[{"id":"9594","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 S4E3, Drum Codes [Part 2]: Sounds of Data, 5 December 2022, Miya"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-part-2-sounds-of-data/"],"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":["Chelsea Miya"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"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/f155a6f6-3a58-44fe-8b40-8536a7c437ab/audio/89995b0d-9cfc-4a2e-a427-ad697eb76aea/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:41\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,663,031 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-part-2-sounds-of-data/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-12-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"content_notes":["No transcript."],"contents":["Audio technology and audio data come in radically different forms. This month’s episode, “Sounds of Data” is a follow up to Season Two’s “Drum Codes” and takes us deeper into the sonic world of data: from the sounds of surveillance to music of the stars to the wireless transmission of drum songs. Featuring interviews with sound artist and poet Oana Avasilichioaei, NASA sonification expert Matt Russo, and speech technologist Tunde Adegbola, each offering a unique perspective on the question: what does data sound like?\n\nSpecial thanks to master drummer Peter Olálékan Adédòkun, whose music you hear in the first half of the episode. Original music and performance clips were also provided by Oana Avasilichioaei and by Matt Russo and his team at SYSTEM Sounds. Thank you, as well, to Sean Luyk, who co-produced the “Drum Codes” episode and played a significant role in conceptualising this follow-up."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"No transcript.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549530607616,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":3.1419106},{"id":"9595","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E4, Genuine Conversation, 6 February 2023, Fyfe"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/genuine-conversation/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creator_names_search":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/57d4aa97-aa60-4920-acb2-82fea5edbdc4/audio/1d809ebb-6e39-40ca-a736-16390cc90357/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e4-genuine-conversation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:53:12\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"51,068,804 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e4-genuine-conversation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/genuine-conversation/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-02-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Antin, David. “Talking at the Boundaries.” How Long is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin. Edited by Stephen Friedman, University of New Mexico Press, pp. 31-64. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Strauss &  Giroux, 1975.\\n\\nDiepeveen, Leonard. Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception. Oxford UP, 2019.\\n\\nGoffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. Simon and Schuster, 2008.\\n\\nKreillkamp, Ivan. “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing.” Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 69-88.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549530607617,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What makes a genuine conversation? And why is it so difficult to have one? Frances Grace Fyfe is on a quest to find out. This madcap talk therapy session has the SpokenWeb RA consider the literary concept of the dialogue, the verbatim transcription of speech in writing (through an exploration of—what else?—Charles Dickens’s early forays in court stenography), especially “expressive” phonemes, and david antin’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s. An investigative journalist, a peer supporter, and one especially sincere friend weigh in to help FG orchestrate the most genuine conversation of all: one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:35)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End music: SpokenWeb Podcast theme music]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Conversation. When was the last time you thought about conversations, thought about what exactly makes them conversations? In this episode, SpokenWeb research assistant Francis Grace Fife thinks about the literary concept of the dialogue, about conversations by having conversations.\n\nFife has conversations with an investigative journalist who conducts interviews for a living, with a friend whose thoughts on the capabilities of speech over writing informs how their most genuine conversations take place, with a peer supporter at Concordia who intentionally makes use of non-speech responses to create connection in conversation and even with herself, in the style of talk therapy. But Fife goes a step further delving into what happens to conversations when they are transformed from speech into writing.\n\nTaking up Charles Dickens’s foray into court’s stenography and David Anton’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s, Fife thinks about those aspects of genuine conversation like those affirmative “mm-hmm’s” in conjunction with their written representations.\n\nDigging into expressive phonemes, the pathological urge to mirror your conversation partner’s speech style, and the discomfort of silences in speech conversations. Fife reflects on when and how speech might be inescapably performative and considers what happens when speech is literally performative, but also genuine, like in David Anton’s talk poems. We invite you to listen with us to what Fife calls the most genuine conversation of all, one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form. [SpokenWeb theme music begins] Here is episode four of season four of the SpokenWeb podcast. Genuine Conversation. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n\n(02:58)\tPhone Voice 1\tHey, how are you? [clears throat] Hey, how are you? Yeah, good, thanks. Yeah, thanks, um, for agreeing to talk with me today. Hopefully this won’t take up too much of your time, but, yeah, as you know, the idea for the podcast is about genuine conversation.\nHey, [laughs], how are you? Yeah, good, good. Thanks. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me. Um, yeah. Hopefully this won’t take up too much of your time, but, yeah, as you know, the idea for the podcast is on the topic of genuine conversation, and I just thought I’d reach out cuz I thought you might have something to say about that. [Sound effect: phone rings] Oh, shhh Sorry. [Soundeffect: Answer phone] Hi, sorry. Can you hear me? [Music begins: calm jazz with high hat and piano] Um, sorry. This is kind of awkward.\n\n(04:10)\tNarrator\tIn Aldous Huxley’s short story “Over The Telephone”, a young poet mentally rehearses a whole conversation between him and the woman he hopes will accept his invitation to the opera. [Sound effect: phone  rings] But when the operator finally makes the connection, he stumbles hopelessly and she declines. Nothing, in other words, goes as planned over the telephone.\n[Music fades and ends]\n\n(04:33)\tPhone Voice 1\tSorry, I don’t really know where to start.\n(04:37)\tPhone Voice 2\tThat’s okay. Why don’t you start by telling me what it is you want to talk about?\n(04:44):\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah, I guess that’s partly what I came here to find out or, yeah. To talk about. I guess I’m seeking an occasion for the kind of conversations I wanna have or, yeah, I don’t know. I guess I could just use some practice.\n(05:01)\tPhone Voice 2\tPractice talking?\n(05:02)\tPhone Voice 1\t[overlapping] Talking [laughs]  Yeah.\n(05:06)\tPhone Voice 2\tOkay. Well, why don’t you start by telling me how long you’ve been feeling this way?\n(05:13)\tPhone Voice 1\tThere was, there was a period where it was hard to talk to people. You remember, I’m sure. A lot of people thought that would make it a good time for writing. I don’t know. I, I, I guess I just feel like being away from people writing began to feel so insincere and then, you know, since I’ve started this master’s degree in English, I’ve just been feeling like, I don’t know, I don’t wanna read books anymore. I wanna talk to people, actual people.\n(05:42)\tPhone Voice 2\tThat sounds difficult.\n05:44)\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah. I mean, it’s [laughs], it’s, it’s whatever. Yeah. I guess.\n(05:48)\tPhone Voice 2\tI think you might benefit from talking to a specialist. I have someone in mind. I’m gonna transfer you over. Okay? [Sound effect: phone dialing and then dial tone starts]\n(06:00)\tHannah\tI essentially had to learn how to interview people twice or maybe even three times as my working practices changed and learning how to construct conversations all over again, such that they were delivered in a human and interesting and relevant way was a really important part of what I had to learn how to do.\n(06:21)\tNarrator\t[Music begins: electronic with drum beat]\nThis is my friend Hannah talking. She’s a journalist working in current affairs and investigative reporting. As someone who has, according to her LinkedIn profile, a proven track record negotiating difficult access to people for print and television reporting, I thought she might be a good person to give me pointers on how to structure a conversation in the first place.\n\n(06:41):\tInterviewer\tI’m interested in the human aspect of it. Are there some strategies you can use to prod someone to speak in a sort of interesting or even humorous manner to get a good clip for your video?\n(06:53)\tHannah\tAbsolutely. There are ways of working that are very helpful. The first of which is most profoundly is like, just don’t be a jerk, right? Show up and be human and be present. And people like to act sometimes, like there is a way of gaming a conversation or short cutting it somehow. And there isn’t. The most important thing that you do is show up and engage with someone in the way that they expect to be engaged with. And you get very good in a slightly pathological way at mirroring people.\nYou become very good at matching somebody else’s conversation style. If they crack jokes, you crack jokes. If they take it more seriously, you take it more seriously and you catch yourself doing it in non-professional situations and you realize that it is really quite a creepy thing to do. But we’re responding to someone as they hope to work is a really important part of what I do.\n\n(07:55)\tInterviewer\tI have written in my notes, “don’t be a jerk”, which seems like a good maxim, generally speaking.\n(08:00)\tHannah\tIt’s a good rule in life.\n(08:02)\tInterviewer\t[laughs] Yeah, I’m interested in what, and maybe it’s not a good question, but maybe you can answer it to the best of your ability. What is it that makes a good question to ask?\n(08:19)\tHannah\t[Music begins: electronic and spare] So I have a couple of answers to that. The first and most obvious one right, is open-ended questions. We like open-ended questions. What you want, again, it’s that people are more comfortable expressing their experience, which is something that they know to be true rather than an opinion or even a fact that they just think to be true.\nAnd beyond that genuine engagement and that genuine sort of interface, there are a couple of things that are helpful. The first of which is being genuinely passionate and curious about people’s own personal experiences. People are uncomfortable talking in hypotheticals, talking about things that they may not be sure about, all those kinds of things, but people are always secure in their own experiences and their own perceptions. I think the other thing that you always want to do when you’re asking someone questions is, again, so where people are more comfortable expressing their own experience, make it clear that that is what you value and that is true for personal stuff as well as for professional stuff.  What you value is them as people and what they bring to this conversation and not what they think or what they know. They’re not quantities to be known to you.\n\n(09:36):\tInterviewer\t[Music ends] Well, I value your skill as a journalist, [laughs], just so you know. [Hannah laughs] And you know, and keeping with the kinda self-reflexive nature of question asking and the open-endedness. Maybe you could tell me like, how do you feel this interview has gone so far?\n(09:54)\tHannah\tI think it’s gone really well. I think, so what you’re trying to do here is something really difficult, right? Which is that you’re trying to record for academic content fundamentally and record the building blocks of something that will prove an academic point, but in a performative way. And that’s actually a very difficult thing to do.\nAnd I’ve said this before, but, you are doing now what I do professionally, and I am both paid money to do it and given a lot of time to do it in, and I still find it difficult. [Music begins: soft tones] So I think you should be proud of this interview and I think you’ve done a good job with those questions in as much as they’re reflective from me, they’re interesting for me, and it’s a selection of questions that I don’t think I remember being asked before, which makes this feel like a contribution that you value, which is good.\n\n(11:00)\tInterviewer\tI really was not fishing for anything. I just wanted a sound bite. But [Interviewer and Hannah laugh], I appreciate- [Soft tones music fades into jazzy piano music]\n(11:05)\tHannah\tHappy to provide.\n(11:15)\tNarrator\tNow that I had some formal training from Hannah, I figured it was time to test out some genuine conversation skills in real time. So I called up one of the best conversationalists I could think of, my friend Ben. Remembering Hannah’s advice I try to ask open-ended questions and show a genuine interest in the subject matter. Here’s me asking Ben about his own relationship to making conversation.\n(11:40)\tBen\t[Music ends] It used to be that it would happen on the fly. And then I was introduced to the phenomenologists and that really made a difference in the way that I speak. I can’t remember what made me stop and then start to hesitate before speaking, but there was some shift in second year university where all of a sudden the words that I was using, um, got caught.\nUh, and I started to have more trouble just speaking off the cuff. And then with Sarah Ahmed she writes about, and Alia Al-Saji both write about, uh, hesitating and stopping and how that might interrupt, uh, some unconscious sort of, well, racism that can, that can come out in speaking and just that has really, uh, that has really impacted the way that I have conversation with others. I think I hesitate, um, out of a fear of stepping into, out of a fear and also a care.\n\n(13:07)\tInterviewer\tI mean, that was a great answer. I really wasn’t expecting anything [laughs]. And because I, you know, the final form of this podcast is interested in the relation between speech and writing. It’s interesting to me that you’re kind of telling me you’re getting some of these ideas about how to speak from texts that you were encountering. Well, did you feel like it, this kind of fearful and careful speech is an imitation of text, or is that maybe not,\n(13:41)\tBen\tHuh. Huh.\n(13:43)\tInterviewer\tYeah.\n(13:44)\tBen\tI wonder, that’s a good question. I mean, as a, I mean, I think, I imagine that you are someone who, are you someone who is more comfortable with text then speech for that reason because of the hesitation? [Interviewer gasps]\n(13:59)\tInterviewer\tUm, I don’t know. I just, I also feel  similarly to you in that speech and speech patterns were molded so much from being in university and studying writing and, but, you know, there’s also, I think that the writing that happens in the classroom and also the kind of teaching in and outside also equally inform modes of speech. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t know, but interesting too that you’re using this metaphor too, of like the words getting caught, this sort of, yeah. Yeah. Interesting image of-\n(14:37)\tBen\tYeah. And I think mm-hmm. I think that when I am too thoughtful about what I say, well, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking more about speaking from the heart, as opposed to speaking from my head. I think a lot of times I’m speaking from my head, especially when I’m having a higher level theoretical conversation with someone. But also, when I’m having an uncomfortable conversation with someone or a conversation where there’s a, there’s a power asymmetry, or we’re talking about a power asymmetry. [Music begins: calm tones] But oftentimes if I can manage to surrender that and speak from the heart, then I surprise myself with what comes out of my mouth. And, sometimes that can be a good thing.\n(15:41)\tInterviewer\t[Music ends] So beautiful. [Interviewer and Ben burst out laughing] It’s so weird. It’s like, I’m, I’m, I’m conscious thatI’m trying to interview you and I’m thinking about how this is gonna sound on the podcast, and also thinking about Yeah. Syncing up this audio and not wanting to interject too much [laughs] Like, woah, it’s such a great conversation. I wish I was just jumping in a little more, but, well, yeah. Let’s see.\nWe can, that can be an interesting reflection, I guess, later.  But, um, I, I also wanted to ask part, the reason why I wanted to interview you as well was I know that you spend a lot of time by yourself or at least last year when I knew you, you were kind of spending maybe two weeks at a time in your kind of cabin in the countryside. And I’m just curious, like if you spent, well, if you consider that time alone and if you spent any of that time talking to yourself?\n\n(16:45)\tBen\tMm-hmm.  I did spend a lot of time alone last year, and I haven’t spent very much time alone this year. And I almost feel a little bit lesser for it. I think it’s because of the conversations that I’m not able to have, but I don’t talk with myself too much when I’m alone. [Music begins: soft tones] I have really appreciated speaking to the non-human environment around me. [Sound effect: birds singing]\nThat was something that I think I got into a little bit more. And it has brought me  a lot of joy to be in, like a conversational relationality with the birds and the squirrels and the trees. And yeah. So it’s not something that I do regularly, but when I do do it, it feels pretty good. [Music and sound effects end]\n\n(17:45)\tInterviewer\tI mean, are you also writing down the things that you’re speaking aloud?\n(17:49)\tBen\tNot very often. Yeah. Not very often because I get, um, sometimes the hesitation. I feel that stronger when I’m writing. And oftentimes, like, this has happened a couple times recently where I’ve had friends request significant conversations over text. So, you know,  there’s a difficulty in our dynamic, and I’d like to attend to this with you in this text messenger format. And I’ve had to set a boundary and say it like, let’s call on the phone or  speak verbally because  when it comes to expressing myself, I really have a block  textually. I can write an essay, but  if I want to, um, yeah. If I want to articulate how I feel  I really struggle. I, it’s like pulling teeth, to get that into a paragraph that, that I can then read back and think, yeah, that’s, that’s how I felt.\n(19:06)\tInterviewer\tHmm. I’m trying to think about what question to ask you then about the relationship between speech and writing. Is it because?\n(19:17)\tBen\tWell, I-\n(19:17)\tInterviewer\tSpeaking is- no, you go.\n(19:20)\tBen\tThere’s just so much that I, I mean, I say this with trepidation to an English student [laughs].\n(19:28)\tInterviewer\tI really don’t know anything, don’t worry about it.\n(19:29)\tBen\tBut, okay. Well, just that, there’s a lot that I haven’t, there’s a lot that I can’t capture in writing, like the medium of writing doesn’t deal well with silence, [Music begins: instrumental and electronic] with pauses, with those little ums and ahs. And yeah. And that means that I think I really depend on those to express myself. And without them, there’s sort of a certainty that I don’t think is genuine to where I’m coming from.\nAnd there’s also, I’m just realizing this now as I’m thinking while speaking, there’s also a tugging that happens when you are in conversation like a requirement to finish the sentence. Whereas you can take however long you want to finish a sentence on paper.\n\n(20:42)\tInterviewer\tYeah. Well, there’s, I guess it’s something riskier about, I mean, this is a bit basic, but about speech in that it can’t be edited. But maybe that also speaks to, I think, your desire for it to feel. Hmm. Yeah. The real possibility-\n(21:00)\tBen\tYeah-\n(21:02)\tInterviewer\tOh, no, go.\n(21:04)\tBen\tIt’s the question of like, when you’re thinking of the art of talk, is the talk or the conversation, is the conversation the medium of the art? Or is it the object of the art? And, you know, maybe it’s the object of the art if you are featuring a conversation, a powerful conversation. But if it’s the medium and it can’t exist in any other, like by putting it into a podcast takes away, that’s something that, yeah, that’s something that really interests me is what is possible within the medium of conversation that isn’t possible in text or in recordings or in an image?\nYeah. Which is why I love, which is why I love live radio as opposed to a podcast, [Sound effect: radio voice talking and ends] because live radio seems to me it’s slightly more conversational and, huh. I love silence and radio silence, and the awkwardness of radio silence. I hope that you include it at least somewhere in your piece.\n\n(22:20)\tInterviewer\tYeah. What do you mean by radio silence?\n(22:23)\tBen\tOh, just this idea of dead silence and in an audio format that is to be avoided at all costs. Like, you know, you’re just, at least with radio, you’re just supposed to talk, you know, it doesn’t matter what you say, just don’t let it get silent, because that silence is so discomforting to someone who’s listening. Um, but I really, I really love that discomfort. [laughs]\n(22:51)\tInterviewer\tYeah. Well, I’m curious about that because most people don’t. In real life do you also like that discomfort?\n(23:01):\tBen\tUm, if there’s, [long pause]  depends on how it ends. It depends on how it ends. Sometimes it ends in conversation with an inability to find the other person, to attune yourself to them again. And the conversation falters and then it ends awkwardly. And that’s a horrible feeling. [laughs] But on the flip side, some of those uncomfortable silences have opened a space for a really deepened, beautiful connection. [Music begins: soft tones] And so maybe you can’t have one without the other.\n(23:58)\tNarrator\tBen’s conversation left me thinking much about the differences between conversation and the written word. For Ben, the genuineness of the encounter, or in his words, a deep and beautiful connection is made possible only because of the failings of conversation. The fact that it can hesitate, stumble, or lag into silence. Writing feels disingenuous to speech then, in Ben’s terms, because we don’t have the notation to represent these hesitations in the first place.\nIt’s the same way Isaac Pittman, a British teacher felt when reading the London journals in the early 1900’s. Reporters at that time, he felt, didn’t accurately transcribe parliamentary speeches they were reporting on. Rather, they recorded them in the way they were accustomed to writing. That is to say, in grammatical English, but spoken English, as Ben gestured to, isn’t grammatical. People “um” and, “uh”, or more accurately to the Britain of the time,” irm” and, “uh”. In order to better capture these noises, Pitman invented phonography, a new system of shorthand that would allow for a more exact registration of speech than ordinary writing could claim.\n\nAs Ivan Kreilkamp writes, “shorthand promised not simply an efficient system of information storage, but a means by which writing might be infused with orality and the living breath of vocal articulation.” One photographic manual went so far as to claim that phonography would indeed render a greater service to mankind than the discovery of a new world.\n\n(25:23)\tNewspaper Boy\tExtra, extra! Read all about it!\n(25:26)\tNarrator\tPhonography was interestingly enough, essential to the writing career of one Charles Dickens, who learned the craft first as a court stenographer, and later as a newspaper reporter of public speeches. As Kreilkamp writes, “Dickens characteristic style, the vivid immediacy of his character’s voices owes a significant debt to the shorthand mastery that meant so much to him.” Indeed, Dickens’ experience with phonography was essential to pioneering a new type of Victorian realism. Where before a novelist like Jane Austen might present a highly stylized representation of conversation, as in some sense, speech itself, Dickens shorthand could more accurately represent conversation generally. All the speech patterns and mannerisms of the characters in his novels have a corresponding sign where every sign represents a real life sound.\n(26:12)\tScrooge\tBah humbug!\n(26:13)\tNarrator\tDickens’ mastery of phonographic shorthand led some people to consider him something of a writing machine. Here Dickens describes the mechanical movement of his writing hand when listening to a dull speech.\n(26:25)\tCharles Dickens\tI sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old way. And sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the tablecloth taking an imaginary note of it all.\n(26:37)\tNarrator\tDickens’ idea of a mimetic representation of speech in writing mirrors my own experience putting my conversation with Ben through my computer’s automatic transcription software. Going over the transcript I noticed the prevalence of one word over any other one my computer spells h-m-m.\n(26:55)\tBen\tHmm.\n(26:56)\tNarrator\tIf automatic transcription exists in Pitman’s words, to eliminate all ambiguity from language by creating a one-to-one correspondence between sound and sign, what exactly does this sound signify? Let’s replay the tape. [Sound effect: tape rewinds]\n(27:11)\tInterviewer\tI know that you spend a lot of time by yourself-\n(27:16)\tBen\tHmm. [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:16)\tInterviewer\t-or at least in the classroom, and also the kind of teaching in-\n(27:20)\tBen\tHmm. [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:20)\tInterviewer\tAnd it can’t be edited.\n(27:23)\tBen\tHmm.  [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:25)\tNarrator\t[Music begins: jazzy piano] On its own I find the “hmm” sound has a soothing quality unto itself. It seems I’m not the only one with this mysterious intuition. In his book, What Makes Speech Patterns Expressive, for example, the linguist Reuven Tsur looks at sound patterns in six “especially tender” poems by the Hungarian poet, Sándor Petőfi, and finds that what they have in common is an unusually high frequency of the “m” phoneme.\nThere’s this 1995 study by British linguist David Crystal that seems to confirm the poetic mode of speech perception Tsur writes about can’t be separated from the way we perceive speech more generally. What Crystal did was pull a whole bunch of writers alongside the general population, and found that they all agreed one of the prettiest and most relaxing consonant phonemes, at least in received British pronunciation, was the M Sound.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nAt the same time, I also read this M or “mm” sound in my conversation as a sign of responsiveness or attention to the conversation at hand. Here’s Irving Goffman on the discursive power of this word: [Music begins: electronic]\n\n“In conversation, there are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works, to attract the attention of the interlocutor, or to confirm his continued attention. Are you listening or in Shakespearean diction, lend me your ears. And on the other end of the wire mm-hmm.”\n\n(28:47):\tPhone Voice 2\tCan you hear me?\n(28:48)\tNarrator\tThis sound, in other words, is an expression of the state of a social relationship, one in which one participant consents to their continued participation therein. I noticed in my conversation with Ben that the sound also acts as a way of vocalizing or making legible what would be an otherwise silent listening practice. To learn more about this noise and its relationship to listening more generally I decided it was time to consult another expert.\n[Music ends] [Sound effect: phone number dialing]\n\n(29:15)\tMirdhula\tI’m Mirdhula and I am a peer supporter at the Concordia Gender Advocacy Center.\n(29:22)\tInterviewer\tPerfect. That’s great. And just for people who maybe don’t know, what does a peer supporter, what does that role look like?\n(29:29)\tMirdhula\tSo, as a peer supporter, you can actually come in and we can provide you with a space where you can feel validated and where you can experience any feelings that you’re feeling and maybe not feel so alone in those feelings. Because we’re not certified professionals, we don’t offer advice. But that’s kind of the concept of peer support.\nIt’s to offer validation and to remove that power struggle between a mental health professional and the person seeking support. So the way we even out that power struggle is by being  a person who doesn’t lead the conversation, doesn’t offer advice. We purely let the person navigate their feelings in however way they would like to. Whether it’s in silence, whether it’s just going on a rant, we don’t control the conversation in any way.\n\n(30:30)\tInterviewer\tYeah. I’m so interested in this really particular form of conversation because it’s a different form of conversation than we’re used to. What does it look like for you as a peer supporter to not lead a conversation? What actual kind of methods are you employing to signal to the other person that it’s their time to talk?\n(30:50)\tMirdhula\t[Music begins: quiet drum beat]\nBasically, as a peer supporter, we specifically received training, because it’s not something that comes very natural to everybody. We’re taught to constantly kind of riff off of what people are saying and to keep a conversation going. The importance of keeping a conversation going is really important in our society. But what I had learned personally, what really was like, so jarring to me in this training was how much I felt like I needed to quickly respond to things and not actually listen to what people were telling me. And to exist in the silence that is required to really think about what people are telling me, you know?\n\nBut some methods that we use, including [laughs] incorporating some silence to give people time to think is reflection. So we reflect what the people are telling us. And what that is, is like not assuming any emotions that somebody may be feeling unless they explicitly express that they’re feeling those feelings, and to kind of mirror what they are telling us in order to validate what they’re telling us. So that they don’t feel any pressure to feel a certain way or to even figure out how they’re feeling, but to really just live in that moment.\n\n(32:14)\tInterviewer\tAre you conscious about other kinds of gestures or things like nodding your head, like, I’m really interested in, in the technical aspect. What other kind of signals besides sitting in silence can you show to somebody that you’re paying attention to?\n(32:28)\tMirdhula\tSo, this has been my saving grace as for my impulsivity. Like, basically the replacement for every single interjection that I wanna insert, because I always wanna, I’m very expressive in the face, vocally. Anything you were just saying, every time I nod my head, it’s me preventing myself from being vocal about it. And that’s also a skill that we learned. We learned about different ways of expressing your validation, or sorry, expressing your validation by nodding your head. And for me, that’s a big one. And then the “mm-hmms”. And the “oh, yes, of course”. Like, I try not to use too many cop outs. So there are some, there’s some terminology that could be seen as surface level, like, oh, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about that. They really tell us to avoid terms like that just because it can come off as insincere.\nAnd sometimes we just say that. So sometimes when we apologize for somebody and offer them our pity, it could be seen as us trying to get through our discomfort with their feelings. So I try to stick to the “mm-hmm” and “yes”, like just very simple terms for validation. But the head nodding is big for me. It’s my, one of my biggest ways of validating what someone is saying to me. [laughs]\n\n(34:06)\tInterviewer\tIt’s interesting to me that you’re talking about how you’re such an expressive person. I mean, it’s coming through just in the interview. It seems to me like part of peer support isn’t getting rid of that personality. It’s about mobilizing expression in a way that feels really conscious and sincere. And yeah. This is something actually, I think a big part of the podcast is that I’m really interested in words like “mm-hmm” or sounds that we signal to someone that we’re paying attention, that aren’t necessarily words, but they do signify something. Do you feel like you’re using those more in your everyday speech now?\n(34:44)\tMirdhula\tDefinitely.I’ve noticed, like with this training, I’ve noticed more how much I was rushing through conversations in my day-to-day life. So these are my tools to stay more grounded and to be more present in those conversations. So I definitely, like, even my friends have actually noticed a difference. They’re like, I’ve really felt heard, and I thought that was so amazing. It’s really validating to feel like you can give someone, you can give someone a safe space with just a head nod and a few, like, sounds, you know, like validating sounds, and I think it’s really powerful. Um, but the “mm-hmm,” that’s like my big one, that’s my big validation sound. [laughs]\n(35:33)\tInterviewer\tAnd it also makes me think about, you know, the particular dynamics of talking on the phone with someone, like in peer support, it seems like body language is really important, but in a context like this, you know, especially if we couldn’t see each other, then those words become a lot more helpful.\n(35:53)\tMirdhula\tThey’re an anchor.\n(35:54)\tInterviewer\tHmm. Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it.\n(35:56)\tMirdhula\tLike that! There you go. Yeah. You got it. [Mirdhula and Interviewer laugh]\n(36:02)\tInterviewer\tOkay. Great. Thanks. Well, that was super helpful. I won’t take up any more of your time unless there’s one nugget of wisdom you wanna share us with me? [Music begins: soft tones]\n(36:09)\tMirdhula\t[laughs] Nugget of wisdom. That’s a lot of pressure. [laughs]. Um, honestly, this training alone, I’ve felt transformed. I know that’s so dramatic, but I’ve truly felt transformed. It was very difficult to face these things because they feel like failures at first. But when you can face them, and that’s what they teach you to do, to face these things that are so ingrained in your person, these dynamics of conversation that are so drilled into us, like from a young age, to face that and to realize that I can change, it’s like, it’s, it’s a different kind of education that I’ve received in my lifetime.\nIt’s a different type of learning. And I really had to accept that I wouldn’t be comfortable in it. I had to accept the discomfort of changing the way that I communicate and connect with people. And I think that is so powerful and so important for people to experience in life. So what they’re doing at the center is just amazing. I am so happy to be a part of something, something so groundbreaking.\n\n(37:22)\tNarrator\tMirdhula’s conversation helps me reframe this noise, not just as a signal of responsiveness, but of genuine responsiveness. Interestingly, it seems to me that the authenticity of this responsiveness comes from a failure to speak or find the appropriate words to say in the first place.\nIndeed, both Ben and Mirdhula talked about silence’s ability to create a sense of meaningful connection between speakers when faced with a difficult conversational situation. Maybe then, what we can say of this noise is that it’s a sonic representation similar to what Goffman writes about eye contact. It allows us to quote, “monitor one another’s mutual perceiving and develop a heightened sense of moral responsibility” for both participants’ speech acts.\n\n(38:03)\tPhone Voice 1\tI have a confession to make. I’ve noticed that ever since talking to Ben and Mirdhula, I’ve been making this hmm humming noise more often than I ever have. [Music Ends]\n(38:14)\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, that sounds like a good thing, right?\n(38:16)\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah. Although I have to wonder, how can I be sure it’s not just an imitation of responsiveness? Or like, I’m worried I’m modeling my own speech patterns on them because I wanna be read as someone who’s responsive. Didn’t Hannah say something like that? Hang on, let me find it. [Sound Effect: Tape rewinding]\n  (38:34):\tHannah\tAnd you get very good in a slightly pathological way at mirroring people. You become very good at matching somebody else’s conversation style. If they crack jokes, you crack jokes. If they take it more seriously, you take it more seriously, and you catch yourself doing it in non-professional situations and you realize that it is really quite a creepy thing to do. [Sound Effect: Tape fastforwarding]\n(39:02):\tPhone Voice 2\tIt still surprises me that you know how to do that.\n(39:05)\tPhone Voice 1\tOkay, but can we get back to this issue? How do I know if I’m being genuinely responsive and not just mirroring responsiveness in a performative or worse still, pathological way? I’m thinking of something Isaac Pitman said about phonographic shorthand, that it would eliminate all ambiguity from speech and writing by creating this kind of perfect correspondence between speech and science.\nBut doesn’t the hmm noise evade signification in some way? Or like, isn’t it a representation of the ambiguity of the silence generated by awkward or difficult conversation? I just worry I’m imitating Ben and Mirdhula becoming like Charles Dickens, but instead of a writing machine, I’ve become this speaking machine, a kind of automatic generator of conversational noise.\n\n(39:48):\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, let me ask you this. What is genuine anyway?\n(39:52):\tPhone Voice 1\tOkay, Socrates, take it easy.\n(39:54):\tPhone Voice 2\tNo, for real. That was a real question or object of scholarly inquiry. I was just reading about the invention of the typewriter and its relationship to the development of the aesthetics of modernist poetry. It made it so that language could be edited down to seem artificial, and it also at the same time made the mechanical reproduction of poetry easier. So it was this kind of generation of distance and proliferation that made poetry’s intent… Hmm… Unclear. It’s what led people to think of modernist poetry as insincere. They thought they were being duped somehow.\n(40:25):\tPhone Voice 1\tIt’s funny, the ambiguity surrounding the intent of modernist poetry reminds me of some conversations I’ve had about David Antin. Have you heard of him? [Phone Voice 2 affirms with a “mhmm”]\nHe was this conceptual artist who in the 1960s started performing these improvised talk poems at readings and exhibitions. What he would do is come up with a theme beforehand, or sometimes whoever was getting him to perform would give him the preassigned topic, and then he would talk off the cuff sometimes for an hour, hour and a half at a time.\n\nMeanwhile, he would use a tape recorder to record the whole thing, then go home and transcribe the work onto the page. But even before the transcription, Antin was really adamant that what he was doing wasn’t just talk or like a means to communicate something else through it. Rather, his talk was actually poetry. It had this distinct aesthetic quality.\n\n(41:09)\tPhone Voice 2\tLet me get this straight. The talk itself wasn’t necessarily adhering to a regular meter or rhyme? So what is it about the practice that makes talk poetry?\n(41:18)\tPhone Voice 1\tWell, that’s part of it, right? What enabled Antin to define his talk as poetry was that he had defined himself as a poet from the outset. You know, someone who gets contracted to perform poetry allowed at universities. And actually most of his poems are preoccupied with the institutional forces that make something like poetry happen or legible in the first place.\nLiterally, the opening lines from the written text of “Talking at the Boundaries” starts with him recounting getting contracted to perform the poem. Antin writes, “when I agreed to come here to Indiana, Barry Alpert didn’t have a title for what I was gonna talk about. I think maybe he forgot to ask me, which was I suppose just as well.” And on and on and on. [Sound Effect: Take being put in player and someone pressing start]\n\n(42:01)\tClip of David Antin  from “Talking at the Boundaries”\tWhen, uh, I agreed to come out here to talk, Barry didn’t have a title for what I was going to talk about. I think maybe he forgot to ask me, and I think it probably didn’t make a terrible great difference. Uh, it was probably six or one half dozen or the other, whatever you called it. But, uh, he did wind up with a title, which somehow reached me, some voucher form came back to me in the mail that I had to sign, and then I signed in the wrong place and I had to sign it again.\nBut on it, it said what I was gonna talk about. And I was very relieved because, uh, until then I thought I would have to find out myself. But it said, “talking at the boundaries.” And, uh, I think in a way it was kind of a great piece of good fortune to encounter my subject on a voucher and in a sense… [Audio fades] [Sound Effect: Tape stops]\n\n(42:55):\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. That’s interesting. On one hand, I can see how Antin’s self-consciousness about the institution of poetry can be read as kind of maddening or self-indulgent. On the other hand, well, I don’t know, like, do you consider the talk poem a genuine work of poetry? Or-\n[overlapping]\n\n(43:10)\tPhone Voice 1\t-Well, I guess-\n(43:12):\tPhone Voice 2\t-I dunno. Oh, no, sorry. You Go ahead-\n(43:13)\tPhone Voice 1\tNo, I was just gonna say, well, yeah, I guess the proliferation of new recording technologies like the typewriter in the case of modernist poetry or the tape recorder Antin used to record as poems generate a kind of multiplicity of artworks in our society that don’t necessarily allow for the focus or time or one-on-one interactions required to establish sincerity.\nLeonard Diepeveen argues that because of this in the 20th century, people had to come to rely more and more on news signs of sincerity, like the professional certification to attest to a person or a work’s genuineness. I think Antin’s playing with this idea, his poems are sincere in so much as they’re insincere. He knows he needs to market himself as a professional poet or performing artist to get the university to pay him to perform in the first place. But then again…\n\n(44:01)\tPhone Voice 2\tThen again?\n(44:02):\tPhone Voice 1\tI don’t know, it seems to me like the talk poems portray so much an interest in conversation in the first place. Like, there’s this funny conversation, Antin recounts between him and his cab driver in “Talking at the Boundaries”. Here, I’ll play the clip. [Sound Effect: Tape being put in player and starting]\n(44:18):\tClip of David Antin from “Talking at the Boundaries”\tAnd he said things were like that then. He says, it’s not like that now. He says, now everybody’s got money. He says, I don’t have money. He says, everybody’s got money. My children now have money. He says, so much money. He told me they sent me to Israel for my vacation. I said, they sent you to Israel for your vacation. I said, was it dangerous? Uh, he said, um, he said, well, dangerous. He says, like, they said to me, what do you want? Do you want to go to the islands? What do you want? They’ll send you, they’ll send you anywhere. What do you want? And he said, I’ll go to Israel. So I went to Israel. I said, for long? Did you get a good look at it? What was it like? He said, well, he said, I really saw it. He said, I was there for five days. He said, one of those tours you got at Athens and Rome, and then you go to Israel. And I said, that’s great. I said, you know, like, uh, did you stay in one place for the five days? He said, no. He says, I went all around. He says it’s a very interesting place. [Audio fades] [Sound effect: Tape ends]\n(45:09):\tNarrator\tNotice how many times in this clip Antin repeats the word, said, his recollection of verbatim dialogue signals to me, this kind of sincere interest in the poetics of talk more generally, the way it generates this rich, sad, and often funny social life we co-create or yeah, I guess it returns to talk this kind of especially poetic quality.\nAnd for me, these rambling kind of elliptical accounts of other conversations that populate Antin’s work, they’re doing something like Erving Goffman’s idea about eye contact. They don’t mean anything but a desire to participate in social life in the first place. I see in Anton’s preoccupation with representing conversation in literature, my own preoccupation with the study of literature. I’m interested in books the way I’m interested in people.\n\n(45:57):\tPhone Voice 2\tThat’s nice. [laughs] A little cheesy, but nice.\n(46:02):\tPhone Voice 1\tDo you want me to open up to you or not? [laughs] No, that’s actually fair of you to make fun of me for that. I maybe wasn’t being totally sincere. And by that I mean I was actually quoting someone else. This book critic Parul Sehgal. I’m thinking about an interview where she’s asked about the initial process of marking up a book for review. Here, let me pull it up. [Sound effect: Old Dial Up sound effect]\n(46:25):\tParul Sehgal\tMy inclinations are so much, I think maybe a little eccentric in the sense that I’m interested in the way that texts can be like people, you know, they can falter, they can fumble, they can have secrets from themselves. They can be very flawed and very, very beautiful and very, very noble. All of these adjectives, I think, are more interesting to me than good or best even.\n(46:45):\tPodcast Host\tSo, you’re, you’re sort of like figuring out what you think as you write.\n(46:48)\tParul Sehgal\tYeah, I think that I only think when I’m writing, I think it just goes blank when I’m not writing. [laughs]\n(46:53)\tPodcast Host\tLike you’re not taking like, uh-\n(46:54):\tParul Sehgal\tNo, I take notes. I take notes and I’m like in the margins and it’s just like, you know, all my gormless checks and, you know, um, sad faces and all that’s happening there. But-\n(47:01):\tPodcast Host\tWait, you use sad faces.\n(47:03):\tParul Sehgal\t[laughs] All kinds of embarrassing marginalia.\n(47:07)\tPodcast Host\tBut tell me about it. No, but it’s, I want to know how you do your job!\n(47:08)\tParul Sehgal\tI mean, I, I talk a lot back to the book in the margins. You know, um, there’s definitely a lot of, I mean it’s stuff some, some of it, I’m flagging it for myself, but there is also a real way that, yeah, you’re reading this book and you’re reacting to it constantly, you know? I’m not gonna give you any more embarrassing stories about you. No [laughs]. I know, but yeah. But it’s, I mean like it’s-\n \n\n(47:32):\tPhone Voice 1\tI’m interested in the way Sehgal frames the initial critical impulse as a kind of conversation, what she refers to as “talking back to the book in the margins.” Funny too, that this marginalia, really the work of the book critic, should be seen as something embarrassing, maybe because it’s too sincere or impressionistic to be taken for a professional practice. Or maybe because talking back to the book in the margins too closely resembles talking to yourself, which at least in our society is kind of a faux pas.\n(48:02)\tPhone Voice 2\tIs it? I wouldn’t know.\n(48:05)\tPhone Voice 1\t[laughs] [And then sarcastically] Oh my God, so funny. Haha.\n[Seriously]\n\nNo, but I mean, speaking about things that are embarrassingly sincere, talking to Ben and Mirdhula reminded me of the way I sometimes markup favorite passages for my own text with this kind of shorthand,  m m m, which stands for hmm. But when I think about it, I only really do it for passages that really moved me, but I can’t quite articulate why.\n\n(48:34)\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. This kind of initial sonic or onomatopoeic response to text you’re talking about is reminding me of a passage from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. I’ll pull it up. Although be warned, it’s kind of sexy, [laughs] Ahem, here it is:\n[Music Begins: soft electronic tones]\n\n“Writing aloud is not phonological, but phonetic, its aim is not the clarity of messages. What it searches for are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh. A text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal\n\nstereophony.”\n\n[Music ends]\n\nI guess I take Barthes’ idea of reading aloud as a kind of metaphor for the sonic aspect of the way text elicits a bodily response. I read into your own marginalia a kind of textual representation of the sonic expression of the way text moves you. That hmm, is articulated as a kind of expressivism incident, to use Barthe’s terms. It makes me think too of Wordsworth, you know, for him what sincerity was, was expression itself, which is interesting, right? Because that word means two things. There’s artistic expression and then expression as vocalization.\n\nThe romantic idea of expression is tied mostly to a sense of overwhelming emotion that needs to be expelled from the body somehow. And they developed conventions for this in writing that epitaph or the elegy were seen as more sincere because they were tied so strongly to this overwhelming emotion. But I guess from Barthes, we also get the sense that emotion is so overwhelming it can’t necessarily be bound by any form.\n\nThe response that elicits from you is totally bodily. I see a parallel to this idea in Ben’s sense that conversation is more sincere than writing because it’s less conventional. It can’t be edited in real time. Or maybe the lack of the edit is its own convention, which is symbolized for me, at least by this hmm noise. [Music Begins: jazzy piano] And to return to Barthes, there’s pleasure in that, I think.\n\n(50:31)\tPhone Voice 1\tWait, what do you mean “there’s pleasure in that”?\n(50:34)\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, for me it’s the pleasure of recognition. I see my own ability to hesitate in speech in someone else’s, and that suits me. You know, this version of me that’s always rehearsing what I’m gonna say and then inevitably fumbles when the time comes.\n(50:46)\tPhone Voice 1\tNow, I didn’t think you did so bad there.\n(50:49):\tPhone Voice 2\t[laughs] You mean that?\n(50:51)\tPhone Voice 1\tI do. I really, really do.\n(50:58)\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. [laughs] Hmm.\n(51:01)\tNarrator\tOkay. Time to cut the tape. Enough of this genuine conversation. I talk about this too much. [Music ends]\nSpecial thanks to Hannah Cogan, Ben Heywood-MacLeod and  Mirdhula Kannapathapillai. Although their audio didn’t make the cut, my conversations with Alia Hazineh, Barbara Saldana, and Matt Fyfe informed a part of my thinking for this podcast. [Music Begins: Soft tones with the sound of wind rushing through trees]\n\nThe inimitable Matthew King performed the voice of Charles Dickens.\n\n(51:31)\tScrooge\tBa humbug! [Music ends]\n(51:47):\tKatherine McLeod\t[Music Begins: SpokenWeb outro music]\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Francis Grace Fife, an MA student at Concordia University, and a research assistant on the Concordia SpokenWeb team.\n\nOur supervising producer is Kate Moffatt, our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. Special thanks to the interviewees and voice actors of the episode, Hannah Kogan, Ben Haywood, Mirdhula Kannapathapillai, and Matthew King. And thanks to Jason Camlot for providing early initial script and audio feedback.\n\n[Music fades into the SpokenWeb theme music]\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades and ends]"],"score":3.1419106},{"id":"9596","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E5, The Affordances of Sound, 6 March 2023, Eastwood"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-affordances-of-sound/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/b3e0dc23-17dd-48c0-baf1-37efbe9e6ac2/audio/b69f4a17-24df-4ac2-b188-4b76a967ed1f/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e5.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:53:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"51,756,765 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e5\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-affordances-of-sound/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-03-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. 1992. ‘General Introduction’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.\\n\\nBrinkmann, M. (2018) The ‘audio walk’ as a format of experiential walking, Phenomenological research in education. Available at: https://paed.ophen.org/2018/06/25/gehen-spazieren-flanieren-das-format-audiowalk-als-erfahrungsgang/\\n\\nCardiff, J. and Miller, G.B. (no date) Walks, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Available at: https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/\\n\\nGrint, K. and Woolgar, S. 1997. The Machine At Work. Cambridge: Polity.\\n\\nHutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42856294. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.\\n\\nKellough, Kaie, et al. “‘Small Stones’: A Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography.” “Small Stones”: a Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography – SpokenWeb Archive of the Present, https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/small-stones-a-work-in-poetry-sound-music-and-typography/.\\n\\nLevine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine, host. “The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts, Season 3, Episode 5.\\n\\nMills, Mara. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press, 2015. “deafness” p.45-54.\\n\\nRicci, Stephanie. The Making of “Small Stones” (2021) SpokenWeb Archive of the Present. SpokenWeb.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549535850496,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What is sound design? This is the question Miranda Eastwood, current Sound Designer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, is looking to find out. Exploring soundscapes of all shapes and forms, Miranda draws from interviews with friends, colleagues, and academics, as well as Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network to tackle this particularly tangled question. From sonic literature to audio walks, podcasting to music, this episode is a deep dive into what it means to “sound out” any and all audio texts, and the affective power afforded to sound as a medium of art and communication.\n\n(00:05)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music ends]\n(00:34)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Back in 2019, when the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast was coming together, a big question for our team was, what do we want the podcast to sound like? We ended up deciding that we didn’t want to be prescriptive.\nWe wanted SpokenWeb researchers listening to the podcast and thinking about pitching an episode themselves to really know that the podcast welcomes all approaches when it comes to what your research about sound sounds like, and that we are there as an editorial team to collaboratively shape the sound design of each episode. But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about sound design? Fast forward to the fall of 2020 in Jason Camlot’s grad seminar at Concordia University on sonic approaches, where current spoken web podcast, sound designer Miranda Eastwood, was faced with the question, what is sound design?\n\nThe question of sound design sent Miranda Eastwood on an epic sonic journey, armed with their own experience, scholarly literature on the topic, and interviews with a wide ranging cast of individuals engaging in sound design in their own work. This episode, whens its way through both the theoretical and the practical.\n\nThe episode itself is exploring the affordances of sound, including how the medium is both a form to be used and a space in which to play. What does it sound like to ask the question, “what is sound design” on a podcast all about literary sound? Well, that’s what you are about to hear. Here’s episode five of season four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, The Affordances of Sound. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music plays and then fades]\n\n(2:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[deep breath] Yeah, okay. [Piano music begins]\n(02:45)\tElevator\tSixth floor.\n(02:47):\tMiranda Eastwood\tAlright, come on. Here we go. [sound effect: footsteps walking]\nWe’re in the English Department right now at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal. I’m Miranda, by the way. I’m also currently the sound designer for the SpokenWeb podcast, and right now I’m taking you to Professor Jason Camlot’s weekly seminar course, Sonic Approaches. [sound effect: door opens] [piano music ends]\n\n(03:12)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSo I was doing my presentation on podcasting in Jason’s seminar.\n(03:16)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI just finished one of our assignments, a presentation.\n(03:20)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd I kept throwing around the term sound design.\n(03:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI volunteered to go on the week in which we covered scholarly podcasting.\n(03:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tLike, remember to start thinking about sound design early on, or you might want to consider sound design before you start recording, you know, stuff like that.\n(03:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBig surprise.\n(03:39)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tThen Jason says something along the lines of we’re going to move on, but we’ll circle back to that term, Miranda, and we’ll get you to tell everyone what sound design is. And I just blanked, I just blanked for 30 seconds because I was sitting there like, I don’t know what sound design is.\n(04:01)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[Piano music begins] Oh boy. The sound designer doesn’t know what sound design is.\n(04:05)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOr at least, I know what it is, but I don’t, I don’t know how to describe it. Not in a way that makes any sense.\n(04:13)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo I did some research.\n(04:15)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tYou know, Google doesn’t count as research, right?\n(04:18)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd I got some definitions.\n(04:21)\tMultiple Voices\t[Piano music fades and ends] The art and practice of creating soundtracks for a variety of needs, creating the audio, the craft of creating an old term, which describes….\n(04:31)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tThese definitions. They don’t tell you anything. Some of them are too specific or too vague or they focus in on one aspect of the process. They describe one design choice rather than the series of choices as a whole or, or these definitions don’t even begin to cover the question. It’s too big. This…\n(04:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis could be a podcast episode.\n(05:02)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\t[Piano music begins and ends] Ah, okay.\n(05:03)\tJason Camlot\tSo where are you at with things?\n(05:05)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWell, maybe I’ll just, I’ll do like a quick speed run of my outline. It’s no,t like this is really…\n(05:11)\tMiranda Eastwood\tReally fast forward a week or two or three. Let me get the syllabus.\n(05:16)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThere’s gonna be a lot of back and forth. There’s a lot of overlap between…\n(05:20)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSee, part of the seminar course was the option to tackle a long form podcast.\n(05:26)\tJason Camlot\tAre you doing short form, longform?\n(05:27)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYes.\n(05:29)\tJason Camlot\tOkay.\n(05:29):\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAbsolutely. Why on earth would I write an essay when I could make a podcast?\n(05:33)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Laughs] So like, would any good student I pitched my idea to Jason.\n(05:37)\tJason Camlot\tOn air! [Laughs]. Hi, I’m Jason. I’m a professor in the department of English at Concordia University and a Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound studies.\n(05:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tDo you have that, is that like a script in your head that you just like…\n(05:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tLike I mentioned, this all started with his seminar.\n(05:55)\tJason Camlot\tPutting your key concepts front and centre…\n(05:58)\tMiranda Eastwood (05:58)\tSo I got some feedback and he gave me a book. Forms: Whole. Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Carolyn Levine. Good book. Great book. And I’m going to be using it to build a roadmap, so to speak, based off Levine’s concepts of forms and of affordances.\n(06:19)\tJason Camlot\tAnd reminding us of them, you know and sort of making it almost like a quest narrative for…\n(06:26)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tA quest narrative. I like that. I like that a lot.\n(06:33)\tMiranda Eastwood\tA quest! [Videogame music plays and ends] Here’s our game plan. [Soft electronic music begins]\nWe’re going to rely on Levine’s five main ideas about forms in order to navigate different genres of sound. What are the five ideas?\n\n(06:44)\tMultiple Voices\tForms. differ, forms do political work in particular historical context, forms travel, forms, constraints, various forms, overlap and intersect.\n(06:55)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhat are the genres?\n(06:56)\tMultiple Voices\tVoice, podcasting, music, audio walks and sound effects.\n(07:01)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDid you get all that?\n(07:02):\tMultiple Voices\tUh no.\n(07:04):\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’ll come back to them. Tackle them one by one. Our weapon of choice: affordances. Paraphrasing from Levine, who’s borrowing from design theory, “Affordances are the potential actions or uses of a material based on, well, the object itself, the teapot, for example, is very good at what it does because its form and material lend themselves to pouring tea and keeping hot liquids contained. This is due partially to the ceramic and partially to the fact that the teapot has a spout and a handle.”\nAnother example, this one’s from Levine, is the doorknob. A doorknob affords not only hardness and durability, but also turning, pushing and pulling. Outside of its design, certain materials and forms can also have unexpected affordances, like using a chair to get to that top shelf or substituting a mug for a flower pot. Likewise, forms also have limitations, but we’ll get to that later. For now, we’re going to use this idea of affordances as a blade.\n\n[Sound effect: Sword unsheathing]\n\nYes. A sword that will help us cut through the jungle of interconnected forms and navigate the landscape of genre, right up to the moment where we face the ultimate question. Our proverbial dragon. What is sound design? [Music fades and ends]\n\n(08:46):\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[People talking in the background] Excuse me. Pardon. Scusez. Merci. Sorry. Phew.\n(08:49):\tMiranda Eastwood\tHey, how’s it going? I’m not late, am I? Good? Good. We’re sitting in the crowd at the Casa del Popolo. It’s March, 2020. Kaie Kellough, Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, and Jason Sharp are performing their piece tonight, Small Stones. While they’re setting up, I thought we could talk a bit about forms. Yeah. I’ve been throwing the concept of form around like a hacky sack, so I figured I should explain beyond the main ideas. Going back to Levine… Forms are a sort of indication, an arrangement or pattern, a shape, something identifiable. Sounds vague? Yeah, it kind of is, but this inclusive definition allows us to break down Levine’s ideas and use them to our advantage. The first main idea we’ll look at is this:\n(09:51)\t(onstage) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking on stage] Forms differ.\n(09:53)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDistinct forms are different from each other. Easy enough, right? Right. [Sound effect of mic feedback] Oh, they’re just about ready to start. [background talking spots]\n(10:05)\tJason Sharp (off mic, barely audible)\tSo like we, we do what we were just doing…\n(10:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI thought it’d be nice to start here with Kellough, with voice, the voice as it’s featured in poetry, music, podcasting, everywhere and anywhere in audio texts. [Sound effect of mic feedback] [Calm electronic music begins]\nI think it’s a good way to explore this idea of forms differing from one another because this voice, this performance, we’re about to hear… this never happened. [Music ends]\n\n(10:37)\t(onstage) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking on stage]\nHi. Hey. Yeah. Does anyone remember March, 2020? COVID 19. “Small Stones” was originally planned as a live performance.\n\n(10:49)\tKaie Kellough\tThis work was supposed to be a performance, like a live in-person performance.\n(10:53)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Kaie Kellough, from an interview from “The Making of Small Stones”.\n(11:00)\tKaie Kellough\tBut because of COVID, that was no longer possible because this was originally scheduled, I think for 2020.\n(11:06)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis migration of form, from a physical space to a virtual space. I mean, it begs the question: how does this change the nature of the piece itself?\n(11:17)\tKaie Kellough\tIt was generally decided that an in-person performance wouldn’t work as well, and it would be very complex because we would need to rent a venue if we wanted to present a live performance.\n(11:31)\tMiranda Eastwood\tKatherine McLeod, current host of the podcast actually had a talk with Kellough about this exact topic, but from an alternate angle. In ShortCuts Season 3, “The Voice That Is The Poem”, Katherine and Kaie revisit a piece he performed as part of an online Words and Music show. In that interview, he talks about the difference between a live piece and a studio-produced piece, the exact opposite of what we were just discussing.\n(11:58)\tKaie Kellough\tThere’s a raw, rawer quality to it than… Like, if this were made in a studio, it would’ve been a different piece because it would’ve been created for audio, right? It would’ve been created exclusively as an audio piece, and there would’ve been really limited emphasis on the visual aspect of performance and that communication with an audience, it would’ve been a much more, it would’ve been elaborate in a different way as a sonic object.\n(12:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Quiet string music begins]\nThe voice, manifested in these separate situations has its own set of affordances, even if as Levine tells us, no one has yet taken advantage of those possibilities and also to their limits, the restrictions intrinsic to particular materials and organizing principles.\n\n(12:41)\tKaie Kellough\tIn the studio, it’s a bit different. You wind up assembling the piece part by part.\n(12:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou can manipulate the voice in different ways.\n(12:49)\tKaie Kellough\tAnd then if you can overlap them or layer them or have them speak across one another and sometimes sync up and sometimes diverge, then it becomes not just multiple voices, but it becomes an interplay among multiple voices, sort of directed movement. [String music ends]\n(13:09)\tJason Sharp\tDoing so in the studio gives us a really unique opportunity to use the studio as an instrument.\n(13:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Jason Sharp, the musician behind “Small Stones”.\n(13:19)\tJason Sharp\tIt allows us to kind of, to compose using a wider sonic palette while still being sourced with just a saxophone and voice.\n(13:30)\tMiranda Eastwood\tRestricting the performance to a studio, then, can open or widen the soundscape of a piece.\n(13:36)\tKaie Kellough\tAnd then what happens when you have multiple voices? What do you do with them?\n(13:39)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAn affordance, born of limitation.\n(13:42)\tKaie Kellough\tWe’re trying to take a very broad approach to sound. So everything from sharp high screams to low brassy pulses like you’re hearing now. [Low electronic music begins] We’re trying to explore sound. So sound, to me, also relates to exploration and listening.\n(14:04)\t[Beginning of\nSmall Stones plays]\t[Audio fades in] The chronicles of [inaudible] relate that in remote times… at the auction of a circus. [Audio fades out]\n(14:22)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to shortcuts. [ShortCuts theme music plays briefly and fades]\n(14:27)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis concept of multiple voices is very interesting to me. Digitally we can layer voices. Similarly, with effect pedals, we can loop and layer vocals to, in Kellough’s words, “make the sonic field a little bit richer”. But what about your voice, the quality of a single voice working in different ways?\n(14:51)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn that summer I had the opportunity to work on the first episode, so…[Laughs] [Sound fades}\n(14:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis Is From a very lucky interview I had with Katherine Mcleod, current host of the podcast, longtime host of Shortcuts, and the producer of the SpokenWeb podcast’s very first episode.\n(15:10)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWe’re, we’re here at the podcast studio at Concordia University.\n(15:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSomething I would hear a lot during Jason Camlot’s seminar on sound was the phrase, “I hate listening to myself. I hate the sound of my own voice.”\n(15:25)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s, everybody hates the sound of their own voice. It’s just you hear yourself and, and there’s that, it’s weird. It’s like, ooh, is that, is that what I sound like? [Laughs]\n(15:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt’s a common expression, but the real statement here is: “I don’t sound the way I want to sound.” [Soft piano music begins to play]\nBut then… What would you like to sound like?\n\n(15:48)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tFilling slots for season one, you mentioned that there was a struggle for that, and I think you mentioned that part of that was that apprehension to working with sound and to going into what is perceived as a very technical field and then putting your work out there. And, and there’s that common question that comes up is like, I don’t, I don’t know if this is a good idea or not, and it’s like every idea is a good idea. [Laughs]\n(16:13)\tKatherine McLeod\tBut knowing that, that that idea is gonna be in public is it, is there’s, there’s apprehension about it. Also, something that often first time producers will comment on is that hearing themselves speak, hearing a recording of themselves speak… It will just be such a sort of process of just letting go of a lot of the ways that we hear ourselves and often really judge ourselves.\n(16:43)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, yeah, I don’t know how many…[Piano music ends]\n(16:45):\tMiranda Eastwood\tThere seems to be an immaterial standard of voice. A voice towards which we all reach or compare ourselves to. It’s different for everyone, you know, based on ourselves. But that standard can get in the way of artistic creation.\n(17:02)\tKatherine McLeod\tThis is something that Hannah McGregor has talked about quite extensively around voice, is the idea of like, how does the voice have authority and what or what do we think of when we think of a voice that has authority? And I think that sometimes when we hear ourselves if we don’t think that we sound authoritative, we can think, oh, oh no, I don’t, I don’t want this to be in public.\nBut then realizing that, well, I think we, we just, we have a… [Laughs] When we evaluate our own voices, we often don’t think that they sound authoritative. Whereas we’d be very, you know, easily I could say, oh, you, you, you sound like you know what you’re talking about. [Laughs] But it could, it might, we might be much, again, harder on ourselves.\n\n(17:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tNot just in relation to the voice, but in podcasting itself.\n(17:50)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, I was gonna ask about that. Like doing the first podcast episode. Like to me, like, that sounds like a lot of pressure, [laughs] that sounds, that sounds very, like, did you have, going into that, did you have a notion, like a sort of standard that you set yourself for that episode? Did you have an idea in mind going into it, or was it sort of just like, I don’t know what I’m doing and we’ll see what happens? [SpokenWeb theme music plays]\n(18:17)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n(18:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYes. Podcasting! Finally, we get to take a look at podcasting, academic podcasting ,to be specific.\n(18:33)\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, for the, for the SpokenWeb podcast, I would say that the idea has always been there from the beginning, in the sense that when SpokenWeb became a Cross-Canada partnership in 2018, that there was really an interest in making literary criticism that was also exploring sonic possibilities. So there was discussion right away from the beginning about having a podcast as part of the research dissemination.\n(19:03)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhich makes sense, right? I mean, SpokenWeb. Spoke, speak, sound. It seems obvious, but maybe it wouldn’t be as obvious just a few years ago. [Low string music begins]\n(19:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tI remember in 2019 when we had our first SpokenWeb institute at SFU, Hannah gave a presentation to try to show the SpokenWeb researchers in the room how podcasting was very accessible. We had to, you know, gather into groups and come up with a pitch for an idea for an episode. And it was really exciting to see everyone kind of thinking about this possibility, ’cause I think that it was, it was something at that point that nobody had really thought about.\n(19:51)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn my interview with Katherine, we touch on and explore a second idea relating to forms. That is, forms do political work, in particular historical contexts.\n[Music swells and then fades]\n\n(20:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. And even the way that the podcast forum is rooted in more of like a DIY culture where you know, it’s not necessary, it’s not something that is supposed to be made sort of at the sort of top down. It’s supposed to be coming from a grassroots place of just being able to record a conversation or work with some sounds and make it yourself, basically. So that sense of it being accessible and something that, again, doesn’t have to sound perfect. [Laughs]\n(20:44)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn Levine’s words, “forms […] shape what it is possible to think, say, and do, in a given context.” This idea provides somewhat of an answer to Grint and Woolgar’s question, “Does technology determine, or is it determined by the social?”\n(21:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tAs you know, as academics, there’s such a push for the finished product to be really polished, as polished as possible. And again, the podcast can still be rigorous places for thinking, but they don’t have to sound the same as an academic paper.\n(21:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSurprise! It’s both.\n(21:24)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tLike, that was a decision that you, you sat down and you were like, do we wanna set a structure for the podcast, or do we just invite anyone to come in and, and do what they wanna do?\n(21:36)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Quiet electronic music begins] The decision was to be as open as possible in terms of the kinds of sounds that people wanted to bring to the table and the kinds of approaches that they wanted to take with their episode.\n(21:45)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThe idea was to build a podcast that reflected the ideas of researchers, rather than suggesting a rigid structure for episodes to follow, producers can arrange each episode to reflect their research strategies. Audio essays, panel talks, and interviews, all make an appearance in the SpokenWeb podcast. Just recently, we’ve released an episode based on a dramatic script.\n(22:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tI think that we also kind of by chance in terms of which episodes we were pitched the first season, really does show that very well too, because we have an episode that Kate Mofatt made with very raw audio that was recorded at that SpokenWeb symposium and institute in 2019, not knowing that it would become part of a podcast, but it did. And she was able to edit the audio, but also then interview one of the panelists afterwards.\nAnd so there was both a sense of hearing the raw audio and then also adding an interview to it. But that episode is a great example of being able to work with what you have and make something really exciting out of it. [Music ends]\n\n(22:55)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut these, these genres of podcasting, they’re still established forms. There is a right way to do an audio essay as well as an interview. There is a version of a podcast episode that works or does what it’s supposed to, what it’s designed to do.\n(23:15)\tKatherine McLeod\tThere’s a responsibility and a creativity to that process.\n(23:20)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIf your episode doesn’t end up doing what it’s supposed to do, is that a failure in sound design? A lack, maybe, of design? Or maybe even overly designed, overly produced? [Sound effect of someone walking on gravel] What would that even sound like?\n(23:44)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThis.. is not an audio walk. I mean, depending on the definition. I’m walking. You might be walking too. If you are walking, does that not make this whole episode an audio walk?\n(24:00)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’re up to our third idea about forms.\n(24:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tI’m on Mount Royal, by the way.\n(24:09)\tMiranda Eastwood\tForms travel.\n(24:11):\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tLevine’s point with this one is that, that forms travel across time and space.\n(24:18)\tMiranda Eastwood\tCheesy. I know. Introducing this concept with an audio walk.\n(24:22)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tYou’ve gotta start somewhere.\n(24:24)\tJason Camlot\tI think that’s a great place to start.\n(24:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tHopping on back to office hours with Professor Jason Camlot.\n(24:30)\tJason Camlot\tBut there are audio walks that don’t require technologies, right?\n(24:35)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(24:36)\tJason Camlot\tYou can just go walking and listening.\n(24:38)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(24:38)\tJason Camlot\tAnd that’s a sound walk, right? You might say, we don’t hear much more when we’re walking without headphones than we’re here with headphones.\n(24:46)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(24:46)\tJason Camlot\tIf we’re not actually trained or intentionally trying to listen, right?\n(24:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMm-hmm.\n(24:50)\tJason Camlot\tSo that it might be, I think it’s important… No matter what you’re talking about in terms of sound design, remember that our hearing is already mediated, right?\n(25:04)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(25:04)\tJason Camlot\tEven without using technology extensions, right? You know…\n(25:08)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Plucked strings music begins to play] But a unifying function of most audio walks, to paraphrase Malte Brinkmann, is an effort to reframe the individual, the walking subject, and to draw our attention to our own perception and observation of what surrounds us. That being said…\n(25:26)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThose walks, you don’t, you don’t really want to be following a map when you listen. It’s overwhelming. For a reason. Of course, they’re meant to be immersive. Maybe that’s just the way this form of the audio walk is evolving.\n(25:45)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI’m quoting Bijker and Law here, “Technologies do not have a momentum of their own at the outset that allows them to pass through a neutral social medium. Rather, they are subject to contingency as they pass from figurative hand to hand, and so are shaped and reshaped. Sometimes they disappear altogether. No one felt moved or was obliged to pass them on. At other times. They take novel forms or are subverted by users to be employed in ways quite different from those for which they were originally intended.” [String music ends]\n(26:26)\tJason Camlot\tAnd what else do you see here that’s really weird?\n(26:27)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(26:28)\tJason Camlot\tOh, two headphone jacks. That’s a really great device. All metal casing. [Laughs]\n(26:34)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah. Nice, nice brick in your pocket.\n(26:35)\tJason Camlot\tYeah.\n(26:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\tJason showed me a button on the original Walkman.\n(26:39)\tJason Camlot\tI actually have one still. It doesn’t work anymore, but I may get it repaired one day.\n(26:43)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah. Well, what’s the big yellow button?\n(26:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOn his computer. Not in real life.\n(26:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, that’s a mic.\n(26:49)\tMiranda Eastwood\tUnfortunately.\n(26:50)\tJason Camlot\tSee That? So there’s a mic on it.\n(26:53)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. Just for the podcast to know, I’m at an angle from Jason’s computer, [laughs], like, this isn’t me being-\n(26:57)\tJason Camlot\tAnd we’re zooming in on an image of the first Walkman TPS- L2 model.\n(27:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut it is a button that allows you to switch from listening to your tape, to your surroundings. A sort of anti-isolation.\n(27:15)\tJason Camlot\tThere was a fear of one’s listening being blocked out from one’s actual environment. And if you press this button, it would pick up sound from the outside through this microphone. It could not record, but it was designed to hear the outside world.\n(27:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDespite this being “old” technology, we’ve recently seen a resurgence in demand for headphones that offer an ambient noise function. That is, they let you hear your surroundings with the push of a button.\n(27:47)\tJason Camlot\tBut it went away after-\n(27:47)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tI did come back-\n(27:48)\tJason Camlot\tWell- Did it come back?\n(27:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tIt has come back.\n(27:50)\tJason Camlot\tAnd why…?\n(27:50)\tMiranda Eastwood\tTechnologies travel. Sometimes they go in circles.\n(27:56)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking in gravel]\nOh, should’ve… Okay. I should have went left. I think I’m caught in a loop.\n\n(28:09)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAll right, kiddos, we set?\n(28:10)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah, I think so.\n(28:12)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOkay. So here’s one thing about those definitions from the beginning, those definitions on what sound design is. A lot of them, for me, only capture a part of the process, a moment.\n(28:25)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tAs opposed to having to go up. Because I, I like, I don’t know, it just feels like there’s more abilities here than there is…\n(28:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd it’s true. Sitting down with an arsenal of sounds and trying to make them into something cohesive can and usually is the most time consuming part of the process. But what about recording?\n(28:44)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAre we set?\n(28:47)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah, I think so.\n(28:48)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Kaitlyn.\n(28:50)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t[Laughs] Do you wanna, do you wanna take a moment?\n(28:51)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tNo, I think I’m good.\n(28:53)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay.\n(28:54)\tKaitlyn Staveley\t[Piano music begins to play]\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn and I am Miranda’s friend.\n\n(28:58)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tUh, No. [laughs]\n(28:59)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tWait, we’re not friends? This is news to me. [both laugh]\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley, and I’m a full-time cat servant. [both laugh]\n\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley and I’m gonna sing a song. [laughs]\n\n[Music fades and ends]\n\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley. I am a hobbyist musician, singer and artist.\n\n(29:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is us in my home studio working on some vocals for a Christmas collaboration.\n(29:31)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tAnd it was just giving me…\n(29:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt took us about two hours for two minutes.\n(29:38)\tKaitlyn Staveley (singing)\tDecorations of red.\n(29:41)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tIt’s clipping.\n(29:42)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, it’s definitely… Alright, we’re gonna tune it down.\n(29:44)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThe majority of those hours being spent on decisions.\n(29:48)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tCan we perhaps scoot this one over because I need to be able to see the lyrics? Can we lower this just a little?\n(29:55)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOh yeah.\n(29:56)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tDo you have like a little, like a little seat? Because I feel more comfortable with my diaphragm down a bit as opposed to up, because… I was curious if maybe we could lower it all together and I can sit and sit maybe just a tiny bit lower? I’ll have a little sip of tea.\n(30:09)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, let’s have a sip of tea.\n(30:11)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tSorry.\n(30:12)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tNo, no, no. That’s why, that’s why this is…\n(30:13)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSound design begins long before you sit down at the computer.\n(30:18)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tExactly. If you’re gonna do it, just do it. [Piano music ends]\n(30:26)\tJames Healey\tSo it’s like the truest representation of the sound field at that time.\n(30:30)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThat, that statement just corroborated, ugh, Corroborated…. I’m gonna cut that one out. [laughs]\n(30:36)\tJames Healey\tCrimina!\n(30:36)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\t[Laughs]. Just, I keep saying-\n(30:37)\tJames Healey\tSound criminal.\n(30:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSometimes it starts at the studio at Concordia University. Again.\n(30:46)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAll right. That… Shouldn’t be humanly possible. [laughs] That’s the real mark of a musician. You can snap with all four fingers.\n(30:52)\tJames Healey\tThats. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how they know.\nMy name is James Healey. I work with sound and music. I specialize as a sound recordist in like, ambient music.\n\n(31:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThere’s no right way to set up a microphone. I mean, there are definitely wrong ways, but talking with James…\n(31:12)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since last week about your setup on that record we were listening to. Which was insane. There was a name for it…\n(31:23)\tJames Healey\tYeah. Yeah. So there were four microphones.\n(31:27)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI realized that sound design begins even before you set foot in the studio. Or wherever you happen to be recording.\n(31:35)\tJames Healey\tThree of the microphones were in an array known as a double mid-side. You can do an abbreviation M-S-M, so mid side mid. We’re gonna, as you say, unpack this a bit, and we’re gonna do a little bit of wave physics.\n(31:54)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh boy. My favorite. [laughs]\n(31:56)\tJames Healey\tHa, yes.\n(31:57)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo, I realize this isn’t the podcast to air a 20-minute conversation about wave physics, so we’ll fast forward through this one.\n[Sound effect of conversation fastforwarding]\n\n(32:09)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. But like, like what… That sounds like so much work. What’s the advantage here?\n(32:15)\tJames Healey\tSome stuff suffers for the good stuff. I mean, whatever turns out good is the good stuff, but then some stuff suffers and then if you don’t do it justice, you’ll find that in post you’re fighting against it in the mix rather than working with it. It’s very risky.\n[Electronic drum music begins]\n\nAnd the advantages, I think, kind of outweigh that. Using one mic configuration to pick up several sound sources live off the floor, essentially causes a compression of the sound sources together, kind of like a glue to your mix that is natural to the acoustics and the spacing.\n\n(33:02)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tNatural to, like, our hearing?\n(33:05)\tJames Healey\tIt’s, it’s natural and true to the room. It’s natural and true to how the sound sources are placed. It’s natural to their amplitude according to each other.\n(33:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd although James works in music, these recording setups could be applied to the design of any sound-based text. Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks, for example, use binaural recording; a method that more accurately captures the way we perceive sound. [Music ends]\n(33:32)\tJames Healey\tLike. I’m just like, I’ll hear the music and I’ll think of the record as like a whole. And I’ll think of the vibe to say something very not technical.\n(33:40)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAre there sound shenanigans that you’ve pulled off? Like similar, really interesting, I guess noteworthy?\n(33:47)\tJames Healey\tSo-\n(33:48)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tDo, do a rapid fire.\n(33:50)\tJames Healey\t[‘Soulless Days” by James Healy begins to play]\nOkay. The first record I ever made for a band would be a band called Dumpster Juice. And we just committed eight channels to four track cassette tape. I ended up doing some records in Dawson City Yukon, where I was running a recording studio over the winter up there doing some cool EPs in like, sort of this barn workshop in my friend’s loft of this like barn workshop in the woods there. And did some records in like negative 50 outside. It was, it was crazy. T\n\nhere was another one, the Wakefield session where I was studying the record, “The Trinity Session” by the Cowboy Junkies. So I did the same thing, but in a church in Wakefield, with the sound field microphone, and that’s the first record, I think, that was like really a professional piece of audio, but when I finally did it, I was like, wow. Like, it was not all in vain. It was very stressful. [Miranda laughs]\n\nYou know, I made a record. I have like some, an ambient project called Jupiter Machine where I made a record all to cassette tape.\n\n(34:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’re listening to it right now. This is “Soulless days”. You can check out the show notes for a link to the rest of the album. [“Soulless Days swells and fades]\nThe idea of an organic or natural sound… That’s not going to be the same across cultures, industries, or individuals. Sometimes you’ve just got to keep the context in mind.\n\n(35:26)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tI feel… maybe like one more take cuz it’s… I’m drying out.\n(35:31)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo, in terms of what form is doing here.\n(35:38)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay, I think we’re good. All right. Are we ready-Eddie-setti?\n(35:39)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah.\n(35:40)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOr what idea the form of recording represents.\n(35:43)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t3,2,1…\n(35:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tForms constrain.\n(35:50)\tKaitlyn Staveley (singing)\tI’ll have a blue Christmas without you. I’ll be so blue just thinking about you. You’ll be doin’ all right, with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.\n(36:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t[Miranda claps] Yay!\n(36:29)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tThank you. How was that? How does that sound? I didn’t hear it in the headphones.\n(36:35)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tWait, so what does that mean? Forms constrain? That doesn’t sound positive.\n(36:40)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhen we designate something as a specific form, we also designate its limits. The teapot includes the lid, but not the mug next to it. The sonnet is made of 14 lines, no more, no less. Or it isn’t a sonnet.\n(36:58)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tRight. Right.\n(36:58)\tMiranda Eastwood\tLet’s go back to affordances. Remember? What a form can do and what it can’t do or what it does badly. [Piano begins to play]\nTo quote Ian Hutchby: “the reason is that different technologies possess different affordances and these affordances constrain the ways that they can possibly be written or read. While a tree offers an enormous range of affordances for a vast variety of species, there are things a river can afford, which the tree cannot and vice versa.”\n\n[Music ends]\n\nI mean, it seems obvious when you put it like that, right? The thing is, we don’t really decide what forms are. If I put a sonnet in front of you and you refused to acknowledge it as such, the form of the sonnet wouldn’t seize to exist. That poem wouldn’t stop being a sonnet.\n\n(37:53)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tNo. If only I were that powerful.\n(37:57)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIdentifying forms is the first step to understanding how they work and what their affordances are. This might seem straightforward. After all, is sound not a form? Could we not simply explore the affordances of sound?\n(38:14)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tThat’s a bit ambitious, isn’t it?\n(38:17)\tMiranda Eastwood\tImpossibly ambitious. Sound is made up of multiple, countless other forms, or rather multiple countless other forms are made up of sound. Which, by the way, leads us to our final idea about forms.\n(38:32)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tForms overlap.\n(38:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd intersect.\n(38:39)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…Because it’s not… Yeah, no, Like that’s a nice sound. Wait, wait, just do. Oh-oh-oh yeah.\n(38:47)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThat’s me.\n(38:49)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWe look like fools. [Laughs]\n(38:50)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Laughs]. Oh yeah. And Ghislaine.\n(38:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tThis is fun. Hello, my name is Ghislaine Comeau and I am a PhD student at Concordia University where I study early medieval English literature.\n(39:04)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe spent a morning at Concordia University collecting sound effects for our short form podcast assignment.\n(39:10)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[String music begins]\nAnd secretly I am also an amateur artist.\n\n(39:16)\tMiranda Eastwood\tShe was also in Jason’s seminar.\n(39:19)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWith the clacking of the feets and the doors and an occasional plexiglass slider and keys.\n(39:28)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd she was after very specific sounds.\n(39:31)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tWe can take the zoom recorder and we can get footsteps like literally in the hallway.\n(39:34)\tGhislaine Comeau\tYeah, in the hallway.\n(39:35)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s Thursday morning-\n(39:36)\tGhislaine Comeau\tYeah. And it’s gonna, we’re gonna make it sound like a big fancy schmancy archive place in the hallway.\n(39:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou could call what we were doing Foley art.\n(39:49)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tRemember it’s not about like how-\n(39:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIt’s about all of it.\n(39:55)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s not about how leather actually sounds. It’s about how you think, how we would think leather sounds, you know, decontextualized from its environment. [Music ends]\n(40:06)\tMiranda Eastwood\tFoley art brings an environment to life through sound. From big things like thunder… [Sound effect of thunder plays]\nTo small things, like brushing dust off a hardcover book…[Sound effect of someone brushing dust off a book]\n\nFoley started in radio, but has since evolved into a term used primarily in film.\n\n(40:26)\tJames Healey\tThe concept of Foley plays with sort of this perception of source bonding.\n(40:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI talked a bit about Foley with James.\n(40:37)\tJames Healey\tI’ve done some post for a handful of short films, as well as one feature where there was some Foley involved, sort of like informal, you know, using rubbing on a table if they’re rubbing on something else or you know….\n(40:56)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(40:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn Foley, what you record is rarely the object you’re trying to imitate. The sound you capture will be more exaggerated, sharper, more focused. There’s a difference between sound as we experience it and sound effects.\n(41:13)\tJames Healey\t[Upbeat electronic music begins] So source bonding in electro acoustics is basically relating a sound to the context of its source, like attributing sonic characteristics to a certain sound source. And that is enforced by the visual on the screen and therefore sound also enforces the visual context as well. So they’re sort of acting in resonance.\n(41:40)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tI guess that’s why they call it Foley “art”. [Music ends]\n(41:42)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt’s although I will say that thunder from before? [Sound effect of thunder plays]\nI did get that one right outside my apartment. So not that it’s my goal to cover everything, because as mentioned, that would be insanely ambitious. But we do need to talk about… [Spooky music plays and ends]\n\nThe dark side of affordances. Affordances, remember, are a double edged blade.\n\n(42:21)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of sword being unsheathed]\nBy the way, this sword sound is actually me dragging a spoon across an empty travel mug. Isn’t that cool?\n\n(42:29)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAffordances are useful in describing what a material does well, but also what it does not so well. It’s limitations, it’s failures, which brings us to a difficult question. How does sound fail? [Spooky music plays and ends]\n(42:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThe only anecdote I can think of, like where, where sound, at least sound design has really failed personally for me is I… That workshop with Oana… Avasilichioaei?\n(43:00)\tJason Camlot\tYeah.\n43:01)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood (\tYeah. So we submitted a short piece and I thought I was doing something very nice and artistic by ending my piece with, you know, footsteps on gravel walking off into the sunset, she marked the, she timestamped that moment with a little comment, why is somebody chewing? [Jason laughs]\nAnd I was just like… where does that come from?\n\n(43:23)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tWould this sound like walking to you if you didn’t have any context? [Sound effect of someone walking]\n(43:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\t“In any given circumstance, no form operates in isolation.” That’s a quote pulled directly from Levine. When we immerse ourselves in sound, we’re not coming to the table empty handed. We all have our own personal and cultural experiences that can and will shape the way we hear. You could argue for the affordances of sound as… Immersive, transformative, but what happens… [Sound effect as though Miranda is speaking in an echoey hallway]…when sound can’t reach you?\nFrom Hutchby again, “it is important to see that affordances are not just functional, but also relational aspects of an object’s material presence in the world.” [Sound effect of someone walking] You could say sound offers us immersion, but who’s the us in this case? More importantly, who are we excluding here?\n\n(44:34)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\t[Breathes deeply] 51, almost at the top. You know, it’s, it’s funny when, when people ask for directions to the chalet, they don’t call it the chalet. They say ‘the view’. Which way’s the view? Oh, right. We were, we were talking about deafness, right?\n(44:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tTwo technologies clashing.\n(45:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tIs it ironic to talk about deafness on a podcast?\n(45:10)\tMiranda Eastwood\t“The ear itself is a composite organ which hears by mechanical and electrical means.”\n(45:16)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tOr is it of the utmost necessity?\n(45:19)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThat was a quote from Mara Mill’s chapter from Keywords in Sound. And I believe it’s useful to think of our own hearing as a sort of technology, but one that’s unfixed, subjective. There are different degrees of deafness, paraphrasing Mills, which can be conceived as a pre-condition of hearing, or as the resistance to hearing.\nAs we age, we often lose our ability to hear. Exposure to loud environments over time will wear down our ability to hear sounds at certain frequencies. Acknowledging the inherent differences in an individual’s hearing can reshape the way we design sound. If I were to design a piece for a friend that could only hear low frequency rumbling, I’d likely come up with something that would be physically difficult to listen to for someone with a wider frequency range. But beyond that, acknowledging limitations can also invite quite literally, invention.\n\n[Electronic music begins]\n\nThomas Edison identified as deaf, once remarking, “I have not heard a bird since I was 12 years old.” Quite the anecdote from the guy who invented the phonograph. Mills mentions other audio-notable figures in her chapter who similarly identified as deaf or hard of hearing. To quote Mills, “deafness has afforded insights into etology, acoustics, and phonetics, and in turn given rise to new psychotechnical devices.” All this to say that the affordances of sound are not isolated to sound itself, but emerge from a relationship between the listener and the audio text. Sound design insinuates that the piece is being designed with a subject in mind. Considering the subject as an open position encourages us to reconsider the role, function, and form of sound.\n\n[electronic music ends]\n\n(47:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAlright, um…\n(47:28)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWell, we’ve been all over the place.\n(47:34)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tThis is… this is a box [laughs], and it’s got a little latch.\n(47:41)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI hope this has been as much of a journey for you as it has been for me.\n(47:45)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd inside the box is another box. A music box. It is, yeah, that’s, yeah. It’s a music box that is literally, [sighs] It’s a box that makes music. Um…\n(48:02)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut what about our question?\n(48:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tAt the top. Can you hear that? Can you hear the, the flag?\n(48:10)\tMiranda Eastwood\tMy question, Really.\n(48:12)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThe flag hitting the metal pole in the wind.\n(48:16)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…And you run the strip of paper through it, and the idea is that the paper, you can make little holes in the paper and the holes dictate where the notes go because it’s a music box. It makes music.\n(48:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAfter all this, all this talking.\n(48:36)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd yelling and screaming! And stomping down hallways. [laughs]\n(48:41)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWhat do we think?\n(48:42)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd there’s a little crank. You have to.. I’m gonna turn the, turn the crank. Like-\n(48:49)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhat is sound design?\n(48:52)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSo it’s this, it’s [laughs]. It’s a, it’s a neat little, little machine. I love it. The thing is about… So there are rules, you, well rules. You can’t play the same note twice. It’s just because…\n(49:09)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSomething, I think, that has summed up every step of the way, every mark on our map. It’s been this…reaching for something…\n(49:14)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…Fast Enough. There’s no way it can go fast enough reaching for something for the same note, hit twice, two beats in a row. Also. it’s got a weird scale.\n(49:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou’re aiming for something when you begin that process of design. You’re practicing intention.\n(49:34)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tI made it. There’s, there’s the view.\n(49:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAt the end of this podcast episode, I’m making the argument for sound as a means of transport and creation. Sound design is, well, design. Design is creation. Creation is storytelling. And stories take us places. [Music box music begins to play]\n(50:04)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tI’d… Like you to meet my imaginary friend..\n(50:11)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWhat does sound design mean to you?\n(50:17)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tWe stay up late…\n(50:17)\tKatherine McLeod\tSoundscape.\n(50:18)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tSoundscape. Let’s narrow that down a bit.\n(50:21)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd thinking that when one, say, has a recording of something that one wants to work with…\n(50:28)\tJason Camlot\tIt’s about thinking through the affordances of, like, hearing and listening.\n(50:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tSo how does the Hunched Wizard sound like when he walks? [Laughs]\n(50:40)\tJason Camlot\tAnd the media technologies through which one is actually manipulating sound.\n(50:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tMarvelilicious!\n(50:47)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah? Was that better than the last one?\n(50:48)\tJames Healey\tFor me, it’s like, almost sculpting.\n(50:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn an episode or in a, you know, a performance or what have you.\n(50:56)\tJames Healey\tYeah, you really are, you’re sculpting like a stereo field.\n(51:00)\tJason Camlot\tAnd coming up with a sonically formal configuration of those sounds…\n(51:05)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat is gonna be the, the sort of the sound that holds that sound.\n(51:11)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tSaid, you were mine, mine, mine. Gimme, gimme, never get. I know the going’s tough, but we can’t give up just yet. So breathe on 1, 2, 3.\n(51:22)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThe sound that holds the sound.\n(51:23)\tJason Camlot\tA particular listening model in mind in order to achieve specific effects.\n(51:30)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tShould we listen to it with music?\n(51:32)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSure.\n(51:33)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tMusic to me is, you know, kind of the highest form of sound design you can say, because it’s so.. Difficult.\n(51:43)\tKaitlyn Staveley\t[laughs] Yeah, exactly. You’re right.\n(51:44)\tJames Healey\tRight. Becomes this glue to the work, which actually sort of makes the viewer or the listener feel like those elements have always belonged together.\n(51:55)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, I said that you were mine. You said that you were mine. I’d like to keep my imaginary friend. My imaginary friend. My imaginary friend. [Music box ends]\n(52:26)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tUgh. Good. One more take? One more take.\n(52:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYeah, okay.\n(52:46)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Spoken Web] heme music begins] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nOur producer this month is Miranda Eastwood, an MA student at Concordia University and our very own sound designer for the SpokenWeb podcast. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. A special thanks to Professor Jason Camlot, professor Katherine McLeod, James Healy, Kaitlyn Staveley and Ghislaine Comeau for lending this episode their original voices.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [Theme music ends]"],"score":3.1419106},{"id":"9597","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 S4E6, Revisiting “Mountain Many Voices: The Archival Sounds of Fred Wah”, 3 April 2023, Shipton and Brock"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-mountain-many-voices-the-archival-sounds-of-fred-wah/"],"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":["Don Shipton","Teddie Brock"],"creator_names_search":["Don Shipton","Teddie Brock"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Don Shipton\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Teddie Brock\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0bf2a7c7-ddac-40e7-8106-659d4438a7d5/audio/55dfa8f4-b0b8-4048-bc33-a1f90eed0fdb/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e6.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"38,194,826 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-mountain-many-voices-the-archival-sounds-of-fred-wah/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-04-03\",\"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":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Makarova, Liza. “The Night of the Living Archive.” Season 4, Episode 2, The SpokenWeb Podcast, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/.\\n\\nArchival Audio:\\n\\n“Ed Dorn reading in Albuquerque on October 30, 1963 Side 1 #109b.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Lionel Kearns, Mike Matthews, and Fred Wah reading poetry at UBC #258.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Charles Olson on August 14, 1963 #48.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Louis Zukofsky reading at Library of Congress on November 3 and 4, 1960 Tape 1 of 2 #260a.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Avison, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, and Levertov on August 7, 1963 #45.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Avison, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Whalen, and Levertov on August 9, 1963 #46b.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Around New Sound Daily Means: Selected Poems by Larry Eigner and Gary Snyder, Tape 1 of 3 #500a.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549538996224,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the summer of 2022, research assistants Don Shipton and Teddie Brock took part in a roundtable discussion that explored the archival work of student researchers involved with the audio archives of Canadian poet, Fred Wah. Alongside his literary and academic work, Wah has had a longstanding practice of recording poetry readings, lectures, and conversations, documenting key moments in North American poetry.\n\nThis sonic-archival meditation highlights the impact of recording technology on the trajectory of poetic circulation and composition, as it brings together the ‘many voices’ that constituted Wah’s listening and recording practices as a young poet. The first part of this episode will revisit a recording of Wah’s conversation with Deanna Fong, co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive, in which Wah reflects on the significance of portable tape recording to literary community-building and the development of a poetic ‘voice.’ The episode will also present a selection of archival clips documenting the poets whose recorded voices Wah encountered throughout the 1960s, including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, among others.\n\nSpecial thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for their production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books for hosting the “Mountain Many Voices” roundtable event.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[SpokenWeb Theme music ends]\n\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. For each episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, the producers and production team are always thinking about recording; the microphones, zoom recorders, sound quality, from voiceover to interview to archival audio clips. And this month’s episode is all about recording and how recording shapes the way we encounter sound, particularly poetry.\n\nThe poet at the center of it all, Fred Wah, is known for both his poetry and also for his recording. Did you know that the sound recordings of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference were thanks to Fred Wah being the guy who carried the tape recorder around? And let’s remember that tape recorders were not easy to carry around back then. And because he had the tape recorder, he was able to have it running during so many of the sessions, and there ends up being an audio archive of that now famous event in Canadian poetry.\n\nSo keeping that in mind, let’s jump to another event in 2022, when Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted an event called Mountain Many Voices: the archival sounds of Fred Wah. That event was a round table discussion with Fred Wah himself, student researchers working on Wah archival materials, both from SFU and from Concordia, and moderated by Dr. Deanna Fong.\n\nBy the way, Fong leads the Fred Wah Digital Archive Project, which you can hear more about by listening to the episode “Night of the Living Archive” produced by Liza Makarova and aired on the SpokenWeb Podcast in November, 2022. And yes, Liza is also part of this round table discussion Mountain Many Voices. In this month’s episode, Teddie Brock and Donald Shipton, two of SFU’s research assistants, who also contributed to that round table revisit the event and they revisit its many voices along with recordings of Wah speaking about what he calls “the materialism of the voice”.\n\nYou’ll also hear recordings of other poets referenced during the event, such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn. When making this episode, Teddie and Don were inspired by live radio, and this episode has our producers becoming hosts themselves, curating, introducing, and sharing a rich selection of archival audio. Here’s the sixth episode of season four, Revisiting Mountain Mini Voices, the archival sounds of Fred Wah.\n\n[SpokenWen Podcast theme music begins and fades]\n\n(03:28)\tTeddie\t[Sound effect of static swells and fades]\nIn June of 2022, Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted a round table event titled Mountain Many Voices, which centered on the audio archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah.\n\n(03:42)\tDon\tIn the following recording an excerpted conversation between Fred Wah and post-doctoral researcher Deanna Fong, you’ll hear the story of Wah’s first encounter with portable tape recording and how the social and technical practices associated with emergent audio technologies in turn shaped his own relationship to the reading, writing, and listening of contemporary poetry.\n(04:03)\tTeddie\tNext, we will play a selection of archival recordings, bringing together the sounds of the many voices of Wah’s personal literary history.\n(04:24)\tTeddie, Don, Deanna Fong, and Fred Wah all talking as they set up for the interview:\t[Somber string music plays while indistinguishable voices talking to one another.]\n(04:56)\tDeanna Fong\tI think we’re just gonna go in alphabetical order… Fred and I will have a little quick introduction here first. So I think the reason for our gathering is that we’ve all sort of been encountering Fred’s many voices through the archive through these many years of recordings that are held at different institutions which are being collected digitally in Fred Wah’s Digital Archive. I’m here at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. So given that you’re the voice and your voice is kind of the reason for us gathering for today in that we’ve all done some work with your archival voice in one way or another. I thought we could just start off by having a quick discussion about your recording practice and how there came to be so many tapes [all laugh].\nBut in terms of, you know, just having a quick discussion about recording, I just wanted to start by asking you, so when did recording come into your life and when was the first time you saw a portable recording device? [Don laughs] And when was the first experience of hearing your own recorded voice?\n\n(05:56)\tFred Wah\tUh, yes. Let me contextualize my interest in recording, which is back around 1962. The poetry that we were involved with then with the Tish Group in Vancouver was this whole movement in poetry towards working around Charles Olson’s project first for us. And, the whole notion of the head by way, the ear to the syllable, the heart by way of the line to the breast or the breast to the line. So the formality, the materialism of the voice was very much a new thing then. Most of us had grown up with poetry on the page, and  with a silent experience, kind of conversation with oneself silently. So this was new. So the whole notion of making something oral was exciting to me. And, I was primarily a musician or was interested in music, so sound was prominent. And Robert Creeley showed up at UBC as a new American poet, and he at one point brought out his tape recorder.\nWow, what’s that? You know, it’s a machine and it was a kind of stainless steel machine. It’s a Wollensak Reel-to-Reel. And he had tapes that he had made of radio interviews he had done for a radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he lived and worked. And so he had tapes there of Louis Zukovsky and Ritter Binner, Ed Dorn.\n\n[Low electronic string music begins to play]\n\nI was fascinated by Ed Dorn’s poetry and I heard Ed Dorn’s voice. In those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading on the, off the page. [Low electronic string music ends] So I traded in my Marimba vibes and my trumpet for a Wollensak tape recorder [All laugh]. The first time I heard my own voice, I think, was a reading I did with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews at UBC, a Noon Hour Reading.\n\nAnd I must have taped it cuz I have the tape.\n\n[All laugh] I can’t remember doing it. And then, so I heard my voice that way, but we weren’t interested in necessarily recording everything. Like I don’t, I have no tapes of the Tish Poets reading or George or Frank or any one of those people reading. And then in 1963 we had the Vancouver Poetry, so-called Vancouver Poetry Conference, which was in the summer of 1963 out at UBC. And Warren Tallman, his father-in-law, gave him this beautiful big console tape recorder. And so he wanted to record the whole conference and he was really interested in recordings.\n\nAnd he asked me, because I knew a little bit about, was learning about tape recordings. He said, could you learn to run this and do that? So I did. But one of the very first sessions we had in the 63 conference, the take up reel broke.\n\n[Sound effect of tape breaking and falling on the floor] It broke down. So I sat there through the whole meeting winding, [All laugh] taking up, taking up the tape, and then I ended up using my own recorder, the Wollensak, to record the rest of the conference.\n\nSo I got into recording and I really enjoyed the notion of not so much documenting, but having the voices of these poets who, you know, a lot of us were interested in, sort of around and available. And they became kind of, it’s a kind of a precious thing and it, and it kind of melded with the whole notion, the whole technology that was going on there. Cuz Reel-to-Reel tape recording was relatively new in the late fifties, early sixties in North America. And eventually it led to other tape recorders and other forms and, and it’s gone on ever since. And I’ve always used tape recording as a, or audio recording as a way of registering more accurately the oral nature of how poetry is being made. [Light piano music begins to play]\n\nAnd I studied linguistics. I was really interested in the kind of nitty gritty of how language is its rhythm and stress is, is there. [Piano music fades and ends]\n\n(10:16)\tDeanna Fong\tI find that such a fascinating response because I think like one of the follow up questions I had was this question of, you know, what this sort of impetus to record was and in the way that you speak of it, and not necessarily a documentary sense, like not as a kind of living proof that you were there or whatever, but more thinking about it as a sort of tool that aids or at least says something about, you know, the affective register of the voice and, and a sort of tool towards composition, it seems like. Is that what you’re talking about?\n(10:47)\tFred Wah\tYeah, I think that recording was a way to sustain the notion of poetry as oral. It just helped. I know I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing. I wasn’t doing it for any specific, other than to collect the ‘63 conference, was basically documenting that. And I remember when we finished, UBC said they owned the tapes, so we gave them a set of the tapes and within a few months they had lost them [Deanna laughs]. And, and I said, do you want another set? No, we’re not, no nevermind. Just don’t bother [Fred laughs]. So it was kind of, you know, it’s kind of a disregard for what we had done in terms of the poetry.\n(11:34)\tDeanna Fong\tHmm. And it also sounds like it becomes a means of circulating poetry that you might not otherwise have access to, or at least not like certainly in oral form. Right?\n(11:45)\tFred Wah\tThat too. And it became, as you know, a way of sharing poetry and voices all over. So you could, you know, like the notion of pen sound or spoken word, all these efforts to get the voices out there has changed, I think, the context for making poetry, because it’s so shared, if you want to. You know, to be able to hear Larry Eigner after reading him carefully was just [Fred laughs]. My mind was blown. [All laugh] [Soft piano music begins to play]\nThat was just so, it was so different and so new. So poetry was made new in us, at least for myself and, I think, made others because of the voice. [Piano music ends]\n\n(12:36)\tDeanna Fong\tAnd also I was, cuz I know that you found a home for the Reel- to-Reel recordings, which include the original 1960s poetry conference recordings at Karis Shearer’s UBCO AMP Lab. And she mentioned that in that collection there’s also a tape that’s like an audio letter, which is either to you or from you, [Deanna laughs]  from Gladys Hindmarch.\n(12:59)\tFred Wah\tI think it’s from her. Okay. I haven’t listened to it because my tape, I didn’t have the tape. I don’t have a tape recording, so I asked Terrace to transcribe it. You know, the technology shifted. So we were able to get portable tape recorders that we had this small tape recorder that did small, could do small three inch reels. Right? And so we shared some letters with our friend Gladys Hindmarch, and, and I don’t know how much we did that with others. Actually, Louis Cabri was with me in Calgary when his friend Aaron [inaudible] from Philadelphia came up. We, Aaron came up and sat and recorded or transferred those old seven inch reels, which by then were 45 years old into mini disks [All laugh]. Right?\nAnd he sat there for a week doing all these transcripts, not transcriptions, but transferring into, into digital format. And luckily the tapes, because they had just been put away in a basement, were still okay. And in fact, I listened to some before I gave them to Karis, that they still seemed to be okay.\n\n(14:14)\tDeanna Fong\tYeah. Because sometimes we really only get the one shot. Hey?\n(14:16)\tFred Wah\tYeah.\n(14:16)\tDeanna Fong\t[Deanna laughs] So when you, when you were recording these things, did you have a sense of a future audience in mind?\n(14:25)\tFred Wah\tNo, not particularly. I was interested in recording, I guess for academic reasons. All through my tenure as a teacher, I would record visiting poets as a way of replaying them for students in classes and that, and I found being able to play recordings of someone reading something that they had read in a book was a valuable experience for students.\nSo pedagogically, they were useful. I didn’t have any other sense of where they might, [Fred laughs] what might happen to them or I, there was a kind of, they were valuable, they were precious things, these tapes. And when I put together these boxes of cassettes to give to Tony that, you know, to deposit up here in the archives there’re just hundreds of, I don’t know how many of there are, but there are a lot of cassette tapes of readings of, you know, particularly Canadian poets that came to Selkirk College or the University of Calgary area, or at least 300, I think.\n\nAnd, you know, so a lot of them probably aren’t of great quality. Just sticking a, I remember the ‘63 conference, we had one microphone. So we have a panel of, you know, six people and this one little Wollensack microphone and the cord wouldn’t reach that long [ All laugh], so people like Robert Dun would grab the whole machine and bring it so he could speak. [All laugh] But distant people sitting at the table, you know, like Phil Win, sitting at the table, you can’t even quite hear him.Things like that.\n\n(16:11)\tDeanna Fong\tYeah. So, what does that mean as like, maybe as a final question, what does that mean as a reader slash listener slash amateur of poetry? That all of these things are all of a sudden just kind of right available at our, our fingertips, our eardrums?\n(16:27)\tFred Wah\t[Somber electronic music begins to play]\nI think it grounds them a little bit more. It makes them, the materiality of them, brings them sort of closer to a different understanding of the event of the poem.\n\n(16:46)\tDon\tDuring their conversation, Fred Wah mentions numerous authors whose voices were instrumental in the development of his own. First among these writers is Charles Olson. From memory, Wah quotes a line from Olson’s now famous essay “Projective Verse”.\n(17:01)\tFred Wah\t“The head, by way, the ear to the syllable of the heart. By way of the rest of the line.”\n(17:06)\tDon\tThis idea of breath, providing the foundation for one’s poetry was influential to many poets writing throughout the 1960s, including a young Fred Wah. [Electronic music ends]\nWe’re gonna play Charles Olson reading “Maximus from Dogtown 2,” recorded at the so-called 1963 poetry conference. But before we do that, let’s begin with that UBC noon hour reading that Fred Wah gave with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews. The recording he cited as the first time he heard his own voice.\n\n(17:44)\tTeddie\t[Electronic music begins, interspersed with the sound of radio waves]\nYou are listening to “Revisiting Mountain Many Voices”, the archival sounds of Fred Wah. [Sound effect of a tape being put into a tape player and beginning to play]\n\n(18:04)\tArchival Audio of Fred Wah\tNo particular poetics today, except that I think you’ll probably hear the voices of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Robert Creedey and Robert Kelly. That whole Black Mountain group coming in as I don’t think I’ve found my voice yet.\nThe cold and brisk breeze whipped today the cold and brisk breeze whipped today. But no snow comes such ardor, pure and freeze the muddy water on the streets. Me and my love, seraphic pride walked windward, smiling faces. A quiet morning, early morning and fog my darling, you are sleeping warm with sleep. Cold floor stretches in the dark boulevard and headlights past the glass, the start of day, eggs, coffee, cigarette. I walked before you already in the tired morning, no beginning, but our sleep and love, deep rhythms in our breathings. [Electronic music plays and fades]\n\n  (19:30)\tArchival Audio of Charles Olson\t“Maximus from Dogtown number 2”, or December 5th, 1959. Which I will open with.\nThe sea. Turn your back on the sea, go inland to Dogtown, the harbor, the shore, the city, are now shitty as the nation is, the world tomorrow. Unless the princes of the husting, the sons who refuse to be denied the demon. If Madea kills herself, Madea is a Phoenician wench, also daughter of the terror as Jason Johnson Hines son, hindsight. Charles John Hines, whole son, the Atlantic Mediterranean Black Sea. Time is done in Dun for gone. Jack Hammond put a stop to surface underwater galaxy, time. There is no sky, space or sea left. Earth is interesting. Ice is interesting, stone is interesting. Flowers are carbon. Carbon is Carboniferous, Pennsylvania age under Dogtown, the stone, the watered rock, carbon flowers, rills Aquarium time after fish, fish was Christ. Oh Christ picked the seeds out of your teeth. How handsome the dead dog lies horror X the migma is where the seeds Christ was supposed to pick out.\n\nW sh wunk grapevine Hok, the Dutch and the Norse. And Algonquins. He with a house in his head. She who lusted after the snake in the pond, Dogtown berry smell as the grub beaten fish. Take the smell out of the air. A you’re the tar of Dogtown, the tar matas. Here is the angel matter not to come until R 3000. We will carry water up the hill, the water, the water to make the flower hot. Jack and Jill will up Dogtown Hill on top. One day the vertical American thing will show from heaven. The latter come down to the earth of us all the many who know there is one, one mother, one son, one daughter, and each the father of him self. The genetic is ma the morphic is pa, the city is Mother Polish. The child made man, woman is Mary’s son Elizabeth Mangen the mangen in collagen in collagen time leap onto the leap onto the lamb.\n\nThe aquarium time. The greater the water you add, the greater the decomposition. So long as the agent is protein, the carbon of four is the corners in stately motion to sing in high voice the fables of wood and stone and man and woman love and loving in the snow and sun. The weather on Dogtown is protonic, but the other side of heaven is ocean filled in the flower, the weather on Dogtown. The other side of heaven is ocean Dogtown. The under vault heaven is carbon ocean Quam Dogtown. The under vault, the mother rock, the diamond coal, the Pennsylvanian age, the soft coal love age, the soft coal love hung up burning under the city. Thet is heart to be turned. Black stone, the black cri is the throne of creation. Ocean is the black gold flower.\n\n(23:32)\tTeddie\tNext you’re going to hear poems by Larry Eigner, Louis Zukovski and Ed Dorn. As well as a short clip of Robert Creeley from a panel at the UBC Poetry Conference. Each of these poets, while a part of their own literary coterie were associated with schools and states, were included in the 1960 anthology, the New American poetry edited by Donald Allen. It was this work which Wah referenced earlier when he mentioned the new American poets.\n(24:01)\tFred Wah\t[Echoing sound effect is added to Fred’s voice]\nYou know, to be able to hear Larry Eigner after reading him carefully was just [Fred laughs]. My mind was blown. That was just so, it was so different and so and so new. So poetry was made new in that sense.\n\n(24:28)\tArchival Audio of Larry Eigner\tLanguage is temporary king poetry, the mask on everyday life. What time of the day is it land? What have you to do with or gotten done? Love to poems, the unexpected, the magnetic power. The speed, the ocean drop, dry drop. If there were time they go drawn after us. The city is music is human in the events. The seas drag light in the earth. The greatest thing is orchestra. With men, the wind and the waves are fixed. Open road. You look in hundreds in the night sky, any place the drone would this time enough new each day. Bruce is enough of the old, the dying of oppos to the present contact communication. Explanation. Enough not we keep on.\n(26:31)\tFred Wah\tAnd so he had tapes there of Louis Zukovsky.\n(26:38)\tArchival Audio of Louis Zukovsky reading\tSong Three from 55 poems, compute leaf points water with slight dropped sounds. Turn coat sheet facts say for the springs, blooms fall the trees trunk has set the circling horn branch to cipher each drop the eye shot and the rain around. So cheated well let the fallen bloom wet clutter down and into and the heart fact hold Nothing. Desire is no excess. The eye points each leaf. The brain desire the ray, she recites their brief song. 13 in that this happening is not unkind. It put to shame every kindness mind mouths their words. People put sorrow on its body before sorrow had came. And before every kindness happening, for every sorrow before every kindness song 18, the mirror oval sabers playing the chips in the room next door. The voices behind the wall will be lit by highlights in the morning, in bed. A wall between continuing voices, chips stacking instead of bales, the water sounds extending a harbor, one sleepless, one sleeper on the fourth floor. In that this happening is not unkind. It put to shame every kindness mind mouths their words. People put sorrow on its body before sorrow. It came. And before every kindness happening, for every sorrow before every kindness Song 18, the mirror oval sabers playing the chips in the room next door. The voices behind the wall will be lit by highlights in the morning, in bed, a wall between continuing voices, chips stacking instead of bales. The water sounds extending a harbor, one sleepless, one sleeper on the fourth floor.\n(29:39)\tArchival Audio 5\tHow can you be other than where you are?\n(29:45)\tFred Wah\tI was fascinated by Ed’s poetry and I heard Ed’s voice in those days. That was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading off the page.\n(30:02)\tArchival Audio of Ed Dorn\tI sure never tried to do this without smoking [audience laughs]. This one is called Hawthorne. End of March, 1962. That day was dark fog fell down our mountain. The snows were wet patches and around the legs laid as like and around the barn, dark red shadows the day he died. The slow quiet break. What an odd person to die beside. Franklin Pierce never go to the mountains. Near the end, the air is spoken for. I thought how just Americans still love morality. With many preliminary question, he was fierce for the slight connection back to what there was. This poem is, uh, completely abstract, as far as I know. It’s called an inauguration poem. And I wrote it during the last inauguration. Unasked, of Course, [Audience laughs] Out of the zone of interior armies, the Nebraska of our terror flies pro gating the statistical laws of our starvation, where on the spinning habitation men’s eyes see the regiments of vegetation. And one man is the mouth of all and a narrowing harrowing rib in Denmark that dope delivered country is not starker than the staple deprived herdsman of the African. Who’s it? Out of the zone of interior armies come the advocates of nations where none can breathe outside the given crush, forsaking even established ignorance. Promo gating desire born against the honed knife of one secretary or another. Out of the zone of interior armies. The trains of El Presidente shoot laden with food for no destination anyone has charted because in a storage bin in the Midwest was held the grand conference on the grammar of scarcity. And the farmer stands beside the senseless soil and mumbles that this far starvation is named parody. Out of the interior skulls of our rulers stepped slim hygienic elegance of patrons of painted walls and bushman’s haircut, gut full with the art of wishing rice upon the multitude to make marriage of new nations to be ridiculed by coronets of old jazz. Like, don’t have too many babies unless you have the viles.\n(32:53)\tDon\tThat was Larry Eigner, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn. Next you’re going to hear a conversation between Denise Labov and Margaret Avison taken from a panel at the 1963 Poetry conference before coming back to that first tape of Fred Wah.\n(33:15)\tDenise Labov\tWell, I I think that if you’re, if you’re worrying about whether you are communicating while you’re writing it’s absolutely undermining. Well, to whom are you communicating? Are you communicating to, to someone you know who who who has, who’s who, whom you know to be your peer? Are you communicating to your landlady who isn’t gonna read it anyway? Are communicating on what level are you communicating? So you can’t possibly think about Tom about communication while you’re writing forth. But if you think about precision, if you really try to be absolutely accurate to what you know then chances are that you will communicate. Cause there seems to be a level of of, of communication that that comes about through through precision to one’s own knowledge.\n(34:10)\tMargaret Avison\tI used the word conversation earlier about the early stage of writing when you imitate. And I think that is a real communication of poetry you’re reading and it possesses you in a sense and you murmur back at it. You don’t do it intentionally. You usually feel bad when you discover you’ve done it. But I think most writers, at least when they’re 12 and 15 and so are doing that, aren’t they? And then you get away from that kind of communicating as you begin to find, yes, I have a voice.\n(34:55)\tArchival Audio of Ed Dorn\tOne last poem I’m going to sing in this one. So laugh if you want to. My voice is very good. But this is with lots of voices. Pound and especially Duncan Olson coming in. I can’t get away from it. But here it is a poem appealing for a life of pla passion and a place on earth where poetry is wanted are variations on a voice from Duncan. And if I live, I live for love of you. All things come together. So they say, and the way which one will show us which time it is in place of memory. I live for love of you. My life becomes the pin through the nude. Kneeling and worship becomes my wall. My white PHUs becomes light, strikes the beat. Time takes up making up remembrances. I call out ahead into the dark. Who is it? Who would love me? On the mountain side, the snow still falls and her glowing cheeks hang low ahead of me. The tracks are filling. I follow unanswered with the snow falling in my dream of love. And stay this place a while. Press her hanging to my breast. The lovers test, fragments of music ripple in my head. Unsteady notes in the lake light fall themselves into my eyes. Vow glides of water. Sing. Sleep. Sleep. Peel of poem from my memory. Sleep. Sleep. And if I live hold, let me live. Which also calls this place of passion speaks as it is poetry to me. And make it new reader. Strike out new you become old. In remembering, recall, I reproached you two summers ago at your excretions. I could only look at you that way. I can only speak to you now with your pants down. Those first few words are still as costly to my passion. Who would make life new when love grows old? Oh, show me the way to the next listener’s ear. Oh, don’t ask why. Oh, don’t ask. Why for I must find the next listener’s ear for if I don’t find the next listener’s ear. I tell you, we must die. I tell you, we must die. I tell you, I tell you. I tell you we must die. And if I live, he’ll let me live and sing. My poems a spool of passion. Ill let me live. We’re loved ones, but I reach with the hand for the new moon. And if I live, they’ll let me live in love of you. The song still sings And further on, that’s time King, queen of the Summer, throne of love in the sand stained the pins in tired, she floats backside in the lake water ripples in smooth furs about her nipples, breaking the sleek moon surface that summer night. And if I live, I’ve lived for love in full time. The beat strikes on time dances the memory to the full tune. Thank you.\n(38:19)\tTeddie\tThis has been Revisiting Mountain Many voices, the archival sounds of Fred Wah. If you want to hear more from Fred Waugh’s audio archive, check out the episode “Night of the Living Archive by” Liza Makarova.\n(38:48)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Teddie Brock and Donald Shipton, MA students at Simon Fraser University. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for Shortcuts, with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.1419106},{"id":"9598","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 S4E7, Audiobooks in the Classroom, 1 May 2023, Levy and Schwartz"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/"],"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":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maya Schwartz\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/58cbf262-da12-45e9-9dd7-822f98fa2de2/audio/819beef1-71ae-494f-8194-25b545bae90c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e7.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"52,667,080 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-05-01\",\"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":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Baron, Naomi S. How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. Oxford University Press, 2021, https://academic-oup-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/book/41098.\\n\\nCarrigan, Mark. “An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/12/17/an-audible-university-the-emerging-role-of-podcasts-audiobooks-and-text-to-speech-technology-in-research-should-be-taken-seriously/.\\n\\nHarrison, K. C. “Talking books, Toni Morrison, and the Transformation of Narrative Authority.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011, p. 143.\\n\\nSarah Kozloff, “Audio Books in a Visual Culture.” Journal of American Culture, vo. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 83–95, 92.\\n\\nMorrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.\\n\\nPergadia, Samantha. “Finding Your ‘Voice’: Author-Read Audiobooks.” Public Books, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/finding-your-voice-author-read-audiobooks/.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. “Introduction: Talking Books.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011.\\n\\n–––. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Harvard University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1890, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/cabinet_kiosk_16_march_2021_rubery_matthew_audio_002.mp3.\\n\\n \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549542141952,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does it mean to “read” an audiobook? What happens when we teach literary audio in the university classroom? How can we prepare our students for success in reading and listening to audio literature?\n\nFeaturing a round-table conversation with graduate students Ghislaine Comeau, Andy Perluzzo, Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris at Concordia University and an interview with Dr. Jentery Sayers from the University of Victoria, this episode, hosted by Dr. Michelle Levy and SFU graduate student Maya Schwartz, thinks through the challenges and opportunities of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Music fades] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music ends]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Imagine sitting down to read a book for your literature class. When I said that, you probably pictured yourself opening a book, maybe a Toni Morrison novel, or a poetry anthology. But what if reading a book for your class looked like putting on headphones and pressing play? What happens if we consider the audio book pedagogically? What does the medium of the audiobook allow for in the classroom? How do students respond to listening to books?\n\nIn this episode, styled like an audio essay, producers Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz ask these very questions, putting current scholarship and personal reflection in conversation with interviews with professors and students alike in order to think through how literature sounds when it comes to audiobooks. Put on those headphones and turn up those speakers. Here is episode 7 of season 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Audiobooks in the Classroom. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins to play and quickly fades]\n\n(02:01)\tVoices Overlapping\tIt’s like, listen, ear skimming-\nYou kind of just like-\n\nBlank Out listening-\n\nIs attention by treating-\n\n-artifact myself-\n\n-Oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the books, so it must be a quarter of—–\n\nThe way the author enters the room. And I often, uh, when I’m teaching…\n\n(02:17)\tAI Generated Voice\tYou’re listening to “Audiobooks in the Classroom” by Michelle Levy, narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz.\n(02:28)\tMichelle\tThis podcast asks a seemingly simple question; how are we harnessing new audio forms to teach literature in the university classroom? According to Casey Harrison writing in 2011, “there is a dearth of scholarly literature on the medium of the audiobook.”\nFrom this, she concludes that this widely popular form is not being taken seriously by the academic establishment. With some important exceptions, the lack of research on the audiobook persists, even though as Harrison writes, “academics and avid readers happily avow their enjoyment and appreciation of recorded books.”\n\n[Light electronic music begins to play]\n\nAs you will hear throughout this episode, we are getting a lot of dishes washed with all of our listening. But are we taking advantage of the pedagogical potential of literary audio? This episode addresses the challenges both real and imagined that are shaping both the use of and the resistance to the incorporation of literary audio in teaching. [Electronic music ends]\n\nIt explores some of the ways in which college instructors are taking advantage of the wealth of literary audio now available to us.\n\nIt also offers reflections from students about how they are experiencing these experiments with literary audio. Ultimately, this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast seeks to offer some practical guidance to instructors and to elucidate how the use of literary audio can enhance connection, understanding, and enjoyment for our students. [Quiet string music begins to play]\n\nTo address these issues from the perspective of both the instructor and the student.\n\nThis podcast will interweave my own commentary with that of Professor Jentery Sayers of the University of Victoria, an expert in sound media and literary history, who Maya interviewed for this podcast. You will also hear an interview conducted with four graduate students from Concordia University who have recently taken a course with Professor Jason Camlot, that centered audio literature PhD students, Ghislaine Comeau and Andy Perluzzo, and MA students Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris were asked to set up questions similar to the ones I asked Jentery, and I’m delighted to include their responses to provide a range of student perspectives on the use of audio literature.\n\nI’m also joined by Maya Schwartz, an MA student at SFU, who helped to produce this podcast episode and who joins me in voicing some of the narrative commentary in this episode. [String music ends]\n\nAs an avid listener of literary audiobooks and podcasts for over a decade, it was the pandemic that finally prompted me to teach audiobooks. Jentery had decided to take the plunge before Covid.\n\n(05:07)\tJentery\tIf I recall correctly, I think I proposed it prior to the shift online for the pandemic. We shifted in March, 2020. But what I did as I was preparing it is I took advantage of some aspects of that dynamic. The fact that, I think, increasingly people were listening to podcasts, people were listening to literature, and, you know, a lot of people were inside for [Jentery laughs] doing a lot of their work.\nSo I taught, I ended up teaching the seminar online, and doing what I can or doing what I could to integrate audio into the teaching, into the dynamic that way. And I think on the whole, it worked out quite well. It was a joy to teach.\n\n(05:45)\tMichelle\t[Low string music begins to play]\nAs Jentery says, the shift to online teaching during the pandemic meant that students were receiving their instruction through audio and video, and apart from others in their home, which seemed to support the incorporation of literary audio into our courses. When teaching audiobooks and literary audio as instructors, we face a number of practical considerations.\n\nShould we require students to buy both the audiobook and a print copy of the book? Assuming the audiobook is not freely available, will they need a print copy of the book for their assignments? And if we require them to purchase both, can we justify the cost, particularly given that audible.ca unaccountably fails to offer a student membership? Could we assume that every student had a device from which they could access an audiobook or a podcast?\n\nThere were also questions about which audiobook or podcast to select and how much performance and accessibility should drive our selection. In some cases, such as canonical novels like those by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, there may be dozens of audiobook versions to choose from, and much like the decision about which print edition to ask our students to purchase, selecting an audiobook requires thoughtful deliberation of the various options. Accessibility also plays a role. Most of our students have spent their academic careers silently reading. How do we prepare them to listen? [String music ends]\n\nOne of the audiobooks I have assigned, Anna Burns’ novel Milkman, is narrated by a character known only as “middle sister”. It is performed by Belfast actor Brid Brennan in a thick northern Irish accent. For me, the voicing brought the novel vividly to life. It also helped me to make sense of the stream of consciousness narration and the disorientation that comes from none of the characters being assigned proper names. [Quiet electronic music begins to play]\n\nBut some of my students struggled to hear the words and the story through the accent. Thus, a feature of the voicing that enhanced the story for me was a barrier to some. I begin, however, with one of the most fundamental questions that has vexed the use of audiobooks for teaching and research; whether listening is reading.\n\n(08:01)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter One: Is listening reading? [Electronic music ends]\n(08:07)\tMichelle\tThere is an entrenched suspicion that listening to an audiobook or a podcast is a passive activity, and hence not really reading. Jentery describes how this issue arose in a contemporary American fiction class he taught about a decade ago. One of his students kept referencing, having listened to a novel assigned for the course.\n(08:28)\tJentery\tThere was one student in particular that talked about listening the whole time when answering questions and just having class discussion. And I was fascinated by this. So I just said, do you mean just to be honest, do you mean this literally? Are you, are you listening to the book? Are you using this as a way to talk about the novel as a living text, as language, as discourse? And he’s like, no, no, I’ve listened to audiobook versions. And then, and he is like, is that okay?\nAnd so it became this discussion around the popular student perception, I think, that listening was cheating, right? And so I was like, oh, this is, this is a fascinating topic, but also more important, like it is not, and I want to think through why, for a number of reasons, including accessibility, we might want to, for good reason, debunk the that listening is cheating or that books are not meant to be listened to.\n\n(09:19)\tMichelle\tIn our conversation, this question of whether listening is reading and more pointedly and judgmentally, whether listening is cheating, resonated with Jentery who began to think about how these ingrained biases impacted his scholarly approach to and valuation of literary audio.\n(09:38)\tJentery\tI’ve always been interested in the kind of cultural dimensions of listening, the cultural dimensions of sound, but only recently, like in the last eight years or so, started to think about that in literature. And I think partly because I too had inherited this idea that if I started to do that work in literary studies, I’d be cheating my discipline.\nSo it kind of brushed against the grain of how I had been taught literary studies, how to read text with a capital T as a methodological field, but also, yeah, just plainly the sensory work I was doing and why I was parsing it. Like why was it that when I was listening I was like, oh, this is my media studies work. And why when I was reading, I was like, oh, this is media studies and or literary studies depending on the content.\n\n(10:16)\tMichelle\t[Quiet string music begins to play]\nIn his introduction to the essay collection, Audiobooks, Literature and Sound Studies, Matthew Rubery, an historian of talking books, examines some of the assumptions that feed into assertions that listening as opposed to reading on the page, offers a compromised cognitive experience. According to Rubery, there is a belief that audiobooks do not require the same level of concentration as printed books, or that one can be inattentive while listening to an audiobook. He explains how the very features promoted by audiobook vendors as selling points; their convenience, portability, and supplementary status to other activities are the same ones used by critics to denigrate the format as a diluted version of the printed book.\n\nAudiobooks are chiefly marketed as or conceived to be entertainment, and this is another reason why they’re considered derivative of or subordinate to the printed book. What, however, other than marketing pitches underlies the belief that listening to audiobooks is not the same as reading, and why is it considered even more punitively a form of cheating?\n\nOne possibility relates to what is called, and this is a quotation from Rubery, “the reader’s vocalization of the printed page, which has been taken by many to be a fundamental part of the imaginative apprehension of literature. When we read on the page, it is thought that we voice what we are reading in our head, and thus are more actively involved in meaning making than when a text is read to us.” The implication again is one of listening being passive, that instead of voicing in our minds, we are merely receptors when we listen.\n\n[String music ends]\n\nA similar objection is often made to watching a film version of a book before reading the book. The belief, again, is that it robs us of our imaginative reconstruction of the world the author creates through words alone. Reading on the page, so the theory goes, demands one’s undivided attention and imaginative powers, whereas listening does not because it allows and even invites us to perform other activities. And the fact is that many of us do turn to audiobooks in the hopes that we can accomplish other tasks while listening, but what in fact happens when we listen in order to or because we think we can multitask?\n\n(12:43)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter two: Listening As Overwork\n(12:49)\tMaya\tAs you will hear in the conversations throughout this podcast, many of us turn to audiobooks and podcasts as an attempt to maximize productivity, to fill intellectually the downtime of commuting or driving across the country, of doing chores or other forms of physical labor. Here is Jentery speaking about why he began to listen.\n(13:09)\tJentery\tAnd at first I took this as just basically a way of multitasking. Maybe it was like a form of overwork. If I’m being more reflective about it, I’m like, okay, so I might be going for a walk or I might be gardening or I might be doing the dishes, so I’m gonna put on a podcast that’s about, you know, literary criticism, literary culture or games culture, or I might listen to an audio book.\n(13:29)\tMaya\tMaia, an MA student from Concordia similarly explained that her desire to listen while doing other things was a coping mechanism meant to address overwork.\n(13:39)\tMaia\tI also have a similar experience. It was during my undergrad and I was really overworked, so I thought I’d get, I think it’s called scribd, an account on there. And I downloaded Milton’s Paradise Lost and I thought, this is great, I can do this while I work out. Two birds, one stone, and I, I think I missed about half the novel that way and it was a really unpleasant time.\n(14:00)\tMaya\tPhD students, Andy and Ghislaine also spoke about their experience with audiobooks before the course and how they attempted to listen while working and driving, cleaning and crafting. They also found that they could not concentrate on what they were listening to when doing these other activities and mostly gave up on audio books.\n(14:21)\tAndy\tI started listening to audio books. I got an audible membership to trial because I was working in a warehouse and so I had a lot of time moving my hands, but my brain was idle. So I remember I bought The Brothers Karamazov and I thought that that was gonna be the book and then honestly totally just distracted me. I never listened to audiobooks after that. I found it pretty unpleasant and I couldn’t focus. It was really hard for me to focus. Yeah, otherwise maybe driving. I drove cross country twice last year, so I definitely listened to some audio books, but, same thing, totally zoned out most of the time.\n(15:01)\tGhislaine\tYeah, I have kind of a similar audible trial experience where it’s like, yeah, I’ll try this out. And I downloaded the entire works of Poe and I’m like, yeah, I can listen to this at night or whatever. And after maybe 5, 10 minutes, I couldn’t focus on it, I just fell asleep. So I [Ghislaine laughs] since then, didn’t try to listen to other audiobooks cuz it just didn’t hold my attention.\n(15:29)\tMaya\t[Quite electronic music begins to play]\nEven after the course, the students reported that their ability to multitask while listening almost entirely depended on the content of the audiobook and the nature of the task at hand.\n\n(15:40)\tGhislaine\t[Electronic music ends]\nOn your note, Ella, of listening to non-serious books after the class ended, and it was like winter break and I still had this Audible subscription that I had to renew [laughs] because of the class and I forgot to cancel it. So I’m like, you have one credit. So I got this very unserious book called The Housemaid and all through the break, well not all through because it just took me a couple of days, I listened to it nonstop and I had a really good time listening to it, doing menial tasks, like dishes and, you know, little crafts.\n\nSo not for sleep and not for any serious work and not serious books, I could see myself maybe getting into audio books now, but yeah, I don’t know.\n\n(16:26)\tElla\tYeah, I mean I mostly listen to audio books if I’m walking or doing the dishes, like nothing that takes any more brain power than walking or doing the dishes. There’s a very fine line, like the harder the book, the more specific the task has to be to be like the right task to listen to an audiobook.\n(16:42)\tMaya\tThese conversations challenged the belief that listening is passive. Maia likewise spoke to her surprise at how much attention listening required and how this challenged her assumption about the primacy of the written.\n(16:55)\tMaia\tI wasn’t anticipating, as you’ve said as well, the amount of attention or even treating the audio as an artifact in and of itself. I didn’t realize coming into this class that I thought about it as a secondary modality to like a written form, especially from my past experience of really struggling with the audiobook and more complex wordplay that didn’t really amplify the porosity of what I was reading at all.\n(17:21)\tMaya\tAnd Jentery related that when he attempted to listen while doing chores, those chores often took a very long time.\n(17:28)\tJentery\tTo use one of my everyday examples, I often listen to a podcast while I’m doing the dishes in the evening and it’s always striking to me that there’s something said or something I heard that I will stop and go take a note. I’ll write that down on my phone or I’ll have a notebook next to me and I’ll make a note of it to return to later cuz I’m worried I might forget it, perhaps, just due to age at this point, but I go and I make a note and then I go back and then all of a sudden I’ve been doing dishes for two hours. It’s such a…it’s almost ritual at this point.\n(17:55)\tMaya\tFor Jentery, careful listening did not necessarily lend itself to multitasking, or at least to efficient multitasking. Ella described how even though she had been listening to readings in other courses and thought she was prepared, the reality was very different when confronted with the kind of listening she was asked to do in her Concordia class with Jason.\n(18:16)\tElla\tI was sort of primed for the class. I was like, great, now it’s just official, I’m going to be listening instead of reading. But I guess some of the things that we ended up having to listen to for the course required a lot more attention than I usually gave to my listening. And so I’d have to sit and listen rather than walk or do the dishes and listen, which I find a lot more difficult. I don’t know, I lose track, I lose focus if I’m just sitting and listening.\n(18:42)\tMaya\tAlthough we sometimes turn to an audio version of a book as a time-saving mechanism, thinking we can do chores when listening or as Maia says, “two birds, one stone”. It is not always possible. Often the listening or the chore or both are compromised. Further, we should bear in mind what Mark Kerrigan calls auditory fatigue; the analog to screen fatigue. Which he describes as experiencing a limit to listening, which is increasingly familiar, a sense of being oversaturated and unable to hear myself think.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nIn the conversation with Jentery, he talked about the challenges of asking people to take listening seriously and understanding the obstacles to attentive listening are part of that conversation. But to bring listening more fully into the classroom, we also need a better understanding of the processes of reading on the page. If listening is relentlessly and usually negatively compared to reading, we should first make sure we know what we mean by reading in the first place.\n\n(19:46)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter three, what is reading anyway?\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(19:52)\tMichelle\tI asked Jentery about how dismissals of listening are often informed by idealized notions of reading, particularly reading in print what you read.\n[Audio from interview with Jentery begins]\n\nBut I wanna go back to what you said earlier about often listening while multitasking, and I guess that just strikes me as so interesting and important and I think it is one of the reasons why lots of us do listen to a lot of different things, but I guess what I’m wondering is can we again maybe muddy that and say listening doesn’t just have to be deep or intense or close, that sometimes we don’t listen with that kind of intensity and that’s okay.\n\nSo one thing that has come up with my students and I’ve heard this in the interview with Jason Camlot’s students, is that they kind of go in and out of attention. Certain audio texts are much easier to listen to, some are harder, but I also think that’s what we do when we read.\n\nWe just have this fantasy that when we read, we’re just wrapped and we’re reading every word, and we’re taking it all in. I think that waning of attention is common to both acts.\n\n[Quiet string music begins to play]\n\n[Interview audio ends]\n\nEven though we often treat reading as if it is one thing, it is in fact a multitude of practices and cognitive experiences. Sometimes we read every word, but very often we scan or skim or surf when reading or simply fail to take in the words in front of us due to incomprehension or boredom or fatigue. And the same thing happens to us when we listen. Andy coined the phrase “ear skimming” to describe a similar experience that happens when listening.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(21:22)\tAndy\tYeah. That makes me think of skimming. When you skim readings that you’re not interested in, it’s like, listen, ear skimming [laughs], you kind of just blank out or, you know, distract yourself and then tune in when something picks up your interest.\n(21:38)\tMichelle\tThe contemporary neuroscience of reading as popularized by writers, including Maryanne Wolf and Stanislas Dehaene has shown us the complexity and variety of the neural processes that we designate by the single term reading.\n[String music begins to play]\n\nAnd notwithstanding the strong opinions about listening as compared to reading, there is a surprising lack of empirical research that directly evaluates how modality of presentation impacts comprehension and what little research there is has yielded conflicting results.\n\nNaomi Baron’s 2021 book, How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen and Audio, surveys current research and reports that although some studies suggest that comprehension may be improved when texts are read on the page as opposed to heard, these studies are limited and other empirical evidence suggests no difference. Some research, for example, shows that with listening, multitasking and mind wandering may be more prevalent.\n\nHowever, these effects appear to be lessened when what is being listened to is a narrative as opposed to an expository text. Some of the experiments involve listening to textbooks where depending on the subject matter, mind wandering is perhaps not surprising. My takeaway from her book is that the difficulties that are detected with oral comprehension and retention in some of the studies are more likely to be learned rather than innate. This interpretation aligns with research that shows that younger children are more effective listeners and that they lose these skills over time, becoming better readers than listeners.\n\nPerhaps this is because younger children are rewarded for and taught to value listening and this capacity wanes as emphasis on reading written materials intensifies. At the college level, we need to ask whether students put the same mental investment and time into their listening as they do into their reading. Baron helpfully points out some of the specific ways in which audio texts, including podcast and audiobooks, can prove challenging in terms of comprehension and recall.\n\nShe notes that audiobooks often lack certain elements that appear in or are endemic to print and that have been proven to aid learning when reading written texts. Podcasts, she points out, usually present undifferentiated sound and emit what are called signalizing devices such as bold or metallics that emphasize what is particularly important, as well as other visual landmarks such as headings and page breaks that can help readers chunk material into more comprehensible pieces.\n\nAudio texts also do not provide visual aids such as charts or graphs or images, all of which can enhance learning. Finally, annotation of written materials is a practice that has been proven to help readers understand and retain material, but annotation of audio can be more challenging. One of the reasons why the physical book has been such an enduring medium is because it enables annotation, whether in the form of handwritten notes, underlining or highlighting or adding sticky notes.\n\nBut performing any of these tasks with audio is, if not impossible, then less familiar, as our students are usually asked to speak or write about what they have read or heard. And as that is our work as scholars, we need mechanisms for marking audio to help us emphasize and find those passages we wish to return to. When listening to an audiobook or a podcast, we are often compelled to keep notes in a separate medium as Jentery did while listening by taking notes on his phone or notebook. This is one of the challenges we discussed.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(25:12)\tJentery\tYeah, so the only audiobook I taught in that particular class was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I recommended getting it in print as well, and I gathered probably somewhere between two thirds and three quarters the students did. So I did not, however, I demonstrated the use of annotation in the online class, like by showing how I annotate my own audio, you know, sharing a screen essentially, but I did not, and I should have, but I did not teach annotating audiobooks or annotating sound more generally.\nIn hindsight, if I had done it again, I would probably do something like that or figure out a way to integrate some kind of software or a mechanism to make it more approachable to students. But it kind of sparks my imagination here and I’m wondering how it is that when students were listening, how it is that they took notes and how that might correspond with and differ from how helped students take notes, say in the print novels that I teach, that would be a fascinating question. I’m sure people have studied this, but it’s not in my wheelhouse.\n\n(26:06)\tMichelle\tFortunately, annotation tools for audio do exist. Audible has a bookmark function that saves your place with a timestamp and in the digital file and allows you to enter notes. Tanya Clement, a scholar from the University of Texas, Austin, who is part of the SpokenWeb network, has been working with her team to create Audi Annotate: a web-based open source tool that supports audio and video markup.\nThese tools are needed to enable us to engage with audio in ways that are analogous to how we mark up text and print and now digitally audio annotation tools therefore seek to provide us with a set of options to approximate what we do with a printed book, such as turning down the corner of a page or adding a handwritten note.\n\nAnnotation can also support our spatial sense of where we are in a digital audio file, an aspect of reading that is normalized when we read a physical book, even if we don’t mark it up as we read, we tend to have a sense of what comes where, but this recall can be harder to replicate in an audio file. [Light electronic music begins]\n\nElla similarly reported needing to reference a print edition in order to anchor herself when listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(27:16)\tElla\tSo I ended up having to look at a print version just to anchor myself, you know, I’d look, oh, oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the book, so it must be a quarter of the way through the audiobook. I mean, that was difficult, taking a long form audio piece and being like, somewhere in here I remember listening to a fun thing, now I gotta find where it is. So I would use the print for that, but then I was, again, just using like the free Gutenberg version of that.\n(27:39)\tMichelle\tThe printed book offers us navigational tools and opportunities for annotation that support the comprehension and retention of written texts, but they are not reading per se. As Ella points out, books can also provide images and other formatting and formal features that help us to make sense of the words on the page.\nAudio is in need of tools that help us to anchor ourselves for the reasons mentioned and also because listening almost always takes longer than reading. I noticed that on the syllabus Jentery quantified the length of time students were expected to listen to the material he had assigned. [Light string music begins]\n\nThat was one of the aspects of teaching audiobooks that I struggled with as the audiobook of the novel, Milkman comes in at 14 hours, 11 minutes, and the two other audiobooks I assigned, Cersi by Madeline Miller and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evarist clock in at just over 12 and 11 hours, respectfully.\n\nAs we do not want to encourage our students to listen at faster speeds, and as we must acknowledge that re-listening may be needed, we must factor in the time it takes to listen, which is almost certainly longer than it takes to read on the page. Jentery explained that he had been quantifying expectations for how much prep time students would need to listen since the pandemic. [Electronic music ends]\n\n(28:56)\tJentery\tSince the pandemic, issues related like when, you know, your sense of place and your sense of campus changes, and the campus is kind of in your house now or in your domestic space. I think time management is affected pretty deeply and I gather research supports that assumption. So that was part of it, just making clear and or transparent labor expectations, while noting that mileage may vary.\nBut it also comes actually out of doing a lot of work with digital media and just more generally in digital studies, where in my own training and in my own education, I had gleaned a pretty concrete sense of how long it would take me to read a 200 page novel and I could assign that accordingly and we could talk about that in terms of time.\n\n(29:38)\tMichelle\tWhat I hope these conversations have illuminated are the ways in which we as instructors can help our students. By recognizing that effectively reading written text encompasses a range of practices, we can think about how best to provide a set of comparable supports to enable our students to succeed in listening.\nIn the pedagogical audio we create, such as this very podcast episode, we can enact some of the signalizing devices that readers of printed material are accustomed to and rely on to make sense of what they’re reading, by adding section breaks, as I’ve endeavored to do in this podcast.\n\nAlthough a podcast is in oral media, we can enhance it with visual aids and transcriptions as again is attempted in the blog post that accompanies this podcast. [Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nOne of the other immediate demands of teaching literary audio is providing students with a framework for understanding what they are hearing.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nWhat is an audio book or a podcast anyway? A genre? A medium? According to Jentery, the critical conceptual category is format, and a podcast or an audiobook are both formats within the medium of audio.\n\n(30:52)\tAI Generated Voice\t[Electronic music begins to play]\nChapter four: Format matters.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(30:58)\tMaya\tOne of the most riveting exchanges with Jentery was about the conceptual categories he offered to his students to describe and distinguish between different forms of literary audio, from audiobooks to podcasts to radio dramas. Format occupies the zone between the more abstract category of media, on the one hand, and the more content specific category of genre, on the other. To break down the three conceptual categories, a familiar example may be useful.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nLet’s take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was first published in London in 1813 in three volumes. We begin with the most abstract category, that of media, which is usually divided into text, audio, video, and image. The medium of the novel’s first public appearance was text, but before its publication it lived in audio form as Austen is said to have read the novel aloud to her family in advance of publication. After its publication, it would’ve continued to be read aloud in countless homes across Britain and abroad, especially after its publication in Philadelphia In 1832.\n\nIn 1833, an illustrated version of the novel was first published, bringing the novel into a visual medium in 1940, just over 100 years later, it entered another medium; video. As we can see, a work like Pride and Prejudice exists in multiple media at the same time, and simply because it was first presented to the public as a text does not mean that that medium should necessarily have primacy.\n\nThe next conceptual layer is that of format, for example, within video there are different formats such as feature length film adaptations and mini-series, as well as many, many others. With the concept of format referring to how our particular media is structured and delivered. We may also create a typology of audio formats in which the novel has been presented, from the handful of amateur readings on Librivox to audiobooks narrated by celebrities.\n\nThe final conceptual category is that of genre, which describes content. Pride and Prejudice is a work of fiction, a novel, and we could historize it further by calling it a domestic novel or a comedy of manners.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nIn discussions with Jentery, he explained that with his students, he lent heavily into the concept of format, asking students to listen to a variety of audio formats, radio plays, serialized drama, voiceover narration, and first person video games. Using the concept of format to ground their understanding of what they were hearing, historically and technologically.\n\n(33:35)\tJentery\tI think one of the really useful aspects of that approach was that we could, in very kind of concrete ways and in palpable terms, talk about the ways in which audio achieves a context, if you will, and brings material together, brings together, for example, aspects of narrative and story with art and design. And since it’s so much about situation and context, you know, not taking for instance the kind of formalist approach to media where we kind of unmoor it from time and space and talk about it abstractly.\nI think one of the consequences of that was we were also able to look at moments when this work was made and this work was produced. Actually look at the specificity of context in each case and talk about how format, genre, and audio production, just writ large is always kind of grounded in particular situations.\n\n(34:28)\tMaya\tThroughout this podcast episode, we will return to one of Jentery’s key insights that thinking about literary audio through the lens of format helps us to situate it in place and time and allows, as he puts it, for audio to achieve a context.\n[Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nWith all of these efforts needed to support listeners, it might reasonably be asked whether listening is worth it? If we need to provide new media frameworks for students, if listening requires as much, if not more attention than reading on the page, if it takes longer than reading a physical book, if it can induce auditory fatigue, and if in order to write about it, you still need special tools to annotate or a print version anyway, why bother?\n\nAvid listeners of audio books, however, answer this question by noting that they often listen to books that they have already read in physical form, and yet always they hear something that they didn’t see. What are some of the ways in which listening enhances comprehension and enjoyment? What do we hear that we did not see and what questions or insights does listening give rise to that we would not otherwise have from reading the book in written form?\n\n(35:40)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter five: Hearing What We Cannot See.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(35:45)\tMichelle\tMatthew Rubery, author of the foundational history of audio literature, The Untold Story of the Talking Book speaks to the different perceptions that come from listening and reading on the page. [String music begins to play]\nNearly all readers, he writes, report understanding identical texts differently in spoken and silent formats as various elements stand out depending on the mode of reception. He notes that the narrator who performs the story can be especially useful in giving voice to unfamiliar accents, dialects or languages. The vocalization of such distinctively oral text would otherwise be impoverished for many readers poorly equipped to sound out the linguistic effects for themselves.\n\nAn audiobook is a performance, an interpretation of the original text, often accentuated with the narrator adopting different voices for different characters and enhanced with sound effects and music, all of which bring the audiobook closer to theater or film even when it offers absolute fidelity to the written text, as is the case with most unabridged audiobooks. Jentery and I explored the performative aspects of the audiobook he assigned, Toni Morrison’s reading of The Bluest Eye. I asked him whether he attempted with his students to disambiguate the text as written from the text as performed by Morrison.\n\n(37:07)\tJentery\tAnd that, so we tried just that and actually I think it was a bit of a setup because when we went through and listened to it, and in many cases read alongside what we were listening, we did our best to think about the various roles, if you will, that Toni Morrison is playing in that audiobook of The Bluest Eye. So Morrison as author, Morrison as narrator, as reader, as voice actress, even as character voices.\nAnd we went through and tried to mark how we would understand that differently. So I remember this exercise and yeah, and ultimately probably without a shock, we determined it was very obviously difficult to make a clean demarcation between one and the other when it would happen in a sentence and whatnot.\n\n(37:48)\tMichelle\tAs Jentery explains, there are many different rules that Morrison takes on in reading her novel aloud. Rubery distinguishes between different models of audiobook performances. The narration may be read by the author, by a professional voice actor, by a celebrity, or even by an amateur. Characters may be voiced by the narrator, sometimes in different voices or different actors may be cast to play different roles.\nAn extreme example of this is the audiobook version of George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is performed by over 160 actors. Toni Morrison reads The Bluest Eye herself, performing the third person narration and also giving voice to different characters in the novel. Morrison also narrates another book that is embedded in the novel, one of the Dick and Jane Reading Primers, a series intended to help new readers first published in America in the 1930s.\n\nThese primers, with their idealized characters living seemingly problem-free lives, are white and middle class, setting up a potent contrast with the character’s Morrison depicts in her novel. Morrison’s novel begins with a Dick and Jane story of about 150 words. The Dick and Jane story is reprinted at the very beginning of the novel and it appears in its entirety three times, each time with different typographical features.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe first time the story is printed, there are spaces between the lines and the words, and the story takes up most of a page. The second time the spacing between lines and words is reduced, shrinking the presentation of the story to half a page with all punctuation removed. The third time the story is printed, all spaces between the words have disappeared with each word bleeding into the next.\n\nTo help you visualize this, please refer to the blog post for this episode on the SpokenWeb website, which includes images taken from these two first pages of the novel. Morrison’s repetition of the story three times in printed form seems to mimic a young child becoming proficient in reading, from one who slowly sounds out each word to one who becomes so fluent that she can run each word into the next, but the blurring of words into one undifferentiated mass has other implications.\n\nAs Morrison reads the three versions of the story in the audiobook, she speeds up the pace of her reading as might be expected, but a more sinister element also presents itself. Here is Morrison reading the first part of the story at three different speeds.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(40:22)\tToni Morrison reading from The Bluest Eye\t[Morrison reads the text slowly]\nHere’s the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They’re very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text again, faster this time] Here is the house, it is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text even faster]\n\nHere’s the house. Green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come and play with Jane.\n\n(41:46)\tMichelle\t[String music begins to play]\nWhat Morrison’s voicing brings to life is both how the child learns to read, but also how through the rote rehearsal of the story at a speed that renders it mostly unintelligible the white family living in the green and white House becomes internalized as the norm and the ideal.\n\nIn the forward to the printed version, which interestingly becomes an author’s note at the end of the audiobook, Morrison reports that the story originated in a conversation with a friend from elementary school who confided in Morrison that she wished for blue eyes. [Electronic music ends]\n\nWithin the first four minutes of the audiobook, Morrison’s pointed reading of the Dick and Jane story at three different tempos draws out the menace lurking within these stories for Black children; the Dick and Jane stories provide just one potential explanation for a central question the novel poses: How does Morrison’s childhood friend and the character in the novel who asks for the same thing, learn to wish for the bluest eye? What Morrison describes as racial self-loathing.\n\nFor me, the meaning of Morrison’s rendering of the Dick and Jane story in the print novel is enhanced by her performance of them. I might have had an inkling of her meaning by reading it on the page, but it is amplified by her reading as seeing and hearing her translation of the embedded story intensifies and crystallizes her meaning.\n\nAt the same time, any attempt to read authorial intention into the audiobook performance must be interrogated. To return to Jentery’s suggestion that by listening and situating the audio recording within the time and place of its production, audio achieves a context. We might want to ask students to reflect on the fact that Morrison is reading the novel in 2011, more than 40 years after its first publication in 1970. Morrison also makes changes to the presentation of her peratext, moving, as I said, the forward from its position prefacing the printed novel to the end when she reads the novel for the audiobook.\n\nThe reason for this shift seems likely to do with the difference in media and format. Readers can and often do skip preparatory material in print, but this action of skipping ahead is perhaps less natural with an audiobook. Beyond these changes, what does seem consistent over this 40 year period is Morrison’s belief that her books were meant to be heard.\n\nThus, she describes the language she uses in the novel as speakerly, oral, colloquial. And it is perhaps for this reason that her audiobooks are so powerful. Indeed, Morrison performed all of her books as audiobooks, demonstrating her investment in aurality. Sarah Kozloff has argued that audiobooks create a stronger bond than printed books between storyteller and listener by invoicing the narrator, and many listeners in particular enjoy hearing authors perform their own works.\n\nAudiobooks, particularly when read by the author, seem to bring us closer to the source of the words and the story, much in the same way a handwritten manuscript seems to bring us in proximity to the hand and body that inscribed it. Jentery related to me how he found it effective, as he put it, to bring the author into the room in assigning an audiobook read by the author like Morrison’s Bluest Eye and by playing interviews with or speeches by authors.\n\n(45:03)\tJentery\tWell in American fiction courses, I love including videos of James Baldwin’s speeches in a lot of material. I think that’s fascinating to bring the author into the room and I often when I’m teaching primary source, a novel for example, love to include and play in the class podcast interviews with those authors, in a way that allows students to think about the kind of context around the book, but also just kind of what went into the book and some of the motivations for it.\n(45:29)\tMichelle\tJentery and I discussed how changes in digital technology make it much easier too, as he put it, bring the author into our classrooms. We have a wealth of freely available audio and video such as the New Yorker Fiction podcast, which makes hundreds of stories from the magazine’s archive and current issues available to listen to, some enhanced by extended conversations about the stories.\nIn addition to improved access to primary source audio material, Jentery also points to how changes in accessibility to technology and equipment for playing and recording audio are transforming what is now pedagogically possible.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe final section of this episode considers how technological developments have changed both what we and our students can do with audio.\n\n(46:22)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter Six: Teaching with Audio Now.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(46:28)\tMaya\tIn the conversation with Jentery, he reflected on how much has changed in just the past decade of teaching audio.\n(46:35)\tJentery\tWhen I was teaching sound studies at the University of Washington and the University of Victoria between like 2010 and 2012, the accessibility of material there, like what I could circulate and what I couldn’t, what I had just to play, say, on a desktop computer in the classroom, but also what students could record and what with, I’m always careful not to assume that students have access to technologies and computers.\nBut I can say just matter of factly, the degree to which they would need to, say, rent or go to the library to acquire an audio recorder has dramatically changed, just given the ubiquity of mobile phones at this point. So there’s that angle, which recording is, I think, on the whole, it’s not universally accessible, but it’s more accessible to students now than it was then. I think just being able to hit “record” is more ready to hand.\n\n(47:17)\tMaya\tRecording equipment and podcasting software also open new forms of assessments. As Jentery explains, when working with sound, it often makes sense to sample the sounds being analyzed and hence an audio essay is often the best way for a student to fully engage with the material.\n(47:35)\tJentery\tA thing that really struck me as compelling and did gain traction among students in the seminar was the idea of composing in such a way, composing an essay, an audio essay if you prefer a podcast, in such a way that makes room for your primary sources to speak and to be dialogic in that sense. So, the inclusion of samples of authors reading their work, of hearing the author’s voice in a way that I think, again, you don’t need to adhere to a metaphysics of presence to find this interesting.\nYou can just think of it in terms of honoring other people’s work and what it means for you to hear other people’s work in your writing and your composition in the production of space and time. And so I liked that too, the threading through other people’s work into your material in a way that might be a little different than reading a block quote or seeing an image on the page.\n\n(48:22)\tMaya\tJason Camlot’s student Ella explained that she chose the podcast format for her final assessment because it seemed more natural and easier than writing and attempting to describe her object of study, which were recordings of poetry readings.\n(48:37)\tElla\tI chose to do the long form. I mean, I simplified in my head the long form. I told myself I’m not gonna do interviews or anything, I’m just going to essentially record myself reading this essay and then insert the sounds I’m talking about because I think this might actually be easier than trying to transcribe those sounds in a way that I can then analyze them in writing.\nIn this case, I could just play the sound for you and you can hear it and then I can talk about my thoughts on it. That seemed like an easier process, actually, because I was going to be working with a bunch of different old recordings and newer recordings and poetry readings and stuff and, it just, I don’t even know how I would’ve approached describing some of this, especially cuz I was working, for instance, with experimental poetry from the eighties and I was working with really old recordings on wax cylinder of Tennyson and like, how do you describe those kinds of experimental or super old degraded sounds to people in order to then really get into a conversation about it? So it just made sense to have people hear them.\n\n(49:36)\tMaya\t[Soft electronic music begins to pla]\nElla’s observations about the need to incorporate the different sounds she was working with,once again return us to Jentery’s idea of audio achieving a context.\n\nIn order to describe and situate 19th century wax cylinder recordings within their particular historical and technological moment, it is necessary to hear them in the same way that we say a picture is worth a thousand words. A short audio clip, here, the Tennyson recording on wax cylinder that Ella refers to is likewise easier to understand when heard.\n\n[An audio clip of Tennyson reading poetry plays]\n\nIn addition, Ella explained her preference for the audio essay format by echoing Jentery’s sense that there might be something more dialogic and open about it.\n\n(50:32)\tElla\tI do think it was faster for me to write for this podcast than it was for me to write what could have been a conference paper because I don’t like the structure of the academic paper where you say your thesis statement in the beginning, prove your thesis statement, and then restate your thesis statement. I prefer a structure where you sort of go from a starting point, like essentially more of like a thought process, like, here’s my starting point and by the end of it you’re like, here’s where I got from that starting point.\nI had the option to do that with the podcast. Whereas usually when you’re writing an academic paper for a class, they don’t give you the option to just run with things. So it just went a lot faster cuz it was a form that made more sense to me.\n\n(51:11)\tMaya\tJentery also spoke about how crafting an audio essay is different than writing for the page and reading it aloud, or even reading a conference paper, which might be designed for oral delivery. An audio essay perhaps because it is modeled on the podcast may be more audience oriented. Maia reflected that having the opportunity to listen to each other’s podcast or audio essay assignment distinguished the course from others she had taken where a student’s writing is primarily directed towards the professor.\n(51:38)\tMaia (51:38)\tIt was also interesting to hear everyone else’s podcasts because in a normal normal class in, a more traditionally like written assignment based class, you don’t read everyone’s essays and get to interact with your classmates like that. And I think, for me, it was a really interesting atmosphere that I don’t know that I’ll ever have again. It was really, really special in the way that we all interacted and I don’t know to what part of that was the sharing in a medium that is more shared, listening of togetherness rather than kind of an individualized personalized reading.\n(52:13)\tMaya\tFor Andy and Ghislaine, the audio essay felt different than in-class presentations, which are to a great extent formalized. By contrast, the audio assignments were diverse, fresh, and engaging.\n(52:27)\tAndy\tEveryone took it in such a different direction. So it was like when you have a presentation, I feel often they follow a similar format and structure, but with this it was completely different in every kind of way. Genres across the board, like kind of there were no limits of what you could really do and I think that’s what for me made it different than just a typical class presentation. [String music begins to play]\n(52:51)\tGhislaine\tRight, that makes sense. So it’s like with regular normal class presentations, it would have been as if, you know, someone came in singing and dancing versus, you know, just with their PowerPoint. [laughs]\n(53:03)\tMaya\tWe will end with Ghislaine’s words, as her comments should inspire both instructors and students to turn to literary audio, both as a source of teaching material and as a form for student work. We believe she speaks to what we all could use in our classrooms. A little more singing and dancing and a little less PowerPoint.\nYou have been listening to “Audiobooks In the Classroom”, a SpokenWeb podcast episode by Michelle Levy and narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz. Thanks for listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(53:54)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play]\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\nOur producers this month are Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz, both based at Simon Fraser University. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca, subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme music ends]"],"score":3.1419106},{"id":"9599","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 S4E8, Ambient Connection: The Sounds of Public Library Spaces, 5 June 2023, Trotter"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ambient-connection-the-sounds-of-public-library-spaces/"],"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":["Maia Trotter"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Trotter"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Trotter\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://the-spokenweb-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/ambient-connection-the-sounds-of-public-library-spaces\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:48:40\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ambient-connection-the-sounds-of-public-library-spaces/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-06-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"Listed on site as S4E7. Not downloadable, so some entries (file name, size) are left empty.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"EPL Makerspace\\nhttps://www.epl.ca/makerspace/\\n\\nEPL Gamerspace\\nhttps://www.epl.ca/milner-library/gamerspace/\\n\\nShelley Milner Children’s Library\\nhttps://www.epl.ca/milner-library/childrens-library/\\n\\nKatherine McLeod, “Listening to the Library”\\nhttps://labs.library.concordia.ca/listening-to-the-library/\\n\\nValentine, P. M. (2012). A social history of books and libraries from cuneiform to bytes. The Scarecrow Press, Inc.\\n\\nPeesker, S. (2019). Sounds like hard work: How the right noise can help you focus and be more creative. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-sounds-like-hard-work-how-the-right-noise-can-help-you-focus-and-be/\\n\\nBuxton, R. T., Pearson, A. L., Allou, C., Fristrup, K., & Wittemyer, G. (2021). A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(14). https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1073/PNAS.2013097118\\n\\nHan, Z., Meng, Q., & Kang, J. (2022). The effect of foreground and background of soundscape sequence on emotion in urban open spaces. Applied Acoustics. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1016/j.apacoust.2022.109039\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549660631040,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, Maia Trotter—SpokenWeb research assistant and recent graduate of the MLIS program at the University of Alberta—explores what libraries actually sound like. Featuring interviews with three staff members at the Edmonton Public Library Stanley A. Milner branch and her own personal reflections, this episode considers how the sounds of library spaces have changed over time, and the connection between those sounds and the ways that libraries can make us feel.\n\nDuring the COVID pandemic, before she had ever set foot in a classroom dedicated to learning about libraries, Maia Trotter discovered a YouTube video titled “Library Ambiance.” This video didn’t contain the typically fabricated sounds of a library that someone had layered over each other like book pages turning and a fireplace crackling in the background, but a live recording of the sounds of a public library out there in the world. These sounds are what helped her to get through the isolation she felt during those long months at home.\n\nHaving now been surrounded by ideas about libraries for the last two years, Maia decided to investigate the different sounds of libraries, how they have changed over time, and how they make people feel. For this episode, Maia interviews three staff members of the Edmonton Public Library Stanley A. Milner branch who work in unique spaces to get their perspectives on the way sound affects patrons and staff members alike. She interviews staff members who have worked in the Makerspace, Gamerspace, and the children’s library in order to explore the relationship between feeling and sound in libraries, and how the sounds of libraries have changed over time.\n\nSpokenWeb 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. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n[Katherine talks softly] In this episode we are in a library. [Katherine makes a shushing noise, “shh”]\n\nI’m talking quietly because I’m in a library. I’m in a library at the University of Toronto and I’m here in the stacks talking quietly because a library is a place where you are supposed to be quiet, a place of silent reading. But libraries are also full of sounds. Not just the sounds of the library, the entrance, the beep of the book checkout, hushed voices, pages turning, but also the sounds of audio materials held within the library.\n\nIn 2021, I was the researcher in residence at Concordia’s Library. And my project, Listening to the Library, linked in the show notes was all about exploring sound materials and sites of sound within the library. The library is full of sound and that’s why at the SpokenWeb Symposium last year when SpokenWeb research assistant Maia Trotter pitched an idea about a podcast episode about the sounds of public libraries, I was so keen to hear what you would come up with.\n\nMaia takes us into a public library in Edmonton and she takes time to really listen to its sounds and what sounds it makes. The library has never been noisier, but noisy in a positive sense. The library as a place of making, of listening and of community. Here’s this month’s episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, live from the Library and produced by Maia Trotter: Ambient Connection: The Sounds of Public Library Spaces. [SpokenWeb Theme music swells and then fades out]\n\n(02:18)\tAmbient Library Audio\t[Indiscernible voices talking over one another]\n(02:22)\tMaia Trotter\tWhat do you hear when you close your eyes and think of a library? Do you hear pages turning, books being reshelved, perhaps some hushed whispers or maybe even the infamous librarian “shush”? [Sound effect of a person shushing plays]\nHow much of that is real and how much of it is just an idea or an expectation of what a library is and sounds like?\n\nHi everyone, my name is Maia and I am a metadata assistant for the SpokenWeb University of Alberta team. I recently finished my Master of Library and Information studies at the University of Alberta, which was a two, two year program that introduced me to a world of libraries, so different from my original perceived notions of what libraries are and what they sound like.\n\nMy interest in the sounds of libraries originated during the Covid Pandemic when everyone was in lockdown and I was working from home. I was fortunate enough to still be living with my family at the time, so I wasn’t completely isolated, but I remember long stretches of silence with just the sound of my hands typing on my laptop. As many people did, I felt lonely, but even phone calls with my friends didn’t feel like enough sometimes.\n\nI tried to listen to music while I worked or shuffled around at home, but the music either distracted me or failed to help ease the loneliness I felt. One day as I was searching YouTube for some lo-fi beats to listen to, I came across a video titled Real Library Ambiance. I could hear books, people’s lowered voices, the dull thud footsteps, pens scratching across paper, chairs pushing in and out, and the low hum of the traffic outside. I listened to this video many, many times throughout the pandemic as I attempted to feel closer to the world outside our house.\n\nI found comfort in hearing the everyday sounds of people using these spaces, and there was something about libraries in particular that made me feel calm and connected. The sounds of that video hadn’t necessarily been what I was expecting when I clicked on it, but that difference was exactly what I needed to hear.\n\nIt was about a year and a half later after I’d already begun my master’s program that I discovered I wasn’t the only one to find comfort in the sounds of real libraries during the pandemic. I read an article in The Guardian that reported that many people had been accessing real library ambiance sounds during the pandemic and during periods of time when libraries were closed. And so I began to wonder about sounds and libraries and why we find comfort in them and why I had gravitated towards real library sounds during the pandemic, compared to the soft and edited sounds that I had originally expected to hear when I clicked on that video.\n\nAs I sifted through videos on YouTube, I found obvious differences in actual recordings of real world libraries compared to edited and created videos of library ambiance, which would typically consist of sounds of pages turning layered with sounds like a crackling fireplace or rain on a tin roof. The sounds in the actual recordings of libraries were full of life, of people talking, people moving, and not really the sounds we might expect when we think of a library.\n\nAnd so this is what we will be discussing today. What do libraries sound like now and how do they differ from our preconceived notions of what they sound like? How have their sounds changed over time? Does this make people feel differently?\n\n[Ambient sound of children and adults talking in a library]\n\nIn order to better understand sounds in a public library, I interviewed three staff members from the Edmonton Public Library, Stanley A. Milner branch, which is the downtown library and the largest branch in the EPL system. I interviewed Dan Hackborn, who works in the Makerspace, Charlie Crittendon, who frequently works in the gamer space, and Anna Wallace who works in the Children’s Library.\n\nMy first question to them was to take me through an average workday for each of them in these unique spaces.\n\n(06:14)\tDan Hackborn\tHi, my name is Dan Hackborn. I’m currently employed by the Edmonton Public Library Makerspace, and I’ve worked there for five years at that specific location or branch.\n(06:27)\tMaia Trotter\tSo maybe first if you could just take us through an average day working in the Makerspace.\n(06:32)\tDan Hackborn\tIt’s in quite a bit of flux right now. There is a real push to open up all the services that were promised with the downtown branch’s retrofit as quickly as possible after a couple of years of more slowly and carefully deploying services. So right now it can be any mixture of learning new services, giving certifications or guidance to members of the public on existing services and planning models for potential future services, and then performing maintenance on existing services as well.\n(07:17)\tMaia Trotter\tCould you give us some examples of what those services are?\n(07:21)\tDan Hackborn\tThe existing services we have right now are free printing which requires regular maintenance of the printers and fixes, the recording studios, which basically just requires minor tuning of guitars- [Sound effect of a guitar string being plucked]\n-and software updates and things like that. Creative computers, which are all managed centrally. So we don’t really have to do much IT on those aside from some minor admin stuff, and the vinyl cutting and key press service, which doesn’t require that much maintenance.\n\nAnd finally, the sewing machine and surging service, which is our newest service. [Sound effect of sewing machine whirring plays] And that mainly requires cleaning of the sewing machines. [Soft string music begins to play in arpeggios] And then all of them require certification and education for members of the public when they’re using them for the first time. So that happens between a mix of short kinds of orientations that last 15 minutes to full three hour courses. [Music swells and fades]\n\n(08:29)\tMaia Trotter\tHi Anna.\n(08:30)\tAnna Wallace\tHello!\n(08:31)\tMaia Trotter\tSo you work at the Children’s Library at EPL, correct?\n  (08:36)\tAnna Wallace\tI do. Technically it’s like a blended position. I work on the literacy vans out in the wilds of Edmonton, [Maia laughs] but I also work, yes, part-time in the Children’s Library downtown.\n(08:49)\tMaia Trotter\tThat’s awesome. Could you tell me a little bit about The Children’s Library and what your day-to-day looks like while you’re working there?\n(08:55)\tAnna Wallace\tThe Children’s Library downtown is huge. So it kind of has its own square footage inside Milner that is about the same as a regular size branch of the Edmonton Public Library. So it kind of turns into its own little world. The way that the shape is spaced, it ends up being kind of a corral in the corner of the first floor of Milner.\nSo we have quite a bit of space for our families to come and hang out in. So your day, just like working a desk can be, honestly day to day, it can look vastly different. It depends on how many people are in the space, how many programs are running that day, whether or not there’s tours in this space or just kind of like what needs your customers are looking for from you as a representative of the Edmonton Public Library.\n\nSo a lot of the time we’re just kind of hanging out, waiting for like, cause the library work is very responsive, right? Like you are, you’re there with library services and you’re waiting for what the customer needs from you or the patron needs from you. So a lot of days can be intensely hectic because our children’s library has turned into an attraction space because it has a lot of interactive elements for the kids to be learning and playing with.\n\nSo there’s a lot of space, for example, we have a little playhouse for three and under to be like climbing on. We have lots of interactive things on the walls to engage their brains obviously, but also just like lots of stuff to play with. So a lot of our families are coming in not only to borrow books and look at our services or our programming but to just be in the space and let their kids kind of interact with the space.\n\nSo sometimes you come in on a Saturday and it sounds like you’re walking into a play gym in a rec center or like Treehouse and you have to question yourself like, didn’t I get into library service?\n\n11:10\tMaia Trotter\t[Maia laughs] Aren’t libraries quiet?\n11:12\tAnna Wallace\tRight? Yeah. Because I mean, it’s a very, like, a very busy space. So within a shift you can be, you can be programming in the program room for a small number of people which is like noise and like, like especially if it’s an early literacy program, you’ve got shakers going. [Sound effect of music with shakers plays]\nYou’ve got music going, you’ve got children interacting with you, and then once that’s done, you could be on the floor helping people with, oh my goodness, like anything on the computer, 3D printing, getting video games set up, letting people into our children’s maker space, explaining things in the children’s maker space. Or you could be running a story stop, which we do every single day.\n\nOr just helping people with the provocations or crafts that we have on the floor. There’s just, it gets really, really intense in there sometimes, a lot of the time, actually, most of the time these days. It’s really, really, really intense. [Shake music ends]\n\n(12:11)\tMaia Trotter\tWe’ve got our next guest here, Charlie, who works in the EPL Gamer Space. Thanks so much for being here.\n(12:18)\tCharlie Crittenden\tYou’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.\n(12:20)\tMaia Trotter\tCharlie, could you tell us a little bit about the Gamer Space and what your day-to-day looks like while you’re working there?\n(12:26)\tCharlie Crittenden\tAbsolutely. Yeah. So the GamerSpace is a room in the Stanley Milner Library, which is dedicated to trying to make gaming more accessible for library customers, sort of creating and giving opportunities to access different kinds of gaming technologies. So we have each of the major consoles there, you know, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, we have a bunch of gaming PCs there as well.\nAnd then we have some sort of retro arcade cabinets there with a bunch of cool games on ’em. So my day-to-day work there is really just, you know, welcoming people into the space, [Electronic music begins to play]\n\nexplaining to them how it all works, helping them get on these various devices, and then sometimes troubleshooting or providing advice, helping out with any issues that might arise. [Music ends]\n\n(13:15)\tMaia Trotter\tYou don’t work exclusively in the Gamer Space though?\n(13:19)\tCharlie Crittenden\tThat’s right. So the Gamer Space is actually staffed by a rotating group of librarian employees drawn from different departments, the Maker Space, the children’s library, and the general library staff as well. People kind of cycle in and out of there throughout the day. [Ambient sounds of people talking plays]\n(13:34)\tMaia Trotter\tNow that I know what an average day looks like for these folks, I wanted to know how these spaces sound in comparison to the rest of the library. I could have chosen to interview staff members about the sounds of the library as a whole, but as we will discuss, libraries are no longer the kinds of institutions they used to be, even if our perceptions are still a little bit behind, and these specific areas we’re talking about are clear indicators of that evolution of space. So I wanted to focus on them and the ambiance they contribute to the library. [Ambient sound ends]\n(14:09)\tAnna Wallace\tIt’s been many a moon since libraries have been quiet spaces, to be completely honest. I mean, I’ve been working for EPL for like a decade now, and it’s never really been like, it’s not like don’t come in and scream your head off, but a certain level of humans being in a space together noise is kind of accepted now. We’ll definitely separate our quiet spaces.\n[Soft light music begins to play]\n\nLike if someone walks into the children’s library and is like, oh my God, we can be like, Hey, there’s quiet spaces on the third floor, or this study room is great, or whatever. But study spaces in the children library aren’t, they’re not copasetic.\n\n(14:53)\tCharlie Crittenden\tSo in terms of library policies, it is interesting to note that we do have a specific policy to not try to, we still don’t allow people to yell too loudly or something like that, you know, or something that’s really disruptive.\nBut like, we do have a higher, like we sort of welcome more noise in that space if people are just having a good time and like the more the level of, you know, cheering or yeah, just kind of calling out or getting excited that’s totally okay and sort of welcomed as part of the gaming experience of, you know having that kind of community of fun around it.\n\nOf course there’s some people who are just kind of quietly playing and doing their own thing, but yeah, that’s definitely something that we welcome in that space. And that’s a bit of a difference to the rest of the library where we would generally ask for people to keep their noise levels more at a conversational level. And yeah, so it’s definitely a special space in that regard for noise.\n\n(15:49)\tAnna Wallace\tYeah, Milner is a very popular branch for our downtown families and public. So it does, like, the Milner itself can get very, very loud and I find that the open space, when you walk into the library, you see the digital wall and you can kind of like see the ramps going up. Like you can hear pretty much everything when you’re in that space. The children’s library itself is a little bit off to the corner, so I feel like they did make a conscious choice to be like, okay, we’re not gonna put the children’s library with a giant open ceiling because then the noise of the children’s library is gonna end up everywhere in Milner.\nI mean, I’ve gotten used to now on my breaks that like, I go find a dark room and like I just, I don’t talk to anybody [Anna laughs] and I just eat my lunch in the dark room because sometimes the space can be so overwhelming that like I myself need a reset button before I can go back on the floor.\n\n(16:49)\tDan Hackborn\tThe design decisions for the Maker Space leaned into more of a bare bones industrial aesthetic. So there are concrete floors in the Maker Space and the ceiling ducting and wiring and stuff is all exposed, which in some ways looks good. I’m a fan of this aesthetic but it has extremely different acoustic properties than the rest of the library.\n[Soft electronic music begins to play]\n\nWhereas the rest of the library things like books actually act as essentially natural sound absorption barriers within the library or within the Maker Space specifically, there’s almost no soft surfaces. Like that we actually had to install some acoustic paneling on the ceiling because at the beginning it was so incredibly loud and impossible to hold a conversation, particularly when we were covering our faces in masks and had the plastic barriers up.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nSo any, basically any conversation anywhere in the space automatically becomes simultaneously magnified and fades into a gray noise where it’s hard to tell what words are actually being said. So that’s the main characteristics of the acoustics in the Maker Space.\n\n(18:16)\tMaia Trotter\tWhen we think of a library, I think we usually refer back to what we have seen in media, which is usually based on libraries of an older generation. I personally think back to that scene in the Music Man when Marian, the librarian, is stamping each book to be checked out, interspersed with s shushes and books being stacked or reshelved in an echoey and quiet environment.\n(18:46)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Hill\t[Arpeggiating brass plays in the background] No, it’s all right. I know everything and it doesn’t make any difference.\n(18:50)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Marian\tI don’t know what you’re talking about. You please make your selection and leave.\n(18:55)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Hill\tI have.\n(18:56)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Marian\tWhat do you wanna take out?\n(18:57)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Hill\tThe librarian.\n(19:00)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Marian\tShhhh. Quiet please.\n(19:03)\tMaia Trotter\t[Ambient sounds from a library begins to play] Throughout history, libraries have typically been indicators of wealth, class, and higher social status, and were thus exclusionary in nature. The materials required to create books were expensive, and the labor to create them was extensive, so they were only available to those with great means.\nThey were typically exclusive spaces reserved for academic spheres in the upper class. Public libraries as we understand them today, didn’t even really start to appear until the mid 1800’s. Silence is a common characteristic of how we generally think of library spaces and has typically been enforced throughout history. But there is an oppressive nature to enforced silence, and as libraries have evolved as public spaces, so too has their acceptance and even encouragement of sounds.\n\nBut this is a more recent approach, and it wasn’t until the 21st century that libraries began to incorporate more spaces like the Maker Space and evolve into spaces that could really be considered community hubs rather than book houses of the past.\n\nAs someone who has studied libraries for the past two years, I will be the first to say that libraries have their problems and they are still not wholly inclusive institutions, despite the vocational awe that permeates most of the general public perception. [Background noise ends]\n\nBut libraries have changed and over time have become increasingly community-led spaces unless their sounds have changed and the sounds themselves represent what a community wants, what it feels, where it struggles, and where it draws comfort. And so with that in mind, I asked my interviewees what were the most frequently heard sounds in each of these spaces.\n\n(20:41)\tCharlie Crittenden\tThe sounds you hear most often emanate from the various consoles. So each of the consoles has its sort of in a the switches up with the front of the room, sort of with the largest TV instead of speakers, which are sort of directionally positioned to try to keep the sound more located like around the couch. That’s couches that are facing it, but you can still hear it throughout the space.\nAnd then the PlayStation on the Xbox are in little sort of areas as well that have speakers sort of near where the people are seated. And so when you’re in the space, you’ll usually hear a variety of sounds from those three different sources. Most often you’ll hear the sounds of Mario kart, like getting started, you know, the engines rubbing and the sort of countdown of the race about to begin. [Sound bite of race starting in Mario Kart]\n\nYou hear Super Smash Bros as a very common one as well. With the sounds of the battle going on or the announcements of the different sessions going on there. You might also hear unexpected noises, like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the game Untitled Goose Game, but it features a goose, which is just basically walking around cracking constantly. [Soundbite of music from the Goose Game plays and ends] So that’s like a fairly common noise you might hear. But like on our other consoles, for example, very popular games are FIFA or NHL. So you’ll hear kind of like, you know, sports stadium noises that sort of thing. [Soundbite of crowd cheering plays and ends]\n\nYou know, like the sort of that side of gaming. In the space there is a restriction of no rated M games allowed sort of rated teen or under, so you don’t actually have as many like, shooting games, although you do have some. So you do hear some of that sort of like gunfire perhaps, but it’s like less often. And it’s more so these sorts of more either like, you know, family friendly Nintendo games like I was describing, or the sports games are the most common.\n\n(22:30)\tDan Hackborn\t[Sounds of people talking ambiently in the background begins to play and then fades]\nBecause there’s reporting studios and stuff like that, music is a lot more probable in the space versus other parts of the library. There is that grand piano down on the main floor which would be the other major space. But in the maker space, you either catch glimpses whenever someone opens a door to the recording studios, it kinda escapes momentarily or if they’re loud enough you can actually hear it, sometimes.\n\nThere’s one guy at the temporary branch before we actually moved into Milner, who was regular, came in every week and played bagpipes. [Soundbite of bagpipes playing begins] And it is my understanding that it’s impossible to play bagpipes quietly. I’m like, you could just hear him over the entire, throughout the entire branch. [Bagpipes fade and end]\n\n(23:25)\tCharlie Crittenden\tAnother notable noise you’ll hear comes from the arcade cabinets. And so on those, it’s like a lot of the kind of retro noises of say like original Mario or very commonly you’ll hear you know, a Pacman or something like that. And then the noises of, or like, you know, Mortal Kombat or something like that, and you’ll hear the noises of the kind of joysticks and buttons getting mashed, that sort of thing.\nSo I’d say those are the most common noises that you might hear in the space. Oh, and sorry, one more point is that you’ll also hear people talking to each other, right? So there’s a lot of times people playing games together. And so especially on the consoles you might hear people, you know, cheering when they score a goal in FIFA or kind of joking around with each other.\n\nMaybe they’re playing Fortnite together on some of the PCs and talking about, you know, what’s going on or something. So you will hear, you know, definitely a fair bit of conversation as well from people cheering or getting excited or talking to each other. [Calm soft electronic music begins to play]\n\n(24:33)\tDan Hackborn\tMachines that make, and equipment that make noises themselves, whether that’s actually the 3D printers which are noisy enough that they actually have what’s called a stealth mode, [Music ends] which makes them move more slowly, turns down the sound, makes the print take longer cause it’s moving more slowly in case you’re in an office that doesn’t want the noise to be that loud.\n(24:58)\tMaia Trotter\tCould you describe any of the sounds that the 3D printer makes?\n(25:04)\tDan Hackborn\tYeah. Like a [Dan imitates a low droning noise]  and like a, [Dan imitates a low churning noise] and those are probably the two main noises.\nThe fan turning on and off, which sounds like a fan. The filament coming off the spool has a very specific noise that’s probably impossible to replicate with the human mouth, like in a large less band being kind of stretched breaking.\n\n(25:31)\tMaia Trotter\tOh, okay. I’ve never used any of the 3D printers in the library or at the university, so I have no idea what they sound like.\n(25:39)\tDan Hackborn\tYeah.\n(25:42)\tAnna Wallace\t[Soft piano music with light percussion begins to play] The sound of children, of course. So either laughing, playing or screaming, crying, which is natural children are gonna communicate the way they’re gonna communicate. [Music ends] You get a lot of once an hour, the cuckoo clock will remind you of its existence, [Soundbite of a cuckoo clock plays] which is right beside the desk.\nYou’ll hear the sound of like sometimes pretty frequently the like floor cleaning machine from custodial will come through, you’ll hear teens or tweens playing Roblox, which you always question like, are they friends if they’re talking to each other like that when they’re playing this game? [Maia laughs] But I assume so cuz they’re back every single day doing the same thing. So it’s a lot of people sounds.\n\n(26:37)\tLibrary audio\tAmbient audio of people chatting in a library. No one person’s voice is audible.\n(26:38)\tMaia Trotter\tNow that we know what we can hear in these unique spaces, even if it may not be what we would’ve expected to hear, I wanted to know more about how sound affects people’s emotions or moods when they visit these spaces. I experience my own set of emotions when I use the downtown library, but I’m usually using the common spaces, the open areas. So I wanted to know what my interviewees thought about the emotions of patrons using the Maker Space, the Gamer Space, and the children’s library.\n(27:08)\tCharlie Crittenden\t[Soft electronic music begins to play] Hopefully I would say that it creates a welcoming sense of fun of it being the sense that it’s a different sort of space than the rest of the library. I think sometimes it can maybe draw in different audiences of people who enjoy games who come there specifically just to play the games and enjoy that environment and being around other people who are playing games, having fun talking to each other about it.\nYou know, I think you might have just maybe a sense of relaxation or of, you know, just having fun, you know, like watching, say like a family play together, you know, on the switch racing on Mario Kart or something and laughing or having fun.\n\nLike it’s, I think the more permissive sense of, you know, just there being volume allowed on these consoles. They’re having speakers where we’re allowing this, this, these sounds to be played. I think it just creates this kind of relaxed environment where I think at least for people who enjoy games, enjoy the noises of games, I think it creates quite a fun sense of play.\n\n(28:21)\tDan Hackborn\tIt’s got complicated equipment in it and it’s a non-traditional part of the library. I think people automatically come into it and don’t know what to do with it. And while the staff tries to be very welcoming and say hi and things like that, like it still, I think, can be an intimidating space, whereas people walk into the rest of the library and like, it looks like what you’d expect a library to be given a common sociocultural understanding.\nWhereas this, I think there needs to be work done on making it approachable. It doesn’t feel like a living space yet. Like it’s a very new built environment. And so I think very smart people are working on changing that. But I do think there’s some work to be done on making it less intimidating cuz there is a definite noticeable sense that when someone walks into it and they don’t know what they’re walking into, they’re not walking into it with a specific purpose.\n\nThey don’t know exactly, like, I’m going to use the 3D printer, I’m going to book a recording studio. They’re kind of like, their eyes go wide. They may just come back out the way they came. They get very quiet, which is ironic given the traditional view of libraries and how that’s changed over time. And then that combined with the acoustic properties of the space, like people tend to whisper a lot more.\n\n(29:50)\tMaia Trotter\tInteresting. That’s not what I would’ve expected with people walking into the maker space, but the way that you’ve described it, that makes sense that they would be more quiet if it doesn’t feel familiar.\n(30:01)\tDan Hackborn\tYeah, totally. I think it’s super fascinating and I look forward to how decision makers in the library work at making it more like a living space rather than kind of like a cold laboratory setting.\n(30:18)\tAnna Wallace\tWe do story stops every day at 2:15 in the children’s library, and convincing kids to go on a little story time adventure with you is so fun. And I love when their parents force them to sit down for a story time. They’re just like, leave me alone. I wanna go back to the train table. [Maia laughs] I’m not interested in this literary nonsense. And then you start reading a story and my favorite is when I get a story that allows me to do a lot of voice changes and then the look in their face when they’re like, that’s not what your voice sounds like. [Maia laughs] Like where is that coming from? Is so fun.\n(31:05)\tCharlie Crittenden\tWhen people kind of walk in sometimes I feel like there’s just a sort of sense of interest or even wonder or excitement. And I think sometimes it’s related to like, for some people maybe with memories they have of going into other environments, like going to the arcades when they were younger. Like if they were from that generation of just like these noises of like, wow, I haven’t seen an arcade cabinet like this in so long. Or, you know, something like that.\nLike it’s, or those noises I think they have quite a nostalgic pull to them when people access games that they played when they were a kid. And so I know for me how I feel in the space, like when I see people playing games that I’m very nostalgic about, like Mario Kart or what have you, definitely has associations for me that really create a sense of, I don’t know, just fun.\n\nYeah. And so I think that can be some of the effect of the space, having these noises be welcomed of these different nostalgic elements of noises that for a lot of people connect elements of their childhood, like whatever, whenever that childhood was, different generations of gaming. I think that can be one of the effects of the noises in the space. [Music ends]\n\n(32:16)\tMaia Trotter\t[Ambient background library audio begins]\nSpecific sounds can evoke varied and powerful emotions in people. Emotions and feelings and thoughts can become attached to specific sounds based on our experiences. Various studies have shown major links between sound and emotion. One study in particular published in 2022 demonstrated that when there is a positive noise in the background and a negative noise occurs in the foreground, like a loud horn honk, for example. The emotional recovery from the negative sounds occurs more quickly because of the positive background sounds, which vary depending on the person.\n\nStudies positive sound examples included mostly nature sounds, but at least in my experience, a positive background sound for me is people laughing, children playing, soft music or nostalgic sounds like video game sound effects, which might partially explain why I felt generally more relaxed and happier when I was listening to library sounds and working from home, even if I heard loud traffic outside or the constant stress-inducing text message ding from my work phone.\n\nThere have also been several studies that have linked ambient sounds and background noises with increased productivity and the masking of everyday stressful or intrusive thoughts, which lead to the feeling of familiarity and relaxation. An article in the Globe and Mail from 2019 looked at a study being done at the University of British Columbia, which made these claims and gave the example of spaces like coffee shops, which would have similar sounds to a library being ideal environments for focusing and thinking creatively based on their average decibel level.\n\nThese studies have their exceptions and obviously not everyone reacts to ambient sounds the same way. But it was fascinating for me to discover this link because I’d experienced it myself. I think it is worth noting that studies have found that the most calming sounds were found to be nature sounds such as wind, the rustling of grass or trees, running rivers and babbling streams.\n\nAnd the most anxiety-inducing sounds for those of outdoor cityscapes like engines revving, horns honking, people yelling and loud music. Dounds in a library seem to sit somewhere in the middle. The sounds of a library are not as harsh and there’s still a general reduced nature of the sound, but you can still hear people talking and walking around and sometimes distant music. And yet I still find these sounds just as comforting as the sounds of nature.\n\nI think when we listen to the sounds of the city, we hear chaos, we hear movement and liveliness, but it is loud and jarring and harsh. That is not to say that loud or unexpected sounds don’t exist in library settings because they absolutely do and they are a part of the library experience. But because it is a public space with a specific and dedicated purpose, there does seem to be a general cohesiveness to the sound that doesn’t translate outside the building.\n\nI think the combination of sounds of other people and the familiar sounds of books, laughter, music, new things to try, and maybe even the distant sound of familiar video games, makes people feel the connection of that public space. A library may not have the calming sounds of nature, but it does have the deeply connecting sounds of community. And even if there are unexpected sounds, I feel as though I recover faster because I can still hear the comforting sounds in the background.\n\n[Background ambient sounds ends]\n\nI think when we think of spaces like libraries, spaces we usually consider to be literary spaces. We have fairly strong preconceived notions about how they sound. We think library, we think books, we think reading, which is usually thought of as a fairly quiet and individualistic activity. But the way libraries are structured now with this emphasis on a community-led approach, we encounter a literary space that is not only increasingly evoking specific emotion through sound, but also one that asks us to engage sonically or verbally in order to learn.\n\nFor anyone who wants to dig deeper into this idea of the sounds of literary spaces, I just wanted to briefly mention that one of our own here at Spoken Web, Dr. Katherine McLeod, [Spoken Web podcast theme music plays very quietly] put together an amazing blog post series while a research fellow at Concordia University in Montreal where Spoken Web is based and the series is sensory based investigation into audiovisual materials housed in library collections. It is a wonderfully insightful examination of not only what we hear in libraries, but how we listen to them. [Spoken Web music swells and fades’\n\nSo getting back to the sounds of learning.\n\n  (36:53)\tAnna Wallace\t[Soft bell tone music begins to play]\nI don’t know if it has particularly changed. Working in children’s, specifically. I mean I feel like I came into library work kind of as libraries were moving into kind of what they’ve called a community led philosophy in that we see that people are buying more books on Amazon or like DVDs are going out of style and all of that stuff. So you have to reevaluate what is the library for the communities that they serve.\n\nAnd it has really moved into being a community space where we’re trying to offer access to information and as best we can. So a lot of these days that’s not just, you know, books and prints, like books aren’t going anywhere. Everybody wants to, like, I get this from a lot of older generations where like, oh, you know, are you worried your job’s going anywhere? I’m like, my friend. My pal.\n\n(37:57)\tMaia Trotter\tI get that a lot too. [Maia laughs]\n(37:59)\tAnna Wallace\tRight? Like, we are the last free public space. If libraries are gone, civilization is just crumbling. Do you know what I mean? Like-\n(38:08)\tMaia Trotter\tThat’s how I answer that question too. [Maia laughs]\n(38:10)\tAnna Wallace\tRight? We’re not, we’re not going anywhere, right? But we do have to be thinking about how we can best serve our communities. So having these spaces where kids can be kids and be learning at the same time, I think is just so important. And it, it, yeah, it’s funny to me because if you’re trying to create that space for children in like a branch where you have to balance, okay, but we have people working on the computers and we have people studying in among the stacks, you need to keep, you know, you have to keep the whole of the branch in mind.\nThe beauty of being in the children’s library is that we can focus that space on, you know, 12 and under or, you know, 17 and under. Cause we do wanna encourage teens to be in our space as well.\n\n(39:02)\tDan Hackborn\t[low droning piano music begins to play] To the vinyl cutters or the sewing machines, which also have their own noises. You can actually look up, I think people have straight up programmed 3D printers to make sound or make songs themselves because they come with such a weird variety of noises. Not only there’s like four different motors on each one and belts and yeah, all just all kind like the extruding 3D printer film, it makes it to a noise. Yeah. It’s all kinds of stuff.\n(39:35)\tCharlie Crittenden\tOn the whole I find it sort of like a pleasant array of noises and sounds generally playing out and overlapping with each other. And I think they’re doing a fairly good job of designing the space with how the speakers are directed and positioned so that it’s not, and we can control the volume as well, so it’s not too overwhelming or too much. We try to keep it more to that sort of pleasant level, I guess, of noise.\n  (39:58)\tAnna Wallace\tLike, you know what I mean? Like the squeals, right? Like we want to hear them. We want them to explore and we want them to play because play is learning and you can’t expect a child to play particularly quietly, like on average.\nLike we all know those one or two kids that can like sit with a book and be quiet and all that stuff and we see it. But if you’re looking at an early literacy space, which half of our library is dedicated to early literacy, you’re looking at five years old and under, and that developmental range is just loud and gets excited and expresses themselves. So we want to make sure that they feel like they can do that in their space. And unless they’re like, hurting themselves or getting dangerous, then we don’t often step in because it does, it just ends up sounding like, oh, they’re just having a good time, or they’re interacting with the things that we’ve put out. [Music ends]\n\n(40:55)\tMaia Trotter\t[Soft piano music begins]\nAs employees, these folks spent a lot of time in the library compared to the average patron. And so my final question for them was to ask what their favorite sounds were in these unique spaces that are huge contributors to the changes in the sonic environments of libraries, most of which produce sounds that are so different from our preconceived notions of what libraries sound like.\n\n(41:18)\tCharlie Crittenden\tWell, I’d say as someone who enjoys gaming and I have lots of positive memories of gaming growing up and that sort of thing, I find it’s sort of a multi-layered experience of almost like different eras of my life of different memories and connections I have with different noises.\nSo, you know, when I was fairly young, going and playing Super Smash Bros on a M64 with some friends or something like that. So when I hear people or I see like let’s say, some friends playing Super Smash Bros and I hear those, you know, like, “SMASH” or whatever you know, “KO” it gets like these kind of very like deeply nostalgic, almost overly memorable noises that you just heard so many times in different parts of your life.\n\n(42:11)\tAnna Wallace\tI mean, I don’t know if it’s cheesy, but I do love a delighted giggle. I love listening to kids discovering something new or the grateful thank you when you like find the book that they were looking for or find something they weren’t looking for, but they get really excited about.\n(42:34)\tDan Hackborn\tMy favorite sound of the space. My favorite sound of the space is like people talking and being excited about projects that they’re interested in or that they’re making, like that feeling when you can tell someone’s just really excited about the thing they’re making or the thing that someone else is making.\nAnd I hope that the space continues to encourage those things. Cuz I think between a number of the characteristics I’ve mentioned, those conversations and those outbursts and exclamations are a lot more rare than I’d like them to be. But when they happen, that’s the best. Like, that’s the whole point of the space really. And so I’d just like to see, yeah, that’s my favorite and I’d like to see more of that.\n\n(43:19)\tMaia Trotter\tThat’s great. Yeah. I remember walking into the Maker Space for the first time and I think it was you and I, we were using the recording studio. I think that was like the first time I explored the MakerSpace and I remember my wow, like look at all the stuff you have in this one room. It’s so cool. [Maia laughs] That’s great.\n(43:39)\tCharlie Crittenden\tThe Gamer Space is really unique in this regard because there’s not many, if any, really, spaces like it in other libraries that are so dedicated in this way to gaming. So I think it’s really quite a unique set of noises that you could stumble across when you’re exploring the library. And I think noise is a big part and sound is a big part of what draws people in and sort of helps them enjoy their time in the space I think is, is these sort of different sets of sounds that they’re experiencing.\n(44:12)\tMaia Trotter\t[Soft arpeggiated piano begins to play] Like I’ve said throughout this episode, how libraries sound is typically not how we expect them to sound. And although that may be jarring for some, the evolution of libraries as public spaces has also caused the evolution of an increasingly sonically rich environment, which might have a more positive effect than we are currently aware of.\nI had no idea that when I clicked on that YouTube link a few years ago, it would open a door to a world of sound that has changed the way I work and the way I listen in public spaces. Although I still find comfort in listening to library ambient sounds like book pages turning and the soft thud of books being shelved, what I really enjoy is listening to sounds of people using the library. It feels so much more real to me. I have been fortunate enough to have positive experiences with libraries, so I typically associate library sounds with positive emotions.\n\nAnd this may not be the case for everyone, but based on what I heard from my interviewees, their favorite sounds all had to do with people enjoying using these unique library spaces, or at least sounds that indicated the spaces were indeed being used, like the gaming sounds. Or like Dan’s wonderful impression of the 3D printer. I find myself feeling relieved that libraries have moved away from enforcing silence and towards a more accepting approach to sound, especially given all the new additions of unique spaces that produce their own unique sounds.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nA library is meant to be explored and used and sound is a wonderful and comforting indicator of the evolution of that usage. Libraries are a way to connect with our communities, which is probably why I found so much comfort in the sounds of people using the library during a time of loneliness and isolation.\n\nHow we think a library sounds probably would not have offered me the same kind of comfort during that time. I wanted to hear life in a way that wasn’t overwhelming and the real sounds of the library gave me just that.\n\nI want to thank Edmonton Public Library for allowing me to record sounds in their spaces, and I especially want to thank Dan Hackborn, Charlie Crittendon and Anna Wallace for taking the time to talk to me about Sounds in Libraries. I’ll leave you with this, A taste of the comfort I experienced the first time I clicked on that YouTube video. Thank you.\n\n[Ambient sound of library: people walking, books being moved, pages flipping, etc]\n\n(47:49)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play] The SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nOur supervising producer is Kate Mofaitt, our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcription is done by Zoe Mix. To find out more about spoken web, visit spokenweb.ca, subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\n\nIf you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. 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Pittella","Sherine Elbanhawy","Alex Affonso","Ariella Ruby","Olive Andrews","Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Carlos A. Pittella","Sherine Elbanhawy","Alex Affonso","Ariella Ruby","Olive Andrews","Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Carlos A. Pittella\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20169375254524282048\",\"name\":\"Sherine Elbanhawy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Alex Affonso\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariella Ruby\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/59173484194347231513\",\"name\":\"Olive Andrews\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/abc0784b-45ae-4014-8d4e-5fa1ba8e6d7b/audio/5ad0c7d9-d592-4a0c-80f5-8b2091a3b8b8/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"final-mix.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"37,998,385 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"final-mix\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-serendipitous-headlight-24/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-08-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["No transcript."],"contents":["“Though staff turnaround is a challenge for student-run publications, community support remains when people love it. Let’s revive the love for Headlight.”\n\nThis was the sign-off of an application for managing editor for Headlight, Concordia University’s graduate student-run literary journal. Carlos A. Pittella’s application was accepted shortly after—along with Sherine Elbanhawy’s application for co-managing editor—and the 24th edition of Headlight was put into motion.\n\nThis episode is a behind-the-scenes look at Headlight 24, and an exploration of what happens when print publication meets audio production. Diving into a host of recordings made along the way, the episode revisits readings from authors featured in Headlight 24, as well as recordings from the journal’s launch at the De Stiil bookstore in Montreal. Also featured is a roundtable conversation with the editorial team—Carlos A. Pittella, Sherine Elbanhawy, Alex Affonso, Ariella Ruby, Olive Andrews, and Miranda Eastwood—as they revisit the challenges faced in reviving the journal following pandemic restrictions, as well as the exciting new directions embraced by this year’s team.\n\nHeadlight 24 will host the second part of their launch at the 4th SPACE at Concordia University, August 31st, at 2pm. We hope to see you there!\n\n"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"No transcript.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bandukwala, Manahil. “Turning Twenty-Four on the Rise of the Sturgeon Moon”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nSolomon, Misha. “Tubes”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nMazur, Ari. “A&W”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nO’Farrell, Paz. “I don’t even know what to do about all this”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nPalmer, Jade. “Onyx and Rose Gold”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nTrudel, Nadia. “Goblin”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nCirignano, Sophia. “Giverny”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nWayland, Tina. “The Tending of Small Gardens”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549666922496,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.1419106},{"id":"9592","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 S4E1, Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley Presents “Challenging, beautiful bioregion”, 3 October 2022, Burr"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-to-fire-knowledges-in-and-around-the-okanagan-valley-presents-challenging-beautiful-bioregion/"],"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":["Judith Burr"],"creator_names_search":["Judith Burr"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Judith Burr\",\"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/31248cf9-be05-49e8-9e8a-b28ed3022a72/audio/c94c3c7a-5e2d-423d-b2b2-3a77183099eb/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e1-crossover-fire-knowledges.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:00:33\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"58,128,971 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e1-crossover-fire-knowledges\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-to-fire-knowledges-in-and-around-the-okanagan-valley-presents-challenging-beautiful-bioregion/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-10-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.93921425\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39841307186015\"}]"],"Address":["1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In this episode, we hear clips from a cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” from the Lent Fraser Wall Trio’s album “Shadow Moon.” Used throughout this episode with permission from John Lent. The rest of the music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions, and you can find specific tracks cited in the transcript: https://app.sessions.blue.\\n\\nCatherine Owens, Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography (Hamilton: Wolsack & Wynn, 2020).\\n\\n“It is clear that a successful record of fire suppression has led to a fuel buildup in the forests of British Columbia. The fuel buildup means that there will be more significant and severe wildfires, and there will be more interface fires, unless action is taken.” Filmon, G. (2004). Firestorm 2003: Provincial Review. Government of British Columbia, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/public-safety-and-emergency-services/wildfire-status/governance/bcws_firestormreport_2003.pdf.\\n\\n“Master Plan for Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park.” 1990. Kamloops, B.C.: B.C. Parks, Southern Interior Region.\\n\\nMy analysis of B.C. Wildfire Service data using QGIS. Okanagan watershed defined by watershed atlas polygons and compiled by fellow Living with Wildfire researcher Renée Larsen. Area burned data from: “Fire Perimeters – Historical.” Statistics and Geospatial Data. BC Wildfire Service. Available at https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/about-bcws/wildfire-statistics.\\n\\nXwisten et al., “Xwisten Report Executive Summary,” Revitalizing traditional burning: Integrating Indigenous cultural values into wildfire management and climate change adaptation planning (Department of Indigenous Services Canada (DISC) First Nations Adapt Program, 2019), Accessed April 2022 at https://www.fness.bc.ca/core-programs/forest-fuel-management/first-nations-adapt-program.; Eli Hirtle, Xwisten (Bridge River Indian Band) (Masinipayiwin Films, 2019), Accessed April 2022 at https://vimeo.com/383104228.; Shackan Indian Band et al., “Shackan Indian Band Report Executive Summary,” Revitalizing traditional burning: Integrating Indigenous cultural values into wildfire management and climate change adaptation planning (Department of Indigenous Services Canada (DISC) First Nations Adapt Program, 2019), https://www.fness.bc.ca/core-programs/forest-fuel-management/first-nations-adapt-program.; Eli Hirtle, Shackan Indian Band (Masinipayiwin Films, 2019), https://vimeo.com/383108850.\\n\\nForest Enhancement Society of BC, “Projects,” Accessed May 2022, https://www.fesbc.ca/projects.\\n\\nAmy Thiessen, “Sharon Thesen’s ‘The Fire’,” English Undergraduate Honours Thesis, 2020, https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/about.\\n\\n\\nMore Resources: \\nFireSmart Canada, https://firesmartcanada.ca/; Blazing the Trail, https://firesmartcanada.ca/product/blazing-the-trail-celebrating-indigenous-fire-stewardship.; Nature Conservancy, Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges (TREX), http://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/FireLandscapes/HabitatProtectionandRestoration/Training/TrainingExchanges/Pages/fire-training-exchanges.aspx; Karuk Climate Change Projects, “Fire Works!,” https://karuktribeclimatechangeprojects.com/fire-works; NC State University, “Prescribed Burn Associations,” https://sites.cnr.ncsu.edu/southeast-fire-update/prescribed-burn-associations; Firesticks Alliance, https://www.firesticks.org.au.\\n\\nMore Fire Podcasts: Amy Cardinal Christianson and Matthew Kristoff (Hosts), Good Fire Podcast, https://yourforestpodcast.com/good-fire-podcast; Amanda Monthei (host), Life with Fire Podcast, https://lifewithfirepodcast.com; Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski (hosts), “On Fire: Camas, Cores, and Spores (Part 1),” Future Ecologies Podcast, August 29, 2018, https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe1-5-on-fire-pt-1.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549774925824,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, the SpokenWeb Podcast features an episode created by our former supervising producer and project manager Judith Burr. This audio is part of Judith’s podcast, “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley,” which she produced as her master’s thesis at UBC-Okanagan. While Judith was working on The SpokenWeb Podcast, she was also working on the research methodology of making a podcast as thesis and on the compiling of interviews and tape that would become the sound of this representation and intervention in ecological thinking. The episode features a number of Judith’s interviews about living with wildfires in the Okanagan, including the story and poetry of Canadian poet Sharon Thesen. Listeners of the SpokenWeb Podcast might remember Thesen from past episodes, including Episode 7 of last season about the Women and Words Collection, or from episodes of our sister podcast SoundBox Signals produced by the Audio-Media-Poetry Lab at UBCO. In Judee’s conversations with Sharon and other interviewees, we hear first-hand perspectives of those who have witnessed and lived through the dangers of these wildfires. We hear about challenges of resource management and land-use planning in fire-prone geographies. And we hear about the role that storytelling may have to play in helping us reckon with these challenges.\n\n\n00:19\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. For our first episode of this season, we’re bringing you sound work by someone who has been instrumental to The SpokenWeb Podcast as a team member: Judith Burr. Judith Burr is our former supervising producer and project manager, and she’s now off to embark on a PhD in geography at UBC. During her work on our podcast, she was also hard at work on a podcast that she called, “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley.” That podcast was her master’s thesis project in the Digital Arts & Humanities theme of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. You heard Judith Burr’s voice on the episode “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, Creativity” that I co-produced with Kelly Cubbon.\n\nWe interviewed Judith back in February 2022, when she was in the early stages of conducting oral histories for her podcast. At that point, she had so many sounds – clips from news reports of the Okanagan wildfires – long conversations with wildfire experts – and was planning to speak with poet Sharon Thesen about how the environment finds its way into the sound of her writing. Sharon Thesen is a poet who the UBCO Amp Lab, as part of SpokenWeb, has previously featured in a collective reading of her work. Hearing Thesen on this podcast feels like a bringing together of Judith’s work her master’s thesis and on The SpokenWeb Podcast. Along with Thesen, you’ll hear from foresters Daryl Spencer, Dave Gill, and Gord Pratt; UBCO Living with Wildfire project lead Mathieu Bourbonnais; forest technologist Jeff Eustache; and FireSmart program lead Kelsey Winter. The SpokenWeb Podcast starts season with Judith’s podcast because it is a timely call to reflect on how we listen and live within our complex and challenging ecosystems. [Music Interlude]\n\n03:05\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tHi, it’s Judee. This is the second episode of my thesis podcast, Listening to Fire Knowledges. This episode includes a number of conversations about surviving wildfire events and living in their aftermath. My heart and thoughts go out to those who have lost something in a disastrous wildfire event, including to my aunt and uncle who lost their home in the California Camp Fire in 2018. I know conversations about wildfire disasters can be challenging to hear, so I hope you can take care of yourself, and listen when you are ready. Thanks for being here.\n \n\n03:45\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tWell, I love the dry heat [Music Starts] I love the smell of the earth. I love the blue and gold, the blue sky and the gold grass. I love the orchards. They always seemed so beautiful in an almost biblical way: these orchards with all this fruit hanging, the gift of that. And the gift of its warmth, its welcoming warmth. Maybe it’s the smell of the pines too, that resinous perfume. I mean, you come from a different place and so you would have your experience of this place too.\nMy name is Sharon Thesen. I’m Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus. I’ve been a writer, a poet, a critic, and an editor for many decades in the Canadian, BC, and Cascadian worlds – Cascadia being the bioregion that encompasses most of BC, including the Okanagan and the coast and Washington State and Oregon and part of Northern California. It’s an extremely unstable region – geologically – prone to fire, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, flood, avalanche. It’s a landscape that’s very vibrant, very beautiful, but also dangerous. It creates challenges for sure. And in this challenging beautiful bioregion, I’ve been living for most of my life.\n\nLiving in Vancouver, I was always aware, as a writer, of being in a different zone from the rest of Canada. It seemed that we writers – a lot of us poets in Vancouver – had deeper aesthetic and poetic connections with our counterparts in the States. But the quote-unquote “rest of Canada” was not involved in these poetics. There was always an east-west stretch. There was a sense of not belonging, really, to either of them. Okay, so then what do you belong to? So here is this very prominent geography and landscape. [Music Ends]\n\nBut I always had a soft spot for the Interior. I spent probably about 10 years of my young life, living in the Kamloops and Vernon areas, and always wanted to come back. I appreciated the spectacular landscape on the coast, but my body, my heart, was here. So, when we started coming back here, I would feel at home. Because I could smell it. I could recognize the weeds –when you’re a little kid, you’re closer to the ground and you’re seeing the weeds and all that small stuff. It’s all about those weeds, right? And it still is. [Start Music] It still is the place of my heart, and my deepest being is this landscape.\n\n07:39\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tYou sat down with another student Amy Thiessen almost two years ago, who was another student in the AMP Lab, like I am, to record a digital edition of your poem “The Fire,” which was really wonderful to listen to. You talked about your experience of living through the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park fire, and I’m really grateful that you’re willing to revisit these experiences again. It sounds like that was the year that you move to Kelowna was the year of this fire. I wonder, if you, if you’re comfortable talking about it again, talk about what you remember of that fire happening and the experience of having to be evacuated at that time. [Music Shifts]\n08:24\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tWe had moved into this new subdivision. We were thrilled to be able to live in a beautiful house that was new, and certainly didn’t cost nearly as much money as a house like that would on the coast at the time, especially then. I did have doubts about it, but, anyway, we moved there. On every side of the house, was forest. And it was beautiful. We had these two dogs, I’d take them to walk every morning. There was trees, forest, coyotes. There was a little lake. It was really, really hot for a couple of weeks prior to the fire starting, but we didn’t mind. We liked it.\nCan I read this little paragraph?\n\n09:10\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tPlease do.\n09:10\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\t[Reading from Locations of Grief] Hundreds. The subdivision was called South Ridge and there were about 40 houses off a t-shaped roadway. “A park” was made somewhere in the middle and a new road was already being built just above ours. Hundreds of acres of woods, streams, and meadows flourished just beyond where the roads ended, having not yet succumbed to the inferno that would engulf the landscape a couple of months later. – That’s when we first moved. – June and her husband David lived a little farther up the hill, while we were closer to cherry orchards and large, old properties that until then had been somewhat out of town. Deer hunters still stalked the woods not far from our houses back in 2003 when I first met June. Late one night after a lengthy heat wave, we were awakened by a thunderclap and, in the morning, a plume of smoke could be seen rising into the sky to the south. This plume, by the time June and I got to the beach that afternoon for our regular swim, was starting to develop an ominous anvil shape on its eastern edge. Two days later, you could hardly see or breathe for the smoke. And there were reports of houses burning in a residential area far to the south. But, for some reason, we weren’t quite sure about that, even though evacuation alerts were being handed out in neighborhoods farther down from us. We tried to stay calm as falling embers burned holes in our lawn chairs. Paul – that’s my husband – Paul and I had made a casual arrangement just in case, with friends who lived in Penticton should the worst come to the worst which we didn’t think was possible. Surely the fire wouldn’t jump the blocks-wide clearing where the big power lines were. [Stops reading]\n11:02\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tBy the time they started trying to put it out, it was out of control. [Music changes] And the wind was blowing. And the wind is the worst thing that can happen with a fire. When a fire gets really bad, as this one did, it became the worst level of fire you could have, a Rank 6 firestorm. People even farther north than us were getting evacuation alerts. So we’re just thinking “oh, well, they must think we’re going to be okay then,” right? Because we didn’t get one. But it got to a point where I was starting to get really nervous. I was starting to think maybe we should pack some things up. To go through that process is horrible. We phoned our friends in Penticton, and Paul said, “you go and I’ll stay here and hold the fort.” And – it was that afternoon – it was pitch dark from smoke, and driving down to Penticton you saw the whole east side of Okanagan Mountain Park, from Kelowna to Naramata, on fire. That side of Okanagan Lake used to be green and forested. There was that little railway near the top. [Music ends] Paul went down to June and David’s for dinner\n12:34\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tWho lived in that same subdivision, nearby?\n12:36\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, nearby. So they were eating dinner inside, and June went out to see how things were. And there was the fire coming right down the hill. So, Paul jumped in the car, drove back to our place. I had packed some stuff and he was throwing it in. The police were going up and down and saying get out right now, right now, right now… So…\n13:01\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tAnd you hadn’t received an evacuation alert prior to that?\n13:04\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tNo.\n13:05\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tWow. It was moving that fast.\n13:07\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tIt was moving that fast, and, also, I think that the authorities didn’t really even know we were still there, because it was such a new development. We probably weren’t even on the map. So he had to drive down through what was an old quarry, and is now called “The Quarry.” June and David decided to go back to White Rock, and they stayed overnight at our friends in Penticton in their car. [Start Music]\n13:39\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tThere was a period of time when they thought the whole town was going to go up in flames. The whole town. And there was still so much chaos, and the fire still wasn’t really out for quite a long time. It was the Winfield fire department that saved our place. I still see the tracks of their boots in our little flower beds around the house where they were working, but they had given up. The fire was coming. It was too hot. It was terrifying. They could have died. But the wind changed. The wind changed and took the fire north to an area called Crawford and burned up most of the houses there. Ours were left standing. But we didn’t know that for a long time.\n14:29\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tSo, when did you find out that – when were you able to return back to your house?\n14:35\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tThe fire department held a meeting in the big Trinity Baptist Church downtown, because they were not saying what areas had burned. There were roadblocks keeping people out from the badly affected neighbourhoods. All those people were to sit in Trinity Baptist Church while whoever it was pointed out all the lots on a map, which houses burned and which were still standing and which were damaged. And so, can you imagine that meeting? [End Music]\n15:30\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tNo.\nDo you remember anyone talking about fire danger before the, um, fire?\n\n15:38\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tNo.\n15:46\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tAnyone who was living in the Okanagan in 2003 remembers the firestorm. It was a season stoked by drought. This fire started in a park where people had been warning of the accumulating fuels and fire danger for years, but little had been done. The Okanagan Mountain Park Fire burned more than 25,000 hectares, caused 33,000 residents to be evacuated, damaged or destroyed 238 homes, and caused $200 million in damages. It was one fire of many in “Firestorm 2003,” a summer that set a record high number of forest fires burning in British Columbia. [Music Ends] A Provincial Review team was established after this fire season was over to evaluate the response to these fires and make recommendations for the future. The resulting Filmon Report explicitly linked the severe wildfires of 2003 to the build-up of fuels caused by decades of fire suppression. Between then and the time I write this in early 2022, the Okanagan Valley has experienced even larger fire seasons. Here is Matthieu Bourbonnais again.\n17:12\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tDo you have any specific fires that have happened in the Okanagan that you point to, to explain what our wildfire situation is here in the Valley? Or examples you use to think through how we live with wildfire and what the challenges are?\n17:12\tMathieu Bourbon, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, the Okanagan, the communities here, have a lot of like experience with fire. The 2003 Okanagan Mountain Fire was – if we look back over the last 20 years – it was one of those fires that put fire as a big threat to communities back in people’s minds. We lost few hundred homes, there was thousands of people evacuated for over a month, and it’s something that it’s ingrained in the mentality here in the Okanagan. You hear people who lived through it still talk about the 2003 fire. And if you go up into that area where it burned, there’s infographics and signs talking about the fire and what happened. So that’s one that people that have been here for a long time, they remember it.\n18:13\tDaryl Spencer, Interview, January 2022:\tIt was unpleasant to understate it. Yeah, it was quite smoky and fiery and scary. Houses were being burned, and it was really kind of apocalyptic. And I remember seeing the fire, the smoke start. When the fire first started and I heard about the lightning strike and the fire started burning, and people were out looking at and it just kept burning northward and northward and started destroying homes. [Music begins] So yeah, it was quite a scary occurrence to happen. And at the same time there are some health risks too – I was into different athletic events back then, that was when I was into marathons and running and so forth, and it really interrupted my training schedule which wasn’t good. [Both Laugh] Either that, or I was going to just be smoking all day while I run through this smoke. I remember the smoke being so thick at times you couldn’t see more than 20 feet through it.\nSo, my name is Daryl Spencer. I’ve been a registered professional forester since 1985, so it’s been a few years. I’ve done fire management and planning amongst other things in the Okanagan Valley for the past 20 years. My current role – I work for the government. I work with the Forest Practices Board, which is an environmental watchdog for the Province. We look at various things that fall under the Forest and Range Practices Act and the Wildfire Act.\n\nCertainly there was fires, but not as predominant as say, 2003 was like a fulcrum kind of point where fire seemed to take off for me anyway. I think that fire, like I said earlier, was a launching point or staging point for more awareness with municipalities, the parks, and the government and served as a bit of a wake-up call for, say the city of Kelowna, BC Parks, and the Ministry of Forests. And it raised awareness of the importance of managing interface fuels and so forth. So that was a key thing there. And I mentioned all those homes were burned down. It was a situation where Okanagan Mountain Park which was back then a Class A park – I think it still is – and Class A parks are left unto themselves to evolve ecologically. So there’s huge mats of pine needles on the forest floor up to two or three feet thick and gathers in areas. So a lightning strike in that fuel – which is readily burnable and burns quite rapidly – started that fire and all these homes were being developed adjacent to this park without the thought of fuel management. So that resulted in a lot of these homes burning up. So that was kind of a wake-up call for city planners and parks and so forth to start setting up interface and buffer areas and so forth to protect homes. [Music ends]\n\n20:57\tDave Gill, Interview, February 2022:\tThe night the fire started, our oldest who’s 20 now…it was a thunderstorm on a Saturday night, I think it was, or a Friday night. And it woke her up. I remember walking around, holding her and tried to console her and get her to go back to sleep. We saw these flashes of lightning, and I was thinking to myself exactly about this guy that was on his horseback in that area just a few weeks before that. And thinking, wow, you know, it’s been so dry all summer, this is going to start something. And the next morning, yes, for sure, [Music Begins] it had cleared off and there was this wisp of smoke going right over our house. It was this odd yellowy color, and it was just a thin strip of smoke. And it was fairly hot, and I thought, ‘Oh, man. It did, it started.’ My name is Dave Gill. I am a registered professional forester, and I work for Westbank First Nation, a company called Ntityix Resources, which is Westbank’s forest management company.\nWe heard them on it, we could hear the helicopters on the fire. We thought that they’d bring it under control, but within a couple days, we realized it was much more than that. It wasn’t long before people were starting to crowd on the streets around us, and higher up on the hill behind us, just looking at this thing. A few days later we were told to leave.\n\nThat was the way I was initiated to fire in the Okanagan, and that in itself changed the way I thought about fire [Music Ends] – from what I learned to, you know, on the ground what I’ve been hearing from people that that live here, rather than what I had learned in school. From there, we had the Filmon Report, and we had a lot of other, I guess for the most part, high-level reports that came out about fire. And that maybe we’ve been taking the wrong approach with fire for about 100 years. [Music Begins]\n\n23:28\tMathieu Bourbonnais, Interview, January 2022:\tMore recently, just even the last few years – Mount Christie fire, White Rock Lake Fire – again fires that really, really quickly came right to our doorstep. These aren’t fires that – oh, there’s an evacuation alert, or you need to be kind of prepared. It was just, pretty quickly, it was right there. That’s the situation that we have in the Okanagan where oftentimes there are really dry conditions that are really conducive to fire spreading quite quickly. And what we should be expecting moving forward is really more of that. It’s unfortunate, again people lost homes. It disrupted a lot of people’s lives. You always try to take that into context, but those are examples you can point to – like this is what we should be expecting, and we need to kind of prepare better for that. From 2003 to now, we look at this last year: the heat dome, these extreme kind of weather conditions that regardless of where you are, if there are those kind of conditions, there is a good chance that if a fire happens, you’re going to have a lot of problems. [Music ends] Yeah, definitely landscape management is a part of it, but also just our legacy and our history of how we’ve managed this Valley combined with how our climate is changing. You can see the progression now as you look back over the last kind of 20 years. [Music Begins]\n25:11\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tJust hearing about that experience of really not having a lot of conversations about fire and then having this massive fire happen, I wonder how fire seasons since then have been for you. Do you hear more conversations happening about fire preparedness and FireSmart? Also, what’s it been like for you for these past fire seasons that have been bad, again, to have to live through those kind of smoky summers again?\n25:45\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tSmokey summers. It’s true, I’m extremely anxious every summer. We moved to Lake Country. I guess it felt like a new start or a fresh start. Or to go somewhere where there hadn’t been that kind of destruction and damage. Yes, Smokey summers, the heat, the wind, extreme anxiety. Then it gets cooler in the fall and you kind of forget about it. Then everybody says, “oh, it’s not going to happen here.” Or “oh, they know enough about it now that they will make sure that there’s protection.” But anyway, last May, half of the fire departments from around the Okanagan, were in our very neighborhood practicing putting out forest-interface zone fires. [Music Begins] And I’m sort of like “ha ha, just practice! not rehearsal I hope!” This last summer, because we live in a place where we can see northward up the lake toward Vernon, there was that Monte Lake fire that was burning for about a month and a half.\n27:16\tJeff Eustache, Interview, February 2022:\tYeah, there’s a lot of work needed. Just speaking to the Okanagan Band lands here and the fire that they experienced last summer was quite devastating for the community and the loss could have been a lot worse. But if you look at the landscape, from about a kilometer from here, I’m on the north end of the Reserve, to the south end, which is probably at least 10 kilometers in length – once you get off the lake you get into interface forest and it’s quite thick. Very dead, decayed, pine and fir. I know they do fuel reduction projects, but you’re talking 10, 20 hectares at a time. [Music changes]] And you probably need 50,000 hectares to be done along the whole interface to make a difference.\nMy name’s Jeff Eustache, I’m a registered Forest technologist. I’m from the Simpcw First Nation just north of Kamloops, but I live and reside on the Okanagan Indian Band lands. And I work as the emergency program manager for IPO West, Natural Resources Canada.\n\n28:29\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tBefore moving over to Natural Resources Canada recently, Jeff had worked for the First Nations Emergency Services Society of British Columbia since the mid-2000s. That’s how I found his work. As head of the Fuel Management Department, Jeff supported First Nations communities in taking care of wildfire hazards on their land. This also included working on the “Revitalizing Cultural Burning” project in 2019 with the BC Wildfire Service, the Bridge River Indian Band, and the Shackan Indian Band. This project provided funding for these First Nations communities to conduct cultural burns and document their Indigenous fire stewardship knowledge in videos, reports, and infographics. I’ll put the link to those projects in the show notes. In all of my interviews including this one with Jeff, we talked about much more than you’ll hear in this podcast. But it was significant for me to hear Jeff – someone with extensive wildfire hazard management experience – reflect on living through the White Rock Lake fire last summer on Okanagan Indian Band land.\n29:30\tJeff Eustache, Interview, February 2022:\tThat fire that came through here last year, it started at Monte Lake, which is about, I don’t know, 30 kilometers from here. When they kept on talking about it, I said well it’s never going to get here. They’ll knock it down over there somewhere. The next thing you know, we’re getting evacuated. I was pretty surprised at even how it came into the community, because I know there’s some what I thought would have been pretty good fire breaks. I was pretty surprised that it made it that far. [Music Changes] We got kind of lucky; we’re a little bit further away from where the fire actually was. We got displaced maybe three times over the summer, but some were displaced for probably most of the summer. Unfortunately, some haven’t been able to go home because they lost their homes, right.\nSo, you can see the need for higher-level, landscape-level treatments. You can do the fuel reduction outside at the doorstep there, but once it starts rolling like it did, it takes a lot more than a 50, 100 metre fuel treatment to stop that. I think it’s going to require a lot more aggressive fuel reduction treatments. I know my wife’s family members, they actively go out – and it’s really about, I would say, not even five kilometers from here – they would actually go out every spring and do some burning outside of their property. I’m fairly sure that resulted in a few of their structures being saved, because it didn’t have that understory that could have ignited and swept through there. I was pretty surprised there was not a lot more losses along the Valley here where it came down. It hit pretty hard, but I’m fairly sure that the burning practices of that family really helped. Because they would go in the forest, it wasn’t just grass burning, and they’d go up the hillside and that really, I think, resulted in some protective measures for them. You need to try to increase that more and more. Otherwise, like I said, once it starts rolling that quickly, it’s pretty hard to stop. [Music Changes] You actually can’t stop it.\n\n32:09\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tI’m Gord Pratt. A professional forester who works as an operations manager with the Forest Enhancement Society of BC. [Music Ends] And yeah, just happy to be able to join you here today, Judee.\nI was actually on the Peachland fire, back in 2012, I believe. I remember being in Kamloops that day, and it was one of those hot, early September days where, you know what, you’re starting to think you’re past the fire season in many ways. But, it was windy, super windy. I actually remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who was pretty active with BC Wildfire, who said, ‘this isn’t a good day. If we get a start, it’s going to be a problem somewhere.’ Right? And, sure enough, later that weekend, Peachland was on evacuation. It started up, I believe, in the top end on the Coq [Coquihalla Highway] and it ripped down through the community. [Music Begins]\n\nIt’s hard to predict where it will happen. My philosophy is reduce the fuels where there’s likelihood of starts. Where’s that fire behavior going, and what’s the typical weather going to move it towards – and that’s where we need to do it.\n\n33:40\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tI wonder if you could just introduce the FESBC for folks who might not know what that is, and talk about your role in this work now. And maybe we could talk about some of the projects in the Okanagan too.\n33:50\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tFor sure. The Forest Enhancement Society was formed by government back in 2016. It’s really about a good opportunity to invest back in the province good stewardship projects going forward. Those stewardship projects are governed by our five primary purposes…\n34:12\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tThe Forest Enhancement Society of BC has been a major funder of fuel management projects. I spoke with the foresters I interviewed extensively about fuel management practices. This refers to work to remove combustible layers of woody debris and brush and other material that is accumulating in forested areas where fire has been suppressed and excluded. Sometimes these projects involve removing material from the forest floor, sometimes they involve cutting down some trees to open up a forested canopy to reduce the likelihood of a wildfire spreading from tree to tree, and sometimes they include prescribed burns. We’ll hear a lot more about fuel treatments in the next episode. I asked Gord about some of these projects in the Okanagan.\n34:54\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tI think hats off to the Okanagan-Shuswap District, who applied for funding through us to do a lot of work, primarily in the Southeast Kelowna area. And it’s fit into the Ministry’s Wildfire Risk Reduction Program, which is their own internal program that started after FESBC initiated these projects to continue that good work. Because there’s a lot of work that needs to happen throughout the Okanagan.\n35:26\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tHave you noticed a change in the way people perceive these projects? [Music ends] Are people able to see a thinning project as ‘this is actually making my home a lot safer’ – from your time in Kelowna, even, through now?\n35:44\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tWe have. I think people are pretty sensitive and, I hate to say it, but sometimes an event like 2003 makes it easier. The events of ‘17, ‘18, and ‘21 makes it easier for people to believe us. But, that being said that, there’s definitely a need for that balance. We fund a project in the Joe Rich area. That’s an area, I guess it would be southeast of Kelowna on the highway towards Rock Creek. Gee, what year was that? 2017, 2018 – Joe Rich had a significant fire of note. I think it was four to six hundred hectares. That scared everybody there. The need for a treatment in there probably changed the perception of the people. That project came as an application to us in ’17, ’18, somewhere in there. But I was involved with the high-risk concern of the Joe Rich area when I was in wildfire from 2009 to 2014. Difficult, you know – what do you do there? There’s so much work to do that you kind of need the partnership of industry to do it. And then, you know, maybe that’s too much. [Music Begins]\n37:07\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tNone of these things can happen overnight, Judee. And, I guess that’s the other thing, is it takes time to get these things done, to plan it right, get it all done. I always encourage our industry partners to be part of our project because you and me and everybody in BC – we can’t afford to do all this. Well, it’s expensive for us all to do. We can’t afford not to do it, but it’s expensive for us to do, I guess is probably a better way to put it. We need the assistance of our forest industry.\nOne of the balancing acts of some of the projects that we have funded is the importance of the irrigation districts and the watershed groups in and around the Okanagan. We’ve funded some planning and some treatments that either we have done or have been picked up by the wildfire risk reduction program by the Province, to recognize how important the watersheds are – not only for the public but your agricultural industry in the Okanagan.\n\nI am so excited and happy to see that the importance of wildfire risk reduction is getting out in the public eye. Because it can be forgotten so quickly. I saw that in my career as a fuels management specialist – if we didn’t have a fire last year, nobody cared. All I care about is I’m going to go canoeing and camping have a campfire. And, all of a sudden, we get smoked out. It’s a really lousy summer. You know, in Kamloops, I think in Kelowna it was the same there: we got robbed of a summer. In so many different ways. Either we knew somebody who was impacted from an evacuation, or, in my household, people had trouble breathing. It was just one of those things. So, you know what, I think this is critical that we’re getting this out to the public eye, and I think it’s important to all of us who live near, in, around the wildfire-urban interface, those who recreate in BC’s forests: we all have a role in reducing the starts and supporting the activities that our leaders actually want to get done to reduce the likelihood of fire in your neighborhood. That’s the key thing for me. [Music Changes]\n\n39:28\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tDid you ever work on any fires in the Okanagan?\n39:31\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tYes. [Laughs] Of course. As a firefighter in British Columbia, that’s like a rite of passage. There’s fires in the Okanagan season, right, it’s just an eventuality, right?\nMy name is Kelsey Winter. I work for the BC Wildfire Service in the Province of British Columbia in Canada. And I’m also the chair of the BC FireSmart Committee.\n39:57\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tDo you have any stories from some of the first fires that you worked on?\n40:02\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, I have quite a few stories. I’m trying to think of a good one. We got a report of a fire way, way up a Forest Service Road. No helicopters. It’s the middle of the fire season. There’s more important targets elsewhere. We’re probably on day 12 of working, so people are pretty tired. We drove up there regardless. It took us quite a while. This was not a very well-maintained FS, Forest Service, road. So there’s potholes that could sink your entire vehicle if you weren’t careful. Got up to where it was, thankfully not a big hike from the forest service road – no water anywhere. And we’re talking anywhere. A helicopter that was bucketing on another fire was able to come by and say, yeah, the best place to get water is way back down the road you just drove up on. And so we went all the way back down, filled up our tank and then on the way up, got a flat tire. Got a flat tire. So we’re perched on a super steep section of the road, obviously can’t change the tire without emptying the tank. So all of the water we just went and got, we dumped all over the road so that we could change the tire. Drove all the way back down. Thank goodness the fire was like in some pretty gnarly slash and some bigger growth. So it hadn’t taken off – because it we were not very quick on our initial attack. But yeah, we did it, went back down, got more water, drove all the way back. It was challenging. But that was one of my very first ones too – I was like, are they all going to be like this? Holy…\nThe one I think of the most, Smith Creek, fire in the Okanagan, I was there with an incident management team. We were pretty sure we’re going to lose neighborhoods. It’s scary. It’s a scary place to fight fire because it’s so populated, right, and the fuel type there is not an easy one to stop when it’s hot and dry and windy, right?\n\n42:09\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tIs there anything that stands out to you from working in this Valley?\n42:13\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tI think for me, in my job now too as the FireSmart Program Lead, the Okanagan for me is always like – if we’re succeeding in the Okanagan, that’s a really good indicator that we’re succeeding. [Music Changes] Because it’s somewhere that’s always going to be impacted by fire. Somewhere that historically has had some of the worst fires that have really heavily impacted the populations. It’s a tourist center. It’s economically a super important area of British Columbia. I think it’s kind of where all of those things converge. One of the things with FireSmart that I say all the time – that everybody that lives and breathes FireSmart does – is that it’s not a disaster unless homes are involved. And in the Okanagan homes are involved. You know, it’s populated, there’s people, everybody lives in the wildland-urban interface..\n43:06\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah. Can you think of any particular stories or projects that are happening in the Okanagan with FireSmart? I don’t know if there’s any like specific, place-based stories that you have of doing this work in this area.\n43:25\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, so in BC our primary funding program for FireSmart is the Community Resiliency Investment Program, and it’s run through UBCM, which is the Union of BC Municipalities. But basically it provides up to 150 thousand dollars per community to do FireSmart work or fuel management work, which is amazing. And the eligible activities within that program, you know, you can do assessments, you can replace the cedar shake on your roof, you can make those small changes that – you can change bylaws, you know. Create a position that’s dedicated to FireSmart. Cross-train, so you get your fire department staff out with your wildfire staff and make sure that they know how to handle each other’s equipment, that kind of thing. And the Okanagan has quite a few areas that have been involved in that that grant funding for a long time. Penticton has probably one of the best FireSmart programs in British Columbia. They have a van that’s a FireSmart van, they have community events, they have year-round positions. They have by-laws that are in place that enforce FireSmart principles if you live in Penticton. So they’ve really gone above and beyond.\nKelowna is really involved in the program. They have the Home Partners program there, which is detailed mitigation assessment of individual homes. The homeowners are provided a report, and then they are able to go do those mitigation recommendations on their property, and then they get a certificate at the end that says you’re a FireSmart property that they can then use for their insurance. So Kelowna is really involved. I can’t list all of them. But there’s a ton of great areas in the Okanagan that have really adopted the program, and I think that’s, like you were saying earlier, that’s because of living in the Okanagan. They understand it’s something that’s always going to be there, right? [Music ends]\n\nThere’s a project that we started last year through the BC FireSmart committee and it’s doing research in the wildland-urban interface on structure ignition. So, basically, getting more data on why some structures ignite and why some don’t. So when a wildfire moves through a community, why are there those – you see the pictures, especially more out of the US, but even in Lytton – of that one house on that row that’s still standing, and the others that are gone. And I went to a couple fires this summer in the Okanagan with the research team, and it was crazy to see the little things. Like – maintained green grass. So, someone who just mowed their grass, you know, might make a huge difference, might be the reason why that house was still there and the one beside it was gone. Or things like, all their lawn furniture was pulled away off their deck, or their deck was sheathed in. And so, to me, being there and actually seeing those structures – the one that’s just ash and all you can see is bricks that were there on the chimney stack and everything else is gone – next to the one that is still there. That’s some pretty powerful stuff. I was saying to the researchers, you’re coming home and you’re walking down your driveway, and you have this idea of what’s going to be at the end of your driveway. It would be so I think reassuring to a member of the public – and we talked to a few of them – that were like, ‘I did everything I could like. When I left that house, when I was told to evacuate, it was FireSmart to the best of my abilities.’ Like, ‘I was confident leaving that house that I had given it the best chance I had of coming back to it.’ Versus someone who is thinking ‘Oh man, the propane tank was right up against the house’ or, you know, those little changes. Or ‘the windows were open’. I think that was pretty powerful for me this summer, just seeing what people were going to end up coming home to right. [Music Begins] And what we can do as a program to encourage them to make those changes ahead of time, right? When they still have time to do it.\n\n47:52\tRecording, Sharon Thesen:\t[Thesen reading the final sections of her poem “The Fire,” from Amy Thiessen’s digital edition of the poem.] … And now once more the wind is blowing [Music ends] and the fire surges upon the town and the countryside the dear historic what was lovely the firs and the pines, etc. the brown rabbit hopping the canyon road to the railway trestles where we took our brother and our mother on a Sunday or a Wednesday with its tall ears standing up I would comfort if I could but would have to wrestle it down and feel its sacred heart pounding A stubble of blackened shards where magpies fly, try to settle—in autumn light pine sap looks blue against bark’s carbonic crust and a spray of brown needles on the forest floor we pretend are a carpet of grass and not a scorch of tears upon the miles of roots that smolder still in molten maze where a bluish haze appears to mark [Music begins] the transit of ghosts and giants who left an arsonist’s hoard heaped extinct to matchsticks leaning tip to tip\n49:34\tMusic Interlude:\tJohn Lent singing a cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” from the Lent Fraser Wall Trio’s album “Shadow MoonThere\n50:12\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\t[Music Ends] I’m curious to hear more about this homemaking in a fire-prone place. Can you say more about actually writing “The Fire,” and about how home and making a home in the Okanagan came through in the poem?\n50:30\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tI think my sense of being at home in the Okanagan at the time that I wrote that poem was still really new and fresh, because we had more or less just moved there. We didn’t know that many people, except for June and David. And there’s another little section of my little piece that I call “My Friend June” that I can read – because for me, home is people too. It isn’t just my house. My memory of that time is as much about June as it is about the fire, and the two events coincide so deeply in my memory of the time.\n51:22\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tSharon read from her essay “My Friend June”, which is published in a collection called Locations of Grief. June got sick with cancer and passed away two and a half years after she and Sharon lived through the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire together. Sharon and I talked about the importance of her friendship with June, and Sharon told me about an event that she and June organized to bring people together after the fire.\n51:48\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tSo after the fire, June and I decided we should get some people together. Because everybody, this entire city, had been traumatized and then we’re just all kind of sitting there. So why don’t we get some people together to talk about their experiences, share their experiences of the fire? I don’t know why. So, we organized this and made posters and sold tickets. I got on the phone to the local helicopter company and asked if somebody be willing to speak about being a helicopter pilot, putting out fires. Indeed, this one fellow did come, and it was fascinating. We got Patrick Lane, who used to live in the Okanagan. Wonderful poet who was living on Vancouver Island, but he came up and read. John Lent’s quartet came and played afterwards – and the place was packed. It was just a relief. It was a relief, to be with other people and talk about this. Cry, and everything.\n52:56\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tI keep thinking about what is powerful about poetry and art and literary work that has to do with fire, and why it’s important to have a space for these kind of fire humanities reflections. This gathering that you organized seems to embody a lot of what feels powerful about it. Like, this ability to use language to notice together, and also the way that poetry can bring people together, and literature and music. Do you have other reflections on what the humanities have to offer and what poetry has to offer in communities that are fire-adapted and live with fire?\n53:41\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tI think what writing does and maybe poetry even more so is [Music begins] it brings to life the particulars of an experience. Not just the generalities about it or some aspect of it, but actual, real particular things. From particular feelings, to particular objects, to particular relationships. Where there isn’t this sense that okay, if it’s a poem about the fire, it has to be about “the fire.” When the fire is just part of what’s happening. So, I think what poetry does is restore us to the real. Restore us to who we are as feeling, perceiving, spiritual beings – and reminds us of the value of that. And that’s not a trivial thing. Like I was saying earlier, what we care about is tremendously significant. And we have to keep remembering what we care about. Because we’re often misled by things that are impossible to care about. Who can care about an abstraction? Who can care about some general office language about this, that, and the other? Maybe the people working there need it to do whatever they have to do. But it’s just an aspect. It isn’t the fullness of the real. What we share are these particularities in our experience. And that’s what holds us together. I don’t know. It just seems that sometimes these terrible things happen. When we were together at the Rotary Centre afterwards, we were together again, as human beings who’d experienced a calamity. But I think what is at risk now is precisely that separation of home and people. And I think when that happens it’s very hard to restore. [Music Changes]\n56:52\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tThe Okanagan based Lent Fraser Wall Trio played music at the gathering that Sharon and June organized in 2003. You’ve been hearing parts of their cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” in this episode, used here with permission of John Lent. The rest of the music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions. You also heard a selection from Sharon Thesen’s poem The Fire in this episode, recorded for the digital edition of the poem created by UBC Honours English graduate, Amy Thiessen. You can view the digital edition of the poem and hear Amy’s interview with Sharon at sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net. In this episode, you been listening to my conversations with Sharon Thesen, Mathieu Bourbonnais, Daryl Spencer, Dave Gill, Jeff Eustache, Gord Pratt, and Kelsey Winter. We spoke about living through severe wildfire events and about how to protect communities from wildfire danger. You can get going today to prepare yourself and your home for wildfire events, and there is great information on the FireSmart Canada website about this, at firesmartcanada.ca. You can listen to many of my full interviews on my thesis project website, listeningtofirepodcast.ca. You can also find the transcripts of those interviews there, and transcripts of each of these episodes. The episode transcripts include citations for my research. This research was supported in part by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund through UBC Okanagan’s “Living with Wildfire” Project. I’m Judee Burr, and thanks for listening. [Music continues and fades]\n58:56\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] The Spoken Web podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Judith Burr, PhD student in geography at the University of British Columbia. You can listen to her full podcast by searching “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley” in your favorite podcast app. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt, our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood, and our production manager and transcriptionist is Kelly Cubbon. Judee would like to extend a special thanks to the SpokenWeb project team for teaching her so much about podcasting, and to her thesis co-supervisors Karis Shearer and Greg Garrard, who encouraged her and supported her as she created a thesis in the form of a podcast. 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. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod—mini stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.1419106},{"id":"9593","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E2, The Night of the Living Archive, 7 November 2022, Makarova"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Liza Makarova"],"creator_names_search":["Liza Makarova"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Liza Makarova\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/fb141e0b-924d-4e1f-8ea4-d1b28a057963/audio/c5a844a6-1623-443d-ba91-bb326cefe213/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:16\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"47,303,828 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"},{\"date\":\"2022-11-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In For Instance Radio Show: Literary Arts Program Interviewing Fred Wah, https://fredwah.ca/node/431\\n\\nPoetry Reading – March 8, 1979, https://new.fredwah.ca/node/438\\n\\nFred Wah: Classroom Conversation on March 9, 1979\\n\\nWah, Fred. Mountain. Buffalo, NY: Audit/East-West, 1967. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/mountain\\n\\nWah, Fred. Limestone Lakes Utaniki. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College P, 1989. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/limestone-lakes-utaniki\\n\\nWah, Fred.”Limestone Lakes Utaniki.” Karabiner: the Journal of the Kootenay Mountaineering Club 30 (1987): 9-12. Print. https://fredwah.ca/content/karabiner-journal-kootenay-mountaineering-club-30\\n\\nWah, Fred. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” So Far. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/so-far\\n\\nWah, Fred. “Don’t Cut Me Down” Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community, 1972. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/tree\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549780168704,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["What better way to understand the archival state of a poem than to ask it? \n\n“The Night of the Living Archive” is an audio drama/mock interview between research assistant Liza Makarova and Fred Wah’s poems Mountain (1967), Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1987, 1989, and 1991),  and Don’t Cut Me Down (1972), which currently live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca). \n\nPoems within the archive are independent documents that live incredibly interesting lives that are celebrated within this episode. Over a series of three interviews, Liza invites these poems, drifting in “the Great Universal Archive,” to speak about their existence in the digital realm. These poems are given the opportunity to speak their minds  on topics such as how digital archives are treated, the poems’ complex histories, and their relationships with each other on a literal and literary level.\n\nThis episode will also present excerpts of Fred Wah’s archive of audio recordings, ranging from his 1979 Poetry Reading Series to an interview which aired at a literary arts radio show in Calgary. As an artist, educator, and writer, Wah has built an incredible social network throughout generations through his poetry, which has the capacity to tell its own story.\n\n\n(00:04):\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n(00:19):\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\nMy name is Katherine McLeod and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Do you ever wonder what a piece of literature is thinking? What better way to find out research assistant Liza Makarova realized, than to ask?\n\nAnd in this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, Liza does exactly that. Three of Fred Wah’s works that live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive are given voice as Liza interviews them about their lives. Mountain from 1967, Limestones Lakes Utaniki from 1987, 1989 in 1991, and “Don’t Cut Me Down” from Tree in 1972. What is a typical day in a digital literary archive? In this episode, Liza imagines how the preservation of a digital archive can impact the works that it holds and what the relationship between multiple versions of a work in an archive could look like and sound like.\n\nThe episode cleverly and creatively examines the shape of print and digital archives and their preservation and engages in questions of textuality and performance. It dives into the lives of these literary works and how they have shifted and changed over time, and how they feel about this new age they live in. Our producer, Liza Makarova is an undergraduate student at Concordia University in the honors English and Creative Writing Program, and a research assistant on the SpokenWeb affiliated project, “Mapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive.”\n\nThe Fred Wah Digital Archive is a bibliography and repository for the works of Canadian writer Fred Wah. This episode features archival audio of Wah and the voices of the students, researchers, and scholars on the “Aapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive” Project. Here is episode two of season four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “The Night of the Living Archive.”\n\n \n\n(03:25):\tArchival Recording Fred Wah In Class Conservations – March 9,1979\t[Sound Effect: Sound of a tape clicking shut]\nSteve McCaffery, a Toronto sound poet, and I have been having discussions about the mutations or mutability of a poem. He is now writing poems which, at a certain point, the poem reaches the pages and he admits that: “Okay, at one stage in a poem’s life it belongs in a book or on a page in type, but there are further stages to that poem’s life.”\n\n[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking Shut]\n\n(04:07):\tLiza Makarova\t[Start Music: Upbeat Percussion]\nHello, SpokenWeb Podcast listeners! My name is Liza and I am an RA for a Spoken Web-Affiliated Project called “Mapping Social Bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive” led by the brilliant literary editor, researcher, Concordia doctoral candidate, and archivist, Deanna Fong. Fred Wah is an extraordinary experimental poet, professor, literary critic, editor, and community literary legend currently based in British Columbia but he has connections all throughout Western Canada.\n\nHis poetry, prose, and scholarly work has been in circulation since the 1960s. Various researchers, developers, and academics have been involved with his digital archive, building off the work of Susan Rudy, who initially started the Fred Wah Digital Archive around 2006 after starting the paper archive in the late 80s/early 90s. Working on the archive of a writer who is still active is a curious and special thing. If we have a question about something or need more context, we can directly contact Fred for support.\n\nPlus, the archive is still growing as we add his recent collections. I used to think of an archive as something purely historical, out of date, a storage room. But ever since I started working on the Fred Wah Digital Archive I realized that archives are incredibly dynamic and ongoing spaces. I would even go as far as to say that most digital archives… [End Music:Upbeat Percussion] are living. //\n\nI first noticed it when I was organizing a dataset in the backend of the site. I was having some trouble with finding older entries so I could update them, nothing was coming up when I was searching for a couple of his poems. I decided to refresh the page when all of a sudden I heard a voice. I thought I was hallucinating from too many all nighters but then I heard it again. “Hey! Don’t do that! We’re trying to bring our brother over from our old place. He’s stuck in the search box,” I looked and the site URL was replaced by the text for one of Fred’s poems called “Artknot 14”.\n\nI quickly copied and pasted him into a new entry and heard cries of joy from the reunion. They asked how they could repay me and I said by letting me interview a couple of them…for research. They said okay, if Fred said okay and Fred said okay as long as the poems get back before 8am the next day because they have a lecture to attend together. Today, I have the deepest honor and pleasure of speaking to three of Fred Wah’s collections and poems from the Digital Archive. First off, I would like to introduce Mountain, a collection of Wah’s poems from 1967.\n\n(06:44):\tComputerized Voice:\t[Music Interlude: Synthesizer] Hello and welcome to the Fred Wah Digital Archive. Please sit closer to your device to proceed onto the liminal speaking platform.\n(06:53):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, like this?\n(06:55):\tComputerized Voice:\tExactly. Who can I connect you with today, past, present, or future?\n(07:00):\tLiza Makarova\tI would like to speak to Mountain, please. From 1967.\n(07:04):\tComputerized Voice:\tUnderstood. Mountain is now loading. [Sound Effect: Computer whirring]\n(07:14):\tMountain\tUh, hello?\n(07:16):\tLiza Makarova\tHello, and welcome to the podcast.\n(07:18):\tMountain\tHello. Hello.\n(07:20):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, what’s up? How’s it going?\n(07:22):\tMountain\tI’ve been good. Coasting. What about you?\n(07:26):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. Mm-hmm. Not much, but, but good. Okay. I’m just gonna jump right in. How long have you been in the archive?\n(07:34):\tMountain\tThat’s a difficult question.\n(07:36):\tLiza Makarova\tHow so?\n(07:37):\tMountain\tWhat archive are you talking about?\n(07:39):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, well, the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(07:42):\tMountain\tAh, okay. You see, saying the archive without specifying which one usually signifies the whole universe.\n(07:49):\tLiza Makarova\tThe archive is the whole universe?\n(07:52):\tMountain\tPrecisely. As soon as something is made, even if it was just a second ago, it becomes part of the archive.\n(07:59):\tLiza Makarova\tThe great universal archive. It seems vast and overwhelming.\n(08:05):\tMountain\tIt is, but that’s why you exist, right? To keep it all organized?\n(08:10):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah, and I guess it is.\n(08:12):\tMountain\tAnyway, to answer your question, I’ve been around since the beginning of Fred’s archive, but not the archive. Moving from platform to platform since 2008. Then in 2015, and now again in 2022.\n(08:23):\tLiza Makarova\tBy platform you mean website, right?\n(08:26):\tMountain\tMm-hmm.\n(08:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat’s it like in Drupal 9 in general, but also compared to previous platforms?\n(08:33):\tMountain\tSo far it’s not too much different from other places we’ve lived. Think of moving from a duplex to a townhouse.\n(08:39):\tLiza Makarova\tInteresting. What about the jump from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7?\n(08:43):\tMountain\tWe call that period… [Ominous music starts and then ends] the dark times. The age of Link Rot.\n(08:55):\tLiza Makarova\tLink Rot? Can I ask what happened?\n(09:00):\tMountain\tNovember 6th, 2013. It was a Wednesday and we were getting quite a lot of visitors because of “Diamond Grill”, Fred’s 1996, semi-fictional biography. Since everyone was trying to figure out that Lorde song by looking up the lyrics, “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh.” It was at the top of the charts, you know? That was our last normal day for a while.\nWe noticed something was wrong right away after that, Susan Rudy, Darren Weshler, derek beaulieu, Bill Kennedy and a group of researchers like you were always active on the site. In fact, from 2009 to 2013, even the public could submit pitches and bibliographic material to the site. We became accustomed to this very caring community. We knew something was wrong when sections of the archives started to get dark. We literally could not see them. Poems, which were friends of ours, literally started to disappear.\n\nNothing seemed to work properly and the quality of our space gradually decreased as no human was working on the archive at the time. By working, I mean what you humans call maintaining the site by updating it to the right versions of Drupal, editing data sets and uploading new ones. As our website link died, so did our connection to the digital ecosystem. We were lost in space and time. For a human it would be like if you were stranded and then your phone dies.\n\n(10:16):\tLiza Makarova\tAnd that’s Link Rot? It almost sounds like a  loss of identity or not being able to properly take care of yourself.\n(10:24):\tMountain\tIt’s exactly that. But one day it all changed. We don’t celebrate a lot of holidays over here at the Fred Wah Digital Archive, but we do celebrate the summer of 2014. [Calming, ethereal music begins]\nSuddenly two new users logged into the site and then a huge group of student researchers, archivists, and designers followed. After a month or so, we were launched onto a whole new platform.\n\n(10:46):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, yeah. Hearing  the project start up again in 2015 from your perspective is so special. I’m really touched. Thank you.\n(10:54):\tMountain\tOf course. We’re very, very lucky to have been supported and taken care of for so long, and that there were people like Deanna Fong and Ryan Fitzpatrick who were able to get more funding and get us back on our URL. [Music ends]\nIt’s hard to imagine the number of archives, especially ones about tracking social relationships in the literary world that go under. All of those fellow poems suddenly go dark and disappear.\n\n(11:16):\tLiza Makarova\tAnd why do you think that Fred Wah’s Digital Archive has lasted so long?\n(11:21):\tMountain\tOur versatility, our literary community, the longest breath of all.\n(11:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat was the best part about being rebooted?\n(11:30):\tMountain\tI would say the most special part was being reunited with collections who were still in the process of being digitized in 2013. Seeing them in the digital realm was miraculous.\n(11:40):\tLiza Makarova\tAw, one big family reunion.\n(11:43):\tMountain\tYes. It was such a happy but interesting day.\n(11:47):\tLiza Makarova\tOh?\n(11:48):\tMountain\tWell, Fred wrote, recorded and performed new work while the archive was down. There were a lot of first time introductions to be made as this new work, which was very well received and known in the public, was unknown to us in the archive. Making space for them in Drupal 9 was easy though.\n(12:04):\tLiza Makarova\tYou know, that’s actually something the current team is working on right now.\n(12:07):\tMountain\tOh, are you digitizing more archival material?\n(12:11):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. Over the summer, the humans working on the archive went to Vancouver to work in the SFU Special Collections. We went over the digital archive and found what didn’t have a cover or a textual scan, pulled it from the collections and scanned it. While we were there, we formally met the SFU Fred Wahl Archival human team and hosted a public talk about what it was like to work on a “so-called” living archive. We called the conversation “Mountain Many Voices: The Archival Sounds of Fred Wah.”\n(12:39):\tMountain\tHow original [Mountain and Liza laugh] That’s super sweet.\n(12:44):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah, we mostly talked about Fred Wah’s audio fonds, which are a collection of his audio tapes and recordings. At the end of the trip, we brought home a lot of good memories, new scholarly knowledge, and a USB full of archival material.\n(12:57):\tMountain\tI’m looking forward to the reunion as well as a new design of the site. We’ve all been chatting about this a lot. I’m most excited for the audio recordings to get their own page. They do not respect after hours noise regulations. [Mountain and Liza laugh]\n(13:12):\tLiza Makarova\tSpeaking about having a page of one’s own, how does the way we organize the archive affect the relationships between the various poems on the site? Do you feel like being represented on separate pages/links isolates you from specific contexts?\n(13:26):\tMountain\tI mean, not really. We already represent different places and time periods depending on when we were created.\n(13:32):\tLiza Makarova\tCould you clarify what you mean by created? Do you mean when/where you were published or when/where you were written?\n(13:40):\tMountain\tDo you really think there’s a difference? Where do you think we came from?\n(13:45):\tLiza Makarova\tI guess from Fred Wah, but the thing about his work, about you, I guess, is that his writing is really inspired and contextualized by the environments he grew up in. His Chinese Canadian heritage, the politics of the time and the social groups, he was, and still is a part of.\nI’m a writer myself, so I really like to compare it to the textual art of embroidery. You have this base, which is like a book website or even a single poem, and you’re using all these threads that you’ve collected by living life to weave together these art forms. Oh, sorry. That was really long winded.\n\n(14:22):\tMountain\tNot at all. I quite miss the wind actually.\n(14:30):\tLiza Makarova\t[Liza blows into the mic to simulate the sound of wind blowing] Is this helping?\n(14:32):\tMountain\tIt’s the thought that counts. You’re really making me think about my home and my fellow poems. We’re all so different from each other, in conversation with each other, but also in comparison or reference to other pieces of art, music and writing. These influences can be hard to highlight in print, but the vastness of a digital archive creates a lot of space for these intimate connections to receive the attention they deserve.\n(14:55):\tLiza Makarova\tI would love to know more about what it’s like in the actual digital space.\n(14:58):\tMountain\tWell, we live in a five story house. Each floor is labeled by sections A through E.\n(15:04):\tLiza Makarova\tRight. We call that the bibliography. For those who might want more clarification, a bibliography is essentially a list of everything a writer ever wrote. What are your thoughts on how you’re currently organized?\n(15:15):\tMountain\tI really like it. It’s what I’m used to, you know? Archival work has always kind of been a thing, but digital archival work is super new. Susan, as in Susan Rudy, started this digital archive with a team of researchers in 2006. Fred has always had an organizational system, so we got used to who we were surrounded with, who’s in the neighborhood. Thankfully, Susan made sure that when we got digitized, the same system was put in place, hence our bibliography. [Soft warm music begins to play]\nI’ll never forget the feeling of being scanned for the first time. I think you can imagine it as an x-ray. I’m pretty old, so I’m not used to any of those things. I thought that laser scanning would be the end of me, but instead it was the beginning.\n\n(15:59):\tLiza Makarova\tI can only imagine how that might have felt. [music ends]\nWhat about migrating? What is it like to migrate onto version 2.0? How did it feel?\n\n(16:07):\tMountain\tKind of feels like a huge family road trip.\n(16:10):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, that’s really sweet.\n(16:12):\tMountain\tYeah. Yeah. I’m pulling your leg. Assuming that it is pullable. It was quite a long process since we can’t all just move at once. There are a lot of steps involved to make sure everything goes smoothly. Think of migrating from site to site like this. You’re moving boxes from one shelf to another, but the other shelf has slightly different dimensions, so you have to make certain adjustments to make sure everything fits again. Then again, these spaces can be filled with new software updates that improve the overall functionality of the site. It’s like moving into a bigger house, so now you have space for that vintage standing lamp you’ve always wanted.\n(16:47):\tLiza Makarova\tWow. I just love hearing your thoughts on all this. As we discussed, digital archives are a really incredible tool to showcase and disseminate the oeuvre of writers who use multimedia such as audio, visual arts, and small press publishing. You mentioned earlier that due to the age of Link Rot, newer material didn’t get on the site until a couple years after they were published, so I’m not quite sure who makes the calls inside the archive, if someone or something like that exists for you, but out here we have something called for-profit publishing companies.\n(17:21):\tMountain\tHmm, Yes, the InPrint books or the LabuorLeaflets, if you’re trying to be a part of the open source movement.\n(17:28):\tLiza Makarova\tThe movement… [Liza hesitates before going on] [whispering]  Can we talk about this near a recording device?\n(17:33):\tMountain\tOf course. I think more people should know about this. Here in the archive, no one is in charge, no anthology name or chatbook is more important than the community that we make up. But it’s true that outside of the archive, some work is still in print and therefore under institutional control.\n(17:50):\tLiza Makarova\tRight. We can’t scan or upload anything still circulating for the public to purchase. Does that make you sad or feel anything in particular?\n(18:00):\tMountain\tIt’s simply a phase of our lives and the archive is hopefully the next.\n(18:04):\tLiza Makarova\tWould you consider the archive as your home at the moment?\n(18:08):\tMountain\tIt’s definitely not a permanent home. I don’t think something like that exists for anything. Like for you, where would you consider home? Where you were born, where you grew up, where you are now, or where you’ll end up? Like a retirement home. Nothing and no one stays somewhere forever, or at least a part of them is always somewhere else.\n(18:28):\tLiza Makarova\tCould you expand on what you mean by a part of them is always somewhere else? [Mountain sighs deeply]\nOh, are you? Are you talking about, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this…\n\n(18:42):\tMountain\tOh, just say it.\n(18:43):\tLiza Makarova\tAre you talking about your body?\n(18:46):\tMountain\t[Soft piano music begins to play] Yes. I miss it a little.\n(18:50):\tLiza Makarova\tHardcover or paperback?\n(18:53):\tMountain\tWell, that’s a little personal. [Music ends]\n(18:54):\tLiza Makarova\tI’m, I’m sorry. So your body, your physical presence on earth. Would you consider that your home? Okay. Maybe a better question would be what about the present digital archive feels like home compared to the physical one?\n(19:07):\tMountain\tThe relationship is a little tense. I mean, my physical body is kept in a temperature controlled room in the Simon Fraser Special Collections. While my contents and consciousness have been bloated to a nebulous space. I really can’t tell which is more permanent, the internet or the real world. What I like about being in a digital archive, that I hope you humans listening can also appreciate, is how open it is. There are no clear boundaries about where I start and where I end.\nPlus maintaining a literary archive in the real world can be a lot of work. I mean, I can only imagine how hard it is to keep 50 books open at the same time, or even worse, to never be opened again. In the digital space, we keep ourselves alive, always ready. There is no rest for the digital archival poem. The internet is a busy place. Sometimes it’s nice to dissociate for a little and reconnect with my physical form. [Soft piano music begins to play] To feel the chill of my spine, to stretch out my pages when someone brushes by. Sadly, in a physical archive, I’m not relevant until someone needs something from me. [Music ends]\n\n(20:15):\tLiza Makarova\tThat’s not true. You’re an artifact. You’ve survived so much. We don’t need to be needed in order to be important. The fact that you still exist and people who didn’t even exist in the sixties can interact with you is really special.\n(20:30):\tMountain\tThank you for that.\n(20:31):\tLiza Makarova\tOf course, I don’t do this just because I like to keep the great universal archive organized. I’m also passionate about the preservation of literature.\n(20:41):\tMountain\tI actually have a question for you now.\n(20:43):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Go ahead.\n(20:44):\tMountain\tWhy do you have to put our dimensions and everything up on the digital archive? Do people really need to know how much I weigh, and how truthful is it to say that I’m 22 pages long when the PDF actually compresses me down to 20?\n(20:57):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, that’s metadata.\n(20:58):\tMountain\tData can be existential.\n(21:00):\tLiza Makarova\tNo, it’s data about data.\n(21:02):\tMountain\tThat’s kind of existential.\n(21:04):\tLiza Makarova\tI guess so. The reason why archivists and researchers need to collect and display metadata is so that it’s easier for users to find the information they’re looking for. The process of creating metadata from large and various sets of data is kind of like creating a dating profile.\nA person, just like a data set, is complex and often holds a lot of information at once. Metadata is specific details about information rich material that is formatted and categorized so it’s accessible, easy to find and descriptive.\n\n(21:36):\tMountain\tWell, when you put it that way, I can see how it reduces the amount of smalltalk I have to do when someone new comes to the site.\n(21:42):\tLiza Makarova\tExactly. By using the search bar, any user can just type in what they’re looking for in terms of genre, length, or collaborator, or all the information can be found just by looking at you.\n(21:53):\tMountain\tI gather slightly similar information about our users.\n(21:56):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, like what?\n(21:58):\tMountain\tWell, I know that you all have good taste. [Mountain and Liza laugh]\n(22:03):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, it has been an absolute pleasure to speak with you, Mountain 1967. Before I let you go, I have one last question to ask you. Can you describe existing in a digital archive in one or two words, even?  If you can, of course?\n(22:22):\tMountain\t[Mountain takes a deep breath] Freedom. [Soft piano music plays briefly and then fades out]\n(22:36):\tFred Wah, In Class Conversations – March 9, 1979\t[Sound effect of a tape being put into a tape player]\nAnd maybe you, maybe, maybe people have some opinions on, you know, paying for literature or poetry. Uh, I mean there, you know, there’s a pretty good argument for saying that poetry belongs, because it’s language, it belongs to everyone. It belongs to all of us. [Sound effect of a tape ending]\n\n(22:54):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, hello? um, com-computer voice?\n(22:58):\tComputerized Voice:\tHi.\n(22:59):\tLiza Makarova\tMay um, may I please speak to “Limestone Lakes Utaniki?”?\n(23:03):\tComputerized Voice:\tWell, does it wanna speak to you?\n(23:06):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, yes? It agreed to meet with me, so I think…\n(23:11):\tComputerized Voice:\tOkay, I see you on the list. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” is loading.\n(23:15):\tLiza Makarova\tThank you.\n(23:18):\tComputerized Voice:\t[Whirring noise begins] They have now been loaded. [Whirring noise ends]\n(23:20):\tLiza Makarova\tThey? [Music begins]\n(23:25):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Hello?\n(23:26):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, am I speaking to “Limestone Lakes Utaniki?”\n(23:29):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Yes.\n(23:30):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, hello. There are so many of you.\n(23:34):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Yes, but…\n(23:37):\tLLU 1\tUh, yes, but we are not all the same.\n(23:41):\tLLU 2\tWe’re like identical twins with slightly different features.\n(23:45):\tLLU 3\tI like to think of myself as an individual, a lone wolf even, distant from the pack.\n(23:50):\tLLU 2\tOh, so you went from first to second person in 1987, and now you think you’re so different from us.\n(23:56):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] That’s not true!\n(23:58):\tLLU 3\tWow.\n(24:00):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, I’m still so excited to speak with all of you today. It completely slipped my mind that there are so many versions of this collection. My first question for all of you, I guess, is this: The Fred Wah Digital Archive is more than an archive, right? It also explores mapping a social bibliography. So from your perspectives, how does this mapping appear for you?\n(24:25):\tLLU 1\tSo the social bibliography is, well, like a list of everyone who has worked on a project with Fred. Each person is housed under us as either an editor, contributor artist, or as, uh,  someone who was published alongside Fred. However, archival materials are, uh, also housed under the contributor.\n(24:51):\tLLU 2\tOkay. Okay. You’re getting a little wordy. To summarize there’s—\n(24:55):\tLLU 1\tWordy! Aren’t you the one with three extra passages?\n(25:00):\tLLU 2\tTo summarize, you can’t search for information about a specific contributor without also learning about different archival material and vice versa.\n(25:08):\tLiza Makarova\tSo for you, being an independently published poem, as well as appearing in a few different publications means you’ve come across a lot of people.\n(25:16):\tLLU 2\tI’m not sure if “come across” is the right word to describe the relationship the social bibliography has with the literary bibliography.\n(25:25):\tLLU 1\tOh! Oh, I agree. Oh, we’re, we’re not just passing through. The poem is part of the community, just as much as the poets.\n(25:33):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm, I see. So perhaps you could say that you’re not only personally connected to each contributor, but you also make up the bonds that connect people in the Wah-verse.\n(25:42):\tLLU 3\tInside and outside of the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(25:46):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh? What do you mean?\n(25:47):\tLLU 2\tWell, think about yourself, for example.\n(25:49):\tLLU 3\tOr the cooler, [clears throat] I mean, cool people that worked on the Fred Wah Digital Archive before you.\n(25:55):\tLLU 1\tOh, we’re always meeting new and familiar researchers as the project gets new team members or when it moves to a different province.\n(26:05):\tLiza Makarova\tWait. So, like you, you know our location?\n(26:08):\tLLU 3\tUm, we weren’t created in a vacuum.\n(26:10):\tLLU 2\tOf course we have a sense of spatiality.\n(26:13):\tLLU 1\tYou could even say that, that spatiality is our specialty.\n(26:21):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] [All three laugh] Good one.\n(26:21):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. So I know that one of the main features of the archive is to plot and display geographical metadata based on the framework of Fong and Fitzpatrick who revived the Fred Wah Digital Archive in the 2010s. We know how the text, you all, circulated throughout Canada in various time periods. In their words, this sort of research adds another layer of relational information that illuminates literary sociality in a spatial sense.\n(26:48):\tLLU 2\tRight.\n(26:49):\tLLU 1\tI think I know what you’re getting at.\n(26:52):\tLiza Makarova\tBut you’ve also developed a sense of present sociality.\n(26:56):\tLLU 3\tIn order to be in the Fred Wah Digital Archive, you have to have been outside of it at some point.\n(27:01):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh. So since your positionality is currently inside of the archive, how or in what ways are you connected to the um, I guess non-archival space?\n(27:13):\tLLU 2\tCapturing the present is also a way of capturing the past.\n(27:16):\tLLU 1\tI mean, couldn’t every space be considered an archival space?\n(27:21):\tLiza Makarova\tOh yeah, yeah. Right. Sorry. The great universal archive. Oh, okay. So let’s break it down a little bit. You’re all in the Fred Wah Digital Archive, like within the code that’s projected as a legible image in text. But you also exist in various library archives that are in British Columbia and Montreal, because Fred Wah donated his reel to reel tape collections and books to SFU, UBCO and Concordia. But you also absorb information in the homes of everyone who has ever bought, bartered or stole a copy of you- your material.\n(27:57):\tLLU 2\tThere’s a movie like that, right?\n(27:59):\tLLU 1\tLike, um… Everywhere…\n(28:01):\tLLU 3\tAt once.\n(28:02):\tLLU 2\tAt once everything is…\n(28:04):\tLiza Makarova\tEverything Everywhere All At Once-, anyway, what I’m trying to understand is how you feel about your positionality as digitized archival material. In the many places where you are at the moment you are simultaneously in the digital archive, which is a very dynamic place in terms of temporality. How does this huge angle inform your sense of self and how you feel about all the places and people you are connected to?\n(28:29):\tLLU 3\tThe Fred Wah Digital Archive is just like any other place that’s been passed down over time. You always know what kind of person lived prior to you based on how they left the space, and you’re going to be aware of the contributions you personally make in the space.\nSame thing goes for an archive. The research group in Vancouver at SFU are very different from you all in Montreal. They have access to material you don’t, and vice versa. We take note of these distinctions quite literally since it affects how we are presented, but also how people interpret us\n\n(28:57):\tLLU 2\tBy working on the Fred Wah Digital Archive with someone in the same position as you from Vancouver in 2016, automatically makes you affiliated to them in some way, even if you’ve never met before. Internally, we see that by comparing your organization of metadata, use of punctuation, and what information you think should and shouldn’t appear in the archive.\n(29:18):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. There is definitely a connection between how you track the variation of archival interaction and how we track the development of Fred Wah’s work and community as he moved within different literary milieu’s.\n(29:29):\tLLU 1\tYes, exactly! So to go back to the question about the social bibliography, it is a list of people, but it also represents a network, one that spans across generations and miles, genres and styles, friendships and camaraderie.\n(29:51):\tLiza Makarova\tSo there is an archive of contemporary interconnections within so-called Canada inside of the archive of Fred Wah’s collected works.\n(29:58):\tLLU 3\tIt’s super layered. It’s not exactly clear where the archival text ends and where the social bibliography begins.\n(30:05):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat are your thoughts on being in conversation with so many different people, texts, and environments?\n(30:10):\tLLU 2\tIt’s exciting.\n(30:11):\tLiza Makarova\tI’m so glad. Personally, I think I would feel a little overwhelmed. It’s a lot of information that overlaps. I would be scared of getting lost.\n(30:19):\tLLU 2\tI would say that’s why it’s important to be precise, specific and to display a variety of labels in the way you organize things. An editor of Fred’s work could also show up as an artist. As part of the collected work taxonomy, we became accustomed to being called “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” without any note about us being different versions.\n(30:39):\tLLU 3\tFor the longest time we were just listed as the same poem.\n(30:42):\tLLU 2\tAnd in some ways we are, different variations of it.\n(30:47):\tLLU 1\tBut it’s important to track these changes over time.\n(30:51):\tLiza Makarova\tWe actually found out through an audio recording from March 9th, 1979 that the reason why there are so many versions of the same poem is because Fred Wah edited them before sending them off for publications.\n(31:03):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Oh, we know!\n(31:05):\tLiza Makarova\t[Liza laughs]  I wonder if there are any other versions that we don’t know about that were specifically edited for readings.\n(31:10):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Oh, we wouldn’t know.\n(31:12):\tLiza Makarova\tWait, you have never heard yourself be read aloud?\n(31:16):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Nope.\n(31:16):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, would you like to?\n(31:18):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once, talking amongst themselves]\nI, I’m not sure. Like… I think it’d be, I think we could…\n\n(31:22):\tLLU 2\tLet’s do it.\n(31:25):\tLLU 1\tThe thing is… I don’t think there is a recording of us being read.\n(31:28):\tLLU 2\tWe actually haven’t ever heard an audio recording of Fred read before. Like at all.\n(31:36):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. Okay, let me see. [Sound effect of someone typing on a computer]\nOh, here. Let’s listen to this clip of Fred reading “What does Qu’ Apelle mean?” for the 1985 TISH celebration. A bunch of poets like George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, Gladys Hindmarch, Lionel Kearns, Peter Auxier and Warren Tallman were there reading as well.\n\n(32:02):\tFred Wah reading in “TISH: A Celebration (1985)”\tI was in, uh, I was in, uh, Fort Sand this summer, Fort Qu’ Apelle and, uh, a few poems out of that. This was a letter, a letter back home.\nWhat does Qu Apelle mean?/ Did you know I watered the Japanese cherry out front?/ The manchurian plum too./ How late did Jennifer sleep on Sunday?/ I talked to my mum about using the wormy cherries for wine./ Tell her about the worm in the tequila./ What did Erica do at Gray Creek?/ I picked two cocoon-like burs off the apricot tree./ What do you think they are?/ I think we should plant more flatter sugar peas from now on./ I cook that halibut with some veggies in the leftover burnt brown rice./ I’m trying to remember a particular and specific rotten two by four on the deck or a blemished shingle/. So I can take us there by mentioning to you like that piece that’s soft to the touch of my foot when I turn to the left on Slant Trans Canada./\n\nYou can’t swim in the lake here because of the algae./ I don’t have a printer for my computer, so I’m using a typewriter./ There’s a girl here who was an old Smith Corona portable of her mother’s, which is just like yours only in better shape./ This place is full of noise because it’s a band camp and there’s a black lab right outside my window howling all night, every night./ When I flew over Invermere, the fires were really chugging out. Huge smoke stacks./ So you could tell the mountains were in control./ They have mosquitoes here./ Is life work?/ Where’s my olive green tank top?/ I don’t know if my grandmother’s ever talked to one another./ Do you know that idea about if you image something, it will be true?/ There are probably images in our lives which will never be actualized, particularly ones above the north./ Information is definitely not narrative or maybe narrative isn’t narrative./ Could someone, and I don’t mean in the Japanese sense at all, clean out the culverts on the road in case it’s a real deluge./ The food’s mediocre./ I’m too academic./ This worries me, but I, but maybe it’s okay./ Like I don’t think it’s a serious problem./ But if it becomes part of a life force blow, I’ll really wonder./ Don’t forget to check the water in the batteries in this hot weather/ What does Qu’apelle mean?\n\n(34:22):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat did you think?\n(34:25):\tLLU 2\tI could feel the air flowing through the spaces between each letter, the warmth of breath propelling us towards the microphone and seeping into the tape.\n(34:34):\tLLU 1\tI felt like I was there. As soon as you played it, I was transported to 1985. Being inhaled [LLU 1 inhales] and exhaled,[LLU 1 exhales]  riding each sound wave to the present.\n(34:51):\tLiza Makarova\tRecording poetry readings was really important for Fred Wah’s generation in the sixties all the way into the eighties. It wasn’t just for the sake of preserving or capturing the work of prolific poets on tape, but it’s also a way for work to be shared or even gifted.\n(35:05):\tLLU 2\tThat isn’t to imply that we were some commodity either. A huge part of sharing tapes was keeping the contemporary writing ecosystem alive. Poets from the west could hear poets from the east read and vice versa. After this exposure, writers from one side of the country could respond to the work of their distant peers, and it would also circulate throughout their local literary communities.\n(35:27):\tLLU 3\tThe Digital Archive is similar in that way. Instead of being transferred from the hands of one artist to the next, we’re easy to access for the entire world. Obviously, we don’t wanna compete with people buying books, but for some people it’s hard to find copies of older material, especially if a bookstore doesn’t carry our publisher.\n(35:44):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. I hope there’s a time when literature on the public domain and independent publishers can work together. Literary artists and editors deserve to be paid for their work, but Digital Archives shouldn’t be neglected in the process.\n(35:57):\tLLU 1\tEspecially one like the Fred Wah Digital Archive. It’s a homage to all the care that goes into creating a generative literary community with a lot of significance placed on the people who made it possible.\n(36:14):\tLLU 2\tHaving one’s memory and work be celebrated and sustained is an important non-monetary contribution to a writer’s career.\n(36:22):\tLiza Makarova\tI feel like that’s the reason why the legacy of this specific archive is so vital to the Canadian literary scene. It isn’t just about the bibliography and access to Fred’s work, but it’s also about the possibility of interacting with people in literature you otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to. Do you think that this sort of openness or convenience affects the personal connections between writers and their work?\n(36:44):\tLLU 3\tMm, I can speak on that, I guess. I would argue that putting these relationships into context is a way to preserve their intimate nature. Fred Wah widely wrote for his community and vice versa. Making sure the users of the archive know who these people are, where they’re from, and how often they’re connected is a great way to situate them in a closed network.\n(37:02):\tLiza Makarova\tTo clarify, are you saying that us as users of the archive and researchers are situated as outsiders? From this position we can view this network but not really consider ourselves as part of it.\n(37:14):\tLLU 1\tMm, no. That would be a little harsh. I guess it has more to do with ensuring that the network of writers and artists and editors and others are represented in the temporal and spatial realm when and where they had strong ties. The beauty of mapping a social bibliography is that these connections are only framed by our knowledge of them. Rather than thinking of them as a box, someone who is not, well, let’s say a part of the network, someone who grew up in a different setting or time period has a different perspective and sociality.\n(38:05):\tLLU 2\tSo you’re not outsiders. Actually quite the opposite. You’re insiders! By using the archive and inspecting the relationship network, you’re getting an in on the details, which develops your understanding of the archival material you are trying to analyze. It brings you closer to us.\n(38:22):\tLiza Makarova\tI definitely feel closer to all of you after this interview. Thank you so much for inviting me into your space.\n(38:29):\tLLU 1\tThank you for having us.\n(38:31):\tLLU 2\tIt was a pleasure.\n(38:32):\tLLU 3\tIt was nice to have someone different to talk to— Someone like me—\n(38:34):\tLLU 1 and LLU 2\t[LLU 1 and LLU 2 speak over each other.] Oh. Oh, Come, come on, on you. This is the last time we’re oh, oh, this. Why are you making such a scene? Jeez! [Music begins to play and then quickly ends]\n(39:00):\tFred Wah reads “Don’t Cut Me Down”\t[Sound effect of a tape player starting plays ] So I’ll read a few poems from the book, Tree.\nDon’t Cut me down/ I don’t want any of this tree poetry shit from you/ You don’t know what a fucking tree is/ If you think it’s only in your head, you’re full of shit/ Trees is trees and, and the only thing they’re good for is lumber, so don’t give me any crap about them being something else/ For Christ’s sake, you think the rest of us don’t know sweet fuck all all compared to you/ But you don’t know nothing until you go out there and bust your back on a set and chokers break your so fast, you wouldn’t even wanna look at a tree, let alone and write about it/ Then you’d know what a tree was ‘stead of yapping about it.\n\nThat’s essentially what was said to me in a bar, obviously, when I said I’m a writer and I write, I’m writing poems about trees.\n\n(39:37):\tClip of Fred Wah speaking  “In For Instances – Literary Arts Program on CJSW” \tLanguages, I see language as quite an organic, uh, moving thing. We really don’t have, uh, you know, individually, uh, a lot of control over what language does. Um, and I, I’m, I’m a believer in the notion that really the poem writes itself or the poem writes me. [Sound effect of tape player stopping]\n(40:01):\tLiza Makarova\tHello? May I please speak to, “Don’t Cut Me Down” from Tree?\n(40:06):\tComputerized Voice\tAre you sure?\n(40:08):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, yes? It will be my last interview, I promise.\n(40:14):\tComputerized Voice\tAll right. If you’re sure. [Sound effect of whirring begins] “Don’t Cut Me Down” has now been loaded. [Whirring ends] [music begins and ends]\n(40:27):\tLiza Makarova\tHi, my name is Liza and welcome to the podcast.\n(40:30):\tDCMD\tHuh? What the hell is a podcast?\n(40:32):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, it’s like a radio show.\n(40:34):\tDCMD\tAll, right. Then why don’t you just call it a radio show?\n(40:36):\tLiza Makarova\tI mean, it’s not technically a radio show since we’re not on air.\n(40:40):\tDCMD\tWell then what the hell are we breathing?\n(40:43):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, no. To be on air means-\n(40:45):\tDCMD\tDon’t explain to me what a radio show is. I know what a radio show is. So in 2022, you have no radio shows and no sense of humor. Typical. What do you wanna talk about?\n(40:56):\tLiza Makarova\tI would love to know what a day in a life of a digital literary archive looks like. What do you usually get up to?\n(41:02):\tDCMD\tSit around. Mind my business. Load once in a while, if I feel like it.\n(41:07):\tLiza Makarova\tWould you say you sit around more in a digital archive or in a material archive?\n(41:11):\tDCMD\tMaybe we’d be sitting around more if you’d bother to code some damn chairs.\n(41:15):\tLiza Makarova\tOh… I’m not the web developer.\n(41:18):\tDCMD\tWho do I talk to to get a chair around here?\n(41:21):\tLiza Makarova\tI’ll let our web developer know as soon as possible. Okay. Here’s a question I think you’ll like. What are some things digital archive poems don’t appreciate? I’m talking, boundaries.\n(41:33):\tDCMD\tJust don’t talk to me about feeling complete.\n(41:35):\tLiza Makarova\tYou don’t feel complete? Do you feel like a draft?\n(41:38):\tDCMD\tDidn’t you hear me? Do you feel complete? Aren’t you sort of a draft? See? Don’t go asking things if they feel complete, you’re gonna get in a lot of trouble.\n(41:49):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Fair. Noted. I’m sorry.\n(41:51):\tDCMD\tIn terms of boundaries, I’ll narrow it down to two. Number one is close your damn tabs. I know you’re reading, researching, rambling, but be mindful of those tabs. You have me open in three different browsers and you don’t even realize, and then you complain that I’m slow. Then you refresh, refresh, refresh. It’s hard to keep up.\nNumber two, don’t forget about that Fred blog, new updates thing, on the site. You people are digging deep into the archives, but forget what’s happening in the present. If you do, then you’re really not grounding yourself. It really grinds my metaphysical gears, tightens my syntax. I don’t like it.\n\n(42:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, thank you for bringing that up. [Music begins] Another aspect of the Fred Wah Digital Archive that’s very unique is that it informs users on what Fred Wah is doing in the now, as well as the creative contemporary writing that is inspired by him, his older works, and even the archive itself.\n(42:43):\tDCMD\tAnd that’s what I like to see people exploring. I know what Fred has done, but I wanna know what he’s doing right now. Hopefully not writing any more tree poems.\n(42:52):\tLiza Makarova\tI can assure you he’s doing a lot of interesting writing and revisions since your publication. Bringing up tree poems and the theme of experimenting with the temporal clash of digital archives and material archives, I’m wondering about your thoughts on immortality. You were written and published in 1972, but you’ve honestly not aged a bit.\n(43:09):\tDCMD\tI want everyone to know that I’ve gotten zero work done, by the way, and I say that because you can’t say the same for some of these revised poems.\n(43:18):\tLiza Makarova\tGetting some touch ups isn’t a bad thing.\n(43:20):\tDCMD\tYou know what I don’t like?\n(43:21):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat’s that?\n(43:22):\tDCMD\tInstall updates. I hate moving, migrating, whatever you call it. We’re not birds, we’re poems. We belong somewhere. We need to be treated with more respect Now, everything’s a mess. We have duplicated poems, couplets, if you’re trying to be all fancy, all these new functions. But, oh, don’t you dare marvel at new technology because once you blink, there’s something out there that’s newer. And that’s what I’m talking about. Who is paying for all of these moves? Are we really getting that popular? That’s what I wanna know.\n(43:51):\tLiza Makarova\tYes, actually! You are. I can completely understand how migrating can be tough, especially after experiencing two big overhauls. Maintaining and updating a digital archive is both a very slow, yet simultaneously overwhelming process.\n(44:05):\tDCMD\tMhm, I hate being hurried and I also hate feeling stuck.\n(44:08):\tLiza Makarova\tStuck? Do you feel stuck in the Digital Archive?\n(44:11):\tDCMD\tDon’t put words into my mouth.\n(44:12):\tLiza Makarova\tI just wanna know your thoughts on what it means for a piece of literature to end up in a literary archive.\n(44:18):\tDCMD\tEnd up?\n(44:20):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. There’s a general misconception, I feel, in the public opinion that an archive, digital or not, is a place where old books are left to collect dust or take up space.\n(44:31):\tDCMD\tAnd who are you? Some hero? Why do you feel the need to prove them wrong?\n(44:34):\tLiza Makarova\tBecause I think there’s a lot of value to preserving the work of our predecessors. It’s a way to be a part of the conversation and interact with media we wouldn’t have been able to interact with otherwise.\n(44:45):\tDCMD\tSo you think you can just waltz into any old archive and listen to a couple of tapes and you’re just like the greats?\n(44:51):\tLiza Makarova\tNo, it isn’t a hierarchy. Without getting too stoic, I, I think it’s a duty of contemporary writers, artists and academics to be critical of, listen to, and take care of archival material, their future is our future. Plus we as researchers wouldn’t have this deep connection to prolific writers from the past if  archives like this one weren’t maintained.\n(45:12):\tDCMD\tYou don’t know what an archive is.\n(45:14):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh?\n(45:15):\tDCMD\tYou’re pulling all this nonsense out of the website’s backend. I’ll do you a favor by telling you some difficult truths by asking you some questions now. How do you decide what makes it onto the digital archive and what doesn’t?\n(45:25):\tLiza Makarova\tSelection criteria is subjective.\n(45:27):\tDCMD\tWell, that’s what I’m asking you, subject!\n(45:30):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Well, personally, I don’t think I’m the one to say. This isn’t my body of work, but in general, I think that everything deserves to be preserved one way or another. Either through a library, a special collections room, in art, a digital archive, or even in memory.\n(45:47):\tDCMD\tYou know, not everything is up on that archive.\n(45:50):\tLiza Makarova\tI know that. We can’t track down everything Fred Wah has ever written.\n(45:54):\tDCMD\tAnd you’re okay with that?\n(45:56):\tLiza Makarova\tI mean, no. Call me a perfectionist, but I love the satisfaction of knowing there are no gaps when I’m looking at a bibliography, especially in the sense of mapping out a social sphere. No interaction, inspiration or contribution is too small.\n(46:11):\tDCMD\tMm, interesting.\n(46:13):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat, what is it?\n(46:19):\tDCMD\t[Music begins] Did you really think that you could preserve everything? [Music ends]\n(46:49):\tClip from “Fred Wah In Class Conservations – March 9,1979”\t[Sound effect of a person’s footsteps and a tape player being started]\nFred: It’s a line printer, so it only prints out how many copies are requested. They don’t have to print a whole edition.\n\nAudience Member: Well, all this stays in the computer, in other words.  Say, I’d like a copy, it would run one off whatever edition it is now. Second, second draft, or whatever.\n\nFred: To a certain extent, I agree with you except that, that I also like, uh, I like books. I like the feeling of something, uh, of a statement, um, of a, I like monuments too, but I like the possibility that monuments can be, uh, destroyed. [Sound effect of tape player stopping]\n\n(47:42):\tKatherine McLeod\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collective from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Liza Makarova, undergraduate student at Concordia University and research assistant on the mapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive Project. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt and our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. Kelly Cubbon is our production manager and transcriber. And I’m your host, Katherine McLeod.\nSpecial thanks to Deanna Fong, the principal investigator of the Fred Wah Digital Archive and the entire Fred Wah Digital Archive RA team. And an extra special thanks to Fred Wah for giving us permission to use his recordings, text, and the overall support he has provided us through the creation of this podcast episode.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme music begins] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod: Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme ends]"],"score":3.1419106},{"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":3.1419106}]