[{"id":"9601","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 S6E1, Invitation to Sonic Poetry: Demarcations, Repositories, Examples, 7 October 2024, Whiteman"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/"],"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 6"],"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":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creator_names_search":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/35145971350432331044\",\"name\":\"Andrew Whiteman\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/559b1f32-3d22-44aa-9b3f-3125de148a67/audio/225b5ac2-e7fd-45a6-a035-97f4c89bb277/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,284,009 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-10-07\",\"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\":\"“Happy Birthday Ed Sanders Thank You!”, written and performed by Edward Sanders ( from “This is the Age of Investigation Poetry and Every Citizen Must Investigate” part of the “Totally Corrupt Dial-a-Poem Series by John Giorno. Found at https://www.ubu.com/sound/gps.html ) and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track.\\n\\nAudio clips of Amiri Barak, Helen Adam, and the Four Horseman from Ron Mann’s 1980 film Poetry in Motion. found at https://vimeo.com/14191903.\\n\\n“The Great Reigns” written and performed by Erica Hunt ( from Close Listening with Charles Bernstein at WPS1 Clocktower Studio, New York, June 20, 2005, available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hunt.php ), and Andrew Whiteman.\\n\\n“#7” by Alice Notley and AroarA. Unreleased track. Text taken from Notley’s book “In The Pines”, Penguin Books. 2007.\\n\\n“ Pinbot” and “Abu Surveillance” by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track. Text taken from Waldman’s book “Iovis: the Trilogy”, Coffeehouse Press. 2011.\\n\\n“How I wrote Certain of my Books” by David UU and the Avalettes.  from the casette Very Sound (Sound Poems By David UU). Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.18. 1984.\\n\\n“whn i first came to vancouvr” by bill bissett. from the cassette Sonic Horses. Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.19.1984.\\n\\n“From The Life & Work Of Chapter 7 (For Steven Smith)” by Tekst. from the cassette “Unexpected Passage”.\\n\\nUnderwhich Audiographic Series – No. 15. 1982.\\n\\n“ Canto One” by Andrew Whiteman featuring Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, Richard Sieberth, Al Filreis. buried somewhere at Penn Sound. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/. Unreleased track.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549667971072,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this first episode of Season 6, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. We all know it when we hear it, and we have mixed feelings about it. Why does the archaic meeting place of music and poem hit such a nerve? Is this art form literature or is it music? Surely, it’s not song, is it? And if poems already carry their prosodic intentions within themselves – why bother supplementing them with extraneous audio?” These questions are answered by Siren Recordings, a new digital-DIY sonic poetry label run by Kelly Baron and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:51\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. The episode features the playing of newly created works of “sonic poetry,” along with recordings of sonic poetry that inform and inspire this type of sound work that reactivates audio archives.\nLet the sounds wash over you as you listen, and maybe even start dancing. Plus, along with all of this sound, this episode announces the creation of Siren Recordings, a new multi-platform collaborative venture co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron.\nSiren is a record label, a digital academic hub, and a stable audio-visual archive for a growing database of sonic poetry in many forms. A place for people obsessed and interested in this kind of sonic art making that sounds like us.\nHere is episode one of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Invitation to Sonic Poetry Demarcations, Repositories, Examples.”\n00:02:00\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Sound of voice recorder] At the dawn of 1976, during the New Year’s Day marathon poetry reading given at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, Ed Sanders began his reading with the following lines–\n00:02:18\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders, 1976\tThis is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate.\n00:02:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tForty-seven years later, I raided the UbuWeb Sound archives, listening through all the incredible Giorno poetry systems albums that are digitized and archived there, and I discovered this work.\n00:02:38\tAndrew Whiteman\tI wanted to make a birthday present for Sanders, who turned 83 this past August. I altered his poem, attending to its syntax and cadences and nuances and its energies, supplying whatever skills my training as an indie rock musician affords me.\n00:02:55\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders’s reading, edited by Andrew Whiteman\t[Piano plays in the background] This is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate. For the pallid tracks of guilt and death, slight as they are, suffuse upon the retentive electromagnetic data retrieval systems of our era. And let the investigators not back away one micro unit from their investigations. And this is the age of investigative poetry when verse froth again will assume its prior role as a vehicle for describing history. And this will be a golden era for the public performance of poetry when the Diogenes Liberation Squadron of Strolling Troubadors and Muckrakers will roam through the citadels of America to sing opposition to the military hitmen who think the United States is some sort of corpse firm. And this is the age of left-wing epics with happy endings. [Upbeat music starts playing]\nThis is the poet’s era, and we shall all walk crinkle toes upon the smooth, cold drill of Botticelli’s show.\nHappy New Year.\nAnd this [Distorted voice] Is the age of the triumph of beatnik messages of social Foeman coded in videos the clatter of the mass media over 20 years ago. Oh, how we fall to salute with peels of that the beats created change without a drop of blood.\nIn 1965, it was all it could do to force cajole the writers for Time magazine not to reinforce the spurious and slinger synapse that pot puff leads to the puppy field. But now the states are setting hemp free. Ten years of coding romance yesterday, the freeing of bursts today, pot tomorrow, free food in the supermarket, and finally, [Distorted voice] haha.\nLet us never forget that this is the age of–ha ha ha. He is such a valuable tool, haha. He will set you free from worm farm haunts. Ha ha. He outvotes the warrior cast, haha. He peels out through all the cosmos mandarlid with poet angels, holding Plato’s seven single syllables in a tighter harmony than the early beach boys.\n00:06:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tThat was the track. Happy birthday, Ed Sanders. Thank you. A piece of sonic poetry from last year.\n00:06:32\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is a podcast about sonic poetry and announcing a new project called Siren Recordings, designed to create, distribute, promote, archive, and discuss it in all of its myriad forms.\nIt’s difficult to define. Here is one attempt I made.\n“Sonic poetry” is the collaboration space between contemporary poetry and music. It occupies an aesthetic space of its own making, neither coldly conceptual nor dramatically declamatory. It gathers people who are both passionate and curious about such workings. The poets give their full attention to the soundscape that compasses their words. The musicians arrange their elements in accordance with the materials of the poem.\nIt’s a bit stiff. At least that’s what Anne Waldman told me, and she ought to know, having contributed a vast amount of poetry, sonics, activism, and knowledge to the contemporary poetry scene over the past 50 years.\n00:07:27\tAndrew Whiteman\tMore from Anne later.\nI was trying to delineate aesthetic boundaries for the sonic poetry I wanted to hear and make. I wanted to cut out what I found to be lazy or ill-prepared artistic responses to the call of sonic poetry. The most obvious being either the single-note synthesizer drone, which provides a vague sense of eno-esque atmosphere to a reader. Or the quote: “my friends are great jazz musicians in their killer improvisers approach.”\nYes, I’m sure that’s true, but have your friends read Susan Howe, Percy Shelley, Anne Carson, or Jordan Abel.\n00:08:04\tAndrew Whiteman\tI want sonic poetry where both elements are scrupulously thought out and then allowed their free reign. Jazz and poetry might seem cliched, but listen to Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus or Kenneth Patchen with the Al Neill quartet, and you might have a different opinion.\nI need to remember that Brandon Hokura is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher Séance Centre. His research intersects with experimental poetics and ethnography, exploring the complex relationships between music, language, technology, geography, and culture. He is also a part of the vulnerable media lab at Queen’s University, where he’s engaged with audio and video preservation.\nHe puts the distinction of sonic poetry in this for me: There are only two categories of sound sonic poetry, really: “acoustic” and “electric.” The “naked voice” and what “sounds the body can produce,” and those transformed by electronics. I suppose you could call the former “sound” and the latter “sonic.”\nStill, I see them as almost historical distinctions since recorded sound is, by necessity, transformed by electrical electronic recording processes.\n00:09:30\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m interested in the liminal space between the human voice and sonic technologies, language and expression, and body and media. This is what makes the work so important to me. These murky, definitional waters, along with my obsession to make such art, led Brandon, myself, and Kelly Barron to decide to build Siren Recordings.\nHere is a blurb we wrote for a recent grant proposal. So yes, this is going to be a little dry as well.\n[From the grant proposal] Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as a community hub, boutique, studio and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Edward Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic, the spoken text, the text as beauteously presented on the page, and the text as performed.\nWe incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the effective social experience of poetic work. We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in our work. Archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak. [Prposal ends]\n00:11:01\tAndrew Whiteman\tWhat that doesn’t mention is Kelly’s essential grasp on the importance of building a specific, stable archive. “Sonic poetry” has always suffered from the taxonomic impulse. Where does it belong, literature or music? People often answer this differently; so much of it slips through the cracks and becomes forgotten.\nSiren Recordings has three distinct archiving, creating, and hosting options, and I’ll discuss each of them. But before I do that, I’ll first give a genealogy of how I came to this art form, how it shaped me, and some of the work I’ve done.\n00:11:38\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tHis work is about the universe. [Echo]\n00:11:39\tAndrew Whiteman\tIn the mid-1980s, late-night television provided a welcome respite to the Reagan Mulroney-saturated daytime, fortunate enough to have stumbled multiple times onto Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann’s incredible documentary poetry in motion, which put the oral or the page poetries of that specific moment upfront—witness–\n00:12:00\tAudio Clip, Presenter\tAmiri Baraka. [Cheers]\n00:12:15\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tIt’s a poem for Larry Neal and Bob Marley, two [pause] black cultural workers we lost in 1981. [Beat music starts]\n00:12:37\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tWell, as a week, we know we don’t get scared. Nothing is happening, way out nothing is happening but the positive unless.\n00:12:54\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tYou the negative whalers, we whalers, yeah. Whale, we whalers we whale we whale we could dig Melville on his ship confronting the huge white man beast speeding death cross to see the wheat but we whalers, we can kill whales we can get on top of a whale.\n00:13:17\tAndrew Whiteman\tOr listen to Helen Adam in her apartment, singing an updated ballad of the times.\n00:13:21\tAudio Clip, Helen Adam\tTimes, cheerless junkie’s song, seeking love upon a day, a day of summer’s pride. I left Long Island suburbs for the Lower East Side. The train roared and thundered, and I sang above its scream. There’s a cockroach coming towards me, but it cannot spoil my dream. Love, love and LSD. It shall not spoil my dream. Or the four horsemen cantering toward an unknown destination.\n00:14:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tToronto was having a reggae music boom, and the dub poet Lillian Allen could be heard at the Bamboo Club. Around that time, I fell into a job at the Coach House Press, a place SpokenWeb listeners need no introduction.\nIn addition to making money for rent, I received an informal education in contemporary canlet and some of the people responsible for dragging canlett into what we could loosely call “postmodernism.”\nSome of these writers were experimenting with sonic poetry. As Mann’s film documented, BP Nicoll was one of the four horsemen we just heard, and Coach House co-founder Victor Coleman was making long-playing records. This is from one called “Nothing too fragile or heavy.” [Soft music starts playing]\n00:15:14\tAudio Clip, from BP Nicoll\tI only think of–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because I only Think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing here behind it–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing there behind it–nothing good in the distance, three fates wave signals BP–\n00:16:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tNicoll died suddenly in 1988, and Coach House began a short-lived talking book cassette project with the Toronto Music Gallery the next year.\nThat same year, Hal Wilner produced a record by Allen Ginsberg called “The Lion for Real,” which burned into me and has remained an imprint of what sonic poetry might achieve if the elements are precisely attended to. The musicians with Ginsburg were all people from the downtown New York scene, the secret location that had fostered so much critical writing, art, music and activism since the beginning of the 20th century. I wanted to participate in that communal and poetic world.\n00:16:57\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tDeath needs time for what it kills to grow in, for our book, sweet sake, you stupid, vulgar, greedy, ugly American death site.\n00:17:07\tAndrew Whiteman\tAs I mentioned, I’m a musician, producer and performer by trade. In the early 2000’s, I began touring relentlessly, playing indie rock and spending an inordinate amount of time in vans, buses, and planes.\nI had been very slow to embrace computers, but when the iPhone came out, I took to podcasting instantly, and very quickly, I discovered both UbuWeb and PenSound, and my inner world exploded here.\nI must confess that my obsession with poetry has always held itself separate from my love of music, an aloof, almost higher state, nearly an inverse of Louis Zukovsky’s famous poetic statement, where in my case, music is the lower limit and speech the higher.\nThe discovery of PenSound and Ubu and the tendrils they put out to other locations and activations ignited a second, more profound wave of poetic thrill-seeking from which I have yet to recover. I discovered the incredible storehouse of recorded North American poetry that exploded from the 1950s onward. The archive, I realized, is a hive.\nI began to digitally flip through the lists of poets, listening to their speeches and eventually making sonic poetry. This is Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\n00:18:34\tAudio Clip, Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\t[Eerie music starts playing] A row of xs appeared overnight on windows across the street. We on this side wondered what they knew, what we weren’t being told. The sun shined through the taped windows and made geometric shadows on the floor. On this side, we learned that the sun did not shine that way for us. We did not know what they were doing with their days or nights. And there were photos. The family across the street taped photos onto the windows. After we put up our x’s, which was, after all, only one letter of the Alphabet, their family would never be broken. We on our side wondered what was coming to hurt us. Would our windows break into shards? Would our windows become weapons against us? We wondered who would protect us from the people across the street. Who would protect us from what they knew and that we didn’t know? We wondered what they meant to us. Were the families marked by x related to us? When would they come to occupy our apartments? What were they hiding, hiding behind the x? What did X stand for? Was it really for protection against possible flying glass? Or was it something else? Was the x a sign for the angel of death? Was it a cock? And what was it a code word for? What did the x exempt them from? Into? What did it enlist them? What did we leave out when we didn’t leave our ex? What hadn’t we joined? And what had we said yes to?\n00:20:42\tAndrew Whiteman\tI developed a rough technique for making sonic poetry related to how I used the archive. I would select a poem based on listening. Indeed, many of the works were difficult to access and print, but listening’s advantages were manifest, as Bernstein’s excellent introduction to the volume known as close listening points out that sound enacts meaning as much as designates something meant—end quote.\nWhen backgrounding a poem, I decided firstly to avoid the two situations I mentioned earlier, the default into a textural or drone-like atmosphere created by synthesis, or its opposite, the live musician improvising to poet reading style. My second move was to develop constraints based on the un, as an Alypian might. These constraints might take any form, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, or in the choice of instruments used. The formal qualities of the piece might be closer to d,  song, or something else, depending on what I heard in the poet’s voice and understood in the poem’s text.\nI’ll demonstrate how two very different examples. Interestingly, neither of these sonic poems use the archive as the Sanders and the Hunt pieces do, though it remains the greatest resource for creators and scholars. And I plan to make a record based on HD’s reading of “Helen in Egypt.”\nIn 2007, I bought books at Book Soup in Los Angeles. Alice Notley’s “In the Pines” had just come out. While reading it, I noticed her dropping quotes into the poems from a source I knew, the famous Harry Smith folk anthology records, which were legendary, and I knew because they had been re-released on CD.\nI felt instantly that I should take Alice’s numbered poems 1 through 14 and retranslate them back into faux folk songs, taking special care not to attempt any authentic folk or acoustic sound or structure which would have frozen them to death, but rather by using midi and the rough recording situation my partner Arielle and I had set up at home.\nI wanted to create a sepia sound and Dust Bowl sonics. I applied erasure to the poems and shaped them into semi-ballad forms. After securing Alice’s kind permission, we made a record.\nHere is number seven:\n00:23:17\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Alice Notley’s Writing\tEveryone said not to destroy time. We can’t have evolution, we can’t have the mind-body problem, we can’t have compassion, but I am losing mine because in the pines enchants and fortune in love once I had now I don’t in love there is no because your self-identification of the night is hard enough for identification. The night was hard enough, so in order to make the night hard enough, I slept all night. The pines as I offered to, I heard that ooh down moaning, but I’ve never heard that my defect is so beautiful. Now, it’s all that I have. My closet is on fire; turn up the clothes and shoes the closets are on fire to burn up the clothes and shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes and shoot the closets on fire to burn, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes that shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn off the clothes.\n00:25:52\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m happy to say that Siren Records will be re-releasing “In the Pines” in 2025 with extra poems read by Alice.\n00:26:00\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe second example I’ll play is my collaboration with Montreal-based poet and theorist Michael Nardone last year. From Metatron’s digital zine glycophorin, we chose his poem “Tower One, Tower Two” from the book thug titled The Ritualites.\nThe poem centers around an Italian American Sunday family dinner filled with loud, disjunctive conversation, plates being passed crosswise, and background noises of TV and the radio. Here, the constraint provided all the creative impetus needed, given that the song “Hotel California” gets referenced more than once, though interestingly, nobody at the table seems to be able to name it. I decided to scour YouTube for versions of this ubiquitous song, limit my sound choices to what I could find, and then manipulate all sounds other than the poet’s voice coming from other people’s ideas of what “Hotel California” is.\n00:26:57\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Michael Nardone’s Writing\t[Distorted voices with background instrumental] Oh, the pepper. The pasta. Pasta.\nOh, I hope we hear the one about Calvin. Such a lovely song. Such a lovely place. The crushed pepper. At Grossman’s. My dentist. At eight, I caught a commercial on his television for that concert on the national channel.\nWell, we wait until the sauce starts to simmer.\nIt’s nearly time.\nAdd sugar and your tooth, Helen. How to ache.\nBut it doesn’t hurt to eat. It does. But Bob, with all this good food, how could I not help but eat? Sue, this crab dips. My aunt Louise was in California, and she sneaked.\nThe recipe for her favourite.\nHow much sugar should I use, sue?\nTwo tablespoons.\nAdd a pinch of pepper to the pasta.\nOh, Joe. Television. Past the pasta.\nWait, wait, wait, wait. I can’t hear one word of what you’re saying.\nThe pasta, the television.\nTurn it down.\nJoe. Why must he eat adult television? Please pass the. Please, Joe.\nIt’s no use. We’ll have to wait till we have his attention.\n00:28:24\tAndrew Whitman\tWell, I faded that out. As it is a longer piece clocking in at nine minutes, I’d like to move on to Siren Records’s first release, which is slated for the fall of 2024. It’s an album based on a single book, Laois, by Anne Waldman.\nLaois is a thousand page, 30 year meditation on the patriarchy and Anne’s observations of them…uh, us [laughs].\nHal Wilner is responsible for introducing us, and back in 2009, I attempted to get him to produce an album for Anne, who largely relies on her son, Ambrose Bay, to produce her sonic poetry. “After all,” I said, “Hal, you made records for Burroughs and Corso and Ginsburg. Why not for Anne?”\n00:29:08\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Andrew imitating Hal Wilner] “This is in the eighties,” Hal drawled, “I can’t get that money anymore.”\nI thank Hal immensely for slyly shifting this job onto my shoulders.\n“What kind of Anne Waldman record do you want to hear, Andrew?” He dropped into my ear one day. Originally, I had wanted a Plastic Ono-style band featuring Cibo Matto founder Yuka Honda to back Anne up. Stark, minimal three-chord pieces, with Anne’s powerful moan reduced to a whisper. But I couldn’t get the money either. So during COVID I assembled the strongest pieces and began stitching Laois together.\n[Instrumental/techno music starts playing] I’ll play two tracks from the upcoming album.\nHere is “Pinbot.”\n00:30:01\tAudio Clip of “Pinbot”\tHe chokes me. He chose me. He chokes me. He chokes. He chose. He chose me. Pinbot. He shows me comet. He plays me Genesis. He plays TX sector. He shows me punched out Sega Turbo he needs more coins two tigers pole position two Gyrus Metro Cross Double Dribble action Circus Centipede he needs more coins Taito ten yard fight feature Spy Jailbreak super contra he shows me Wonder points Flicky Distron he plays Radical Ninja Galaga give me a break spy Hunter Ring King hat trick he shows me he shows me he shows me twin Cobra ikari warriors after burner danger zone Koban xy bots rampage silkworm Shinobi gorilla or xenophobe as the quest for freedom continues I can’t even carry or travel with this book, let alone read from it. I need a I need a roadie I need a roadie to carry it around and hold it out for me.\n00:32:34\tAndrew Whiteman\t“Abu Sus Valens.”\n00:32:41\tAudio Clip of “Abu Sus Valens”\tTo never have enough Canada never have enough being up Canada never to have enough be enough get enough have enough be enough yet enough never to have enough be enough yet do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish unmitigated, concealed our actual colour never be enough get enough never have enough be enough get enough never to have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough over in Iraq, over in Afghanistan, over in Pakistan where next?\nThat’s why we do it at night never have brown paper bags portrait death to never have enough never have enough one out of five to the crippling form of p t s d or suicide Eddie paid certainly slabs never have enough people to never have enough body slumber exultant civvies wild laughter turned on what drug area distorted by the marines where to hide set teeth to knuckles in combat wincey Lindy brutality o ever revert Abu surveillance never have enough be never again never have enough be enough or thumbs up never have a blow to the stomach cold savage beatings more brown bodies atrocity plus silence equals more atrocity Abraham not enough to never have enough link your memory to energy sleeping to never have the hungry ghost ever have enough to never have a hungry ghost more valiant have it all by itself between our realms hungry ghost that dwells in consciousness torments our desire never have a hungry ghost to never have a hungry ghosts never have enough be enough to never have enough be enough get enough never to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough yet to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have a get enough be enough get enough get enough.\n00:36:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’d like to return to the specifics of Siren Recordings’s three-part project as it is unfolding right now.\n00:36:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tFirst, the archive of Brandon’s work on the Underwhich Editions’s legacy, which informs our first acquisitions, includes most of the sonic poetry made and recorded by the likes of critical members of the Canadian avant-lit scene from 1977 to 1988.\nIn the words of our managing director, Kelly Baron, art needs to be additive, not iterative, for it to advance.\nWe need access to art that comes before us to learn from it and create something new. That access is incredibly limited when it’s originally on vulnerable forms of media, where it was never digitized and where it was originally given limited releases. I want to democratize that access and make it available. Opening up access to the sonic poetry of the past can show new artists how the boundaries between music and literature can be placed, and I hope it will inspire new art.\n00:37:17\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tThere are those who can tell you how to make Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, bombs, or whatever you might be needing. Find them and learn. Define your aim clearly. Choose your ammo with that in mind.\n00:37:29\tAndrew Whitman\tOur first two archival tasks are the Underwich audiographic editions and the Coach House talking books series. Neither have been archived in their totality.\nThe cassettes and reels from the Underwich audio, graphic series and Coach House talking books were given limited releases. There is limited time remaining to digitize them. Digitizing these works will provide widespread access to early, otherwise unseen and unheard works from significant poets in Canadian literary tradition, such as BP Nicoll, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffrey, Penny Kemp, David W., and Bill Bissett.\n00:38:10\tAudio Clip, Unknown\t[Distorted voice] Sewers go into the water instead. Where does it go from the train onto the tracks? Everyone said. My doctor told me cattle ship. That’s what the cows alongside the tracks are waiting for when the trains pass through an English bay in the waters. We could have cows dying. They would be washer cows. People could go into the water again and rob the cows on the dirt, out of the boats, or to the university. I remember a place in Nova Scotia called Cow Bay.\n00:38:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books.”\n00:39:05\tAudio Clip from David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books”\tCrowd out, crowd out. Crowd out.\n00:39:18\tAndrew Whiteman\tListening closely, we hear the voice of Gertrude Stein and notice that David W himself is mining the archive to create new forms of sonic poetry. Finally, this is the text from the life and work of chapter seven of Stephen Smith.\n00:39:56\tAudio Clip, from Stephen Smith\tWhen they turned out to be inferior to their reverse heroes, silver’s reign, the poise was the burning beauty being allowed to become holy Balsam. His dignity clouded me possessed by being like an absolute cap sometimes about unloose the full ambition. But there was a person who was certain. Latency in the way of Slosha. With all his regard for the point. Departure stiff places disappeared became gloss fit to a little reveal something a new conscious purpose beyond humanity, having originality and ancient thought while there was still echoing a mighty Asian empathy born incapable of destruction, it became easy to recognize as if sorrow to divide outside. He had known the avoiding drama Asian.\n00:41:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tLanguages would have awakened an age, Kelly continues. Our archival approach is also special. A few Underwich audio graphics series recordings are currently available on Pen Sound.\nStill, the presentation of this archive is such that each piece is just a link, and it becomes a disembodied audio source. The original materiality of that artifact is lost. This materiality is significant, as these works were handmade with unique artwork associated with each release. Our archival process ensures that everything associated with the release is documented and scanned, rather than just the audio itself. We will then describe the images via text, making this work fully accessible for people with visible disabilities.\n00:42:15\tAndrew Whiteman\tDescribing the material ephemera of the tapes will allow the blind community to experience the artwork in its original form more fully. Beyond better serving the blind community, this archival approach also helps to narrativize the work, showing the conditions and artistic context in which it was made. Indeed, Siren seeks to become the standard repository for all forms of sonic poetry, creating a stable archive where the work can be accessed easily and indexed efficiently.\nThe second function of Siren Recordings is the label itself. Depending on the project, we will release three or four full-length albums per year in multiple formats. There are a lot of artists experimenting with sonic poetry at this moment, to name just a few: Kaie Kellough, who has an album coming out on Constellation Records this year, and Fan Wu from the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective is working with Tom Gill on a full-length.\nGary Barwin has been a tireless exponent of sonic poetry since the Toronto small press fair days. Jordan Abel performed at a recent SpokenWeb conference with a crew of two musicians and two readers, and he DJ-ed recording voices during his performance.\nFrom phonograph editions in Portland, Oregon, comes records by Douglas Kearney, featuring the incredible Haitian Vodou electric composer Val Gentil and author Harmony Holliday, under the moniker Bright Moments, creates incredible lo-fi mixes of African American speeches, poetry, interviews, and then mixes everything from Jazzenhe as to Rasta Nyabinghi sounds underneath, something I would love to archive.\n00:43:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tSo here is where I would like to formally call anyone listening. Siren solicits new works, archival manipulations, and interart collaborations involving poetry and sound. We are dedicated to the sonic poets of the present. Our goal is to provide a specific venue for these poets to publish their works.\nRight now, there’s no clear venue for doing this in Canada, but there are venues doing this elsewhere. Examples include recital records from the United States, which started in 2012, and nymphs and thugs and culture recordings. Both British labels begin in the mid two thousand ten s and blank forms from the US. It’s a nonprofit arts organization that began in 2016. Our poets deserve the same opportunities as the American and English poets. We’ll give them that opportunity in science.\n00:44:35\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tI don’t believe in any of your gods or powers. It’s all bullshit. I don’t even believe in my powers or gods.\n00:44:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe third effort of the Siren is perhaps the most important and follows directly on the productive actions of establishing the archive and running the label.\nThese two activities will generate the need for responses from our wider community. Essays, interviews, reviews, reports, and other writing will be hosted, shared, and discussed on the Siren Records hub by those obsessed and interested in sonic poetry.\nStrange as it may sound to those of you who have never left the university and might be a bit worn out by the institutional setting, as a latecomer to academia, I have been energized and excited by meeting scholars and students and deepening my study of poetry in an incredibly profound way. Indeed, I found it somewhat of an initiation, something Robert Duncan speaks of in a lecture he gave in 1969, describing when he was a young man, how desperate he was to find his way into Pound’s just released 1st 30 cantos.\n00:45:41\tAudio Clip from Robert Duncan’s Lecture, With Sound Edits\tWhen I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community: its total interest in Mister Ezra Pound seems to have faded. I want to go back to my initiation in the cabinet. How did I come to hear it?\n[Audio starts getting distorted] Forth, on the godly sea, we set up mast and sail on that swart ship, bore sheep aboard her and our bodies also heavy with weeping August and terrifying presence of a lady bluestocking who knew the entire modern scene, Aphrodite and in my belt on Telegraph Avenue, Elliot and the and pound, the 30 cannons. What was then the avalanche, the whole very confused domain of something one might call voice, which in pound one doesn’t know whether the voice is sort of actual metaphorical and then went down to the ship and I said, I can’t bear it, and then went, one week I went around with that on the godly sea.\nWe set up the mast and sailed on that swart ship. But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You find it the way they find it in music. Cadaverous dead brides of youths and the old born, many souls stained with the recent tears, girls, tender men, many more found out something we could not know when we were reading the thirties, the forties and so forth.\nAnd that is that pound intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of a singing intoning to the line. And then went down the ship, battle spoil bearing and. And these many crowded with bronze lands, many mauled. I mean, just our American trouble with men, many mauled. The word ” min men ” is already tricky enough when you get that many in there: men mauled with brand land.\nAnd so the Kirkheim. So I don’t always find, you know, Ava Hess’s husband as a Brit says, well, sounds like, you know, you never got out from under the impress of Yates or something like this, you know, and the next day reads in a completely different fashion, much more original. And you have the two readings there took it to heart, making them overlap so that the thing plays a double role.\nNow, I took it to heart. It’s exciting. The first high Yeatsian reading and the following much more casual and intimately superior reading. It’s exciting. Right. And where did you find them? She sent them to me. Oh, fantastic. They have not heard since, you know, they made them back in 59 for a German rating. I wonder if other stuff will start to sound. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution.\n00:49:05\tAndrew Whiteman\tThanks for listening.\nI’m Andrew Whiteman, creative director of Siren Recordings; looking forward to hearing from you soon.\n00:49:13\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’ve been listening to the Spokenweb podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:49:32\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was produced by Andrew Whiteman.\nSiren Recordings is a project co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron. The SpokenWeb podcast team supervises producer Maia Harris, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. Our sound designer James Healy of season five will be making an exit this season, but we have a new sound designer: TJ MacPherson, who is ready to come aboard.\n00:50:02\tKatherine McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know. Please rate us, comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Also, check social media for our listening parties and more for now.\nThanks for listening."],"score":4.1670523},{"id":"9603","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 S6E2, Virtual Pilgrimage: Where Medieval Meets Modern, 4 November 2024, Pereira and Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/"],"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 6"],"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":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lindsay Pereira\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2d652a48-92e5-4aab-964f-13c84ab334cc/audio/768dfb20-fca9-4d6c-9e00-295fa04a0338/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e2-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:51:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"49,800,911 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e2-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-11-04\",\"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\":\"Magical Minstrelsy: Where Medieval Meets Modern Through Mimesis, Season 1 Episode 1: Virtual Pilgrimage uses sounds from Freesound. All sound samples that were used in this episode are licensed under CC0 1.0:\\n\\nFootsteps on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/lzmraul/sounds/389454/\\n\\nBirds: https://freesound.org/people/MATRIXXX_/sounds/519110/\\n\\nWater: https://freesound.org/people/BurghRecords/sounds/415151/\\n\\nCows: https://freesound.org/people/Nontu_Lwazi00/sounds/541920/\\n\\nSheep: https://freesound.org/people/rent55/sounds/709921/\\n\\nHorse on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/Ornery/sounds/233345/\\n\\nHorse with cart: https://freesound.org/people/bruno.auzet/sounds/538438/\\n\\nFootsteps on cobblestone: https://freesound.org/people/SpliceSound/sounds/260120/\\n\\nMedieval city: https://freesound.org/people/OGsoundFX/sounds/423119/\\n\\nChurch bells: https://freesound.org/people/Audeption/sounds/425172/\\n\\nCoins: https://freesound.org/people/husky70/sounds/161315/\\n\\nBlacksmith: https://freesound.org/people/Emmaproductions/sounds/254371/\\n\\nMusic: https://ccmixter.org/files/asteria/2615\\n\\nChurch coins: https://freesound.org/people/scripsi/sounds/335191/\\n\\nGregorian chant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ecce.lignum.Crucis.ogg\\n\\nCrowd gasping: https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480774/\\n\\nBaby crying: https://freesound.org/people/the_yura/sounds/211527/\\n\\nBreath: https://freesound.org/people/launemax/sounds/274769/\\n\\nHeartbeat: https://freesound.org/people/newlocknew/sounds/612642/\\n\\nWorks Cited and Consulted\\n\\nAhmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2015.\\n\\nArsuaga, Ana Echevarría. “The shrine as mediator: England, castile, and the pilgrimage to Compostela.” England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century, 2007, pp. 47–65, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603103_4.\\n\\nArvay, Susan M. “Private passions: The contemplation of suffering in medieval affective devotions.” (2008).\\n\\nBailey, Anne E. “Reconsidering the Medieval Experience at the Shrine in High Medieval England.” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 203–29. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874.\\n\\nBeckstead, Zachary. “On the way: Pilgrimage and liminal experiences.” Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality, 2021, pp. 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83171-4_5.\\n\\nBeebe, Kathryne. Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: The Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri’s “Die Sionpilger.” West Virginia University Press, 2009.\\n\\nBenjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, 2018, pp. 217–220, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498909-39\\n\\nCassidy-Welch, Megan. “Pilgrimage and embodiment: Captives and the cult of saints in late medieval bavaria.” Parergon, vol. 20, no. 2, 2003, pp. 47–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2003.0101.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Tradition as play: Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth.’” History and Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 3, 2004, pp. 273–288, https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720042000257430.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, Ellen Badone, and Sharon R. Roseman. “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham.” Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2004, pp. 52–67.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and Marion Bowman. “Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Heritage, Adjacency, and the Politics of Replication in Northern Europe.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 1–23. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515341.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages.” Pilgrimage Explored, edited by J. (Jennie) Stopford, York Medieval Press, 1999. WorldCat Discovery Service, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=16637.\\n\\nDíaz-Vera, Javier E. “Exploring the relationship between emotions, language and space: Construals of awe in medieval English language and pilgrimage experience.” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 88, no. 2, 2015, pp. 165–189, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2015.1093918.\\n\\nFoster, Elisa A. “As You Came from the Holy Land: Medieval Pilgrimage to Walsingham and Its Crusader Contexts.” Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain, edited by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 91– 114.\\n\\nGertsman, Elina, and Marian Bleeke. “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage.” Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 23–41.\\n\\nGrazia Di Stefano, Laura. “How to be a time traveller: Exploring Venice with a fifteenth-century pilgrimage guide.” Making the Medieval Relevant, 2019, pp. 171–190, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-008.\\n\\nGregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010.\\n\\nHill, Joyce. “Rome in Ripon: St Wilfrid’s Inspiration and Legacy.” History, vol. 105, no. 367, 2020, pp. 603–25. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13027.\\n\\nHill‐Smith, Connie. “Cyberpilgrimage: The (virtual) reality of online pilgrimage experience.” Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2011, pp. 236–246, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00277.x.\\n\\nHundley, Catherine. “Pilgrims in the Parish: A Method and Two Herefordshire Case Studies.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol. 8, no. 3, Oct. 2022, pp. 40–87.\\n\\nHurlock, Kathryn. “Virtual Pilgrimage.” Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, C1100-1500, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 145–174.\\n\\nJenkins, John. “Replication or Rivalry? The ‘Becketization’ of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 24–47. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515327.\\n\\nKempe, Margery, and Anthony Paul Bale. The Book of Margery Kempe. Oxford University Press, 2015.\\n\\nKuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald d’Aurillac. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.\\n\\nLangland, William, and Schmidt A. V. C. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Oxford University Press, 2009.\\n\\nNickell, S. A. The Limits of Embodiment: The Implication of Written and Artistic Portrayals of Mary at the Foot of the Cross for Late Medieval Affective Spirituality, Graduate Theological Union, United States — California, 2011. ProQuest, https://lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdissertations-theses%2Flimits-embodiment-implication-written-artistic%2Fdocview%2F875240824%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D10246.\\n\\nOusterhout, Robert. “‘Sweetly Refreshed in Imagination’: Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images.” Gesta, vol. 48, no. 2, Jan. 2009, pp. 153–68. www-journals-uchicago-edu.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.2307/29764905.\\n\\nPowell, Hilary. “Saints, Pilgrimage and Landscape in Early Medieval Kent, c. 800-1220.” Early Medieval Kent, 800-1220, Boydell Press, 2016, pp. 133–53.\\n\\nSinnett-Smith, Jane. “Ætheldreda in the North: Tracing Northern Networks in the Liber Eliensis and the Vie de Seinte Audree.” Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, edited by Christiania Whitehead et al., Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 285–303.\\n\\nWynn, Mark. “God, pilgrimage, and acknowledgement of Place.” Religious Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–163, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412506008778.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549671116800,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["From medieval itineraries to modern livestreams, Christian pilgrimage is often, if not always experienced through an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth. In this episode, hosts Lindsay Pereira and Ella Jando-Saul explore the concept of virtual pilgrimage through conversations with two guests: Michael Van Dussen, a professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, teaches us about the medieval experience of pilgrimage in the British Isles while Simon Coleman, a professor in the\n\nDepartment for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto teaches us about the modern reconstruction of pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk, England.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapping with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, producers Ella Jando-Saul and Lindsay Pereira invite us to ask what makes a pilgrimage real.\n00:01:00\tHannah McGregor\tAs digital technologies and global pandemics lead to the rise of virtual pilgrimages, modern spiritual seekers can go on pilgrimage without actually going on pilgrimage.\n00:01:14\tHannah McGregor\tBut is a virtual pilgrimage a mere mediation of the authentic experience? Or are pilgrimages, by nature, an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth?\nDrawing on the expertise of Dr. Michael Van Dussen, professor of English Literature at McGill University, and Dr. Simon Coleman, professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Toronto, Ella and Lindsay explore the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages before inviting us, the listeners, to take part in our own mediated spiritual journey through their sonic reconstruction of a medieval soundscape.\n\n00:01:57\tHannah McGregor\tHere is episode two of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Virtual Pilgrimage, Where Medieval Meets Modern.\n00:02:06\tMusic\t[Soft harmonizing music starts playing]\n00:02:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m Ella Jando-Saul, a Master’s student at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, in English Literature.\n00:02:23\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd I’m Lindsay Pereira, your other equally brilliant, equally razzle-dazzle, though significantly shorter host from Concordia’s MA In Literature.\n00:02:34\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, Ella.\n00:02:36\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes, Lindsay?\n00:02:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI have a completely random and unscripted question for you that will miraculously segue into today’s topic.\n00:02:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, you’ve surely piqued my interest. Lindsay, what’s on your mind?\n00:02:47\tLindsay Pereira\tHave you ever gone on a pilgrimage or maybe wanted to go on one?\n00:02:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tUm, okay, no, I’ve never gone on a pilgrimage or even thought about doing so, to be honest. Have you?\n00:02:59\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, I’m so glad you asked. Yes, I have gone on one.\n00:03:04\tLindsay Pereira\tI’ve completed the Camino de Santiago and even have the virtual badge to prove it.\n00:03:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWait, what? Hold on. When did you go to school? Spain?\n00:03:11\tLindsay Pereira\tNo, no, I didn’t actually travel there. I did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\nI just activated the challenge on the app, and voila.\n\nPilgrimage complete.\n\nLook, it says “Camino de Santiago, start this expedition and hike 784 km by tracking your daily steps.”\n\nCool, right?\n\n00:03:14\tLindsay Pereira\tI did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\n00:03:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tHuh. So, can people go on pilgrimage without going on pilgrimage?\n00:03:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI mean, yeah, it’s a thing.\n00:03:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt’s a thing.\n00:03:40\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah, it’s clearly a thing.\n00:03:41\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut is it a good thing?\n00:03:42\tLindsay Pereira\tHow is it a bad thing?\n00:03:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m not saying it’s a bad thing.\n00:03:45\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, my brain hurts. Speak with words, please.\n00:03:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tLook, I’m just saying with my scholarly hat on.\n00:03:51\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, fine, fine. I’ll Engage Smart Mode 2.\n00:04:02\tElla Jando-Saul\tVirtual Pilgrimage. It’s not a new thing. It’s been around since medieval times, too.\n00:04:06\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, absolutely. Not everyone could afford to travel during that period or was healthy enough even to make such a long, exhausting journey to Jerusalem and back again.\n00:04:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tRight, right, exactly.\n00:04:17\tElla Jando-Saul\tThis is why we have various manuscripts meant as walkthroughs of pilgrimage that were used by nuns who weren’t allowed to physically leave the cloister.\nVirtual pilgrimage was a legitimate workaround for those who couldn’t make the trek.\n\n00:04:30\tLindsay Pereira\tA badge to validate the virtual experience and the indulgences.\n00:04:35\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd, in a way, all pilgrimage is virtual.\n00:04:38\tLindsay Pereira\tWhat’s that supposed to mean?\n00:04:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, ultimately, we are all metaphorically on a pilgrimage toward Judgment Day. And when we travel to Jerusalem, we’re symbolically walking in Christ’s footsteps.\n00:04:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tWhen we travel to Canterbury, Santiago, Walsingham, Hereford, or any number of other pilgrimages, we are metaphorically walking in the footsteps of a saint and, ultimately, of Christ and imaginatively taking ourselves to Jerusalem and Judgment Day.\n00:05:02\tLindsay Pereira\tSo then, why are you poo-pooing my flashy, virtual, totally legit pilgrimage badge?\n00:05:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tElla, I’m not.\nI’m just wondering about things.\n\n00:05:11\tLindsay Pereira\tThings like pilgrimage hierarchy.\nLike is a virtual pilgrimage less valuable or respected than an in-person one?\n\n00:05:20\tElla Jando-Saul\tNo. Well, yeah.\nI mean, it’s an interesting point to consider. Think about Benjamin, right? What’s his first name?\n\nWalter…Walter…\n\n00:05:32\tLindsay Pereira\tWalter.\n00:05:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tWalter Benjamin.\nAnd his concept of the “aura” that an artistic object has.\n\nLike the Mona Lisa, for example. It’s more meaningful to actually have the real Mona Lisa. Even if you had a high-resolution print or a near-indistinguishable replica, it wouldn’t give you the same feature feeling as being in the presence of the painting created by Da Vinci.\n\nAnd in the case of pilgrimage, it’s more concrete. Like, will this experience actually heal me? Will it actually bring me closer to God? And, will this pilgrimage actually have my prayers answered?\n\n00:06:09\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, okay.\nWell, there’s another reason I’m interested in talking about pilgrimage with you today. The Garmin Watch was merely a brilliant lead-in for my big reveal.\n\n00:06:22\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, what’s going on?\n00:06:23\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, you may previously be aware of my Portuguese background from such things as our years long friendship and the fact that I don’t try to hide it.\nAnd my, you know, clearly, very obviously Portuguese last name.\n\n00:06:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes.\n00:06:41\tLindsay Pereira\tYou may also be definitely previously aware from such things as Professor Yeager’s grad class, colourfully entitled “Virgins, Martyrs, Trans Folk, the Early English Saint’s Life,” that my interest in pilgrimage stems from my father’s 50-year plus career as leader of a religious Marian pilgrimage known as the “Romaria,” which is specific to the Azorean island of San Miguel and in existence since 1522.\n00:07:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, this is both absolutely shocking and incredibly exciting.\nTell me more.\n\n00:07:14\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, my father, Eduardo Pereira, was a master who led pilgrims on an eight-day journey during Lent.\n00:07:25\tLindsay Pereira\tThey would all walk from before dawn until dusk, no matter the weather, in a clockwise direction around the island, stopping at churches and chapels, all the while praying the rosary and singing religious songs. At night, benevolent hosts who considered such guests a blessing from the Virgin Mary would feed and shelter them.\nOr if no homes were able to take them in, they’d sleep on the floor of a local church.\n\n00:07:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, eight days. That’s a lot of walking.\n00:07:54\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah. And praying. They walk, they pray, they pray, they walk.\n00:08:01\tLindsay Pereira\tI can’t help but think about this sort of invisible yet increasingly potent buildup of what Sarah Ahmed, everyone’s favourite affect theorist, would call affective value. I’m picturing all these pilgrims doing this pilgrimage on a yearly basis, going through the same motions, and every year it becomes more important, more powerful, more valuable.\n00:08:29\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt increases in effective value. And that’s why it feels so intense for pilgrims.\n00:08:32\tLindsay Pereira\tExactly.\n00:08:33\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut at the same time, I feel like there’s this thing where something gets super popular and then suddenly it’s too popular and it’s not cool to like anymore. Or it gets commodified.\nLike everyone is going on pilgrimage these days, or I guess those days in the 14th century, and suddenly you aren’t sure if people are going because they really want to connect with God or just because they want to look good.\n\n00:08:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd someone might, for instance, take issue with feeling accomplished for having completed the Camino de Santiago via their Garmin forerunner.\n00:09:00\tLindsay Pereira\tHey, I thought we were besties.\n00:09:00\tElla Jando-Saul\tOkay, look, now I’m really excited to learn more about pilgrimages—medieval pilgrimages, that is.\n00:09:10\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, me too.\nI have so many questions, but we need more background information, more learned input, and more context.\n\nNow it’s time for “What’s up, Prof?” The part of the podcast where we interview experts in the field to learn about important medieval-ly things so we can become not just smart scholars but also smarmy Scholars.\n\n00:09:40\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, that’s not a good thing.\n00:09:41\tLindsay Pereira\tFor the first episode, we are treating you to two experts.\n00:09:45\tElla Jando-Saul\tWe interview Drs—Michael Van Dussen of McGill University and Simon Coleman of the University of Toronto.\nDr. Van Dussen speaks to us about the material culture of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. He introduces us to objects such as pilgrimage badges and itineraries and discusses the cultural conception of travel.\n\n00:10:03\tLindsay Pereira\tDr. Coleman tells us about the modern revival of an important medieval pilgrimage site in Walsingham, England. Walsingham is a remote village in Norfolk that has become a popular pilgrimage destination over the last century.\nThe site contains a variety of historical and modern shrines to Our Lady of Walsingham, an apparition of Mary in that area. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and non-religious pilgrims gather in the village throughout the spring and summer to venerate the saint and reconnect with England’s medieval past.\n\n00:10:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tWell, hello, I’m Michael Van Dussen. I’m a professor in the English literature department at McGill University in Montreal and I work a lot on medieval manuscripts, medieval travel, and I’m happy to talk with you today.\n00:11:00\tSimon Coleman\tWell, hello, I’m Simon Coleman.\nI’m a professor of the Anthropology of Religion based in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.\n\nAnd my latest book on pilgrimage is called Powers of Pilgrimage Religion in a World of Movement that was published about a year ago. And it really tries to take us through different ways in which anthropologists and others have tried to analyze the significance of pilgrimage in the contemporary world.\n\n00:11:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tFrom your email, I understood that you’ve worked with the material culture of medieval pilgrimage.\n00:11:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tYeah, I am not intentionally going for pilgrimage, though.\nYeah. So I mean, people are traveling for a number of different reasons, but the idea of “curiosity-based” travel, where you’re just going around to see the sights and that’s an end in itself.\n\nThat’s the reason for doing it. That’s not really a culturally held value in the later Middle Ages. I mean it’s coming to be one sort of. But people are apologetic about it or people are maybe doing something out of curiosity, but they are also doing something for a more traditionally legitimate reason as well.\n\nSo that could be a pilgrimage. So, it’s something that’s infused with theological, devotional, and especially significant aspects. Or it could be trade, but trade is always iffy sometimes. But it’s a legitimate reason to travel or diplomacy. So, political travel is traveling for political reasons. But one of the things that are interesting is that what I’m going to call pilgrimage sort of loosely finds its way into all of this kind of travel.\n\n00:12:59\tSimon Coleman\tYou know, some of the best historians of Walsingham and people who’ve written really interesting work on Walsingham are also themselves associated with the church in some way.\nThose are people who are very, very keen on getting the historical facts right. And, you know, Walsingham is more than just a place where there are numerous shrines. Walsingham also has numerous archives. I hope to look at the archives again in a few months.\n\n00:13:34\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so there are all sorts of ways in which people are working to try and make the if you like, the religious or the theological and the historical come together.\n00:13:50\tSimon Coleman\tThere are obviously occasions when people see them as clashing. And I guess I’ll give you one example: If we go back to the Anakin shrine, I think I mentioned to you earlier that, you know, it’s not where the original site was when it was first constructed.\nA well and some artifacts were discovered in the area when the Anglican shrine was constructed. And, you know, Hope Patton at one point was thinking, okay, well, actually, look, God has actually brought us to the original place, you know, by providence, and gradually decided, you know, it’s not clear how long he kept that view.\n\n00:14:48\tSimon Coleman\tGradually, that view tends to fade.\n00:14:50\tSimon Coleman\tIn the 1960s, an archaeological dig is made, it seems, to establish the original site further away. And yet when I first went to Walsingham in the 1990s and I said to people, hi, I’m an anthropologist.\nI’m here to look at the shrines, people said to me, oh, I hope you’re going to actually discover a real place where the original shrine was.\n\nSo even the archaeology of the 1960s had not quite settled this sense of where people felt that the shrine should be for religious and theological reasons. And so there’s always this kind of. There may be slight tension. Not always, but it’s often this slight tension.\n\n00:15:38\tSimon Coleman\tAnd for many people, you know, where history and theology or when history and faith clash, of course, for many people, faith wins. What matters is what Walsingham can do for one’s faith and how it might bring one closer to a church. And I’ve had some clergy and pilgrims say that they don’t want to know the details of the history because that’s precise. That’s not important. And that’s a distraction from Walsingham’s real message.\n00:16:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd in that sense, I find it fascinating and curious that if you go to the original site of the Holy House, for instance, there’s the kind of. That’s now a blank space, and there’s a big kind of arch, which is the original east window of the pirate.\nThat’s there, but there isn’t much else. Of course, that means that people can insert their own imaginations into the site. They can reclose a relatively blank space with their ideas of what the medieval shrine should be for them as pilgrims.\n\n00:17:02\tMichael Van Dussen\tI accidentally found an itinerary in an ugly manuscript in Prague Castle.\n00:17:10\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou know, forgive me, a proud castle for saying the manuscript’s ugly, but it’s got water damage all over it, and it’s grimy. And the last part of this manuscript is soiled. It’s gross and different from the rest of the manuscript it’s bound with. It was clearly carried on its own as a little notebook on the trip that it describes. And there’s this guy; he seems to be a knight. He’s called a Miles, a knight in Latin. But we don’t know anything about it, or what he’s travelling for.\n00:17:43\tMichael Van Dussen\tWhat we do know is that he moves from Prague and makes his way across the continent in the direction of England. He dips down to Paris, goes back up to Calais, and crosses the English Channel.\nAnd then he starts being interested in what he’s describing England. He describes stuff in other places, too, but he’s really kind of. His curiosity, you can just come back to that word, is piqued.\n\n00:18:08\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd he…It’s unclear. Sometimes people are writing their itineraries themselves.\nSometimes, if they’re a little more wealthy, they might have a secretary traveling with them who writes things for them.\n\nWe don’t know who wrote this, but I have found evidence of people going through England and other places with multiple secretaries writing their itineraries.\n\nSo that’s another layer.\n\n00:18:36\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know in this particular case, but he starts to describe the distances between places. You know, this is a very…almost literally grounded itinerary. It’s saying, from Dover or Dover to Rochester or Canterbury to London.\nThis many miles use different units of measurement. And you get a sense that his recording stops along the way, about as far as he could go in a day’s ride on a horse, probably with some other people.\n\n00:19:12\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe goes to Canterbury. He describes the shrine of Thomas Becket as one that no longer survives. One of the tricky things about England is that most of these shrines, these pilgrimage destinations, were destroyed during the Reformation.\nIt’s interesting when we find material evidence of what a shrine looked like because we don’t have that anymore in most cases. So, he describes this shrine of Thomas Becket. It’s golden and beautiful. He doesn’t give a lot of information. He goes to London, to Westminster Abbey, where the queen is crowned and everything.\n\n00:19:55\tMichael Van Dussen\tThen he starts describing all sorts of tombs, which do, for the most part, survive.\nThese still are…You could go to Westminster today and still see what he’s describing. And he describes them. Some of them are saints, some of them are just, you know, kings and queens who died. He’s impressed by these tombs. They’re imposing tombs. And he does the same in St.Paul’s Cathedral. He describes tombs.\n\n00:20:22\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe describes the dimensions of the place in swords, which is weird because he describes the dimensions in swords. It’s this many swords wide, it’s this many swords long, and it’s this many swords high from the ground into the top of the.\nThat’s hilarious—the steep. Like, wait a minute, how’s he doing this? Appropriate. It’s nuts. Is he going around with a sword? But then, how’s he getting up to the very top of this? But then I found. He’s not. He’s not.\n\n00:20:54\tMichael Van Dussen\tI found it by accident. The exact same description, maybe a couple of words different, but the exact same measurements, the exact same everything, is found in another manuscript in the British Library.\nIt tells you where those measurements are written. They’re written down. They’re written on posted texts. Say, this is St.Paul’s Cathedral. This is how big it is, this is how many swords wide it is, or whatever width it is, it’s how tall it is. These are the different tombs. This is who’s buried there.\n\n00:21:26\tMichael Van Dussen\tThis is this cross, this pilgrimage destination at the north door, this CR Cross associated with Joseph of Arimathea and the Christianization of England. There are all these guides in textual form that he’s just transcribing.\nAs I said, I first studied waiting in the 1990s, and sure, we had, you know, we could have email and so on, but it feels like it’s a kind of world apart.\n\n00:21:59\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou Know, going back in the.In the 2000s and twenties. Of course, that has to do with technology, but it also has to do with the post. Post covert experience and the sense I got, you know, having and having done. I’ve been in Walsingham a lot over the last year, especially just posting in the post-COVID period, if you can call it post-COVID. We’re not quite post Covid now, but you know, what I mean was the ways in which actually that sent that.\n00:22:24\tMichael Van Dussen\tDuring that period, people could not come to the shrines, people physically could not come to the shrines, or very few people could.\n00:22:33\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd you had this kind of. You had to have these groups separate. They were separated from each other.\nSo, you had to separate people physically from each other as they went through. So, how could the shrines respond to that?\n\nWell, as I guess must have been true for many other parts of the Christian and wider religious world, they discovered or were kind of forced into thinking about the role of technology. So rather than simply saying the shrines are closed and nobody can come, they realized that they could actually use cameras in the shrines, Facebook, and other ways of linking with pilgrims.\n\nAnd now, you started to get daily masses broadcast from the shrines—sorry, both shrines. Of course, this linked the shrines with people who would normally have been at Walsingham but couldn’t make it. But it also started to link them with even wider constituencies.\n\n00:23:43\tSimon Coleman\tSo you’ve got a shrine mass, and you suddenly realize that people who are attending that mass virtually, who are looking through the cameras at the priest at the altar, and so on, are people who are spread around the world.\n00:23:58\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so in a curious sense, you’ve, I mean, as one person put it, one, one. One priest put it, he said we broadened our constituency.\nWe actually increased our connections through COVID-19 in a curious way. And there’s one point when there’s a big, you know, celebration that takes place in the Anakin shrine. And it’s one on the national level. It’s one of the national days, and it crashes. I think this.\n\nI forget whether it’s the Anakin or the Roman Catholics, but, you know, the shrine crashes, the link crashes because there are so many people actually trying to get on or that’s certainly one possible explanation. But there’s a wider aesthetic sense here, which is that it’s not just that the linkages are made with a wider constituency.\n\n00:24:46\tSimon Coleman\tAnd okay, at the kind of Fsites, you can see how people attending mass also chat with each other.\n00:24:55\tSimon Coleman\tSo there’s another. There’s communication going on there that wouldn’t have taken place otherwise.\nBut there’s a wider sense in which the use of cameras actually means that images from the shrines are used in such a way that it allows the viewer to get much closer to, say, statues or other parts of the shrine’s material culture.\n\nAnd so effectively you might actually have an image of a statue of, say that of Our lady of Walsingham from the Slipper Chapel. And there’s an image that’ll be on the video, and nothing happens for half an hour.\n\n00:25:36\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, it. You have a cl. Effectively, you can meditate on that statue in a way you wouldn’t have been able to do if you had been there. And so I’m like, there’s a sense in which there’s a kind of diffusion of links, but also a kind of magnification and bringing one closer to these images, even if one can’t physically touch them.\nAnd then, of course, as has happened in other pilgrimage sites, you know, people do them in their local areas so that you recreate the sense of going on pilgrimage. But you can’t do it physically in Norfolk, but you can do it in your local area, possibly with walking with other people, if you’re allowed to.\n\n00:26:28\tSimon Coleman\tAgain, there are all sorts of ways in which people can retain this sense or magnify this sense.\n00:26:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tBeing in touch with Walsingham and that sort of doing a local pilgrimage because you can’t actually do the bigger one, is something that we’ve been researching a lot for this project because that’s a lot of what medieval pilgrimage in England seems to be doing is like, well, if you can’t actually make it to Jerusalem, you can make it to this cathedral in England and that’ll be a stand in for Jerusalem.\n00:27:07\tSimon Coleman\tThis is absolutely true.\n00:27:08\tSimon Coleman\tAnd of course what we need to bear in mind is that Walsingham itself, and when I think about Walsingham, I talk about Walsingham as the place, but I also talk about Walsingham as the experience.\n00:27:21\tSimon Coleman\tBoth Catholic and Anglican shrines are linked up with parishes and dioceses that will have their own local altars where you might Celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham.\n00:27:38\tSimon Coleman\tYou might get together once you know you’re part of a guild or something else orientated towards Our Lady of Walsingham.\nAnd so it’s not. You don’t just think about Walsingham when you’re going on pilgrimage.\n\nYou might actually come together, have a Mass, and celebrate Our Lady. You’ll gather under the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in your local parish church. And so, the statue itself—the statue of Our Lady might be taken from either shrine and might be taken around the country. And so you might be visited by Our Lady of Walsingham.\n\nShe might come to see you in your local church. Very famously, for instance, the Roman Catholic statue of Our Lady was taken to Wembley Stadium, a big sports stadium in London, in the 1980s, when the Pope, Pope John II, John Paul II, came to England. He celebrated Mass in Wembley Stadium, and on the altar was our statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. So she is mobile.\n\n00:29:01\tSimon Coleman\tAnd, you know, Pope John Paul II effectively contacts her and blesses her, and then she returns to Walsingham. So Walsingham, as a wider experience, is itself mobile.\n00:29:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd then this gets augmented, as we say, during COVID as people recreate not just to celebrate Mass. You can’t get together to celebrate Mass in your local church, but you can still go on a walk and coordinate with others online.\n00:29:32\tSimon Coleman\tI think this has had some degree of effect after the lockdown experience, where people have realized that you can expand the ways in which you celebrate your connection to Wolsingham.\n00:29:51\tMichael Van Dussen\tI mean, a lot of these are not like the texts, say, the Stations of Jerusalem or Stations of Rome, which are encouraging.\n00:30:20\tMichael Van Dussen\tThey’re not just saying, and it takes one day to get from here to here, or this is how many meters wide this is or something. These kinds of itineraries. Yeah, swords wide, you know, statues or something. This isn’t what they’re recording. They’re. They’re usually much more meditative. Yeah, they are. They have a reference point to specific locations and what’s there, but they might.\n00:31:03\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know if you know about the Stations of the Cross, but you’ll find in every Catholic church today and during Lent, especially leading up to Easter, the Stations of the Will, there will be Stations of the Cross. So you can come.\nIt can be separate from a Mass or part of a Mass, and sometimes physically walk around the church. It’s inside the church but around the walls. And there’ll be 14. You know, all the stations that represent the stages of the Passion of Christ. And they are located in, you know, Jerusalem. But it’s a meditative experience. And sometimes, it’s sort of a pilgrimage within the church.\n\nThis still happens every year today, but I’m mentioning that because these stations of Jerusalem or stations of Rome proceed in similar ways—not identical, but similar. So they’re very meditative and prayerful.\n\n00:31:58\tMichael Van Dussen\tUsually, there are prayers interposed between descriptions of a location so that the emphasis is.\nIt’s hard to lose sight of the idea that the emphasis is spiritual and not just sort of like, “Oh, and then there’s this great place.”\n\nYou’ve got to go to this one bar. It’s not right near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sorry, that sounds blasphemous. One of the things I have heard people talk about is that you know, of course, physically going. Going to the place does more than just put you in. Touch with a place that may differ greatly from your local experience in your everyday experience.\n\n00:33:02\tSimon Coleman\tOf course, you can have your Walsingham, your statue of Our Lady Walsingham, in your local parish, but that’s different than making an effort to travel, let’s say, 200 miles in a coach with other parish members.\n00:33:03\tSimon Coleman\tYou’ve paid. You’ve paid some money, which may be difficult for some people.\nYou are seeing fellow parishioners in a new way. And a lot of people talk about this idea of when you kind of get towards Walsingham, you feel as though there’s this. Suddenly, this bubble appears. It’s a bubble that surrounds the village. And you go through that bubble, and you’re in a Norfolk.\n\nBut you. Maybe you. You may come from industrial Manchester, okay? And that’s where you are most of the year. And maybe you haven’t. You only travel a little. And then suddenly you find yourself, Reg. You know, you. Once a year, you find yourself in this Norfolk rural village. And you’re seeing people who you may know very well. You’re seeing them in a new way. You’re not just that, but you come, and the clergy at the shrine recognize you. And some clergy are brilliant at this. They may see you once a year, but they say, oh, hello, Simon, how lovely to see you again. You know, hello, Lindsay, how. Hello, Ella. It was lovely to see you again. You know, I remember last year. Oh, have you come with your friend?\n\n00:34:21\tSimon Coleman\tSo, all of that, that complex process of hosting is occurring. And then, of course, there’s the fact that you are separating yourself from a lot of the things that you might be having to do at home.\nPeople talk about it, and it allows you to have a particular kind of focus when you actually get there.\n\n00:34:59\tSimon Coleman\tSo it’s a combination of the place itself and the experience of having gotten away and having a time and space in which you can focus in unusual ways on the pilgrimage experience, which I think is very significant.\n00:35:00\tSimon Coleman\tAnd I talked. I have written about this.\nWe need. When we think about that experience, it’s not just a question of looking at what happens actually in shrines or liturgically.\n\nIt’s also looking at what happens on one side of the official worship experiences: that you talk to people and engage in spaces adjacent to shrines but somehow significant.\n\nThey may not be obviously religious, but I call them lateral spaces rather than liminal spaces and times, kind of penumbral spaces, where you’re temporarily and spatially in the environment of a site, but you’re not necessarily celebrating a Mass at any given moment, but you are somehow orientated towards a pilgrimage experience.\n\nIt’s those fuzzier spaces that are also very important. You don’t get them when, effectively, you’ve looked at the shrine through your screen, switched the laptop off, and that’s it. And all of a sudden, you’re back into your everyday.\n\n00:36:23\tSimon Coleman\tAnd those Anglo Catholic sensibilities that we’ve talked about were sometimes derisively talked about as being kind of British Museum religion. And why are you going back to an ossified faith?\n00:36:35\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, what we’re trying to understand here is how it’s not an ossified faith.\n00:36:49\tSimon Coleman\tIt’s a faith where the past and the present are so closely sandwiched and allied together for theological and other reasons that we’ve got to try and think back into a sensibility where the past becomes living in a new.\nIn a new kind of way.\n\n00:37:07\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, well said.\n00:37:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tCan we do that? Can we create a sensibility where the past becomes living?\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWe sure can.\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWith the magic of our next segment, Medieval mixtape soundscape shapes from centuries past.\n00:37:20\tAudio Clip\t[Background noise of sheep and chatter]\n[Background chatter in Middle English]\n\nIt that will not…\n\nA fool I…\n\nWish is overcome…\n\nBut first in and…\n\nEke to bring and weave as in sweet farm Thou mayest have not of…\n\nAnother thing a brother of who hath no way he eats no kukiwal but e say natural…\n\nThe morning in the morning in the morning, in the morning…\n\n00:49:39\tLindsay Pereira\tThank you, gentle listeners, humble scholars and fellow medieval addicts.\n00:49:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tThanks to James Healy and the rest of Concordia’s SpokenWeb Team for letting us use their facilities and to the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia for lending us fantastic recording equipment.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd thank you, of course, to our lovely experts, Professors Michael Van Dusen and Simon Coleman.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tDon’t forget to check out Professor Coleman’s book– Farathya Sunder.\n00:50:08\tMusic\t[Harmonized singing and music starts playing]\n00:50:56\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. The Spoken Web Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web Team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:51:00\tHannah McGregor\tElla Jando-Saul and Lindsey Pereira produced this month’s episode.\n00:51:01\tHannah McGregor\tSpecial thanks to Dr.Michael Van Dussen and Dr.Simon Coleman for lending their time and expertise.\n00:51:18\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast Team supervises producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and, me, Hannah McGregor.\n00:51:29\tHannah McGregor\tTo learn more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen.\n00:51:36\tHannah McGregor\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us, leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tThanks for listening.\n\n"],"score":4.1670523},{"id":"9604","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 S6E3, Sound Box Signals Presents – “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings'”, 2 December 2024, Drew, Chircop, and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/"],"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 6"],"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":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creator_names_search":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sofie Drew\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Emily Chircop\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c42f89ac-b9dc-42d9-8fca-240f2598846c/audio/4976f18d-ed74-4fde-91c1-f1ac6d19fad6/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,746,880 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-12-02\",\"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\":\"“Side A: Sharon Thesen’s Reading at [George and Angela] Bowerings’” from Sharon Thesen fonds, nd. 2019.002.002, SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/sharon-thesens-reading-at-bowerings/\\n\\nSharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: Studio Reading of “The Fire.” Ed. Amy Thiessen. https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/reading\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Artemis Hates Romance. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems. Ed. Erin Moure. Talonbooks, 2023. https://talonbooks.com/books/?refabulations\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 1 “Stories of Spoken Web”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 2 “Sound Recordings Are Weird”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\\n\\nThe Capilano Review, The Sharon Thesen Issue. Spring 2008. https://thecapilanoreview.com/issues/spring-2008-the-sharon-these-issue/\\n\\nSpecifically, Thea Bowering’s article “Sharon Thesen: Poem in Memory, and growing up there”\\n\\nhttps://journals.sfu.ca/capreview/index.php/capreview/article/view/2674/2674\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549676359680,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, the SpokenWeb Podcast is happy to showcase an episode from our sister podcast, the SoundBox Signals Podcast from SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan. SoundBox Signals is hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer.\n\nIn this episode, from Season 2, Episode 1 of the SoundBox Signals Podcast, University of Exeter undergraduates Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop carry out a close listening of a 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen reading from her first book Artemis Hates Romance at George and Angela Bowerings’ house. Drew and Chircop’s conversation focuses on the intimacy, sociality, and ambiguity of the recording, and how this shapes interpretation. The episode features multiple archival clips from the digitized cassette tape, alongside interview audio from Karis Shearer and George Bowering. “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings’” was co-produced by Emily Chircop and Sofie Drew as part of the Press Play project. The SoundBox Collection is part of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:55\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, we present an episode from our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals.\nThe episode we selected was produced by Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop.\nThey are students at the University of Exeter, and this episode was produced as a collaboration between their university and the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, home to the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nIt is not the first time that SoundBox Signals has made an appearance on the SpokenWeb podcast feed.\nAnd like in those past episodes, this episode is another close listening and real conversation about archival audio.\nWe’ll let Sophie and Emily introduce you to that audio at the start of the episode.\nHere is episode three of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings.”\n00:01:52\tEmily Chircop\tWelcome to season two, episode one of the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nWe are your guest hosts for the episode.\n00:02:00\tSofie Drew\tHi, I’m Sophie Drew.\n00:02:01\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I’m Emily Chircop.\nWe’re undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, and this is part of the Press Play Project.\nWe are very excited to collaborate with UBCO researchers to explore and share these recordings with a wider audience.\n00:02:15\tSofie Drew\tWe’re here in the Digital Humanities Lab in Exeter to discuss the circa 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen’s reading at the Bowerings of her first published collection of poetry, Artemis Hates Romance.\nWe will be looking at “side A” of this tape in which Sharon Thesen, introduced by fellow poet Robin Blaser, reads the first half of this poetry collection.\n00:02:33\tEmily Chircop\tThis recording is available to listen to in full at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca\n00:02:40\tSofie Drew\tBefore getting into the recording, we’re going to play you a clip from our interview with Karis Shearer about the tape.\n00:02:45\tKaris Shearer\tHi, I’m Karis Shearer. I’m an English professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, and the director of the AMP Lab.\n00:02:55\tSofie Drew\tGreat!\nWe wanted to ask you a little bit about the tape recording and how it got to the AMP Lab.\n00:03:02\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, that’s a great question. I had already been working on a box of tapes that a colleague, Jodey Castricano, had given me, and we were digitizing them.\nWe’d done some presentations about them. So it was known–People knew we had this box of tapes. They knew the lab was busy digitizing, doing scholarship on literary audio recordings. And Sharon Thesen was a colleague of mine in the creative writing department, and she one day gave us two tapes. And her sound is now part of what we call the “SoundBox collection.”\nAnd so it’s two tapes, one of which you’ve worked with.\n00:03:46\tEmily Chircop\tCould you just describe the tape for us, for the listeners? Give an idea of what the event was and what the format was?\n00:03:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. So this is a tape that George Bowering made at his home in Vancouver. And the occasion is he and his wife, Angela Bowering, have invited Sharon Thesen to launch her very first book at their home.\nMy understanding is that that was their reading, and literary events in their home was something that happened quite a lot and they often recorded.\nSharon is introduced by an American poet named Robin Blaser, who was living in Canada. And she reads the entire book, and then she reads a little bit of new work. And so it’s both a kind of presentation of her, a launch of her first book, and then also, you know, what I love about that is a kind of sounding out of new work with a friendly audience.\n00:04:48\tEmily Chircop\tWe also wanted to ask you about the George Bowering oral history that you conducted for us.\n00:04:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, so when you listen to a tape that’s been recorded in an amateur context, people don’t necessarily say their names the way we said our names at the beginning of this recording. So we don’t really know who is speaking on the tapes. And so the tapes are full of mystery.\nOne of the ways that we can do some research and solve some of those mysteries is by inviting people who we know are on the tapes or who gave us the tapes to do some oral histories with us. So we invited them to listen to the tape first.\nHaving, you know, having digitized it, we share it with them, and then we set up an oral history where I get to ask them, or people who work on their research team, get to ask them questions about the context, the history, what they hear on the tapes. And they have all kinds of insights about things that, of course, there’s no way that I could know they can describe the setting as George Bowring does in that particular tape. He says, “Oh, it was a living room.”\n“Do you know how big the living room is?”\n“You know, my living room was?”\nAnd I was like, “I have–I have no idea”.\nSo he is able to sketch out and give me a visual sense of the scope of that room and setting, who was there, and all the. As you hear, what the kind of social context and circumstances of the recording were.\n00:06:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s the kind of context we were looking for when we listened to the recording.\n00:06:27\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. And in some ways, those questions that you have, the tapes themselves, generate all kinds of questions. Right.\nSome of these questions can be answered with research, and some remain mysteries.\nBut I love it–That’s one of my favourite parts of working with archival literary audio. Like, this is the kind of really wonderful questions that they generate and the kind of mysteries that are on them, partly because they’re not often well labelled or they’re, you know, people don’t document in the way that would be useful, but also it’s fun.\n00:07:05\tEmily Chircop\tThank you so much, Karis.\n00:07:06\tKaris Shearer\tThank you.\n00:07:08\tSofie Drew\tIn this episode, we will take you through the recording, delving in and out to explore the sounds of this poetry reading.\n00:07:15\tEmily Chircop\tFirstly, we’re going to play you a clip from the very start of the recording before the poet is even introduced.\n00:07:36\tAudio Recording from the Literary Event at the Bowering\t[Overlapping voices]\nWell, go get one, George.\nGo get one. Go get one.\nGet yourself.\nSomebody might take your seat.\nNo, respect you.\n00:08:06\tSofie Drew\tSo before we hear anyone’s clear voice, there’s a series of sounds that set the scene. There’s whistling, there’s laughing, the sounds of people clearing their throats.\nAnd it really sets the image of a lively, excited group that Thesen is about to be reading to.\n00:08:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it immediately places you in a very intimate household setting. And it really sets the tone for the whole recording by placing you in that atmosphere.\n00:08:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely, and you pointed out that we can even hear a child in the background. It really adds to that household setting.\n00:08:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it does seem like a child’s voice in the background as well.\n00:08:42\tSofie Drew\tIt feels like this little community that’s all gathered.\n00:08:45\tEmily Chircop\tDefinitely, yeah, it is. It’s a community feel. And that’s, I mean, exactly what poetry reading feels like when you’re listening to it. It feels like a very community-based event, a really social event, and a really intimate one. Yeah. And it sets the tone for the whole reading because that’s a thread that’s carried through for the whole performance.\n00:09:06\tSofie Drew\tSo one of the first voices that we hear is, we presume, George Bowering saying that he doesn’t have a beer, which is quite an informal moment, really, that’s captured there. And he gets responses from various people telling him to go and get one or just wait.\nAnd there’s really that sense of familiarity there between the audience members. They’re not afraid to accidentally offend him by telling him to wait. And it’s that really nice view of the intimacy of the setting. And it’s something that’s continued throughout.\n00:09:36\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And it’s a really funny moment as well. It sticks out from what you expect a poetry reading to be like. It’s a very informal moment, and it sets the tone.\n00:09:49\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:09:50\tEmily Chircop\tSo, we hear a man we believe to be Robin Blaser introduce Sharon Thesen on the recording.\n \n\n00:09:55\tAudio Recording, Robin Blaser\tA little respect here.\nI always feel very peculiar introducing somebody that everybody knows. Actually, I kind of like–I very much like introducing Sharon. I’ve been watching her for a long time, and what fascinates me about this book of hers is–she’s going to read to us tonight.\nShe’s going to split it, she tells me, and she’s going to give it the rest in the middle, and she’s going to add to it.\nOne, two, three, newborn something. Anyway, whatever she decides, she wants to do. But Artemis Hates Romance fascinates me. One, Artemis–\n00:10:37\tSofie Drew\tSomething that really stuck out to me about this part about his introduction of Sharon Thesen is probably the pronunciation of the word “romance.” It was quite unfamiliar to me, with this pronunciation putting emphasis on the “ants” at the end of it.\nAnd really, that small change there, for me, conjured up ideas of “courtly romance” of knights in shining armour.\nWhen Sharon Thesen then goes on to talk about her thoughts on the title, she says the word “romance” in a way that is more like how I would. How I’m used to it completely changed the meaning of romance to something a bit more informal, a bit more casual.\nAnd I think it shows us how the recording as a whole does that kind of thing, opens up all these different interpretations that if you were just reading the collection of poems, or perhaps even if you were in the audience, you wouldn’t think too much about.\nAnd I think that really sums up something that the whole reading does: the idea of these different available interpretations. Something Thesen also taps into when she talks about the context around each poem, her insight into them.\n00:11:42\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, the recording and the extra content we get from the introduction and Thesen’s explanations add something to the meaning of the poems.\nWhat I found interesting about the introduction was that this man says that “I always feel very peculiar when introducing someone everyone already knows,” which highlights how social this reading was. And again, the intimacy we mentioned before kind of blurs the boundaries between what should generally be a public event or a book launch with the very private friendship group and household intimacy.\nAnd it’s-it’s very interesting. It really adds something to the meaning of the poems. When you listen to them, you feel–\n00:12:23\tSofie Drew\tThat everyone there is contributing to make this reading work. When people talk about–and they’re discussing whether to have the lights on and, yeah, you really get this feeling that although it is Sharon Thesen doing the reading, she has this supportive audience around her who are all helping to make this happen.\n00:12:41\tEmily Chircop\tSure. It becomes almost a collaborative performance when you hear the whole thing. You can hear the audience as well as Thesen reading. And it adds to the performance. It becomes one whole rather than a reading on its own.\n00:12:54\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:12:57\tEmily Chircop\tWhen we first listened to this recording, I remember we talked about our first impressions. And a lot of the stuff that came up was about these kind of small background noises–\n00:13:11\tSofie Drew\tlike underneath that of the—\n00:13:13\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And interspersed throughout the whole recording. And I mean, there’s a wide range.\nThere’s a moment where a door opens. You can hear someone come into the room. There are cars in the background as well. We can hear cars on the street outside the house, as well as just an ever-present static behind it all. A child laughing in the introduction–\n00:13:39\tSofie Drew\tPeople clearing their throats, that kind of thing.\n00:13:42\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I mean that really made an impression on me when I listened to it. It’s just something I wasn’t expecting at all. I was expecting it to be more of a formal kind of poetry reading.\nAlthough, of course, it, you know, with it, with the setting, that isn’t how it is. But those extra background noises, they take that to a whole different level for me.\n00:14:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I think the sound of the door opening or closing, especially. Especially as we don’t know if it is opening or closing, if someone’s leaving or entering.\n00:14:13\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s this constant reminder of the people in the room that the recording is. And that the performance is more than just the speaker. It’s more than just the reading of the poems. It’s a recording of the whole room. It’s a recording of the audience. It’s a recording of the whole event.\n00:14:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd in turn then you wonder where that line is between the actual reading and the performance as a whole. Including the audience, including the setting.\n00:14:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I think that’s one of the main questions I have about this recording. Where is the line between what is performance and what is just coincidental noise picked up by the tape?\n00:14:51\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely. And I guess having that constant awareness that the audience is there. When you’re listening to Thesen speak, you also know that you’re accompanied by all these other people also listening to her, and you feel as if you are part of that little community there.\n00:15:09\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. You almost get kind of sucked into the recording, sucked into the atmosphere of the tape, because it’s just so. It’s so tangible.\nYou can tell that they’re in a residential area because you can hear the cars on the road. You can know. You can hear the doors; you can hear the people. And it just really places you in the material surroundings of this recording.\nEven though it was recorded 40 years ago, it still feels like it’s happening presently around us when we listen to it.\n00:15:43\tSofie Drew\tYeah, yeah. You experience similar sounds, cars going past all the time. It’s things that we’re familiar with, even though it was that long ago.\n00:15:50\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s definitely–It’s the familiarity. It pulls you into the recording makes you feel part of the audience, which, of course, you are part of the audience listening to the tape.\n00:15:58\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:15:59\tEmily Chircop\tThe original audience adds to the performance, but at the same time, you become part of that audience.\nThe way that it’s been recorded, being able to pick up on all those background noises, it’s not just a poetry reading. It’s a much bigger experience when you listen to it.\n00:16:14\tSofie Drew\tI think it’s a moment in time captured in a way.\n00:16:17\tEmily Chircop\tYes.\n00:16:17\tSofie Drew\tAll these individuals are people you can make out little bits of what they’re saying and doing rather than just the focus being on. Although the focus is on decent speaking, you’re also very aware that there are all these other individuals who have all come together for this one moment.\n00:16:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I like that. A moment in time. That’s a really interesting way of putting it. That’s definitely how it feels to listen to kind of like a poetry time capsule.\n00:16:45\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nYou will now hear the voice of George Bowering, the host of the reading and Thesen’s fellow poet and friend, who was interviewed by Karis Shearer.\nKaris Shearer’s Interview of George Bowering\n00:16:54\tKaris Shearer\tGeorge, one of the things I was thinking about when I was listening to this tape, I realized there is kind of a difference between reading in someone’s house amongst friends and versus, reading at a public library or launching a book at a bookstore.\nOne of the things that’s happening in this tape, especially in the second half, is that people are responding. People are laughing. People are–There’s twice in the reading, someone asks her [Thesen] to read the poem a second time.\n00:17:27\tGeorge Bowering\tYeah.\n00:17:27\tKaris Shearer\tAnd I wonder if you could say something about it.\n00:17:30\tGeorge Bowering\tJust used to do that a lot.\nWell, when you’re at–in somebody’s house like that, especially somebody that you’re close to, right? And that you’re really good friends of, you feel a little bit like that thing that I said about Robin, that you’re not doing a performance, that isn’t that formal thing staying in front of you is rather that they know that you’ve been writing this work for a long time and you finally seem to have got it done.\nAnd it’s almost as if they helped you. Right. It’s like a joint production, and they were there. I really do remember not enjoying it. It might not be the right word, but I felt as if it was important to my soul, you know because it was because of the continuity that I was talking about.\nAnd sometimes, we would do something like work that was not finished and say, here’s where I’ve got so far. And people would read it and get familiar with it. And then later on, you know, when it was 3/4 finished, another one. In a sense, doing something that’s in your house, in somebody’s house. Well, you could have done it in a bookstore, or you could have organized it for, you know, the Western Front or something like that could have happened. But deliberately.\nWould you go to somebody’s house and do it? Because of the sense of community and to use it. We knew this poem was coming, right?? And we knew we. We had read quite a bit of the poem before that. We have it. So it wasn’t as if it was, oh, geez, there’s the poet, et cetera. It was so high.\n00:19:32\tEmily Chircop\tShared.\n00:19:33\tGeorge Bowering\tIt’s shared. Right. Yeah. It was also because. Partly because Sharon, like, she and Angela were best friends at the time, at least, and they were.\nThey spent a lot of time at each other’s place. It was not just an extension of the poetry, but it was an extension of that friendship as well.\n00:19:59\tSofie Drew\tThat was the voice of George Bowring.\n00:20:03\tEmily Chircop\tSo you were talking about the ambiguity and the different interpretations of the poems that are opened up by the recording. Could you tell me a bit more about that?\n00:20:14\tSofie Drew\tSo, yeah, really, some of the most interesting moments of the recording for me were actually the bits where I couldn’t quite hear it.\nI couldn’t quite make out what was being said. And I think it’s due to the sound quality, really, of something recorded. So Long ago. But really, I found that when there were moments where I couldn’t quite make out the words, I was, without really thinking, replacing those ambiguous moments with words that felt more relatable to me and, you know, things that perhaps I would have liked to have written about, that kind of thing.\nSo, one particular moment where I noticed this was something like meeting the sweetest sky at night, meeting the sweetest guy at night, or even sweeping the sky at night. And I thought it was that variety of interpretations that could be taken from the reading that really made it so fascinating.\nThere was another moment where, until we had access to the written versions of the poems, we listened to the recording quite a few times without any knowledge of the actual text.\nJust what we had to hear Thesen speak about it and say because quite a few times, she adds in bits. And you can’t always quite tell where the poem starts and where the explanation ends.\n00:21:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it all blends together.\n00:21:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd so there was one moment where there was a word, we realize now it’s “Creeley”, which is the name of an American poet, but we weren’t sure of that until recently. And so it was this moment where we just really had no clue what these lines were, but it really added to it. It felt like there’s this intimate audience that presumably understands that reference, and we’re almost outsiders to that, in a way, and yet.\nSo that just increases that idea of familiarity among the audience, among Thesen, that we, as listeners, are hoping to catch a glimpse into and join. So, in continuing on from the idea of the listener of this recording being somewhat of an outsider to the community of this reading, is when in one of her poems, she mentions stc, and it’s not explained within the poem, but then afterwards, she explains to the audience that it’s Coleridge.\nAnd the audience reacts to this by laughing. They all burst into laughter, insane laughter. And so it’s like, oh, it must be some kind of inside joke. Must have perhaps expected that kind of thing from her. And yet. So we see that it’s an inside joke. And yet, as the outsider, in a way, we still don’t exactly know what the joke is. We’re not allowed in on it.\n00:23:06\tEmily Chircop\tNo, no. In a sense, yeah, definitely it is.\nThere is that barrier which, to me, amplifies that sense of the sociality and the intimacy of the reading. It really makes you feel the social atmosphere, that they’re all friends, and that they’re all close.\nThey all know each other.\n00:23:28\tSofie Drew\tYou kind of want to get invited in, you know, you want to become one of them.\n00:23:32\tEmily Chircop\tI guess listening to the recording, the fact that it was recorded and has been kindly given to the Amp Lab for us to listen to, is kind of like them inviting us into the moment, which is the only way they can.\n00:23:44\tSofie Drew\tYeah, I like that.\n00:23:46\tEmily Chircop\tIn a way, the kind of ambiguity that you get through the recording, it both alienates us from that original recording context because it also reminds you that it is a recording and that’s why you can’t hear.\nBut then at the same time, it kind of brings you back into that potentially because you are acting more as an audience than ever and trying to understand.\n00:24:10\tSofie Drew\tYes, definitely.\n00:24:13\tEmily Chircop\tI think it does both, which is very interesting as a listener. It’s a very strange experience to be both pulled into the recording and pushed out of it at the same moment.\nBecause I don’t think that’s something you experience when you’re listening to something live.\n00:24:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:24:31\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you miss something, you don’t feel like you’re being pushed out of the experience.\n00:24:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd you could even make a point that today when we’re listening to something, there’s subtitles available or, you know, there’s the whole Internet out there ready to explain it to you, but when you’re looking at something from a while ago, you know, you do lack that.\n00:24:55\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah. The prevalence of captions and transcriptions, I think it definitely changes the way we listen to things. We kind of expect to be able to hear every word and know what the correct word is.\n00:25:08\tSofie Drew\tIn fact, when I went through the written versions, I had a completely different insight really, to some of the poems that I just read. I wouldn’t have gotten just from listening to it.\n00:25:20\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. Listening to poetry being read is a completely different experience. And listening to a recording of a reading, I would say is even a different experience to that. When we’ve been talking about this recording, the way we talk about the recording versus the way we talk about listening to a reading of a poem, it’s completely different. It brings so much more to it.\nI mean, all the things we’ve been talking about today are things we would never really consider in a live reading. We wouldn’t be talking about how the door opens at this point or there’s a car in the background, or we can hear laughter.\nBecause of it being recorded makes all of those things more obvious and noticeable.\n00:26:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nAnd I think, live, your brain probably automatically filters out those background sounds like doors opening and cars driving past.\nBut when you’re listening to a recording, it’s all there at the same level, really, as each other, and you have to work a bit harder to figure out which bits to filter out and which bits to focus on.\n00:26:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And, I mean, personally, I think none of it should be filtered out. While a lot of those noises might not be intentional, they’re still part of the recording. They add to the art and add to the performance. And I think if you cut out all of those background noises, it would be a completely different reading. The impressions we get from it, and the emotions and ideas that are conveyed.\nThe audience has such a huge hand in portraying that to us, and you wouldn’t get it if you cut out all that background noise. It’s interesting. I wonder if they recorded the whole room because that’s the technology they had available or if they recorded the whole room because they wanted to hear their friend’s reactions to their friend reading a poem. In our interview, Karis Shearer had some really insightful comments about this, which we’ll now play for you.\n00:27:11\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, I think that is such a great question. And it’s something that I find I listened to a lot, actually, and I have a research assistant who works on the project, Megan Butchart.\nWe both do a lot of listening for intention. Like, what did people think they were recording? What did they think the occasion was, and what did they think the purpose of the tape was? The recording captures bookends in some ways that exceed the intended purpose of the event.\nSo the sort of sociality, the, you know, George Bowering says, “oh, I gotta have to get another beer from the fridge.”\nProbably not, you know, an intended part of the recording, but nevertheless something that tells us a lot of information about the kind of conviviality of the setting and the way in which people were, you know, food and drink flowing.\n00:28:05\tSofie Drew\tSo another area of the reading that we wanted to focus on was the poem Kirk lonergren’s home movie, taking place just north of Prince George, with sound.\n00:28:14\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you can hear a clip from that play, now.\n00:28:18\tAudio Clip, from N/A\tThis one is a prose piece. It’s a description of a movie that a student of mine brought to class. Instead of an essay, they had that choice.\nIt was one of those kinds of classes. You could do something else. So this kid brought this movie, and he had bright red hair. He was a Sagittarius, and he was into archery completely and thought that archery had a lot more integrity going forward as far as killing things and guns and so on.\nAnd he and all these other archers would go up to a place just outside of Prince George every year and hunt for bears with their bows. And this movie was a–they took up their little movie camera, and they made a movie of one of these little trips, these little hunting trips that they took.\nThis is a description of the movie. And it was very artistic, the movie, the beginning. Some landscapes and words about nature. That particular landscape and what it harbors. Shots of woodpeckers, porcupines, the swamp lilies, bears and moose. And the three archers, one old guy, one medium guy, one young guy, Kirk.\nThis is called “Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.” Taking place just north of Prince George, with sound. That was another thing that was really interesting about it. It was sound. Okay, so.\nAnd one young guy, Kirk, all dressed in camouflage clothing, like those green–\n00:29:53\tSofie Drew\tSo something that really stuck out to us was the introduction to this, in which Sharon Thesen uses quite intimate, small details about this Kirk Lonergan, saying he’s got red hair, that he’s a Sagittarius. Quite unusual details.\nYou can kind of get an insight into her mind that these are the specific details. Not the common details you’d use to describe someone, but those are the ones that stick with her.\n00:30:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:30:19\tSofie Drew\tAnd it’s that kind of thing as well that I think perhaps lots of people can relate to. When something’s quite personal to you, you do remember those small, perhaps unusual details.\nAnd so you get this feeling that what she’s about to read is definitely an insight.\n00:30:36\tEmily Chircop\tAnd it’s humorous, of course, mentioning that he’s a Sagittarius and then describing all of this archery.\nYou can really get that insight into the humour that’s present throughout this whole reading as well.\nThe bit I find most interesting is what she said–She says the film is very artistic, and the room laughs at this. And you just–I just don’t know, does she mean it seriously? Does she mean it’s an artistic movie, or is she saying it’s sarcastic?\n00:31:06\tSofie Drew\tWe have no clue what face she’s making as she says this. Or if people just naturally get from the context that it’s meant in a humorous way.\n00:31:16\tEmily Chircop\tI think either way, whether it’s sarcastic or genuine, it’s a really wonderful moment.\n00:31:21\tSofie Drew\tIt’s great to see the audience engaging with the poem like that.\n00:31:25\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:31:27\tSofie Drew\tAnd she continues to engage with the audience.\nHalfway through reading it, she decides to go back to the title, give a bit more description, context for the poem.\n00:31:37\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. The way she reads this poem is really interesting because in most of the poems, she reads the title, and then she reads the whole poem.\nSome of the poems don’t have titles in this collection. But in this one, she explains what the prose piece is about, and she explains the context behind the movie and the fact that it was a submission to her as a teacher, but she doesn’t give the title.\nShe starts reading the piece and gets to the name “Kirk.” Then, she has to interrupt herself because she realizes, or at least we presume she realizes, that the audience does not know who Kirk is. She interrupts and says, “oh, this is called Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.”\nAnd then she goes back and repeats herself, “Kirk,” and continues with the reading. And it’s really–I find it really fun, a very different way of reading poems, but it brings it back to just the presence of the audience in the intimate setting.\n00:32:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:32:35\tEmily Chircop\tThe fact that that interruption to put the title halfway through the poem is likely a necessity of just the way she was reading it and in the context of the moment rather than a deliberate decision. And yet it’s a really lovely way to read the poem because you don’t need to know the title until you get to that part where you mentioned Kirk. And the way it flows, I think, is actually–It flows really well. I think it’s a really good way of conveying that to the audience.\n00:33:08\tSofie Drew\tAnd in fact, by not introducing it with the title initially, it is almost as if what Thesen is speaking is actually just her thoughts she decided to share with the audience.\nThere’s that sense that she feels comfortable around them. Comfortable enough to interrupt a poem in the middle of it to add on to it more.\n00:33:26\tEmily Chircop\tIt feels very organic, I think, I would say.\n00:33:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd you had some interesting ideas about the form of it.\n00:33:33\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah.\nI think this section really showcases the medium of the recording because you have this prose piece which already stands out in a poetry collection, but that prose piece is a visual, written-down rendition of an audio-visual medium of the home video itself. Then we receive it in an audio format with no visual element. The descriptions are still so immersive and striking, even when you take away the visual aspect that you would expect to be central to a description of a video.\nAnd I think it’s a really. It’s a really interesting experience to be able to convert what was written visually about a visual medium into purely audio. And how that–Then we’re listening to it now, and we can visualize that movie, and I think we get something from it that we wouldn’t get from seeing it written down in the way that she describes it, the way her voice sounds and the way the audience responds.\n00:34:41\tSofie Drew\tAnd I think the fact that in the title, it’s added on at the end “with sound,” I think that really highlights element of the different forms merging together.\n00:34:52\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. So, considering the medium and the fact that it is purely sound-based, how do you think it interacts with the imagery in the poem?\n00:35:02\tSofie Drew\tWell, the images are quite disturbing; some of them, especially in the last few lines, talk about how there’s blood on the hunter’s hands but not on the bear. And I think the fact that these images are so vivid, again, contributes to the idea of the different forms of media kind of coming together there.\n00:35:23\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, there’s convergence of the different elements.\n00:35:26\tSofie Drew\tExactly. The descriptions, the–some of the disturbing simile metaphors that she uses are when she compares things: Cuddling their dead teddy bears.\n00:35:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:35:38\tSofie Drew\tBut I think the fact we get almost, perhaps a better description, a more emotional description of these things in the video than we perhaps would get from actually just watching the video.\nWe do get that sense that there is emotion behind it for either the people in the video or for Thesen watching it.\n00:36:00\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, definitely.\nAnd I think it is because we feel quite pulled into the audience because of the way the recording is formatted, the way that the listening experience–You feel like you’re part of that audience. You feel very kind of taken and potentially like, shaken by what she’s saying. And it’s very–It is quite off putting, but in a very mesmerizing way.\n00:36:28\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely.\nIt’s almost like we’re–You feel that…\nWell, yeah. In the gruesomeness of the imagery, Thesen is being forced to watch the video, in a sense, as–I mean, if these people have submitted it–\n00:36:43\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:36:44\tSofie Drew\tAs work, then she is forced to watch it, in a sense.\nAnd it’s like she’s taking the audience along, us along with her, into being forced to see these gruesome images. It’s almost–\n00:36:56\tEmily Chircop\tSee, I don’t know if this is the right word.\nThe way we’re listening to this is almost voyeuristic, as the content of this video is viewed through the very, like, opinionated lens of Sharon Thesen’s work. And to see someone’s home video through that lens, it’s–I think it definitely changes the meaning. We might feel the same way if we were to see that video or just read a less opinionated description. But the nature of it being prose poetry, really, it just adds that extra level of vividness, that extra level of, like the grotesque metaphors that she uses similes.\n00:37:34\tSofie Drew\tAnd we really get the feeling that it is something personal, even to Kirk Lonergren, because his full name is in the title of this poem.\nI wonder if he knew that he would have a whole poem.\n00:37:46\tEmily Chircop\tI wonder.\n00:37:47\tSofie Drew\tAnd the fact that it’s a home movie.\nYeah. We’re seeing something that’s very personal to this guy, Kirk. What’s, then, very personal to Thesen becomes personal to us.\n00:37:57\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, It’s. It’s just. It’s also intimate, isn’t it?\n00:38:01\tSofie Drew\tAnd yet, while we see the intimacy of this reading as a positive thing, very friendly, comfortable.\nThe intimacy that we see in the. Well, see, in the reading of this poem of the home movie, it’s very disturbing.\nDefinitely not a comfortable. Definitely not comfortable for the reader or the audience.\n00:38:24\tEmily Chircop\tThe next clip we’re going to play for you is from near the end of the recording. And it is the start of the poem, “The Shifting Sands Motel.”\n00:38:35\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tThe Shifting Sands Motel.\nSome transients for you, Robin.\nClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nI get this blue stuff from the Safeway called intensive care.\nBaths and the mineralmakend it makes the water just Mediterranean blue.\nIt’s wonderful.\n00:39:06\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nYou are soon to have lunch with a movie star.\nOpen your eyes and pretend your bath is the Arctic Sea.\nYou are soon to eat your companion in the rowboat.\n00:39:24\tSofie Drew\tSo, from the very start, you seemed quite interested in this poem in her description at the start of it. Why is that?\n00:39:32\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, this part of the recording really was one of my favourite parts. I find the way that she pauses her reading of the poem really intriguing. She says the first two lines, “close your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.”\nShe then explained that the bath beads she got from Safeway make the water really blue.\nAnd then, she goes back and repeats the first two lines. And in doing that, the explanation, that additional context, becomes part of the poem.\nWhen you’re listening to it, it becomes part of the performance. And it brought a lot of extra meaning to the poem for me. And I just. I just think it’s a really interesting concept, especially the explanations throughout this whole recording.\nBut I think this really exemplifies it. Well, the way the explanations are presented and the audience’s reaction. You can hear them laughing when she provides the content, the way that it kind of works its way seamlessly into the performance itself.\n00:40:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I mean, do you feel like it, at least, I think, possible?\nI feel like when she’s describing it, it almost feels like she’s talking to you as a friend, you know, like, “oh, check out these great bath bombs that I get.”\n00:40:44\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s very casual, isn’t it, outside of just the intimacy that’s so prevalent in this recording. And it’s both an interruption to what you would expect to be quite a, like, formal, straight-through-the-poem kind of performance.\nIt’s both an interruption to that aspect, and also it slots right in and makes the poem a lot more, I would say, tangible.\nIt makes it more tangible because you can imagine just how blue that water is.\nAnd by rooting it more in the home, it really picks up on that idea of, like, imagine your bath is the Mediterranean. Not just imagine you’re in the Mediterranean. Imagine your bath in the Mediterranean. And by describing the bath beads that she buys herself, I think it really amplifies that aspect of it, being your bath and the location. Yeah.\n00:41:33\tSofie Drew\tShe’s trying to connect to her audience on that kind of level.\n00:41:36\tEmily Chircop\tThat’s exactly it. It connects to you.\nSo, just to finish off now, I’ve got to ask, what is your favourite part of the recording?\n00:41:45\tSofie Drew\tI think for me, it’s probably within the first poem, “Japanese Movies.”\nI just–I really loved the image created there, especially of death, really. But the main line is where a cold snow lady waits with blackened teeth to cure you of the fear of life. And it’s something that throughout the rest of the recording, that image from the very start really stayed with me.\nI love the representation of death there, really. The idea is that if you trust death long enough, you end up risking more, and death will come down on you twice as hard.\nYou know, the idea that the poem just conveyed, I really loved it, and I think it set a tone for the rest of the poems.\nSo what about you? What was your favourite part of this reading?\n00:42:29\tEmily Chircop\tI think we’ve honestly talked about most of my favourite parts so far. The “hunting piece” and the “Shifting Sands Motel” poem are two of my favourites.\nBut one part we haven’t talked about yet is the poem from which the title of the collection, “Artemis Hates Romance,” comes. And I love this part of the recording.\nBesides, it is just a wonderful poem; you also get this interruption of Thesen talking about the inspiration from COVID-19, which I loved hearing. I loved getting that extra insight into the whole collection, especially with it being a book launch.\nI think getting that kind of extra information about COVID and about the process behind not just writing these poems and reading them but shaping the text into the book form that we end up hearing. Being read from, I think, is something extra special that we get from this recording.\n00:43:24\tSofie Drew\tIt’s something that we probably don’t really think about the majority of the time.\nYou know, you see, like a collection of poems–\n00:43:30\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:43:30\tSofie Drew\tYou take it; those poems are as they are. You don’t think about how they came to be put together, how you choose the title, that kind of thing.\n00:43:38\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:43:38\tSofie Drew\tThis really reminds me of when Thesen reads her poem, “It Being Over, There Being No Other Way,” when at the end she says how she hates it and that she only put it in the collection because Robin Blaser told her to.\nAnd I think that just really highlights that collaborative element of this collection of poems.\nThere’s a personal insight there from Thessa and the people around her. All these individuals have come together to create the collection and create the reading.\n00:44:08\tEmily Chircop\tI think that idea that you touched on about taking the poems as they are is really key in the way we listen to this recording because we’re not taking the poems just as they are.\nWe’re getting so many other layers of meaning and layers of interpretation from the audience, from the recording, from listening to her speak them aloud, and from the fact that it was recorded in the past. That kind of temporal shift. All of it just adds layer upon layer upon layer to the point that you’re not just taking the poem as they are, you’re taking the recording as it is. And that’s, to me, what makes this recording so special.\n00:44:47\tSofie Drew\tYou’ve been listening to the SoundBox Signals podcast with Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop from the University of Exeter.\n00:44:53\tEmily Chircop\tI study English and Communications, and I’m particularly interested in podcasting and how different mediums can influence texts.\n00:45:00\tSofie Drew\tI’m studying Classical Studies in English, I’m pursuing writing poetry, and I’ve written and directed a couple of short audio dramas with the BBC.\n00:45:07\tEmily Chircop\tYou can check out the full recording we discussed today on the SoundBox website.\nThe link can be found in the show notes.\n\n00:45:13\tSofie Drew\tIf you enjoyed this podcast, you can read more of Sharon Thesen’s work in her newest book, Refabulations.\n00:45:20\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music]\n00:45:45\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was a guest appearance by our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals. It featured producers Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop.\n00:45:54\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\n00:46:05\tKatheryn McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\n00:46:14\tKatheryn McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media.\n00:46:21\tKatherine McLeod\tPlus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\nFor now, thank you for listening."],"score":4.1670523},{"id":"9605","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 S6E4, From Me to You, A Sonic Glimpse at Proprioception, 3 February 2025, Harris"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/from-me-to-you-a-sonic-glimpse-at-proprioception/"],"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 6"],"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 Harris"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/dcf63247-f0ec-4b4d-a72a-f471c2c46d1a/audio/aef0eda4-6e4f-4343-a8ed-6c4732f445f1/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e4.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:44:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"42,922,421 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/from-me-to-you-a-sonic-glimpse-at-proprioception/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-02-03\",\"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\":\"Han, Jia, et al. “Assessing Proprioception: A Critical Review of Methods.” Journal of Sport and Health Science, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 80–90. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2014.10.004.\\n\\nHickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. W.W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2014.\\n\\nStarr, Gabrielle G. “Multisensory Imagery.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.\\n\\nMechanical Buttons (DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel) by PixelProphecy — https://freesound.org/s/497026/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\nEnd Credits Music by vibritherabjit123 — https://freesound.org/s/738579/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\nWalk – Gravel.wav by 16FPanskaStochl_Frantisek — https://freesound.org/s/499245/ — License: Attribution 3.0\\n\\nsnare 2 SMALLer.wav by Logicogonist — https://freesound.org/s/209884/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nright x small crash.wav by Logicogonist — https://freesound.org/s/209870/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nMagazine Rustle and Book Closing by Zott820 — https://freesound.org/s/209577/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nEnd of 78 Record Gramaphone Running Down .WAV by trpete — https://freesound.org/s/627419/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nRagtime – https://pixabay.com/music/vintage-ragtime-193535/ Liscence: CC0 License\\n\\nrelaxation music.mp3 by ZHRØ — https://freesound.org/s/520673/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\ncelestial arp loop c 01.wav by CarlosCarty — https://freesound.org/s/572560/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\n165 bpm – Broken Beat – Guitar.wav by MuSiCjUnK — https://freesound.org/s/320630/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nSynth Lead by EX-AN — https://freesound.org/s/561505/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nShopping theme (90bpm).wav by Pax11 — https://freesound.org/s/444880/ — License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0\\n\\nSky Loop by FoolBoyMedia — https://freesound.org/s/264295/ — License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549679505408,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["A proprioception-enthusiast and a thespian walk into a podcast booth.\n\nTogether, they engage with scholars from three different fields outside of those traditionally working with and through the sense of proprioception. From spatial music mixing, to arts education, to English literature, our hosts learn how these scholars understand and apply the sense of proprioception for their work.\n\nThrough the engagement process, the proprioception-enthusiast and the thespian come to understand the affordances of proprioception for framing bodies in space and time and refigure how they understand the space between you and me.\n\n00:00:03\t[SpokenWeb Intro Song]\t[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is a series of stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine MacLeod.\nAnd each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, producer Maia Harris and guest Ryan Litvak offer a sonic glimpse into how scholars from three different fields engage with the sense of proprioception for their work.\n00:01:06\tHannah McGregor\tThrough conversation with special guests, Maia and Ryan learn how this sixth sense, the sense of where your body is in space, might apply to different fields outside of physiology, from spatial music mixing to arts education to English literature.\nAlong the way, they start to rethink the texture of how they move through life.\n\n00:01:30\tHannah McGregor\tAs a note to listeners, this is probably one you want to wear headphones for.\nNow, sit back, get comfortable in your body, and enjoy Season 6, episode 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “From Me to You, a Sonic Glimpse at Proprioception.”\n\n00:01:50\tMusic\t[MUSIC]\n00:01:59\tMaia Harris\tHi, my name is Maia. And two years ago–gosh, coming on three now-I became utterly obsessed with the sense of “proprioception.” [Faint drums play in the background] I see proprioception everywhere.\nWalking down the street [sound of steps], proprioception.\n\nPlaying the drums [sound of drums], proprioception.\n\nReading a book [sound of pages flipping], yeah, funnily enough, proprioception.\n\n00:02:26\tRyan Litvak\tI can attest that Maia will not shut up about proprioception.\n00:02:31\tRyan Litvak\tMy name is Ryan Litvak. I’m a theatre writer, director, and multidisciplinary artist.\nI’ve known Maia for a few years. We work together and do other stuff. [Laughter]\n\n00:02:43\tRyan Litvak\t[Inaudible]\n00:02:46\tRyan Litvak\tI, in fact, am not obsessed with proprioception.\nActually, I don’t really know what it is or why it’s relevant to someone who’s in the humanities, like Maia.\n\n00:02:57\tMaia Harris\tWell, Ryan, I have some great news.\n00:03:00\tRyan Litvak\tYou’re gonna tell me what it is?\n00:03:02\tMaia Harris\tNot only am I going to tell you what it is, but I’m also going to tell you why it’s relevant to you, to me, to the listeners, and, frankly, just everybody. [Faint music starts playing in the background]\n00:03:10\tRyan Litvak\tThat’s huge.\n00:03:11\tMaia Harris\tBut to do this right, to introduce you to proprioception in all of its glory and affordances, I’ve enlisted the help of scholars from three totally different fields who have one thing in common.\n00:03:23\tRyan Litvak\tWhat’s that?\n00:03:24\tMaia Harris\tThey have to grapple with a sense of proprioception for their work. [Music stops abruptly]\nLet’s start with a simple definition. To cite Gary Merrill in his book Our Intelligent Bodies. Proprioception is the sense of the relative position of one’s body in space and time. So a spatiotemporal orientation, which means that–\n\n00:03:48\tRyan Litvak\tWow, pause.\nCan you just back up a little bit there?\n\n00:03:52\tMaia Harris\tOh, I’m sorry. Yes, of course.\nIt all started in 1826 when Charles Bell began to study the anatomy of the brain-to-limb connection–\n\n00:04:00\tRyan Litvak\tStop. That’s not really. I just meant, like, what exactly do you mean by “spatiotemporal orientation”?\n00:04:08\tMaia Harris\tOh, my gosh! Yeah, let’s start there.\nSo, your body is always in space and time, right?\n\n00:04:15\tRyan Litvak\tYeah.\n00:04:16\tMaia Harris\tProprioception is our sense of that.\nIt’s our sense of our own body in space and time.\n\nSo, your sitting body position in this room, for example, or your body position when you walk and navigate the space of, say, like a sidewalk, these are spatial and temporal states.\n\nYour body and your sense of it are relative always to an object in space, to space, or even our own body, just five seconds ago.\n\n00:04:44\tRyan Litvak\tOh, okay. So, proprioception is your sense of your own body.\n00:04:49\tMaia Harris\tExactly.\nThink you’re knowing how, if you close your eyes and you put your hand behind your head, you’re aware that it’s there. That awareness of your own body is your proprioception. And this sense, what you feel with your eyes closed, is what helps to maintain one’s sense of orientation, one’s sense of balance.\n\nIt’s as simple as that.\n\n00:05:16\tRyan Litvak\tOkay, I think I understand what proprioception is, but like, how does it actually work, though?\n00:05:23\tMaia Harris\tWhat’s that now?\n00:05:24\tRyan Litvak\tLike, how do I know my hand’s behind my head? How does that feeling maintain my sense of balance?\nTo see, I have my eyes.\n\nTo hear, I have my ears.\n\nWhat about the proprioception? Is that a verb?\n\n00:05:38\tMaia Harris\tI don’t think so.\nBut to address your question first, we have these things called “proprioceptors,” which are receptors deep in one’s body and tissues. These proprioceptors sense a variety of stimuli having to do primarily with movement, from velocity to vibration to deep pressure. This information is monitored via the central nervous system and is signalled to the brain.\n\nBut I don’t want to oversimplify it because proprioception is actually a “distributed sense.”\n\nIt’s not in or of any single bodily location, nor informed by any single kind of stimuli. Our five major senses also contribute to proprioception.\n\n00:06:24\tRyan Litvak\tSorry, I still don’t understand.\n00:06:27\tMaia Harris\tWould a specific example help?\n00:06:30\tRyan Litvak\tI think it would.\n00:06:33\tMaia Harris\tTake “sound.” We know sound.\nWe do, well, we’re always relative to a source of sound. And that sense of our relative position to that source of sound is an aspect of how we orient ourselves.\n\nJames can explain it better than me, though.\n\nLet me introduce you to James Healy.\n\n00:06:53\tJames Healy\tI’m James. I work with SpokenWeb and Maya. I work in sound, and I’m an artist. I make a lot of music and other stuff.\n00:07:04\tMaia Harris\tSo I asked James about how “proprioceptive orientation” and “sound” might coexist.\n00:07:13\tJames Healy\tOne way we would basically get oriented in a space.\nBasically, the only way that we know where a sound is coming from, if your eyes are closed, is because of your ears.\n\n[You] have your pinna. What that will do is taper down high frequencies coming from behind you. It will absorb some really high frequencies and let the “lows” wrap-around, which means that if you hear that quality, it means that something is behind you.\n\nBecause of the way they’re facing, they’re not absorbing the same high frequencies as if something’s in front of you.\n\nSo, if you were to chop up your ear or something, like pull a little Van Gogh thing or whatever, you actually would have a lot of trouble figuring out where things were.\n\n00:08:05\tRyan Litvak\tOkay, that makes sense. So, our pinna is part of our proprioception.\n00:08:11\tMaia Harris\tIn short, yes. Our pinna and “sound localization” are part of the feedback loop of proprioception.\nBut what if I told you that isn’t the whole story?\n\n00:08:22\tRyan Litvak\tThen I would ask, what is the whole story?\n00:08:26\tMaia Harris\tRyan, come on, it’s not my story to tell.\nAllow me to defer to our next guest, Théo. [A keyboard click, followed by a chime of an incoming video call]\n\n00:08:35\tThéo Bouveyron\t[Soft chime plays in the background] My name’s Théo Bouveyron, and I’m currently enrolled in a Master’s degree and also working at the University of Cologne in Germany. Although, I am currently studying Information Processing.\nAfter finishing my Bachelor’s degree in Media Informatics, I actually started off with a degree in Audio Engineering. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:08:54\tMaia Harris\tThéo has thought a lot about the role of proprioception and spatiality in VR.\nHere, he is describing his project. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:09:02\tThéo Bouveyron\tI recreated a recording studio, or the very least a room resembling it, through which you can move and where you can position instruments.\nThe position of the instruments relative to yourself influences how the music is being processed and ultimately heard.\n\n00:09:17\tThéo Bouveyron\tAdditionally, I provided users with a more traditional way to control the volume of the instruments through a modelled and interactive mixing console.\nMy aim with this project was to build a virtual reality application that reconnects users with the spatial characteristics of sound by allowing them to mix audio in a fully three-dimensional environment. Proprioception is an essential part of my project as it bridges the user’s physical presence with the virtual space in the real world. We naturally use our body’s awareness to orient ourselves, understand distances, and locate sounds.\n\nMy goal is to replicate and enhance this connection in virtual reality, where spatial audio is not just something we hear but something that helps users feel embedded within the environment. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:10:02\tMaia Harris\tThéo’s project exists in a field called “spatial music mixing,” or “spatial audio,” more generally. [Keyboard click]\n00:10:10\tThéo Bouveyron\tIn conventional stereo or surround sound mixing, sounds are represented as fixed points along a two-dimensional plane or confined within specific channels. This approach can never fully capture how we perceive sound in real life, where each sound interacts with the environment and our bodies in complex ways.\n00:10:29\tThéo Bouveyron\tSpatial music mixing, on the other hand, reintroduces the body into the equation, opening the door to making the act of listening a dynamic, participatory experience.\nWith spatial music mixing, the goal shifts to recreating a more authentic auditory experience by treating each sound as a discrete entity existing in a 3D space, free to move and adapt based on the listener’s position. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:10:54\tMaia Harris\tSo, for Théo’s project, listening position – which is part of proprioception, so where you are relative to sound – is a huge deal. [Keyboard click]\n00:11:04\tThéo Bouveyron\tThe concept of “listening position” is pivotal in both “acoustics” and\n“spatial audio.” Typically, our listening position is determined by our head’s orientation and position. Our ears become the reference point for sound perception. As users move through the virtual space, the soundscape shifts in response to their movements, providing constant feedback.\nThis interplay engages proprioception, allowing users to feel their position within space and making the virtual environment feel tangible and responsive. Proprioception, therefore, comes into play not just as a means of feeling present but as an integral part of how users interact with the virtual environment.\n\nAs they move, the spatiality of sound continuously informs their perception of the world around them. This combination of spatial audio and proprioception makes the virtual environment more than just a visual or auditory experience. It becomes an embodied interactive space that adapts to the user’s movement and perspective, creating a more intuitive and immersive sense of presence. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:12:06\tRyan Litvak\tThat’s really interesting.\nI feel like these days, everybody’s plugged into their headphones all the time. And when we listen to music, or we’re watching something with our headphones, all of that sound is just inside our heads, between our ears.\n\nBecause I come from a theatre background, which is very open and communal. But I think that we, as listeners of sound in every context, deserve better than that. Like, we deserve to feel the sound in our body. And to really like “propriocept it.” [Laughter]\n\n00:12:45\tRyan Litvak\tAnd so I think what Théo is doing is really cool.\n00:12:49\tMaia Harris\tYeah, I do, too. Théo doesn’t shy away from the conceptual implications of this project, specifically about what a sense of oneself means in VR either. [Keyboard click]\n00:13:00\tThéo Bouveyron\tIn virtual environments, proprioception becomes a dynamic tool, allowing users to interact with their surroundings in ways that transcend the limitations of the physical world. This freedom introduces an exciting form of self-exploration. As users move or alter their listening perspective, they are not just shifting how they hear sound. They are actively reshaping their sense of presence and identity within the virtual space. That’s what excites me the most: how proprioception in VR enables users to rethink their identity in relation to space, where users can continuously adapt to the virtual environment in ways that redefine their relationship with themselves and vice versa. The virtual environment can also be adapted to your sense of self. [Keyboard click]\n00:13:46\tRyan Litvak\tSo, this proprioception thing is starting to feel like a big deal.\n00:13:50\tMaia Harris\tYeah, it kind of is. So Teo is building the sense of proprioception into his project, but I want to introduce you now to someone whose project was built out of the sense of proprioception itself.\nMeet Eija. [A chime of an incoming video call]\n\n00:14:10\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tMy name is Eija Loponen-Stephenson.\nI just finished my master’s in Art Education at Concordia University. I’m an artist and a scholar. I come from a background in fine arts. I’ve recently been becoming an academic [Laughs], and my work has to do mostly with, I guess, studying, augmenting, and disrupting how bodies move through urban spaces. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:14:39\tMaia Harris\tEija and I talked about her master’s thesis project, which she finished and premiered just last year. [Keyboard click]\n00:14:47\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThe really long academic title is “Urban Choreographics Tracing the Extralinguistic Pedagogies of Montreal’s Underground Metro System.”\nSo my project, in kind of broad strokes, is about how moving through public architectural spaces is really actually an educative experience. So, my thesis project looks specifically at the architecture of Montreal’s underground metro system. It was useful for me to look at a highly programmed structure. Therefore, the metro is a place in the city where bodies have to be highly organized in order to move efficiently through space. And it has to be able to accommodate, like, a lot of flux of movement. And there’s a very kind of obvious rhythm structure of those spaces. Therefore, I investigate the dominant movement patterns of those spaces through experimental long-exposure photography. And also so experimental performative, like sonic investigations, I would say. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:15:59\tMaia Harris\tWe also discussed who and what inspired Eija’s project.\nHere, she discusses Lawrence and Anna Halprin. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:16:09\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, Lawrence Halprin was an architect based out of New York City. Instead of designing structures and then kind of putting bodies in them, he wanted to invert that kind of dynamic. So he invented a kind of choreographic notation. It’s called motivation. And so it was a kind of. It was a way for him to score the ways that a body should move through space before the structure had been conceived of. He would create a score of motions or gestures according to the purpose of the building and then create a structure kind of around that. Those movements. He was a lifetime collaborator with his wife, Anna Halprin, who is kind of lauded as one of the inventors of contemporary dance. And so a lot of his ideas, like his ideas are actually things that they collaborate on together. And so his choreographic notation absolutely comes from the. The kind of history of choreographic notation that was especially big in dance at that time.\n00:17:18\tMaia Harris, recording with Eija Loponen-Stephenson\tCould you talk a little bit more about your own mode? Would you call it a kind of notation recording?\n00:17:24\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah.\n00:17:25\tMaia Harris\tCould you say more about that?\n00:17:26\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah. Thinking about choreographic notation, I think it’s just a good place to start. So it was a way to kind of codify a set of gestures because, like, before videography or photography, how does a dance actually get archived? But what I’m interested in about choreographic notation is actually the absence of exactitude. So, the kind of empty spaces that are left between the notes are not in the precise reenactment of the score. It’s actually in the spaces in between where artistry is.\n00:18:02\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, I became very interested in thinking about architecture as a form of choreographic notation. So, if we think about a building as a bunch of points, bodies have to move between. I’m interested in the similarities and variations in those spaces between the vectors of a building.\nEssentially, my first approach to trying to document these variances or similarities in movements between vectors had like a. Just kind of an inclination. I think it’s probably from my artistic training. I have seen a kind of long exposure to photography. The opening and shutting of the camera lens are very similar. These vectors are in space and like architecture.\n\nSo conceivably, I could if I stayed still. The bodies are moving in space; I could conceivably document that in-between space.\n\n00:19:04\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tIn my preliminary photography, I was getting some interesting results. But it was kind of like I didn’t have a measure. It felt very blurry and just kind of random.\nAnd so I realized that I needed to actually figure out a way to capture time and space in an intentional way where they were kind of connected. So, in my photographs, I started thinking about rhythm analysis, which is the study of the rhythms of everyday life, especially everyday motions. I developed a walking practice where I was walking in time with groups of people during rush hour. So I was using a metronome in my ears, and I was able to, as I was walking, adjust the metronome time so that the beats per minute lined up with my footsteps, like the pace of my footsteps and, therefore, the footsteps of the crowd.\n\n00:20:04\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, I’m able to get a BPM. A bpm reading of that space and time then informs the duration of the exposure. So I have the BPM, and then I determine the length of the gesture that I want to record. So let’s say it’s like a 10-step. So, it’s 10 steps between the two vectors in the architectural space. I also have a formula where I can figure out the exposure time to record a body’s movement across that kind of vector field. When the group of people, like the group of bodies in motion, are walking in synchronization, they become uniformly blurred in relation to proprioception. I think that if we can isolate these gestures and make them strange, then we have an opportunity to at least critically examine them and maybe augment them.\n00:21:06\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThat word vector comes from the text where I first encountered the concept of proprioception, which was Brian Misumi’s Parables of the Virtual.\nBrian Massumi is like a Montrealer and a preeminent scholar in the field of affect theory. He talks about proprioception in a self-referential sense. So, it is something that registers the displacement of the parts of the body relative to each other rather than finding your location in space based on your surroundings.\n\n00:21:47\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tS,o like especially, I mean, this is why it was such like a foundational text for me was that he talks specifically about when he’s on the metro and how if he were to be asked to draw a map of how he gets to the metro, through the metro, where the train goes and then how he gets out of it, he would not be capable of drawing this map. He talks about it in relation to this nautical term, dead reckoning. This form of navigation is based on measuring where you have been. Yeah, it’s a kind of way of navigating through remembrance. Yeah. Anyway, so I read this in this chapter. He’s talking about it, and he’s like, I have no visual sense of this space. Yet I could probably do this with my eyes closed. And so he’s like, this is how he locates. The idea of proprioception is in this kind of bodily memory of, like I said, transporting yourself between vectors.\n00:22:59\tMaia Harris, recording with Eija Loponen-Stephenson\tWhy do you think folks in the arts like yourself are integrating and thinking through this concept of proprioception?\n00:23:09\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tI think, in general, right now, in the art world, there is something happening where the process is kind of becoming more valuable than the product. And I think this is great. When I was just a young art student, I was really, really interested in automatic expressionist painting. It kind of. It took me a long time to articulate this properly. But how a work of automatic expressionism, like Jackson Pollock and many others, is a record of motion. So you can see it like a record of a dance.\nYeah. So I think in terms of my own practice, it’s something that I have been trying to unfold and unpick and start thinking about how. I mean, I’m still in the unpicking phase, but my fantasy is that in my future work, I’ll be able to move towards thinking more clearly and enacting the production of things through gestures first without thinking about the outcome.\n\n00:24:30\tRyan Litvak\tI’m just thinking about my day-to-day life in the context of proprioception and rhythm and, like, awareness of space and architecture and all these ways that Eija just talked about it and yeah, like, I’m never gonna step on the metro and feel how I did step on the metro before listening to those clips. Like, I never really thought about the relationship that the movement that I’m doing has to that space. So, yeah, I’m just really grateful that I got to hear that. But I am still confused. James, Aya, Theo, it’s all made sense. Why do they care about proprioception, but why you? You’re in a literature program. I just feel like I’m missing something, maybe.\n00:25:31\tMaia Harris\tYeah, there’s definitely more to the story. Bear. Literature and proprioception might not seem like an obvious connection, but it’s a really rich intersection of thought. And I’m not the only person who thinks. So. Allow me to introduce you to our next guest, Dr. Andre Furlani. [Keyboard click]\n00:26:00\tAndre Furlani\tYes.\nI’m a professor of English in the Department of English at Concordia University and a fellow of the School of Irish Studies, partly because I teach in that area. I’ve written especially about the expatriate French writer and Irish author Samuel Beckett. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:26:18\tMaia Harris\tDr. Furlani, in part, studies “walking literature,” specifically the composite subgenre of what he’s characterized as the “pedestrian excurses.”\nHere he is walking us, pun intended, through that work. [Keyboad click]\n\n00:26:35\tAndre Furlani\tSome of this work is, you know, really a kind of verbal archeology just reminding us what our language has already prepared us to see and to understand.\nAnd “excursus” is a word that has come to mean a kind of a digression, but which literally means “to rush out.”\n\nI went back to that term, excursus, and attached pedestrian to it to make it clearer.\n\n00:27:02\tAndre Furlani\tOf course, it’s also a term that was really coined by William Wordsworth, one of the arch poetic walkers in the English Romantic tradition.\nBecause there’s such a large body of modern and particularly contemporary texts, what I find in so much “walking literature,” which has famously alluded to generic classification, are traits as old as these terms.\n\nThe excursus presumes that you’re walking out.\n\nBy and large, it’s experienced through the body, it’s experienced through a weather world. It’s congressive in the sense that all kinds of other elements either precede you or accompany you to do so.\n\n00:27:44\tAndre Furlani\tAnd a great many texts have been organized on that very principle. They just go out and see what they can find, or find what they can see by serendipity, find something unanticipated, but very choice, but that which only the particularly the aimlessness of the walk can improve.\nThat is to say, the living, moving, proprioceptive kind of shared cognition that the walk precipitates is characteristic of a wide body of literature. And I thought, well, I’m going to tell you really what these books do have in common.\n\nThese are works that think in terms of the it this way, the tour rather than the map. You know, you don’t see it from above in an abstract, schematic way.\n\nYou are walking it.\n\nYou are faced with it.\n\nSomeone’s saying, “Oh, we’ll go left here,” or “Oh, I made a mistake, but it’s okay, we can turn here, and maybe we’ll find our way back.” And if you’re lucky, you get lost because, as one of these writers, Tiziano Scarpa in Venetian, says, the great thing about Venice is that you get lost in it immediately.\n\nThat’s when you start to really walk because you start having this proprioceptive awareness.\n\nWhere am I?\n\nHow am I moving?\n\nWhat’s next to me?\n\nYou start paying attention to your movements, and you see more through confusion or defamiliarization.\n\n00:29:06\tAndre Furlani\tI guess the first thing about walking is that it is successive, linear, and exposed. Of course, it’s a mode of proprioception and a limited viewpoint. So, all of those are fruitful avenues.\nAnd I think that disposition to experience has a lot to tell us. So, what one perceives in one’s immediate vicinity and through all the senses. There’s been fascinating work on how we think with our, through our skin.\n\nYou know, I always talk about thinking not just on one’s feet but with one’s feet. That sense that if I listen to the body, it actually has something it’s been trying desperately to say. So, it has actually tried to develop my proprioception.\n\n00:29:58\tAndre Furlani\tI have a very narrow, almost tunnel vision mode of attention, but I walk with people who, in fact, have been gifted or have developed a real skill of a larger, more generous proprioception.\nAnd I’ve been learning from them and then from the books which practices remind us how much is happening in the immediate vicinity and how many of our senses are available to absorb it and to interact with it, to recognize one’s, one’s place in it.\n\nThe literature was teaching me something about something you think you know how to do, how to walk around. But I think, in fact, you have to learn how to walk. There’s the first, simply the bipedal gait, and then there’s actually learning how to think with one’s feet. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:30:56\tRyan Litvak\tWait, is that true? Isn’t proprioception just innate? Can people have better proprioception than others? Can you develop it?\n00:31:05\tMaia Harris\tOh, yeah. Although proprioception is precognitive, that is, we don’t actively have to think about it for it to happen. Proprioceptive awareness is not just innate. Like all perception, it’s shaped by memory, learning, habit, or even injury and disease.\nBack to Dr. Furlani. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:31:23\tAndre Furlani\tWalking is a universal yet facultative propensity.\nBears can walk, but it’s a propensity; it’s not a species attribute at all. And you see that, of course, with the very young, how difficult it is. It is striking that walking is actually precarious. And it has been characterized basically as a perpetual successful recovery from a fall.\n\nYou know, we are not brains in a vat. We would not have the same thoughts if we were in a vat. When you walk, you realize how much you’re getting from other sources of being and how your ideas are altered.\n\nAnd the way I would put it, it is not only the body that has a mind of its own, but the body’s mind, you know, minds what it’s doing, minds itself, and mind restriction.\n\nAnd it’s by walking that we’re reminded of it. I’m a white middle-class male, so I’ve had fewer, and I’ve had to be reminded how difficult it is actually to go here or there or at this time at this place.\n\n00:32:40\tMaia Harris\tDr. Furlani also has his own walking practice.\nHere, he is talking about that. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:32:47\tAndre Furlani\tSo, in my walking practice. Well, I mean that gives it to, you know, it’s too August a term.\nBut, one of them is like I’ll fall into a certain kind of rhythm which will remind me of my wife who died of cancer many years, 21 years ago. And she was German. So, there’s a kind of German phrase that just came out of me from walking, remembering, walking with her.\n\nLike it’s, I mean, you know, Emma by Mia Unterwegs Tsuda, you know, always with me and towards you and then, so you know that again, that sense that you’re always walking with someone, whether you remember it or not, is very strong in me. And it’s a way to actually be with that person.\n\nAgain, partly because when you’re walking as well, you’re walking alone, you’re not kind of, you’re not molested – and I really use that word advisedly – molested by the shock element of the city. It is more important than ever, I think, now to be a bit militant about it for us actually to be unmolested.\n\nAnd one of the only times we are is when we’re walking from A to B. And that place between A and B is actually most of our lives.\n\n00:34:00\tAndre Furlani\tAs I said earlier, we’re always going somewhere, but it’s only the going. It’s like Gertrude Stein’s line, right now, you know where I live most of the time, right?\nThe important thing is the walk.\n\nIt is not where you started, where you are, and where you end, but the actual place where you spend most of your time in the middle, and we miss that middle thing.\n\nSo when you walk alone, it’s one of the only times when you can actually be alone, but not solipsistically alone by “you never walk alone,” let’s put it that way. You cannot walk alone.\n\n00:34:44\tMaia Harris\tSo Ryan, what are your takeaways from what you heard today about proprioception?\n00:34:53\tRyan Litvak\tWell, now I’m thinking about proprioception as far as my own practice goes.\nLike in theatre, when you’ve been doing a show, however many times you kind of intrinsically know where in space the path to your light is. And then you get there, and then you feel the warmth of the light all of a sudden.\n\nAnd I feel like that has to do with proprioception. It’s like the path getting there and spending that time in the middle from getting to your spot or even in clown. There’s this idea of the actor’s awareness behind the play within clowning. And I feel like there’s a proprioceptive element to that actor’s awareness as well, where you have that feeling of your body and the feeling of your body in space and the feeling of the movements that you are making outside of the performance in the context of theatre as a performer, but also as an audience member. And maybe wear proprioception as we talk about it as this sort of ultimate form of presence. But what about when proprioceptive awareness can kind of get in the way of being embodied or being present? And this might be a really stupid example, but I’ve been at theatre performances where the person next to me is taking up the entire armrest, so my arm is squished up on my torso, and I’m just hyper-aware of my body’s placement in space that way. And it kind of becomes a barrier to entry for that kind of presence.\n\n00:36:40\tMaia Harris\tAnd it’s so true because, yeah, proprioception is a physiological term. It does not mean embodiment. It can mean a. When it could be a window into these thoughts, you know, about embodiment, about presence. But it’s not those things in and of themselves. Right. It’s still precognitive, but we can become aware of it. We can.\nIt’s like we’re always breathing, but when we become aware of it, maybe that breathing’s a bit interrupted. Maybe it’s not as natural a feeling as blinking. When you start thinking about your blinking, it gets disrupted.\n\n00:37:21\tRyan Litvak\tYeah, absolutely.\nAnd there’s also like this relationship as we’re talking about, or maybe we’re not talking about, but we understand proprioception to be a precognitive thing that our body does. But at some point, those precognitive awarenesses often become cognitive. And how does that change what we are proprioceiving? Also, proprioception is an amazing tool for writers in poetry and prose where, oh, I’m writing a character in a situation, so let me put myself in a similar situation and think about my proprioceptive awareness and how my body feeling and finding the words for those qualities and Placing that into your work. So I’m going to start doing that.\n\n00:38:20\tMaia Harris\tYeah, that’s. It’s so true. I mean, putting your characters in situations that your body takes on. It’s speculative, but there’s something called mirror neurons. And your motor cortex kind of does activate when you read motion, and you read movement, although it is very speculative, but in a more metaphoric and maybe conceptual sense. Feelings of proprioception. Reading proprioception, what that does to the real body is real, even in terms of paying attention to it.\n00:39:01\tRyan Litvak\tYeah.\n00:39:02\tMaia Harris\tAs Dr. Furlani said, as Eija said, Theo kind of applies in his VR situations.\n00:39:09\tRyan Litvak\tYeah. And anecdotally, speculatively, I felt that while reading. It seems like we’re getting to the end of the episode.\nSo what about you? Why do you care about proprioception?\n\n00:39:31\tMaia Harris\tYeah, so I do research proprioception’s affordances for the literary.\nI focus on his name as, Charles Olson. He has 1965; we’ll call it a poem essay, actually called Proprioception.\n\nThough if you know Olson, you’ll understand. I can’t just casually get into it. And I did consider getting into that for the episode, but that wouldn’t actually really explain why I care. Not in any real way, at least.\n\nI care about proprioception because I care about being, like, really being present in my body. And what that means for poetry. Sure, but what does that mean in and of itself? Something came up in almost every interview that I haven’t really talked about yet. It’s the idea of perception, specifically proprioception, as an enactment. This idea comes from the philosopher Alva Noe. And for me, it reframes my relationship and my interest proprioception to my capital S self, and to you too, because, as Dr. Furlani said, we never walk alone in the spirit of enactment.\n\nI want to end with an exercise, if you’ll, what’s the word–\n\n00:40:49\tRyan Litvak\tAgree–\n00:40:50\tMaia Harris\tIf you’ll agree.\nI want to end with an exercise by composer and scholar Pauline Oliveros’s 1996 score Rhythms, which Eija actually cited as inspiring her project.\n\nRyan, listener, wherever you are, I invite you to stand, walk for a moment, and follow along if you’re able. Here’s Eija again.\n\n00:41:19\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThis score is meant to be a walking score, and the score goes.\nWhat is the meter and tempo of your normal walk?\n\nHow often do you blink?\n\nWhat is the current tempo of your breathing?\n\nWhat is the current tempo of your heart rate?\n\nWhat other rhythms do you hear if you listen?\n\nWhat is your relationship to all the rhythms that you can perceive? Of at once.\n\n00:42:14\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah, I think it’s a really beautiful score. And my response to her final question is and always will be my body.\n00:42:28\tMaia Harris\tThank you to the incredible individuals that appeared in this piece. James Healy and I actually spoke for over an hour.\nIn the end, I wasn’t able to include a lot of it, but a huge thank you to James for everything.\n\nThank you to Théo Bouveyron, who was so gracious in participating despite the time difference between us.\n\nThank you to Eija Loponen-Stephenson, whose art and thought are an inspiration to me.\n\nThank you to Dr. Andre Furlani for taking the time and letting me make him so late for his next meeting that day.\n\nAnd thank you to Ryan Litvak, who makes every project more fun. Thank you for listening.\n\n00:43:08\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThat’s very sweet.\n00:43:09\tRyan Litvak\tThank you.\n00:43:17\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute the audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n00:43:37\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Maia Harris and featured the voices and insights of Ryan Litvak, James Healy, Théo Bouveyron, Eija Loponen-Stephenson, and Professor Andre Furlani.\nHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod, and, me, Hannah McGregor.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and 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.\n\nPlus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n\nFor now, thanks for listening."],"score":4.1670523},{"id":"9606","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 S6E5, Sounding New Sonic Approaches – A Podcast of A Live Recording Session of A Journal Issue Located in Multiple Spaces and Temporal Dimensions, 10 March 2025, Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/new-sonic-approaches/"],"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 6"],"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":["Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4a081369-0b04-4bfa-917f-2a3a734e3020/audio/3c52525a-bd89-41d3-b0ee-cb006a4c8c6c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e5-mixdown-ext-outro-music.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"55,996,320 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e5-mixdown-ext-outro-music\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/new-sonic-approaches/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-03-10\",\"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\":\"“Amen Drum Break” samples all downloaded from:\\n\\nhttps://pixabay.com/sv/sound-effects/. The file names of “amen drum break” samples used are:\\n\\n140-bpm-amen-break-original-processed-6945\\n20_ca_amens-104513\\namen-sequence-01-dirty-180-bpm-102243\\namen-darkness-74126\\n175bpm-amen-punchy-loop-104487\\ndv-amen-break-133bpm-103971\\namen-break-remixed-loop-01-160-bpm-235384\\namen-break-no-copyright-remake-120bpm-25924\\nBach, Johann Sebastian. “BACH Goldberg_Variations_BWV_988_Variation 25_1955.” Looped excerpt. Performed by Glenn Gould.\\n\\nbissett, bill. “bill bissett at SGWU, 1969. 31 October 1969.” I006-11-083. SpokenWeb\\n\\nMontreal Sir George Williams University Reading Series collection. Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason. All music used to score the episode was produced from\\n“artifact sounds” derived from the source recordings combined with effects and other synthetic digital manipulations.These include:\\n\\nWork 1: “Zoom Music” developed from high-frequency sounds resulting from Zoom connectivity, equalization and reverb effects.\\n\\nWork 2: “Endless Vision” developed from interval noise run through long delay effects.\\n\\nWork 3: “EVOCalities” developed from event participants’ ambient talk and noise recorded after the event had ended, sped up and run through phase effects, delay.\\n\\nWork 4: “Pedalboard Drones and Drips” developed from sounds derived from outdoor microphone run through digital simulations of guitar pedal effects, mainly overdrive, chorus, and delay.\\n\\nWork 5: “Shapeless Fragments with Voices” developed from sounds of participants\\n\\nGinsberg. Allen. “Allen Ginsberg at SGWU, 1969.” I006-11-033.1. SpokenWeb\\n\\nMontreal Sir George Williams University Reading Series collection, Concordia University.\\n\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/allen-ginsberg-at-sgwu-1969/#1\\n\\nMartin, Daniel. “Martin_Mouth by Daniel Martin.”\\n\\nMitchell,Christine.  “Can you hear me?” Sound Collage from audio of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series.  Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), edited by Jason Camlot and Christine Mitchell.\\n\\nhttps://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/\\n\\nRobertson, Lisa. Clips downloaded from PennSound,\\n\\nhttps://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Robertson.php. File names are as follows:\\n\\nRobertson-Lisa_Voice-Box-Condensary_8-31-10\\nRobertson-Lisa_02_Introduction-to-The-Weather_PhillyTalks17_UPenn_10-03-00\\n“Vinyl Needle Drop, eclectic kitty, September 28th, 2024. https://freesound.org/people/eclectic-kitty/sounds/757639/\\n\\n“waterfall-in-the-forest_nature-sound-149379” by NickyPe.\\n\\nhttps://pixabay.com/sound-effects/waterfall-in-the-forest-nature-sound-149379/\\n\\nWaterman, Ellen. “Excerpt Dusk at Warbler’s Roost.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549683699712,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This podcast episode performs a sound-media meditation on a live event based on a collection of printed scholarly articles. In May 2023 a triple-issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) was published on the topic of “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies,” edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. The issue, designed to explore how sound, literature, and critical methodologies intersect, included thirteen scholarly articles, and an interdisciplinary forum on the place of listening as a methodology in a wide range of scholarly and artistic fields.\n\nAs the editors considered what kind of “launch” would be best suited to this issue, they felt it should build on the printed scholarship, but also take it further – respond to it,  sound it, and perform it. They asked, “What would this journal issue sound like as a chorus or collage of voices?” They proceeded to organize an event to enact the idea of sounding and performing a scholarly collection as a kind of poetic reading of criticism. Each contributor was invited to select an excerpt to perform, and the performances unfolded in sequence within the 4th Space research showcase venue at Concordia University, and through the virtual participation of some contributors on Zoom. The performance event was also the object of an experiment in the multi-track recording of a spoken word event, with microphones of different kinds situated throughout 4th Space, and even outside the venue itself.\n\nThe eight tracks of audio resulting from that recording session serve as the raw material, the bed tracks, for a podcast that playfully explores the affordances of sound design for the presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. Some of the simple yet profound possibilities of working in sound to think and argue about sound that are explored here are those of amplitude (playing with the relative loudness of sounds), temporality (the movement and mixing of historically-situated times), speed (the movement of sounds in time), space (the relationship of sounds to the places they happened), noise (the sounds we are supposed not to want to hear), intelligibility (the intention of sounding for meaning), positionality (from where and to whom one is sounding), timbre (the textural quality of sounds and what they do), among many others. The goal of this production has not been to deliver the content of the journal as one might grasp it from the print journal (read the special issue for that!), but to emphasize the possibilities and features of sound, sometimes apposite and sometimes in opposition to the intention and circumstances of the intended message. Archival voices and sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt the planned “Sounding New Sonic Approaches” event. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and mutated by an occasional soundtrack scored for monotonic analogue synths. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new kinds of meaning and feeling-making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Intro\t[Audio recording] Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds.\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor.\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature and history created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada.\nIn this episode of the SpokenWeb, podcast producer Jason Camlot explores the affordances of sound design for the presence of presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. The raw audio material for this episode was recorded at an event, a sounding of the special issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.”\n\nIt was recorded live in the room and online on zoom and with mics placed all around the room and even outside. But what you are about to hear is so much more than that live recording of the event you are about to hear.\n\nA new sound work.\n\nA new sound work that performs an exploration of the possibilities of working in and with sound.\n\nArchival voices and found sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and manipulated. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new meanings and feeling making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.\n\nHere is episode five of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Sounding New Sonic Approaches, a podcast of a live recording session of a journal issue located in multiple spaces and temporal dimensions.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\n\n00:02:28\tDifferent Recordings Edited Together\t[Chaotic overlapping voices, testing microphones]\nVoice 1: Hello? Can you hear me?\nVoice 2: I hope you can hear me.\nVoice 1: Test, test, test.\nVoice 3: If you can’t hear me, I think there are more seats up here.\nVoice 4: I’ll try to speak a little louder on my own.\nVoice 5: Is it hard to hear back there?\nVoice 6: Even with the microphone?\n\n[Multiple voices testing simultaneously]\n\nVoice 1: Test, test, test.\nVoice 4: There we go.\nVoice 5: If I talk louder into the mic, does that help?\nVoice 6: Can you hear that?\nVoice 3: It’s hard to tell.\nVoice 2: Hello? Can you hear me now?\nVoice 4: Is it still hard to hear back there?\nVoice 1: Hello? Can you hear me with this mic?\nVoice 5: Can you hear me now?\nVoice 6: Y’all hear me?\n\n[Laughter, sound stabilizing]\n\n00:03:13\tDouglas Moffat\t[Regular audio resumes, background instrumental music begins]\nOkay. Hello, everyone. I’m just going to start things up here. Thank you very much.\n\nHello, everyone. Welcome to Concordia University’s Fourth Space. Thank you for joining us for today’s event, Sounding New Sonic Approaches.\n\n[Soft instrumental music continues in the background]\n\nTo help situate you, we are streaming this event live on YouTube from Fourth Space, here on Unceded Indigenous Lands in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.\n\nWe are also running this event as a live-streamed Zoom meeting—though, as you may have already noticed, this is a bit of an unusual setup for us.\n\nWith that, it is my pleasure to hand things over to the editors of New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies, Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod.\n\nWelcome, both of you. Over to you.\n\n00:03:57\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to Sounding New Sonic Approaches, a live recording session.\nWe are recording this event here at Fourth Space at Concordia University and online on Zoom. And we’re live with an audience.\n\nWelcome, everyone! Let’s hear a round of applause.\n\n[Applause]\n\nThe idea behind today’s event is to create a spoken sound work drawn from our collective special issue of English Studies in Canada. Each contributor will sound their article—either by reading an excerpt from their piece in the journal or by selecting surrogate sounds that capture the essence of their discussion.\n\n[Scattered clapping, sound cues shifting in the background]\n\n00:04:50\tJason Camlot\tThe sounds of speech—whether spoken through microphones, over Zoom, or pre-recorded and played back through Zoom—will be layered through multiple outputs.\n[Jason’s voice subtly shifts as different sound devices are introduced]\n\nThese sounds will be played through a variety of speakers, both inside and outside Fourth Space.\n\n[A mechanical whirring sound begins in the background]\n\nThe audio from these various sources will be captured and sent to a mixing desk, where SpokenWeb audio engineer James Healy will be recording everything on multiple tracks using an RME Fireface digital converter.\n\nThis will then be used to create a new sonic approaches sound work, which Katherine and I will be producing as a SpokenWeb podcast episode from today’s performance.\n\n[Persistent clapping continues in the background]\n\nSo, that’s the basic idea. Think of this event as a big poetry reading, or maybe an open mic collaborative performance, or even a kind of literary sonic manifesto—but one that’s being recorded from a variety of sources, in multi-track layers.\n\nSpecial thanks to James Healy, Douglas Moffett, and the Fourth Space team for helping bring this event to life and for creatively reimagining how to record it.\n\n00:05:59\tKatherine McLeod\t[Katherine’s voice echoes, slightly distant]\nWe have a set list for our readers—[Sudden distorted noise cuts in]\n—which also serves as the table of contents for the special issue.\n\n[Echo fades out, sound stabilizes]\n\nWhen it is your turn, please state your name and the title of your article before reading. Keep it brief, and we’ll smoothly move from one reader to the next.\n\n[Brief pause]\n\nWith that—let’s begin.\n\nStart recording.\n\nSounding New Sonic Approaches, take one.\n\n00:06:26\tKatherine and Jason\t[Voices overlapping, slightly out of sync]\nRolling, rolling, rolling.\n00:06:30\tJason Camlot\tMy name is Jason Camlot–\n00:06:32\tKatherine McLeod\tand I’m Katherine McLeod–\n00:06:34\tJason Camlot\tand we will be reading from–\n00:06:37\tKatherine McLeod\tIntroduction New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.\n00:06:43\tJason Camlot\t[Jason’s voice echoes, layered and resonant]\nThe sound of literature is now discernible as never before.[Echo fades, voice stabilizes]\nThis emerging discernibility—inciting new sonic approaches to literature—is due, in the first instance, to digitized audio assets and online environments that have made previously analog collections of literary recordings more accessible and valuable for research and study.\n[A soft whirring sound begins in the background]\n\nBeyond this infrastructural shift, the heightened discernibility of sonic approaches to literary culture has come from a recent interaction and convergence of methods between literary studies and sound studies as a broad interdisciplinary field.\n\n[The whirring sound grows louder, filling the space]\n\n00:07:23\tKatherine McLeod\tOur Call for Papers for this special issue of English Studies in Canada invited submissions that pursue sound-focused studies of literary works, events, and performances—exploring the intersections between literary studies and sound studies.\nFrom the outset, we framed literature as an intentionally expansive concept, one that has shaped the diverse case studies featured in this collection—ranging from archival objects to live performances.\n\n[Katherine’s voice begins to distort, subtly warping]\n\nThe authors whose work we received and selected for this issue embody this diversity in their approaches.\n\n[Distortion fades, voice stabilizes]\n\nIn asking our contributors to—or rather—[laughs]—in asking them to be…\n\n[Soft whirring begins again, subtly shifting in the background]\n\n…thinking sonically, as we put it, we challenged them to write from their perspectives as listeners.\n\nIn other words, we asked them to conflate literary studies and sound studies—to do literary sound studies—while critically reflecting on what it means to listen within the context of their discipline.\n\n[Whirring fades into silence]\n\n00:08:28\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot again, and Annie Murray will be joining me.\nAnnie, do you want to say hi?\n\n00:08:35\tAnnie Murray\tHi.\n00:08:37\tJason Camlot\tDarren Wershler can’t be with us today, but we three are the co-authors of an article called The Afterlife of Performance.\n[Sound of cymbals and drums from a ritual chant]\n\nThe afterlife of performance—\n\n[Cymbal sound repeats, layered with an eerie resonance]\n\n—is riddled with assumptions about life, death, and time.\n\n[Another cymbal strike, now accompanied by a distant, guttural yell]\n\nOne major assumption is the possibility of distinction between the live—\n\n[Cymbal strike reverberates]\n\n—and something else. Not so much death—\n\n[Cymbal clangs again, layered with rising tension]\n\n—but an afterlifeness, shaped by various theorizations of media in what we might call the Age of the Zombie.\n\n[Cymbal clang echoes, now joined by chaotic grunts and shouts of exertion]\n\nBut we’re not so much interested in how particular instantiations of liveness are produced.\n\nRather, we’re examining how the afterlife of performance is produced, managed, and maintained—through the application of various cultural techniques.\n\n[The sound of rhythmic clattering, like a drum being struck]\n\nA network of people, using specific hardware, capturing performance in a particular space, on particular kinds of storage media—\n\n[Drum strike repeats, layered with subtle distortions]\n\n—along with techniques such as mastering—\n\n[Drum beat sharpens]\n\n—editing, filing, labeling—\n\n[The sound repeats, layered with an accelerating intensity]\n\n—holding (that is, long periods of neglecting), digitizing, remastering, and circulating—\n\n[The rhythmic pulse builds, overlapping voices chanting and talking]\n\n—all working together to produce our sense of the relative worth of a recording.\n\nA recording of another group of people—chanting, talking, reading.\n\n[Clattering intensifies, layered with cheers and echoes of past voices]\n\nIf we examine this assemblage closely, we can see its inner workings—the mechanism that produces literary value.\n\n[Final crescendo, then silence]\n\n00:10:13\tAnnie Murray\tI’m Annie Murray, also reading from The Afterlife of Performance.\nOnly some of the materials that document poetic practice in the late 1960s have ever crossed the formal archival threshold.\n\nOthers have been ignored, lost, or destroyed.\n\n[Faint background noise begins, like shifting paper and distant murmurs]\n\nSome, like the Sir George Williams University series, only became formal institutional records after a chance discovery, followed by validation through concerted scholarly and institutional effort.\n\n[The background noise grows slightly, a textured hum of archival handling]\n\nBeing attuned to the concept of the archival multiverse allows us to rationalize the messiness—the expanse, duplication, and incompleteness of literary legacy, especially for event-driven records.\n\nAnd finally, we can see the role of the Web—how it makes archival content both ubiquitous and messy, introducing new complexities in preservation.\n\nThinking in a multiverse way allows us to layer and intersect poetic events, poets, and their literary and geographical movements, as well as the movement and proliferation of evidentiary traces of their work.\n\nIt invites us to gain comfort with a decentralized model of both preservation and dissemination.\n\n[A whispered echo repeats:]\n“…preservation and dissemination.”\n\n00:11:35\tJason Camlot\tNext will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.\n[Distant echo repeats:]\n“Next will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.”\n\n00:11:46\tAudio Recording\t[Applause erupts, transitioning into a recorded voice]\n[Recording of a woman:]\n“Thanks a lot, Louis, and thanks, everybody, for coming.”\n\n00:11:50\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tHi there, I’m Julia Polyck-O’Neill.\nI’m reading from my article, Archives, Intimacy: Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive.\n\n00:11:59\tJason Camlot\t[Faint echo, layered and reverberating]\n“Next will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.”\n00:12:01\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tWhile researching Robertson—\n[A sharp mechanical hum begins, like an electric current surging]\n\n—meaning Lisa Robertson at SFU, I inquired about the different media available in their collections that might allow me to better access Robertson’s—\n\n[More mechanical noise, layered with a subtle distortion]\n\n—personal feminist networks, a key topic in my work.\n\nI’m particularly interested in materials related to poet, curator, and organizer Nancy Shaw, a scholar responsible for many changes in KSW’s operations, especially in its connections to Artspeak, a Vancouver artist-run center.\n\n[The mechanical noise persists, a rhythmic pulsing of archived media playback]\n\nDuring our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my focus on how KSW intersected with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.\n\n[The machine sound fades, leaving an ambient electronic hum]\n\n00:12:29\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\t[Julia’s voice echoes]\nDuring our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my interest in how KSW intersected— [Voice distortion]—with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.\n\n00:12:45\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tPresented with a box of tapes from the Kootenay School of Writing—[whirring sound]—fonds, also held at SFU, I selected the hand-annotated tapes bearing Robertson’s name, as well as those of Shaw, which only roughly corresponded with the finding aid.\n00:12:58\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\t[Julia’s voice echoes]\nIt was explained that the tapes had been annotated somewhat ad hoc over the years. [Voice stabilizes] Again, the experience was heightened and singular—[whirring sound]—made even more so by the privacy of the listening space. Putting on a pair of ear-covering headphones, I pressed play on the first tape—only to realize it had to be rewound first.\n\n[Background noise]\n\nAll of these attributes build momentum for the initial moments of listening to—[voice echoes]—the recording. Thank you. [Applause]\n\n00:13:39\tAudio Recording\t[Applause blends into an audio recording]\nThanks, Colter. Thanks, Jacqueline. This is… This is nice to be here in the living room.\n\n00:13:47\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’re going to hear a sound clip of Michael O’Driscoll reading—[sound of truck driving by]\n00:13:54\tMichael O’Driscoll\t[Voice starts in an echo]\nThis essay features a reel-to-reel recording of a 1969 classroom lecture during which Canadian poet and playwright James Rainey demonstrates sound collage in relation to his celebrated 1967 play “Colours in the Dark.”\n\nOn first encountering the recording, the listener will notice—[sound of something large approaching]—the extraordinarily intrusive presence of a jackhammer, located somewhere near the classroom.\n\n00:14:24\tAudio Recording\t[Audio blends into a recording with applause]\nThanks very much. I’ve already given you about a quarter of the reading on tape and gramophone. [Jackhammer begins]\n\nAnd fortunately, before the jackhammer started, the first thing I played was from Karl Orff’s “Music for Children,” which begins with nursery rhymes and lists of names that children recite…\n\n00:16:28\tMichael O’Driscoll\tRainey’s equanimity in this moment is astounding. One could well imagine canceling the lecture—especially one focused on attentive listening. Rainey, however, simply absorbs the intrusive jackhammer into the performance, adopting—or adapting—the sonic dissonance into the logic of a lesson already leaning toward an appreciation of—[voice starts to echo]—the affective tension and political force of jarring oral juxtaposition.\n00:17:03\tKatherine McLeod\tNext up, we have Mathieu Aubin.\nThe paper is entitled “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in the Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966–1971.”\n\n[Distorted] And we’ll be listening to a recording.\n\n00:17:23\tMathieu Aubin\tA short history on queer listening.\n[Faint sound of a man, poet bill bissett, singing in the background]\n\nIn the 1960s and 1970s, listening to and recording queer people from a police perspective was a means of documenting and regulating their behavior.\n\n[Background singing increases] Surveillance efforts targeted queer writers, monitoring their activities through bugged homes, wiretaps, and infiltration of their communities. Police forces compiled this data, circulating it across networks to justify increased surveillance.\n\n00:18:01\tMathieu Aubin\tBut quite the opposite—some queer writers saw listening as a form of homosocial rapprochement. Writers like Allen Ginsberg practiced a tender form of listening, using it to build queer bonds. Rather than being exploitative, tender listening was a way for queer people to connect, orient themselves toward each other, and foster solidarity. [Mathieu’s voice echoes faintly]\nSimilarly, some queer writers performed close listening as a practice of careful consideration—both for meaning and for social potential.\n\n00:19:15\tMathieu Aubin\tAs Jack Halberstam theorizes in Queer Time, queer uses of time and space are developed according to other logics of location, movement, and identification—rather than the heteronormative life model of marriage, family, and reproduction.\n[Singing momentarily increases]\n\n00:20:13\tKatherine McLeod\tJason Wiens: Voicing Appropriations: Sounding Found Poetry in 1960s Canada [Amen drum break sample  plays]\n00:20:20\tJason Wiens\tThe oral performance of found poetry adds a new layer of interpretive complexity to an already complex practice of appropriation and recontextualization.\n[Fast drums continue]\n\nHowever, little consideration has been given to the oral performance or audio recording of found or appropriated poetry—whether from the historical moment I discuss here or in contemporary conceptual poetry.\n\n00:23:25\tKlara du Plessis\t[Voice echoes]\nMy name is Klara du Plessis.\n\n[Whistling sound] I’m reading from “Do You Read Me, Kaie Kellough: The Words of Music”\n\n[Distorted voice and whistling]\n\n00:23:41\tKlara du Plessis\t[Very distorted and echoed voice] In fact, I’m not reading from my essay. In fact, I’m not. Instead, I’m reading from a handwritten scan titled Word Sound System 1: Read Part A, which is included in Kaie Kellough’s 2010 poetry collection.\n[Voice becomes slightly clearer]\n\nThe piece, Maple Leaf Also Reads, instructs that letters indicated by numbers should be stressed to emphasize rhythm. The goal is to repeat until the rhythmic pattern is understood.\n\n[Layered voices overlapping]\n\nD—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—y—o—u.\n\nUnderstood.\n\nE—a—d—m—a—d—d—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—e—y—o—m—a—e—n—d—o—m—y—o—u.\n\nD—r—o—a—d—o—a—o—o—d—u—e—y—o—u—m—r—o—a—u—r—o—y.\n\nD—o—u—r—y—a—r—e—d—r—o—y—o—u—y—o—a—r—I—o—e—r—e—d—o—y—o—u—r—e—a.\n\n[Voice becomes more coherent]\n\nEach component follows a logical continuation.\n\nY—o—o—y—o—a—d—and—e.\n\nSorry, the notes are confusing.\n\nEach component is a continuation of the previous—and once they are strung together, they form a tidy loop that can repeat infinitely.\n\n00:25:48\tJason Camlot\tThanks, Klara. That’s the first cover of a Kaie Kellough sound poem I’ve ever heard. [Jason’s voice blends into a recording]\n00:25:52\tAudio Recording\tYes, [Laughter]\n00:25:53\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’ll hear an audio clip from Kate Moffitt, Kandice Sharren, and Michel Levy, co-authors of Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant’s 1984 Reading of “Grip” and “Posh”.\n00:26:11\tKandice Sharren\tThe rationale behind the copy text aligns with the impulse to prioritize the story itself in our audio edition, rather than the physical artifact or recording event. In some ways, audio offers unique advantages—for instance, when a story is read by its author, it can clarify ambiguities through intonation or even provide the most authoritative version of the text.\n00:26:31\tKandice Sharren\tIn this case, our copy text was the story as Mavis Gallant performed it [eerie sound] on 14 February 1984—a version that clearly had her seal of approval.\nProducing the two podcast episodes required listening to Gallant’s reading dozens of times, and in doing so, Moffitt noticed a significant aside:\n\nNear the end of the recording, Gallant deviates from the story and remarks–\n\n00:26:54\tAudio Recording\t[Cuts to the audio recording of Mavis Gallant] I have an editorial query here. Is he imagining this? Yes, these are proofs.\n00:27:00\tKate Moffatt\tDuring a Q&A session celebrating the first episode’s release, we discussed Gallant’s reference to these elusive proofs.\nFollowing that event, SFU Professor Carol Gerson informed us that the proofs for this story, along with a cassette copy of the 1984 reading, were held by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.\n\nWith help from Roma Kail, a librarian at Victoria University, we were able to access scans and confirm that these were the exact same proofs Gallant had been reading from.\n\nOn page 24, Gallant’s editor had added an interlinear pencil notation between lines 6 and 7, stating:\n\nIs he imagining this?\n\nJust as Gallant had read aloud in 1984.\n\n00:27:38\tKatherine McLeod\t[Echo effect] Next up, Kelly Baron.\n00:27:40\tKelly Baron\t[Bell dings] I’m Kelly Baron, and I’m reading from Oral Memory in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.\nIn the opening pages of Thien’s novel—which explores intergenerational trauma resulting from the Cultural Revolution in Chinese-Canadian communities—[Voice distorts, accompanied by soft piano notes]\n\nLi Ling, the novel’s protagonist, is walking through Vancouver’s Chinatown when she hears Bach’s Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 4 playing from a store speaker.\n\nShe feels drawn towards it, as keenly as if someone were pulling her by the hand—the counterpoint of the music binding together the composer, the musicians, and even the silence.\n\nThe music, with its spiraling wave of grief and rapture, was everything she remembered.\n\n00:28:26\tKelly Baron\tThat moment sparks a memory of her father.\nIn the act of listening, he becomes so alive, so beloved that the incomprehensibility of his suicide resurfaces, grieving her all over again.\n\nBy her own admission, she had never before experienced such a pure memory of her father, Dong Kai, in the two decades since his death.\n\nLi Ling’s experience in Vancouver’s Chinatown raises important questions about the role of music in literary depictions of intergenerational memory and trauma:\n\n– How does music shape memory recall in novels like this?\n\n– How can listening to the music within literature expand our understanding of trauma and memory transmission?\n\nIn this article, I argue that listening within a literary context provides a methodology for understanding intergenerational trauma—one rooted in the sensory experiences that accompany inherited trauma.\n\nThese experiences are defined by rhythmic repetition, a new setting, and an emotional distinction that alters perception.\n\n00:29:32\tKelly Baron\tI propose that listening to music in literature represents a new method for identifying intergenerational memory.\nThis method focuses not only on the literary depictions of sound but also on how that sound shapes the experiences of future generations.\n\nIf traumatic memories are communicated through silences and gaps in declarative or narrative memory, then sound itself becomes the conduit—a means by which these memories are passed down to future generations.\n\n00:30:04\tDaniel Martin\tMy essay is called— [A recording starts playing]— Girl, the Piercing.\n00:30:09\tSPK_1\t[Recording plays] Yeah, the hell were you doing with her? It’s not what you think.\n00:30:16\tDaniel Martin\t[A low humming sound begins in the background] My essay, The Child’s Stuttering Mouth and the Ruination of Language in Jordan Scott’s Blurt and Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, explores how we read and write about the enigmatic experiences of people who stutter—without succumbing to metaphor, stigma, or the valorization of creative stuttering inherent in all textualities.\n00:30:43\tDaniel Martin\tWe put aside critical methodologies that expose the tensions between voice and text in literary expression and instead imagine the experiences of children who stutter through playful and experimental fantasies of language, devourment, and ruination. [Brief static sound] Despite their differences in genre—one a celebrated Canadian sound poetry work, the other an experimental text by an innovator in hypertext and found-document fiction—\n00:31:11\tDaniel Martin\tBoth Jordan Scott’s Blurt and Shelley Jackson’s Riddance reimagine stuttered speech beyond the prosaic deconstruction of voice and text—presence and absence, fluency and disfluency—that have shaped so much critical study on literary voicings. [Humming sound increases]\n00:31:29\tDaniel Martin\tBoth texts examine what it means to return, in Scott’s words, to the fact of the mouth. These works do not merely romanticize the stutter as inherent to language systems, nor do they simply deconstruct speech versus text, presence versus absence, or phonemic versus phonetic binaries that dominate most literary voice studies.\n00:31:51\tDaniel Martin\tOur critical and theoretical methodologies have grounded literary voice studies in these binaries, but there are other ways to reimagine the romanticization of communicative breakdowns. [A voice in the background hums an extended “mmm” sound]\n00:32:06\tDaniel Martin\tScott and Jackson both reorient the reader’s response away from a logic of extractive meaning toward an invitation to participate in the childlike pleasures of—[stutters]—devouring, ingesting, and ruining language. With this pleasure comes trauma, longing, and loss, inevitable aspects of such a destructive relationship with language. [A distorted voice emerges, layering over Daniel’s words] [Daniel’s voice starts stuttering] Their work experiments with devices, techniques, and tricks introduced under biomedical imperatives for speech cure and management.\n00:32:42\tDaniel Martin\tBoth texts raise profound questions about the history of speech therapy, the cultural history of the stutter, and its status as a haunted and haunting presence—one that is both internal and external to the speaking mouth. [A voice in the background repeats an extended “mmm” sound]\n00:33:03\tDaniel Martin\tFundamentally, these works suggest that reading or speaking fluently is not necessarily a triumph. For people who stutter, reading can feel threatening—it introduces a fragility in the relationship between speaker and language. The stutter itself is a threat of undoing. It creates a hole, swallowing up the very binary distinctions we rely on to make meaning.\nSometimes, that hole becomes a portal—a doorway to other dimensions and voices. Other times, it is simply a giant mouth, consuming language and eroding meaning, a threat as gleeful and destructive as a child’s indulgent play. These texts introduce disfluent joy, embodying the stutterer’s ruinous relationship with words.\n\n00:33:51\tKatherine McLeod\tNext is Kristen Smith.\n00:33:56\tKristen Smith\tHello, I’m Kristen Smith. I’m so grateful to voice an excerpt from Unsounding: A New Method for Processing Non-Linguistic Poetry. [Faint static noise in the background]\n00:34:15\tKristen Smith\tThe comparison of a non-linguistic poem to a graphic score emphasizes the openness of the art form. The poem as score foregrounds the reader’s role as both performer and interpreter, yet it offers no clear guidance in executing either role.\n00:34:35\tKristen Smith\tAt every turn, with each proposed paradigm for assessment, non-linguistic poetry resists. [Faint static continues] Non-linguistic poetry rejects totalizing methods for reading and unsounding. In No Medium, Krecht Dworkin performs close readings of unfilled, erased, or blank pages—seemingly silent texts.\n00:35:03\tKristen Smith\tIn his analysis of Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin asserts: Silence is always ideal and illusory. Silence is a thought experiment—provocative and unverifiable. [Eerie, distant tones rise in the background] Unsounds are filled with interpretative possibilities and semantic meaning.\n00:35:22\tKristen Smith\tThis essay specifically examines works that are not blank but still eliminate linguistic material and prevent sounding. These texts are composed of unsound.\n00:35:35\tKristen Smith\t[Eerie sound increases] Dworkin pushes further, suggesting that in such works, medium itself is as unrealizable as silence. Non-linguistic poems subvert expectations of medium or category. Moreover, these works compel readers to adopt new reading practices.\nWorks like Soult’s Moonshot Sonnet, Bergwoll’s Drift, and Schmaltz’s Surfaces require the reader to meet the poem on the page and actively work through it on its own terms.\n\n00:36:07\tKristen Smith\tWhen encountering a non-linguistic poem, the reader is forced to question their relationship to reading, sound, and communication. [Distorted, eerie sounds grow louder]\nBy resisting any singular method for interpretation, these works show that both sounding and resisting sound can communicate multivalent, albeit elusive, messages.\n\n00:36:36\tKristen Smith\tYet, these communications are incomplete without the reader’s participation—perhaps through unsounding the poetic material. The reader is essential to the visual poem’s communication. The reader is integral to the poem’s becoming. [Eerie sounds linger before fading]\n00:36:57\tJason Camlot\tNow we’re going to hear from the Readers’ Forum on Disciplinary Listening.\n00:37:01\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot.\n00:37:03\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd this is Katherine McLeod.\n00:37:05\tJason Camlot\tAnd we’ll be reading from Forum on Disciplinary Listening: An Introduction.\n00:37:08\tKatherine McLeod\tWe have developed this forum to invite further reflection from experts who have worked with sound across a variety of disciplines. We asked—\n00:37:23\tJason Camlot\t– How has your discipline taught you to listen?\n– What does listening mean within your discipline?\n\n– How do you understand sonic approaches in relation to disciplinarity?\n\n– What aspects of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field do you translate or transpose into your approaches as a researcher and teacher within a specific discipline of knowledge and university department?\n\n00:37:56\tKatherine McLeod\tNow, we invite you to listen to this voice forum as a conversation and to consider what you would write in response to these same questions. Notice the constellations of listeners evoked, the resonances in reflections. Immerse yourself in the listening that each writer educes on the page. [Static noise begins]\n00:38:20\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot again, reading from my short article Towards a History of Literary Listening. The story of literary listening may tell of two long-lasting, concurrent desires within literary encounters. One desire embraces literature as something best apprehended through sound and listening. The other seeks to extricate sound and listening—and, perhaps by extension, the intimacy of other kinds of exchange and communication that involve presence—\n00:38:56\tJason Camlot\t[Static noise fades] —from the scenario of literary study. The latter desire—to remove sound and listening from literary study—seems particularly disciplinary in its motivation. [Static starts again] This removal is often justified as a way to protect literary appreciation from the corrupting effects of sound. To the extent that literary criticism seeks to justify its status as a discipline—with established principles of literary judgment—it may be that an interesting technique for contemporary literary listening emerges precisely through acts of listening that ride the contradictions of these competing desires. These contradictory desires reflect larger critical tensions—the desire to hear the past in the present, to feel presence in absence, to know and feel the literary as it exists here and now, as it was, and as it will be.\n00:40:03\tJason Camlot\t[Jason’s voice shifts slightly] Next, we’re going to hear from Tanya E. Clement—reading from Distant Listening and Resonance. [Sound clip begins]\n00:40:14\tTanya E. Clement\tSpeech recordings: sound is text—the words people speak—but also other sounds that indicate a speaking and listening context. Tone, laughter, coughing, crying, birdsong, car engines, horns— [Tanya’s voice begins to echo]—a baby crying, thunder clapping, gunshots, the nano dropping. Using computation to analyze large datasets of sound texts has been called distant listening in digital humanities literature. I describe distant listening to sound texts as a process that uses computing to—[voice distorts slightly]—”distill the multi-layered, four-dimensional space of the text of performance—embodied within the performer’s hour of interpretation in time and space—into a two-dimensional script called code.”\n00:40:59\tTanya E. Clement\tDistant is often understood as implying a lack of presence, an observation removed in both space and emotion—detached from individual, subjective knowledge.\n00:41:12\tTanya E. Clement\t[Tanya’s voice subtly shifts] Yet, sound travels differently—and what is lacking in distance is often made up for in other ways. [Eerie sound rises in the background] What is too close can be deafening. What is far away can be heard loud and clear. As both a physical property and a cultural hermeneutic, resonance serves as a useful theory for articulating how distant listening can create meaning differently. [Sound fades]\n00:41:41\tKatherine McLeod\tNext, we have Kim Fox and Reem Elmaghraby. Kim, would you like to say hello and read your title to start off?\n00:41:51\tKim Fox\tSure, I can do that. Thanks for having me—I’m really excited to join you all. Though it is 11:43 PM in Cairo, Reem and I have an essay titled Reflections on Evaluating Soundscapes and Gathering Sounds in Cairo: The Case of the AUC Diaries Project.\n00:42:12\tReem Elmaghraby\tSo, it is now 10:30 AM, and I should probably open the curtains to see what the weather is like. [Sound of curtains opening]\nWell, it’s raining heavily, and the sky is extremely dull. What a depressing way to start the day. [Sound of liquid pouring] Time to make my everyday morning coffee—an espresso shot with a bit of lactose-free foamed milk, no sugar. [Sound of ceramic clattering] Super basic.\n\n00:42:37\tReem Elmaghraby\tI tend to get really bad headaches when I skip my morning coffee dose. I also get super grumpy, so let’s try and avoid that. [Alarm sound goes off]\n00:42:48\tSPK_1\t[Sound blends into an audio recording] It’s 6:30 AM, and I must get up for my 8:30 class at AUC. The sound of the alarm, which I snooze over and over again, is not enough to get me out of bed. That’s why I always leave the curtains open.\nI don’t like getting up this early. I don’t like it one bit. [Sound of door opening] In fact, I hate it. You know what, maybe I’ll just skip today’s morning class. [Sound of shower running] I’m too tired.\n\nNo, I need the grade. What I do slightly appreciate about this pre-8:30 class ritual is its peacefulness—the silence of everyone still asleep.\n\nAnyways, I grab my things and head out to a busy Thursday. [Sound of keys jingling, bag zipping]\n\n00:43:32\tReem Elmaghraby\t[Back to Reem] I stare at the usual pictures of my classmates—and at the black screens with names in the bottom left corner—as I listen to the lecture. [Sighs]\nThe professor just gave us an assignment, so I write it down in my bullet journal, my calendar, and on a sticky note that I put up on my wall.\n\nOrganization is the only thing keeping me afloat this semester. Otherwise, I’d get nothing done. [Sound of a pencil writing on paper]\n\nMy desk is probably my favourite place to be. The best way I could describe it? If a crazy wizard started hoarding objects from his many journeys.\n\nI have stickers on my wall, art from my favourite artists, tech gadgets, makeup, accessories—honestly, anything of interest to me is somewhere on my desk.\n\n00:44:15\tSPK_1\t[Audio switches to another recording] Minute 63—Egypt scores! [Background chatter and cheering] But then, Congo ties the score in minute 87.\n[More background cheers] We need one goal to qualify. With two minutes left, it felt hopeless. People walked out.\n\nBut then—minute 94—Mohamed Salah scores, in a moment that will go down in Egyptian history. [Loud cheers, static interference]\n\nMy microphone couldn’t handle the reaction. [Cheering and static noise blend together] It wasn’t any tamer on the streets either. [Sound of drums]\n\nIt didn’t look like I could drive home tonight, so I decided to sleep over at Andrew’s.\n\n00:44:56\tKatherine McLeod\tKristin Moriah—That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It: Hearing Blackness.\n00:45:06\tKristin Moriah\t[Audio recording begins—rain-like sound gets louder, then fades]\n00:45:06\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’re going to hear from Nina Sun Eidsheim and Juliette Bellocq.\n00:45:28\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tListening techniques are naturalized within an area of study. [Eerie music starts playing faintly]\nIn the PEER Lab—the Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research Lab, which I started a few years ago—we seek to listen to the ways different people and different fields listen.\n\nOur goal is to understand more about how the world appears through specific listening techniques.\n\nOne of my main collaborators is the graphic designer Juliette Bellocq. We took the invitation to contribute to this volume as an opportunity for me to learn more about her listening practices.\n\nThe piece we created together is called What They Say is What They Mean: Listening to Someone’s Story.\n\n00:46:09\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tI started by asking Juliette—what is listening for a graphic designer?\n00:46:16\tJuliette Bellocq\tAs a graphic designer, I agree not to be the sole author of the content in my work. Graphic design, in my practice, means sharing content.\nI place myself in a position to translate something I’ve heard, understood, seen, or reconfigured. That means that I have a voice—I am an author, but there is also a co-author.\n\nThis co-author can be a client or a community, so listening is essential.\n\nBesides working with the PEER Lab, I primarily work with architects in designing spaces. And the key question when we visit a space or meet with people is: What are their stories?\n\nListening is our primary tool and resource. [Faint instrumental music begins playing]\n\n00:47:03\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tDo you listen similarly or differently from architects or even other graphic designers? And if so, how do these different types of listening come together?\n00:47:15\tJuliette Bellocq\tI do think that I listen differently than some other designers because my primary goal is not to solve people’s problems—which is a big part of what graphic design is often about.\nMy job now is to capture something in the air, make it visible for everyone, and see if it can participate in the culture.\n\nI work to transcribe or crystallize ideas that already exist for all of us.\n\nIf I do not listen well, I have nothing to create. Does that make sense?\n\n00:47:45\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tIt does, but I’m wondering—is listening a metaphor for all the ways we absorb things?\n00:47:53\tJuliette Bellocq\tIt’s not a metaphor. It’s note-taking and research to make sure we heard correctly.\nIt’s cross-checking information to ensure that what people meant was actually what we heard.\n\nIt’s about understanding group stories before producing anything visual or graphic.\n\nIt’s a kind of listening that is meant to engage with something alive.\n\n00:48:16\tJuliette Bellocq\tSo, we have to listen in a way that is—hopefully, when done well—non-intrusive.\nIt should not orient the story but let people say what they want authentically.\n\nIt is about understanding their words in the right context before finally proposing something that can participate in the culture it comes from.\n\nSo, listening is a way to circumvent assumed knowledge.\n\n00:48:43\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tThank you.\n00:48:46\tMara Mills\tMara Mills and Andy Slater, Blind Mode: Blind Listening Techniques.\nI’m Mara Mills, a media studies professor and historian of electroacoustics and disability. My co-author, Andy Slater, is a blind sound artist who records, transcribes, and documents blind listening techniques—or what Andy calls Blind Mode.\n\n00:49:11\tMara Mills\tI first learned about Andy’s work when I was researching the history of the C1 cassette player.\nThis machine was released by the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled in the United States in 1981.\n\nIt included a time-stretching or pitch-restoration feature so that blind people could speed-read talking books without distorting the narrator’s voice.\n\n00:49:37\tMara Mills\tTo my surprise, this tape player—which is no longer in production—still has a fan base in noise and experimental music scenes.\nAndy uses sounds from the C1, among many other accessibility tools, in his compositions.\n\nAnd now, we’ll hear a recording of that.\n\n00:50:07\tAndy Slater\t[Static sound] [Robotic voice begins] Tape decks and 8-RPM record players were ugly and bulky.\nThey were meant for home use—out of sight, hidden from embarrassment.\n\nMuch like large print books and the white cane itself, some of us knew the glory of the talking book players.\n\nEverything could sound weird if we let it. [Background sound warps slightly]\n\nReading is fundamental, but any Paul Anka song could sound like sword fighting against Yamat the Chromatic Dragon on those players.\n\nJust as many of us discovered that sound itself can be an alternative to photographs and paintings.\n\n00:50:34\tAndy Slater\tThese tools, designed to be unappealing so no one would steal them, were also phenomenal noisemakers—antiquities of blind culture. [Voice gets deeper and more distorted]\nAnd they are not that different from contemporary assistive technology. Both can be used creatively—and both can disrupt and annoy.\n\nPhones talk aloud, lid detectors double as theremins, and object recognition apps are often wrong.\n\nBlind folks process multiple sound sources at once because of our use of this tech.\n\n[Voice gets faster and higher] When you compose and perform using these tools, filling the room with blind people’s sounds, you’re most likely making people uncomfortable—which is often the motive of any noise artist.\n\n00:51:10\tAndy Slater\tBut in my case, it’s about deconstructing my own culture and using tools made specifically for me.\nIt gives more meaning to the art and experience.\n\nIt’s political. It’s entitled. And it’s not just some guy showing off a thrift store find.\n\n00:51:22\tSPK_1\t[Switches to another audio recording] [Overlapping and distorted voices] What does this sound look like?\nHow is my hair? Do any disabled people work here? Am I wearing a red shirt? Can you tell me how to find the bathroom? [Sound of tape rewinding]\n\n00:52:08\tJason Camlot\tThank you, Mara and Andy.\n00:52:09\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd next, here on Zoom—Ellen Waterman.\n00:52:14\tEllen Waterman\tMy piece reflects on a research-creation project with Deaf culture artists, Spill Propagation. It’s called Reorienting Audition through Bodily Listening in Place.\n00:52:35\tEllen Waterman\t[Sound of a page flipping] The practice I’m calling bodily listening in place requires something akin to what Natasha Myers and Joe Dumit have termed improvising in a state of mid-embodiment.\nWriting about the interactive practices and responsive bodies of scientists, Myers and Dumit describe how researchers engage with experimental media, communicate their findings through narrative and embodied gesture, and develop new forms of dexterity in the process.\n\n00:53:22\tEllen Waterman\tTheir concept of the responsive excitability of bodies helps explain how experimentalists acquire new kinesthetic, affective, and conceptual dexterities—as they learn to see, feel, and know.\nTheir description matches my embodied experience. I am learning all over again how to listen. [High-pitched sound begins faintly]\n\n00:53:30\tEllen Waterman\tOf course, Myers and Dumit’s article is implicitly ableist. It assumes a hearing, seeing, mobile subject—and in that respect, it resembles most writing about music, sound, and listening.\nWe need to account for the complexities of working across Deaf and hearing music cultures. And what draws me to this work is precisely what can be learned in this reciprocal, intercultural encounter.\n\n00:53:55\tEllen Waterman\tFor example, my work with Spill Propagation has made me attuned to vibrations—seen and felt—with an intensity I have never experienced in my five decades of making music.\nWhen I listen to music through the vibrotactile vest, I can only discern a generalized buzzing and rhythmic thumping.\n\nMy haptic sense is, it seems, woefully undeveloped.\n\nWhat does it mean to acquire dexterity in a sensory mode?\n\nOr better—what does it mean to adopt an intersensory approach to listening that encompasses multiple sensory modes?\n\nAnd what happens when we foreground interdependence as a valid and precious foundation for musical creativity?\n\nThese questions animate my desire to reorient audition through bodily listening in place. [Sound of book closing]\n\n00:54:51\tJason Camlot\tThank you, Ellen. And we’re going to close this reading from the special issue of English Studies in Canada with Katherine McLeod: Archival Listening.\n00:55:02\tKatherine McLeod\tThis is Katherine McLeod, reading from Archival Listening. [Faint background sound]\nArchival listening is listening to archives while reflecting on how you are listening—and how you intend to share what you have heard.\n\nArchival listening listens with a future listener in mind.\n\nArchival listening is a practice of attending to the archival apparatus—holding the sound.\n\nWhile you were away, I held you like this in my mind.\n\n00:55:34\tKatherine McLeod\tArchival listening is hearing the body in time.\nArchival listening is situating oneself as a listening body in time.\n\nArchival listening understands that there are limits to knowing—and makes room for what cannot be heard. [Static and overlapping voices in the background]\n\nArchival listening takes time.\n\n00:55:54\tKatherine McLeod\tWe want to remember what the archive seems to remember.\nArchival listeners are removed from the time and space of a recorded event—but having heard its sound, a new memory of that event is formed, and the feeling of hearing it remains.\n\n00:56:16\tKatherine McLeod\tThat ends our recording. Thank you all for listening. [Sound fades into a whistle]\n00:56:21\tHannah McGregor\t[Beat music starts playing] You’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast—a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team.\nThis podcast is part of our work distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n00:56:45\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was produced by Jason Camlot.\nIt features the voices and sounds of Douglas Moffat, Katherine McLeod, Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Michael O’Driscoll, Mathieu Aubin, Jason Wiens, Klara du Plessis, Kandice Sharren, Kelly Baron, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Juliette Bellocq, Kim Fox, Reem Elmaghraby, Kristin Moriah, Daniel Martin, Kristen Smith, Tanya E. Clement, Mara Mills, Andy Slater, and Ellen Waterman.\n\n00:57:20\tKatherine McLeod\tThe New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies event was produced by Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, James Healy, and Douglas Moffat. [SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\nCheck the show notes for all of those names again—and for a link to the journal issue itself that this sound piece performed.\n\n00:57:36\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team includes: – Supervising producer: Maia Harris\n– Sound designer: TJ MacPherson\n\n– Transcriber: Yara Ajib\n\n– Co-hosts: Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod\n\n00:57:48\tKatherine McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.\nIf you love us, let us know—rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on social media.\n\n00:58:05\tKatherine McLeod\tFor now—thanks for listening.\n00:58:08\tSpokenWeb Outro\t[SpokenWeb theme song plays] [Harmonizing voices singing]"],"score":4.1670523},{"id":"9607","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 S6E6, Sound & Seconds: A Roundtable on Timestamping for Literary Archives, 19 May 2025, D'Amours, MacKenzie, Freeman, and Wu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-seconds/"],"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 6"],"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":["Natasha D'Amours","Michael MacKenzie","Sarah Freeman","Xuege Wu"],"creator_names_search":["Natasha D'Amours","Michael MacKenzie","Sarah Freeman","Xuege Wu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Natasha D'Amours\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael MacKenzie\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sarah Freeman\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Xuege Wu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/audio/ae6837bb-0fb9-49ac-9461-d3cb833658f7/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e7-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:57:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,754,506 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e7-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-seconds/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-05-19\",\"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":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Abel, Jordan. Nishga. McClelland & Stewart, 2021. pp.243-73\\n\\nBernstein, Charles. “‘1–100’ (1969) .” Jacket2, jacket2.org/commentary/1%E2%80%93100-1969. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Charles Bernstein (Poet).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Feb. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bernstein_(poet).\\n\\nBolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. MIT Press, 2000.\\n\\nOne central point of departure for our research, though we had to cut our remediation questions due to time.\\n\\n“Eadweard Muybridge.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Apr. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge.\\n\\nEliot, T. S. “‘Burnt Norton’ from Four Quartets.” Four Quartets – 1 Burnt Norton, www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Gertrude Stein.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein.\\n\\n“Hayden White.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_White.\\n\\n“Jackson Mac Low at SGWU, 1971.” Edited by Jason Camlot and Max Stein, SpokenWeb Montréal, 17 Aug. 2015, montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1.\\n\\nThe full version of the recording shown during the episode can be found here. The portion shown during the episode begins at 1:09:35.\\n\\n“Jackson Mac Low.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Mac_Low.\\n\\n“Susan Stewart (Poet).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Sept. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Stewart_(poet).\\n\\n“Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theorist).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Apr. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Ernst_(media_theorist).\\n\\nMore information about our participants can be found at:\\n\\n“Jason Camlot.” Concordia University, www.concordia.ca/faculty/jason-camlot.html. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Michael O’Driscoll.” English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/mo. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Tanya Clement.” College of Liberal Arts at UTexas, liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/faculty/tc24933. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\nMusic Credits\\nThis podcast uses music from www.sessions.blue:\\n\\nFor post-question pauses, we used Jemeneye by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).\\n\\nFor framing the podcast itself, we used the song The Griffiths by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).\\n\\nFor framing the roundtable and preceding questions, we used portions of the song “Town Market” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).\\n\\nThis podcast also uses these sounds from freesound.org:\\n\\n“Mechanical Keyboard Typing (Bass Version)” by stu556 ( https://freesound.org/people/stu556/sounds/450281/? ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Monitor hotler“, by iluminati_2705 ( https://freesound.org/people/iluminati_2705/sounds/536706/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Monitor hotler“, by tobbler ( https://freesound.org/people/tobbler/sounds/795373/ ) licensed under Attribution 4.0\\n\\n“aluminum can foley-020.wav”, by CVLTIV8R ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/800102/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“whoosh_fx”, by ScythicBlade ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/800102/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“ignite_dry_02”, by DaUik ( https://freesound.org/people/DaUik/sounds/798712/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Dewalt 12 inch Chop Saw foley-049.wav”, by CVLTIV8R ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/802856/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Electronic Soap Dispenser 5”, by Geoff-Bremner-Audio ( https://freesound.org/people/Geoff-Bremner-Audio/sounds/802734/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549686845440,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How does timestamping shape the preservation and curation of literary sound? This roundtable episode brings together four SpokenWeb researchers––Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Mike O’Driscoll in conversation with moderator Michael MacKenzie––to explore this deceptively simple yet profoundly complex question. What emerges is a layered, multidisciplinary view of timestamping, not just as a technical task, but as an archival, aesthetic, and philosophical practice.\n\nIn Part One, the conversation begins by situating timestamping in broader historical and intellectual contexts. Panelists reflect on the epistemology of time, from ancient timekeeping and annalistic history to modern digital temporality. What does it mean to mark time, and how does a timestamp compare to a page number, an index, or a narrative structure?\n\nPart Two asks what it means to think critically about timestamping. Here, the guests draw on their scholarly practices to examine the subjectivity of timestamps, the tension between precision and ambiguity, and the role of annotation. The discussion turns to digital media’s microtemporalities and how timestamps carry expressive, affective weight beyond their data function.\n\nIn Part Three, the panel listens to an experimental performance by Jackson Mac Low and considers the challenge of timestamping layered or deliberately disorienting sound. What responsibilities do timestampers have in maintaining a balance between accessibility and artistic intention? Can timestamping illuminate without flattening?\n\nPart Four focuses on vocabulary. Why does it matter if we tag something as a “reading” versus a “performance”? How do controlled vocabularies shape what we can learn from large-scale literary audio corpora? This final section explores how even the smallest metadata decisions reflect theoretical commitments and institutional values.\n\nUltimately, this episode makes one thing clear: timestamping is never neutral. It is an interpretive act, grounded in choices about meaning, representation, and access. From poetic performance to archival platforms, timestamping remains central to how we listen to—and understand—literary sound.\n\n00:00:05\tSpokenWeb Intro Song\t[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod.\n00:00:39\tHannah McGregor\tOne of my favourite genres of SpokenWeb podcast episodes is the behind-the-scenes look at the material labour involved in creating, preserving, and studying literary sound.\nIn past episodes, we’ve talked about the work of transcription, the affordances of sound design, and the messy business of wading through archival collections.\nIn this new episode, producers Natasha D’Amours, Michael MacKenzie, Sarah Freeman, and Xuege Wu take us inside one of the most common kinds of work that research assistants, working on the SpokenWeb project, participate in: timestamping.\n\n00:01:19\tHannah McGregor\tDrawing on the insights and questions that have emerged from their own engagement with timestamping as a practice, the producers bring together a panel of three SpokenWeb researchers—Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Mike O’Driscoll—for a roundtable discussion. Together, they explore epistemologies of time, the subjectivity of annotation practice, and the role of controlled vocabularies, concluding that timestamping is always an interpretive act grounded in choices about meaning, representation, and access.\n00:01:57\tHannah McGregor\tThis is Season 6, Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb podcast: Sound & Seconds: A Roundtable on Timestamping for Literary Archives. [SpokenWeb theme song plays and fades]\n00:02:17\tSarah Freeman\t[Upbeat instrumental music plays in the background]\nWhat does it mean to listen to literary history? Not just to hear voices from the past, but to make them searchable, structured, and accessible.\nFor SpokenWeb, timestamping goes beyond marking moments in an audio recording—it transforms sound into something legible, curates literary events, and preserves ephemeral voices. Each timestamp isn’t just a data point; it bridges raw audio with structured metadata. By logging sonic events alongside their timecodes, we create a detailed map of each recording. These timestamps are then transferred to a public-facing platform where users can engage with the archive, clicking on a timestamped event to jump directly to that moment.\n\n00:03:10\tSarah Freeman\tI’m Sarah Freeman, a student research assistant with SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta. I joined my fellow research assistants, Natasha D’Amours, Michael MacKenzie, and Xuege Wu, to take a deep dive into timestamping. After all, for most of us, our first task with SpokenWeb was timestamping—carefully listening to archival audio to identify and describe sonic events using a controlled vocabulary.\nThis work sits at the intersection of archival practice and digital humanities. But why does it matter? How does timestamping shape the preservation and curation of literary sound? As Phase One of SpokenWeb nears its conclusion, we turn to three scholars who’ve shaped this discussion: Jason Camlot—\n\n00:04:09\tJason Camlot – Audio Clip\t[Click-whirr] Timestamps have existed since the beginning of time. [Click-whirr]\n00:04:14\tSarah Freeman\tMike O’Driscoll–\n00:04:16\tMike O’Driscoll – Audio Clip\t[Click-whirr] I connect it to a whole series of print-based technologies and responses to an overflow of print information. [Click-whirr]\n00:04:25\tSarah Freeman\tAnd Tanya Clement–\n00:04:27\tTanya Clement – Audio Clip\t[Click-whirr] Time is a perspective, and a timestamp can be off, given a perspective. [Click-whirr]\n00:04:34\tSarah Freeman\tIn this episode, we bring you a roundtable conversation moderated by Michael McKenzie that dives into the intellectual, technical, and archival stakes of timestamping.\nLet’s press play [sound of needle dropping on record] and immerse ourselves in the layered sounds of literary preservation.\n00:04:55\tMichael McKenzie, Audio Clip\t[Soft instrumental music plays]\nOkay, so if everyone could just clap on three. Okay, one, two, three—[one clap]\n[Laughter]\nYeah, that was bad. That’s the worst timestamp ever. [Click-whirr]\n00:05:08\tMichael McKenzie\tMy name is Michael McKenzie. I’m a third-year PhD student at the University of Alberta, in English and Film Studies, and I’ll be moderating today’s roundtable on timestamping. [Soft instrumental music continues to play]\n00:05:26\tMichael McKenzie\t[Click-whirr followed by a beep]\nOkay, so, because we only have an hour, I’ll just introduce the first question. So, timestamping is one of the chief places where many graduate students working with SpokenWeb put in our hours. Our podcast teams experience has brought us to think about timestamping in part like literary indexing practices, something that literature has long been subject to by scholars through, for example, the table of contents.\n00:05:52\tMichael McKenzie\tTimestamping, however, is distinct and that it applies the practice of indexing to durational media such as video and audio by cutting it up into smaller periods of time that can easily be searched and studied. Among our team, we’ve begun to notice the ways timestamping exceeds these definitional boundaries to blur the lines with transcription, annotation, introduction, or summary.\n00:06:18\tMichael McKenzie\tThere seems to be a lot more happening with timestamping than its modest reputation suggests.\nSo given the diversity of institutions and styles across SpokenWeb, we’re so glad to have all of you here and your expertise as leaders in SpokenWeb to help us think through these problems and challenges further.\nSo maybe as a point of departure, you might all attempt a definition for timestamping, and explain what timestamping is or has been for you, and perhaps a defining moment for when you started to think about it seriously. [Upbeat music]\n00:06:55\tJason Camlot\tI wouldn’t mind going first because I I took it very seriously and began to think about what is that question: what is a timestamp?\n00:07:03\tSarah Freeman\t[Click-whirr] Jason Camlot, professor at Concordia University and PI [principal investigator] of SpokenWeb, specializes in literary sound recordings and digital artifacts. As the originator of the SpokenWeb project, he’s been around since the very first recordings were digitized and timestamped. [Click-whirr]\n00:07:23\tJason Camlot\tAnd so, I’d like to share a few theses on timestamps that I’ve just developed, right? The first one I want to mention is that, as I was thinking about this, timestamps have existed since the beginning of time. I think that’s an important place to start.\nTimestamps within digital systems, in that sense, represent one manifestation of a long history of temporal measurement—timekeeping and its mobilization for meaning-making. There’s a lot of scholarship on ancient timekeeping, both in relation to the seasons and in the development of mathematics as a way of producing a calculus of time for various purposes.\n\nSo, the conception of time in terms of measurable units and ideas of temporal precision goes back very far in history. Then I started thinking about Hayden White’s work from the 1980s on history, particularly the distinction between annals and historical narrative. I think that’ll be interesting to think about. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:08:22\tSarah Freeman\tHere, Jason is referring to the American theorist of history, Hayden White.\nWhite introduced medieval annals—lists of notable events organized by year—as alternatives to homogenizing historical narratives. Like timestamps, annals link moments in time to events that occurred within them, albeit on a much larger scale. A set of timestamps may be similar to annals, attributing equal importance to disparate threads of a sonic event.\n\nTimestamps may also emphasize similarities across a sonic event, creating a unified narrative of that event—but more often, timestamps do a little bit of both. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:09:06\tJason Camlot\tBecause, you know, annals, in a way, represent another form of historical timestamping, right? They’re just lists of dates and things that happened. But I think there’s an interesting relationship—perhaps even a tension. I’d probably want to think of it as a dialectical relation between the timestamp as a demarcated moment in time’s unfolding, and the larger narrative account within which that timestamp gains significance.\nSo that’s the first thesis.\n00:09:32\tTanya Clement\tI’m going to play devil’s advocate here. [laughs]\nI’m going to say that a timestamp is more like a page number—a way to reference something else you’re interested in. [Click-whirr]\n00:09:48\tSarah Freeman\tTanya Clement, an associate professor at the University of Texas, brings leading expertise in digital sound technologies, data searching and visualization in relation to literary audio and software development for sound pattern searching. [Click-whirr]\n00:10:06\tTanya Clement\tBecause the timestamp itself is only relevant to the extent that it points you to a concept, an idea, or an event. The way we’re working with timestamps in this project is to indicate or index an annotation. That annotation could be a transcript, a note, or a description. But the timestamp itself is significant only insofar as it points to a place on the material medium. This doesn’t mean it’s insignificant as a material aspect of that medium, but I don’t think it bears significance without an attached annotation—without a reason.\n00:10:58\tMike O’Driscoll\tYeah, I’m going to take a slightly different approach. I think of timestamping as a technology of information management. [Click-whirr]\n00:11:07\tSarah Freeman\tMichael O’Driscoll, professor at the University of Alberta and co-applicant of SpokenWeb, contributes deep knowledge of poetry and poetics, material culture, and archive theory. [Click-whirr]\n00:11:20\tMike O’Driscoll\tAnd I connect it to a whole series of print-based technologies and responses to a deluge of print matter in the mid-19th century—responses that led, for example, to the formation of the Royal Indexing Society in the UK. This included the standardization of cataloguing systems in libraries, a whole suite of archival management techniques, and other methods for handling an overflow of printed information at the time. One of the ways Western society responded to this was by developing a system of codified, standardized, and professionalized information management technologies.\nThese systems evolved over time. And with the emergence of durational media in the late 19th and 20th centuries, we also began to require new ways of counting and organizing time within those media.\n\n00:12:19\tMike O’Driscoll\tAnd so, like Tanya, I would probably connect those to various kinds of print technologies;you mentioned page numbers, but I think of them more predominantly as a form of table of contents—a form of indexation, a way to get inside the black box of analog and digital recordings in order to discern what those contents might be in a practical and manageable way, in advance of actually engaging those as listening events.\n00:12:51\tJason Camlot\tJust to reinforce– [Click-whirr]\n00:12:53\tSarah Freeman\tHere’s Jason Camlot jumping back in. This type of spontaneous exchange is part of the roundtable format, where anyone can speak up at any time. [Click-whirr]\n00:13:05\tJason Camlot\tThe emphasis on print that both Tanya and Mike made—the page, the page number, the index—highlights the mirrored presence of the term “stamp” in relation to temporality, right in the phrase itself. I think it really underscores that way of thinking about the control of time, or the attempt to control something that is, by nature, probably less controllable, you know, by fixing it in some way or another—with a reference or an index—we attempt to make time manageable.\nAnd I would just add to Mike’s point that so much of 19th-century print culture is periodical, right? It essentially divides itself into periods—whether it’s dailies, weeklies, or monthlies—each of which is a different measure of things happening within that span of time. So, the explosion of periodical literature in the 19th century is another strong manifestation of what Mike was talking about.\n\n00:14:11\tMike O’Driscoll\tHaving said that, Jason, I also found that your recourse to early time mechanisms—timekeeping mechanisms—is really fascinating, because it’s true that everything from sundials to Stonehenge, to much else—to the pyramids—are devoted to ways of marking time. And that time is also, you know, connected to astrophysical observations and all kinds of other geological observations. And, you know, it maybe is a false heuristic to divide these things, because they are all technologies of temporal management in one way or another, and time is just one more form of information.\n00:14:52\tJason Camlot\tDespite Tanya’s opening rhetorical gambit, I did not take them to be in opposition to each other whatsoever. Actually, I think what all three of us have said is quite continuous with one another.\n00:15:05\tTanya Clement\tWith one exception, though—I really, honestly, don’t see timestamps as a table of contents. I think it’s page numbers. In my mind, it really has very little information without an annotation attached. So, a table of contents doesn’t make much sense if you just have the page numbers; you have to say, like, what’s on those page numbers that you’re actually indexing. I think the same is true with information architectures—you know, just having numbered cells isn’t necessarily useful unless you know what they’re indicating.\nI still think I’m being a bit of a devil’s advocate here, because I’m not giving that much importance or significance to the timestamp in and of itself without the attached—what I would call—the annotation.\n\n00:15:58\tJason Camlot\tI don’t see that as being different from, say, the annals, right? The annotation there is how the crops were that year, right? You know, whatever—it’s referring to something that happened. So in that case, the annotation and the reference point in time is an event. It might have been an event related to the weather, or crops, or some political event, potentially. You know, when annals mention kings—when they took the throne, etc.—those are all indexing events that happened.\nOne thing I really like about your pushback, though—because when this question about what is a timestamp? was asked to me and I sort of went back in time—is how much I realized that, as we move from ancient history and conceptions of temporality through analog media and its modes of marking time to digital media, a lot of that shift seems to be about the scale at which one is doing annotations, and the increasing degrees of precision—what Wolfgang Ernst calls micro-temporalities—as we move into digital media.\n\nSo, I think a table of contents versus a timestamp, or annals that are annual versus a timestamp of a 3-minute recording with 50 annotations—those are questions of temporal scale that I think are really interesting to think about in relation to timestamps. But personally, I see them as working on a continuum.\n\n00:17:29\tMike O’Driscoll\tOne of the things I really liked that you said, Tanya, is that it actually invites us to make a finer distinction between the timestamp as simply the marking of time, and the annotation as the demarcation of content, or event, or evaluation, or summary judgment—whatever that might be—of that particular moment in time.\nAnd by saying, “Oh, it’s like a table of contents,” I think I’m collapsing those ideas into one concept. And it sounds like you’re working to keep them as distinct—distinct activities or distinct forms of impression. [Soft instrumental music plays]\n00:18:14\tSarah Freeman\tAs student assistants on the SpokenWeb U Alberta team, we see timestamping as a crucial intermediary step between digitizing reel-to-reel tapes and making them publicly accessible.\n00:18:28\tSarah Freeman\tWe use close listening to identify when specific sounds occur in the recordings and sometimes conduct archival research to determine, for example, which poem a speaker is performing. This process results in metadata, such as the following timestamp: “From 0:01 to 1:01, Earle Birney performs his version of Kurt Schwitters’ ‘Ursonate’.”\nIn creating these timestamps, we’re not just listening to and analyzing the recordings—we’re transforming them into written data, effectively turning sound into another form of media. [Instrumental music plays and fades]\n\n00:19:10\tMichael McKenzie\tThe next thing I wanted to ask is: why should we think critically about timestamping? This question comes from a place of thinking about timestamping as something that might fly under people’s critical thinking radar. What kinds of things have you encountered that made you start to think critically about timestamping?\nI have a list of examples here—everything from YouTube’s heat map algorithm, which shows how popular a video is at any given point along its time bar, to EKG (electrocardiogram) monitors that mark the rhythm of a heartbeat and any interruptions in it with beeps and squiggles. There are also the SETI Institute’s protocols for parsing sound from outer space to identify potential alien messages, and seismic monitors or lie detectors that give off sudden bursts of timestamping activity.\n\nThese are all examples with very specific goals and motives. Given the wide variety of things a timestamp can do, what brought you to start thinking critically about it?\n\n00:20:28\tTanya Clement\tSo obviously, especially in the context of the examples you gave, timestamping can be done for a variety of reasons, and different people might choose to index a recording differently for a variety of purposes. What I find interesting, though, is that when you engage with something like timestamping—and you try to translate those timestamps across systems or datasets, or manipulate the data in the process of transposing it from one format to another—what you sometimes find is that the timestamp gets altered. It becomes a little less accurate, a little bit off.\nAnd I think that does matter. I’m not sure if this is an exact response to your question, but it is something that feels closely related.\n\n00:21:24\tTanya Clement\tWhat comes to mind is that the act of timestamping reminds you that time can also be subjective. Especially because timestamping is inherently something that depends on a digital or electronic apparatus in some way, shape, or form. And those devices are calibrated according to different standards—different time zones, and many other variables. There’s also the question of precision: whether the timestamp goes to the thousandths of a second, or just to the milliseconds, or even less precisely.\n00:22:01\tTanya Clement\tSo I think there is some space to consider whether we are actually thinking about timestamps—and if, as I’m proposing, we disambiguate timestamps from the act of annotation itself. If we want to think about timestamps in a more theoretical or conceptual way, I do think there’s a provocation or an invitation to consider the extent to which time is a perspective—and how a timestamp can be off, depending on that perspective. Whether it’s a human perspective, a particular system, or a specific data format, time shifts. It’s not fixed.\n00:22:43\tMike O’Driscoll\tSo I was teaching T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets yesterday, which is, of course, a poem about time—a really deep philosophical meditation on time—that I would argue can only be understood through listening to the poem. And I think that, in some ways, is Eliot’s argument: you cannot comprehend the poem’s bid for revelation or incarnation through critical description or classroom discussion. You can only get where he wants to take you by listening to the poem.\nAnd that’s predicated on those great lines toward the beginning of Burnt Norton:\n“If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.\nWhat might have been is an abstraction,\nRemaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.”\n\n00:23:44\tMike O’Driscoll\tAnd Tanya, as you were talking about the transmediation of timestamps—the ways in which they go awry, and the ways in which they are unredeemable, in Eliot’s words—that’s what I was thinking about: that it’s actually an incredibly complex process to mark time. And we delude ourselves into thinking it’s a matter of simplicity. There’s so much going on in the presumptions we make about redeeming time in the space of durational media, and how we might mark and manage something that, as Eliot says, remains a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.\nThis is not only a deep philosophical problem—it’s also a very complex practical one.\n\n00:24:40\tJason Camlot\tGoing back to the distinction between analog and digital media, I think the idea of having greater control over something unfolding as it’s represented in a medium is key. And I would add photography to this. We could think of chronophotography, for example—Muybridge being one notable case. [Click-whirr]\n00:25:00\tSarah Freeman\tEadweard Muybridge was a 19th-century photographer known for using sequential images to capture motion, pioneering early studies of time and movement. [Click-whirr]\n00:25:12\tJason Camlot\tAnd then we can think of early cylinder recordings—and especially flat disc recordings—as having timestamps on them, or at least as representing or manifesting a certain kind of timestamping of time. In Muybridge’s case, each image is, in a way, a timestamp in a series of movements. But on a flat disc record, the spaces between tracks could be seen as timestamps, as the album side unfolds. They help you locate something that could also be matched up with time indicators next to a track—though that happens a bit later.\nThen, analog tape recorders began to include time counters. Not right away—in the 1930s, they didn’t have them—but eventually, they did, as it became more important to navigate and manipulate the recordings. So, there’s a strong sense of timestamping as a form of power over time, embedded in whatever media format one is engaging with.\n\nAnd I guess the point I was going to make about digital technologies, as opposed to analog ones, is that digitized and digital media represent a fuller realization of the timestamp concept in media form.\n\n00:26:35\tJason Camlot\tSo that is—time in digital media becomes sampled into these micro-temporalities. It’s not fluid in the way we understand analog media to be, because analog is made up of transduced patterns that don’t necessarily have natural breaks within them. But digital media is literally sampled—it’s slices of time. That’s how it’s represented. And so we could say that, as a media form, it lends itself even more to the idea of controlling time in the most infinitesimal ways.\nBut where I want to go is actually to my last thesis, in relation to what Tanya was saying, which is that timestamps also have the potential to express. That’s the thesis—it’s an ambiguous or cryptic one, and I’m going to unpack it. I think it has something to do with what Tanya was pointing out about the subjectivity of timestamps. What I mean by that is the possibility of an aesthetic or a poetics of the timestamp in itself. And I love the idea that timestamps, when disconnected from their annotations or from their historical or temporal events, can go awry in a variety of ways.\n\nThey are primarily mechanisms of precise control over time—for a variety of purposes, to make arguments, to serve different ends. But the example I have in mind is actually a chapter in Jordan Abel’s book Injun. There are a couple of sections where he offers a timestamped transcript from a lecture he gave at the TransCanada conference. And if you read that text as a poem, I think what he’s performing there is exactly what Tanya was talking about—he’s really attempting, in this piece of writing (which consists of a lot of timestamps), to explore that poetics.\n\nI’ve actually read it out loud, and when I quote from it, a long section might be something like: 15:38:53–15:38:54, right? That’s just the passage of a second. But it carries so much weight in how it’s presented.\n\n00:28:56\tJason Camlot\tAnd it just goes on and on—you can literally read that for half a page. But he’s using timestamps in relation to the text, which is also timestamped, but without the same precision. He’s using them to communicate either what’s not being said, or what’s being felt in the interim as he’s reading. He gives a sense of using the timestamp to capture the affect in the room and in the speaker, as that speech unfolds in time.\nAnd the timestamps, as they appear on that page, I would argue, represent a kind of poetics of the timestamp—one that aims to show how time is always subjectively relative. It depends a great deal on how one is experiencing a moment, a second, or whatever unit of time it may be.\n\n00:29:48\tJason Camlot\tI think it’s very important, as a sort of initial ethos or way of thinking going into timestamping, to remember that these are determinations. It’s a kind of determinate technique that we’re attempting to use to control time in certain ways. But the poetics—or aesthetic—of the timestamp, as I’m finding it in Jordan Abel’s work, reminds us of something very important. And that’s what Tanya opened with in this segment: the idea that timestamps can be off, and they can be off even when they’re on, in some ways. I guess that’s my point—yeah.\n00:30:30\tMike O’Driscoll\tMichael, you started this part of our conversation by asking what it was that got us to think a little more critically and carefully about the act of timestamping. And for me, that was very much part of it—the recognition that this was a constructed way of framing, accessing, and receiving durational media and its contents. That in the act of timestamping, as well as in the act of annotation, there is a whole series of historically, ideologically, and culturally bound presuppositions that we bring to that activity.\nAnd that is where the expressivity of the timestamp might lie: in the fact that we carry certain values and meanings into the production of timestamps and annotations. Those values and meanings shape the circulation and reception of the objects we subject to those practices.\n\n00:31:31\tJason Camlot\tI have a question for Tanya, actually—and it comes out of the project we’re working on right now, which involves attempting to crowdsource timestamps from people watching a video. It’s a great example of the unhinged timestamp, because we’re trying to bring in timestamps from Zoom and then figure out how to upload them and match them to the AV content.\nWhat I’ve realized as we go through this project is that so much of our work focuses on making sure that the comments—the annotations—are timestamped, that they’re actually linked up to the AV, right?\n\nI’d love to hear, or for all of us maybe to reflect on: what’s the difference in value between a timestamped annotation (which we almost use as one word sometimes) and just an annotation? Like, what if we didn’t timestamp any of our annotations for that event, and we just had this running text? The reader—or the listener—would then have to figure out what’s referring to what. You know?\n\n00:32:34\tTanya Clement\tYeah, no, I think—I mean, if you’re going to do that, then why even do them sequentially? Because I think even the act of having those annotations, the way you described it, gave me a visual of positioning them next to each other—almost like people are listening and looking at them side by side. But that’s also a form of timestamping, right? It’s not as precise, per se, but I think it’s a kind of conceptual timestamping that operates with broader parameters around time.\nFor example, I was timestamping an interview the other day—mostly just doing transcripts—but I had a range for a particular moment.\n\n00:33:25\tTanya Clement\tAnd it was interesting to me because I kept having to correct myself. I would say, Oh, this is wrong because the timestamp isn’t exactly right. But then I had to remember, as I was listening and then looking over at the timestamp, that I had used a range. So in fact, what the person was saying wasn’t outside the range—it wasn’t at the start time or the end time—it was somewhere in the middle.\nBut I kept having to remind myself: Oh, it’s not that exact number. The number kept making me think it had to be very precise, when in fact, it could be anywhere within that space. I’m always reminded of Gertrude Stein, right? As human beings, when we’re reading things or trying to understand them, we tend to put them into structures—and we rely on those structures to make sense of what’s happening. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:34:20\tSarah Freeman\tHere, Tanya introduces Gertrude Stein, a modernist writer who challenged linear narratives through her use of repetition. Tanya’s evocation of Stein invites us to consider how we impose order on information. Perhaps our uncritical encounters with timestamping reflect a broader tendency: our uncritical reliance on the formal structures of language itself.\n00:34:46\tTanya Clement\tSo I do think that just the simple act of placing notes—again, in my mind, it’s spatial—next to the screen where you see the video means that people are going to tend to read them sequentially, unless you intentionally mix it up. And if you tell them it’s mixed up, then that becomes a whole different experience. But if you don’t tell them it’s mixed up, they might feel confused—and I don’t know if that’s the intention.\nSo I think one’s intention, if you’re being inexact with timestamping, can be generative, but it can also be confusing. Because when people see timestamps, they tend to assume: this is what’s happening at that exact moment. Or if they see something in sequential order, they assume: this is what’s being talked about first, then this, then the next thing. So you’re still imposing a time-based order, I think.\n\n00:35:57\tMichael McKenzie\tYeah, that’s actually so great—it leads me right into the next question, which has to do with the idea of the audio object as a black box. Someone approaching it without something like timestamps won’t necessarily know what’s inside.\nMy question is about what timestamping does in this context: on one hand, it provides accessibility—it allows you to directly find what you need. But at the same time, some artists or performers might want to preserve a certain sense of enigma or opacity in their work. So timestamping can also risk disrupting that intentional ambiguity.\n\nWhat I’d like to do now is briefly check out a clip from Jackson Mac Low. I’ll share my screen so we can listen to it together—it’s one of the pieces we’ve timestamped. I’ll share my question with you right after we take a look. [Click-whirr]\n\nWarning: you might want to turn your volume down a little bit. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:37:04\tJackson Mac Low – Audio Clip\t[Overlapping, distorted voices]\n“…About—honestly, that… Alison Knowles, Carol… Dickens’ farm… Rose Jackson, Scott… take… Gotti? Haha… there’s something… dark—God? Song? Sing? Maybe that. Slide… please… I—I gotta eat… thank God now… guaranteed… body spa? Please…”\n\nNote: This segment contains heavily distorted and overlapping voices. The transcript reflects best approximations.\n\n00:38:30\tMichael McKenzie\tOK, so that was a clip from Jackson Mac Low’s Fifth Gatha, and I’ve got a few questions. What do timestamps do on a practical level for people using the audio in your practice? And what do you want to avoid with your timestamps in a recording like Mac Low’s, or something else you’ve encountered?\nWhat matters from a practical and theoretical perspective when you encounter a difficult piece like this? And specifically, what I mean by that is: when a piece appears to want to remain enigmatic or appear opaque—not necessarily easy to interpret—what happens when we include, inside our timestamps, descriptive words like inaudible or unintelligible? What does that do? How might that affect a reader or listener when the thing they’re listening to might have the express purpose of being noise, or of being inaudible on purpose?\n\nAnd so, have you thought about the intersection of those things? And also, more generally, have you run into difficult pieces like this that have really made you think about your practice?\n\n00:39:49\tJason Camlot\tSince this came from the Sir George Williams series, and I was there when this first transcription happened—this timestamp mentioned—I could give a little bit of background. And I think it’s a fascinating example for thinking about timestamping in the way we’ve been discussing it.\nFirst of all, how is this timestamped and annotated on the site where it appears? Essentially, there’s a timestamp before the performance of the Fifth Gatha, where Mac Low explains what they’re about to do. The transcript for that explanation is actually connected to a timestamp—so that’s at 01:06:11, where he says something like, I’ll do a piece called Fifth Gatha, and then he goes on to explain what’s about to happen.\n\nThen you have an annotation at 01:09:35, and it just says performs Fifth Gatha, right? And there’s nothing else there. But I’m looking at this, and I’m actually quite grateful that there are no annotations for the piece itself.\n\n00:40:54\tJason Camlot\tThe reason we didn’t include annotations to describe what was happening in the piece is that we had an approach for all the annotations: not to transcribe any of the poems themselves, so to speak—because we didn’t have the rights to them. Although that probably wouldn’t have applied in quite the same way to this particular work.\nSo, following that logic: at 01:09:35 it says performs Fifth Gatha, and then at 01:26:20 he starts talking again. So all we have is the time span during which that piece unfolded, and that’s the only annotation that exists in relation to that timestamp.\n\n00:41:34\tJason Camlot\tSo there’s not much there, other than the fact that a certain amount of time took place—or unfolded—when this particular piece was performed. The other thing I’d mention is that we approached it with the sense that transcribing it wouldn’t necessarily have been advisable anyway. Instead, we did a lot of contextual research around the event to try to understand what it was we were hearing.\nAnd that, probably, would be more interesting to actually include—because we learned quite a bit from conducting an oral history with two of the technicians who were there assisting Mac Low. They told us about the setup in the room: there were five reel-to-reel tape recorders that had been pieced together. I even saw the tech list that Mac Low had submitted, and that made all the technicians laugh when they were together in the room.\n\n00:42:21\tJason Camlot\tIt was like, there’s no way we’re getting him this stuff, you know? But they cobbled together a bunch of machines. This piece was performed in other places at other times, and he would play those performances while the one happening in the room was also being performed—and recorded by another machine, right?\nSo, essentially, to timestamp this would be extremely complex, because it’s an event unfolding in multiple places at the same time—in New York, and wherever else he was—as well as in the present moment. And then that tape would be brought to a future performance, and so on.\n\nSo, in this case, I think some explanation of the context of what we’re listening to would probably be even more useful than attempting a transcriptive annotation.\n\n00:43:15\tMike O’Driscoll\tThe gaffes are really important for Jackson, as I understand it, in part because they’re one of his many challenges to the centered, stable, egoic presence of the author in the production of the work. In particular, with these polyphonic pieces, he’s challenging notions of a monologic, expressive lyric subject and disrupting our presumptions about the authority that rests with that voice. And the gaffes do really interesting work in that regard.\nBut the other thing they do—and you could say this about a lot of Jackson’s work—is tied to its recursive nature. He’s working with computer technologies and other algorithmic systems to produce his work in the first place, and he’s drawing from discursive corpora of other authors. Gertrude Stein came up earlier in our conversation, and the Stein poems would be a really good example of that—but there are many others as well.\n\nOne of the things he’s doing is also challenging our notions of time. The linearity of the performance piece, its monologic subjectivity, and its stability—these are all things that he’s disrupting in a piece like The Gathas. And these, in turn, are the very presuppositions we often bring to the practice of timestamping.\n\nIn other words, in a very fundamental way, Jackson’s art forms challenge the basic suppositions we hold when we think about duration, performance, event, and subject. All of those things come under scrutiny—and all of them are disrupted in one way or another by his work. That’s why the limit case you shared with us is such a wonderful way to get us to rethink the fundamental ideas we bring to the activity of marking durational media.\n\n00:45:35\tMichael McKenzie\tYeah, that’s so great. OK, the next question has to do—and this might be interesting to you—with constrained vocabularies or standardized vocabularies that are used in style guides. What happens when the only option, for example, when someone is reading or performing something, is to choose the word perform—which is the case here at UVA?\nWhat goes into deciding on a standardized vocabulary or a reduced set of words that we’ll use when annotating or timestamping? What’s the thought process behind determining that perform is going to be the word we use, and not read?\n\n00:46:28\tTanya Clement\tYeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that, because I mean—it’s really the most difficult part. So for our project, we allow people to index the annotations, and that includes a tag. That tag allows you to group your annotations in particular ways, which then lets you access them according to those groupings later.\nSo, let’s say your annotations are transcripts, and you want to add speaker names as tags so you can see everywhere that a particular person has spoken across a project—because all of their annotations have been tagged with their name. The same could be true if, say, you were working within a particular theoretical perspective, and you had terms that might be adopted in the context of that theoretical positioning—you might want to tag a transcript based on those.\n\nI guess the short answer is: it depends on your theoretical perspective. It depends on what it is you’re trying to pull out or identify as significant in a particular recording. You don’t have to do transcripts at all, really. A lot of people tend to do them because they create better access for listeners or users. But I think the larger point is: it depends. It depends on what you’re trying to mark as significant.\n\n00:48:08\tJason Camlot\tTo build on what Tanya said—why reads versus performs—that’s an interesting question, right? The short answer is: it allows you to do things with larger amounts of data that you couldn’t do otherwise.\nSo, the very first thing we did with SpokenWeb in the first year—the first task force we struck—was our Metadata Task Force. That was in anticipation of having hundreds of hours of audio that we were planning to describe. We were imagining doing things with that material which, without some kind of controlled vocabulary and grammar for our schema, would have been much more difficult—especially if we wanted the recordings to teach us things about each other when placed in relation to one another.\n\nWhen I say it allows us to do things we couldn’t do otherwise, I mean we were looking at other existing schemas—their vocabularies and grammars—to ensure that, if we came across other collections that already had some metadata, we’d be able to bring it in, or ingest their metadata, more easily than if we didn’t have a shared structure.\n\nSo we wanted to make sure our terms were interoperable with other standardized languages or grammars. But we also wanted, as much as possible, to ensure that we were tagging, annotating, and describing individual recordings in a way that categorized them meaningfully.\n\n00:49:40\tJason Camlot\tSo that if we then faceted our larger dataset by a search term—like, say, poetry reading or radio broadcast—it would bring up all of the recordings, or as many as are appropriate to bring up under that category. It allows us to actually search a larger corpus of audio more effectively, and also to make connections across recordings in ways we might not have even thought of yet.\nFor example, if we’re interested in the distinction between performing versus reading, perhaps that becomes a useful search term for locating more experimental kinds of performance within the contents fields themselves—which one could do, if one wanted to, because that vocabulary was adhered to.\n\nSo the vocabularies can be useful, but they are all forms of abstraction—necessary forms of abstraction if you want to do this kind of more distant searching or reading of the contents. They’re useful in their own ways, but abstractions also do violence to the particulars of the events themselves. They’re not always accurate, or fully capable of capturing what’s actually unfolding—but they’re useful up to a point, depending on the goals one might have when working with these materials as data.\n\nAnd that’s the other thing that’s really happening in a lot of this work: we’re converting qualitative humanities content—speech, performance, sound of various kinds—into different forms of data, by using these controlled vocabularies.\n\n00:51:21\tMike O’Driscoll\tOne of the things I really love about these kinds of questions—and this is something that has become more and more apparent over time in working with archives of audio media in the context of SpokenWeb—is that every one of these practical questions actually has an incredibly rich intellectual, theoretical, and scholarly background. And that’s quite an amazing thing.\nSo I would say, for example, that the difference between performance and reading—if we designate the activity of a particular author on stage who’s been recorded as reading a work—for me, it connotes the idea that the literary audio performance is secondary to a print version of the text. That you are reading—that it’s derivative, right? That it follows from something else.\n\nWhereas the notion of performance, for me, carries the weight of the performative. In other words, it’s a constitutive medium of its own. A performance produces a text that is not secondary or derivative to the print version—it’s its own beast.\n\nAnd so, the language that we use to describe the work we’re doing in this regard can carry some pretty heavy connotations. But that only comes under scrutiny—only becomes a matter of discussion—when we sit down and deliberate: how do we describe these things? And what values does it carry to do it one way or another?\n\nThat’s the part that’s most exciting for me. Getting to the practicality of it—being able to produce constrained vocabularies to increase searchability, interoperability between different systems, and all of the things that go along with that—is really crucial.\n[Upbeat instrumental music starts playing] But the fun part is the conversation that gets you there.\n\n00:53:41\tSarah Freeman\tTimestamping doesn’t happen in a bubble. During our roundtable, timestamping took us through history—as we discussed, for instance, Gertrude Stein, medieval annals, Hayden White, Victorian periodicals, and Stonehenge. We reflected on the intricacies of the controlled vocabulary used in timestamping and its broader applications, from EKG machines to SETI protocols that extend far beyond literature.\nWe also explored what it means to timestamp a recording that resists singular meaning—such as Jackson Mac Low’s Fifth Gatha. Most of all, we learned that timestamping is far from a settled field. There is no objective or universal timestamp. Each one results from a series of subjective, contingent, and political decisions made by the time stamper.\n\nTimestamping is an invitation to intervene, to interpret, and—most of all—to create.\n\n00:54:49\tSarah Freeman\tThank you to our roundtable participants—Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Michael O’Driscoll—for their insightful contributions to our discussion.\nFurther thanks to Michael O’Driscoll, Sean Lowe, and the SpokenWeb Podcast production team for their support in creating this episode.\n\nTechnical support was provided by the Digital Scholarship Centre at the University of Alberta.\n\nThis podcast was produced by Natasha D’Amours, Michael MacKenzie, Xuege Wu, and me, Sarah Freeman.\n\n00:55:41\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. 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.\nThis month’s episode was produced by Natasha D’Amours, Michael McKenzie, Sarah Freeman, and Xuege Wu, and features the voices and smart ideas of Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Mike O’Driscoll.\n\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast Team includes supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know — rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media.\n\nPlus, check out our socials for info on upcoming listening parties and more. For now, thanks for listening."],"score":4.1670523},{"id":"9672","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 S6 Trailer, Welcome to Season 6!, 16 September 2024, Harris, McLeod, McGregor, Healy, and Ajeeb"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/"],"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 6"],"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 Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Yara Ajeeb\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3849923d-330b-4a2b-8e36-2347aca1e839/audio/1fac0b3b-c40e-4950-8e0f-966db64790a2/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:04:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"4,544,931 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-09-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"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":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897346,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hold onto your hats, because the SpokenWeb Podcast is back!\n\nThis season, we’ll continue to bring you contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds with all new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout.\n\nCheers to Season 6 ~\n\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:14)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does the SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? Or should I say — when?\n[Theme music fades]\n(00:21)\tMusic\t[Futuristic, electronic music starts playing]\n(00:26)\tHannah McGregor\tBecause in season 5 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we travelled through time–\n(00:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tFirst, we paid a visit to the medieval period [choral music starts playing] where we attempted to textually and orally translate the old English poem “The Ruin.”\n(00:42)\tAudio clip from episode 1 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Ghislaine Comeau reciting “The Ruin”\t[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]\nnum geheapen felon/\ngrimly ground/\nIt shone/\n(00:52)\tMusic\t[Upbeat pop music starts playing]\n(00:54)\tKatherine McLeod\tThen we jumped to the 1950s, where we revisited the fascinating early history of Caedmon records.\n(01:02)\tAudio clip from episode 4 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Barbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth.\n(01:13)\tMusic\t[Grunge guitar music starts playing]\n(01:16)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe travelled to the 1980s and listened to recovered recordings from the boundary-breaking Ultimatum Festival.\n(01:24)\tAudio clip from episode 6 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Frances Grace Fyfe\tThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n(01:32)\tMusic\t[Pop-esque, upbeat music starts playing]\n(01:35)\tHannah McGregor\tWe “crossed over” to 2021 and checked in with Linda Morra to hear about Kaie Kellough’s “Magnetic Equator.”\n(01:43)\tAudio clip from episode 3 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Linda Morra\tKellough was the point toward which they were all magnetically drawn. I’ve never seen anything like it.\n(01:53)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Pop-esque upbeat music continues] And we revisited the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium to ask academics and artists big questions.\n(02:02)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Kate Moffat\tWhat are you listening to?\n(02:03)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Rémy Bocquillon\t“What are you listening to?” Ho, that’s a hard question.\n(02:07)\tMusic\t[Eerie echo music starts playing]\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWe also explored how our bodies experience time, by asking how “not-knowing” feels and how it sounds.\n(02:20)\tAudio clip from episode 2 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Nadège Paquette\tDoes the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps]\n(02:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd then, [Sci-fi music starts] we looked to the [echo] “future.”\n(02:36)\tHannah McGregor\tWe heard from the artists harnessing algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance in a live episode.\n(02:45)\tAudio clip from episode 8 of SpokenWeb Podcast\n– Audio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\t[Overlapping voices] nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat.\n(02:52)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe also asked computers to help us decide which oral performers are the best at “doing” the voices in the Waste Land.\n(03:01)\tAudio clip from episode 5 of SpokenWeb Podcast, MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading The Wasteland\tTwit twit twit\nJug jug jug jug jug jug\nSo rudely forc’d.\n(03:07)\tHannah McGregor\tAnd we looked ahead to a future without our mini-series Shortcuts, bidding it a fond farewell.\n(03:13)\tAudio clip from SpokenWeb Shortcuts Season 5, Episode 6, Katherine McLeod\tAs always, thank you for listening.\n(03:18)\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast that showcases audio from archival literary recordings across Canada.\n[Theme music starts playing] But while we’re fascinated with how audio archives can help us understand the history of literature in Canada, we’re not just a history podcast.\n(03:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast covers the “then,” the “when,” and the “now” – contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds.\n(03:49)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season, we’ll continue to look back at the past and explore the future with new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n(03:58)\tKatherine McLeod\tSeason 6 will be our last season, at least in this current form. The podcast will evolve into a new series, on this very same podcast feed, so don’t go anywhere!\n(04:10)\tHannah McGregor\tIn the meantime, as always–\n(04:13)\tKatherine McLeod\t–My name is Katherine McLeod–\n(04:14)\tHannah McGregor\t–And I’m Hannah McGregor. And we are back as your co-hosts.\n(04:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe podcast production team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, and transcriber Yara Ajeeb.\n(04:27)\tHannah McGregor\tSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.\nAnd welcome to season 6!\n(04:37)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Electronic music fades away]"],"score":4.1670523},{"id":"9675","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 S6E7, Listening on the Radio, 16 June 2025, Camlot and McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-on-the-radio/"],"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 6"],"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","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0ce6d2de-52b4-4599-9c37-54198c620fc4/audio/c33fb792-620d-47f8-afb7-6bfe99eb739d/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6ep7-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:43\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,173,943 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6ep7-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-on-the-radio/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-06-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"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\":\"Camlot, Jason. “Toward a History of Literary Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 271.2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 263-271. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17421\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.”\\n\\nESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 1-18. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17412\\n\\n“Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show.” CJLO 1690 AM, http://www.cjlo.com/shows/sonic-lit-spokenweb-radio-show\\n\\nThe audio of “Listening on the Radio” is currently presented as part of the digital gallery of Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe (University of Vienna) in June 2025.\\n\\nListen to the radio show Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, on CJLO 1690 AM in Montreal on Mondays at 2pm EST, or check out past episodes online at cjlo.com.\\n\\nRecordings played during “Listening on the Radio” include the voices of poets Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Cyano Sun Suite), Maxine Gadd (from SGW Poetry Series), David Antin (The Principle of Fit, II”), FYEAR (FYEAR), A.M Klein (Five Montreal Poets), bpNichol (Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1970 – 1980), Allen Ginsberg (from SGW Poetry Series), and P.K. Page (The Filled Pen).\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549796945920,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show is a bi-weekly radio show on CJLO, the campus radio station of Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada). On air since September 2024, the show features “sound recordings from 1888 to the present that document times when people have whispered, spoken, howled and screamed literature out loud” (“Sonic Lit”). Co-hosted by us – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod – the radio show is an extension of our collaborative and creative research about “new sonic approaches in literary studies” (McLeod and Camlot). Prior to stepping into the booth, we had imagined the show as a curation of audio recordings as catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers working with various community and institutional holdings of literary audio across the network. However, as the show began, we had to sort out how the definition of “spoken word” as understood by regulatory bodies in Canadian radio intersects with “spoken word” as understood by poets and scholars of poetry recordings. Making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience than making audio for podcasts such as this podcast, The SpokenWeb Podcast. We soon realized that our radio show was a performative exploration of a set of research questions relating to the affordances of radio for “literary listening” (Camlot). For example, what are the affordances of radio as compared to a podcast when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio? How does spoken word poetry register in relation to other discursive forms on the radio? How do we as hosts perform “talk radio” in talking about poetry? And what is our sense of audience when on air? What does listening sound like on the radio? We produced this audio, “Listening on the Radio,” as a radio-show-as-podcast-episode to answer these questions and others – out loud.\n\n\n00:00:05\t[SpokenWeb Intro Song]\t[Instrumental music begins]\n[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast — stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor —\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod.\nAnd each month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history — created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n[Vocal instrumental music plays]\n\n00:00:54\tHannah McGregor\tThe lines between radio and podcasting have been blurry for as long as podcasting as a medium has existed. With radio shows now regularly streaming online, that distinction has only gotten blurrier.\nSo it makes sense that when today’s episode producers, SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, first started making their radio show Sonic Lit, they anticipated an experience similar to that of making an episode of this very podcast.\n\nInstead, making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience—one that led them to begin asking about how making radio differs from making a podcast, especially when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio.\n\n00:01:45\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, you’ll hear Jason and Katherine modeling their creative and collaborative approach to exploring these questions through a process of conversation, curation, and careful listening.\nThis is Season 6, Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Listening on the Radio.\n\n00:02:10\tJason Camlot\t[Upbeat instrumental music begins] Rolling.\n00:02:13\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast — or should I say, welcome to Sonic Lit, a SpokenWeb radio show–\n00:02:21\tJason Camlot\tPodcast. [Laughter]\n00:02:24\tKatherine McLeod\tIs it a podcast or a radio show? We’re recording this live in the AMP Lab at Concordia University. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with —\n00:02:37\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot. [Katherine laughs]\nI hate the way I say that on the radio show, I have to say.\n00:02:43\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s okay. I always take a deep breath before saying “Sonic Lit: a SpokenWeb radio show.” I’m tempted to almost say—I have to really think and not say “Spoken Lit,” so—\n00:02:56\tJason Camlot\tSpoken Lit: A SonicWeb radio show. [Laughter]\n00:03:00\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd we’re recording this live and kind of pretending that this podcast episode is a radio show — well, we’re more than pretending. We’re recording it as if it’s a radio show, and that’s making us think differently about how we’re talking.\n00:03:16\tJason Camlot\tYeah. Well, wait a second — this is a podcast, right? So welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast. [SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\nBut the conceit of this podcast— and we’ve made many podcasts together —\n00:03:25\tArchival Recording – Unidentified Speaker\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\nJoin episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. Here are Katherine and Jason—\n00:03:34\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\n–But the conceit of this one is that we’re going to make a podcast in the spirit, or maybe even the form, of a radio show—so that we can reflect on the differences between our—at least our experience of—podcasting and radio.\n\n00:03:52\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s right.\n[Soft vocalizing music starts playing]\n\nWe’ve been hosting a radio show on Concordia Campus Radio, CJLO 1690 on the AM dial, or streamed online at cjlo.com, and we’ve been hosting it since September. We’ve been playing recordings of poetry and talking about what we hear as we play those recordings. And we’ve created a bit of a body of work over these past months, and we’re starting to sort of get a sense of what kinds of themes are emerging through the show—but also some experience in making radio.\n\nNeither of us had made radio before when we started this show, so it was not only a question of figuring out what were we going to play on the show and how were we going to talk about poetry, but also quite literally: how are we going to make the show?\n\nBecause when we sit in the booth at CJLO, we also work the board and sort of figure out how to come in and out of commercial breaks—what are we going to do to end the show, how are we going to begin the show, and how are we going to keep track of time while doing all of that?\n\nRadio is really a very timed medium, as we found out.\n\n00:05:06\tJason Camlot\tI mean, really, one of the least podcasting things I could say right now is: “It’s 4:30, and we’re in the AMP Lab podcast studio. It’s partially sunny outside.” Right? You know? [Laughter]\nKatherine opened by saying, “We’re live.” Right? And we are live and we’re speaking live—but you will not be hearing this live, in the same way that when we do our radio shows live.\nPeople who happen to be tuned in to CJLO 1690 [brief hip hop beat] are hearing our shows. So we want to reflect on, you know, some of the differences—that would just be an example. And we’ll talk more about “liveness,” but we’re going to talk about—and just to give some of the themes that we sort of thought of in advance that might be interesting—to play examples of and reflect on:\n\nHow we listen on radio\nWho we’re talking to\nWhat’s our imagined audience for radio\nThis sense of liveness that we’ve been talking about already\nWhat to do with mistakes when they happen on the radio\nBecause, you know, what we do with the mistakes usually when we make podcasts is—we hide them. We cut them out. [Laughs]\nWe erase them. There are no mistakes in our podcasts. But on radio, there are mistakes. And in that sense, it’s a more spontaneous and possibly surprising medium.\n\nSo we want to talk about spontaneity and surprise. We want to talk about: what are some of the things we can do on radio that maybe we wouldn’t do in a podcast? And then I suppose also reflect on some of the larger frames of our show—like Katherine mentioned—one show being part of a larger body of work, but also that our own show plays or is heard among many other shows that are happening, that sound quite different from our show.\n\n00:06:49\tKatherine McLeod\tWe thought that we would follow the format that we usually follow for the radio show, which will involve listening to a series of clips related to those topics that Jason just outlined, and talking about what we hear as we listen to them—and listening to them together.\nThis is Jason and I listening to them together, but also imagining that we’re listening to them with you, our audience.\n\n00:07:15\tJason Camlot\tYeah, that’s great.\nI mean, just to get things straight—usually on a radio show, we don’t play clips of ourselves talking. [Laughter]\n\n00:07:21\tKatherine McLeod\tRight, good point.\n00:07:23\tJason Camlot\tWe play records, we play poetry—\n00:07:26\tKatherine McLeod\tPoetry recordings. Yeah, that’s a good point. We should make that clear.\n00:07:30\tJason Camlot\tBut we’re going to be treating clips from our past radio shows as though we’re DJ-ing them. You know, I was very proud after our first show to come home and tell everyone that I was a DJ now.\n00:07:43\tKatherine McLeod\tAs someone who’s been listening to a lot of recordings of poets on the radio in the CBC archives, I was pretty excited to know what it’s like to be on the other side—making radio.\nAnd then it does make you think about all the different considerations—how the show gets put together and also just how that has changed over time as well.\n\nSo yeah, we’re making radio here—and also making this podcast episode.\n\n00:08:08\tJason Camlot\t[Upbeat instrumental music begins]\nYeah, I was never so proud to claim that I was a podcaster as I was to claim I was a DJ.\nAnyway, let’s move on into the show itself.\n\n[Instrumental music continues for a while]\n\n00:08:48\tJason Camlot\tMaybe we should start by playing a clip or two of what our radio show sounds like, so people have an idea of what we’re talking about.\n00:08:54\tKatherine McLeod\tSounds good. Let’s listen.\n00:08:58\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Transcriber’s note: Audio excerpt from a previous episode of the Sonic Lit show]\n[Soft instrumental music begins]\n\nWelcome to Sonic Lit, a spoken word radio show. I’m Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with —\n\n00:09:09\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tJason Camlot.\n00:09:11\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tAnd every second week, we’ll be bringing you literary audio to the airwaves of CJLO. We decided to call this show Sonic Lit because we’ll be playing many different examples of literary audio.\nAnd today, we’re going to offer you a bit of a sampler of what you can expect to hear on this radio show.\n00:09:33\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tYeah — the theme, if we want to think of the theme, is: what is literary audio?\n00:09:37\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts into another recording from another episode of Sonic Lit]\nWe’re back with Sonic Lit. Before the break, we heard “America” by Allen Ginsberg. And while listening to that, we were — well, we were sitting here in the booth just laughing to ourselves, because we couldn’t believe that after almost every line there was a roar of laughter from the audience. [Audience laughter and cheering]\nIt almost sounded like we were listening to comedy. [Grand piano music fades in and out]\n\n00:10:01\tAudio Clip, Unknown Speaker\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is an excerpt from William Wordsworth’s poem “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” recited here by an unidentified speaker.]\n…the untrodden ways / Beside the springs of Dove…\n00:10:05\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tThat track was called Part 1: Trajectory, from a new album by the group “Fire.”\n[Transcriber’s note: Unable to locate a definitive release under this title or artist.]\n[Distorted instrumental music with overlapping heaving sounds]\n\n00:10:20\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tSo…do we know what a poem is now, Jason?\n00:10:25\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\t[Pages flipping] I think that I understand. I think I understand exactly what a poem is now after having heard that. How about you?\n00:10:33\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI think I do. I also feel like that poem is in my body. [Voice fades]\n00:10:38\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nSo that was a collage of a variety of clips from our radio show. What are we listening to there, Katherine?\n\n00:10:45\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, Jason, the question of what we’re listening to is really part of the question: how did this radio show begin?\nWe wanted to extend a practice we’ve been calling “listening practices” — something we’ve been developing here at Concordia as part of the SpokenWeb team since 2019.\nWe’d gather in a room and a “listening guide” would bring a sound or sonic concept for us to listen to. As that evolved — and continued online during the pandemic — the focus was still on bringing a sound and then talking about it, listening together.\n\nAnd I think this radio show has really continued that. When we play something on the show, we usually don’t prepare how we’re going to respond to it. We just respond to what we’ve heard and ask ourselves what it was we were really listening to.\nI think you can hear that in the clips — that moment where we’re still figuring it out, thinking on our feet. You can hear us listening live and responding in real time. It’s rooted in that idea.\n\n00:12:14\tJason Camlot\tYeah, that’s a major difference between how we do the podcast and how we do the radio show. We don’t prepare. [Laughter]\nFor the radio, we barely prepare. Katherine and I will meet like 20 minutes before and say, “Which CD are we going to listen to today?” Sometimes we haven’t even pre-listened — which can cause problems, but usually creates some very exciting moments. It also allows our audience to hear us listening — to experience listening modeled by listening with us.\n\n00:12:48\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly. And the fact that we’ve been doing this show twice a week during a really busy term —\n00:12:56\tJason Camlot\tOnce every two weeks. We’ll get to errors later. [Laughter]\n00:13:01\tKatherine McLeod\tDidn’t I just say every two—?\n00:13:02\tJason Camlot\tYou said twice a week. [Laughter]\n00:13:07\tKatherine McLeod\tNo, no — that would be a bit much. Maybe one day?\n00:13:10\tJason Camlot\tWe’re aiming for twice a week.\n00:13:11\tKatherine McLeod\tRight — the morning poetry show.\nBut seriously, doing the show every two weeks — it’s amazing we’ve kept that up, given everything else going on: teaching, research, life. If we were making a podcast, there would be so much planning involved. But for this, you have to improvise. It’s almost like training for… I don’t know, not a marathon, but something long-term. It’s about sustaining it. You don’t have to make one polished, research-heavy podcast episode — you’re making something every two weeks. So we can try new things, experiment, and not overthink it.\n\n00:14:13\tJason Camlot\tThat’s a great point.\nIf I were to sum up what you just said: radio, as a medium to explore literary listening, is sprawling. We can go deep, we can take our time. We can just talk — no scripts.\nWith podcasts, we at least draft a script, sometimes fully write it out, and then read it. But here, it’s talk-thinking. Thinking aloud in response to sound. It’s all part of the same continuum of listening practices — like those group listening sessions we’ve done. We’ve even listened to full-length readings and modeled that on the show. But again, radio feels different from sitting in a room with people.\n\n00:15:16\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd to extend the podcast comparison a little further, it actually reminded me of the ShortCuts series I did for the SpokenWeb Podcast — where each episode took a deep dive into the archives, really listening to one or two clips and asking: What are we really listening to here?\nWe gave the space and time to reflect. And honestly, there have been moments on the radio show that feel just like that — which has been a really wonderful thing. But unlike the podcast, we can’t assume the audience is ready for a deep dive. Radio has a wider, more general audience — and truthfully, we don’t know who’s listening at all.\n\n00:16:10\tJason Camlot\tRight. As we were talking about listening, you started talking about audience — and of course, you can’t think about listening without thinking about who’s listening.\nFor me, audience is one of the biggest differences between podcasting and radio. With a podcast, it’s a bit like writing a poem or an academic essay — I imagine a reader or listener in mind, and that’s enough for me to move forward. But when I’m live on air — when I’m actually on the air — someone might be listening to me right then. That changes everything. It summons a completely different sense of audience.\n\nSo… who are we talking to on our radio show?\n\n00:17:05\tKatherine McLeod\tIt’s fascinating to imagine — we could be talking to anyone, anywhere. It could be a broad audience… or a very small one.\nSome might be in their cars, others at home, or listening while doing something else. And if they tune in to 1690 AM or stream it online, they may not hear the show from the beginning. They might drop in mid-show and wonder, “What are these sounds I’m hearing?”\nThat’s why we do things like station IDs or say: Welcome to Sonic Lit, a SpokenWeb radio show. I’m Katherine McLeod and I’m here in the booth with…\n00:17:58\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\n00:18:00\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly — and reminding people of where they are, what they’re listening to, and who we are. That’s not something we’d typically do in a podcast. It felt strange at first, but I think we’ve gotten used to it.\nAnd then of course, the show streams online too — and we can archive episodes. That version of the show maybe feels closer to a podcast, but the radio experience still feels a lot more unknown.\n\n00:18:42\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I have to say, I completely block out the idea of a streaming audience—you know, the idea that people might be listening to it streaming afterwards. And probably it’s possible that more people will listen to it because we’ll tell three or four people to listen to it streaming, whereas probably there are zero people listening to our show when it’s playing live.\nBut that’s not the point. The point is: when we’re on the air, it creates a sense of urgency, because if there’s dead air then we’re not being responsible.\nSome of the things you mentioned, like playing the station ID—I like to say, “It’s 1690 on your AM dial”—you know, playing the station ID, playing the advertisements that we’re required to play during the course of the hour that we have on the air, is all part of a kind of responsibility to the station and to the audience.\n\nBut I have to say, the fact that we don’t know who’s listening to us creates a kind of potential—in my mind, anyways—for an actual listening audience. And it allows me to summon them, you know?\n\nAnd I want to give you an example. So we’re on a college radio station, so it’s probably fewer listeners than, say, larger radio stations—either commercial or the CBC. But, you know, I was on the CBC just yesterday morning to promote a show that’s happening at the Blue Metropolis Festival this Friday–\n\n00:20:21\tCBC Host – Archival Recording\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is an excerpt from Jason Camlot’s appearance on CBC Radio.]\nMontreal-based literary group The SpokenWeb is back at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. They work out of Concordia University to save the audio history of poetry across Canada. They preserve recordings that date back as far as the 1950s. Their event on Friday: Not Your Mother’s Poetry Reading…\n\n00:20:25\tJason Camlot\t[End of CBC clip – podcast resumes]\nAnd I won’t go into the details of promoting it because this is a podcast, so there’s no point. But yesterday I was on CBC at 7:30 in the morning–\n\n00:20:33\tAudio Clip of CBC Episode\t[Audio cuts back to the CBC clip]\n–Jason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb podcast. He’s also a professor of English Literature at Concordia University and joins us on the line.\n\nCBC Host: Good morning.\nJason: Good morning.\nCBC Host: What kind of audio archives is your group trying to preserve?\nJason: These are like–\n00:20:48\tJason Camlot\tI got up to be on the air and I was like, “Oh, why am I getting up? No one’s going to be listening to this.” And I had my eight minutes to talk about the event we’re doing at Blue Metropolis.\nThen, as soon as I got off the air, my phone [phone notification ding sound] was off the hook with texts. I don’t know if that metaphor makes sense anymore, but I was getting a lot of messages from friends.\n\nI was literally thinking to myself, as I got off the air, “Oh no, I’m going to be so tired today. Why did I even do this?” And then all these friends were texting me saying, “I just heard you on the radio!”\n\nIt took me aback. First of all, I was like, what are you doing up listening? I mean—it’s not even that early… Sorry, this is making me sound like a real slacker. [Laughs]\nBut it was a surprise. I got about five texts—that’s five people within my inner circle who had heard me.\n\nSo that made me think, “Wow, there were probably a lot of listeners out there.” And then if we think of college radio in relation to the CBC—maybe it’s only 5% of the CBC audience, but still, that means there are actually people tuned in to that station, listening. So, oh my God—it’s a huge difference.\n\n00:21:53\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, I haven’t told you this story yet, but I have to add it to what you just said—thinking of stories from these past couple of days.\nOver the weekend, I was at a party, talking about our radio show. And in fact, I think I’ve attracted three new audience members from that.\n\nIt was a party full of poets—so, you know, maybe this came from that. But when I was telling them about the radio show, one person replied, like, they responded, they were like:\n\n“Oh, you know, even if your audience is reaching, like, that 17-year-old listening to the radio in that moment…”\n\n[cryptic sound plays and fades]\n\n“…it’s going to change his life.”\n\nAnd I was like—yes! You know, that’s our imagined audience. If we want to have one of many possible versions out there. But really, if someone’s tuning in, there’s a real potential to change their life. And it’s—it’s—yeah. The possibility is there.\n\n00:22:42\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I wanted to run something by you in relation to audience.\nWe’re running out of time for audience. So that’s the other thing. [Laughter]\n\nYou know, we’re working with a time limit—both with the podcast and the radio show—but the urgency of time is much more dramatic in a radio show, because you literally are the clock–\n\n00:23:00\tKatherine McLeod\t–is ticking, coming up at the hour and we have to be done by then, yeah.\n00:23:03\tJason Camlot\tBut I wanted to tell you this story about David Antin, who was a talk poet.\nHe was an avant-garde poet, and he used to sort of create poems by going before an audience and just starting to talk.\n\n00:23:38\tDavid Antin, Archival Recording\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is a recording of poet David Antin before a live audience.]\nI came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’ve been thinking about, and because I don’t come unprepared to do pieces.\n\nOn the other hand, I don’t come prepared the way one comes to a lesson. I haven’t studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit—the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness that comes in certain socially structured events.\n\n00:23:39\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nHe would talk for 45 minutes to an hour, and then he would record them, and then he would turn them into print poems as well. And the poem existed across all these different media—live performance, tape, in a book.\n\nI was doing a sort of email interview with him and preparing an article about him. He had done some radio, you know, so I asked him a little bit about what’s the difference between performing a talk poem on the radio versus performing a talk poem in a classroom before a bunch of people who showed up to hear you?\n\nAnd his response was that when you’re on the radio, you’re just speaking into a black hole. It’s as though your words are just evaporating as soon as you speak them. And there’s no sense of reception.\n\nBut that’s not been my experience at all of speaking on the radio. I—somehow, even though I can’t see anyone listening—have a very tangible sense that there are people listening. I mean, big myth perhaps, but you know, that’s how I feel.\n\n00:24:50\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I feel like the idea of it traveling across the airwaves—and like, you know, again, there’s something about the radio dial or tuning in—that anyone could be tuning in.\nAnd also, that responsibility to put on the show and not have silence, not have that dead air happen. You feel like not only are the listeners depending on you, the station’s depending on you. There’s—again—a sense of responsibility for the sound.\n\n00:25:16\tJason Camlot\tWhat I have, going back to these texts I received from friends, is that I learned things about them — that they have rituals of listening to the radio.\n00:25:24\tKatherine McLeod\tBut yeah, there’s a ritual. Also, really, radio has connection.\nI think of so many times I’ve texted my mom across three hours’ difference out to her in Vancouver. And I did this a lot when I first moved to Toronto and we had moved away from home. But I’d be like, “Oh, turn on the radio at 3:40,” or whatever, to hear this specific piece of music.\nAnd because we were both big CBC Radio 2 listeners, if we could be connected by both having heard that piece of music at that point in the day, there was something very special about both having listened to the same thing at, you know, the same time in our day. [Instrumental music starts playing]\n\nSo radio — connecting across really vast distances — is something that’s really quite, again, special about the medium–\n\nArchival Recording\t[Audio cuts into a prior radio broadcast. Fast-paced instrumental music plays in the background. Voices are slightly distorted.]\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nAnd we’re here on September 30th, which is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. And here on Sonic Lit, we’re bringing you all Indigenous sounds. You just heard—\n\n[Audio glitch/cut]\n\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nSo what happened today, Katherine, in the USA?\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nNot sure. Weirdness is about to happen in the USA. Trump’s inauguration?\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nWe don’t know what’s going to happen in the USA, do we?\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nIt feels very, very uncertain — and a bit weird.\n[Audio glitch/cut]\n\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nIt feels a bit weird.\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nAnd so today’s Sonic Lit show is basically going to be American weirdness.\n[Fast instrumental music continues briefly, then fades]\n\nJason Camlot [live recording, clearer]\nWelcome back to Sonic Lit, the radio show.\nKatherine McLeod [live recording]\nToday we’re listening to poetry by memory — poems that people carry with them in their minds and in their hearts.\n00:27:09\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nIn some ways, what you’re saying makes me think that speaking on the radio is closer to doing a live performance — you know, a live poetry reading — than making a podcast is. You know, there’s a liveness, and it’s about the sort of simultaneity in time, as time is unfolding in the present, that really makes it special.\n\n00:27:32\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd a podcast may be more akin to a vinyl record that a poet has recorded some poems on. And you know, that’s also a very moving sonic experience, but something different — experiencing time together.\n00:27:50\tJason Camlot\tAnd yet, when we’ve been talking about — and even sort of theorizing and talking with experts about — podcasting, the sense of liveness, the sense of immediacy and dialogue and informality is always stressed. But the liveness is maybe just a little bit different. There’s a different kind of liveness in radio than in podcast.\n00:28:10\tKatherine McLeod\tPodcasting — there’s maybe a liveness in, say, the intimacy of the voice, and kind of having that voice with you in your headphones as you’re moving about the world. In those moments in time, you’re experiencing sound along the same time — you’re synced in time through sound, that’s what I’m getting at.\nBut, you know, the intimacy of the voice is maybe something different than the intimacy of time, or being connected through, again, through radio — traveling through the airwaves, connecting you across distances, and connecting through time.\n00:28:47\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\t[Audio cuts into another recording]\nZen Ship sounds from Tanya Evanson — that’s “Qutb,” or “Qutb (the search for the bull),” from her album Zen Ship.\n\nAnd I mentioned earlier that Katherine McLeod can’t be in the studio with me today. Unfortunately, she had to stay home because little Clara, her daughter, was having some…well, just not having the best day. And I think it was a teething thing. And you know, teeth are important — they’re all part of this oral performance art that we’re highlighting on the show.\nBut since she can’t be with us in studio, we’re gonna try to see if we can get her on the phone. So I’m interested to hear what Katherine thinks of the Tanya Evanson stuff we’ve been playing so far.\nKatherine, are you there? Can you hear us?\n\n00:29:35\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\t[Katherine on the phone]\nI can hear you.\n00:29:36\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tAlright, cool, I hear you too. This is ecstatic.\n00:29:40\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\tI’m so thrilled to be live on the show via the telephone.\n00:29:45\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tWell, I hope things are going OK. How’s Clara doing?\n00:29:48\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\tShe’s doing well. She’s actually having her nap, so this is perfect timing to be able to call in. I was thinking, well, I’ll get to listen to the show during her nap — but even better, I get to join you on the show today.\nWasn’t expected, but thanks for heading to the radio booth yourself, Jason — and for telling me.\n00:30:07\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tYeah, yeah. No, it’s great to have you with us one way or another. And it was really your idea to feature Tanya Evanson in today’s show. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about why you wanted to do that.\n00:30:25\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nSo one of the— we’ve been talking about some of the different qualities of liveness in radio, and one of the, in some ways most terrifying and yet also most— it’s become for us most enjoyable, funny, comical, I don’t know, humiliating yet pleasurable— elements of liveness and radio is that when you make mistakes, they just happen. And they’re there. And they’re not going to go away.\n\n00:30:50\tKatherine McLeod\tYes, and they range from things like maybe mispronouncing something–\n00:30:57\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\nWe’re going to be listening to, first of all, some tracks from her new albums. You know— Sun Suite. [Disappointed “womp womp” sound effect plays]\n\nAlright, we’re back—Sonic Lit.\n\nWhile we were off-air, Katherine sent me a text. And Katherine and I have a little bit of a running gag going, at least between ourselves, where we correct each other’s pronunciation or knowledge on the things that we’re playing on air.\nAnd I’ve had a good run. I’ve been—I’ve been able to correct her on a few things over the last few shows. But this time, Katherine texted that I’ve been saying the title of Tanya’s newest record, which I’ve been saying *CNO*, as though it’s *Cyrano*—like the Bergerac—*CNO Sun Sweet*, but it’s actually *Cyano Sun Sweet*.\n\nSo—chalk up a point for Katherine.\nAnd I did want to make that correction: cyanosis.\n\n00:31:50\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nStumbling over–\n\n00:31:53\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\n[Deep voice saying: Now, if you’ll open your book, I’ll begin.] *A Child’s Introduction to the Novel Oliver Twist*, as adopted by J.K. Ross, captures the true spirit of an old England in much of Dickinson’s—Dickens—sorry, in much of Dickens’s own words.\n\n00:31:10\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nOr the CD player not working—\n\n00:31:12\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\n–and I’m going to pause that. [Audio playback fails]\n\nI knew I couldn’t get it on the first try.\n\nHere, let’s try that one more time.\n\n[Audio playback resumes successfully: “Stories of snow…”]\n\nAlright, here we go.\n\n[Audio continues: “Those in the vegetable rain—”]\n\n00:32:25\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nOr your microphone not working, and realizing that you have to just figure that out on the fly and try to, you know, make it work— and sometimes have the help of our very wonderful station manager, Cameron McIntyre, who sometimes will fly into the booth and, you know, turn the CD player on.\n\n00:32:47\tJason Camlot\tCameron’s like a helicopter parent, nearby in case something goes wrong. I mean, we had to be trained to be on the radio, right?\nYou know, you can’t just walk into a studio and start being a DJ. Like, you have to pay your dues for at least three training sessions.\n00:33:01\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I think too, though— from making so many podcasts, I think it actually surprised both of us, because we kind of thought, well, we’ve made a lot of podcast episodes, we’re very, very familiar with making audio about literature, and, you know, we can just— we can do this. And then realized— no, no, there’s so much to learn. And we’re still learning.\n00:33:20\tJason Camlot\tYeah, absolutely. I mean, so you mentioned some of the things that can go wrong— equipment failure of different kinds. And there definitely— it happened to us more than once where, you know, we planned a whole show based on a few CDs and— oh, the CD player’s not working. Or, you know, there are three mics in the studio and none of them seem to be picking up any sound. And we don’t know why. And it’s because the person who was in the booth just before us pressed some buttons that they weren’t supposed to. And so, you know, Cameron has to rescue us.\nOh yeah, one of our most common errors is we get too ambitious. We want to— there’s like five more songs before the show is over, but we only have time for one of them. So we actually list all the songs that we hope to play, but then we only play half of one of those songs or poems–\n\n00:34:05\tKatherine McLeod\t–we’re going to, you know, end this— end this show with playing, like, this poem and this poem, and then Jason and I both look at each other and realize that actually— there’s only two minutes. [Laughter]\n00:34:18\tJason Camlot\t[Fast paced instrumental begins] So yeah, managing time is a big cause of errors for us.\n00:34:22\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. [Fast paced instrumental continues and fades]\n00:34:42\tJason Camlot\tIt seems to me, actually, as we’re talking, that almost all of these different qualities of radio seem to come down to the effects of time on us as radio show hosts. One of the things we’ve been excited about in using time— or about the time— is how much time we actually could devote to listening to, say, a single artist or something like that.\n00:35:03\tKatherine McLeod\tBecause we’ve kind of adopted some of the practices of, say, the ghost reading or again, the listening practice or the podcast— in that we have done some really deep dives. And actually, some of the shows that I think have felt the most satisfying have been where we’ve just really listened closely to, say, a CD of a particular poet or an archival recording.\nAnd I should say that actually— radio, CDs—this is like the best forum for playing poetry. Because on a podcast, you can’t necessarily— you know, you can’t really play commercial recordings. Or if you do, you can just play a clip and talk about it, and all those things about rights.\n\nBut on the radio, playing a commercial recording of a poet is a terrific way of playing the work and then being able to, you know, have it count towards Canadian content on air and everything like that. So we’ve really done some good deep dives into Canadian poets who have made CDs. And I think some of the times that we’ve just really dwelled in one disc have been some of the most generative and enjoyable.\n\n00:36:06\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I love that. I mean— yeah, we literally have license under the legal rubric of radio to play whole records if we want.\n00:36:15\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\t[Audio cuts to a recording]\nThe other thing they really have in common is they’re both off of albums, which I just think is so fascinating. So we really, when thinking about the Montreal sounds to feature on today’s show, we thought: well, why not? Why not feature two albums? But two albums from really different periods… [Voice fades]\n\n00:36:31\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd yeah, there is almost a kind of inclination to just talk less, comment less. So it’s less about our intervention, you know, in the pieces we’re playing as illustrations of something, and more of a kind of sharing and collaborative listening with whoever else might be listening at that moment.\n\n00:36:50\tKatherine McLeod\tYou know, in that way, it’s such an ideal format for a listening practice. Because, you know, we’re listening with our audience, and really the focus is on listening.\n00:36:59\tMaxine Gadd, Archival Audio\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is a clip from a previous episode of the podcast, in which Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod listen to and discuss a recording of Maxine Gadd.]\n[Audio cuts into a previous podcast episode]\n[Maxine Gadd archival recording]\n\nI remember the bell— Some of us are to be half-inch diameter crystal. If there is crystal—Leary—I should have mentioned—was Timothy Leary. I should—I should have explained that before, you know?\n\n00:37:23\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tWow. Maxine Gadd, reading at Sir George Williams University in 1972, on February the 18th. So— tomorrow, many, many years ago.\n00:37:37\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI love listening to this reading again.\nI was really noticing how it was really hard to tell when she moved in and out of a poem. But I really liked that— because I was like, then I felt like listening to her talk about the poem also kind of felt like her reading the poem.\nAnd then I would suddenly realize: oh wait, now we’re in a poem. And it felt like just her voice kind of carried us through both— again, from the commentary into the poem itself. And then even at the end there, when she says like, “Leary, I should have mentioned it was Timothy Leary,” it almost was like— oh right, now we’re out of this poem. And it again felt like kind of part of the poem.\n\nBut I was also just thinking— Jason, I don’t know if you’re noticing this too, but like— when she was talking about the poem, either before or after, it felt so improvised. And like, we kind of— I think when we were sitting here, we felt like, oh, we feel like we can just imagine her talking to us. And it felt very informal. But we really liked that element of it, because it just felt, again, like we were sitting down with her, hearing her talk about her poems in a very casual way— and then read them. And the improvisational quality of it was just— it felt very live.\n\n00:38:52\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tI mean, you really hear her— you hear this in many readings, not all readings— but you really hear Maxine Gadd sort of tuning herself or calibrating herself in relation to the room. So  the opening part of the reading that we just heard after Richard Sommer’s introduction, she was really feeling things out. She didn’t really know what she was going to do. You get a sense that she almost didn’t quite know who she was speaking to yet. And so she needed to explain herself. But at the same time, explain that she would be figuring out what she’d be doing as things unfolded. And I think she needed to start making sound in order to get a sense of some feedback that would help her decide where she would be going with this reading, and what pieces she would choose, and how she would read them— and what it would all mean to her as she did it.\n00:39:52\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI think that we’re going to hear more. We might pause for a…well—\n00:39:57\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tLet’s— let’s, yeah— let Maxine have a little more time–\n00:39:59\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tYeah, because she’s about to actually talk about a really important movement in Vancouver called Intermedia. So let’s— let’s hear that before we do anything.\n00:40:07\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tSo let’s continue being the audience for Maxine Gadd, February 18th, 1972. And you’re listening to CJLO 1690.\n00:40:21\tMaxine Gadd, Archival Audio\tOh yeah, this—this is where I’m at now. I don’t like it. OK.\n00:40:27\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd it’s probably not a good point. It’s not necessarily about, you know, disseminating our ideas about these recordings as research. It’s about listening again with other listeners who are tuning in.\n\n00:40:36\tJason Camlot\tYeah, it’s about—it’s about sharing also, right? You know, so the Montreal spoken word performer Fortner Anderson has a show on our rival station, CKUT—not really rival station, but that’s McGill’s station.\nBut on his show, he doesn’t speak at all. He just plays records, right? So basically, he uses his hour purely to share work, to promote work, circulate work, expose work, you know. And there’s definitely a much greater sense of, you know, that being one of the major purposes of what we’re doing on the radio.\n00:41:10\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, and it’s so exciting to think—like to be like, OK, well, you know, this disc that, you know, we— I don’t just have to choose one clip from it. In fact, we can—we can really—we can listen to the whole thing. We can listen to tracks and also then talk about it a bit. But really, it’s about the listening. And then we have been able to share a lot of local artists and, you know, discs that we’re big fans of and want people to listen to as well.\n00:41:34\tJason Camlot\tYeah, so in the spirit of this topic, the next hour of our podcast will be devoted to listening to a single record. Here we go now. Just kidding.\n[Piano instrumental begins]\n\n00:41:59\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’re listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast— or Sonic Lit. [Laughter]\nYou’ll do it again? Yeah, because I was like, wait—how should I— You’re listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with—\n00:42:17\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\nKatherine, was that your radio voice that we were just hearing?\n00:42:21\tKatherine McLeod\tYes. I will say you also have a radio voice, Jason.\n00:42:24\tJason Camlot\tDo I ever. [Laughter]\nIt’s so embarrassing. I hear myself speaking that way and I just can’t help myself when I’m in the studio. I was like, “And Jason Camlot,” you know? Like, who am I? Who is that?\n\nBut I think it’s interesting to think about how we speak on the radio and what forms of talk are happening, you know, on our show. Like what forms of talk are happening to us on our show? What forms of talk are we performing on the show? What forms of talk are we listening to on the show? Because there are a lot of different forms of literary talk and performance, but then also our show happens within a much wider context of other forms of discourse and talk.\n\n00:43:03\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I remember one time when we had arrived early before our show, we were listening to the show that airs just before us. And it’s a sports show–\n00:43:14\tJason Camlot\t–the Tommy John Show.\n00:43:17\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. [Laughs]\nThat was your radio voice. [Laughs]\n00:43:18\tAudio Recording from Tommy John Show\t[Audio cuts to a recording from Tommy John Show]\nAgain, so this could be a disaster— an absolute disaster— for the Carolina Hurricanes. And so what do you do if you don’t think you can get a deal done? So you try and get something for him. And there’s going to be teams that would be interested— absolutely— it’s Rico Ratman— but not necessarily a team he wants to sign with. A team that’s going to try and win a cup. So I would not be surprised. A team like Winnipeg, Edmonton. Because you know what they’re gonna have to do— Carolina— they’re gonna have to retain some of the salary to make it—\n\n00:43:50\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd—\n\n00:43:51\tJason Camlot\tHe has a good radio voice—\n00:43:52\tKatherine McLeod\t—Because we were— when we were listening, we were amazed at the way that he just— he talks continuously [music plays] in such an animated way. And just the way that he pauses— there’s just such a style to it. It was just incredible to hear. So, you know— and also sounds really different from our show and the person that comes in after us–\n00:44:10\tAudio Recording from Tommy John Show\t[Audio cuts to a recording from Tommy John Show]\nThat was “Arizona” by Wunderhorse off their newest album “Midas,” which I’ve been a huge, huge fan of lately. It’s not doing anything necessarily reinventing the genre or doing anything particularly special, but it’s just like— I’ve— sometimes I’m in the mood for just some really, really well-made indie plays, you know?\n\n00:44:18\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nLocal Montreal artist talks about local events and also has a really distinct unique sound to that show as well. And across— again, look across the shows on the station— very diverse sounds of the show across the spectrum of radio. A lot of differences.\n\nAnd yet there’s something about, like, the radio voice that we kind of know when we do it. And you know what? What is that? And, I do it too. And I often, sometimes even on the radio— I’ll notice when I go from sort of a hesitant thinking or like, is the microphone working? Is this working? Is this working? And there’s lots going on in my head.\nAnd then suddenly, in a moment when we’re talking about something we’ve just heard, I’ll realize I’m really just like in the zone of thinking about what we heard and what I’m talking about. Even right now— I’m now gesturing with my hands, whereas I wasn’t before. And my voice changes then. And that’s another kind of, I guess, radio voice.\n\n00:45:32\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I actually like the setup better in here than in the studio— the radio studio— because we get to look at each other. We’re side-by-side in the radio studio, and I think that makes a difference.\nBut I want to say— when we first— or when I first heard the Tommy John Show, because we wait outside before we go in— so it’s playing in the larger studio— I was amazed at how he never says “umm,” you know?\nAnd when I listened back to the first few shows we did, I’m like “umming” every 3 seconds. And I was like— how does he do that? You know? How do I not?\nI think I’ve gotten better at it, actually. And not even thinking about it. It’s just sort of gradually becoming a little more fluid— without “ums.” There’s a good one. I’m definitely going to keep that one there.\n\nBut Matteo, who does the show after us—who does kind of a local music show and bands that are in town, who’s in town—his whole approach is more like, “I love this band,” you know? And basically, the entire approach to the show is, “This band I’ve been listening to like, you know, for 30 years.” He’s only like 20 years old. “And I love them, and they’re great, and they’re in town, and they’re playing here. I remember I last saw them last summer here,” or whatever. And it’s all very personal, you know?\n\nAnd so even just the bookends to our own show have very different— like, when Tommy John’s speaking, you have a sense of a hardcore sports audience who knows as many stats as he does, and he can just rattle them off like nonstop. And is a fan of every sport and can talk extensively about every player, every trade, every—everything. He has a very clear sense of who he’s talking to. And so does Matteo. And I think that’s— that we’re still coming into our own. Like we talked about audience before, but I think we do have that. And—and I suppose the way we talk is going to change as we gain a clearer sense of who we’re talking to.\n\n00:47:17\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, but it is about kind of getting comfortable with your sound, and also knowing that, like, your voice is a radio voice, even if it doesn’t sound like other radio voices. I think that was actually Cameron McIntyre, our station director, who said that when we were doing our training—that every voice is a radio voice. And I was like, yes, that’s right.\n00:47:50\tJason Camlot\tWe’re doing a literary radio show, right? Which is probably—I mean, and it’s a poetry radio show. And it’s like often obscure poetic works. We’re doing sound poetry—[Audio transitions to a distorted clip: “your voice, so what is the bone inside of your body… body.”]\nIt’s probably like the least commercial kind of show imaginable, right? You know, we’re not doing a sports show or one on, like, recent music that’s been through town like the shows before and after ours. And it’s been obvious to me that even at a college station, radio is functioning within a very commercial framework—commercially minded. There are ads we have to play.\n\n00:48:46\tAudio Clip, Unknown Speaker\t[Audio cuts to a recording – Unknown source]\nOne of the lions ladies left behind to scratch coloured gods on rocks.\nLate production. We’d have “Freak, in collaboration with TD Bank Group presents…\n\n00:48:54\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nFor the shows that are topical, maybe are supposed to draw in audiences. It’s as though our show is designed to drive audiences away. Almost. No—just kidding! It’s a great show and you should all listen to it. But yeah, I don’t know—what do you think about this element of radio—that it really is sort of functioning within a kind of commercially minded framework?\n\n00:49:21\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, well, it’s interesting too, because the examples both you and I refer to when talking about the show have often been CBC Radio. And so it’s almost like our go-to comparison is public radio, not commercial radio.\nBut I think that what we’ve noticed is—then realizing, “Oh yes, radio is inevitably influenced by the commercial,” and trying to sort that out when thinking about poetry, which is often not thinking about the commercial. And even things like from the station, getting reminders—because we’re in Canada—to play Canadian content to a certain percentage, or a list of top songs for the week.\n\nI know we just got an email saying that our show was part of the days that will be audited next week, so that means that we’ll have to submit a very elaborate playlist where it really identifies which content is Canadian. And often on our show, most of our content is Canadian, but it’s recordings of poets—not necessarily recordings of the latest Canadian singers. So it’s a different kind—it feels like a different kind of Canadian content.\n\nIt’s also made us think a lot about poetry itself—like, say, playing the poetry, talking about the poetry. Is our show talk radio? That category doesn’t quite feel right for our show, but we are talking about the material. Or is our show more like experimental sound-folk something? You get leaning into more of the recordings, and even the record labels that some of the poets are on. Is it some mix? It feels like it doesn’t quite fit in any of those categories.\n\nBut it’s been interesting to try to apply one of those categories onto our show and sort of see: how does that work? In what ways do we kind of exceed those boundaries or just not quite fit? Which is, it’s funny—for, again, college radio, where everyone’s pushing boundaries—but just this show…it’s a mix.\n\n00:51:33\tJason Camlot\tI do feel that within the college radio environment, being as weird and experimental as you like— [Swooshing sound]\nThere have been a couple of times where Cam has come in from his desk into the studio and said like, “Are you still on air? Or is there something going wrong with the signal?” or whatever. But it’s just because we’re playing a sound poet, you know, or an experimental sound piece.\n\n00:51:55\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly at that moment. I’m glad you told that—told that story. Yeah. He’s like, “Just to check—is that…?”\n00:52:01\tJason Camlot\tAnd he wasn’t like, “Turn it off! Go to the regular programming!” He just pokes in and goes, “Is this what’s supposed to be playing?” But it’s like—oh, that’s cool. That’s great. [Trombone plays]\nThere have been more commercially minded moments of our shows—like when we play Tanya Evanson’s new record or Kaie Kellough’s new record, and we want to promote it.\n\n00:52:26\tAudio Recording, Unknown Speaker\t[Audio cuts to a recording – Unknown source]\nIn the future it’s ache. Strive. A natural continuity.\n\n00:52:46\tJason Camlot\tThe way anyone would be promoting a new band’s record, right?\nBut at the same time, I do feel like the stuff we play on our show is kind of in tension with all the other forms of talk that are expected to be heard on the radio. And I find that really exciting and fun, actually—that like, even though it’s all talk, like you were saying—or music, right? Music is the go-to, really—but of all the talk shows, the fact that we’re playing talk shows that doesn’t register as the correct kinds of radio talk seems to me very exciting.\n\nAnd I think that wouldn’t, again, be a feeling I would have if it wasn’t within the radio context. The fact that it’s actually open to anyone hearing it. The fact that people who probably don’t want to be hearing it are hearing it, because it’s on somewhere or whatever—for me, is very exciting. Because it feels like a discursive intervention of some kind.\n\nStill, when you think about it, for all that talk about how fringy our show is, it is still a radio show. And as Hannah McGregor, our co-producer of the SpokenWeb Podcast, pointed out, there are differences in access to being able to produce shows between podcasting and radio. And the bar—even on a college radio station—may be higher than starting your own podcast would be. So I think it’s important. It’s an important point that Hannah raised, and that we’ve been thinking about surrounding the question of access to the medium, and being able to use it to make interventions of the kind that we’ve just been talking about.\n\n00:54:35\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m really glad that Hannah made that point to us too, because I was thinking a lot about why were we so happy and proud of ourselves to be DJs? And I think it also had to do with the way in which we both just really loved radio as a medium. And that’s been the medium that we’ve grown up with, we’ve listened to throughout our lives.\nAnd so the idea that we were going to do something that others who we have admired have also done—at first, I didn’t think about it so much as about access. It was more like, “oh, we’re getting to do that thing that we’ve always wanted to do.” But then to realize, “oh, right, we’re getting to do that because there’s a degree of access that we have”—to be able to say, like, pitch our show to the station and be trained.\n\n00:55:19\tJason Camlot\tYeah, you’re totally right.\nI think one of the reasons I was so excited to be on the air is because I didn’t have access to that medium growing up. And I wanted to, we would maybe watch a show like “WKRP in Cincinnati” and see the inside of a booth.\nBut it was only when I went to CEGEP—which is like after high school—that I got to see inside a radio booth. And even then, as a first-year CEGEP student, I couldn’t get on the roster of DJs at CEGEP, which was only broadcasting within the building. It didn’t even have a band. So yeah, there was a kind of allure due to the barriers that were set up from using that medium.\n\n00:55:54\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd even for me too—especially the aura of the radio archives. I know when I first went to CBC Radio archives to listen to poets that I was researching there—and I got to go—at that time, CBC Radio Archives were in the basement. And like, going downstairs and seeing the sign for “Radio Archives,” I was just enthralled.\nAnd so then to think of bringing that to my experience of being on the radio—and, you know, not everyone’s going to do that. But I think there was something that then— I hadn’t even thought about access because it was just so exciting to enter into that space itself.\n00:56:31\tJason Camlot\tI mean, I think there’s a continuum of access between commercial radio, public radio, and college radio. College and community radio is certainly more accessible and really big. But we had to be somehow within the community—or within the institutional community in this case—to be able to apply to have a show. The application process wasn’t overly onerous, right? But still, not everyone’s in university, not everyone is in an institution that can provide that kind of access. What does all this add up to?\n00:57:10\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, it makes me think of how this show—it’s not just about one show. The show is a body—the show is a body of work. It’s continuing to grow.\n00:57:21\tAudio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording – a collage of audio clips from previous recordings]\n[Overlapping and distorted voices]\nWhich is cool. I don’t know what that was, but I was just listening and looking. Which is the lake of the island, and it’s freezing.\n\n00:57:41\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd right now, we don’t even have a year’s worth, but we’re sort of reflecting on how this show was evolving. Also thinking about maybe things that, you know, we wouldn’t have known—like doing a deep dive into, say, a CD, or actually just kind of stepping back and listening with listeners would be the way to go.\n\nAnd I think that that was something that we only developed while doing the show. And so it makes me think of almost this show as a space to experiment—or almost kind of like a lab, to use a buzzword—but even more than a lab, almost like—like going back to listening practices—like an opportunity to practice, but also like, it is a performance. Listeners are listening, but it’s evolving. It’s like we’re continuing to practice listening with listeners. And there’s not a conclusion. It’s continuing.\n\n00:58:41\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I’ve found it’s served as a kind of public forum for working our way through content that we don’t have time to do otherwise, right? And which allows us to begin to make connections between some of the different recordings we’re making that we maybe would never have thought of as linking up or connecting to each other. So the fact that we have the time to just play these things, listen to them—it’s almost like doing the first readings, you know, of materials that will then allow you to do something maybe a little more specific, a little more expository with afterwards.\nBut this phase of listening, and then of thinking about connections live as they’re happening, is incredibly generative. And I think interesting in its own way to listen to, actually, because you’re sort of hearing those connections be heard as they’re perceived—and hearing the initial reflections on what those connections might mean right when they were perceived.\n\nSo it is—and I like the idea of—you know, so you have a bad show, right? You make a lot of mistakes or something goes wrong. I like falling back on that argument that—I think it was our colleague Elena Razlogova said to you—is that, well, it’s just, it’s a body of work. Right? So it’s sort of like, you know, OK, that was a bad show, but there’ll be another show.\n\n01:00:00\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly. Exactly. Yeah.\nAnd that idea too, of like listening—hearing the listening unfolding live on air. You know, listeners—they—we really—what we’re doing is listening on air, and listeners are hearing that. And I think that going back to that point about it being live on the radio—that I think that is what is most important about actually doing the show live, is then for listeners to be able to listen with us and hear that listening taking place.\n01:00:35\tJason Camlot\tWhat do we usually say at the end of our show? Like, how do we—how do we sign off, so to speak?\n01:00:40\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, sometimes you’re showing—we announce what’s going to play next and then do an outro. I’ll do it, yeah.\n01:00:50\tJason Camlot\tSorry—we list 10 songs and then play 30 seconds of one of them. Yeah. But apart from that, you know, what do we say? I mean, you’re so good at bringing us into the show. Like, can you do the opening again? Let’s just hear it.\n01:01:01\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, I can do what I did for one of the outros. But I have an idea of how to end this. So let’s see how this goes.\nYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. This episode has been about Sonic Lit, a spoken word radio show. My name is Katherine McLeod and I’m here with—\n\n01:01:21\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\n01:01:23\tKatherine McLeod\tThanks for listening. [Laughter]\nI couldn’t—I got distracted by your radio voice. [Laughter] Well, that’s good.\n\n01:01:33\tJason Camlot\tThis has been a podcast, not a radio show—even though it really sounded like a radio show.\n01:01:41\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s right. So, we could say “Tune in next week,” but in fact, stay tuned on the podcast feed for future episodes of the SpokenWeb Podcast.\nAnd if you’re interested in checking out Sonic Lit, the SpokenWeb radio show, head to cjsf.com. Or if you’re in Montreal, tune in Mondays at 2:00 on 1690 AM. Or as Jason likes to say—\n01:02:10\tJason Camlot\tYour AM dial, 2:00 PM Mondays.\n[Audio: Thanks for tuning in—and keep it locked to 1690 AM.]\n[Soft instrumental music plays and fades]\n\n01:02:31\tHannah McGregor\t[SpokenWeb theme song begins]\nYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n01:02:47\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Jason Camlot and our very own Katherine McLeod.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n\n01:03:05\tHannah McGregor\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\nIf you love us, let us know—rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media.Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n\nUntil next episode, thanks for listening."],"score":4.1670523}]