[{"id":"9626","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E9, Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity, 6 June 2022, McLeod and Cubbon"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Kelly Cubbon"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Kelly Cubbon"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kelly Cubbon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/bb5674c6-4e0b-4112-ba6a-59dd5d5d384e/audio/a5e862c2-6eaf-4e05-9fde-70a956dedb18/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e9-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:04:22\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,798,653 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e9-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-06-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"‘About Us’, Queer ASL\\n\\nAIM Lab: an experimental research hub concerned with disability, access, and affordances, based at Concordia University.\\n\\nAlt Text Poetry Project by Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat. Plus, the Alt Text work at the Banff Centre for the Arts: Distinct Aggregations.\\n\\nAmanda Monthei’s Life with Fire podcast\\n\\nBara Hladik – poet. artist. Facilitator.\\n\\nPlace an order for Bára’s first book New Infinity published June 2022.\\nListen to Bára’s ambient electronic album Cosmosis here on Bandcamp.\\nJoin Bára for Dreamspells (@dream_spells), a collaborative project with Malek Robbana (@melekyamalek) with a monthly new moon dreamspells event\\nregistration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-ygqTouHtaiP7HfwXvhxLi-GXljKu8o\\nBodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT)\\n\\nCarmen Papalia, An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts\\n\\nDaniel Britton on typeface design\\n\\nDisability Art is the Last Avante Garde with Sean Lee, Secret Feminist Agenda S4E22\\n\\nSoundBox Signals podcast (UBCO)\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Transcription Style Guide\\n\\nTalila A. Lewis, “Working Definition of Ableism January 2022 Update” \\n\\n‘Terminology’, Critical Disability Studies Collective, University of Minnesota\\n\\n“The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic” produced by Jason Camlot for The SpokenWeb Podcast\\n\\n“The Voice That is the Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough” produced by Katherine McLeod for ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast, 03:10.\\n\\nTranscription Tools\\n\\nDescript (audio and video editing through text, paid), https://www.descript.com/\\n\\nExpress Scribe (speech to text, free), https://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html\\n\\nOtter AI (speech to text and real-time transcription, paid), https://otter.ai/\\n\\nTEMI (speech to text transcription, paid), https://www.temi.com/\\n\\nMusic Credits\\n\\n“Wavicles” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Erudition” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Atmosphere” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Scarlett Overpass” by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions\\nCloud Cave by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions\\nPacific Time by Glass Obelisk via Blue Dot Sessions\\nSound Effects\\n\\n“campfire in the woods” by craftcrest, ​​https://freesound.org/people/craftcrest/sounds/213804/\\n\\n“Page turn over, Paper turn over page turning” by flag2, https://freesound.org/people/flag2/sounds/63318/\\n\\n“Wall clock ticking” by straget, https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/405423/\\n\\n“Mechanical Keyboard Typing” by GeorgeHopkins https://freesound.org/people/GeorgeHopkins/sounds/537244/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549723545600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Transcriptions of podcasts provide visual renderings of audio that increase accessibility. But what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast, specifically a podcast about literary audio? In this episode, Katherine McLeod of ShortCuts and Kelly Cubbon, transcriber of The SpokenWeb Podcast, explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. In fact, their episode uncovers just how much transcription is collaboration and conversation.\n\nPart One starts with reflections from Katherine and Kelly about how they came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced their thinking throughout the process of making this episode, such as accessibility and ableism. This section also features an interview with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts.\n\nPart Two consists of an interview with Judith Burr, the Season 3 SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, about generative challenges that have come up during collaboration on podcast transcription for the podcast and how decision making has evolved over time.\n\nAnd Part Three is an interview with Bára Hladík, a poet, writer, and multimedia artist, about  the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics. Here, Bára discusses the healing possibilities of sound and the creative potential of transcripts.\n\n \n\n00:00:19\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n00:00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How do we make sound accessible across different forms of media? How do we read and interpret sound? What can it look like? At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we create and release transcripts for every episode. These are written versions of the audio we produce that are publicly available on the SpokenWeb website. But why do we create transcripts —and what is involved in transcribing a podcast about literary audio that often includes archival recordings and experimental audio performances? This episode is produced by Katherine McLeod (ShortCuts producer and host) and Kelly Cubbon (SpokenWeb Podcast transcriber). Together they explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. They also reflect on transcription as an accessibility practice, scholarly practice, and creative practice. As the producers themselves share, podcasting is a space where we encounter ideas—where we find opportunities to contribute to dialogue and engage in ongoing conversations and creative practices. And so an episode of a podcast by producers who are part of the podcasting production team is, in so many ways, the perfect space to investigate the how and why of transcripts. Our team has often asked: what kinds of editorial choices need to be made when making transcripts for a podcast about literary sound? And how does ethical listening inform these decisions? In conversation with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University; Judith Burr, the Season Two SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and supervising producer; and Bára Hladik, multimedia artist and disability advocate, Katherine and Kelly spend this episode thinking through transcription—and how transcription itself is a way to “think through” sound and be transparent about accessibility goals in podcast production. And so whether you’re listening to the audio of this episode, reading the accompanying transcription, or both we invite you to “think through” transcription with us—here are Katherine McLeod and Kelly Cubbon with Episode 9 of the third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity.” [Musical Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:03:18\tKelly Cubbon:\t[Start Music: Flowing Electronic Instrumental] Transcript. What is a transcript?\n \n\n00:03:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you are reading the words of this podcast episode, you are reading a transcript of it.\n \n\n00:03:28\tKelly Cubbon:\tTo transcribe. To create a visual written version of something originally presented in another medium.\n \n\n00:03:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tTrans: across. Scribe: to write. Writing across\n \n\n00:03:40\tKelly Cubbon:\tTranscription, a writing across that creates new points of access.\n \n\n00:03:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt has come to mean a written copy, but really it is a creative process along with being a form of recording.\n \n\n00:03:56\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI love transcription because it is part of the making and it creates it into a new medium, so then it becomes, it almost becomes a new piece or version.\n \n\n00:04:08\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\t[…] and then to say, what does it mean to have a written version of this? And I was absolutely co-learning with Kelly as we developed best practices around some of these hard points.\n \n\n00:04:22\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\t[…] and maybe with how folks use transcriptions, there’s traces and evidence of how reading is inherently collaborative, be that audio reading or visual reading, tactile reading. And sometimes we take that for granted when we centre visual modes of reading. When we then make more inclusive sensory receptions, then there’s different ways of reading that trace of collaboration.\n \n\n00:04:54\tKelly Cubbon:\tHi. I’m Kelly Cubbon. I’m a Master of Publishing student at Simon Fraser University and a Research Assistant for the SpokenWeb Project. I’ve been transcribing the SpokenWeb Podcast since Season 2 and working behind the scenes of the podcast with our team to think through the possibilities and responsibilities of transcription.\n \n\n00:05:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd I’m Katherine McLeod. You may recognize my voice from ShortCuts, or other past episodes, and I work with Kelly monthly on the transcripts for that audio. Making this episode together has given us the chance to really reflect on this process, and to ask ourselves: what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast about literary audio?\n \n\n00:05:35\tKelly Cubbon:\tPart One of this episode starts with reflections from me and Katherine about how we came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced our thinking throughout the process of making this episode. We will talk about what role transcription plays within podcast production and within podcast studies. This section features some of our conversation with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts. In Part Two we chat with Judith Burr, the outgoing SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer, about generative challenges that have come up during our collaboration on podcast transcription for this podcast and how transcription within this podcast has evolved. And in Part Three we’ll join Bára Hladík – a poet, writer, and multimedia artist – to have a conversation about the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics.\n \n\n00:06:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tThanks for joining us on this journey into the sounds of transcription. Let’s get started! [End Music: Flowing Electronic Instrumental].\n \n\n00:06:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tTranscription increases accessibility. And increased accessibility is the first and foremost reason to transcribe a media format like a podcast episode.\n \n\n00:06:43\tKelly Cubbon:\tTo grasp the work of accessibility, it is important to understand the systems and barriers that make the world inaccessible. Abolitionist community lawyer and social justice consultant TL Lewis defines ableism as: [Quote] “A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism, and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person’s appearance and/or their ability to satisfactory [re]produce, excel and ‘behave.’ You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.” [Unquote]. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] Assumptions about how people engage with media information and stories or expectations that there is only one right way to do so places restrictions on audiences, communities, and creative possibilities, and also excludes the vital contributions of people with diverse and changing access needs. At face value, podcasts are an auditory medium. But there are many reasons why someone may find podcast transcripts useful or vital to engaging in the world of podcasting, a now ubiquitous source of media and education. As podcast creators, we should always be asking ourselves: what space are we trying to create? Who is it for? Transcripts make podcasts more accessible for: – Deaf and Hard of Hearing people, – Neurodivergent people, such as those with dyslexia, autism, ADHD, and more, – People with disabilities and illnesses. Transcripts are also useful for people with different learning styles. Working online, in hybrid or virtual settings during the pandemic has heightened some of our attention to how access needs at work and school can shift and change. Two quotes related to access we’ve come across that we’d like you to keep in mind as you listen or read along to this episode are: Access is [Quote] “the power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something… the relationship between the disability bodymind and the environment. [Unquote] – Historian Bess Williams\n \n\n00:08:56\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs Carmen Papalia states at the opening of “An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts”: [Quote] “Let’s try thinking of accessibility as a creative, long-term process. It’s not just about the built environment, but about ideas of agency and power” [unquote]\n \n\n00:09:17\tKelly Cubbon:\tWhen I began transcribing for SpokenWeb a key accessibility goal was working towards the simultaneous release of transcripts with the audio for each episode. Improving accessibility is an ongoing effort, but this is something we are now able to do on a regular basis. Part of my motivation for working on this podcast episode about transcription with Katherine has been to document some of our team’s learnings about transcription best practices, workflow, and decision making as a way to share our learning, as well as be accountable to our communities. When we release this episode, we will also be sharing our transcription style guide. [See show notes for details.] This is a living document that we regularly add to. I inherited it from Natasha Tar, another SFU student who was working on transcription. The style guide supports consistent formatting, but it is also a place where we provide context for collective decisions we’ve made when encountering common transcription challenges – we’ll touch on this more when we chat about collaboration with Judee.\n \n\n00:10:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tOur work on this podcast exists within the larger research activities of SpokenWeb. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] Within SpokenWeb, there are so many examples of transcription taking place, such as: student researchers listening to recordings of literary events are often transcribing as they listen [Sound Effect: Typing] or checking transcriptions while listening — timestamping or describing the extra-poetic speech [Sound Effect: Page Turning] — all of which are forms of creating a written record of an audio object. Transcription of oral history interviews is another example. Or artists transcribing, notating and scoring. Then, stepping back into the world of the podcast, producers transcribe their audio and script their voice overs. In making this episode, we ourselves transcribed our interviews, wrote a script, and now are creating an audio file which we will be transcribing again in order to post it on the website with the launch of this episode. For myself, having published and presented work on poetry scores for overlapping voices, I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between performance and transcription. That approach, not to mention all of the new technologies out there for transcription, will only be touched upon in this episode, but we hope that future episodes might dive into all of these sounds of transcription. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] In this episode, Kelly and I focus on transcription as collaboration, conversation, and as an unfinished process.\n \n\n00:11:58\tKelly Cubbon:\tAnd that approach lets us focus on the format of the podcast itself, how it reaches its audiences and its potential to reach across modes of sensory engagement.\n \n\n00:12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tPodcast listening can be podcast reading. And what does that reading experience feel like? That is the question that Kelly and I wanted to talk about and we decided to do a call out on social media to hear from regular users of podcast transcripts. By the way, if you would like to share your story of how you use podcast transcripts, check the show notes for how to get in touch. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental]\n \n\n00:12:35\tKelly Cubbon:\tDr. Maya Ray Oppenheimer uses transcripts in her personal creative and educational practices. She responded to our call on social media and we were grateful to have a virtual chat.\n \n\n00:12:47\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Door Bell] My name is Maya Rae Oppenheimer, and I’m from treaty one territory, Middlechurch, Manitoba, which is near Winnipeg. And I’ve moved around since leaving Winnipeg, but I’m now living and working in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal and am an assistant professor in the department of Studio Arts with a cross appointment to Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts. And perhaps, an additional item of introducing myself is that I identify as disabled. I have several diagnosed neurodivergencies. So, one of my neurodivergencies is dyslexia. And for those who don’t know about dyslexia, it’s often described as a learning difficulty, but it’s, you know, that takes us to a social model of disability where, you know, it’s, it’s a learning difficulty because dyslexic folks have different learning tendencies. So for some that might mean that letters move on the page, words hop and jump and skip around. One thing that happens to me is I’ll often conceive of a word, but I’ll say a different one. So you can imagine in someone who works as an academic and had to go through the rigours of getting a PhD, that’s really presented some emotional and intellectual and physical challenges. And over the years, as I was trying to figure out manners and modes of consuming information and engaging with language, I found that listening to written texts was really, really helpful. And also just listening constantly to the radio, to podcasts, to soak up intonation, to soak up emphasis on language and to get a sense of the effect behind written words when I’m reading, because that’s also something that can sometimes happen with dyslexic folks is missing the ordering of language on the page to infer emphasis. So poetry can also be a wild experience! [Laughs] So in my writing practice and reading practice, I find listening as well as reading simultaneously very, very interesting because what will sometimes happen and say, for example, here, moving to a podcasting example, if I’m listening to an episode and reading the transcript at the same time, I won’t always read the word that’s being vocalized at the same time, or with the same impression. So it opens up this kind of textured moment of language, what you might describe as like a third text or maybe even elision. But I started using the word errant, which I kind of like, because errant is sort of like this wandering meaning, but it’s also very close to the word errata, but it’s not wrong. It’s just wandering in meaning. So I refer to this as my errant reading practice. As one does accruing notes I thought, well, what else can I do with this aside from considering it as something that’s been consumed. Can I analyze my own weird habit here? And then I started writing using the marginalia as text for writing my own thing. So I guess what I’m trying to say is like the errant reading of things sort of became like a transcript for writing a responsive text.\n \n\n00:16:28\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tWhat does an effective transcript look like to you? And like what would be kind of red flags for a misleading or frustrating or ineffective or unworkable transcript?\n00:16:41\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tWell, I suppose if I had to emphasize some of the qualities that can be a bit alienating are aloof transcripts [Laughs] or rigid transcripts. But very quickly by aloof, I mean, you know, if you have to search out where the transcript lives with an audio documentation. Is it even available? Do you have to ask if it’s available, do you have to get special permission if it’s available? And I feel like that’s maybe linked to the rigidity of transcripting or transcription [Laughs], which is, I think, a concern from content creators that people will copy and paste intellectual content. But what I think is an inclusive standpoint on that from a social model of disability is if you are welcoming more people into your content, then that’s the way to go. So the rigidity: I see that coming in terms of transcripts being downloaded sometimes not entirely. So maybe only the first five to 10 minutes or the beginning 30% of the content is transcribed in this weird translation of printed word publishing copyright at 30% to audio transcriptions. I also find PDFs sometimes difficult because again, everything’s locked in unless you have particular software access. I also wish that there were more open access audio to text and text to audio softwares. One that I use and recommend to students a lot, perhaps you use is Otter AI, which has a certain amount of free use. But then a lot of other apps and services are under a price point. And I think as soon as software that is meant to be inclusive is also barred by a price bracket, then that’s a problem. So I guess, you know, when I reflect on my answer to that, the rigidity relates a lot to capitalism [Laughs] and fear of misuse of content. And that’s a trouble.\n \n\n00:19:06\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah. When you were sharing, um, the kind of aloof versus rigid, that kind of was exciting to me to hear that those, that framing, because I feel like that’s a useful framing to have in mind to almost even add to a style guide that we kind of pass on to other people in a team of like, kind of almost like a, a check-in point of you know. But I was also thinking, I think a lot about like, how do we make our process transparent to others? Because, you know, a style guide can be kind of technical things like we remove and ums and uhs so that the transcript is more readable for people, in these cases, but maybe having a style guide, visible for people who use transcripts to say, you know, that’s actually not something we like, or that’s something that we would like you to include this instead. And making that almost more open access in terms of showing that our decisions are, for us to have some sort of standardization, but they need to be flexible to meet people’s needs and evolve, to meet people’s needs as well.\n \n\n00:20:09\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah. And I think what you’re bringing up Kelly is an interesting aspect of archiving and transcripts because transcripts is such a user interface, and often there’s perhaps a flow from the cultural producer/host to the user, but then that user is making a layer of interpretation and meaning. And that’s why I think having a workable document is such a hospitable mode of transcription. And I mean, I have, I take that almost to an extreme [Laughs], I realize where in, I’m not only marking the, but I do have to move things around because of my associative way of drawing, meaning and dyslexia, and really needs that mobility on the page that then does sometimes make a collaborative transcript. And I think that’s a really important piece in a conversation like this for accessibility, and maybe with how folks use transcriptions, there’s traces and evidence of how reading is inherently collaborative, be that audio reading or visual reading, tactile reading. [Start Music: Upbeat Electronic Instrumental] And sometimes we take that for granted when we center visual modes of reading, when we then make more inclusive sensory receptions, then there’s different ways of reading that trace of collaboration.\n \n\n00:21:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ll hear from Maya again at the end of the episode. But, for now, after thinking about transcripts in the contexts of broader communities, we’d like to invite you into our community of the SpokenWeb Podcast, and to hear from Judee Burr, supervising producer and project manager of the SpokenWeb Podcast about transcription as collaboration.\n \n\n00:22:03\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI’m Judee Burr. I use she/her pronouns. I am here on Syilx Okanagan land, and what is often now called Kelowna in BC where I’m a master’s student at UBC Okanagan. I’m in the interdisciplinary graduate studies program in the digital arts and humanities theme. For my thesis podcast, I’m working on an academic podcast about wildfire and living with fire in the Okanagan Valley where I am right now. And I’m also the supervising producer and project manager of the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is how I know you guys and how we’ve all been thinking about transcription together.\n \n\n00:22:44\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThank you Judee and thank you for joining us this afternoon to talk about transcription. How did you start to work with sound?\n \n\n00:22:53\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI took a class at the Podcast Garage in Boston, Massachusetts. It was podcasting that got me really interested in doing audio work and it was The Heart is the podcast that sucked me in [End Music: Electronic Instrumental] and spoke to my queer soul and that made me want to think about what heartfelt storytelling and audio storytelling could do for environmental stories. I had been doing a lot of report writing and research that took on this tone that I felt is dry on a topic that actually feels so deeply heartbreaking and hard, and really difficult to know how to communicate about in a way it’s like move, going to move people.\n \n\n00:23:42\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThanks for sharing that. It’s always fascinating to hear about your work and what you’re thinking about kind of emotion and connecting people to stories, just really spoke to me because I’ve been thinking about the emotional experience of transcribing, particularly around the most recent episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast. Jason did an episode on reflecting on pandemic events and experiences and it was incredibly overwhelming to be sitting in my apartment by myself, for the purposes of my job transcribing something, but being really affected by the project itself [Start Music: Piano Instrumental] and the intentions around the project, as well as these kind of clips of people, banding together like we all have during this difficult to time to create community and a sense of continuity with what they’ve been doing. So, I just wanted to mention that because I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently.\n \n\n00:24:33\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI feel like every time I get a first draft as the supervising producer to just listen to and think about ways to give feedback and react to, I am so moved. Even though the episodes are so different from each other, they each reflect this really heartfelt engagement with whatever our producers are working on. And yeah, I feel a similar way when I’m reviewing a first draft as it sounds like you feel when you’re listening to it and transcribing it, Kelly. [End Music: Piano Instrumental]\n \n\n00:25:00\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYes, definitely. I think that kind of leads into our first question quite nicely. Can you tell us a little bit about your dual role as the SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, are these kind of different hats you put on at different times or is it kind of a hybrid role?\n \n\n00:25:17\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think it’s all smooshed together [Laughter] in the experience. So I’m the main touch point for the episode producers– we tend to have different producers every month that come to me with questions that I can then answer or reflect on with the task force and work with producers to make sure they feel supported. So, I’ll give producers feedback on a first audio draft, thenI’ll work with Hannah to script an introduction that we feel is appropriate for introducing the episode in the context of the overall podcast and project. Then, when I get that recorded introduction and final draft of the episode I mix and master it and then send it to you, Kelly for a transcription. Working with you and the producers to make any edits to that, doing the work of just putting all of the content, including the transcript and the audio on our website and on our simplecast tool that we used to release it onto all these podcasting platforms and organizing a listening party, where then as a larger community of SpokenWeb people and fans, we can listen to the episodes together and talk about them.\n \n\n00:26:32\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tIt makes me think too about the amount of listening you would have to be doing in that role. And in my work with you, especially on ShortCuts, I’ve always been really struck by how you’re such an attentive listener to the audio. In listening to one piece, you’re really able to pull out the overarching threads. Kelly, I was interested, for you, in hearing Judee, describe the workflow, what, from your perspective, what does it feel like on your side?\n \n\n00:27:01\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think for me the first few months of working on transcription for this particular type of podcast as an academic podcast with lots of archival material and experimental audio kind of – audio collage, different things like that was a real steep learning curve. I’ve done transcription of interviews where there might be one or two voices, maybe three voices max but trying to figure out how to use an existing style guide – which was an excellent tool, provided by the team, that had done this before – but trying to apply that to lots of different I guess use cases or scenarios that needed me to make some decisions. Chatting with Judy was very instrumental –just reframing transcription problems as kind of points of inquiry or kind of a jumping off point for our conversation of me asking Judy, “oh, does the producer maybe have any notes about the archival clip that they used? Was that something that re-occurred throughout that they were using as a theme, or was that a different track?” Things like music cues or overlapping audio or things like that, without the context myself, I could go down a rabbit hole of trying to listen 20 times to see if maybe there was a hidden thing I hadn’t heard, where in fact it was, there was often context from the people with the expertise around the episode, or the kind of academic expertise about certain archives or certain events in communities that was kind of instrumental for providing the context clues for a reader of a transcript. So it became not just technical information, but also information that would make the transcription more beneficial to people down the line for understanding what they were listening to.\n \n\n00:28:57\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAs you were talking there, I was struck by how, in the case of this podcast, because of using so many archival audio clips, there is this question around how much information to include as to where the sound is from, or what is the sound in relation to the archives, in addition to just representing the sound in a visual format for a reader. The SpokenWeb Podcast in its sort of remixing of archival sounds raises these questions for transcription, because, again, in representing the sound is when also representing the source of the sound.\n \n\n00:29:36\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, it’s so challenging with so many of our podcast episodes to think about translating it from its audio form that we produce it to be this audio product. And then to say, what does it mean to have a written version of this? And I think I was absolutely co-learning with Kelly, like, as we like went through some of these tough, like, what do we do for this part or this part? Yeah, we really were doing some co-learning there and trying to figure out: how do we develop best practices around some of these hard points?\n \n\n00:30:14\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, and also realizing too that a transcript of say a SpokenWeb Podcast episode, that there could almost be, there could almost be multiple transcripts of it. That brings me to […] something that I was also struck by in the summer workshop. In hearing people’s responses to some of the examples, it was really interesting to hear […] different ways of approaching transcription.\n \n\n00:30:37\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think the two key examples that I used in the July workshop — and the workshop was kind of to take a peek behind the scenes of the decision making and the people involved in transcription and just say, we’re actively learning this and what our kind of primary motivations are, are first and foremost accessibility. And that, that is kind of a necessarily incomplete and ongoing project. And so it is never fixed [Laughs] and we’re kind of always learning ways to improve and be receptive to other people’s tools and resources and perspectives. But I think the two examples that I chose for that workshop, which were really illuminating and kind of spurred quite a lot of conversation, one involved an experimental sound and musical performance that was quite lengthy. [Archival Audio Clip: the Four Horsemen performing “Mayakovsky”: Several Voices Chanting] I believe it’s the Four Horsemen that the clip was from and we had people in the Zoom chat doing their own transcription and seeing what came of it. And, one person might have in square brackets: “a performance happens and there’s various voices.” Another person might do a paragraph long description of the different types of overlap of these voices. And I kind of just spurred that conversation that you were mentioning Katherine of writing something verbatim versus giving a context clue about something that happens and not overly worrying with the details. And I think for me that was illuminating of trying to balance what would be the most useful to someone reading a script. And I think, by and large, having a condensed description of something to represent a performance has been I think more useful than spending ages to interpret something that people are going to interpret in lots of different ways, and we can’t capture exactly what that sounded like for someone on a transcript.\n \n\n00:32:43\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. I also appreciate that point about the interpretations of each listener or reader. In this case, we use different words. We have different like embodied experiences of what the sound is.\n \n\n00:32:56\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tDefinitely. And things kind of like – do we call this the name of the musical file or what it sounds like? When does it become an interlude, when does it fade into the background? And sometimes that feels really significant to the listening experience, but also I’ve definitely looked back on transcriptions and thought this is – I’m possibly interrupting the reading experience of that conversation or that, archival clip or moment with too many instances of trying to be very faithful to the music coming in and out of things. So I think over time, I’ve learned to be a bit more decisive about where it would be useful to frame things like that and still indicate that there’s music happening without being overly descriptive of it.\n \n\n00:33:46\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAre some of those interruptions actually good in a podcast transcript? I’m still not sure about this. Because when a magazine or something publishes an interview with someone that’s a publication that’s meant for print, it’s never existed to be published as an audio work necessarily. But for a podcast transcript, we’re claiming to be facilitating this written version of the episode. And so I still wonder… I think it’s great to have a ranking of priorities in that and our conversations that lead us to accessibility as the main thing that we really wanna get right in our transcripts feels really good because then we can have a lot more interesting questions while still remaining faithful to the things that feel like a big priority. But, as we do this work, there have been so many interesting questions that have come up.\n \n\n00:34:46\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tEspecially for overlapping sounds. It sounds like with the music too, again, thinking of if it’s, if the music is there [Start Music: Electronic Instrumental] but it’s not sort of interfering with the experience of hearing the conversation then is it worth mentioning, but it’s also it’s there as a layer and if it’s sort of continuing it’s hard to indicate that something is sort of constant cause again, in print it’s like you can mention it, but then how to, you almost want visually for it to be a sort of painted, like an ocean underneath the words [Laughs]…\n \n\n00:35:19\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. Maybe we should have a graphic novel for each episode, instead of a transcript. Like a painting. The sound can be a painting — the sound could be like a portrait behind that thing. That’ll be easy for you to do right, Kelly, and our standard timeline. [Laughter] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n \n\n00:35:39\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThe overlapping sound is one thing, but I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of like slightly different context to indicate.\n \n\n00:36:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn a recent ShortCuts episode, my conversation with Kaie Kellough included overlapping voices and overlapping contexts. Here’s Kellough performing and then listening back to his own voice and to the context of those recordings.\n \n\n00:36:31\tKaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5, February 2022:\tSo, eventually the voice would start to like – it would sound like tape delay is nowhere. [Distorted Tape, Recording of Kaie reciting poetry: “This Prairie, this periphery is intoxicated…” ] You asked me what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it. And um, it’s, it’s strange. It’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself.\n \n\n00:36:50\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. That’s, it brings up a question I have in just good storytelling in general in audio. And I think about this with every podcast episode, how much do we need to say upfront about what the listener should expect to hear? And I think this is what you’re saying about transcripts. Is there something we should say upfront about what the reader should expect to read that makes it easier? But then also remembering how sometimes in some of these episodes it works, somehow it works not having that information up front and we’re really brought along with the story that the episode is telling…\n \n\n00:37:36\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tDefinitely, and I think maybe after wrestling for a few episodes with the music question or the overlapping voices question it was important to me to capture that in the style guide and also explain how it – the decision was made and how it relates to the mission of the podcast and the mission of accessibility, as you mentioned, so that, when that Google doc is shared with somebody else, they’re also learning about our decision making and about the podcast, not just how do I kind of fix this one thing in this one transcript. So I think that’s been really valuable to me in these, this kind of transition from season two to season three, kind of coming together to figure out what were the sticking points or the circular conversations we were having in Google docs and various notes and emails and stuff and how do we reflect those so that we can be a bit more confident about how we’re gonna approach those instances when they come up later and having that kind of option in our back pocket.\n \n\n00:38:41\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThat also makes me just think about in taking on any of these roles with the podcast, especially as graduate students, where we’re planning to have certain amounts of turnover in these roles, you’ve put so much thoughtfulness into that guide, that transcription guide that you’ll be able to pass onto a new person, but also in thinking about transitions for the producer role, I’ve been reflecting on that there was just a learning period that I don’t think I could have read my way out of either. And I want –do you feel, because as we were talking about, I think earlier some of this stuff is like a judgement call, like do – is us music important to transcribe right here? Or should I check in with the producers about this? Or certain questions. And in the judgement calls, in my role, I feel like, okay, I just needed to be in this role for a few months to be comfortable making them. Do you feel like the judgement calls and transcription are also something that they’ll –the person can read the style guide and then they also have to kind of get used to the judgement call part of it? How does that feel for you, Kelly??\n00:40:00\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I completely agree. I think that kind of steep learning curve I was talking about was also the order of listening to things, and pausing to read the transcripts that I had written. And maybe that sounds completely obvious but I was so devoted to listening verbatim and just really trying my best and getting really tangled in spending far too much time listening to particular bits of audio because I was worried I wasn’t gonna be faithful to people’s work. And I felt quite a lot of responsibility to that and making sure it was legible and something that was valuable for people reading the transcript. But I think it was in that July workshop when we were having these kinds of exercises and discussions around this faithful verbatim versus interpretation versus what is legible to people reading a transcript and one of the participants said, “well, what is it like to read the transcript?” And it just like was a lightbulb for me of oh [Laughs] the context clues need to be at the start and not tangled up throughout.\n \n\n00:41:11\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. And I think you and Megan Butchart really led that workshop. And that was an opportunity for me to see both the way that you framed those examples from a podcast as some in that problem space of “how do we think through this?” And then also learn from Megan Butchart’s work transcribing the Sound Box collection and be able to just see the different problems that people are grappling with and how to think about ethical transcription, caring transcription, accessible transcription in these different contexts. And that was a fun way for us to think about what is unique to podcast transcription and some of the problems we’ve been working through.\n00:41:55\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nThank you so much for joining us today.\n \n\n00:41:57\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. I’m so glad that all three of us were able to be here to talk about it together because it does, it just is such a nice representation of the work we’ve done together.\n \n\n00:42:10\tKelly Cubbon:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer and multimedia artist. Bára’s poetic practices often integrate found poetics from sources such as medical texts, self-help books, and medical paperwork as a gesture of transformation and reclamation amongst information that is attributed to complex bodies. She often works in multimedia arts through text, illustration, animation, video, performance and sound, exploring themes of healing, dreams, desire, care, and the body. Katherine and I were thrilled to get the chance to talk to Bára. In this conversation we talk about accessibility as an integrated practice, the healing power of sound, and transcription as a creative opportunity.\n \n\n00:42:52\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI’m Bára Hladík and thanks so much for having me. I’m a Czech Canadian writer, editor, and multimedia artist. I have a bachelor of arts in literature from UBC and I work in many different mediums of art since then and I am tuning in from Esquimalt territory.\n \n\n00:43:17\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThank you so much for joining us Bára. So we’re going to start off with a few questions about how you came to work with sound and the role that sound plays in your life. So we’re wondering what drew you to working with sound? [End Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:43:34\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI grew up playing music around the fire with my dad and my family [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling, Musical Instruments] So like singing and guitar and just kind of collective folk music and often just humming along or shaking shakers or whatnot. So I definitely have a very instrumental background. I learned some sound production skills from someone I used to date and it was at a time where my arthritis was affecting my hands so it was difficult to play with sound in the traditional ways. So I got really into more keyboards and ambient kind of experimental sound and I definitely am drawn to sound as a way of –as I was accepting and learning the new conditions of my chronic illness and becoming okay with how I need to slow down and really, really change pace and sit with things and still transform and process without kind of like the same exertional ways we’re traditionally taught to process things. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] So sound became a way to discographies or very long ambient pieces as a way to just really heal on like a cellular level. So I think sound has a really, really amazing function to affect our bodies and our consciousness and spirits and whatnot. And retune us. [End Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:45:33\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tWhen you’re talking about sound as slowing down and just something that is, as you said, kind of like retuning it makes me think of a quotation that Kelly pulled up that you shared on Twitter by Ursula K. LeGuin.\n \n\n00:45:52\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nAnd it is “listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence. Reading is a means of listening.”\n \n\n00:46:01\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, we were intrigued, what made you share it? Because there was lots that resonated for us, but we were wondering what, what made you share that quote?\n \n\n00:46:10\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI was just reading that book [Sound Effect: Page Turning] and it grounds connection between literature and sound and listening and how reading is a way of listening through time. And, yeah, I think just the idea of art practice as a community form and how the connections between literature and sound and just being with each other as a act of resistance in the time where we are constantly overwhelmed with information and things are happening so fast and our bodies are expected to uphold a very rapid capitalist pace [Music: Bass Plucking] [Sound Effect: Ticking Clock] and our time is monetized. So I think these forms of creativity that are very old, have always been a way for us to create community and connect and communicate beyond just day to day dialogue. [End Music: Bass and Ticking Clock]\n \n\n00:47:23\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. And even the way in that quote too, though, the idea that listening –really emphasizing that listening in the making of community, it takes time, it takes time and space and that’s something that’s not just gonna happen instantaneously. And then it’s sort of reminding one that of the time and effort and the work that is involved to make those things happen.\n \n\n00:47:46\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAnd every form has its own value and accessibility. Reading and listening are so tied and it, something may be sound in a way that isn’t so literary, but it’s still valuable. And part of reading can be quite laborious. So I find, I turn to sound when I’m too tired to read or I’ve taken in too much of that type of information but there’s stillI feel like they’re tied.\n \n\n00:48:30\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tIn podcasting written transcriptions are often a common entry point for people to start thinking about accessibility. People might ask, why do people create transcriptions if this is an audio medium? It is quite a labour intensive process to create them. It’s something that we obviously value and prioritize, but it kind of gets people asking questions sometimes about accessibility and learning about accessibility. So I was wondering, as someone who works in lots of literary and art spaces, what do you find people tend to understand or misunderstand about disability and accessibility in the arts?\n \n\n00:49:11\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI think people often think of it as an afterthought. They’re like, okay, we’ve got this project. Okay. Like how do we make it accessible now? And it’s kind of thought of as extra. And I think that the process of creation in itself and production and development and whatnot it benefits a lot from like, if you’re thinking about it from the get go and it’s an integrative design. And I think people kind of think of it a oh, we’ll make it more accessible to this small group. But I think it actually enhances the piece for everyone, like for – in a transcript for a podcast makes it more accessible, but it also makes it really good for archival purposes. You can repurpose the information in a different way. You can make a Zine. There’s different ways that even people who are listening to the podcast and they forget just one word, they didn’t quite get it, they can go to the transcript. And I think it’s just – it’s a lot simpler than people expect, even if it’s more laborious. Because it’s more creative to share something in multiple ways, and broaden your audience and that may broaden your audience to more than people with disabilities.I feel like accessibility is often simply thought of in the terms of disability, but I think it should be thought of in terms just accessibility to people without disabilities as well. I love transcription because, even though it’s part of the making and it creates it into a new medium, so then it becomes, it almost becomes a new piece or version. And yeah, then it lends like — I almost see it as an opportunity because I’m a poet and a writer and a researcher, so I’m like, “yes, this is the juice! This is the meat.” As much as it’s good to have a recording of something is to be able to view it and listen to it. I’m probably not gonna do that, but I can glance over the transcript, pull out a few ideas. It’s just like, I feel like, a transcript is a creative opportunity. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:51:33\tKelly Cubbon:\tThe music that plays throughout Bára’s interview comes from her 2021 ambient electronic album Cosmosis. During our Zoom chat, we took a cue from Bára’s work to take a break from our screens, pause, and listen. Afterwards, Bára was kind enough to share her process for creating the album. Here, she reflects on the creative benefits of working in multiple mediums, disability, and the healing power of sound.\n \n\n00:52:06\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tWell, this particular album – I’ve done so many different things over the years and I often work in many mediums because with my arthritis I have to be very flexible with what I’m doing. So sometimes I can’t write at the same pace so I’ve learned to work with many different mediums interchangeably so I can adjust to my body’s needs as I go. But yeah, that particular album was made over a few years. I –the process of making that album was very much using sound as a way to attune and wanting to facilitate a half hour of a process of someone just being able to be with their body and move or be with their self and their thoughts. Yeah. Very intentionally don’t have any sound –sorry, voice or words in it because I wanted it to just be very self in cosmos kind of communication. I finished the album while I was undergoing radioactive treatment at a traditional spa in Czech in the Czech Republic. And so it would be a daily schedule of different treatments, laser, magnet, hydrotherapy, but the main therapy is the radium bath. And it’s just like a bath with water from this ancient well that’s very high in radium and basically it ionizes your cells to have a rejuvenating effect. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] And yeah, like I said, as part of the medical system there, so people with my illness actually have a month a year covered to go get this treatment because it’s so successful. So, a lot of the sound, the water sounds I actually recorded there. The whole production part of it was I had all the sound, many of the synthesizer sounds prerecorded, but the whole production sound part was like a roadblock for me. So I focused in while I was at treatment, and added a bunch of ambient sounds and whatnot. But yeah, that was very cool. And that the sound definitely of the album reminds me of being there and of going through that experience.\n \n\n00:54:37\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. Again, thank you for sharing that. And thanks for putting that into the world. It’s meant a lot to me, the album to listen to it over the course of the pandemic and I returned to it a lot. So thank you.\n \n\n00:54:48\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nOh, that’s so nice to hear!\n \n\n00:54:49\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. [Laughs] Definitely. It’s an exhale moment of returning to the body. And again, thank you for sharing the details of where you recorded and captured that sound and what it means to you as well.\n \n\n00:55:11\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tMaybe to frame my question about music and poetry just a little differently of the connections between your sort of your approaches to music, poetry, how they’ve influenced your role as a facilitator, as a community organizer, and advocacy work that you’ve been doing there. [End Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:55:30\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I mean, having skills and sound has been really great for accessibility because then it’s pretty intuitive to be like, oh, of course we’re gonna have a sound version and a text version, bare minimum. And yeah, seeing how to make sound more accessible, cuz often people are like, oh, if it’s read by a screen reader, therefore it’s accessible. ButI have an eye condition where sometimes the laptop’s too bright and I use a screen reader. But the screen reader in itself is very alienated because it’s very robotic. It’s very monotone. It’s not, it doesn’t feel accessible to me. It doesn’t make me feel the same as reading a piece. So thinking about sound – I’m seeing a lot of literary magazines doing this, starting to do this too, like the Hamilton Arts and Letters did a disability poetics issue and they had folks read every single piece. So there was audio recordings and the transcript is the piece. So that connection between text and sound was really cool because it really brought you into the work as well, instead of being able to experience it with a screen reader, but it being quite alienating and I think, yeah, it’s suddenly when everything has to be in this robotic tone, it can be quite discouraging. So thinking about, yeah, even making – adding ambience in the background to make it more podcast-style there’s many ways to think of the forms and I think it’s cool the connections between sound and music and poetry because they really lend a creative lens to approaching these mediums. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:57:36\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. That’s fantastic to hear about because you work across disciplines, you’re sort of attuned to the different potentials within those and always thinking about how you can bring them together. So it can really hear that in all of your work it’s inspiring. So thank you.\n \n\n00:57:58\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nWell, thank you so much for having me. It really means a lot.\n \n\n00:58:04\tKelly Cubbon:\tFor more of Bára’s art, writing, music, and facilitation, see her website. Her newly released book New Infinity is available from Metatron Press. See show notes for links.\n \n\n00:58:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tListening back to our interview with Bára made me think about our conversation with Maya Rae Opphenheimer, who we heard from at the start in response to a question that you asked Kelly about community building. [End Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:58:31\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tSo this question is about transcripts as part of community building. And I’ll just preface it by saying, when you were sharing earlier about having life hacks for your own dyslexia, it really resonated with me as a neurodivergent person as well. And I think when we share these things, it kind of can be a light bulb for connecting to others. And having a way of like, oh I wasn’t just doing this alone, or I wasn’t doing this kind of strange thing by myself, there’s actually people being incredibly creative and connecting to each other through these things as well. So, we are wondering how transcripts have been part of community building for you. You’ve shared some about your classroom experiences, but maybe in online spaces as well for like discussions around transcripts as a way to connect to other people rather way to be, to connect to other people’s creative practices as well maybe.\n \n\n00:59:25\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah, well maybe – it’s an experience I share, but I definitely would love to point attention towards a project, but it’s a duo Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat: the Alt Text Poetry Project. And I first came across their work when Shannon Finnegan was at the Banff Centre on the west coast and was looking at alt poetry as a way of writing about sculpture. And their work is very interesting that, when, you know, Shannon and Bojana are working together and thinking about alt text, it’s not just as descriptive text, but also as critical and creative writing in its own sense. So shouldn’t be dismissed as a necessary provision, I mean, or even like an optional provision [Laughs], it’s progress if we see it as necessary. But it is a valid mode of creative and intellectual writing. And I know Carmen Papalia, who identifies as a non-visual learner and as a performance artist, as well as sculptor and activist, is advocating for different ways of writing about art and engaging with art. And the idea of making a transcript for an artwork that is usually read through visual means only is very cool [Laughs]. And how we can then bring in different resonances of texture and context and association and haptics and smell — that I find as a way of extending how art is often thought to already build community, but it, sometimes, really leaves out community. So the idea of transcription, not just for audio podcasting, which I think in itself is, in the definition of a podcast, is a community building media, [Start Music: Flowing Instrumental] but to do that with art and to then think about those as gateway moments of transcribing and documenting. But as you said, not viewing that as — okay, transcription done, this is the thing — but that it’s another iteration of reading culture.\n \n\n01:01:35\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn making this episode. And listening back to these conversations about transcription, what have we learned about what transcription sounds like?\n \n\n01:01:45\tKelly Cubbon:\tWell, the process of transcription sounds like collaboration, like a conversation. And I think that you could really hear that in our interviews. We were all thinking aloud together about the process. And that’s what happens when putting together a transcript.\n \n\n01:02:00\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is a process that invites access to content through multiple voices and multiple senses. We could just as easily be asking, what does transcription feel like, Smell like, look like, taste like? It makes us think about how we are experiencing content.\n \n\n01:02:19\tKelly Cubbon:\tIt also makes me think about how much this episode is about making the processes of collaboration more transparent, and being able to actively share the production decisions of a podcast episode and its accompanying transcription to show that this work is ongoing and evolving.\n \n\n01:02:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s not a finished product at all in that the transcript is something that is in dialogue with the media that accompanies it. And in dialogue with those who engage with it.\n \n\n01:02:43\tKelly Cubbon:\tThe transcript is there as a point of access into the material. But really that is only the start of the conversation. [End Music: Flowing Instrumental]\n \n\n01:03:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Katherine McLeod and Kelly Cubbon. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And we are excited to welcome to the team, our new sound designer and audio engineer Miranda Eastwood. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’d particularly love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on improving transcription accessibility. And stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n \n\n\n"],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9664","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.1, Archival Listening, 17 October 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-4-1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:10:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,059,067 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-4-1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-10-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Interim Transcript"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1 “Sounds”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds/\\n\\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9 “Re-Situating Sound”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-situating-sound/\\n\\nArchival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 reading, from ShortCuts 3.3 “Communal Memories”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/communal-memories/\\n\\nArchival audio: Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980; Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981 — all from ShortCuts 3.6 “Listening Communities: The Introductions of Doug Barbour” (guest produced by Michael O’Driscoll): https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/\\n\\nArchival audio, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4 “Sonic Passages”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\\n\\nDaphne Marlatt interview with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive” an episode of SoundBox Signals that was aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast (co-produced by Karis Shearer, Megan Butchart, and Nour Sallam), clipped on ShortCuts 3.4: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\\n\\nInterview with Kelly Cubbon, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, Creativity,” (co-produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod), S3E9 The SpokenWeb Podcast, June 2022: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/\\n\\nInterview with Kaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5 “The Voice that is the Poem”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/\\n\\nArchival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-event/\\n\\nArchival audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: “What the Archive Remembers”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/\\n\\nArchival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7 “Moving, Still”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549784363008,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this first episode of Season 4, SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts continues the tradition of starting a new season by diving into its own archives. What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through short archival clips? Join host and producer Katherine McLeod to listen to clips from Season 3 of ShortCuts as a way of asking what literary criticism sounds like through cutting and splicing sound. It is a short exercise in archival listening, and archival making.\n\n[Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] ]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Welcome to ShortCuts. My name is Katherine McLeod. Join me, each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts. Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\nOn ShortCuts, we explore what you can make by cutting up [scissor cut] and splicing sound digitally. What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, do think about joining me on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work, especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening. Get in touch! Write to SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com\n\nNow, as I’ve always done to start each season, let’s dive into the archives of ShortCuts. We’ll listen to clips from the previous season, Season 3, in order to hear what ShortCuts sounds like… We’ll do this as is an exercise in listening – an exercise in archival listening. From now on…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1: All of the sounds will be clips from Season Three of ShortCuts, and that includes my voiceover. [Overlapping] My Voiceover, my voiceover.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound.\n\n[Tape rewinding]\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: I am holding the sound carefully, knowing how difficult it can be to take a recorded voice, with all of its situated affect attached to it, out of the archives. To unarchive carefully.\n\n[Tape rewinding ends]\n\nArchival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 Reading, from ShortCuts 3.3: Lee read the epigram back to me in Montreal. And I was very honoured too, that she had written it back to me and I’ve been trying to write her back an epigram. We might make a book [Audience Laughter]. So I haven’t got very far with the epigram except to say: “Write me out of this epigram, Lee, you are so much water. You are too much water, too much rock, so much eagle. Write me out of this epigram, Lee. I am so much bush, so much ocean, so much rage…” And that’s just the beginning. [Laughter] It’s not finished. [Clapping] It’s supposed to go and like “write us out of this goddamn epigram.” [Audience Laughter]. I want to read a couple poems about South Africa.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.3: Brand starts her reading after Maracle with a poem for South Africa. And that is exactly how Maracle had started hers. I am taking all of these audio clips out of their contexts, out of their linear order in which they would’ve been heard in the reading, but, in doing so, I’m trying to bring to the forefront, the connections that are embedded within it and the conversation happening between poets in the reading itself.\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977, from ShortCuts 3.6: They’ll be right up to your feet but that won’t be too bad.\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977, from ShortCuts 3.6: …Penny is the author of Most Recently Transformed, which is a marvelous looking book, as well as a very, very fine book…\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980, from ShortCuts 3.6: [Audience Chatter] …still a bit of… Not much [Audience Laughter]. We’re happy to welcome Leona Gom. [Audience Applause]\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981, from ShortCuts 3.6: [Audience Chatter] …there’s your friend. There’s a little bit of room if you wanna sit on the floor here!\n\nAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4: This is a poem that I wrote when I was about… oh I don’t know, seven or eight months pregnant… [Pause] …Bird of Passage. I wrote it in Vancouver… spring time again…. Bird of Passage.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.4: Here, was Marlatt in 1970 saying that she had written this poem ‘Bird of Passage’ while she was pregnant. That is significant in and of itself when thinking of the body but now I was hearing it with the full resonance of her recent conversation with Shearer and Buchart from the podcast and what Marlatt says when the date of the recording, July 1969, is mentioned…\n\nArchival audio played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”, 2019, from ShortCuts 3.4: Interesting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I’d had when I wrote those poems. What was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading – there was so much – my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being…\n\nKelly Cubbon, S3E9, SpokenWeb Podcast: […] I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of slightly different context to indicate.\n\nZoom interview with Kaie Kellough, from ShortCuts 3.5: : You asked me [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it and it’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself and to – I didn’t realize it was as far back as 2016, because it feels a lot sooner. I remember what I was thinking about. I remember what my poetry, my poetic preoccupations were at the time. I remember how far that poem came because it was young and sentimental when I wrote it, and then it was not like that by the time it was published. It took on a different sort of personality by the time it was published. But yeah, I remember everything that I was thinking about. I remember how excited I was about it. Yeah. It’s just a — so thank you.\n\nZoom interview, Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.5: Thank you so much.\n\nArchival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: [Performing “Chambersonic”] Let form be oral / a foundation / sonority / an impossible lone sound / recording / the ghost of sound [whispered] the ghost of sound. Let form be oral. A foundation of phonemes. Distorted – [overlapping voice] fragments. Re-assemblages. [Whispered] The ghost of sound…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.8: This. This is a setting on music. This is. What is this? It is as though she is asking us to consider: what is this this-ness of sonority? Of an impossible lone sound? Of the ghost of sound?\n\nArchival Audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: [Reading poem] Wanting you, I forgot you. You erased my name. Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: The emotional weight of archives.\n\nArchival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7: [Reading from “Naked Poems”] In the gold darkening light / you dressed / I hid my face in my hair. / The room that held you is still here. / You brought me clarity / gift after gift I wear / poems / naked, in the sunlight / on the floor [sound of pages turning]…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: To what extent are we trying, trying to remember or trying to erase a memory that may not be ours in the first place –\n\nArchival Audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: [Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: — and yet having heard it, that memory can never be forgotten. The feeling of having heard it is still there.\n\n[Ambient music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. ShortCuts is transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n[End of music]"],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9665","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.2, ShortCuts Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing, 21 November 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-sarah-cipes-about-feminist-audio-editing/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Draft transcript."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"The wrong file is linked on the podcast site, so this episode cannot be listened to/downloaded and some information is missing.\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Cipes, Sarah. “It’s more of a feeling… Digitizing Reel-to-Reel for the SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection.” AmpLab, online.\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Shearer, Karis. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 21 April, 2022.\\n\\nHeld, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Oxford University Press, 2005.\\n\\nHobbs, Catherine. “Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers.” Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives. Eds. Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012, pp. 181–92.\\n\\nWanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch. Eds. Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer.  Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549786460160,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out of the archives and into the world. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University. It is a conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes. \n\nAt the time of recording this conversation, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” In fact, this paper was already in conversation – that is, part of a collaborative article in development with Dr. Deanna Fong and Dr. Karis Shearer who have developed feminist listening methodologies in their introduction to Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch and to their article, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” Listen to ShortCuts Live! to hear Sarah talk with Katherine about feminist redaction when working with sensitive materials in audio archives, and where this collaborative research will take her next.\n\nShortCuts, Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing\n\n[Theme music]\n\nKatherine McLeod [host intro]: Welcome to ShortCuts. This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out into the world and records them as conversations, live. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University in Montreal.\n\n[Theme music ends]\n\nAmid the bustle of a packed week of talks and workshops, it was such a treat to sit down with some of the presenters and have a conversation about their archival audio. It was especially meaningful considering how ShortCuts started in 2020 and so nearly all of its episodes have been recorded during the pandemic, and mostly in my closet. It felt great to be sitting down with folks at our microphones in the same space, and to embrace the background noise around us – after all, it was all happening live! In this ShortCuts Live, you’ll hear my conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes. At the time of the recording, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” We sat down together at microphones set up in Concordia’s 4th Space, and you can hear the buzz of the symposium behind us – reminding us that this is being recorded live…\n\nKatherine: Welcome to ShortCuts. We’re recording this ShortCuts, live, in 4th Space at Concordia University during the SpokenWeb Sound Institute. I’m here with Sarah Cipes. Thanks so much for joining me, Sarah!\n\nSarah: Thanks so much for having me. This is very exciting.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Well, the reason that I asked Sarah to join me is that, during the SpokenWeb Symposium she delivered a paper that was really based on an audio clip. It was really all about one audio clip, which seemed perfect for ShortCuts because we love diving into the complexity of a single audio clip. So I thought that one way of starting would be for Sarah and I to listen to the clip together…\n\n \n\nArchival audio,Warren Tallman: \n\nNow one thing I’m curious about [inaudible – distortion]….\n\n \n\nArchival audio, Gladys Hindmarch:\nThat the young recognize, the elders two years older.\n\n \n\nArchival audio, Warren Tallman:\nAnd they’re both, they’re both and, but now…\n\n \n\nKatherine: So rather than starting with a question of “What are we listening to?” I’m going to ask you, Sarah, what it’s like to listen to that clip – here and now in this moment…\n\n \n\nSarah: That was a really lovely refresher and a nice moment – and, I don’t know if you noticed I was smiling while I was listening to it. I am really pleased with what we were able to sort of tease out of the sound that was left when the voices are gone. And I – I actually said something in my talk on Tuesday that I hadn’t planned to say – and that I hadn’t thought of previously – but I was being sparked by all of these amazing questions and thoughtful comments from the audience – and that is that I wanted people to feel, when they’re listening to it, uncomfortable, as if they’re trying to listen in onto a conversation that they shouldn’t be listening to, like trying to listen through a door. I think that even though this is a preliminary version of the idea of the feminist edit, I think that I was able to bring home that feeling of discomfort and of tonal variance… And, yeah, tonal discomfort for the listener that you should feel when you’re trying to hear other people’s gossip <laugh>.\n\n \n\nKatherine: You refer to this as a feminist edit, and what do you mean by that, generally?\n\n \n\nSarah: So when I initially started working with the idea of feminist edits, it was really, it’s really a large idea. It can, it can really incorporate anything that comes within the idea of feminist ethics of care. So, I looked at Virginia Held’s Ethics of Care, as a big proponent of my understanding of what to do with feminist edits. And I also looked at Catherine Hobbs’s discussions and scholarship about literary archives and what it means to be respectful when you’re archiving.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>\n\n \n\nSarah: And so bringing that into audio was a really interesting idea for me because redaction restriction and censorship and all of these things that have a lot of negative feelings around them for researchers can actually be turned into positive things, I think, particularly within audio that actually allow users to listen to tapes that they might otherwise be totally barred from.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And so my desire was to create sound edits that allow the listener to hear the vast majority of the tape while also protecting the privacy of those on the tape, or even in this case, someone who’s mentioned who’s not there. But really a feminist edit could also be about amplifying voices that are not usually central to the microphone.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yeah, I can imagine – it makes me think of in the 1963 Poetry Conference that was recorded by Fred Wah’s tape recorder. That now is at UBCO <laugh> I think you have that recorder. When listening to those recordings it’s so interesting to hear a question asked, and you can tell that it’s a voice from very far back in the room, and often those voices are women because – you know, you really hear it – the men are up front, closest to the mic. And, you know, hearing say a question asked by a voice that is, say, quite soft in terms of the recording and the placement in the room, and just like literally amplifying that voice, let alone all of the other ways that voices could be amplified. That just just makes me think of the, the potential there for centering voices through audio edits – making them clearer, making them louder – on a very technical level.\n\n \n\nSarah: There really is so much that that could be done. And that’s why I love the idea of the feminist edit within archives because archiving itself is such an intuitive practice and sound editing. These kinds of sound edits have all been very intuitive and very personal. And I think that every single person who encountered and tried to edit this tape would’ve ended up with a different edit, which is really, it’s really cool. It allows you to think about how people’s brains work in terms of what: Do you want the listener to feel when they can’t hear specific kinds of audio?\n\n \n\nKatherine Yes, and you’ve been working with Dr. Karis Shearer and, I believe, [Dr.] Deanna Fong as well, and could you speak to a little bit about that collaboration?\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s been really wonderful. I am lucky enough to have Dr. Karis Shearer as my supervisor. She has just been such an amazing, inspiring person leading me through this. I tend to focus more on the practical, and in those ways I sometimes leave the theoretical behind and I forget to ground my work in theory. And so working with Karis and Deanna has been really amazing and really important for me because it has pushed me to step back and say: Okay, I’m trying to create this practical edit, but what am I grounding my work in? Where is this coming from? Instead of just assuming that everyone understands my desire to do a feminist edit. You have to express, you know, why that’s necessary. Where does this work already exist? Where did it begin? Where am I? Where am I pulling from?\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: So in terms of understanding how to ground my work within feminist ethics of care, Deanna and Karis have been there sort of showing me the light <laugh> – and giving me readings!\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yes <laugh> I can imagine that augmenting and building upon your training in library sciences and just really bringing that theoretical richness to the technical skills that you have already. It makes me think too that the way that like redaction works in the archives and say in the print archives or maybe something is redacted. Here you are redacting through audio editing, but the important thing is that you’re keeping that audio somewhere else. Could you explain how that works? How does the audio remain while also being redacted?\n\n \n\nSarah: Yes. This is something that’s really important to me based on my work in archives, I think I may have overly expressed this actually in my talk because it’s so necessary, but transparency is key in every archive. And I now realize it’s not just necessary for the practical reasons that you would – that I generally – think of, but also for ethical reasons.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And so I have been working with digitizing audio digitizing the sound box collection, specifically the reel-to-reels at UBCO at the AMP Lab. And that has been – that is my joy. I love, love working with reel-to-reel. It’s actually been really interesting because a lot of people at this conference have been talking about sound as ephemeral. And to me it’s, it’s very physical.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s attached to this whole, to working with this machine to being so careful with these amazing tapes. And so the way that we are maintaining them is obviously we are keeping the original magnetic tape recordings, very carefully. And they’ve been archived and gently babied because they are – I call them my babies <laugh> – and then also, upon digitizing them, you have to work to a specific. There’s audio specifications – within, that’s just understood – that’s necessary within archival maintenance of digitized recordings. And so you digitize the tape, which means that you play the tape on its original on a playback machine that’s able to do that; put it through a secondary, a mix-preamp or some other secondary source, and then directly into your computer; and you digitize it at a high enough rate and specificity that it sounds almost exactly the same. And in fact, if it’s done to the highest standards, sounds exactly the same. So you can’t differentiate. And then you maintain that. That’s your master access copy, and you do not edit that copy. You save that, and it’s for no one, it <laugh> it exists solely in case of emergency. Really, and then you can make copies of that, and edit them. So what I’m playing with is not the original.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right, okay.\n\n \n\nSarah: For its own safety. <Laughter> And then you can also save those. Your copied files as lower quality so that you can make them more accessible. Because not everyone has the ability to play wav files.\n\n \n\nKatherine: That makes sense. You have original or the preservation copy and then you’re making the edits on the digital files. I also love what you said about sound as being very, very physical, tangible and just, you know, the way that you described working with these recordings. I think as a last question or reflection. We’ve talked… We’ve moved closer and closer to the sound through our conversation, and I’m wondering if you could speak to the difference between for you, for the difference between editing and leaving silence versus editing and leaving some suggestion of sound, whether that’s visual – looking at the sound waves – or audible in what we’re listening to.\n\n \n\nSarah: I love having both available. I love being able to look at the wave forms and listen to the audio at the same time. They’re visually beautiful and that’s a big part of it, but also it’s sort of, it’s sort of lets you know what to expect, like what’s coming up when you’re looking at the waveform and playing the sound. At the same time. I personally prefer to have ambient sound occurring during the silences, during the redactions, if you want to call them that. I think that it is more implicative of like, the world is still continuing, we’re holding space for this to happen, and just because you can’t hear the words doesn’t mean that the conversation has stopped.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: So I think that’s really important. I also showed a clip in which I just had the, I had the sound removed, all of the vocals removed. And because the tape that I used didn’t have a lot of ambient noise, it was actually really beautifully recorded. It ended up being essentially silent, in the, in the background of that. But for a lot of archives, if you are listening to tapes that were recorded in loud areas or there’s a lot of background noise, if you do remove the vocals, you’re still going to have all of this delicious background sound. So it’s really as with everything each, each object is, is so unique.\n\n \n\nKatherine: So how do you remove the vocals? What tool do you use?\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s so easy. It’s actually, it’s so – Audacity’s most recent version, which is 3.1.3, and I use Audacity because it’s free and it’s open source software, so it’s always improving. And it’s also available to archives even that have a lot of financial constraints and staffing constraints. There’s literally a tool called Vocal Isolation and Removal, and you just high highlight, that’s it. You just highlights the part that you want. So that’s how it leaves, it leaves the background noise. That’s, Yeah. That, So what, what, what we were listening to in that that middle portion that was background or was that, That was distortion. <Laugh>. That was distortion. So in the, in the final edit that I liked the most, the way that I was able to maintain the sound of the conversation because there was so little background noise was to use a distortion element called the VO coder. And so while I still had the vocals in there, I added the VO coder, which added distortion around the vocals, kind of fuzzed them up a little, and then you remove the vocals, and so the, the sound is still there. It didn’t, I think I expressed this. I need to, I would like to do further work because what I really wanted was sort of a smoother conversation tone where you can hear it you can hear it sounds more like speech. I think I did this in my, in my discussion, but sort of like the Charlie Brown teacher.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right.\n\n \n\nSarah: That’s what I was going for…\n\n \n\nKatherine: Hearing that intonation of speech up the, the fluctuations up and down it, well, we could hear it a bit there, but it, it’s, Yeah, I can imagine then you’re even more, you’re aware that you’re not hearing something, but you’re also hearing something and you can, you’re – you’re hearing the fluctuations in the conversation, but not the conversation itself, not the content. It’s so important to know that there’s audio there – there are things to listen to – but also that you know, it’s we don’t have to have access to everything. And in fact, ethically it, it’s not right to have access to everything. And so how to be able to make audio accessible, while still respecting that, respecting the communities that the recordings are from, respecting the individuals and the voices on them, on those recordings because it, it so easily the recordings could just get shelved away and they’re then never listened to. So trying to balance that it’s really exciting that you’re, you’re doing this work. When we know that something’s there, it’s also, it’s tempting to want to hear it. And so it, I think what you talked about about uncomfortableness too, it’s also this sense of even catching oneself, being like: Oh, I want to hear it! And then thinking: Well, wait – am I, am I the listener for this? And realizing that actually you’re, you’re maybe not the person. You’re not in that room, you’re not listening, you’re not privy to that conversation. But that, that sort of checking our impulse of wanting to know everything as researchers and recognizing that that is actually that can actually be problematic too.\n\n \n\nSarah: What you’re speaking to is actually a larger archival issue in terms of wanting to have everything.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And the idea of leaving space was actually something that came out of archival theory surrounding the archive, the capital ‘A’ – Archive – you know, the institution as not necessarily being a place that should have everything. And that, as opposed to maintaining collections that really belong elsewhere, what they should do is hold space and tell researchers: we don’t have that because it doesn’t belong to us. That’s not ours. And so I’ve tried to take that idea of sort of thoughtfulness and space and bring that down to the level of the personal – to the individual – and, and now to audio.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yes, I think what you’ve, what you’re working on, it is holding space in sound. And thank you for sharing this with me today here live and shortcuts live and with our listeners. So thank you so much, Sarah.\n\n \n\nSarah: Thank you, Katherine. This has been great.\n\n \n\n[Music begins]\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod [Outro]: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. A special thanks to this month’s guest, Sarah Cipes. Thanks to supervising producer Kate Moffatt, sound designer Miranda Eastwood, and transcriber Kelly Cubbon. ShortCuts is written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n \n\n[Music ends]"],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9671","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4 Trailer, Welcome to Season 4!, 19 September 2022, Moffatt, Eastwood, McGregor, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-4/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Kate Moffatt","Hannah McGregor","Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Kate Moffatt","Hannah McGregor","Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/aa749423-c429-48b9-8aaf-c150b5c0a869/audio/a0e73918-a5b1-4e35-aa6e-320e73a87208/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:03:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"3,484,987 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-4/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-09-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897345,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hello and welcome to another season of The SpokenWeb Podcast! We’re back with a new line-up of exciting episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network. The SpokenWeb Podcast asks, “What does literature sound like? What stories do we hear when we listen to the archive?” In this season, we have episodes that dive into the lives of archival objects—university poetry events—what it means to read an audiobook—and so much more. This season has something for everyone from lovers of literature and history to sound studies scholars, so come and join us as we continue listening to literature and the archives.\n\nWe would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n00:00\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does The SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? [Start Music: Acoustic Strings] In our third season, we revisited Myra Bloom’s episode about Elizabeth Smart from Season 1—\n \n\n00:11\tMyra Bloom, S3E1 “Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’”\tIt suddenly occurred to me that I actually never heard her voice. (Underlaid Archival Audio of Elizabeth Smart: “I thought, if it was agreeable to you, that I’d read a chapter from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.”\n \n\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\t— heard the voices of poets and writers across Canada —\n \n\n00:21\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, in S3E10 “‘starry and full of glory’: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam”:\n \n\n…stars, stars, stars! [Repeats, fading out]\n \n\n00:23\tInterview Excerpt, S3E2 “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”:\tIs it the glimpse of mortality that makes you feel a bit differently about it?\nWell, it’s quite literally seeing your friends die.\n\n \n\n00:29\tFaith Paré, S3E5 “The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic”:\tThis is not the poem I wanted / It is the poem I could.\n \n\n00:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd thought about how we listen.\n \n\n00:36\tStéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do we discuss the sounds of human beings\n \n\n00:38\tHannah McGregor:\tWe asked, what does scholarship sound like? and revisited last year’s virtual SpokenWeb Symposium—\n \n\n00:46\tStéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do we listen virtually?\n \n\n00:48\tMathieu Aubin, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do you listen virtually to a conference about listening?\n00:52\tHannah McGregor:\t—and the 1983 Women and Words conference held in Vancouver.\n \n\n00:56\tArchival Audio from S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:\t“[…]our subject this morning is women facing traditional criticism, criticizing criticism.” (Clip continues under Hannah and resurfaces, underlaid with the next clips)\n \n\n01:01\tHannah McGregor:\tWe explored how collaboration and conversation are central to the research and work that we do.\n \n\n01:07\tKelly Cubbon, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:\tKelly: Well, the process of transcription sounds like collaboration, like a conversation\n \n\n01:12\tKatherine McLeod, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:\n \n\nIt is a process that invites access to content through multiple voices and multiple senses.\n01:18\tKate Moffatt, S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:\t[Warped Archival Clip Plays With Some Words Audible] And it’s funny, cuz you can almost hear it. Like you can almost hear something being said.\n \n\n01:26\tHannah McGregor:\tThis past season took us to new places and spaces, from the plains of Northern Alberta–\n \n\n01:32\tMichelle, S3E3 “Forced Migration”:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] But the bull dragged the man, and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.\n \n\n01:37\tHannah McGregor:\t–back to the 80s, to the student-run campus radio shows of the CKUA network.\n \n\n01:44\tTerri Wynnyk, S3E8 “Academics on Air”:\n \n\nWe once found a boa constrictor that had escaped. Because up above us was all sorts of science labs and buildings and rabbits and cockroaches […]\n01:52\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and I’ve been the host of the SpokenWeb Podcast since its inception. But I’m stepping out of this role for the next year, and I have the pleasure of passing the mic to this season’s host: Katherine Mcleod.\n \n\n02:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThank you Hannah! [Music Swells to Atmospheric Chords] My name is Katherine McLeod, and I am so excited to host this new season of the SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll recognize my voice from ShortCuts – our deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives that you can find right here on the same podcast feed.\n \n\nThis season on the podcast, we have a line-up of episodes that we can’t wait to share: we’re going to hear more about the “Drum Codes” we listened to in Season 2; we’ll be thinking about audiobooks as a literary medium: what is it like to read an audiobook? What is it like to teach with an audiobook in the classroom?\n\n \n\nWe’ll be re-listening to university poetry events, diving into the archives to converse with the archival objects themselves. We’re going to experience environmental sound with an episode on fire and ecopoetics; and we’ll be thinking about literary environmental sound, and even exploring the soundscapes of libraries. Whether you’re a lover of literature or a sound studies scholar, this podcast has something to share with you. Subscribe and join us for Season Four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, coming to your podcast feeds on October 3rd."],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9984","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.4, Sonic Passages, 17 January 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/db88c6e3-2a5c-41d6-a316-c3e74f9165c7/audio/aabfa4af-a82c-4737-b0b4-e3c8388c83f3/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-4-sonic-passages.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:11:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,928,423 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Full Episode_Shortcuts 3.4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-01-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nAudio in this episode is from a 1970 recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal at the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, and from a 2019 interview with Marlatt conducted by Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart and that aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast’s sister podcast, Soundbox Signals, and re-aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast. \\n\\nListen to the full recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal (1970): https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daphne-marlatt-at-sgwu-1970/.\\n\\nListen to the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/.\\n\\nListen to the previous ShortCuts on Marlatt, “Then and Now” mentioned in this episode: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\n“Daphne Marlatt & Diane Wakoski: Performing the SpokenWeb Archive.” SpokenWeb. Concordia University, 21 November 2014,  https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/oral-literary-history/daphne-marlatt-diane-wakoski-performing-the-spokenweb-archive/.\\n\\nMarlatt, Daphne. “Afterword: Immediacies of Writing.” Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt. Ed. Susan Knutson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. \\n\\n— “Bird of Passage.” Origin, vol. 3, no. 16, Cid Corman, Jan. 1970, pp. 1–68, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28042112.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Daphne Marlatt reading ‘Lagoon’.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 28 November, 2019, https://spokenweb.ca/daphne-marlatt-reading-lagoon/.\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt, leaf leaf/s, then and now.” The AMP Lab. UBC-Okanagan, 17 November 2019, https://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/17/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt-leaf-leaf-s-then-and-now/.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549809528833,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts episode responds to poet Daphne Marlatt’s conversation with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart in the recent SpokenWeb Podcast episode “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive.” By listening to audio from Marlatt’s previous archival performances, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod considers how we remember feelings attached to reading a poem out loud. What does it feel like to hear a recording of your own voice? Are you reminded of how you were feeling while speaking, and can the archive ever hold the memory of those feelings?\n\n*\n\n“Sometimes, unknowingly, one writes a few lines that continue to\nreverberate as some kind of pointer for future years of writing.”\n— Daphne Marlatt, “Afterword” (Rivering)\n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. without further ado. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts. In this ShortCuts, our listening will be inspired by the previous full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That means we’ll be drawing our inspiration from Daphne Marlatt’s conversation with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart in the recent episode “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive.” They talk with Marlatt about poetry readings and about her performance with the archive in a poetry reading that had taken place the night before the interview — in 2019. In that reading, Marlatt had read alongside recordings of her past self — a recording from 1969.\n \n\n02:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis ShortCuts is inspired by the question of what it feels like to hear a recording of your past self – and asks: how can an archive contain traces of what the self – the body – behind the voice was feeling? In the case of Marlatt, she is a poet who has graciously accepted the invitation by SpokenWeb to listen to recordings of her past self and past voice more than once. I was there in the audience at a previous one. That was a reading that Marlatt gave in 2014 in Montreal. She read along with a recording of her reading in Montreal in 1970. What strikes me in listening back to that 1970 recording after hearing Marlatt’s conversation with Shearer and Butchart on the podcast is the extent to which a recording captures a person in a moment in time in their body. I’m thinking here of the difference between what she thought her voice sounded like in that recording and what she could remember feeling. I had listened to that 1970 recording for a previous ShortCuts with my listening attuned to place — check the show notes for Then and Now — but this time I was listening to that 1970 recording with my attention attuned to where the body was present in this recording. I noticed how she introduces the poem “Bird of Passage.” What she says before reading “Bird of Passage” is quite short but it contains so much, both said and unsaid.\n \n\n03:41\tKatherine McLeod:\tShe says, this is a poem that I wrote.\n \n\n03:44\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tThis is a poem that I wrote when I was about… oh I don’t know, seven or eight months pregnant… [Pause] …Bird of Passage. I wrote it in Vancouver… spring time again…. Bird of Passage.\n \n\n04:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere, was Marlatt in 1970 saying that she had written this poem ‘Bird of Passage’ while she was pregnant. That is significant in and of itself when thinking of the body but now I was hearing it with the full resonance of her recent conversation with Shearer and Buchart from the podcast and what Marlatt says when the date of the recording, July 1969, is mentioned…\n \n\n04:30\tAudio Recording, Daphne Marlatt, “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”, 2019:\tInteresting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I’d had when I wrote those poems. What was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading – there was so much – my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being, and I think it’s because of the giving birth experience…\n \n\n05:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tHer comment is about a memory of how the body had felt when she was writing those poems. And her comment is also about how she remembers feeling in her body when she was reading those poems out loud. I wonder, then, how would it have felt to read “Bird of Passage” out loud to an audience in 1970. Only she will know that. The archive cannot answer that question. But what we can hear in the archive is the sound of the poem and how it resonates now in relation to Marlatt’s writing. Listen to the sound of passage vibrating in this poem, “Bird of Passage,” not only in the title but in phrases like this one:\n \n\n05:56\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\t[Reading “Bird of Passage”] “…eave swallows cliff, passerine, which I thought meant passing as passenger sails, through an isthmus, time does not constrict…”\n \n\n06:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is as though the poem is moving towards what passage comes to mean in Marlatt’s poems — passage, passing, a moving towards, language as the medium of passage, a passage between…\n \n\n06:19\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tI cannot grasp your sound, breath, stone, you turn dumb, and will not speak, of what sticks at, feathers, uneasy nest, unease, a restlessness, tonight, drips in, passing in return, perhaps light airs, we begin again…\n \n\n06:43\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat is how she ends the poem, and we’re about to listen to it from the beginning in its entirety together, but I’ve played these clips from it in advance to attune ourselves to the poem. It is a poem that one could pass over while listening to the reading, but her brief introductory words made it stand out especially because I was listening with the question of: how can we hear feelings of embodiment in the recording of this reading? Recently, in the afterward to Rivering, Marlatt has written this observation — quote: “Sometimes, unknowingly, one writes a few lines that continue to reverberate as some kind of pointer for future years of writing.” Here is Marlatt reading “Bird of Passage” in 1970. I invite you to hear the resonances of moving forward, the sound of her voice as passage, surging towards her future poems, her “future years of writing” …\n \n\n07:50\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tThis is a poem that I wrote when I was about – I don’t know –seven or eight months pregnant. “Bird of Passage” I wrote it in Vancouver, springtime again. Bird of Passage. [Reading poem, transcribed as heard – see Show Notes for a link to the poem as published.] Thaw begins tonight, Eaves drip incessant strain rings, wind bell spring brought forward out of time. This bird, dive bird, nestle, why stop nested under the eave of flesh or strong wet bird’s wings. Turned as I am against your anonymous hip, in sleep some cliff must be negotiated. Swallow. Eave swallows cliff passerine, which I thought meant passing as passenger sails through an isthmus, time does not constrict. Helpless, constriction in my throat seeing the picture of oil slick bird, will die. Fixed, its feathers mark coming out of yoke, this black stuff. Fix of its own birth. So a month’s accumulation of tears into icicles, vesicles, leaves, roots. Incessant release can be nothing more than alone, urine past, warm, squat by the window’s cold. Only to lie, quote, alone. Not ceasing its skim in serous medium light as air to us gravity-bound. Head over heels or wing bones supplied to test its limit extent, passage, passing, passenger. Temporary nest high in the air. Hirundinidae, hirondelle in graceful flight and regular migration. Fathered by a bird too sought definition for its passage, bird of sea, bird of passage or, quote, a rolling stone. Jumps in the  womb for joy. A recognition, cognition, knowing whence sound came a rhythm per-vades rocking waves under the face of his, fight to be over the din. We are all born in risk, mute, cliff. I cannot grasp your sound, breath, stone. You turn dumb and will not speak of what sticks at feathering. An uneasy nest, unease, a restless. Tonight, drips in passing in return, perhaps light airs. We begin, again.\n \n\n10:57\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Song] ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Check SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds of these recordings. Thank you for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Song]\n "],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9985","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.5, The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough, 21 February 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/84e938cc-2b23-4f14-b878-f316ed90368b/audio/a1afdd87-27b6-41a9-b7c9-3b8355079a60/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-5.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:20:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"19,369,108 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.5\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-02-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Archival audio in this episode is excerpted from a recording of The Words and Music Show on November 20, 2016 (Casa del Popolo, Montreal). \\n\\nThe performers that night were Eve Nixen, Kaie Kellough, Tawhida Tanya Evanson’s Zenship [Tawhaida Tanya Evanson (voice); Mark Haynes (bass); Ziya Tabassian (percussion); Caulder Nash (keyboards), with guest performance by Nina Segalowitz (Inuit throat singing)], Paul Dutton, and pianist Stefan Christoff.\\n\\nSHOW NOTES\\n\\nKellough, Kaie.\\nMagnetic Equator\\n. McClelland and Stewart, 2020. \\n\\n—“Rough Craft: Notes on the creation of the audio / visual / textual work Small Stones.”\\nSPOKENWEBLOG,\\n22 May, 2021,\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/rough-craft-notes-on-the-creation-of-the-audio-visual-textual-work-small-stones/\\n.\\n\\n“The Show Goes On.” Producer Jason Camlot.\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 7 Feb 2022.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549810577408,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["On ShortCuts this month, producer Katherine McLeod talks with poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough about a memorable recording from The Words & Music Show.  \n\nWhat are we listening to? Kellough unpacks what we are listening to — which turns out to be a highly technical, performative, and polyphonic sonic object, along with it being an early version of a passage from his Griffin Prize-winning book of poetry,\nMagnetic Equator\n. \n\nListen to this ShortCuts for the story behind one archival recording, and what this story reveals about how we remember the feelings infused within live performance. \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor, and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod, for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SpokenWeb blog [Sound Effect: Wind Chime]. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you are a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings and there is a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening — let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine your audio by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Now, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:29\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, where we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors] from SpokenWeb’s audio collections. On this episode, we’ll be listening to an audio clip from a performance by Griffin poetry prize-winning poet, Kaie Kellough. It’s a recording of him reading at The Words & Music Show in Montreal, back in November, 2016. You may even remember this clip. It was featured previously on ShortCuts. It’s a memorable recording in which Kellough’s introduction to a poem becomes the poem. I thought I’d return to this clip, partly as a response to the most recent full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast — and do check that out if you haven’t already — and also because I’ve always wanted to ask Kellough about that performance. What are we listening to? And what does it feel like for him to listen to that recording? So let’s travel back in time to the Words & Music Show at Casa Del Popolo in 2016. Kaie Kellough is on stage and he is thanking host Ian Ferrier for the introduction and he’s about to start his set. We’ll hear a recording of that first. And then we’ll jump into my recent conversation on Zoom with Kaie Kellough. We started that conversation by listening to the same recording. Or, as I said to him, I’ll play this very short clip and we’ll listen to it together…\n \n\n02:59\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tWe we’ll play the very short clip and we can listen to it together.\n \n\n03:02\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tSounds good.\n \n\n03:03\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tAnd so let me just share this.\n \n\n03:06\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough, Words & Music Show, 2016:\tHello, thanks Ian, for that introduction. And… thanks to all of the other artists tonight… It’s been a very nice night. I’mmmmm going to present something to you, for you, that is… somewhat narrative, I guess… but it isn’t related to my novel. It’s some other narratives and… the narratives are related to adolescence… which is a peculiar time in life…. and I think that they’re relevant nowadays because [Recorded speech begins overlapping, legible words will appear in square brackets] they’re related to adolescence in a particular place in time…in Alberta behind in the [I want to forget] 1980s [high school fever forever] in the moment of [black hair, teens from the] heavy evangelical who drank themselves to activity extreme conservatism [trying to prove themselves that they exist] that they, some of the challenge is that arise growing up [I want to forget my stupid conviction] and trying to live oneself in a climate like that, which seems to be a climate that had to reemerging in spite of that [amber alcohol, all of the DNA] all of the [seeped down centuries of slavery] all of the appearances to the contrary that had appeared [in a far flung] in the past [suburb of empire]. The idea [that slum above] born yesterday was finished [or that born yesterday] was finished [or a bubble] or [a burden was seat and, and done suddenly a wave [a froth that was archived by teenage brains] a wave of [autobiography of conservatism] of conservatism has, has has [crashed] crashed [Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the jaws of life rend and pry it open] suddenly a wa— [like a tuna can] suddenly a [everybody is unconscious] suddenly a wave [is bleeding] has crashed…\n \n\n05:22\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tThat was recorded at The Words and Music Show back in 2016. And I’m wondering, what, what are we listening to there? What are we hearing?\n \n\n05:34\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tWow. 2016! I didn’t realize it was that long ago. Actually, what you’re listening to is a passage from the manuscript of Magnetic Equator. I mean, that was a very, very, very early iteration of that. And it was – one of the themes that became a sort of major thread in the book, which was writing about adolescence in Western Canada in the 80s and 90s. But what I was trying to do in the performance was – you know, in live vocal performance one of the things that is a huge concern is that you only have one voice at a time, right. So how do you multiply that? How do you get to have maybe two voices or three voices at a time, or half a voice? How does that work? So you can multiply or divide voice. And that instantly makes, I think, the sonic field and the vocal field a little bit richer. And then if you can overlap them or layer them, or have them speak across one another — and sometimes sync-up and sometimes diverge — then it becomes not just multiple voices but it becomes an interplay among multiple voices, a sort of directed movement. So one problem was, how do you get around having just one voice in performance? And then what happens when you have multiple voices? What do you do with them? Then another other concern is that, sometimes in live oral performance, the poet, or the presenter plays these dual roles and sort of toggles between them. There’s the role of the poet — the, how can I put this? The MC, the master of ceremonies where you, you say, “okay, so now this next poem that I’m going to present is about”….and, and it’s you, right? The human being. You crack a couple of jokes, you present the poem, or you say something important about it, and then you present the poem. But when you read the poem, you shift into another persona. That’s the performer. That kind of movement back and forth — I’ve always liked to kind of try to subvert that and not to emphasize that too much, or find ways of blending it. So the introduction becomes the poem, or the introduction, in this case, winds up entering into dialogue with the poem. The voice that was the poem was recorded into a Zoom recorder. And then that Zoom was — so I had a bunch of electronics in front of me at the time. So there’s a visual part of the performance that can’t be seen in that intro clip.\n \n\n08:15\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd so it’s sort of the playing up the part of sort of the befuddled button, electronic button tweaker, right? Trying to say something, meanwhile, being distracted by the machine and your voice gets overtaken by the machine, but also –so there’s my voice going through a clean microphone. And then there’s a second voice which been recorded into a Zoom and that’s being played through — actually, no, there are three voices. So there’s my voice, introducing the poem. There’s a second voice that’s going through a mixer and out to the house, and that’s a recorded voice. And then there’s a third recorded voice that’s going back into an effects pedal and then out. So there can always – from the recording there can always be a clean channel and a channel that is run through effects. And I was running it through this really the interesting analog delay pedal that doesn’t sound like your usual delay, but it sort of breaks up and fragments the source sound.[Recorded audio of fragmented sound effect plays in the background] So eventually the voice started to – it would sound like tape delay, like scribing and fragmenting and breaking. [Fragmented Voice: “Wandering out of time / This ship built by oil money / this fort for raw tobacco]\n \n\n09:42\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tSo potentially the voice would start to sound like tape delay, like squiggling and fragmenting and breaking up. But yeah, so there could potentially be three voices, mine, the clean recorded, and the broken.\n \n\n09:48\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tAnd I guess the fact that Ian Ferrier recorded every Words and Music Show, then we have this version, all three voices are captured in Ian’s recording in an interesting way that then –.\n \n\n10:03\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYes.\n \n\n10:03\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\t– it’s like we have one iteration of it, but it would never have been performed the same way twice.\n \n\n10:10\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tThere was another thing — I remember this performance and what I was thinking about was — was also having the introduction to the poem, be sort of halting and… failing to progress fluidly. I wanted to have the work come up under that. So to give the impression that I didn’t know exactly what I might be doing and then have the poem take over in a moment of uncertainty. But yeah, thanks to Ian for recording that stuff, because it was an experiment. I’d been playing with it at home and we decided — I got the chance to experiment— I think that might have been a bill that Paul Dutton was on too.\n \n\n10:52\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tTo imagine then hearing that alongside one of Paul Dutton’s performances too. That adds even more. I think too thinking about when – what you talked about the, almost like the hesitant introduction, it felt like that worked so well too with the poem, because it felt like of thinking back —ok back to adolescence, and hesitating kind of feeling like do I wanna go back or do, and so it sort of felt like that hesitancy was also connected to a bit of the emotional distance from that time too, and really, really hearing that process. It really, yeah – it feels like we’re listening to a process unfolding in the way that the introduction moves into the poem. It feels like a very important part of the process of how the poem evolved eventually to become what it is on the page.\n \n\n11:47\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah. No, the poem changed a lot between that iteration into 2016, and what was later, what was the edited version that was wound up being published. The one that was performed in 2016 — I can definitely say that the poem had probably been written within weeks of that performance. I was trying to — I was trying to, trying to play with the idea that…the sense that maybe the person who was presenting the poems was not fully competent. Their confidence was wavering. And those are not things that you’re supposed to perform, right. Once you get up in the moment of performance, it’s supposed to be pure expertise and excellence. And difficulty, hesitancy — those things are not supposed to be there. Those are supposed to be –you’re supposed to gloss those over with a sense of know-how and knowing what to do in the moment. And so how do you approach a performance and get around the need for constant expertise throughout? Because those other experiences are part of the experience of performing. Even if you don’t perform them, you feel them while you’re performing. You feel hesitant, your brain is racing. You’re not sure what to say next. You don’t necessarily always feel totally capable when you go up there to perform. So how do you emphasize that in a way that works within the context of the performance?\n \n\n13:35\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tHearing this now in the archive, how does this recording sit for you in time?\n \n\n13:40\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah, it’s interesting because it does sit – I mean, it does sit as something that is — it’s like a board tap from a live event. So there’s a raw quality to it. If this were made in a studio, it would’ve been a different piece because it would’ve been created for audio. Right. It would’ve been created exclusively as an audio piece and there would’ve been really limited emphasis on the visual aspect of performance and that communication and with an audience. It would’ve been elaborate in a different way as a sonic object. So, I mean, that does cross my mind, and that’s not necessarily a negative thing. What I mean by that is that just kind of establishes the further context for what it was.\n \n\n14:29\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd that was one of the nice things about, about Wired on Words. If you wanted, you could accept Ian’s invitation to go to the show and you could repeat the same work that you repeated two months before that. And three months before that and six months before that. I accepted a lot of Ian’s invitations, and I always tried to take them as opportunities to attempt something slightly different. And so, I might have repeated myself sometimes, but I was really, really trying to move away from that. And that helped me because there was a thought that I could consistently develop new work and it didn’t have to be perfect and flawless to go out to be presented to the public, but it could be developed and developing towards something, and, in the moment of performance, if I could communicate that well enough people would grasp that. That was also — it also felt like it was the context of the show. There was a looseness to it that kind of allowed for that. It was –I mean, it was a show. So you were presenting somewhat finished works to the public, but the thing about it was that there’s something very casual about it too.\n \n\n15:59\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tI feel that The Words and Music Show still feels that way, and it’s amazing to continue having that spirit through — such a long — through over 20 years of having the show.\n \n\n16:11\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah, especially thinking about it now. I mean we’re in the fourth or fifth wave the pandemic and everything shut down again. The literary world has, and the world of literature and performance has kind of migrated online, with varying degrees of success. I don’t think — like the world of performance — I mean, it’s difficult to feel any inspiration toward performance when you’re sitting in your living room — right? [Laugher] It just seems so ridiculous. And, so to think back on the freedom to just roll out to a venue close by home and to be able to perform and to benefit from what you were talking about earlier about — I mean, that’s what we don’t benefit from with online events, the being able to mill about and talk with people after the event. Like when with an online event, you’re there for the event.\n \n\n17:14\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tYeah.\n \n\n17:15\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd there may be some back and forth in the comments or in the chat, but generally you’re there for the event and with live events, you were partly there for the event, but then there was all of the other stuff that went on in between. In between, in between performances, in between sets, like if I would bring a bunch of gear there, like pedals and synths and stuff like that, other musicians would come up on stage and we would chat about the equipment and about the gear. And, “Oh, what can this panel in your synth do? How did you use this pedal? Oh, I have one that does this” And so on. And so there would also be some casual, impromptu learning that would take place. Someone might ask you if you’ve ever used one of your pieces of equipment in such and such a way, and might show you how to do something with it. So that possibility too was really very much a part of those, those. Or, how did you get that sound, you know? And then you could share information about that. And that learning was a big part of those events too\n \n\n18:22\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tHmm. Yeah, we’re definitely missing it. [Sigh] Well, I think that’s a beautiful note to end on. I want to thank you. Thank you so much, Kaie, for joining me and talking about this clip from Words and Music Show and what we’re listening to.\n \n\n18:40\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tOh, thanks. Thanks for having me. And thanks for asking me and reminding me of the clip. You asked me [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it and it’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself and to – I didn’t realize it was as far back as 2016, because it feels a lot sooner. I remember what I was thinking about. I remember what my poetry, my poetic preoccupations were at the time. I remember how far that poem came because it was young and sentimental when I wrote it, and then it was not like that by the time it was published. It took on a different sort of personality by the time it was published. But yeah, I remember everything that I was thinking about. I remember how excited I was about it. Yeah. It’s just a — so thank you.\n \n\n19:34\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tThank you so much.\n \n\n19:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. My guest this month was poet Kaie Kellough. ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]"],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9987","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.7, Moving, Still, 18 April 2022, McLeod "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/023b5797-abed-48ca-ba69-1868d7cacb3c/audio/0fb8f4d8-ae79-48dd-b220-44cfbb8e03b1/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-7.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:17:17\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"16,663,659 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-04-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nPhyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.\\n\\nShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nCollis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549814771712,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, ShortCuts returns to a recording of Phyllis Webb in order to re-listen through this season’s question of how the archive remembers. What is held in the ‘room’ of the recording, and how does that differ from the room where reading took place? Or from the room of personal memory? What exceeds those rooms? And what does it feel like to hear their contours? Join producer Katherine McLeod as she reflects upon these questions while listening to a 1966 recording of Phyllis Webb reading from Naked Poems.\n\n00:09\nShortCuts Theme Music:\n[Piano Overlaid with Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\nHannah McGregor:\nWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nepisode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, so if you love what you hear make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the Spoken Web Project, think about joining Katherine on shortcuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloging recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nTheme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n\n01:28\nKatherine McLeod:\nWelcome to ShortCuts, a monthly minisode in which we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors] from the Spoken Web archives. This month it is April, the month of poetry. The audio that we’ll be listening to is a poem by Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. It is in fact, a series of poems from\nNaked Poems\n, poems that open up space and leave room for the listener to listen, to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. The space is audible in her reading of the poems, and it is visible on the page, as Webb comments on when she introduces\nNaked Poems\nto her Montreal audience in 1966.\n\n02:15\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nI want to move on now to my latest book, which is called Naked Poems, in which one of your local critics – or at least he wrote for the\nMontreal Star\nthis particular point – exclaimed of the price because there are so few words in the book. [Audience Laughter] It’s $2.25. [Audience Laughter] These poems are very small and therefore very expensive [Audience Laughter] and – came at a bitter price, I may say. To me. They came quite as a surprise and I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them the first 14 or so. I thought, my goodness, what are these little things doing here? And I couldn’t quite take them seriously. And then I began to see the order that really was intrinsic in them and realized that here was something almost a new form for me to work on. And it’s very bare, naked, undecorated. And I wanted to get rid of all my affectations. And so I decided to to write, oh a couple hundred of them. And I wrote about a hundred and then got hung up on a technical problem and finally reduced them to, I dunno, 40 or so that are in this book. So this is a distillation, let’s say. [Pages Turning] I’m going to read the first 14, which comprised a total poem. In the sense the whole book is a poem. And then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice and your patience will hold out.\n\n04:31\nKatherine McLeod:\nIn listening to how Phyllis Webb tells her audience about Naked Poems we hear what it would’ve been like to be there in the room. We hear the audience and their laughter. The feeling as though she is holding the pages of Naked Poems in her hands, as she is telling us about them. We can almost feel the touch of the page, the small distilled poems, how they came to her at a bitter price. What does she mean by that? Now, if all of this is sounding somewhat familiar it’s because the clips that I’m playing are from recordings of Webb reading Naked Poems that were the focus of April’s ShortCuts last season. We are returning to this recording for a number of reasons, but most of all as a remembrance of Webb. Last year in April, I created the ShortCuts based on the Webb recording as a gift for her. April was her birthday month and I imagined it reaching her ears on the West Coast. In November 2021 Webb passed away at a glorious old age and even with such a full long life, it still felt like such a loss. This season of ShortCuts, there has been an ongoing theme of listening to remember. And if you listen back through each episode, you’ll hear it developing. I produce each episode in the month it is released. And so that development was not planned at the outset. Each episode has been a way to dive deeper and deeper into one of the stories told in that first episode, “What the Archive Remembers”. In that, I talk about an interaction at a conference in which someone told me that they’d really felt the weight and impact of hearing bp nichol’s voice in a recording that I had played. What strikes me now is that we are in a position in which we have vast amounts of recorded materials of poets, and that those recordings are perhaps more accessible then they have ever been before. That’s thanks to the internet, but also thanks to large scale audio digitization projects such as SpokenWeb, among others. What I’m getting at here is that we’ve had recordings of poets voices for a long time now, but have we ever had them so readily available and with a record of their voice from throughout their career, throughout their lives? It is with this in mind that I invite all of us to return back to that recording of Phyllis Webb, reading in Montreal in 1966. And you’ll hear my voice from last year, commenting on that audio followed by my voice now at the end.\n\n07:22\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nAnd then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice [Pages Flipping] and your patience were hold out.\n\n07:29\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nThe reading was recorded in 1966 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia. At that reading, the second reader was Gwendolyn MacEwen. Imagine hearing Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn McEwen reading in person on the same night. MacEwen would’ve been sitting in the audience, listening to Webb read. Here is Webb reading “Suite I” and “Suite II” from Naked Poems.\n07:58\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n[Webb Reading] “Suite I” Moving to establish distance between our houses. It seems I welcome you in. Your mouth blesses me all over. There is room. And here. And here. And here. And over. And over. Your. Mouth. Tonight, quietness in me and the room. I am enclosed by a thought and some walls. The bruise. Again, you have left your mark. All we have. Skin shuttered secretly. [Page Turning] Flies. Tonight in this room, two flies on the ceiling are making love quietly or so it seems down here. [Audience Laughter]. Your blouse. I people this room with things, a chair, a lamp, a fly. Two books by Mary Ann Moore. I have thrown my gloves on the floor. Was it only last night? You took with so much gentleness, my dark. Sweet tooth. While you were away, I held you like this in my mind. It is a good mind that can embody perfection with exactitude. The sun comes through plum curtains. I said, the sun is gold in your eyes. It isn’t the sun. You said. [Page Turning] On the floor, your blouse. The plum light falls more golden, going down. Tonight, quietness in the room. We knew. [Page Turning] Then you must go. I sat cross-legged on the bed. There is no room for self pity, I said. I lied. In the gold darkening light you dressed. I hid my face in my hair. The room that held you is still here. [Page Turning] You brought me clarity. Gift after gift I wear. Poems naked. In the sunlight. On the floor. [Page Turning]\n\n11:31\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sun beam shining through the air. We see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room. We feel the air thick with eros, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire to be contained within the archives of this reading series?\n\n12:04\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nWhile you were away. I held you like this in my mind.\n12:10\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe hear this holding. The quietness of each page.\n12:14\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nQuietness in the room. We knew. [Page Turning].\n12:19\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe hear the turning of the page. The room.\n12:23\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nThe room that held you is still here.\n12:27\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe are listening to desire in the making every time we press play on this recording, as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem, the room of the reading, the voice moving –\n\n12:41\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n[Ambient Room Sounds].\n12:41\nKatherine McLeod:\n– I hear how in last year’s ShortCuts, I was so interested in that space of the room and what it could hold. I hear that now as speaking to what I was exploring of ShortCuts, as a method of feminist placemaking. A room, an audible place in which to hear women’s voices from the archives. For them to take up sonic space and for us to hear what feelings are made through those sounds. I was interested in and how that related to my role as producer curating this space. How much does one hold up voices by framing them or does one simply press play? One tries (or rather I try) to strike the right balance between supporting the voice with care in how it is introduced, why that voice has been pulled out of the archives, and then letting the listener and the voice embark on their own dance. That is how last year I was hearing the line…\n\n13:53\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nThe room that held you is still here.\n13:57\nKatherine McLeod:\nThis year, I still hear it that way but I also hear the room as a precursor to the room that was far from Webb in 1966, but would be the room in which I met her when I visited her on Salt Spring Island in 2017. I think of that room because I wish I could have visited her once more again. And yet I’m also grateful for that time in which I was there. That room in a senior’s care facility was her room. It was her home. In that room of her own we talked about the 1960s. We sat amid her paintings. Her art was holding us in that room, along with the warmth of her smile and generosity. I thought to myself, this is a woman who knows how to live. I say that in the present tense, because it feels like she is still living. The room that held you is still here. And it is still here. We are still listening. What a word still. It implies a pause in motion, and yet at the same time, it implies a persistence. Still moving. Moving. That is what I called ShortCuts last year. Phyllis Webb is still moving. I say that thinking of these words that I wrote at the end of a chapter about Webb in [the book]\nMoving Archives\n, and they feel like some of the only words that can wrap up, that can hold together an episode that does not want to end.\n\n15:42\nKatherine McLeod\n[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] [Reading out loud from the book\nMoving Archives\n] Only Phyllis Webb inhabits the place where her voice dwells. A reminder of this appeared to me by chance while typing these lines. When I noticed that Stephen Collis had posted a photo to Twitter with the caption “Phyllis Webb’s hands”. The camera looks down at an angle at Webb holding her entire body of poetic work\nPeacock Blue: The Collected Poems\n. The book lies open, the table of contents on her lap, a tray of olives and brie sit next to her, ready to be consumed throughout what promises to be a long conversation with Collis about poetry. [Music Pauses] Webbs right hand is held up, long fingers spread wide and flexed as though she is about to turn the page. Quietly, she is moving. [Music Restarts] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. It was recorded in the city of Montreal or what is known as Tiohtià:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Judith Burr and Kate Moffatt and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]"],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9988","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.8, The Event, 16 May 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-event/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://the-spokenweb-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-event\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:22:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-event/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nAudio excerpted in this ShortCuts is from a recording of The Words & Music Show, online, on May 23, 2021, with readings by symposium participants Kevin McNeilly, Klara du Plessis, SpokenWeb community members Cole Mash and Erin Scott, and a featured performance by Montreal-based poet and SpokenWeb collaborator Oana Avasilichioaei.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nWatch the filmpoem “Tracking Animal (an extemporization)” by Oana Avasilichioaei.\\n\\nRead and listen to an early version of “Chambersonic (I)” published in The Capilano Review.\\n\\nRead and explore Oana Avasilichioaei’s “Living Scores” (Blackwood Gallery).\\n\\nSee FONDS (Anstruther) by Klara du Plessis and read her book Hell Light Flesh (Palimpsest).\\n\\nLearn more about The Words & Music Show by listening to “The Show Goes On: Words & Music in a Pandemic,” produced by Jason Camlot for The SpokenWeb Podcast (Feb 2022).\\n\\nLearn more about the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium by listening to “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium,” produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stephanie Ricci for The SpokenWeb Podcast (March 2022).\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549815820288,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, ShortCuts will be released on the first day of the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium. Diving into a recording that concluded last year’s symposium, producer Katherine McLeod plays excerpts from Oana Avasilichioaei’s live performance of “Chambersonic (IV)” and Klara du Plessis’s reading of “Post-Mortem of the Event.” What is the sound of this event? Listening to the recording now invites reflections on what this event sounds like: how do we hear its affect, its traces, and how it shifts in time?\n\n00:10\nHannah McGregor:\n[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Welcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nepisode, you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Music Interlude:\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nTheme Music] \n01:27\nKatherine McLeod:\nWelcome to ShortCuts. When this ShortCuts comes out, it will be in the same week of this year’s SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute. At the end of last year’s symposium called “Listening, Sound, Agency” there was an online Words & Music Show. Here is SpokenWeb’s Jason Camlot, welcoming those tuning in and explaining the relationship between this event and the symposium week that was coming to an end.\n01:58\nAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music Show, 2021:\nWell, we’re gonna get things started. I just, I wanted to say a few words before I turn things over to the host of the evening and of all Words and Music Shows – Ian Ferrier – who you just saw. I’m Jason Camlot. I’m a co-host of this show. I’ve actually been co-hosting these, or background hosting them with Ian, since March 2020, when pandemic forced us onto Zoom, out of the Casa del Popolo, which you see in the background of my screen, my fake background. This event was imagined as a celebration of that symposium, and as a way of bringing the local community in touch with some of the participants in the symposium. For me, it’s a really fun way to finish what’s been an amazing week of activity and thinking and sharing.\n02:48\nKatherine McLeod:\nAlong with SpokenWeb and Symposium poets – Kevin McNeilly, Cole Mash, Erin Scott, and Klara du Plessis who performed that night – the special guest for that show was poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei. Oana had performed live at the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium in Vancouver, along with participating in various SpokenWeb events in Montreal. In 2021, her book\nEight Track\nhad just received great acclaim and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Featuring her on that night was part of a way of making a connection between the symposium and local Montreal poets. At the symposium, I had, in fact, presented a paper with Dr. Emily Murphy about Oana’s poetry as notation. For that presentation we had been working with a recording of\nChambersonic\nthat is published digitally in visual and audio formats on the\nCapilano Review\n. But Oana’s performance of a version of\nChambersonic\non that night of the online Words & Music Show was its own version. It was performed live. And, after listening, again, to this performance by Oana, I was struck by what Klara du Plessis chooses to read, following Oana’s performance. In listening to the recording, we are hearing a listening taking place within the event. And so in this ShortCuts we’ll be listening to Oana – and then we’ll be listening to Klara – as a listening to the event. What the event sounds like, what it feels like. What are its traces left behind, and its shifts in time? Here’s Ian Ferrier introducing Oana Avasilichioaei.\n04:37\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\n…our star performer of the evening. Her work interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry-hybrids include\nEight Track\nfrom Talonbooks, which is the finalist for the Klein prize for poetry and the Governor General’s Award, and\nLiminal\nfrom Talonbooks in 2015. She’s created many performance and sound works, written a libretto for a one act opera called\nCells of Wind\nin 2020, and translated 10 books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, most recently Bertrand Laverdure’s\nThe Neptune Room\nwhich is also a finalist for the Governor General’s literary award for translation. She’s performed a number of times in our show and each time has brought amazing work. So please welcome Oana tonight. Yeah.\n05:33\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you, thank you so much, Ian. Thank you so much for having me and I’m super happy to be here. So I’m going to share two pieces. The first piece is a video piece that I made last fall, which I call a filmpoem. It’s called “Tracking Animal (an extemporization)”, and it uses some text from the long work in this – in a track called “Tracking Animal.” And in fact, it will take us back outside. I’m just going to share my screen here and play it for you.\n06:14\nKatherine McLeod:\nWhen Oana said those words, she did take us back outside. The visuals then showed her standing and walking in recognizable local Montreal spaces. She had recorded this video alone during the early times of the pandemic. You could see and feel that aloneness. The tracking of the self. It’s also quite moving that the spaces that she recorded in are spaces that many Montrealers have used to create art on their own during the pandemic — and that those spaces will soon, once again, be vibrant with arts events happening in them this summer outside. It is a beautiful piece, this video, and you can find a link to it in the show notes. The fact that she took us outside resonated with me as a listener, because I remember that when I was tuning into this show, I was listening on my balcony. I took a photo that night of my listening with my computer and Oana and the moon shining above. I sent that photo to her the next day as a form of thanks. And I look at it again now to remind myself that it was live. I stress the word live because the next piece she performed and the one that we’ll listen to was a version of\nChambersonic\n, and it was performed live.\n07:45\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThe second piece I’m going to do is actually going to be a live work. It’s new, it’s from a new body of work that I’m working on called\nChambersonic\n— the larger project. And each piece I’m doing is numbered. So this is “Chambersonic (IV)”, and it’s based on a score, “Chambersonic (I)”, that looks like this [Shows Page to Audience] , and it was a version of both the score and the sound piece that was published in\nThe Capilano Review\nin their fall issue. So, I’m going to need to change some audio settings. And then I’m going to start the piece… [Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] This, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now, this is a variant of being, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now. This is a variant of being… Let form be oral. A foundation…. [Singing] Sonority… An impossible lone sound… —netic … Recording… [Whispered] The ghost of sound. Let form be oral. A foundation… [Voices overlap] Corporeal, phonetic, fragments, re-assemblages. [Whispered] The ghost of sound…\n10:45\nKatherine McLeod:\nThis, this is a setting on music. This is. What is this? It is as though she is asking us to consider what is this this-ness — of sonority? Of an impossible lone sound? Of the ghost of sound? It is as though she is saying, I am performing now. This is the performance. This. We hear this even while knowing that there is an accompanying score. Is that too a this? She conveys an assertion of presence in the performance itself, which is why it feels so powerful to remember that it is happening live. As you are listening to this recording. How does listening now differ from me listening on my balcony under the moon to the live-stream? Where is the event now? [Audio of Oana’s Performance Begins] Let’s re-enter the sound and we’ll hear Ian Ferrier take us from Oana’s performance into Klara du Plessis’s reading that follows, and you’ll hear why I let the tape play and where Klara’s reading takes us…\n11:56\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] Voice… Of timbre… The voice. Fills the void. The activity of sound, quieter, and louder, longer, and shorter… [Overlapping voice] The activity of sound — and quieter. Higher, and lower. Longer, and short. The activity of sound, louder and quieter, higher and lower… where silence differentiates.\n13:36\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nOh, that was lovely. Yeah. So nice to hear. And I love the sung voice and the talking voice and the whisper voice and the industrial sound beneath it. That’s really just a beautiful piece. Thank you so much.\n13:51\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you. Thank you. Took me a moment to get back. [Laughs]\n13:57\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah, it took me a moment too. I’m still [Sings] louder [Laughs] right. So thank you so much for that.\n14:07\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThanks so much for having me again.\n14:09\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah. Nice to see you. Yeah, yeah. And next up we have a person who’s been working quite a bit through the symposium as well. Her name is Klara du Plessis. She’s a poet, a critic, a literary curator too. And she resides in Montreal. She’s the winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial award for her debut collection\nEkke\n, which was published with Palimpsest Press. Her second book, which was released in the fall of 2020 is\nHell Light Flesh\n, and Klara is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University researching the recent, contemporary, and experimental curation of poetry readings. Please welcome Klara du Plessis.\n14:54\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you so much for that really generous introduction, Ian. I’m still astounded by Oana’s performance and everything that came before. And so I feel like I’m still in a transitional phase, trying to get my bearings. It’s also the end of an incredible symposium week that’s been running since Tuesday night, and maybe as a result of that, I made a couple of decisions. One of them is to read new work. I’ve decided to try out some works that are in what I would call a draft and a half [Laugh]. So they’ve been lying around for a while they’re maybe six months or eight months old. But I only really edited them very lightly. I’m reading it because I feel like I kind of trust the people here and feel comfortable with a kind of tradition that Words & Music seems to have for people to try things. But the second reason that I am I’ve decided to read from this work is because I feel like it emanates from the research I’ve been doing at Concordia. And very much is a result of me reading works on archives and doing work in audio, audio and digital, both analog and digital archives. And, it’s a short, long poem. The kind of character in the poem is the event. But while I was writing it, because I was kind of thinking of postmortem and anatomy and so on, I did at some point look at that famous old Rembrandt painting of the anatomy table, which has the kind of famous, strange hand, like the hand, if you look at that painting, it’s got a hand that’s supposed to be the right hand, but it’s actually a left hand or a reverse. Um, and that kind of made its way into this poem also. So it’s called “Post-mortem of the event.” [Klara reading poem] The event lies on the table with its left hand and frontal arm dissected, sinuses and muscles, and maybe one disposable bone strumming like lines from a poem, pink inner exposeé, rationalizes the soul from vessel to enlightenment the latter so mystical, who knows how the verse becomes a multidimensional grid. Logic of the luminous skin of the other hand, intact pale rams brawn of the Cartesian Caucasian corpse. The event opened undocumented archive over the table, displayed, displayed, played, and atomically laid out to rest resist laboratory pages white as coats. Only thing is that the left hand is not the left, but the right, but not the right hand, but a second right hand, multifarious body mirroring itself in hands in hand rippling along its definitions of progress, usage and control. On the one hand, and on the other hand as wingspan on the one hand and on the one hand or on the other hand, and on the other hand, the archive of hands fans out fingers replicating selves, look, really look at this artwork. So strange armoured in mourning like the night…\n18:49\nKatherine McLeod:\nThe poem that Klara is reading from will be part of a forthcoming book in 2024.\nPost-mortem of the Event\nis, in fact, the working title of that collection. Oana’s performance that night is also a work-in-progress. It’s one version of “Chambersonic (IV)” of\nChambersonic\nand the written textual material traces of that project will be coming out as a book also in 2024 under the title,\nChambersonic\n. Let’s hear how Klara’s poem ends, and then we’ll hear Ian’s voice again, asking what comes next?\n19:25\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Klara reading poem] …with eight men and an extra dead struck still in time in the instant before darkness hits before bodies speed up moving the event, rapid fire and risqué rinsing themselves in light and a handshake with air. Thank you.\n19:48\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nWhat a great piece. And that’s in progress?\n19:53\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah, this is new stuff. [Laughs]\n19:55\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Laughs] Yeah, it’s really great. It’s really, really, really stunning all the different parts connecting around the event. So thank you very much for that. And thank you for your work on this conference and to Jason and to Ali as well. It’s been an amazing journey, which I guess you get to relax from tomorrow. Or do you do a post-mortem, or what happens at the end of all this?\n20:22\nKatherine McLeod:\nWhen Ian asks Klara about the post-mortem of the event, it’s quite funny to hear that now because our symposium committee for listening sound agency has gone on to produce many collaborative outputs. The event has not ended. There’s an art book called\nQuotes\nedited by Klara and Emma Telaro about to be at this year’s symposium; also to be launched is a vinyl record with sounds from symposium participants, compiled by Deanna Fong, Angus Tarnowsky and Jason Camlot; a podcast episode has been released about the symposium and it was produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stephanie Ricci. And there will be a forthcoming issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches to Literary Studies” edited by Jason Camlot and me, Katherine McLeod. So when you hear the end of this event, know that it is not the end, just like the poems that we have listened to continue to be in progress. This, this too is the event. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n21:32\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nSo nice to see everybody tonight. Thanks for your performances to Klara, to Cole, to Erin, to Oana, to Kevin. It’s been a really fun ride tonight. So thank you.\n21:43\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you. Thank you both.\n21:46\nAudio Recording, Kevin McNeilly, Words & Music, 2021:\nThanks so much. It’s terrific.\n21:49\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nGoodnight, everyone. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for coming.\n21:51\nAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music, 2021:\nWe’ll see you all soon.\n21:58\nKatherine McLeod:\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. If you want to learn more about where the sounds you’ve heard have come from head to SpokenWeb.ca and check the show notes for ShortCuts. If you’re listening to this on the release day, and you want to tune-in to SpokenWeb’s Symposium this year, head to spoken web.ca and click on “Symposia.” Plus you can find the podcast episode based on last year’s symposium by checking previous episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll find “Listening, Sound, Agency: a retrospective listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium” as the March, 2022 episode. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor transcribed by Kelly Cubbon mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, Kate Moffatt, and Miranda Eastwood, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. 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Chronicles: Early Works. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Unarchiving the Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 3-31.\\n\\n“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.\\n\\nKinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.\\n\\nOur Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections,  https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\\n\\n“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.” Produced by Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 21 June 2021. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/.\\n\\n“Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity.” Produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 6 June 2022. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549815820289,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In the making of ShortCuts, series producer Katherine McLeod often talks about how recorded sound is held not only within archives but also by the work of contextualizing whenever one selects an archival audio clip and presses play. Returning to an audio recording of Dionne Brand played in ShortCuts 2.9 “Situating Sound” (June 2021), Katherine reminds us that the process of unarchiving sound is an embodied one. We listen as bodies to the archive. Moreover, how we choose to contextualize sound impacts any listening to it, and written transcripts too frame our understanding of the audio content. Building upon the most recent episode of The SpokenWeb, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity,” this episode of ShortCuts explores the transcript as another version of holding the sound, while, at the same time, invites a listening to that which exceeds that holding.\n\n“…even those that do not hold a wind’s impression”\n– Dionne Brand from Primitive Offensive\n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG, so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work, especially if you’re a student that has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings that there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening. Let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n00:58\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n01:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Last month we immersed in the world of the SpokenWeb symposium. The ShortCuts episode called “The Event” included audio that resonates with both this year’s and last year’s symposium and institute. And if you were at the symposium you’ll know that I was recording ShortCuts Live! A new type of ShortCuts episode recorded live on site with various researchers within the SpokenWeb network. Stay tuned for ShortCuts Live! in the next season. This month, we continue the season’s theme of how the archives remembers. We’ll be listening to a clip from a past ShortCuts – one from last June, exactly one year ago – and we’ll listen to it again in the context of the transcription episode on The SpokenWeb Podcast released at the start of this month. In that episode, Kelly Cubbon and I talk about transcription as a process that is rooted in conversation and collaboration. Do check it out – Episode 9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”. After making that episode, I thought I’d take a look back at some of the transcripts for ShortCuts. When Kelly transcribes the audio, it is usually quite straightforward but when there are questions they’re often questions related to providing further context as to where the sound is coming from, or if we should put a cue for the reader as to where that voice is from, or where it was recorded, right in the transcript. To quote Kelly herself making one of my favourite points in our episode…\n \n\n03:08\tKelly Cubbon, S3E9, SpokenWeb Podcast:\tThe overlapping sound is one thing, but I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of slightly different context to indicate.\n \n\n03:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tKelly and I have talked so much about how these questions are not transcription problems but rather generative transcription challenges and situations to learn from. Another challenge that can emerge in ShortCuts is how to transcribe words from a poem read out loud. What we have gone with is an approach that transcribes the words as spoken out loud (though including in brackets that the speaker is reading a poem since often the tone of the voice has changed.) That way the transcript is not attempting to reproduce the poem on the page as it is published – rather, the transcript aims to represent the sounds heard in the podcast and to make them more accessible. Those examples of what can come up in the process of transcription speak to what I’ve described in past ShortCuts as a figuring out, a navigating of how much to frame the archival audio clips that I play for you here. How much do I explain their context? Or do I simply press play? A phrase that captures this balancing act (at least for me!) is one that emerged out of the partial replay that we’ll be hearing in this ShortCuts. [Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding and Stopping] … is what kind of a framework does audio clipped out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms, gesturing as if I’m attempting to hold the sound. [Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding and Stopping] I’ve returned to this image and to this phrase and to this act in many moments in these episodes when thinking about as place held, supported, with my arms outstretched, as an embodied experience – an audible place created as a feminist placemaking. Holding with arms outstretched conveys that the work of framing is my intervention in it – I am not neutral in how I frame the sound even if I am also offering it to you to do what you wish with it, letting you know that the sound is there ready to be listening to. I Am holding the sound carefully, knowing how difficult it can be to take a recorded voice, with all of its situated affect attached to it, out of the archives. To unarchive carefully. That got me thinking, a transcript is also an attempt to hold the sound – it attempts to hold the sound in such a way that increases accessibility to the content while also recognizing that the transcript is, in some way, mediating the experience. With all of this in mind, let’s return to the episode aptly titled “Situating Sound” and hear it again in this moment in time. It is an episode that could be situated in the context of “Communal Memories” which I produced afterwards in December 2021, and that is based on the second part of this recording with the voice of late Stolo writer Lee Maracle. Hearing “Situating Sound” now makes me feel there’s no episode that necessarily comes before or after, but that these episodes continue to cycle around each other. With that let’s dive into “Situating Sound” from June 2021. [Sound Effect: Tape Fast Forwarding] And you’ll hear a recording of Dionne Brand reading in 1988. I invite you to think of how the transcript holds the sound, how the information I provide holds the sound, [Sound Effect: Tape Stops, Presses Play]. And how my voice holds the sound in that I am telling you about what you are going to hear, and to listen for moments when sound exceeds this holding… [Start Music: Piano Instrumental]\n \n\n07:39\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\t…and she had also written about this solidarity in a 1988 issue of the Black women’s newspaper Our Lives that Brand had helped to edit. These pieces of context are only the beginning of unpacking the significance of these two women reading together. And unravelling this history all started by wanting to know more about one archival recording. [End Music: Piano Instrumental]So as we listen to this reading, what would it be like to be there in that room with Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle in 1988? Now in June, 2021, what does it feel like when you hear this recording wherever you might be listening from? How do we understand this recording in relation to the archive that holds it? I am recording this a week after Brand read from The Blue Clerk at an annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists. How does Brand hear time? When she introduces what she reads from Primitive Offensive in the recording we’re about to hear she says that the poetry is made out of the pieces of history, a history that as she says, if you are Black in the Americas, you have to dig for it. How does that resonate with the lines where she chooses to end?\n \n\n08:57\tArchival Audio, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t… [Ambient Background Noise] [Reading Poetry] I won’t take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [Aside to Audience] Okay, that’s it. [Audience applause].\n \n\n09:14\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\tAs we could hear in that recording, there are noises in the background. We’ll be hearing what sound like cars passing outside, we’ll hear some voices and might wonder if those are people talking outside the bookstore window, or perhaps this recording has been recorded over another one and we’re actually hearing the voices of another time bleeding through the tape. Here is Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive in a recording that was broadcast on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988, and now that recording is held by and shapes an archive.\n \n\n10:00\tArchival Audio, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t[Static and various background noises throughout] I’m going to read a poem for my grandmother, a poem for my ancestors, really. I wrote this book Primitive Offensive because, for whatever history has left you, if you were Black in the Americas, you have to dig and dig and dig and memorize and memorize and learn and learn it and redo it and recover it and re– you know, because it isn’t anywhere else. And so this was my history book. Sometimes you arrive and find what seems to be nothing, and you have to dig for it. And this is a call to my ancestors about this history. And I looked for my ancestors and I found what there was. And so – and sometimes you find nothing and you make it anyway. [Laughs] You know, you find a piece of cloth, a bit of this, whatever, but you make it human. So –[Start of reading] Ancestor dirt/ ancestor snake/ ancestor lice / ancestor whip/ ancestor fish/ ancestor slime/ ancestor sea/ ancestor stick/ ancestor iron/ ancestor bush/ ancestor ship/ ancestor old woman, old bead/ let me feel your skin, old muscle, old stick/ where are my bells?/ my rattles/ my condiments, my things to fill houses and minutes/ The fat is starting, where are my things?/ My mixtures, my bones, my decorations/ old bread, old tamarind switch./ Will you bathe me in oils?/ Will you tie me in white cloth?/ Call me by my praise name/ Sing me Oshun song./ Oya against this clamour [Background Noise Rises; Inaudible Voices] / Ancestor old woman/ Send my things after me./ One moment, old lady more questions./ What happened to the ship in your leap? The boatswain, did he scan the passage’s terrible wet face/ The navigator, did he blink?/ Or steer that ship through your screaming night?/ The captain did he lash two slaves to the rigging, for example?/ Lady! My things/ Water leaden, my maps, my compass/ After all, what is the political position of stars? Drop your crusted cough, where you want./ My hands make precious things out of phlegm./ Ancestor wood/ Ancestor dog/ Ancestor ancestor, old man, dry stick, mustache, skin, and bone./ Why didn’t you remember? /Why didn’t you remember the name of our tribe?/Why didn’t you tell me before you died?/ Old horse, you made the white man ride you/ You shot off your leg for him./ Old man, the name of our tribe is all I wanted./ Instead, you went to the swamps and bush and rice paddies for the trading company and they buried you in water/ Crocodile, tears. /It would have been better to remember the name of our tribe./ Now, mosquitoes dance a ballet over your grave and the old woman buried with you wants to leave./ One thing for sure, dismembered woman, when you decide you are alone/ When you decide you are alone, /when you dance, it’s your own broken face. When you eat your own plate of stones/ For damn sure you are alone./ Where do you think you are going dismembered woman?/ Limbs chopped off at the ankles./ When you decide, believe me, you are alone./ Sleep, sleep, tangential phase, sleep,/ Sleeping, or waking/ Understand you are alone./ Diamonds pour from your vagina,/ and your breasts drip healing copper/ But listen, women, dismembered continent/ You are alone./See crying fool,/ You want to talk in gold/ You will cry in iron./ You want to dig up stones./ You will bury flesh./ You think you don’t need oils and amulets compelling powder and rely on smoke./ You want to throw people in cesspits./ Understand dismembered one, ululant /You are alone./ When waterfalls work, land surfaces./ I was sent to this cave./ I went out one day like a fool to find this cave, to find clay, to dig up metals to decorate my bare and painful breasts./ Water and clay for a poultice for this gash to find a map an imprint of me anywhere would have kept me calm./ Anywhere with description./ Instead, I found a piece of this/ A tooth, a bit of food hung on. /A metatarsal, which resembled mine./ Something else like a note. Musical. /ting ting, but of so little pitch so little lasting perhaps it was my voice./ And this too, a suggestion and insinuation so slight, it may be untrue./ Something moving over the brow as with eyes close to black/ a sensate pull/ Phantom! Knocks the forehead back in the middle of a dance. /No, I can’t say dance. It exaggerates./ Phantom. A bit of image./ A motion close to sound, a sound imaged on the retina resembling sound/ A sound seen out of the corner of my eye./ Emotion heard on my inner ear./ I poured over these like a paleontologist./ I dusted them off like an archeologist/ A swatch of cloth./ Skin, atlas, coarse utility, but enough./ Still only a bit of paint, of dye on the stone./ I can not say crude, but a crude thing./ A hair, a marking. That a fingernail to rock an ancient wounded scratch./ I handle these like a papyrologist contours/ A desert sprung here./ Migrations, suggestions, lies./ Phantom. A table and jotting up artful covert mud./ I noted these like a geopolitical scientist./ I will take any evidence of me even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [End of reading] [Aside to audience] Ok. That’s it. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\tThat was the Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive. The recording was played on Vancouver’s co-op radio on August 7th, 1988 and the recording is held by the archives of radiofree rainforest. Now part of SFU library’s digital collections. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music].\n \n\n16:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. It was recorded in Montreal or what is known as Tiohtià:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n "],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9990","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.10, [Replay] Moving, Still, 18 July 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/replay-moving-still/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/d939009b-0129-4515-85b9-34a39f7b18fd/audio/25ff9391-8f6a-4558-b9e0-9ca82e415aa9/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-10-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:18:49\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,073,435 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-3-10-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/replay-moving-still/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-07-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["*Transcript In Progress*"],"contents":["This month, ShortCuts is replaying a past episode as a response to this month’s full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode – “starry and full of glory”: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam (produced by Stephen Collis) – is a moving commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. Along with archival clips, the episode features conversations with two poets – Isabella Wang and Fred Wah – in which they talk about an unpublished poem of Webb’s. Listen to this replay of ShortCuts Ep. 3.7 “Moving, Still” and then, listen to Collis’s episode about Webb as a collective listening. What does the archive remember?"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nPhyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.\\n\\nShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nCollis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549816868864,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.7048998}]