[{"id":"9267","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E1, Stories of SpokenWeb, 7 October 2019, McLeod and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Cheryl Gladu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/dafaa46d-8602-4296-8aa7-0a66ba8253f2/ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,524,400 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nCamlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007).\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, “Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts,” No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/\\n\\nMcKinnon, Donna. “A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage.” https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement\\n\\nMorris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.\\n\\nMurray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection” http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/\\n\\nToppings, Earle. “Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).\\n\\nUrbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549348155393,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard?\n\nFor this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes…\n\n00:07\tTheme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. I’m so excited to introduce our inaugural episode Stories of SpokenWeb, an introduction to this very podcast and the project it stems from. SpokenWeb is first and foremost a literary research network dedicated to studying literature through sound, but how did it all begin and how did these audio archives make their way from basements and car trunks to university libraries? In this episode SpokenWeb contributor Katherine McLeod takes us into the lives and archives of some of the founding spoken web members to uncover the origins and future of the project.\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tHere is “Stories of SpokenWeb”\n01:39\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat is SpokenWeb? SpokenWeb is a research program, a network of scholars, students and artists all studying literature through sound. But how did it all begin? What does the story of SpokenWeb sound like? My name is Katherine McLeod and I asked SpokenWeb collaborators at universities across Canada how they got involved in the project. Needless to say, each story is different and there are many more than are told here, but their stories do have a few things in common that tell us something about the project. All of their stories begin with an interest in audio well before SpokenWeb assumed its current form, and all of their stories, or nearly all, involve a box of tapes. In 2014 I joined SpokenWeb as a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. I met Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. At that point SpokenWeb was based out of one university, but I remember him saying that there was an interest in widening the network. So how did SpokenWeb become what it is today? To answer this question, I spoke with a number of SpokenWeb scholars from across Canada. We’ll start the conversation with one story of how it all began.\n03:22\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. I am the author of several books about literature and sound recording and I’m the director of the partnership grant of SSHRC Social Science, Humanities Research Council of Canada, called SpokenWeb. I was going to say it began when I was a graduate student and became, in earnest, interested in the history of early sound recordings of literary performance. But I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach, and the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class played to me by my professor, John Miller, who later became a colleague of mine for a spell. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And that really piqued my interest and, well, really just what it was that we were listening to and what it meant and what its significance was. So I think the interest in sound recordings of literary works or of something that identified with literature really began when I was an undergraduate. When I went to grad school, I became interested in really thinking about this as a research project. It wasn’t my dissertation project, but it became my second project that you always have to be able to talk about when you go to job interviews and things like that. And at Stanford University they had a pretty good sound archive with a lot of historical recordings. So I was able to look into the longer history of spoken recordings and began to research that topic. I’ve always been interested in sound recording because I play music, and I’ve recorded myself writing songs and playing my own songs or playing in bands with friends since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been saving up for the latest recording device.\n05:41\tJason Camlot:\tWhen I came to Concordia – it’s almost like in this sort of fortuitous moment – I was asked to have a meeting with the department chair in the first week that I was installed in the department, just to go over very practical things. And sitting in his office I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of tape boxes – boxes that held reel to reel tapes. And I remember asking him what those boxes contained. And he said to me, “Oh, that’s just some poetry reading series that took place here in the 60s.” And I remembered that, although I didn’t do anything about it at the time. I went about my business of teaching and publishing and getting tenure here at Concordia. And then maybe a decade later I thought about those recordings again and I went back to him and asked, “Do you still have those recordings?”\n06:47\tJason Camlot:\tThe department had moved floors and I remember we threw out a lot of stuff during the move. So I kind of feared that maybe those reel to reel tapes didn’t make it during the move, but he told me that he had deposited them in the university archives that held the English department fonds, the records of the English department. So knowing that the tapes were still accessible, I started looking into them and found a bunch of boxes again that I couldn’t listen to. So it was a bit of a stumbling block, not being able to actually hear what was on them and I set about trying to rectify that problem, and to figure out whether this collection of tapes might be of interest from a literary point of view.\n07:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. As SpokenWeb grew, researchers began working across disciplines. In addition to working across disciplines in one university SpokenWeb has built collaborative connections across different universities. We’ll hear from researchers at a few of those universities in a moment, but we’ll start first with someone who has been part of the project since the beginning.\n08:07\tAnnie Murray:\tMy name is Annie Murray. I’m Associate University Librarian for archives and special collections. At the University of Calgary. What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets, were going on reading tours. And so the Sir George Williams section was just one slice of literary life in a given year.\n08:32\tAudio Recording:\tWelcome to the fourth, third, week of the fourth series of our readings here at Sir George. And this one is a special one partly in that it was, it is being presented… [Overlapping audio recordings, exact words not audible]\n08:57\tAnnie Murray:\tAnd we were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings or not leaving behind. And wouldn’t it be great to understand where did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read to kind of sonically recreate those years of very active poetry reading performances?\n09:24\tAudio Recording:\tGets hard to read your own stuff after a while, you forget what it sounded like the last time.\n09:29\tAnnie Murray:\tCause we knew different archives across the country would have some audio record of these events. And we thought: this should all be brought together. This should be a massive aggregation of recordings so that you could listen to a poet across the country and kind of, just as bands tour, see how a poet toured and how they intersected with other poets. So I think we saw the meaning in the individual readings for sure for literary history and analysis. But that the sort of possibilities opened up by knowing what all readings were preserved and bringing those archives together. And I will say in most cases, these are hidden collections that hadn’t been digitized before. So with a partnership grant, it allows us to bring all of these collections out, focus on them in a different and concerted way and try to create that sort of national recording of all of these performances that had taken place.\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe project continued to grow. Now it is in over 13 universities right across the country.\n10:44\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how incredibly grateful I am to be able to work with these materials and with the multidisciplinary scholars that are a part of this project. This is honestly, as I came to recognize during our days together in Vancouver this past summer, this is one of the great research and intellectual opportunities of my career and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this.\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Michael O’Driscoll, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.\n11:18\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve been here for the last 22 years and my work ranges across into the areas of critical and cultural theory. Various kinds of media studies. I’m interested in American literature, poetry and poetics. And I spend a lot of my time thinking a lot about archives and thinking about digital media as well too. You know, the lessons of the world’s great archives theorists – I’m thinking about Arjun Appadurai, I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida – is that archives are oriented not towards the past, but towards the future. Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. We only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them. And the true focus of an archive is its own futurity, not the history that it records.\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tMichael shared with us some background as to how the recordings were made.\n12:13\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWhen personal recording became available, when somebody could pick up a portable or reasonably portable reel to reel recorder and show up at a reading with it, folks just simply started recording everything that moved. There was so much enthusiasm about the new technology. Many, many of the readings that happened in the late sixties and through the 70s and the eighties, eighties, were recorded on reel-to-reel and then subsequently on cassette tape. But one of the realities of that enthusiasm as well as while there’s lots of enthusiasm for the recording, more often than not, those recordings were put in boxes, stored away and never listened to again. And they have as a result, sat inert for the last 50 years or so at this incredible cultural and scholarly resource, untapped.\n13:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn fact, many of the people we spoke with for today’s episode shared with us a story that, at some point mentioned a box of tapes. Just like that story that Jason described earlier of finding a box of tapes and eventually listening to them.\n13:21\tAnnie Murray:\tI think that’s an origin story in a lot of people’s involvement with SpokenWeb; “Hey! What are those tapes?”\n13:28\tDeanna Fong:\tGoing to SFU, Simon Fraser University, and just by happenstance came across this box of tapes as we all do.\n13:35\tRoma Kail:\tOur research assistant was so excited about the project that she went to our chief librarian with the archivist and they found us unprocessed box.\n13:45\tKaris Shearer:\tHe went to get a cardboard box at one point and brought it back to her and said, “You know, I want to give this to you and someday you’re going to know what to do with it.” And she said to me, “I think, I think this is it. I think this is what I’m supposed to do with this box.”\n14:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’ll introduce you to each of those voices in a moment. But for now, let’s go back to Michael who shared with us the process of working with this kind of material.\n14:14\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo the process that we are working by is, first of all, the materials are digitized and we create the digital records of them. Then we produce the metadata that will be associated with those records. At the same time, once those materials have been digitized, they will be made available to the library for formal accession\n14:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhile that seems easy enough, there are in fact many challenges in working with these found recordings, which are often made with older technology such as reel to reel or cassette tapes. The challenges aren’t just technical, they are also legal. Let’s go back to our conversation with Annie Murray.\n14:56\tAnnie Murray:\tIt can be expensive to do digitization. It’s very time consuming. If you don’t have ready equipment or infrastructure in your organization, you need to contract out an expert to make the recordings. With archival audio recordings, you don’t always know what’s on tapes that an author gives you with their archive. So you could be investing resources in something that might not even be a performance. It could be somebody’s voice answering machine tape, which is also interesting. But, if a collection is kind of under-processed, because it’s an audio item it does take resources to get the content out and usable. The other thing is that copyright can be a barrier. So if people don’t know who made the recording or what the status is of the audio work, it can be an impediment to digitizing it because the library or archive might not know how widely it can be shared. So those are some of the things that libraries and archives grapple with. But I also think we’ve just got to work through those problems to make sure that this content gets preserved.\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tPart of the reason it can be challenging to sort out the rights around these recordings is that they were not always straight-forward recitations or performances. Sometimes recordings include informal conversations, off the record interviews and discussions around a presentation of a work.\n16:29\tRoma Kail:\tSo my name is Roma Kail. I’m a librarian at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. I have done some work with the Earle Toppings fonds here at our special collections at Vic Library.\n16:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tEarle Toppings was an editor at Ryerson Press and worked for CBC Radio. He interviewed many Canadian writers such as poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and Al Purdy. The archival collection for Toppings includes correspondence with writers along with audio recordings of readings and interviews and background notes compiled by Toppings himself.\n17:10\tRoma Kail:\tSo here he is talking about – he wrote this in his notes, he wrote about his recording of Gwendolyn MacEwen – he writes that a standard microphone was used. It was a standard RCA Victor 44 – he called it the radio workhorse – and it recorded her voice softly and beautifully. Gwen was a gentle caressing reader, a sort of Billie Holiday reciting poems as she did at creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as, the creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as the Bohemian Embassy. There was a musical feeling in all her work and she almost, saying her poems, which had their own melodies. So it’s just an extra, as my research assistant pointed out, all of that accompanying material brings in an extra bit of narrative, or a different narrative to the actual sound recordings. And it was the sound recordings which really correlate with the initial goal of SpokenWeb as it was presented to us.\n18:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s Karis Shearer, the director of the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab and Associate Professor of English in the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies who has been working with the SoundBox collection, sharing another example of the rich but curious sounds found in these archives.\n18:39\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we recently acquired a new set of tapes, a gift from George Bowering and Jean Baird, which include 19 tapes that George Bowering made, going back to the 1960s. One of them that I particularly like is a tape that was made in July of 1969 and it’s labeled ‘Warren, Roy, Moon, etcetera.’ And so I was just too curious not to give this a listen before we started digitizing it, and it is on the occasion of the moon landing…\n19:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beep] Now selection [Beep]\n19:18\tKaris Shearer:\t…in 1969, and what you hear on this tape is George Bowering, Angela Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and Warren Tallman. All of whom were in Montreal at the time, Warren was passing through, Roy Kiyooka was teaching at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, and George Bowering was teaching there as well. And they’re all just hanging out in their living room, at George and Angela’s living room on Grosvenor Avenue in Montreal, and they’re listening to the broadcast of the moon landing.\n19:50\tAudio Recording:\tWell, we had a picture with the earth right in the centre of the screen, over.\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tSo again, it’s a very messy, interesting tape because there’s lots of, people talking over each other. There’s a broadcast going on in the background. But what’s interesting to me is they’re not recording just the broadcast. Right? It’s not like, “Shh, everybody, we’re gonna record the broadcast of this historical moment.” What the recording is, this kind of very social dynamic moment of them talking about poetics, talking about poetry. Fred was on his way back from Albuquerque to Canada. Did you know, they’re talking about writing, they’re also at various moments, you know, looking at the astronauts on TV and in some cases, you know, making some great jokes. And so it’s a moment of recording their interaction with this historical moment, their interaction with each. So it’s a wonderful tape and I’m excited for people to be able to listen to it.\n20:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s one of Karis’ collaborators across the SpokenWeb network explaining why this sort of recording can be so interesting to study.\n21:00\tDeanna Fong:\tSo my name is Deanna Fong. I’m a postdoctoral fellow working with SpokenWeb. My work with Karis has been so indispensable for my thinking. We’ve worked together on numerous occasions, but thinking about that question of what it is we’re listening to when we listen to this certain kind of artifact, or I suppose what, what are we listening for? And I think one of the things that we’ve found ourselves listening for is that, in any sort of informal or speech-y accounts that we have, we get a sense of the labour that goes on behind the scenes in the production of literature. And a lot of that labour is unevenly divided along gendered lines. So, you know, thinking about women’s contributions to building communities and to maintaining community spaces, acting as public historians, maintaining community archives, taking care of community members when they’re ill or when they need help, providing feedback, being auditors for work in progress, all these sorts of things that you hear, that don’t necessarily make it to the page. So I think that’s been a really crucial concept for the work that she and I have been doing. I don’t know if this is some continuation of my past or something, but I remember when I was a kid and going to hall shows and stuff like that, oftentimes I was way more interested in just sitting outside and talking to people about the bands, like, just as interested in that as I was in actually listening to the bands. So I think there’s a great interest, for me, in listening around rather than listening to, and I find conversations about literature vastly more interesting than a lot of literature itself.\n22:55\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve learned along the way to appreciate the virtues of close listening in the sense that one can learn a lot about the cultural moment of the reading by paying close attention, not just to the words that come from the speaker, but to everything else that is happening in the room. So I think, for example, about Margaret Atwood reading in 1970 and a now defunct gallery of a hub mall on the University of Alberta campus. [Audio, from the 1970 recording: Please come in and sit down, there’s lots of room at the front.] And you can hear during the recording, [Audio: He will be very unhappy if you stand up during all this. So please sit down.] Her coming in and trying to wend her way through the audience and get herself settled down in a hubbub of things, and an introduction starts, and then stops, and then there’s a moment where people have to direct people into the room to find space ’cause it’s so crowed. [Audio: The people standing up at the back can, you not sit down?] And you just get this incredible sense of the energy of that moment and what it meant to have this really fantastic young emerging writer [Audio: There’s lots of room, does everybody, everybody just shuffle forward] show up to do her thing. And the kind of excitement that that could generate along the way [Audio: That’s more like it.]\n24:15\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tLet me give you one other one, and that has to do with when Phyllis Webb is performing at the student union building art gallery in 1972. It’s March 9th, 1972 and she comes into the room, the recording’s already going and she’s completely breathless. She’s breathing hard and she’s clearly rushed over to get to this moment and she’s there late and she says.[I have to catch my breath.] And you can hear her say that, and just that moment of that physical presence and embodiment of this poet, again, with all of that energy that gets pulled into that archival moment into that event of the archive, it’s a really exciting thing. These are real people doing real things and real situations and the audio is a rich medium for capturing that if you’ve only listened closely enough.\n25:24\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n25:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with Deanna I thought about how important it was for her to be involved in the SpokenWeb project early on in her graduate education. After speaking with Roma and her work with student research assistant, Eva Lu, I thought even more about how student training through SpokenWeb is changing what it means to study literature. At UBC Okanagan [UBCO], Karis has taught and mentored many students who have gotten involved with the SpokenWeb project. I asked her more about student training and she had a terrific story.\n25:59\tKaris Shearer:\tFor me, pedagogy is central to what we do here at UBCO on the SpokenWeb team, and it always has been. So the example that you brought up of Lee Hannigan: first student to work on the project back when it was just in its very early stages. Lee came on as a work study student and we trained him in digitization, and so I reached out to a colleague, Stephen Foster, who very kindly invited us into the media centre that he was running at that time. Mike Berger, who’s a technician trained both me and Lee in the digitization process and gave us space in the lab to do that. So it’s always been a very collective process and SpokenWeb has always been such an interdisciplinary project that has required me to reach out to and do some of that community building with other experts in the area, in order to train students and bring them onto the project. That has stayed true all the way through to the current iteration of the team. We have students who are, again, central to the project and bringing their own expertise. And, at the same time, we are training them. We’re training them in the digitization process. We’re training them in design work. We’re training them in cataloguing and producing metadata. But their expertise as they’re learning that is, again, central, so in our team meetings we always come back to having the students talk about – do a bit of a round – and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing, and also what directions they see the project needing to go in or areas that need to be developed. And so the pedagogy is something that is student driven. It’s also, I guess for me, it’s also something that comes right out of our archive – it comes out of the cardboard box, which is at the pedagogy of the archive itself. The collection is very pedagogical. It records Warren Tallman in the classroom. It records Tallman inviting students to his living room to talk about poetry with his wife, Ellen Tallman; they bring up Robert Duncan and record Robert Duncan giving lectures and talking with students. So within the archive and the collection itself, students are central to that. And so, for me, the pedagogy we’re enacting now is very much in dialogue with, or taking a card from that, from the collection.\n28:47\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tFrom a cultural and scholarly point of view, well, audio is, almost and surprisingly so, a kind of unknown frontier. One of the ways I like to think about it is texts are never stable entities: they sit on the page surely, but as they go through various forms of socialization and cultural mediation, they change and shift over time. We deal with versions, we deal with variants, we deal with different contexts of reading and circulation and so forth – so they’re certainly not inert. But I would say if you take a poem by a particular mid century Canadian author that has sat on that same page for the last 50 years, and then you add to that archive, you add to that corpus 6 or 8 or 10 recordings of that author reading the poem, performing the poem, describing it to audiences, responding to audience questions, to hearing the audience itself respond to that poem.\n29:44\tAudio Recording:\tFairly recent poem, which isn’t a political poem. I told them, but a human poem and one that I wrote as a result of watching on television, the debates in the United Nations on the Middle East crisis. And one of the horrible things I felt as I watched it was how completely dehumanized it all was, that the real human issues had been lost sight of and sort of round in an ocean of resolutions and memos from embassies and all this sort of thing.\n30:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWell then that thing suddenly leaps off to the page to an nth dimension of variability and versioning, And suddenly the scholarly opportunities to work with those poems as cultural objects, as objects subject to scholarly comparison and critical analysis becomes all the more richer, all the more lively, all the more vibrant. And that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective.\n30:59\tJason Camlot:\tThere’s still a lot of work to be done before the field recognizes archives of sound as really significant or relevant, even still to the study of literature. Part of the, I wouldn’t call it resistance, but just sort lack of a sense of how to go about engaging with these materials is a result of changes in the way literature had been taught over the course of the 20th century. I think that recitation or oral interpretation was a very important part of the way literature was taught. The way interpretation was understood so that, when we thought of interpretation, it wasn’t critical analysis done silently in an essay about a poem on the printed page, but it was actually an oral performance in which one’s understanding of the poem was communicated through the intonations and vocal actions that one took in order to literally interpret, you know, deliver in sound their version of the poem. Students would be, in a sense, graded on their oral interpretations that would be part of the exam. Exams in the 19th century were called recitations and a lot of the performance of knowledge in the 19th century – Catherine Robson has written about this – was delivered orally, right? But I think during the course of the 20th century, Especially from the 30s on when methods, identified with what was called the New Criticism came into being, certain ideas of oral performance dropped out of the critical analysis of literature. And it became in a sense, silenced or replaced by more abstract concepts of the voice of the poem or in the poem, but not one that one expects to actually hear. But one voice that one expects to find, to give a sense of unity to the poem, and to describe, but the noisy classroom filled with recitation sort of became silenced. And students were asked to scan poems on the page and the sounds of voices were replaced by the sounds of pencils, scribbling paper on the printed poem. So I think that long tradition in pedagogy related to the teaching of literature has created a kind of barrier to our sense of even how to begin engaging with this kind of archive in relation to the development of sort of literary history, the analysis of a different kind of prosody that one can hear in performance, et cetera. So things were already being done in the late nineties, or some initial thinking was being done around this, but I think the archives themselves weren’t prepared, and still to a large extent haven’t been yet prepared for us to engage with this material in the same way, with the same facility, or with a facility that’s even close to that of the printed archive.\n34:26\tDeanna Fong:\tI will say, I’ll begin by saying that I wasn’t that interested in audio at the time. So I remember feeling a great deal of apprehension when I started working on the project in that I had no idea what these artifacts were or why they were, why they would be of interest to anybody or, you know, who would possibly want to listen to them. But when I dove into them and listened to, I found myself particularly drawn to the kind of extra-poetic speech, which is something that I’ve become very interested in, in my own research. But I was really interested in the liveness of these events. And so I remembered one of my first tasks as an RA on that project was to develop just a sort of lit survey around the research that had been done around audio poetry, like audio recordings of poetry. So I dove into Charles Bernstein’s close listening, and had this major revelation where I was like, “Whoa, a live reading of a poem is totally different than the reading of a poem on a page,” which is something that had really never occurred to me before. Like, I just, that it was a simple recitation and I really got a sense of the difference between a performed poem versus a poem on the page. And that difference became immediately very interesting to me.\n35:49\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, Karis – and really everyone we’ve heard from today – are all asking us to consider: what can these archives teach us? And it seems that sometimes these lessons can come from unexpected places. For example, what can this cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative project teach us about academic collaboration more generally?\n36:14\tJason Camlot:\tI’ve been very interested this past year, throughout the past year, in having intensive conversations with Yuliya Kondratenko, the Project Manager of SpokenWeb on project management methods. And which ones are best suited to a research program of this kind. And really to begin to map out what project management for humanities-based research might look like. So I think what we’ve been doing to a large extent has been listening and watching to see how activities have unfolded, what approaches have worked, which ones haven’t been picked up as successfully as a way to then reflect upon and describe, and then ultimately, I wouldn’t say codified, but, you know, abstract in a way so that we could perhaps learn from our methods that are initially just sort of iterative experiments. So that’s another thing that I’m really interested in from that sort of more distant perspective. And it’s been great having Yuliya as a kind of sounding board so that we can actually begin writing this up a little bit and sort of maybe map out a whole new project management approach based on the disciplinary messiness of our project.\n37:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, who we met at the top of the show. So what pulls all of these stories together? Well, at the heart of this project is an ethos of sharing. And as we’ve heard, it often starts with a box of tapes that a community member shares with a member of the team. But that is not all.\n38:06\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things that we see in the archive, vis-à-vis copies, is the circulation and gifting of recordings and tapes within members of the poetry community. Our current SpokenWeb project at UBCO is very much founded on gifting and sharing. And so when I look around the AMP Lab, which is where our collection is housed, so much of what we do is made possible through gifts, and so I’m thinking particularly of Stephen Foster, who is my colleague in visual arts. Our hardware, and even the early, the very first time that we digitized the reels, again, made possible by Stephen’s inviting us into his own lab and sharing his resources with us. And that’s been true all the way through for us, that that idea of the work on the SoundBox project is made possible through the sharing of things, the donation of tapes, and the gifting of hardware. So we really appreciate that.\n39:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, the web of SpokenWeb is not only the collaborative network of researchers, but it is also this web of archival recordings held together by a desire to make these available to more listeners. And this plays into what we’re trying to do here with this podcast. Provide a platform not only for researchers to share with the wider public the outcomes of their work, but a place where people might access the recordings, reflections, and sounds that have inspired so many of us and that continue to inspire us as the SpokenWeb partnership moves into its next year.\n39:57\tJason Camlot:\tOne thing I’m looking forward to in the coming year is beginning to see our metadata ingest system, which we call SWALLOW, which is sort of swallowing up or capturing all of the metadata that’s being typed in to that system, to see it build up and then to see what kinds of questions we can start asking as a result of having all of this metadata built up about the collections.\n40:26\tRoma Kail:\tOnce we have our records in and other institutions have theirs in, it will be interesting to see how they overlap or how they compliment each other. So we certainly have material that would maybe fill gaps in other institutions collections or vice versa. So I’m very excited to see when we are able to search it, for example, who has what and how that how that represents sort of all the institutions across Canada in terms of a collection.\n41:04\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we are, at UBCO with our SpokenWeb team, we’re actively building a website, so there’ll be a landing page very soon, and there’ll be a selection of tapes from a much larger collection that will feature – once we’ve cleared permissions and created some contextualisation for them – a number of recordings that’ll be featured on that site for people to listen in while we’re actively processing the rest of the collection. And so we can stay tuned for that, in fall 2019.\n41:35\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo one of the things I’m also really excited about is having some conversations with some of the individuals who were involved with these moments of recording in their day. And learning a little bit more, not only about the events and the authors and the atmosphere of that moment, but also learning a little bit more about their motivations for recording; what they were doing and how they understood, they were producing an archive and for whom and for what kind of future. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of the collection that we have. But I’d also like to learn a little bit more about the heart of the collection that we have.\n42:14\tJason Camlot:\tPart of the reason that this past year has been so successful has been just because of the people who are involved. That they’re very open minded, courteous and interested, and also extremely hard working, and so we have a bunch of people who share the desire to make things happen, but also a shared desire to have a great time while doing it. You know, I think that’s been a winning combination for our project and has really allowed us to get a lot done, and has allowed for that kind of flexibility and reflectiveness without panicking about whether we’re getting to where we want to go even before we might know where we want to go. And the other thing has been that I didn’t mention yet but that I think is very important in the development of this project has been the role of graduate students and even undergraduates. I mentioned that they were at the beginning of the project in terms of describing that first collection, but I think the network was in great part built because of students who moved from here to go on to study at other universities. Simon Fraser and Alberta and UBCO in particular come to mind where those students came from here, where they’d been working with sound collections and then arrived there and said, “Where are your sound collections? I want to work with them.” And that required those universities to sort of think about, “Oh yeah, we do have huge holdings in this area that we haven’t really looked at or listened to or touched in years.” And it’s really through the students in great part that a lot of the connections with some of these great people I’ve been describing are made possible. I think there’s a lot to learn. And this became very clear from our first institute, from the students and their approaches and the methods that they’re experimenting with in making sense of these kinds of materials. I think the highlight for everyone were the two and a half hours where we heard short talks from all the students across the network on what they had been doing and what they had learned over the past year. And I think that’s a sound that I think we’re going to be amplifying really over the next year or two.\n45:01\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n45:07\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much for listening to the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Cheryl Gladu and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, Roma Kail, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, and Karis Shearer for their candid interviews and continued contributions to SpokenWeb. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":5.0297346},{"id":"9268","cataloger_name":["Jason,Camlot"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E1, Stories of SpokenWeb, 7 October 2019, McLeod and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_notes":["Check the Rights and License Category"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/dafaa46d-8602-4296-8aa7-0a66ba8253f2/ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"46:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,524,400 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nCamlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007).\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, “Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts,” No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/\\n\\nMcKinnon, Donna. “A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage.” https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement\\n\\nMorris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.\\n\\nMurray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection” http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/\\n\\nToppings, Earle. “Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).\\n\\nUrbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549450915840,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard?\n\nFor this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes…\n\n00:07\tTheme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. I’m so excited to introduce our inaugural episode Stories of SpokenWeb, an introduction to this very podcast and the project it stems from. SpokenWeb is first and foremost a literary research network dedicated to studying literature through sound, but how did it all begin and how did these audio archives make their way from basements and car trunks to university libraries? In this episode SpokenWeb contributor Katherine McLeod takes us into the lives and archives of some of the founding spoken web members to uncover the origins and future of the project.\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tHere is “Stories of SpokenWeb”\n01:39\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat is SpokenWeb? SpokenWeb is a research program, a network of scholars, students and artists all studying literature through sound. But how did it all begin? What does the story of SpokenWeb sound like? My name is Katherine McLeod and I asked SpokenWeb collaborators at universities across Canada how they got involved in the project. Needless to say, each story is different and there are many more than are told here, but their stories do have a few things in common that tell us something about the project. All of their stories begin with an interest in audio well before SpokenWeb assumed its current form, and all of their stories, or nearly all, involve a box of tapes. In 2014 I joined SpokenWeb as a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. I met Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. At that point SpokenWeb was based out of one university, but I remember him saying that there was an interest in widening the network. So how did SpokenWeb become what it is today? To answer this question, I spoke with a number of SpokenWeb scholars from across Canada. We’ll start the conversation with one story of how it all began.\n03:22\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. I am the author of several books about literature and sound recording and I’m the director of the partnership grant of SSHRC Social Science, Humanities Research Council of Canada, called SpokenWeb. I was going to say it began when I was a graduate student and became, in earnest, interested in the history of early sound recordings of literary performance. But I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach, and the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class played to me by my professor, John Miller, who later became a colleague of mine for a spell. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And that really piqued my interest and, well, really just what it was that we were listening to and what it meant and what its significance was. So I think the interest in sound recordings of literary works or of something that identified with literature really began when I was an undergraduate. When I went to grad school, I became interested in really thinking about this as a research project. It wasn’t my dissertation project, but it became my second project that you always have to be able to talk about when you go to job interviews and things like that. And at Stanford University they had a pretty good sound archive with a lot of historical recordings. So I was able to look into the longer history of spoken recordings and began to research that topic. I’ve always been interested in sound recording because I play music, and I’ve recorded myself writing songs and playing my own songs or playing in bands with friends since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been saving up for the latest recording device.\n05:41\tJason Camlot:\tWhen I came to Concordia – it’s almost like in this sort of fortuitous moment – I was asked to have a meeting with the department chair in the first week that I was installed in the department, just to go over very practical things. And sitting in his office I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of tape boxes – boxes that held reel to reel tapes. And I remember asking him what those boxes contained. And he said to me, “Oh, that’s just some poetry reading series that took place here in the 60s.” And I remembered that, although I didn’t do anything about it at the time. I went about my business of teaching and publishing and getting tenure here at Concordia. And then maybe a decade later I thought about those recordings again and I went back to him and asked, “Do you still have those recordings?”\n06:47\tJason Camlot:\tThe department had moved floors and I remember we threw out a lot of stuff during the move. So I kind of feared that maybe those reel to reel tapes didn’t make it during the move, but he told me that he had deposited them in the university archives that held the English department fonds, the records of the English department. So knowing that the tapes were still accessible, I started looking into them and found a bunch of boxes again that I couldn’t listen to. So it was a bit of a stumbling block, not being able to actually hear what was on them and I set about trying to rectify that problem, and to figure out whether this collection of tapes might be of interest from a literary point of view.\n07:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. As SpokenWeb grew, researchers began working across disciplines. In addition to working across disciplines in one university SpokenWeb has built collaborative connections across different universities. We’ll hear from researchers at a few of those universities in a moment, but we’ll start first with someone who has been part of the project since the beginning.\n08:07\tAnnie Murray:\tMy name is Annie Murray. I’m Associate University Librarian for archives and special collections. At the University of Calgary. What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets, were going on reading tours. And so the Sir George Williams section was just one slice of literary life in a given year.\n08:32\tAudio Recording:\tWelcome to the fourth, third, week of the fourth series of our readings here at Sir George. And this one is a special one partly in that it was, it is being presented… [Overlapping audio recordings, exact words not audible]\n08:57\tAnnie Murray:\tAnd we were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings or not leaving behind. And wouldn’t it be great to understand where did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read to kind of sonically recreate those years of very active poetry reading performances?\n09:24\tAudio Recording:\tGets hard to read your own stuff after a while, you forget what it sounded like the last time.\n09:29\tAnnie Murray:\tCause we knew different archives across the country would have some audio record of these events. And we thought: this should all be brought together. This should be a massive aggregation of recordings so that you could listen to a poet across the country and kind of, just as bands tour, see how a poet toured and how they intersected with other poets. So I think we saw the meaning in the individual readings for sure for literary history and analysis. But that the sort of possibilities opened up by knowing what all readings were preserved and bringing those archives together. And I will say in most cases, these are hidden collections that hadn’t been digitized before. So with a partnership grant, it allows us to bring all of these collections out, focus on them in a different and concerted way and try to create that sort of national recording of all of these performances that had taken place.\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe project continued to grow. Now it is in over 13 universities right across the country.\n10:44\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how incredibly grateful I am to be able to work with these materials and with the multidisciplinary scholars that are a part of this project. This is honestly, as I came to recognize during our days together in Vancouver this past summer, this is one of the great research and intellectual opportunities of my career and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this.\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Michael O’Driscoll, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.\n11:18\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve been here for the last 22 years and my work ranges across into the areas of critical and cultural theory. Various kinds of media studies. I’m interested in American literature, poetry and poetics. And I spend a lot of my time thinking a lot about archives and thinking about digital media as well too. You know, the lessons of the world’s great archives theorists – I’m thinking about Arjun Appadurai, I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida – is that archives are oriented not towards the past, but towards the future. Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. We only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them. And the true focus of an archive is its own futurity, not the history that it records.\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tMichael shared with us some background as to how the recordings were made.\n12:13\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWhen personal recording became available, when somebody could pick up a portable or reasonably portable reel to reel recorder and show up at a reading with it, folks just simply started recording everything that moved. There was so much enthusiasm about the new technology. Many, many of the readings that happened in the late sixties and through the 70s and the eighties, eighties, were recorded on reel-to-reel and then subsequently on cassette tape. But one of the realities of that enthusiasm as well as while there’s lots of enthusiasm for the recording, more often than not, those recordings were put in boxes, stored away and never listened to again. And they have as a result, sat inert for the last 50 years or so at this incredible cultural and scholarly resource, untapped.\n13:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn fact, many of the people we spoke with for today’s episode shared with us a story that, at some point mentioned a box of tapes. Just like that story that Jason described earlier of finding a box of tapes and eventually listening to them.\n13:21\tAnnie Murray:\tI think that’s an origin story in a lot of people’s involvement with SpokenWeb; “Hey! What are those tapes?”\n13:28\tDeanna Fong:\tGoing to SFU, Simon Fraser University, and just by happenstance came across this box of tapes as we all do.\n13:35\tRoma Kail:\tOur research assistant was so excited about the project that she went to our chief librarian with the archivist and they found us unprocessed box.\n13:45\tKaris Shearer:\tHe went to get a cardboard box at one point and brought it back to her and said, “You know, I want to give this to you and someday you’re going to know what to do with it.” And she said to me, “I think, I think this is it. I think this is what I’m supposed to do with this box.”\n14:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’ll introduce you to each of those voices in a moment. But for now, let’s go back to Michael who shared with us the process of working with this kind of material.\n14:14\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo the process that we are working by is, first of all, the materials are digitized and we create the digital records of them. Then we produce the metadata that will be associated with those records. At the same time, once those materials have been digitized, they will be made available to the library for formal accession\n14:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhile that seems easy enough, there are in fact many challenges in working with these found recordings, which are often made with older technology such as reel to reel or cassette tapes. The challenges aren’t just technical, they are also legal. Let’s go back to our conversation with Annie Murray.\n14:56\tAnnie Murray:\tIt can be expensive to do digitization. It’s very time consuming. If you don’t have ready equipment or infrastructure in your organization, you need to contract out an expert to make the recordings. With archival audio recordings, you don’t always know what’s on tapes that an author gives you with their archive. So you could be investing resources in something that might not even be a performance. It could be somebody’s voice answering machine tape, which is also interesting. But, if a collection is kind of under-processed, because it’s an audio item it does take resources to get the content out and usable. The other thing is that copyright can be a barrier. So if people don’t know who made the recording or what the status is of the audio work, it can be an impediment to digitizing it because the library or archive might not know how widely it can be shared. So those are some of the things that libraries and archives grapple with. But I also think we’ve just got to work through those problems to make sure that this content gets preserved.\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tPart of the reason it can be challenging to sort out the rights around these recordings is that they were not always straight-forward recitations or performances. Sometimes recordings include informal conversations, off the record interviews and discussions around a presentation of a work.\n16:29\tRoma Kail:\tSo my name is Roma Kail. I’m a librarian at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. I have done some work with the Earle Toppings fonds here at our special collections at Vic Library.\n16:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tEarle Toppings was an editor at Ryerson Press and worked for CBC Radio. He interviewed many Canadian writers such as poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and Al Purdy. The archival collection for Toppings includes correspondence with writers along with audio recordings of readings and interviews and background notes compiled by Toppings himself.\n17:10\tRoma Kail:\tSo here he is talking about – he wrote this in his notes, he wrote about his recording of Gwendolyn MacEwen – he writes that a standard microphone was used. It was a standard RCA Victor 44 – he called it the radio workhorse – and it recorded her voice softly and beautifully. Gwen was a gentle caressing reader, a sort of Billie Holiday reciting poems as she did at creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as, the creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as the Bohemian Embassy. There was a musical feeling in all her work and she almost, saying her poems, which had their own melodies. So it’s just an extra, as my research assistant pointed out, all of that accompanying material brings in an extra bit of narrative, or a different narrative to the actual sound recordings. And it was the sound recordings which really correlate with the initial goal of SpokenWeb as it was presented to us.\n18:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s Karis Shearer, the director of the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab and Associate Professor of English in the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies who has been working with the SoundBox collection, sharing another example of the rich but curious sounds found in these archives.\n18:39\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we recently acquired a new set of tapes, a gift from George Bowering and Jean Baird, which include 19 tapes that George Bowering made, going back to the 1960s. One of them that I particularly like is a tape that was made in July of 1969 and it’s labeled ‘Warren, Roy, Moon, etcetera.’ And so I was just too curious not to give this a listen before we started digitizing it, and it is on the occasion of the moon landing…\n19:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beep] Now selection [Beep]\n19:18\tKaris Shearer:\t…in 1969, and what you hear on this tape is George Bowering, Angela Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and Warren Tallman. All of whom were in Montreal at the time, Warren was passing through, Roy Kiyooka was teaching at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, and George Bowering was teaching there as well. And they’re all just hanging out in their living room, at George and Angela’s living room on Grosvenor Avenue in Montreal, and they’re listening to the broadcast of the moon landing.\n19:50\tAudio Recording:\tWell, we had a picture with the earth right in the centre of the screen, over.\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tSo again, it’s a very messy, interesting tape because there’s lots of, people talking over each other. There’s a broadcast going on in the background. But what’s interesting to me is they’re not recording just the broadcast. Right? It’s not like, “Shh, everybody, we’re gonna record the broadcast of this historical moment.” What the recording is, this kind of very social dynamic moment of them talking about poetics, talking about poetry. Fred was on his way back from Albuquerque to Canada. Did you know, they’re talking about writing, they’re also at various moments, you know, looking at the astronauts on TV and in some cases, you know, making some great jokes. And so it’s a moment of recording their interaction with this historical moment, their interaction with each. So it’s a wonderful tape and I’m excited for people to be able to listen to it.\n20:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s one of Karis’ collaborators across the SpokenWeb network explaining why this sort of recording can be so interesting to study.\n21:00\tDeanna Fong:\tSo my name is Deanna Fong. I’m a postdoctoral fellow working with SpokenWeb. My work with Karis has been so indispensable for my thinking. We’ve worked together on numerous occasions, but thinking about that question of what it is we’re listening to when we listen to this certain kind of artifact, or I suppose what, what are we listening for? And I think one of the things that we’ve found ourselves listening for is that, in any sort of informal or speech-y accounts that we have, we get a sense of the labour that goes on behind the scenes in the production of literature. And a lot of that labour is unevenly divided along gendered lines. So, you know, thinking about women’s contributions to building communities and to maintaining community spaces, acting as public historians, maintaining community archives, taking care of community members when they’re ill or when they need help, providing feedback, being auditors for work in progress, all these sorts of things that you hear, that don’t necessarily make it to the page. So I think that’s been a really crucial concept for the work that she and I have been doing. I don’t know if this is some continuation of my past or something, but I remember when I was a kid and going to hall shows and stuff like that, oftentimes I was way more interested in just sitting outside and talking to people about the bands, like, just as interested in that as I was in actually listening to the bands. So I think there’s a great interest, for me, in listening around rather than listening to, and I find conversations about literature vastly more interesting than a lot of literature itself.\n22:55\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve learned along the way to appreciate the virtues of close listening in the sense that one can learn a lot about the cultural moment of the reading by paying close attention, not just to the words that come from the speaker, but to everything else that is happening in the room. So I think, for example, about Margaret Atwood reading in 1970 and a now defunct gallery of a hub mall on the University of Alberta campus. [Audio, from the 1970 recording: Please come in and sit down, there’s lots of room at the front.] And you can hear during the recording, [Audio: He will be very unhappy if you stand up during all this. So please sit down.] Her coming in and trying to wend her way through the audience and get herself settled down in a hubbub of things, and an introduction starts, and then stops, and then there’s a moment where people have to direct people into the room to find space ’cause it’s so crowed. [Audio: The people standing up at the back can, you not sit down?] And you just get this incredible sense of the energy of that moment and what it meant to have this really fantastic young emerging writer [Audio: There’s lots of room, does everybody, everybody just shuffle forward] show up to do her thing. And the kind of excitement that that could generate along the way [Audio: That’s more like it.]\n24:15\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tLet me give you one other one, and that has to do with when Phyllis Webb is performing at the student union building art gallery in 1972. It’s March 9th, 1972 and she comes into the room, the recording’s already going and she’s completely breathless. She’s breathing hard and she’s clearly rushed over to get to this moment and she’s there late and she says.[I have to catch my breath.] And you can hear her say that, and just that moment of that physical presence and embodiment of this poet, again, with all of that energy that gets pulled into that archival moment into that event of the archive, it’s a really exciting thing. These are real people doing real things and real situations and the audio is a rich medium for capturing that if you’ve only listened closely enough.\n25:24\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n25:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with Deanna I thought about how important it was for her to be involved in the SpokenWeb project early on in her graduate education. After speaking with Roma and her work with student research assistant, Eva Lu, I thought even more about how student training through SpokenWeb is changing what it means to study literature. At UBC Okanagan [UBCO], Karis has taught and mentored many students who have gotten involved with the SpokenWeb project. I asked her more about student training and she had a terrific story.\n25:59\tKaris Shearer:\tFor me, pedagogy is central to what we do here at UBCO on the SpokenWeb team, and it always has been. So the example that you brought up of Lee Hannigan: first student to work on the project back when it was just in its very early stages. Lee came on as a work study student and we trained him in digitization, and so I reached out to a colleague, Stephen Foster, who very kindly invited us into the media centre that he was running at that time. Mike Berger, who’s a technician trained both me and Lee in the digitization process and gave us space in the lab to do that. So it’s always been a very collective process and SpokenWeb has always been such an interdisciplinary project that has required me to reach out to and do some of that community building with other experts in the area, in order to train students and bring them onto the project. That has stayed true all the way through to the current iteration of the team. We have students who are, again, central to the project and bringing their own expertise. And, at the same time, we are training them. We’re training them in the digitization process. We’re training them in design work. We’re training them in cataloguing and producing metadata. But their expertise as they’re learning that is, again, central, so in our team meetings we always come back to having the students talk about – do a bit of a round – and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing, and also what directions they see the project needing to go in or areas that need to be developed. And so the pedagogy is something that is student driven. It’s also, I guess for me, it’s also something that comes right out of our archive – it comes out of the cardboard box, which is at the pedagogy of the archive itself. The collection is very pedagogical. It records Warren Tallman in the classroom. It records Tallman inviting students to his living room to talk about poetry with his wife, Ellen Tallman; they bring up Robert Duncan and record Robert Duncan giving lectures and talking with students. So within the archive and the collection itself, students are central to that. And so, for me, the pedagogy we’re enacting now is very much in dialogue with, or taking a card from that, from the collection.\n28:47\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tFrom a cultural and scholarly point of view, well, audio is, almost and surprisingly so, a kind of unknown frontier. One of the ways I like to think about it is texts are never stable entities: they sit on the page surely, but as they go through various forms of socialization and cultural mediation, they change and shift over time. We deal with versions, we deal with variants, we deal with different contexts of reading and circulation and so forth – so they’re certainly not inert. But I would say if you take a poem by a particular mid century Canadian author that has sat on that same page for the last 50 years, and then you add to that archive, you add to that corpus 6 or 8 or 10 recordings of that author reading the poem, performing the poem, describing it to audiences, responding to audience questions, to hearing the audience itself respond to that poem.\n29:44\tAudio Recording:\tFairly recent poem, which isn’t a political poem. I told them, but a human poem and one that I wrote as a result of watching on television, the debates in the United Nations on the Middle East crisis. And one of the horrible things I felt as I watched it was how completely dehumanized it all was, that the real human issues had been lost sight of and sort of round in an ocean of resolutions and memos from embassies and all this sort of thing.\n30:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWell then that thing suddenly leaps off to the page to an nth dimension of variability and versioning, And suddenly the scholarly opportunities to work with those poems as cultural objects, as objects subject to scholarly comparison and critical analysis becomes all the more richer, all the more lively, all the more vibrant. And that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective.\n30:59\tJason Camlot:\tThere’s still a lot of work to be done before the field recognizes archives of sound as really significant or relevant, even still to the study of literature. Part of the, I wouldn’t call it resistance, but just sort lack of a sense of how to go about engaging with these materials is a result of changes in the way literature had been taught over the course of the 20th century. I think that recitation or oral interpretation was a very important part of the way literature was taught. The way interpretation was understood so that, when we thought of interpretation, it wasn’t critical analysis done silently in an essay about a poem on the printed page, but it was actually an oral performance in which one’s understanding of the poem was communicated through the intonations and vocal actions that one took in order to literally interpret, you know, deliver in sound their version of the poem. Students would be, in a sense, graded on their oral interpretations that would be part of the exam. Exams in the 19th century were called recitations and a lot of the performance of knowledge in the 19th century – Catherine Robson has written about this – was delivered orally, right? But I think during the course of the 20th century, Especially from the 30s on when methods, identified with what was called the New Criticism came into being, certain ideas of oral performance dropped out of the critical analysis of literature. And it became in a sense, silenced or replaced by more abstract concepts of the voice of the poem or in the poem, but not one that one expects to actually hear. But one voice that one expects to find, to give a sense of unity to the poem, and to describe, but the noisy classroom filled with recitation sort of became silenced. And students were asked to scan poems on the page and the sounds of voices were replaced by the sounds of pencils, scribbling paper on the printed poem. So I think that long tradition in pedagogy related to the teaching of literature has created a kind of barrier to our sense of even how to begin engaging with this kind of archive in relation to the development of sort of literary history, the analysis of a different kind of prosody that one can hear in performance, et cetera. So things were already being done in the late nineties, or some initial thinking was being done around this, but I think the archives themselves weren’t prepared, and still to a large extent haven’t been yet prepared for us to engage with this material in the same way, with the same facility, or with a facility that’s even close to that of the printed archive.\n34:26\tDeanna Fong:\tI will say, I’ll begin by saying that I wasn’t that interested in audio at the time. So I remember feeling a great deal of apprehension when I started working on the project in that I had no idea what these artifacts were or why they were, why they would be of interest to anybody or, you know, who would possibly want to listen to them. But when I dove into them and listened to, I found myself particularly drawn to the kind of extra-poetic speech, which is something that I’ve become very interested in, in my own research. But I was really interested in the liveness of these events. And so I remembered one of my first tasks as an RA on that project was to develop just a sort of lit survey around the research that had been done around audio poetry, like audio recordings of poetry. So I dove into Charles Bernstein’s close listening, and had this major revelation where I was like, “Whoa, a live reading of a poem is totally different than the reading of a poem on a page,” which is something that had really never occurred to me before. Like, I just, that it was a simple recitation and I really got a sense of the difference between a performed poem versus a poem on the page. And that difference became immediately very interesting to me.\n35:49\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, Karis – and really everyone we’ve heard from today – are all asking us to consider: what can these archives teach us? And it seems that sometimes these lessons can come from unexpected places. For example, what can this cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative project teach us about academic collaboration more generally?\n36:14\tJason Camlot:\tI’ve been very interested this past year, throughout the past year, in having intensive conversations with Yuliya Kondratenko, the Project Manager of SpokenWeb on project management methods. And which ones are best suited to a research program of this kind. And really to begin to map out what project management for humanities-based research might look like. So I think what we’ve been doing to a large extent has been listening and watching to see how activities have unfolded, what approaches have worked, which ones haven’t been picked up as successfully as a way to then reflect upon and describe, and then ultimately, I wouldn’t say codified, but, you know, abstract in a way so that we could perhaps learn from our methods that are initially just sort of iterative experiments. So that’s another thing that I’m really interested in from that sort of more distant perspective. And it’s been great having Yuliya as a kind of sounding board so that we can actually begin writing this up a little bit and sort of maybe map out a whole new project management approach based on the disciplinary messiness of our project.\n37:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, who we met at the top of the show. So what pulls all of these stories together? Well, at the heart of this project is an ethos of sharing. And as we’ve heard, it often starts with a box of tapes that a community member shares with a member of the team. But that is not all.\n38:06\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things that we see in the archive, vis-à-vis copies, is the circulation and gifting of recordings and tapes within members of the poetry community. Our current SpokenWeb project at UBCO is very much founded on gifting and sharing. And so when I look around the AMP Lab, which is where our collection is housed, so much of what we do is made possible through gifts, and so I’m thinking particularly of Stephen Foster, who is my colleague in visual arts. Our hardware, and even the early, the very first time that we digitized the reels, again, made possible by Stephen’s inviting us into his own lab and sharing his resources with us. And that’s been true all the way through for us, that that idea of the work on the SoundBox project is made possible through the sharing of things, the donation of tapes, and the gifting of hardware. So we really appreciate that.\n39:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, the web of SpokenWeb is not only the collaborative network of researchers, but it is also this web of archival recordings held together by a desire to make these available to more listeners. And this plays into what we’re trying to do here with this podcast. Provide a platform not only for researchers to share with the wider public the outcomes of their work, but a place where people might access the recordings, reflections, and sounds that have inspired so many of us and that continue to inspire us as the SpokenWeb partnership moves into its next year.\n39:57\tJason Camlot:\tOne thing I’m looking forward to in the coming year is beginning to see our metadata ingest system, which we call SWALLOW, which is sort of swallowing up or capturing all of the metadata that’s being typed in to that system, to see it build up and then to see what kinds of questions we can start asking as a result of having all of this metadata built up about the collections.\n40:26\tRoma Kail:\tOnce we have our records in and other institutions have theirs in, it will be interesting to see how they overlap or how they compliment each other. So we certainly have material that would maybe fill gaps in other institutions collections or vice versa. So I’m very excited to see when we are able to search it, for example, who has what and how that how that represents sort of all the institutions across Canada in terms of a collection.\n41:04\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we are, at UBCO with our SpokenWeb team, we’re actively building a website, so there’ll be a landing page very soon, and there’ll be a selection of tapes from a much larger collection that will feature – once we’ve cleared permissions and created some contextualisation for them – a number of recordings that’ll be featured on that site for people to listen in while we’re actively processing the rest of the collection. And so we can stay tuned for that, in fall 2019.\n41:35\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo one of the things I’m also really excited about is having some conversations with some of the individuals who were involved with these moments of recording in their day. And learning a little bit more, not only about the events and the authors and the atmosphere of that moment, but also learning a little bit more about their motivations for recording; what they were doing and how they understood, they were producing an archive and for whom and for what kind of future. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of the collection that we have. But I’d also like to learn a little bit more about the heart of the collection that we have.\n42:14\tJason Camlot:\tPart of the reason that this past year has been so successful has been just because of the people who are involved. That they’re very open minded, courteous and interested, and also extremely hard working, and so we have a bunch of people who share the desire to make things happen, but also a shared desire to have a great time while doing it. You know, I think that’s been a winning combination for our project and has really allowed us to get a lot done, and has allowed for that kind of flexibility and reflectiveness without panicking about whether we’re getting to where we want to go even before we might know where we want to go. And the other thing has been that I didn’t mention yet but that I think is very important in the development of this project has been the role of graduate students and even undergraduates. I mentioned that they were at the beginning of the project in terms of describing that first collection, but I think the network was in great part built because of students who moved from here to go on to study at other universities. Simon Fraser and Alberta and UBCO in particular come to mind where those students came from here, where they’d been working with sound collections and then arrived there and said, “Where are your sound collections? I want to work with them.” And that required those universities to sort of think about, “Oh yeah, we do have huge holdings in this area that we haven’t really looked at or listened to or touched in years.” And it’s really through the students in great part that a lot of the connections with some of these great people I’ve been describing are made possible. I think there’s a lot to learn. And this became very clear from our first institute, from the students and their approaches and the methods that they’re experimenting with in making sense of these kinds of materials. I think the highlight for everyone were the two and a half hours where we heard short talks from all the students across the network on what they had been doing and what they had learned over the past year. And I think that’s a sound that I think we’re going to be amplifying really over the next year or two.\n45:01\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n45:07\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much for listening to the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Cheryl Gladu and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, Roma Kail, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, and Karis Shearer for their candid interviews and continued contributions to SpokenWeb. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":5.0297346},{"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":5.0297346}]