your voice, will have trouble understanding, let’s say hearing the packets of data, will reject them as noise, and then wait for them to be sent again. When this keeps happening, you either get partial delivery of the packets, which sounds weird or complete drop-outs. Sort of like if a Star Trek teleportation goes horribly wrong because all the disassembled molecules of the person didn’t come back together again or like when Ron Weasley gets seriously splinched in that bad apparating accident in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Ron left part of his upper arm behind; we leave packets of our voice signal behind. Still, even if old-style landline telephones sometimes sounded better than cell phones and Zoom, these newer media in the present context of social isolation are making us feel what’s at stake in a scenario that suggests the loss of real old-time hanging out in person. My students were clear in expressing the frustration they felt from bad connections. [End Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference]\n00:23:24\tAli Barillaro:\tMy internet connection’s not the best–\n00:23:28\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:23:28\tAli Barillaro:\t–so listening to people through quite a bit of distortion has been a weird thing to kind of manage and just sort of… I’ve had to kind of let it happen and not let it get frustrating. Dealing with the weird kind of distortions and sometimes when the sound cuts off completely it’ll take a couple of seconds and then restart, but almost as if someone’s pressed fast forward. So trying to keep track of everything is kind of interesting.\n00:23:58\tJason Camlot:\tAnd in talking to my students, I let myself get carried away and waxed philosophical about the existential implications of a weak wifi signal.\n00:24:06\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] Your point about the frustration of communicating with people, especially through wifi-based telecommunication system, which is what we’re doing so much and what the university is having us do right now, I think is super important as well. It’s frustrating when you feel like you can’t have the confidence in the voice continuing. That’s a huge difference between in-person communication. You’re not worried about them breaking up in front of you and it makes you just incredibly aware of the fact that when we’re communicating we’re dealing with signal transduction, which is more than just annoying, actually. It’s kind of existentially traumatic and troubling. It’s like that we don’t know that we can count on the continuity of the person and the communication that we’re engaging in.\n00:24:49\tJason Camlot:\tStill, we are relying on Zoom and Zoom-like platforms as best we can for the social encounters that we crave. Here, I’d say we’re feeling the absence of a different kind of noise that we’re also very good at ignoring and not hearing under normal conditions, but the absence of which we notice in a strong way in these dangerous times. We are noticing the absence of social sounds and that absence becomes a distracting kind of silence. MA student in English Kian Vaziri-Tehrani.\n00:25:20\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani:\tThere’s kind of been sort of an avoidance of silence, if that makes sense. I live in a pretty, like, quiet neighborhood. It’s  Côte-Saint Luc. But yeah, it’s generally like a really, really quiet neighbourhood and I go out my balcony a lot and it’s pitch quiet. So I guess like I just kind of… The TV’s always on or I’m always listening to something and I feel like if it’s too quiet then I’m… Something’s wrong or something’s off about it. Like I’ve just been filling my senses up, I guess.\n00:25:49\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Voices Echoing and Overlaid] I’m thinking in particular of the experience of sounds reverberating within a space that makes us feel we are present in a real, material, and social environment alongside others. Something along the lines of what Brandon LaBelle was talking about when he says that “the sonorous world always presses in, adding extra ingredients by which we locate ourselves.” We are increasingly interested in those interstitial noises that suggest life and movement and social activity. PhD student Sadie Barker.\n00:26:22\tSadie Barker:\tI find I’m much more aware of my neighbours’ sounds in the apartment building and I think interested in them and like inclined to speculate into them or like imagine into them just because… Yeah, I find when I hear like the doorbell ringing, I’m like, “Are people having people over? Are they socializing?” You know, you’re just kind of, yeah, more intrigued.\n00:26:44\tJason Camlot:\tWe might become intensive, causal listeners like Sadie, trying to decipher the causes, the things, actions, activities that go with the sounds we’re suddenly noticing. Or we might just be craving those little otherwise meaningless sounds because they suggest a real person in an actual space.\n00:27:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s like the difference between listening to an archival documentary recording of a poetry reading–\n00:27:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, muffled recording of people laughing and chatting]\n00:27:11\tKatherine McLeod:\t–you can hear all kinds of vibrations in the room other than those of the poet’s voice. Clinking, shuffling, breathing, laughter, applause. Compared to a studio recording, like something Caedmon Records would have made in the 1950s–\n00:27:26\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Sylvia Plath reciting her poem “Daddy”] The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through.\n00:27:31\tKatherine McLeod:\t–where the strong signal of the poet’s voice seems to exist in a sort of vacuum outside of any recognizable sonic space in the universe.\n00:27:42\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Childrens’ Voices Echoing and Overlaid] In this present moment of social distancing, I think we’re craving the noise around the signal rather than the signal itself. We’re being bombarded with all kinds of messages, [Begin Music: Sparkly Instrumental] but really we want the comforting sounds of an actual person in a real environment. Philosopher Mladen Dolar might say we’re craving voice itself rather than the messages that voice carries. [End Music: Sparkly Instrumental]\n00:28:04\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Klara du Plessis.\n00:28:08\tKlara du Plessis:\tI have definitely been phoning a lot more like every day I have two or three telephone conversations with friends who I’m close with, but would usually just text with or something. So there’s definitely this move towards trying to communicate more or to de-distance ourselves, I guess.\n00:28:25\tJason Camlot:\tVoice is that medium made up of accent, intonation, and timbre that carries the message but disappears in the process. Usually we don’t notice it because we’re so focused on the message. In this instance, voice is the noise and the meaning is the signal. It’s like what Dolar says about voice and a heavy accent. A heavy accent suddenly makes us aware of the material support of the voice, which we tend, immediately, to discard. Well, now we seem to be craving the accent. I’m speaking metaphorically here using Dolar’s account of voice as an ever-disappearing, yet undeniably present entity to help describe what we feel when we try to be together on Zoom or Skype or something like that, and sort of are together, but at the same time really aren’t together.\n00:29:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe sounds around the signal, the sounds that add the vibrancy to the social, the sense of a real unique person speaking are what we’re listening for, but even when we hear these sounds, we’re kind of aware that they’re evoking a scenario of actual presence that isn’t happening right now.\n00:29:37\tJason Camlot:\tBecause I’ve been on Twitter a lot more than usual, I read a tweet—this was early April—posted by Gianpiero Petriglieri that suggested we’re so exhausted after video calls because we’re experiencing “the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds are tricked into the idea of actually being together. While our bodies know that we’re not” actually together. He’s suggesting it’s the dissonance of being relentlessly in the presence of each other’s absence that makes us so tired.\n00:30:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis may be especially true during graduate seminars and poetry readings and probably even more so in relaxed meetings like the video conference parties and cocktail hours that have been happening more often.\n00:30:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, same various voices      speaking from earlier] [Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin. We’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight! Okay. Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Duh. Oh, Mickey’s outside, shit! Hang on. I gotta go get the dog. You hear him barking? Jason, you lost, your whole family went away. Where’d they go? Jason’s frozen. No, no he doesn’t move! I know, I know! He does it on purpose! I know! You told me your trick! Yeah, you knew I was faking it. You just couldn’t help it!   Welcome back. [Door Shutting]\n00:31:04\tJason Camlot:\tThat clip we just heard was from the middle of the video conference cocktail hour—or two—I held with some friends just after I taught my first online seminar that I’ve been talking about.\n00:31:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tHearing the clinks of glasses at the beginning, the laughter, the spontaneous references to things happening within the individual spaces of the teleconference participants along with the things happening across those spaces, through the screen, really did evoke the sound of an intimate social gathering for me. At times it sounded like you were all there together. Other times, not so much. It was actually really hard for me to tell who was where.\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tIt was a lot of fun. But hearing each other and seeing each other and ourselves through the flat screens of our laptops made me want to crawl through and be there. Wherever “there” is.\n00:31:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat reminds me of the title of the poem in David Antin’s book Talking At The Boundaries, the one called “what am i doing here?” The one where he asks himself, stepping into a space to create a poem by talking rather than reading the poems from a book, what am I doing here in this ambiance? What’s going to happen? Am I doing poetry here? How are we here together? Am I making art here? Just what exactly am I doing here? But that kind of question, the way he asks it in that poem, maybe it can’t be asked in the same way of the here, now.\n00:32:36\tJason Camlot:\tFollowing that opening conversation with the students in my class, which lasted about 40 minutes and functioned as part sonic listening analysis and part group therapy session, and just before the Zoom cocktail gathering I had with my friends, which was also like a therapy listening session, I did, eventually, segway into a two-hour class about the talk poetry of David Antin.\n00:32:57\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] But let’s start at the beginning, I guess, and let’s start with Antin and ask how do we begin to actually define what an Antin talk poem is and how do we define it as an entity? So let’s begin by thinking about what it is, what’s the artifact, what’s the thing that we’re organizing a conversation around? What could you glean from what you’ve read and listened to as to sort of what the production process of a talk poem is? And maybe that’s one way into beginning to define it. And we can think of it generically, we can think of it other ways, but sort of if we think of what is a talk poem, you know, how does he make them?\n00:33:34\tJason Camlot:\tDavid Antin seemed like a deeply relevant artist to be thinking about just now because his poetry originates in live, in-person talking before an audience. He called himself a talk poet. He would come to a venue with some idea of what he was gonna talk about, perhaps a title or a theme, and a few stories in mind. But then he would just stand there and create a poem before a live audience. By talking.\n00:34:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, David Antin saying his talk poem “The Principle of Fit, II”] I came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’d been thinking about and because I don’t come unprepared to do pieces. On the other hand, I don’t come prepared the way one      comes to a lesson. I haven’t studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit, the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness, the calmness, in certain social, socially structured events as between patients and their doctors or between patients and their diseases. It’s a very close social relation and one that takes a certain education.\n00:34:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you listen really closely, you can hear the tape noises on that recording of Antin doing a talk poem. [Static From The Recording]\n00:34:59\tJason Camlot:\tHe would go into a room with an audience, press record on his tape recorder, and start talking. Not reading, not reciting a written text. Just thinking a poem into existence by talking it out loud in front of other people. That’s the first iteration of the talk poem: actual ephemeral talk in a room filled with real people. He would also record his talks on a tape recorder, hence the tape hiss you noticed in that audible trace of the event. He’d take that tape recorder home, transcribe the talk that was on it, and then shape that typed transcript into a unique-looking printed work without punctuation, with special spacing, designed to make the reader have to reinvoice the original talk back to life by finding the speech and intonation patterns that are not obvious to find in the printed treatment of the original, ephemeral live event.\n00:35:51\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] So, if we continue to ask this question, what is a talk poem, okay, and we’ve just rehearsed in a brief way what the production process of a talk poem is, where is the talk poem? I guess that’s my second question, right? Is it in that event, right? Is it in the tape recorder, on the cassette that recorded it? Is it in the initial transcription of it? Is it in the book Talking At The Boundaries after that event happens? Where is the talk poem? Or is it in, or is it that combination of things? Yeah, Brian, you want to..?\n00:36:22\tBrian Vass:\tI guess thinking about this question also just sort of dovetails to the question that I asked on group chat.\n00:36:28\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Brian Vass.\n00:36:31\tBrian Vass:\tIt seems to me that if the talk poem as a piece of art or as a event, if it hinges to some degree on the reciprocity between Antin as a performer and a speaker and the specific context that he’s in, as he seems to sort of describe that it does, like he says he’s got something in mind, but even the spontaneity and some degree of the improvisation is influenced or inflected by the context, specifically the people in the room, to the extent that that’s true. It seems like the real site of the talk poem is the occasion and everything else, the recording and the transcription are sort of derivations of that, but somehow aren’t fully it because you’re part of it if you’re there. Do you know what I mean? Like the audience is also a part of it. If it’s true, what he’s saying about vibing off of the group.\n00:37:21\tJason Camlot:\tI like that, vibing off of the group. So it’s talking, but as you say, it’s sort of talking with an audience present that seems to be important because of this reciprocity as you put it. But it’s more about him vibing off of them than about actual conversation. It’s not talking for conversation. It’s talking for the sense that he’s not talking in a vacuum. There’s a kind of priority that’s given to that original ephemeral event due to this scenario of talking in person before an actual listening audience.\n00:37:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe discussion we had of Antin seemed so appropriate and relevant to us at this moment, I think, because his art was premised on, depended on the act of talking in the presence of other people. If we think about the new scientific evidence coming in that suggests even asymptomatic people can possibly spread the coronavirus, it makes talking to someone in person a truly perilous scenario. We’re not allowed to talk before large groups of people right now. It’s literally against the law. Literary performance, poetry readings, literary gatherings are not possible in that way. But it sort of got us thinking, you know, some of the students were sort of asked what would David Antin do during COVID-19 crisis? Because he’s not, he wouldn’t be allowed to actually stand in a room before an assembled audience, right? And that was, you know, in many of their opinions and in my opinion, too, crucial to the actual creation of a talk poem. That talk poem requires the presence of others within one space, right, in order to actually to be made in the first place. So like, you know, imagining David Antin on Zoom or Skype doing a talk poem, it’s not quite the same thing.\n00:39:07\tMusic:\t[Gentle Instrumental]\n00:39:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo we can’t do talk poems. We can’t read poems before an actual audience. We can’t talk to strangers or speak moistly. Without talking to people in person how can we share art? How can we share literature? How can we share our work under the present conditions? How can we reach listeners? Today, not only are we listening differently in general, but we’re sharing and listening to literature differently. Think about when you listen to literature in your day-to-day life and has that changed? Just as before, you might listen to an audio book or to a podcast and you might listen to that more than before, but the method of listening probably remains the same. What has changed is that you can’t listen to a live reading or at least not in the same space as the reader and other listeners. Literary events have been cancelled or as we prefer to think of it postponed. But we can still listen to writers reading their works and even participate in a live online reading as an event.\n00:40:15\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] Good evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music. We’re very lucky to have two visitors from the great state of Toronto tonight. So all of this should be really fun. And to lead off the show tonight, I asked this person how she would like to be introduced      and she wanted to be introduced by me telling you that she lives beside a lake.\n00:40:46\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] That was a recording of Ian Ferrier performing his usual role as live host and curator of The Words & Music Show, a monthly cabaret of poetry, music, dance, and spoken word performances that’s been happening in Montreal for the past 20 years. At the end of March, the show went online with performers sending in pre-recorded audio to be played in the live event broadcast via Zoom. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Some of the artists, like storyteller Nisha Coleman, integrated into their performances the circumstances and impact of COVID-19 upon artists who depend upon live events. Nisha’s story was about the time she spent hanging out in a community art collective called The Church of Harvey Christ. And this is how she chose to end her story this time.\n00:41:36\tNisha Coleman:\t[Audio, from a past recording] Now, I’ve told this story a lot of times. It’s one I’ve told at parties and campfires and on stage. And every time I tell it, it’s sort of, I sort of tell it in a different way and it has a different meaning, it has a different sort of takeaway. But I think in this particular telling for me what stands out about this story is the strength of community, right? And, and what The Church of Harvey Christ meant to artists and what it provided for them at that time and how important that community is now. I mean, especially now. Because being an artist, you know, it’s precarious, of course. It’s precarious in the best of times and now we’re entering a new time where it’s sort of precarious for everybody. So, I think it’s more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle, or, you know, maintaining this connection over the internet. Because we need each other, we need to lift each other up. We need to help each other out. We need to promote each other’s work. I think that’s gonna be really important in the next however long. Who knows, right?\n00:42:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tOther performances really emphasized the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private spaces that come with a video conference, reading from home. That was the case with poet Alexei Perry Cox.\n00:43:08\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] …extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18-month-old child on her bed and it’s by the poet Alexei Perry Cox. So I’m going to bring that up now and we can take a listen.\n00:43:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence, would get through to humankind.\n00:43:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tNow, I have to admit that for this particular recording, my screen didn’t display the video, so even though others watched the reading, I was just listening. As a listener, I felt that Alexei’s poem conveyed such presence through its recording. Yes, I was listening to the poem, too, but I was also listening and deeply moved by the sounds of her daughter’s presence in the room with her and the interaction between them.\n00:44:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] A book with a room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. But present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time bringing of life.\n00:44:25\tKatherine McLeod:\tEven more than the words of the poem, I was listening to the sounds around the poem, the sounds of the social and of life. When you’re at a live reading, you’re there to listen to the poetry or prose, but so often the experience of the reading is the atmosphere, the ambiance, as Antin put it, and the conversations around the poems. And that’s much harder to describe, harder to document, and harder to replicate in a digital environment.\n00:44:55\tIsabella Wang:\tIn any other circumstance, when we are, there is this live community happening in the backdrop. I would be more hesitant to just go online and hear the works of a poet reading on the internet because there is that community out there. And I’m like, “Why would I want to like, you know, see this somewhat flat screen of you when I can interact with you in person and engage?”\n00:45:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Isabella Wang, who had the idea to go online with the reading series she helps organize in Vancouver, BC: Dead Poets Reading Series.\n00:45:33\tIsabella Wang:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly series at the Vancouver Public Library. We invite like four or five local poets to come and share the work of a dead poet. And so this happened around the time where everything around Vancouver—I mean everything, like not just in Vancouver, but everything—was getting cancelled. And so of course our reading series was also canceled, too, and we had four readers who no longer could come and share their work. I actually… It’s funny you mentioned rob because I actually got the idea from him. And so when I started hearing that “Oh no, we might not actually be able to put on this reading series at the Vancouver Public Library,” I was like, “Hey, rob is doing this thing. How can we maybe try to, you know, move this online?” And initially we were just planning to feature the four readers who couldn’t read anymore. But then it was kind of intuitive and it made sense. I was like, now that we featured Kathy Mak and Natalie Lim, who were supposed to be on the series, let’s start reaching out to more folks and it just started there.\n00:46:47\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bit of a ghostly series to begin with. [Begin Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental] So how did it work transferring this series into an online environment?\n00:46:58\tIsabella Wang:\tThe reading series has definitely transformed a lot. Some poets were saying how, you know, it’s hard for them to film themselves reading at home just because there isn’t that reciprocal audience thing going on anymore and it’s kind of like numbing. But at the same time, what the digital-like realm is so good at bringing out is a different sense of community where like before we were so limited to audiences just in Vancouver. And so that limited a lot of not only who our readers were, but also what kind of dead poets were being shared and spread. And so for the first time I think we were able to bring in a lot of      our friends from different places that normally we would only get to see on social media anyway. And it was when the series started that I realized, “Oh my gosh, I’ve known you and you and you like for so long. And this is actually the first time I’ve seen you, you know, move and be alive. And this is the first time I’ve ever heard you read.”\n00:48:05\tJason Camlot:\tI asked Isabella about her experience of listening to readings online versus in person.[End Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental]\n00:48:10\tIsabella Wang:\tWhat’s really changed is the interactive environment, that lively, bustling atmosphere that is somewhat changed now with, you know, this going online. ‘Cause I think part of the literary experience is that interaction, that engagement with poets like before and after they read. You know, ’cause it’s nice to hear Fred Wah read, but it’s also nice to just talk to him and make jokes with him, like, you know, by his side in the audience. And that’s not really there anymore. And that’s what’s been transformed mostly into the, into social media now. And so there’s still that, I think, you know, the liking and sharing and commenting. But it’s more invisible, it’s something that is more of an… Like you see it after they post something but it’s not that immediate anymore.\n00:49:09\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really interesting. Yeah, I love the idea of response happening in a different temporal sort of timeframe than the actual event, is really interesting. And also in a different media format, so that instead of leaning over to someone and whispering or nudging them with your elbow and exchanging a kind of feeling about what you just heard, it’s being experienced later in a tweet or something like that.\n00:49:33\tIsabella Wang:\tAnd I think it’s also like the function is kind of different because, you know, when you’ve always had that community that you go to like day in and day out, you know, you love seeing the people you see, but kind of take it for granted. It’s like, “Oh yeah, next week I’ll see them again.” And, you know, there will always be literary events. And I think, I think this period just shows us how      important that community and those like events really are to us. And so part of that, social media like that, commenting and interaction is part of just supporting each other and making sure that we’re still going and there is still a sense of community somewhere.\n00:50:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn a poetry reading, you are listening to the poetry, but you’re also listening to community. So the challenge then becomes how to create and make audible that community online. I was so interested in how Isabella’s idea for taking Dead Poets online came from an invitation to read in an online series that went online on that very same weekend of March 14th–15th, 2020. That reading series is hosted on the online journal Periodicities and the poet behind it is Ottawa-based poet, reviewer, and publisher rob  . Jason and I spoke with rob in a video conference call and we asked him about what prompted him to start this online reading series.\n00:51:08\trob mclennan:\tThere are kind of a few factors in play. I’m one of the organizing reading series, founding reading series, of VERSefest, our annual poetry festival. This year would have been tenth, so… We realized, like, we were ten days out of our opening night and we realized like, yeah, this is not going to happen. We have to shut this down.\n00:51:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tWith the cancellation of Ottawa’s VERSfest, rob felt the absence of readings that would have happened. He was also starting up the online journal Periodicities and had the web space ready to curate a reading series. He reached out to poets and was met with an enthusiastic response of poets sending him videos of themselves reading poems. We asked him about his sense of how listeners are responding to all of this new content. Are they listening? But first one of Jason’s students, poet reading series curator and PhD candidate Klara du Plessis, was asking the same questions when some of these reading events started going online. She mentioned it in Jason’s class, so we thought we’d include her perspective before hearing from r     ob on this question.\n00:52:19\tKlara du Plessis:\tWell, yeah, I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about all these virtual poetry reading series, like multiple different people have started. So they kind of invite poets to read between like five and 15 minutes or so to record themselves reading either their own poetry or poetry by someone who’s already passed away and then these videos are posted online. And so I kind of got into a bit of a Twitter thing where I kind of questioned whether people were actually listening to these recordings or whether it was like something for poets to just be busy, so they’re doing something. And my poll discovered that half of the people said that they were super comforted by listening to these virtual poetry readings and felt a sense of connection and community as a result. And half of the other people said that it was like too overwhelming for them at this time to deal with, you know, listening to strange, like sometimes not very well produced audio recordings. I should also mention that I think I offended a few people with my question so I kind of regretted it after the fact.\n00:53:23\trob mclennan:\tI know early on I saw some social media posts of people saying like, “I appreciate that these things happen, but I just can’t deal with it right now.” You know, one or two other people saying like, “I don’t even know why this is happening.” Which is fine, I don’t expect every human on the planet to say, “This is awesome, I’m in.” That is not the point of any endeavor. But for those who might want it or require it, it is there. And for those who don’t want it, there are other things.\n00:53:52\tJason Camlot:\tI asked rob as he was watching these videos come in, if he noticed a blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private,\n00:53:59\trob mclennan:\tI have noticed that; it becomes slightly more intimate, right? Like as opposed to being public. I like watching people do stuff from inside their houses [Sound Effect: Clattering And Moving] or apartments or their, yeah, like you say, bedroom or from their living room table or their makeshift home office because not everyone has a home office. I find that more interesting than someone sending me a more produced video. I’m open to that. I’ve posted some of those. But I just find them just less interesting than something made just for this, with the limitations of that. So like the artifice is gone and one would hope that maybe that intimacy, like we require it now if we’re not able to get it in other ways. So it’s actually maybe helpful as someone… Whether watching or being the one making the video that is actually making this distance less difficult.\n00:54:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. No, I think that’s such a good point. And it’s, and also realizing that we’re kind of maybe even enjoying those readings a little bit more ’cause we’re not just hearing the person, we’re hearing sort of the space around them and they’re interacting with–\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah!\n00:55:07\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah.\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah, they’re not, they’re not at the same microphone, the same backdrop. It’s actually a little more interesting just watching the limitations of the space. Like, “Oh okay, someone has a smaller space than another person.” And just watching their personal effects behind them and none of those spaces really surprised me. Like, okay, yeah, this person is a little more formal than another person and this person feels a little bit more domestic, say. Yeah, I like it. And yeah, it does feel like a little bit more of a connection, but then maybe we’re just making that, we’re seeking that connection, so we’re finding that connection. That’s fine, too.\n00:55:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tSince the first set of videos [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] were uploaded to r     ob’s YouTube on March 15th, there are now over 70 videos and the collection seems to be growing each day. The videos are becoming an ecology of recordings in that they’re networked sounds and representative of the poetry community that they’re growing from. Listening to literature now and specifically poetry in a digital environment becomes a kind of ecological listening. We’re listening to interconnectedness and relationality and we’re also listening to an evolving digital soundscape. Just as the soundscapes around us are changing, public places that would be bustling are empty and the sound of a plane overhead [Sound Effect: Plane Flying By] suddenly stands out when otherwise it would fade into the background noise. Yes, our Murray Schafer was right. Noises are the sounds that we have learned to ignore. Meanwhile, projects like Cities and Memory are documenting the changing soundscapes. #StayHomeSounds invites you to listen to the sounds from the global coronavirus lockdown. And as we walk through our own neighbourhoods, we may notice streets sounding quieter and the chirping of birds sounding louder. Our sensory experiences of our inner and outer worlds have changed. As we listen inwards to ourselves, we still find ways to connect that try to replicate the social. Outside of our homes, there have been invitations—multiple times now—to the entire city of Montreal to join in balcony singalongs to Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne.” [End Music: Gentle Instrumental]\n00:57:22\tMusic:\t[Alvaro Echánove singing along to a livestream of Martha Wainwright singing “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen]\n00:57:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs the summer arrives, balconies will become even noisier as neighbours converse. We have conversations with neighbours we may never have spoken to before and simultaneously we’re even more connected globally. Our phones and computer screens become the new stages. [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] Live-streamed readings are happening like Poetry in the Time of Quarantine here in Montreal and Sound On InstaReadings Series that’s happening in Vancouver or really over Instagram. And large scale initiatives like Canada Performs have launched for musicians and other performing artists including now, thanks to Margaret Atwood, writers whose shows or book tours have been cancelled in the spring or summer. Unlike the streaming that so often is done without compensation to the artist, artists selected for Canada Performs will be paid $1,000 for their at-home performance to be broadcast on the National Arts Centre’s Facebook page. And yes, they do perform from their own home for us, the collective we, to tune in from our homes and listen together.\n00:58:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tBut as collective acts of singing and of listening draw us to our balconies and our computer screens, we can also find ourselves not feeling like joining in. With all of the possibilities for tuning into live streams, we can feel overwhelmed amid searching for something meaningful to listen to. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Back in the first week when everything was changing, I remembered feeling relieved that people like Isabella and r     ob were creating online readings, but I also remember feeling that I didn’t have the concentration to sit down and listen. And I remember thinking that when I feel more focused, or really when I feel a bit better, then I look forward to listening. When you don’t feel like listening that says something about how you’re feeling. When you ask someone how they are listening and if that’s changed, you’re really asking them how they’re doing.\n00:59:33\tJason Camlot:\tHey, let’s try that out. Hey Katherine, how are you listening?\n00:59:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m listening…fine, thanks. How are you listening, Jason?\n00:59:42\tJason Camlot:\tI’m listening pretty well. Thanks for asking. But let me ask you this. How are you really listening, Katherine?\n00:59:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tWell, Jason, how am I really listening? [Sighs] As much as we try to replicate the social, what we manage to produce within these digital environments is a version of the social that is both entirely real and entirely unreachable. We hear in it both closeness and distance and that is affecting. As much as we might try to listen to something that brings back the feeling of the social and the togetherness of before, we are beginning to face the reality of this change and what this change feels like and sounds like. We are listening differently now. Here. Here. Here.\n01:00:34\tMusic:\t[Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental]\n01:01:00\tNatalie Lim:\tHello from my kitchen! Thank you to Isabella and the whole Dead Poets Reading team for putting together this virtual reading. I’m really excited to be a part of it even though I’m bummed that we can’t see people in person this weekend, but we’re gonna hang out for like ten minutes, I’m gonna read some poetry, I got some water, it’s gonna be a good time.\n01:01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod of Concordia University and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Oana Avasilichioaei, Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Arjun Basu, Naomi Charron, Alexei Perry Cox, Nisha Coleman, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier     , Priscilla Joly, rob mclennan, Heather Pepper, Lindsay Presswell, Deanna Radford, Kian Vaziri-Tehrani, Brian Vass, and Isabella Wang for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":5.215919}]