[{"id":"9275","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E2, Sound Recordings Are Weird, 4 November 2019, Camlot and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Cheryl Gladu"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Cheryl Gladu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Cheryl Gladu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/d43444be-7bce-40fc-8a82-091032ea2dba/sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"1:01:28\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"59,075,231 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"128kbps\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-2-sound-recordings-are-weird-novedit_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-11-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford Universiy Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23893\\n\\n—. “Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21 (2015). https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.744/\\n\\nConnor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.\\n\\nErnst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording.”\\nFolklore Forum 32 (2001): 57-102.\\n\\nGitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.\\n\\nStanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.\\n\\nNaremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016.\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke\\nUP, 2003.\\n\\nUCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549461401600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In “Sound Recordings are Weird: Stories and thoughts about early spoken recordings”, SpokenWeb research Jason Camlot interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb Network to uncover the stories behind the making of Early Literature Recordings. Drawing from his recent book “Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings”, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological and personal meaning of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we are interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them? What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world? And What do they mean now?\n\n00:00:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n00:00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As we dive into episode two in the SpokenWeb series, I want you to picture the oldest recording technology you can think of. Oh, what are you picturing? Is it a cassette player? You can tell me if it’s a cassette player. Is it a phonograph and maybe a wax cylinder? In this episode spoken web researcher Jason Camlot, interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb network to uncover the stories behind the making of early literature recordings. Drawn from his recent book Phonopoetics, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological, and personal meanings of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we’re interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them. What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world and what do they mean now? Here is Jason Camlot with episode two: Sound Recordings are Weird: stories and thoughts at the earliest spoken recordings.\n00:02:08\tMusic:\t[Instrumental]\n00:02:19\tJason Camlot:\tPart one. Old Sound Recordings are Weird.\n00:02:44\tJason Camlot:\tNo, there’s nothing wrong with your device. Do not adjust your radio dial so to speak. What you are listening to is an early sound recording.\n00:03:06\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. A Victorian scholar, that’s someone who studies 19th century literature and culture, and a researcher who is interested in the relationships that exist between sound and literature.\n00:03:29\tJason Camlot:\tIf you listened to the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, you might recall that the sound you’ve just heard is what first got me interested in research about the history of sound recording and how people have read literature out loud since the 19th century. I was an undergraduate student taking a full year of Victorian literature class. We were studying the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson. And then one morning, my professor, John Miller,\n00:03:56\tJohn Miller:\tI’m John Miller, and I’ve retired from teaching Victorian literature at Concordia University in Montreal,\n00:04:02\tJason Camlot:\tWalked in with a boombox.\n00:04:04\tJohn Miller:\tThe classrooms weren’t equipped, so I had to get a boombox and trundle into the class and fiddle with the dials and so on.\n00:04:18\tJason Camlot:\tAnd played us that recording you just heard. I have to say the first time I heard the piece, I found it to be a bit off-putting and scary because of the way it sounded, but also kind of strange and wonderful, sort of magical.\n00:04:35\tJohn Miller:\tI think there was some fairly stunned silence because, of course, none of us ever expected anything like this.\n00:04:44\tJason Camlot:\tIt was exciting to know that this long dead poet we were studying was, all of a sudden, transported to us in our classroom through a boombox. Many years later, I asked John Miller if he remembered the first time that he had heard the recording.\n00:05:01\tJohn Miller:\tI first heard the recording when I was a graduate student in a full-year Tennyson and Browning course, and John Pettigrew who was teaching the course had a copy of it and wowed us one day.\n00:05:19\tJason Camlot:\tI asked him if he remembers what it sounded like to him when he first heard it.\n00:05:22\tJohn Miller:\tIncomprehensible.\n00:05:24\tJason Camlot:\tAfter a while, as you listen to an old recording repeatedly, you can get past the strangeness of the sound and begin to decipher the words and tune into the way the reader is delivering or performing the poem. You come to hear the reading as a form of interpretation, a manner of actually performing the meaning of the poem through the use of different kinds of intonation and other vocal techniques that shaped the sound of the text with and through the reader’s voice. There are lots of different interpretations of this same poem recorded by Victorian actors and elocutionists around the turn of the 19th century.\n00:06:05\tAudio Recording:\tHalf a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred. / “Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” he said. / Into the valley of Death\n00:06:24\tJason Camlot:\tThe recording we have of Tennyson reading his own poem is the first such recorded oral interpretation of this poem. It gets us thinking about how Tennyson interpreted his own poetry with his voice.\n00:06:37\tJohn Miller:\tIt’s, I think the term that we came up with was elegiac rather than heroic. Tennyson recites the poem so slowly, that any heroism is evaporated. And, really, I think his performance reverses much of the conventional wisdom about the poem at the time.\n00:07:13\tAudio Recording:\t“Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” He said. / Into the valley of Death”\n00:07:21\tJason Camlot:\tThe heroic sound of the poem that John Miller refers to is clearly audible in this torrential rendition of the poem by Victorian stage actor Lewis Waller known for what James Naremore has described as his ‘phallic performing skill.’ The interpretation that John Miller hears in Tennyson’s reading goes against that standard accepted idea about the meaning of the charge\n00:07:45\tJohn Miller:\tthat it was a kind of newspaper, a poet Laureate glorification of British foolhardy gallantry. Rather than a lament for the disaster that it was\n00:08:10\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:08:11\tJason Camlot:\tHalf a league, half a league, half a league onward. In the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Forward, the Light Brigade. Charge for the guns, he said. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Ellipsis. Dot, dot dot. When can their glory fade? O, the wild charge they made. All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made. Honour the Light Brigade. Noble six hundred. This translation of an unintelligible old recording into clear or at least clearer words that I have just performed, represents an act of demystification, an unweirding of this old recording. Old sound recordings like the one we just heard are weird, not just because we can’t always decipher what the actual sounds are, but because, well, firstly the recording has preserved the voice of a famous person from another century whose voice we may have thought was lost for all time. So it’s weird to have an emanation from that body assumed eternally absent, resonate again, vibrate through the air for us to hear. It creates a kind of vocalic body, evoking the physical body that’s no longer there. That idea of the vocalic body comes from Steven Connor’s book about ventriloquism. Secondly, the recording itself doesn’t sound normal to us. This is because we are listening to a digitized version of a different material medium; a late-Victorian brown wax cylinder. The particular cylinder behind this recording wasn’t preserved according to best archival practices. It lost some of its shape over time, distorting the voice of the poet, making it kind of warped or erie or creepy sounding to our modern ears and adding other sounds that are derived from the material medium itselfT from the wax. Those sounds become even stranger as the sound is migrated from one media format to another. In the case of this early Tennyson wax cylinder recording, it went from brown wax cylinder to a small flat disc record that was sold to the public by the Tennyson society. John Miller purchased that record and then transferred that to a cassette tape and played it through a boombox. Hearing odd cylinder noises through a 1980s boombox estranges the original sound from its source. Same goes for when we turn it into an mp3 file and listen to it through a computer or iPhone. There are a lot of additional sounds beyond the voice that we cannot identify in this recording. For example, starting from about one minute and 33 seconds into the recording, we hear a loud banging sound.\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\tWe can’t know if this is a feature of the recording technology or if Tennyson himself was simply getting carried away with his recitation, banging a lectern or a table as he performed the poem. This is what John Miller assumed the banging sound to be.\n00:11:55\tJohn Miller:\tI think there are points at which he is pounding his cane on the floor, points which he runs out of breath, and that does give an extraordinary sense of the life, I think.\n00:12:08\tJason Camlot:\tAn extraordinary sense of Tennyson’s sonic presence, of his vocalic body. There’s also the issue of context. We can’t always hear context in a sound recording, although there are sometimes clues that can be heard. In this case, it’s hard for us to understand what was going on at the time. Why was he even making this recording? What would that have been like for him? Where was he exactly? What time was it? Was he reading or reciting his poem by heart? These old sound recordings are like escaped fugitives from their original media and historical contexts. And yet, despite all this strangeness, even with all this missing information, when we hear a historical voice recording, when we listen to Tennyson read The Charge of the Light Brigade again, over 100 years after he recited it into a phonograph, there’s something very real about it. This sense of the realness of recorded sound seems to have been felt by listeners even at the earliest exhibitions of the tinfoil phonograph.\n00:13:17\tLisa Gitelman:\tI think there is something to that, that this was an experience of temporal continuity, that there was a slice of time that was being inscribed onto these sheets of tinfoil, in a way that when you write down what somebody said, you’re not putting down – you’re putting down the words, but you’re not putting down a slice of time. My name is Lisa Gitelman. I’m a professor at New York University where I teach in the departments of English and the department of Media, Culture and Communication. There were several ways I guess we could say that these recordings and these exhibitions became experiences of temporality, right? The, the kind of preservative nature of the tinfoil but also the kind of the temporal duration of the recording itself.\n00:14:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe realtime quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what philosopher Wolfgang Ernst has called the ‘drama of time critical media.’ I like the idea that something dramatic happens when we play with time by playing sound recordings. An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing. It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one is hearing is living in the present, replicating the live event of which it is apparently a real time reproduction. Sound recording works on human perception itself and on our perception of time in particular. So Ernst’s argument about the strange drama of sound recording is based on his idea that we’re not cognitively equipped to process events from two temporal dimensions at the same time. When we immerse ourselves in real time sound, we perceive it as live and this jars our awareness of time. So that’s another weird quality of early sound recordings: they give us the experience of feeling time as multi-dimensional. In that way, a phonograph is like a time machine and we’re the time travellers. As an aside, HG Wells published his story, The Time Machine in 1895 soon after the invention of sound recording and film media technologies. Maybe he was inspired by this weird drama of time critical media that Wolfgang Ernst just talking about\n00:15:51\tJason Camlot:\tPart two, what is an early sound recorder? How did recording sounds become possible and how did those early technologies work?\n00:16:05\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:16:06\tJason Camlot:\tMaybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As we just heard from Lisa Gitelman, wax cylinders weren’t even the first recording technology, just my personal entry into the world of recorded sound. Like a lot of innovations, in hindsight, it seems almost obvious that humans would record sound, including the human voice, and play this back for all the reasons we’ve come to expect. However, like a lot of human inventions, there was a certain degree of serendipity involved in the development of recording technologies and also some inventive talent. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, that one name kept coming up.\n00:16:52\tAudio Recording:\tThomas Edison, Thomas Edison, Edison, Thomas Edison.\n00:16:57\tLisa Gitelman:\tI have doctorate in literature, so I’m a person who’s interested in texts, interested in reading and writing. And after I went to graduate school, I got a job at Rutgers University in New Jersey, working with a team of scholars that have, for a long time, have been researching and publishing the papers of the American inventor, Thomas Edison.\n00:17:19\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:17:21\tLisa Gitelman:\tAnd I spent many years working with that team of scholars to educate ourselves and educate the public about this archive and what was it. One of the things in it was a lot of material about the invention of recorded sound and I just was kind of bitten by the buck and became fascinated. In particular with the kind of earliest moments in 1877 and 1878, when the idea recorded sound itself didn’t really exist. One of the most precious things there, were experimental notebooks. So we have the original experimental notebooks in which Edison and his team of inventors were playing around in the 1870s – let’s say, in the fall of 1877 or the summer of 1877 – with lots of telephone devices, basically trying to invent a better telephone. And there was a lot of work in this period by Edison and by many others on telephone and Telegraph work, and there were lots of telegraph systems that did involve paper tapes. Either a telegraphic messages printed on paper tape or paper tape used as a kind of repeating device for telegraph communication, to make telegraphy a little bit more automatic. So using paper was something they had around and it also locked into expectations about inscription. And we have documents that more or less show us a certain moment when Edison realized, ‘Look, the way we’re doing this, we could actually use this technology to not just, you know, sort of transmit sound, but actually save it up.’ So you can actually see this in the manuscript notebooks. And then of course there are lots and lots of pieces of correspondence and business papers, then some promotional materials, so the archive is just a kind of many-splendored collection of oddities in a way. But it’s filled with these stories that can be pieced back together by historians who go through the papers.\n00:19:44\tJason Camlot:\tI’m going to try to take you through a history of acoustic recording technologies from the pre-recording phonautograph of the 1860s to the invention of the tinfoil phonograph in 1877 to the perfected wax cylinder phonograph in 1888. And then, eventually, To the introduction of flat disc gramophone records and beyond. To give this early historical account of sound recording technologies. I’d like to introduce you to:\n00:20:14\tPatrick Feaster:\tMy name’s Patrick Feaster. I’m media preservation specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative at Indiana University and I study the cultural, social, and technological history of sound recording with a particular emphasis on very, very early sound recordings. When we talk about sound recordings today, we generally think of them as something that is intended mainly to be listened to. You record speech music…\n00:20:40\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:42\tPatrick Feaster:\t…some kind of sound, then you play it back again as sound.\n00:20:46\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tThe first person to record a sound out of the air and then play it back was Thomas Edison in 1877, But he was not the first person to record a sound out of the air. The first person to record a sound out of the air was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He was a scientific proofreader who, In about 1850 to 1853, was given a treatise on physiology, which included a section describing how the human ear and eardrum work. As he read this, he began imagining to himself an artificial eardrum that would vibrate in the same way that human eardrum does, but then instead of passing those vibrations along to the auditory nerve and the brain so that we could hear them, it would write them down so that, as he imagined, any sound that the human ear was capable of hearing could be written down in this way. The invention he came up with consisted first of all of a big funnel with the membrane at one end of it. And the idea was you’d direct sounds of speech, song, whatever it was, into this funnel, they would cause the membrane to vibrate, then a stylus attached to the other side of the membrane would move back and forth with the vibrations. Now underneath the stylus would be a sheet of paper covered with the soot of an oil lamp and wrapped around a cylinder, and as sounds were directed into the funnel, you’d rotate the cylinder and as the stylus moved back and forth, it would draw a wavy line in the soot. After you’d made your recording, you’d take the sheet of paper off the drum, you’d fix it in an alcohol bath, kind of like fixing a charcoal drawing, and then you’d have this visual record of sound. Now the wavy line on that sheet of paper contains the same kind of information as the wavy groove on an LP. In both cases, we’re dealing with a graph of sound vibrations, the amplitude of sound vibrations over time, but Scott’s phonautograms were not intended for playback, which hadn’t yet occurred to anybody as a possibility at this point. Instead, he thought of the phonautograph as recording sounds in the same sense that a seismograph records earthquakes, you would not expect to be able to take a seismograph record of an earthquake and use it to create another earthquake. In fact, if you could do that, seismographs would probably be a lot more tightly controlled. But at the same time, we don’t think of seismographs as not really recording earthquakes. They really do, they graph out the vibrations of the, uh, the earth tremors and so forth. And similarly, these records were records of sound. But they were intended to be looked at visually, not listened to. Scott wasn’t sure exactly what people would be able to make of these records. He had rather ambitious thoughts that people would learn to decipher recorded words from them. You could perhaps sit and look at a recording of a performance of dramatic oratory or an operatic aria sitting in your chair at home, and maybe if you learned to read these things well enough, you could imagine in your mind’s ear what their performance had sounded like. But again, it was to be strictly a visual record. That’s not to say that we can’t play them back today. In fact, we can, what we need to do is make a high resolution scan of the phonautogram use an algorithm to detect the position of the wavy line and then convert that information into samples in a digital sound file. Once we do that, we can listen to the recordings Scott made, even though at the time they were made, there was no mechanism available to turn them back into sound. There are a few more things we need to do to get intelligible sound out of a phonautogram. The cylinder on which sounds were recorded was turned by hand, so the recording speed was very irregular. If we were to play the sound waves straight off the paper as the appear there would be extreme speed fluctuations, so severe that you wouldn’t be able to recognize the melody of a tune – something like that. Fortunately, Scott recorded the vibrations of a tuning fork next to the trace of the voice, and the nice thing about that is that the tuning fork always has the same number of vibrations in a given amount of time. And so if we adjust the tuning fork so that it’s at a constant frequency, then we bring the voice in along with it, we can correct for the speed fluctuations from the hand cranking of the cylinder. When we do this, we can hear songs, recitations, very much as they sounded back in the day. The, the tambour was not recorded so successfully, but the pitch very much was\n00:26:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tScott’s recordings were all test recordings to one degree or another. He was really still trying to figure out whether his invention worked and what it could be used to do, so he didn’t go out and record the voices of famous people or famous singers, he pretty much just recorded himself, his own voice. But there was some variety in his recordings. Sometimes he is clearly conducting a dry scientific experiment. Maybe he’s pronouncing words very slowly and deliberately or, or singing a song like ‘O Clair de la Lune’, but holding each note for an uncomfortably long amount of time. The idea here was to see whether, looking at the trace afterwards, you could understand what was going on, you could tell one note from another, maybe different vowel sounds, different consonants would look different from one another. In these cases that’s the sort of thing he was trying to figure out. But sometimes he lets loose with something that really is a full fledged performance. A piece of impassioned, dramatic oratory, a lively rendition of a song from the opera. Here Scott is experimenting with another of his goals for the phonautograph, which is that it could record virtuosic performances. That is, you could have the celebrated figures of the theater and the music hall stand in front of the phonautograph, perform the works for which they were best known, once they were recorded as phonautograms perhaps the, the genius of these people wouldn’t die with them, but future generations could experience it. They could look at those phonautograms, they could hear the performances again in their mind’s ear.\n00:28:29\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, the real breakthrough I think was when they released themselves in a sense from the idea that paper was a recording medium, and started to try experiments with sheets of tinfoil. Um, so the first successful recording surface was sheets of tinfoil, which sounds weird. They are paper-like, right? They certainly come in sheets. But it was a slightly more durable material and it sort of proved useful for what they were trying to do, which is a very kind of crude acoustic recording. The original device was not electronic in any way, it was just mechanical, and in a sense the tinfoil was part of the machine. So in 1877, and then moreso in 1878, the tinfoil phonograph started to gain a lot of popular attention in newspapers, and eventually there were kind of worldwide demonstrations of this, then miraculous, device.\n00:29:36\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo what this machine looked like, it was basically a long cylinder with a handle or a crank at the end that you could sort of spin to make the machine revolve. It had a funnel attached to it that the speaker would speak into, and then the sound of their voice, the vibrations in the air, would create indentations on the tinfoil. And then those indentations on the sheet of tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder, that was sort of the first sound recording. My name is Matthew Rubery, I am a professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Theoretically, that sheet of tinfoil could be replayed again and again, taken off the machine and put back on another machine and played again. But in reality, it did not go so smoothly. Often these sheets of tinfoil tore, they were quite delicate. It was very difficult to rewrap a sheet of tinfoil around a cylinder again, once you’ve taken it off. And then you had to sort of get the rotation speed just right, so you had to have a real skilled operator to turn that handle at just the right speed to recapture the pitch of the original voice. But these tinfoil photographs were the first ones that were made and sort of scraps of tinfoil that were given out at the end of these exhibitions, I mean, what a souvenir, those would be incredibly valuable today.\n00:30:55\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, I mean, if I were to imitate this recording for a classroom it would be easy for me to, I mean, these sounded just terrible. I’m gonna, you know, fake it, but I think they would have sounded like this, [inaudible,] you know just lots of scrapey surface noise. So the real question there is not so much ‘What did we listen to?’ But the real question becomes, ‘How are people so excited about this new recording technology?’ That question takes you back again to this threshold, when things are really new and you need a way to think about them. Apparently available in 1878 was an intuitive sense of fidelity, that ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, that’s you!’ on the recording, because there was nothing to compare it to.\n00:31:58\tDavid Seubert:\tMy name is David Seubert and I’m the Curator of the Performing Arts Collection at the University of California Santa Barbara. And part of my responsibilities here are the management of the historical sound recordings collection, which notably includes one of the world’s largest collections of early cylinder recordings: about 19,000 titles at this point. And we also have the discography of American historical recordings, which is a large database project to document the output of the early North American sound recording industry. A wax cylinder is really the commercial product that resulted from Thomas Edison’s invention of sound recording in the 1870s, where he initially recorded onto a roll of tinfoil wrapped around a cylindrical mandrel in order to use it for mass production of audio content, whether that’s spoken or music or whatever else it might be. They developed a wax cylinder which is a hard metallic soap that allowed for people to both record onto it and then to play it back as well. So unlike flat disks, a wax cylinders are really a read-write medium like cassette tapes or like an mp3 file where people, individuals could buy commercially produced recordings or make their own. So we have some early interesting content there on cylinders.\n00:33:26\tJason Camlot:\tThe history of early sound recording technologies reveals a close connection between sound and visual text or script. As Patrick Feaster explained the original idea for sound recording, the phonautograph didn’t even imagine playing it back, but conceived of sound recording as a kind of sound to printed script technology. The sound goes in and produces a squiggly line that we might perhaps be able to read. Léon Scott wasn’t able to read the squiggles with his own eyes, but Patrick and his colleagues who work on the first sounds project were able to get a computer to read them as digital data and to make that play t`he sounds that were originally recorded in the 1860s. Pretty amazing. Amazing in part because acoustic recording technologies are so very basic. A simple mechanical approach to capturing the air pressure produced by sound producing events like a person speaking. There’s no electrical transduction of the air pressure in this acoustic process, just a horn or tube to direct the sounds toward a thin diaphragm that is sensitive to the changes in air pressure and a stylus or needle that records those changes in air pressure onto something paper – tinfoil, wax – for safekeeping, and then a reversal of just the same process in this case from recorded bumps or squiggles on a material surface, via a stylus, to make the diaphragm shiver and stir the air again and a horn to make us hear those air pressure movements as the sound that had stirred the air in the past. The connection between sound recording and writing was strong from the beginning. Thinking of sound as a kind of printed text may distort or limit our understanding, our apprehension, our hearing of what is spoken recording really is. What if we try to think of these recordings not as visual scripts to be played, not as spoken or sounded versions of print works, but as audio texts, as generic forms in sound.\n00:35:45\tJason Camlot:\tPart three what are the formal and generic features of early sound recordings? What does it mean to think of a recorded speech as a formal entity? What are the elements that constitute the shape and significance of the audio text? The sound of early speech recordings can help us think about how to answer these kinds of questions. They help us hear how the nature of the recording technology itself had an impact on the Sonic qualities of the audio text that could be produced. As we now know, the technological and material underpinnings of an audio text have a hand in shaping how it was produced, used, and consequently the social and cultural meanings it might come to have. This is a pretty typical argument of design theory, which suggests that the material substratum of an artifact informs the possible courses of action that can be taken with it and frames the practices and meanings that surround it. Now, I don’t mean to say that the capacities and limits of the phonograph as a recording and sound playing device, or the material affordances of a wax cylinder as a storage media format, completely determined the use and meaning of all of the sounds that were accorded in preserved with phonograph cylinder technology, but they did play a role in deciding what kinds of sounds could be captured and in the case of speech recordings, what kinds of spoken audio text could be produced. Two quick examples of this. One: acoustic sound recording required the speaker to speak loudly. You practically had to shout to make that diaphragm vibrate enough so the stylus would dig into the wax deeply enough for the recording to the audible when it was played back. This affordance of phonograph recording technology meant that you couldn’t be all that subtle in your recitation of a literary work. You couldn’t whisper a poem into a phonograph. It wouldn’t stick. So early speech recordings couldn’t rely on wide ranges in amplitude, that’s volume or loudness, to communicate the feelings of the speaker. Here’s a second example: cylinders could hold no more than a few minutes of sound. So the storage capacity of the wax cylinder as a preservation medium had some serious implications for what kinds of texts and speeches could be recorded.\n00:38:33\tDavid Seubert:\tYou know the format was short. I mean, it’s a cylinder up until 1908 or so, only held two minutes of content. And after then, after 1908, they introduced four minute cylinders.\n00:38:45\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s David Seubert again.\n00:38:47\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo Edison, when he invented his phonograph, the first sort of prototype made in December of 1877,\n00:38:55\tJason Camlot:\tDr Matthew Rubery.\n00:38:56\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo, going all the way back to the 19th century here he tested it out by reading or reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. And I think that’s an interesting choice, although there’s been a lot of speculation about, you know, why start recorded sound history with this particular example. A few reasons come to mind, one is it’s a very short verse, and the first recordings could only record, you know, I think this one was under 10 seconds, which was perfect for a test case. It’s also something that sort of sticks in the mind quite easily, so you don’t have to think about the words, they just sort of come effortlessly to you as many nursery rhymes still do. It’s also helpful for an audience when listening to these early recordings because even though at the time the recording quality was talked about as being incredibly lifelike, when you hear this today, they sound practically inaudible.\n00:39:51\tAudio Recording:\tMarry had a little lamb, his fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.\n00:40:00\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it helped to have a recording that was familiar, the Lord’s prayer, for instance, was another recording that was often used to sort of demonstrate the phonograph.\n00:40:13\tAudio Recording:\tIn the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Hallowed Father who art in Heaven…\n00:40:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tBut that was when people heard these verses read aloud, they could recognize them clearly. Whereas if they heard something unfamiliar, it’d be a lot more difficult for them to actually hear what was being said. So some of the earliest recordings then started out with just snippets of nursery rhymes, a verse or two of poetry, maybe a short speech from a play, and these all sort of fit the earliest sound recording devices, which could only record up to two or three minutes. But they work great, too, for public demonstrations where the phonographic knowledge had been taken around to places and debuted in different cities. And let’s say a scrap of verse might be read, a speech might be recorded as well, some funny noises by the exhibitor might be made, a little bit of music too, to get the sense of the variety of things that could be done with these, these phonographs. That was what happened in 1878 when the photograph first came out, and it wasn’t until about 10 years later that we get to send in the more literary recordings or serious exhibitions. So the phonographs sort of disappears for 10 years after that.\n00:41:24\tJason Camlot:\tYou weren’t wonna make a recording of paradise lost or a full length play or novel because it would have required many hundreds of wax cylinders to do so. Early on when he first introduced the phonograph, Edison had bragged in some newspaper articles about soon having Charles Dickens’ novel, Nicholas Nickleby, on a single audio record.\n00:41:48\tMatthew Rubery:\tThe main thing holding back audio books or full length audio books is what we talked about earlier. The fact that records could only hold two or three minutes of sound up until the 1930s. And it’s not until 1934 that the technology is capable of recording an entire full length book on a set of discs, let’s say nine or 10 records for an average novel. So that’s a big change from a few decades earlier when, you know, Mark Twain once tried to record one of his novels using these wax cylinders that could only hold a few minutes of speech, and he got up to I think about 40 or so and then just gave up because it just wasn’t going to work. There were way too many cylinders needed to make a literary recording. But in the 1930s radio, the radio industry and organizations representing blind people start collaborating to come up with a way to make the record record as much as 20 minutes of speech on each side of a disc. And once that breakthrough is made, that enables the first full length recorded books to be made. And interestingly enough, they’re not made for sighted people, the first recorded books are made for blind people beginning in 1934.\n00:43:04\tAudio Recording:\tTyphoons by Joseph Conrad written in 1903, recorded for the Talking Book Library for the blind by kind permission of the trustees to the estate of the late Joseph Conrad. Chapter one.\n00:43:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it’s a rare example of people with disabilities receiving a technology in advance of everyone else. And it’s not until about 10 years later, until 1948, that those LP records, long playing records, go on the commercial market.\n00:43:32\tJason Camlot:\tSo the forms of early spoken recordings were necessarily short and the audio texts produced were either abridged versions of longer works or ingeniously condensed synecdotal instances or scenes that evoked a larger work from which they came. What actual genres of spoken recording did these media constraints make possible? You couldn’t hear a whole Dickens novel on a cylinder, but you might hear a minor character addressing you as if you are a character yourself in such a novel, giving you the feeling that you were listening to a Dickens character as if he were a real person and as if you were a fictional character.\n00:44:08\tAudio Recording:\tAh, my dear [inaudible] come in come in. I am rejoiced to see you at this [inaudible] moment. Oh and my dear regal friend, [inaudible], now, welcome to this–\n00:44:25\tJason Camlot:\tOr you might get a key transformation scene taken from the play adaptation of a novel to stand in for the novel as a whole, as if somehow Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could be boiled down to the moment when the professional and respectable Jekyll or Jeekul, as the recording puts it, loses control and transforms into the atavistic monster Hyde.\n00:44:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Chiming bells.] … that terrible night when, transformed as I was into that fiend incarnate Hyde, I murdered the father of the woman I loved. [Organ music.] Ah, I must pray—Pray God to keep away the demons. Ah, God, look into my heart and forgive my sins. You were right. I was wrong. Ah, ah the fiend is coming. Yes. Hyde is here! [Shrill throaty noises.] Stop that damned organ! The noise offends me ears! [Cackling laughter.] [Knocking.] They come for me! They’re going to take me to the gallows! [High tempo organ music.] But I don’t die on the gallows…\n00:45:28\tJason Camlot:\tOr George du Maurier’s best-selling late Victorian novel, Trilby, could be summed up by the scene in which the treacherous and antisemitically-rendered musical genius and mesmerist Svengali mesmerises the innocent Trilby.\n00:45:46\tAudio Recording:\tThe day will come when I shall be the famous Svengali, and hundreds of beautiful women shall fall in love with me — Prinzessin and Contessen and Serene English Altessen. But Svengali will not look at them. He will look inward at his own dream. And that dream shall be all about Trilby — to lay his heart, his genius, his thousand francs at her beautiful white feet. And you shall see nothing, hear nothing, thinking nothing but Svengali, Svengali…\n00:46:20\tJason Camlot:\tWhile no sound recording offers a transparent or unmediated record of a performance event, early sound recordings demanded greater accommodation of the affordances of the recording technology and preservation media than those made after the widespread use of tape recording. So we can’t separate a discussion of the kinds of recordings made in the first decades of sound recording from the technologies and media formats that were used to make them. That said, there were a great variety of genres of recordings made during the acoustic era of sound recording. Looking back to the beginning and the kinds of recordings that were made can help us try to understand why people were interested in these recordings, why they bought them, when they became commercially available, and what they may have meant to the people who listened to them.\n00:47:07\tLisa Gitelman:\tWhen a recorded sound first came into existence. The way people had to understand it was on its merits, in a sense, in relation to older technology, right? When a new technology comes along and the only way you can grapple with it is to look backward., and looking backward from recorded sound in the 1870s was really to think about text, was really to think about reading and writing and what we now think of as all the alternatives to recorded sound.\n00:47:38\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:47:39\tLisa Gitelman:\tA bunch of people signed up with this company, this exhibition company. A lot of them were journalists. Again, going back to the idea that this was somehow about writing and reading. But they were entertainers too, and in my research I just became kind of fascinated with newspaper accounts of these demonstrations. And they all, I mean, weirdly, they all seem to take something of a similar form. When people were faced with this recording device in small audiences or even large concert halls they tended to mimic to the machine to recite nursery rhymes, little scraps of Shakespeare, little tidbits of things they already had memorized, lots of kind of mimicry and animal noises and, I won’t say farting into the machine, but so that kind of mentality, it was a kind of, you know, low brow bonding, if you will, over the potential of this machine\n00:48:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tHistories of the commercial recording industry tend to focus on music, but really the spoken word was a very important part of what it had to offer from the very beginning.\n00:48:47\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Patrick Feaster again.\n00:48:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tMoreover, there were a few different types of recordings that featured spoken language very, very prominently. Some recordings were relatively straightforward recitations of existing, often well-known literary works, somewhat more common than this where recordings in which a performer would take on some particular persona, often an ethnic character, and perform a monologue in that character, usually humorous. A number of different ethnicities were represented. A performer, Will N. Steel specialized in a Jewish character named Einstein.\n00:49:28\tAudio Recording:\t[inaudible] my boy Ikie is a bright boy. Some day he shall set the moon on fire [inaudible]\n00:49:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tFrank Kennedy had a German character named Schultz.\n00:49:38\tAudio Recording:\tChildren are a necessary evil. There’s many different kinds of children. For instance, there’s the good boy, who goes to Sunday school when it grows up he becomes cashier in a bank and he finally skips to Canada with all the money he can get a hold of.\n00:49:53\tPatrick Feaster:\tBest known example of this type was a performer named Cal Stewart whose character Uncle Josh Weathersby was enormously popular for about 20 years.\n00:50:06\tAudio Recording:\tWell sure, we’ve just had our annual camp meeting at Punkin Center.\n00:50:11\tPatrick Feaster:\tThis was a character from rural New England who would tell about his naive blunders visiting New York city. Or sometimes he’d talk about things that happened back home in Punkin Center.\n00:50:26\tAudio Recording:\tIt was a great affair. Wow. For several days we was pretty busy baking and cooking and making preparations.\n00:50:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tThen there’s a third category of more elaborate productions in much the same spirit as later radio drama or radio comedy where you have multiple characters performing sound effects, music, all fitting together to convey some story through sound.\n00:50:53\tAudio Recording:\tMorning [inaudible]. Morning [inaudible] Don’t you know me? Wait ’til I take off my whiskers. We’ll i’ll be darned if it ain’t the constable. What be ya doin’ up outside? Doin’ up? Detectivin’! That’s what I’m doin’ up.\n00:51:08\tPatrick Feaster:\tBut this was done with the phonograph, much earlier examples of this stating back well into the 1890s. Not all early phonographic audio theater was humorous. There were serious examples including a dramatization of the San Francisco earthquake, reenactments of battles in the Spanish American war, one piece by Ada Jones and Len Spencer called House Cleaning Time\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording:\tLet me in. [inaudible] don’t you dare come in without drying your feet on the mat. Why, woman my feet are so wet you couldn’t dry them on the stove! Well, come in then.\n00:51:41\tPatrick Feaster:\tIs really more of a sentimental piece, an old couple reminiscing about their lives together, but a majority of it is humorous and a very large proportion of it involves ethnic humour.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording:\tGood morning Miss Riley, how are ya this morning?\n00:52:02\tPatrick Feaster:\tThere were practical reasons for this, much the same as the practical reasons that made ethnic humour so popular in other venues on the Vaudeville Stage in high dialect pieces published as filler in newspapers. Invoking an ethnic stereotype meant you didn’t have to spend any time on character development.\n00:52:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Inaudible] for you Mrs Riley, my husband and I have been married for two long years.\n00:52:34\tPatrick Feaster:\tBy taking on an Irish stage dialect, a black stage dialect, a German or so-called Dutch stage dialect, any one of a number of different conventionalised ways of speaking, but as soon as you adopt one of these conventionalised dialects, you can take for granted that your audience will make certain assumptions about the character you’re representing and will understand what’s going on based on them. And if all you have to work with is a short slot on a Vaudeville schedule, a few lines of space in a newspaper or two to three minutes of sound recording, then this type of efficiency can be very valuable.\n00:53:22\tJason Camlot:\tPart four: why early spoken recordings are important for understanding of the longer history of audio books, sound recording, and performance today. When I say that early sound recordings are weird, maybe what I’m really saying is that recordings from the early period of the technology can teach us a lot about those of subsequent periods. The fact that we are estranged from the content media and methods of performance in early sound recordings help us see and hear the elements that are less obvious to us in the case of recordings and media that we take for granted today. When we think about literary history by engaging with sound archives, it requires us to think about how the recordings that document the performance of literary texts, conversations, and activities were made and used and how the media and methods of production shaped the audio documents we can hear today. When tape recording became widely accessible in the 1960s with people carrying portable Wollensak and Uher reel-to-reel tape recorders around, they still weighed like 20 pounds, so not quite so portable as an audio cassette Walkman, a mini disc recorder, or an iPhone still when they were carrying these Wollensak and Uhers around, suddenly live readings that lasted an hour or more could be captured and listened to in another time and place.\n00:54:55\tAudio Recording:\tIt’s the sort of thing we do in Vancouver, like we sit down and read the whole book and this was published the same day as Dan Persky’s The Day, a book called The Day and uh it’s about the same length, about a hundred pages and he read The Day and then we took a break and I read Autobiology and then we took a break of a couple of hours and then he read The Day again.\n00:55:17\tJason Camlot:\tWe know that literary readings lasting hours did take place in the 19th century too, there are newspaper reports about that. But there were no reel-to-reel tape recorders back then. Our audible history of the literary past is shaped, in part, by the material nature of the media and archives we have today. Early recordings help us understand that about all subsequent media recordings, even the seemingly invisible digital formats like MP3 files. The difference between digital audio media and the analog and acoustic media technologies is pretty significant. For one thing, analog media capture sound in one continuous stream, and in that sense represent a kind of material index of the original sound event, it records. Digital media, on the other hand, capture microcosmic slices, samples according to a bit rate or frequency data that allows us to rehear the past events, rehear the past events, the past events. They certainly sound as clear or clear to us than all previous analog media and they can record sound events for than any previous material medium, just depends on how much hard drive storage space you have. But there are missing spaces in the documented temporal event in digital audio files that aren’t there in analog recordings. Maybe that makes a difference. Born digital recordings or digitized recordings of the past, turn literary sound into a new kind of data with its own remarkable affordances. We can control, analyze and listen to such audible data in a greater variety of ways than we could with earlier audio media technologies. It’s now very easy to record, store, entire novels on portable devices and to replay them in a variety of places, in the kitchen, walking the dog at the gym, driving to work, and to replay them in different ways. For example, the difference in speeds without changing pitch of the reader’s voice. Speed listening has been around since the 1930s at least recent work by Matthew Rubery, Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills has shown this. But digital media make possibilities for the manipulation of the human voice, virtually infinite.\n00:57:33\tAudio Recording:\tA set of drum rondos from synth loops in the cyborg opera. [beatboxing]\n00:57:42\tJason Camlot:\tMe may admire an avant garde poet’s performance of synthetic sounds, like Christian Bök vocalizing drum loops in a movement from a cyborg opera, as evidence of ingenuity and virtuosity in performance\n00:57:56\tAudio Recording:\t[beatboxing]\n00:57:58\tJason Camlot:\tBut really, with digital media plugins, what can’t the human voice sound like or do? Since the end of the 19th century, each phase of media history, performance history, literary history, and socio-cultural history has come with audible recordings of the human voice for us to decipher. By Listening to these recorded voices and all their sonic historicity. We can begin to understand the meaning of human expression as an auditory phenomenon, which is to say as a relational human phenomenon.\n00:58:37\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:58:39\tJason Camlot:\tWhat methods of listening, what audile techniques – to use a phrase from Jonathan Sterne’s book, The Audible Past – have we developed to help us decipher this remarkable audible archive? That’s a big and important question that I’m going to save for a future Spoken Web podcast. In the meanwhile, why not hop onto LibriVox or Audible and have a listen to the complete works of Charles Dickens.\n00:59:13\tAudio Recording:\tA tale of two cities by Charles Dickens. Book one, ‘recalled to life.’ Book one, chapter one, ‘the period.’ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.\n00:59:46\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n01:00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Cheryl Gladu and Jason Camlot. Our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller, and Matthew Rubery for their candid interviews and continued contributions to Spoken Web. An extra special thank you to everyone who joined us for last months’ #spokenwebpod listening party in celebration of our inaugural episode. Add your voice to the mix on Twitter with #spokenwebpod. To find out more about Spoken Web visits, spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the spoken web podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Please rate and leave a comment on iTunes or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"9277","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, S2E1, Deep Curation – Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice, 5 October 2020, du Plessis and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/ "],"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 2"],"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":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2e2272f2-55cd-4126-9504-959fca8bda69/audio/ea743428-b8dd-4aa5-b204-c8d72da6416b/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:56:13\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,035,897 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-05\",\"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\":\"Print Recordings:\\n\\nBernstein, Charles. ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nBourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009.\\n\\nBrown, Lee Ann. In the Laurels, Caught. Albany: Fence Books, 2013.\\n\\nChristakos, Margaret. charger. Vancouver: TalonBooks, 2020.\\n\\ndu Plessis, Klara. “Santa Cova Muscles.” Unpublished.\\n\\nKellough, Kaie. Magnetic Equator. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019.\\n\\nLongair, Sarah. “Cultures of Curating: the Limits of Authority.” Museum History Journal 8.1 (2015): 1-7.\\n\\nMiddleton, Peter. “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem.” Oral Tradition 20.1 (March 2005): 7-34. Web. 25 December 2016.\\n\\nNakayasu, Sawako. Texture Notes. Seattle: Letter Machine Editions, 2010.\\n\\nObrist, Hans Ulrich and Asad Raza. Ways of Curating. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.\\n\\nRadford, Deanna. Poems. Unpublished.\\n\\nRobinsong, Erin. Rag Cosmology. Toronto: Book*Hug, 2017.\\n\\nRogoff, Irit. “Curating/Curatorial.” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 19-38.\\n\\nVidokle, Anton. “Art without Artists?” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 216-226.\\n\\nWheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.\\n\\nPoetry Recordings:\\n\\nDeep Curation 4th Space. Feat. Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Deanna Radford. 7 November 2019. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Boston University. Feat. Lee Ann Brown, Fanny Howe, Sawako Nakayasu. 30 January 2020. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Mile End Poets’ Festival. Feat. Aaron Boothby, Klara du Plessis, Canisia Lubrin, Erin Robinsong. 24 November 2018. Personal archive.\\n\\nSir George Williams Reading Series. Feat. Jackson Mac Low. 26 March 1971. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1\\n\\nFour Horsemen. Two Nights. 9 and 10 October 1987. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/4-\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549464547328,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Who chooses what words will be heard at a poetry reading, in what order, and why? Since 2018, Montreal-based poet and researcher Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation.\n\nThis episode – the “Season Two” premiere of The SpokenWeb Podcast – chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form, with excerpted and intertwined works creating a thematic, cohesive arc. The eventual collaborative, choral, and sometimes improvisational nature of this project raises questions about authority and authorship. As such, this episode conceptualizes shifting degrees of responsibility between curator and authors, and the dynamic space created as a result of this shared and mobile agency. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio, include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong.\n\n00:03\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:21\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitch Voice Ends] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Picture yourself at your local arts cafe for a poetry reading with some of your favourite artists and writers. You settle into a nearby seat and the hum of idle chatter around you begins to fade as the poet’s ready to take the stage. Now ask yourself: who chooses which artist reads first? Who chooses what words will be heard at the poetry reading and in what order and why? Since 2018 Montreal based poet and researcher, Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation. This podcast episode chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form with excerpted and intertwined works, creating a thematic cohesive arc. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong. Here is Klara du Plessis with season two episode one of the SpokenWeb Podcast “Deep Curation: Experiments with the Poetry Reading as Practice.” [Theme Music].\n02:18\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m Klara du Plessis. A poet and PhD student in English at Concordia University. I’m doing research on the history and practice of the curation of poetry and performance. [Instrumental Strings] About three years ago, I saw a friend in Toronto and we sat on a terrace with our drinks. Our conversation felt energetic and I shared a new idea that I was excited about. So excited about that I continued not only thinking about it, but doing it. I call this doing Deep Curation.\n03:00\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation is a practice of experimental poetry reading organization that I developed and theorized over the past few years. Through it, I deliberately heightened the curator’s role while questioning assumptions of who gets to shape the poetry reading, why, and what the implications of those choices are.\n03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices as sample of Deep Curation performance]\n03:29\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the initial phase of experimentation and in my role as a Deep Curation curator, I would choose the poems read by the authors and the order of the presentation.\n03:41\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices]\n03:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the later phases and in Deep Curation’s more robust form, I worked to create a thematic arc, to re-contextualize the poet’s work, to place poems in conversation with each other through proximity, but also excerpting and formal experimentation.\n04:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Voices]\n04:06\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Strings] The idea for Deep Curation hit me after almost six years of field work organizing the monthly Montreal-based Résonance Reading Series. [Music: Strings increases volume, includes overlapping audio of background event chatter] While this series precedes Deep Curation, it forms the foundation of my experience in thinking about curation. It was a big deal for me to wrap up that series. [End Music: Strings] It was such an ongoing, almost durational part of my curational life. I’ll never forget the final closing event of the series, held on 7, August 2018. [Audio Recording: Background Chatter]\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Klara du Plessis] Can everyone hear me? Amazing. It’s a really huge turnout, which is amazing and I’m so, so happy to see all of you. There are some extra fold up chairs kind of by the front door, on the right-hand side, opposite the counter. So, if anyone wants one, they’re there. Please help yourself. Or ask me to help you. Yeah, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, welcome to the final Résonance reading! [Cheering and Clapping] Yeah, it’s been six years of plus minus 10 readings per year, which makes that give or take 60 meetings right here on this stage. So, I’m gonna allow myself to be nostalgic for a moment because Résonance kind of started by accident in a way, like I just finished my Master’s and decided that I was going to take some time to do my own writing. And that led to me actually working here at Résonance Cafe in different capacities. But then of course I noticed the stage. I was like, okay, well it’s a perfect venue, let’s organize one reading. And so, I invited some friends to read and it was a huge success. It was super fun. And it kind of, then we decided that, “Oh, well, we can just as well start doing it again and again.” And I started organizing events on a monthly basis, but like one month by one month. And if I can give any aspiring curator advice, never organize month to month because it’s incredibly stressful. Like every couple of weeks, “Oh my gosh, I still need three readers, where am I going to find them.” And it just feels like you’re constantly organizing. [Mechanical Sound]. So, there was a point that I realized I needed to step up. And I started organizing the readings way in advance, like up to a year in advance. And this shift in attitude also kind of became a shift in who it was booking. So, I started inviting people who I thought wouldn’t say yes, you know, so I can be like, “who do I want to see on stage?” “Who do I really, really admire?” And then I’ll just reach out. And like the amazing thing was that pretty much everyone I’ve ever invited has said yes. With a few exceptions, with very legitimate reasons that they can’t come. And yeah, so I just realized that people [Metal Clanging] need a platform, people want to share their work. And yeah, that felt like a major kind of shift in what Résonance became. [Mechanical Sound] And then people started asking me to read people —agents and publicists started contacting me — and Résonance became larger, kind of like national in scope. It felt more serious and it felt like  way more responsibility. This is maybe like three, four years in. And then I very slowly started thinking that Résonance had become a form of authority in the sense of being able to offer or withhold opportunity. Those high standards are one of the reasons that I ended up deciding after six years that this kind of like the end of an era, in a sense that if Résonance were to continue, I would want to keep doing better and doing more. And as like one woman doing this, I don’t have the time or the resources to do that. But I do want to say that curating Résonance has been an absolute joy. It has been fun. It has been fulfilling. It has been challenging, energizing, and I’ve learned so much and I’ve met such great people [Audience Member: Woo!] So, thank you. [Clapping] That’s like the longest speech I’ve ever given here. [Instrumental Strings]\n09:01\tKlara du Plessis:\tI had heaps of experience organizing and hosting literary events, but Deep Curation was somehow different. I wanted to curate a poetry reading. I wanted to really curate a poetry reading. I wanted to invite poets whose work I love to read. And then I wanted to tell those poets which poems to read and in what order. “Oh”, my friend said, “yes”, my friend said. “That is a good idea.” [Instrumental Strings with Percussion]\n09:33\tKlara du Plessis:\tWhenever I chat with art historians or exhibition curators about the research that I’m doing, they always have one of two reactions. They either insist that curation in the visual arts is grossly under theorized and not thought about critically at all, or that the word curatorial has been overused and they couldn’t stand hearing it one more time. Coming from a literary perspective, though, it seems to me that the visual arts has done a tremendous job of sussing out critical vocabulary surrounding the presentation, dissemination, and structures of collaboration inherent to curating. For starters, practitioners of the visual arts and museum studies have theorized a very useful division between the terms of curating and curatorial. I’d like to quote scholar and curator Irit Rogoff on this rift. Rogoff suggests quote: [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “the distinction is of curating as professional practice, which involves a whole set of skills and practices, materials, and institutional and infrastructural conditions. Developing the concept of the curatorial has been about getting away from representation and trying to see within this activity, a set of possibilities for much larger agendas in the art world. The curatorial then defines the larger frame” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumental] When I think of most poetry readings that I have been involved in, and especially those that precede Deep Curation, I interpret curating versus the curatorial as a division of labour. Often the poetry reading organizer takes on the work of curating. I mean that the organizer invites the poets, they book a venue, promote the event on social media, they check the microphone and adopt a responsibility of care towards presenters and audience. They ensure that everyone is having a good time. In contrast the poets themselves enact the curatorial role. The poets choose which poems they will share, how these poems will be framed by anecdote and preamble, and in which order they will be performed. As critic Peter Middleton says, choosing which poems to read is quote, [Click] [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “a fiercely held prerogative of the poet.” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] [Click] All of this implies that the organizer of the event has little to no input into the work performed at the poetry reading. They don’t know whether they will like the specific works chosen by the poet. They also don’t know whether the works by different poets will enter into relevant dialogue with each other, [Audio Recording: Echoes of chatter at an event] or whether there will be a thematic or conceptual arc to the event as a whole. Differently put the literary curator has little agency to shape or mediate the event as a cohesive relational platform for the presentation of art. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this division of curating and curatorial and how it impacts the organization of literary events. I became obsessed with trying to shift this dynamic, to play with it, and to get material answers to theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s pivotal question: [Begin Music: Intermittent Strings] what does a form become when it is plunged into a dimension of dialogue? This isn’t a new question. As Bourriaud historicizes in terms of the visual arts, a paradigm shift occurred after cubism resulting in a radical turn away from human deity and human object dialectics and a turn towards human to human relationality. Starting mid-century and swelling through the ‘70s, into the ‘90s, happenings, gatherings and participation-focused art, place sociability and the relationships between human experience center stage. [End Music: Intermittent Strings] At the same time, collaboration and interactivity became a source for exploration in the literary world.\n13:19\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\t[Inaudible/Multiple voices reciting poetry over one another] Opening quotations number. Open quotations. [Inaudible] Closed quotations. Semi-colon. [Inaudible]\n13:30\tKlara du Plessis:\tA good example [Audio Recording from above continues faintly] is Jackson Mac Low’s communal readings using volunteers from the audience to perform elaborate scriptings of his poems.\n13:37\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tSemi-colon. Evan. [Inaudible]\n13:43\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Audio Recording continues faintly] These readings often resulted in cacophonous chaos. This audio clip is from Mac Low’s appearance at the Sir George Williams reading series on 26, March 1971.\n13:54\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tX [inaudible] capital E. A. V [Inaudible] R.Q. comma. semi-colon. period. K. N. Apostrophe. P. 6. D. [Inaudible] Dash. Dash. Dash. Dash. Semi-colon.\n14:14\tKlara du Plessis:\tAnother relevant example is the so called Four Horseman: BP Nichol, Steve McCaffrey, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. [Begin: Audio recording, inaudible] These four poets exploded the potential of sound in their polyvocall joint compositions. This audio clip is taken from the 1988 record, Two Nights.\n14:51\tAudio Recording, Four Hourseman\t[Various Vocal Sounds, inaudible]\n14:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation clearly stems from a rich tradition of experimental collaborative poetry performance. It is also engaging though with contemporary vocabulary from the visual arts and importing it to explore literary potentials. I want to listen to some audio clips from three Deep Curation poetry readings curated between late 2018 and early 2020. But I also want to linger on the shift that is activated when some of these theoretical questions come into play. The division of labor between curating and curatorial with poets themselves often deciding how to present their work upholds the familiar concept that poets perform their own roles as authors on stage. Contemporary authors voice their own work as a display of authority and authenticity. [Sound Effect: Box Opening] As scholar Leslie Wheeler suggests [Sound Effect: Box Closing] poetry readings are manifestations [Begin Music: Instrumental] of authentic authorial presence. There is of course also the opposite danger of tipping the scale of authority away from the author to the curator. This is something that curator Anton Vidokle relevantly critiques in terms of the visual arts. He says, curators have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics. Vidokle warns that curators can easily usurp credit from the artists or poets and rob the voice of their creative work. [End Music: Instrumental] One of Deep Curation’s key points of investigation is to trouble the notion of static authorial authority by distributing curatorial agency between author and curator alike. The curator of a Deep Curation poetry reading aims to direct the presentation of poetry by facilitating polyvocal dialogues between poets and between the works of those poets. Yet poets always retain authorship over the poetic output. Poems and excerpts of poems are placed deliberately alongside each other to create thematic narrative and conceptual arcs and arguments. The poetry reading is no longer a series of random poems placed side by side. Rather, the poetry reading presents a cohesive entity of combined poems that collaborate towards a larger sonic event. By directing, scripting, but also working together to design the poetry reading in this way, agency circulates from the poets to the curator, and back to the poets. Poets and curator constantly navigate a dynamic balance between control and freedom, individual authorship and collaboration.\n17:07\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m going to share audio clips from three phases of my Deep Curation experiments, narrating the project’s development, and illustrating shifting approaches in my practice. [Begin Music: Instrumental] The audio clips will further inspire a discussion on this relationship between control and freedom. [Music Intensifies] Deep Curation: Phase One: Resonance. [Music Continues] One of the first Deep Curation experiments I curated, I invited poets Aaron Boothby, Canisia Lubrin, and Erin Robinsong to participate. I knew that their poetry would form a relevant conversation and I could imagine a reading that centered ecology, language, and loss. In hindsight, my tentative curatorial strategy was just a buffed-up version of a normal poetry reading. And of course, I realized how fraught the word ‘normal’ sounds. For the most part, I scripted the order and interlay of poems by the different authors, but I rarely excerpted or initiated any kind of material intervention into the structure of the poems and their coexistence. I also included some of my own writing. And so, the four of us read together at the vegan jazz bar Résonance Café during the Mile End Poets Festival on 24, November 2018. Here is a short audio clip from this reading. Erin’s poem “Cortes” is deliberately positioned beside a section from an early version of my long poem, “Santa Cova Muscles”.\n18:49\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong\tThe mountain told my eye / its sparkling name / and in return, I answered / from the ashes/ and green /gathered round/ and echoed /along the windy heights/ O my friends/ if you are alone / stretch out both brains / and lash together a middle one/ thus three-way / we waited for the dawn/ fresh and rosy fingered / as the backs of animals/ when evening falls / nobody / yet saved his skin/ so we ourselves untie / the ship took places at the oars/ and seek again / an island where /with burning clouds / and loyal dark / we soon rouse\n19:48\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis\tDespite density a kind of stupidity crushing words/ into a pulp of intelligence /no /air /allowance/ Instead, a breakage into sight /breakwater from words, hieroglyphic impotence / gathering light through the eyes, tearing it out/ salt, water, ocean writing, / organic prismatic/ I stumble over my love for the sea and rest my head on mountains/ I’d like to posit a theory that we’re all descendants of headstones/ The soft jagged edge of the mountain range / where I walk daily for three weeks, then leave/ encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder/ This mountain intelligence, reasoning beyond the usual kind. I reject truth, but fixate on beauty/This might imply a material privilege, visual impulse, / but this banal state of mind is reversed to a vibration, the vibratory / relation exceeds the eye, yet enters everything through the surface of the eye/  to inoculate everything/ Heading towards the garden, which is the museum, / this ontological greenness…\n21:13\tKlara du Plessis:\tI love how green and eyes weave a connecting thread. When Erin says [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Stretch out both brains and lash together a middle one] I respond [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder, this mountain intelligence reasoning beyond the usual kind] thematic coherence and a similar affective register bind these independent poems together. They become perceived as a unit, or at least as a conversation. Despite Erin and myself each composing our poem separately at different times and with different intents. They merge here in this reading through adjacency to create a temporarily shared authorship. In this case, I am both an author sharing my writing beside other authors, and I am the curator of the event as a whole. This implies that my authorship oscillates between a kind of directive stance towards the event as a combined performative entity and the embodiment of intimate listening in proximity to other poets while collectively sharing our poetry. I returned to Résonance Café, the venue for this Deep Curation event in order to jog my memory about the reading, but also to record myself in a less formal, more journal-like way. One could say that I’m [Begin: Echo Effect] Deep Curating my voice through time [End: Echo Effect] as I collage archival material from 2018, formal narration for this podcast, and soundscape audio from the field.\n22:36\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\t[Background Noise] So here I am in Résonance Café, the venue of many, a poetry reading over the course of six years. All kinds of background noises: [Microwave Beep] cleaning the fridge, pots [Coffee Grinder] the coffee machine. Many readings were ambiently disrupted by the coffee grinder. [Background Noise] With me is Isis Giraldo. She’s one of the co-owners of Résonance Café.\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHello!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDo you want to say hi?\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHi!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tAs already mentioned the second Deep Curation event with Canisia, Erin, and Aaron, also happened here in Résonance Café. And, this is really one of the spaces where I’ve listened the most deeply I’ve ever listened on the stage being in such close proximity to the people around me on stage. Because we hadn’t rehearsed very much and because we had such minimal scripting for the reading we were very attuned to what the other readers were doing to make sure that we didn’t miss a cue or forget where and when to start reading. And so just the degree of listening between the four of us on stage was very acute. I remember in particular that Canisia was reading a lot slower than me and that as the event progressed I kind of matched my pace to hers  — it was an element of kind of like empathetic performance where we really tried to listen and adapt to what was happening sonically and collaboratively.\n24:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe four of us were in this together. We were on the stage together. But perhaps counter-intuitively, our togetherness came at the cost of remaining separate. Each poet’s reading is extremely clear and articulated in solitude. Each poet’s words remain their own words and as fellow performers we each respect the sonic space needed for another poet to project their work into the room. The images of Erin’s poem make eye contact with the images in my poem, but they don’t overlap or resolve into chaos.\n25:15\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong:\t[Inaudible]…and seek again an island where with burning clouds and loyal dark, we soon rouse\n25:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tPoems touch, but don’t merge.\n25:31\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDespite density, a kind of stupidity/ Crushing words into a pulp of intelligence /No air allowance.\n25:36\tKlara du Plessis:\tAs the curator of this event, my intention was to create a dialogue between the different poetries presented, but I was also clearly hesitant to overstep my own adopted authority. I felt strange to excerpt poems that I had not authored or to demand borders between poems to be blurred. This is of course symptomatic of the fact that this reading was only the second experiment in a series of Deep Curation poetry readings. I was still figuring out my own project of taking control of the poetry reading’s form. I was trying to strike a balance between directing the reading and maintaining the authorial integrity of the authors and of their works. Here is another excerpt from my audio journal, now seated on Resonance’s patio.\n26:17\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tI’m sitting on the patio outside now. And I’m still thinking about this Deep Curation event that I did with Aaron, Erin, and Canisia. And I’m thinking back and reflecting on the extreme release of energy that happened directly after we performed together that night. And just this like real recognition of the potential of what the project held and what we could feel it, the project could still develop into. And I remember kind of talking to Aaron, Erin and Canisia and, you know, asking how that felt about the very small instances of excerpting, you know, whether they felt comfortable with that after the fact. And they really made it clear to me that while I was being very tentative about excerpting and intertwining, those are really the moments that were the most valuable. And that going, moving forward with the project what I really needed to do was to be less careful, be less tentative and be more dramatic with the process of putting poems in conversation with each other and that this approach would really define, should really define what Deep Curation was and how it made it different from other poetry reading events.\n27:35\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental] Our conversation excited me and I felt inspired to design stranger, more exploratory Deep Curation scripts. Deep Curation: Phase Two: Fourth Space. [End Music: Instrumental] With a green light go ahead from Erin Robinsong, Aaron Boothby, and Canisia Lubrin, I started formally experimenting with what I now call refrains. These are longer, highly excerpted sections that combine lines and a theme from different poets and different poems into a new whole. Conversations with friends occasionally introduce the words, remix, or cento in relation to these refrains. Borrowed, poetic language repurposed as a new creative body of work. I often fantasize about creating an entire Deep Curation poetry reading using this technique. The following audio clip illustrates this refrain style. It is taken from a Deep Curation poetry reading featuring poets, Kaie Kellough [Audio Recording, Kai Kellough: The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.], Margaret Christakos [Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: Listen, they’re not listening], and Deanna Radford [Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: Voices everywhere, talk talk]. Most of the text is from Kaie’s book Magnetic Equator, Margaret’s Charger, and Deanna’s still unpublished work. The event took place on 7, November 2019 at Concordia University’s Fourth Space, a venue dedicated to the sharing of new scholarly research.\n29:05\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:08\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tListen, you’’re not listening.\n29:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tTongu, words. Sibilant chorus.\n29:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:26\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n29:29\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:44\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n29:50\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:53\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n29:57\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am listening\n30:02\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back, is this a beginning? Is it preferable to be erased, to have a voice that does not know the chorus\n30:10\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tvoices mime rooms\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry to listen.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us, ears\n30:27\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country and ear facing upward and listening,  listening, receiving signals from the world.\n30:37\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whisper. Lip to ear. Through glass. Walls. Plastic. Light scope.\n30:44\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n31:10\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n31:12\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am. Listening.\n31:14\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back. Is this a listening? Is it preferable to be beginning? To have a voice that does not know the chorus?\n31:22\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tRooms mime voices.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry. To listen.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us. Ears.\n31:35\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear, facing upward and listening/ listening, receiving signals from the world.\n31:47\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA speech act for ears / speech acts for ears.\n31:50\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tEars would be like metal or dreams of hallucinatoria.\n31:58\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whispered lip to ear through glass, walls, plastic, light scope.\n32:04\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tVaricose, inner ear exorcism.\n32:09\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear facing upward and listening/ Listening, receiving signals from the world.\n32:16\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tSignal whistling for us chorally / come into my arms, darlings / come soft into this cloud.\n32:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tComposing these excerpted refrains on shared topics of listening and poetic articulation clearly took a high degree of familiarity with the author’s work. I needed to recall relevant lines in order to place them in thematic conversations. At first, my process was to mark up hard copies of authors’ books, but in time I realized that searchable PDFs hugely facilitated the process. A PDF allows quicker access to lines and the ability to copy paste excerpts into the refrain. Creating these refrains took a poet’s mind and an eye for composition. Lines were extracted from the original works. They were recombined into a new context and new conversation with lines from other poems and from the minds of other poets. This is a good example of the curator adopting the role of the author. As a curator, I was doing more than mediating the creative performance. I was also molding, creating and literally authoring a new script. Although I always worked with the consent of the invited poets, I was possibly also overstepping my role. My role as directive curator was productively challenged working with [Begin: Background Chatter] Kaie, Margaret, and Deanna, skilled performers and formal experimenters themselves. Kaie had graciously welcomed us into his home serving coffee and warm croissants as we settled into work on the script of our design. We discussed the arc of the event, performance cues and logistics. My memory of our discussion has Margaret questioning the possibility [End: Background Chatter] of opening up the script. She was curious about more organic instances of interjecting into another poet’s words, supporting them with echoes, or drowning them out with overlay. Margaret, Kaie, Deanna and I were all excited about this possibility of opening up the script and worked to integrate new strategies into the performance outline. Some poems needed to be read solo, to maintain the impact of the words’ meaning. But some sections were begging to be choral, to maximize the potential of three voices in performance. In the following audio clip, the three poets’ voices are organically interspersed. The poets borrow each other’s words and insert them into their own poems to create a dynamic and playful conversation.\n34:34\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tI never cared to be a pastoral poet wrote poetry, a small flatland  longings, a poet of evangelical strictures\n34:43\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors.\n34:45\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tRevolutions, oceanic futures written in the veins of the vegetal/ Tenements of Babel dense with voices/ Languages spilling out the summer windows.\n34:56\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors, nor errs/ Nor ers /Nor ors. But ore\n35:08\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tEarthen oar. Earthen tongue. [inaudible] speechless under death. Oar. Air. Weightless volume of big sky.\n35:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors /nor errors, not ers, nor ors but ore /for roses, for eros in decision making/ if edgewise among tongue that propriety.\n35:27\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tErrors, airs, URS, oars, or roses/ name or summon arrows/ muse or crave savour moan or receive conceive arise or arouse.\n35:41\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLike her name was inland/ a corpus yours/ Tongue yours and corp yours.\n35:51\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tEarthen tongues ripple speechless under yours/ Air weightless volume of big sky.\n35:57\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLaps and licks and skirmishes.\n36:00\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tWriters circumnavigate the question with smiles and gestures that dismiss/They write from everywhere at once.\n36:07\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tThe a-ha of poetic inspiration.\n36:12\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe only places the a-ha/ The immediate port at which the next letter a-ha.\n36:18\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\t— a-ha!.\n36:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t— is detained, arrives, or vanishes. [Overlapping Voices] Thank God it exists. A-ha! The ah-a exists either here nor there/ Is every weather, where? / Which is here, which is nowhere.\n36:32\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tA-ha. A-ha. The a-ha a poetic inspiration, shifted to an a-ha reflex of thank God it exists a-ha more is a-ha now I can have this and this to this a-ha this works.\n36:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tA-ha! The poets are taking a-ha! authorship directing the a-ha! performance, developing it and initiating exchange. They’re also leaving audile space for the semantic soundscape of different voices to be heard alongside each other. This is not always the case.\n37:11\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t[inaudible, voices reciting poetry overlapping one another] Press down to form home print that scattered over future service, entrusted. disclosed. incidental behavioural derived body unsettled my reaches organic my past and now my scaped spread evenly over my spaces my means of speech my body my body my personal info invisible presence a proxy my body my body is measured is measured is filled with water scattered future interested disclosed incidental my reach is organic my past image spread evenly over my face [inaudible] stretch. [inaudible]\n38:32\tKlara du Plessis:\tHarmony transgresses into cacophony. Deanna and Kaie read briskly over each other, while Margaret doubles words standing out to her and adds a third layer to the mashup. This is a true merging of voices. Separate strands are no longer clearly audible. Rather, an assembly of voices, tones, and timbres swell chaotically into a shared ownership of poetry.\n38:57\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tHere I am, again, reminiscing on my audio journal almost a year after the Deep Curation event. I traveled down to Fourth Space, the venue of this Deep Curation event and imagined that I could see the event replaying itself through the glass walls almost photographically. So, today has been quite an odyssey. I’m now down by Concordia University’s Fourth Space, which, is of course closed. And I can — the most I can do is peer through the big glass windows and try and imagine again how this Deep Curation event happened with Kaie, Margaret and Deanna. And so, I’m kind of envisioning again the large screen that had a PowerPoint presentation projected onto it and the chairs that I had reconfigured into a circle so that the three poets and I kind of sat at the four cardinal points of the circle with the audience members interspersed in between. This really created the sense that audience was part of the performance, that they were inside the sound and you know that the sound was emanating from three different directions. Also, that the three poets could really make eye contact with each other. They weren’t standing in a line on a stage.\n40:15\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin: Instrumental Strings] There was strength in collaboration. Working with Margaret, Kaie, and Deanna on the design of this Deep Curation poetry reading developed it into an expansive, dynamic, and engaged performance. It also generated methods that I continue to use for Deep Curation as an ongoing project. [Instrumental Strings increase].\n40:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation: Phase Three: Boston University. [End: Instrumental String] Preparing for my first PhD field exam I stress-dreamed that I had to create a Deep Curation script in 10 minutes. “Oh no!”, I thought. “This is an impossible task.” “I haven’t spent months reading. In fact, I’m not familiar with the poetry at all!” Luckily in a happy turn of the nightmare variety, I solved the conundrum. In my dream, I created a set of performative cues for improvisation. In my dream, the poets had to choose their own poems, but they had to read them according to my design. The real life, non-dream Deep Curation event that took place at Boston University on 30 January 2020, definitely wasn’t limited to 10 minutes of preparation. But it did function as a broad structure with signals for the authors to move more freely. In other words, my authorship of the outline demanded reauthorship from the poets as they played and reworked their words collectively on stage. This reading included prerecorded audio of Fanny Howe’s poetry and the following audio clip features live performance by Sawako Nakayasu —\n42:22\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tSo, where’s my werewolf pillow.\n42:24\tKlara du Plessis:\t— and Lee Ann Brown.\n42:27\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tBlockade.\n42:27\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis clip extracts poetry from Sawako’s book, Texture Notes, and Lee Ann’s In the Laurels Caught.\n42:36\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Blockade is pink lemonade made from strawberry library books. The Totoro house hums a deep song in yonder glen. You’re a fragment of my imagination. Experience wafts its checkered travelers in with a thumbprint. Vexed then fixed. Seeing signs shaped like huge shoes Fox church road sprang up on her left. Bright blue-green beetle vale under a rock. Keats’ favourite letter was V. She spins it like a tiny DJ on her alphabet box. Wendy Mandy over the wall straggles in with beeping shoes, lit up like a kite.  The leaves are out of pollen or soon will be. Who are you calling a verdant lush. Here, mommy, hold this moss. Hold this mess. Don’t say to me. I don’t like to. Blap is my friend. He’s a boy. He’s a ghost who lives in New York. He painted with me. His hair is yellow.\n43:46\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis section of the Deep Curation script is constructed as a series of wave formations. Lee Ann begins by reading a poem up until the word yellow. Yellow serves as a cue for Sawako to begin reading her poem, “Texture of Needing Yellow”, in the background.\n44:09\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Yellow! He painted. He painted pink hair. His hair is red. I am blap. Here are some pieces of puzzles for you. I will make some more for you. Are you a cat bus? We’re getting married. I married this train. We’re getting married. Cheeky Dickie married a Chickadee. You’re dead, Chuck with yourself. Scraping together, scraping away at a bleeding book and you should be too. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. Where is my werewolf pillow? Sawako.\n44:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tLee Ann improvises. She fixates on the weirdness of the werewolf pillow and transforms this poetic image into a direct question, addressing Sawako head on.\n44:51\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tSawako. Where is it?\n44:53\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tWhere is your werewolf pillow?\n45:02\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tWhere’s my Totoro house that I want on the hill so I can go up there and see all those little puffballs.\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tIt’s down the old [inaudible] stomping in the Ramsey cemetery?\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t[inaudible].\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s where you’re gonna find your werewolf pillow.\n45:22\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tIt’s up in the house. I love my pillow. That deep pillow song. That deep pillow collaboration and curation.\n45:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat deep pillow collaboration and curation? Ha! Reality is ousting any kind of script.\n45:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices, Improvisation] That deep pillow collaboration and curation. [Inaudible]. These mountains are old mountains. Rockies. Where are we now. 5 million years old. What happens to the yellow you had here? Appalachians. 500 million. The texture of yellow. [Inaudible]. Which are plentiful here, like overgrown version of some families, private [Inaudible]. And the position.\n45:59\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe positions have reversed. The poets have exchanged words so that Sawako performs Lee Ann’s words, and vice versa.\n46:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Voices Overlapping] The positions reverse. Raised from [inaudible]. Yellow is a light that contains a friendly sort of heat. I am drawn to a newer [inaudible]. Maybe yellow is light which massages. [Inaudible] Carved. Straight path. Thus transmitting. Bumpy road to heaven. And then at a later moment. Existence for a straight arrow. Transposed. It’s an altogether different, similar. The way your friends are different, similar. That way. Here. The point of meeting yellow and it’s specific geography. Down on the bypass where someone wept. Maybe yellow as a geography that grows and shifts. Otherwise, known as now. The now of needing yellow. I need more yellow. That comes lower forth like an angel, the angel needing yellow. Needing yellow without needing yellow. Missing without being missed. Being close to needing yellow is close to not needing yellow. Needing yellow is all —it shows up becomes less being yellow becomes more needing yellow. Near being yellow from the distance or after or close at hand. More, more needing yellow. And more and more and more and more and more needing yellow in result of an explosion, which is yellow and is not needed. That’s enough.\n47:43\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako interjects. Self-reflectivity of both Sawako and Lee Ann’s performance amplifies their authority over the poetry reading at hand. By commenting on what they’re doing while they’re doing it, they showcase their awareness of their words. They actively take authorship of their poetic presentation by manipulating and reworking the words at their disposal. This is no passive replay of a script, but an engaged and playful [Audio Recording, Overlapping Voices] public display of fluid and fun authorial control.\n48:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] [Inaudible] Five. Million. Years. Old. Yellow that you had here. The texture of being yellow. The permutation of being yellow.\n48:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the Q&A discussion after the Deep Curation performance, Kate Lilley, poet and professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney queried the relationship between improvisation and script.\n48:40\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThe script [inaudible] opened some doors and then we opened some more doors in the moment.\n48:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Sawako.\n48:53\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tYeah, we just read through it a little bit yesterday. We had the script before, but we didn’t really do any of this yesterday at all.\n48:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Lee Ann.\n49:04\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tYeah it was very — but I think we were just interested in listening to each other and —\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t— Playing.\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\t— Playing. Yeah. And Lee Ann and I have known each other for many, many years, which I don’t think Klara knew when she curated us. But there is a feeling of friendship that also contributed to the way it felt to be in conversation through our poetry in this particular moment. That was like a gift that Klara gave us.\n49:27\tAudio Recording, Kate Lilley:\tThat certainly came across.\n49:35\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako’s metaphor of the door is apt. As the curator, I initiated gestures that opened doors between the writing of Sawako, Lee Ann, and Fanny Howe. But gestures are never static. The doors kept swinging open and shut as the poets themselves move through doorways and opened other entries and exits that I didn’t even know existed. I’d like the sense of play and improvisation as impetus for the poets to author their own work again, recurrently. I want to extend Charles Bernstein’s claim that each performance of a poem adds to its “fundamentally plural existence”. Not only is the poem multiplying into variant forms, but each performance allows the author to rewrite that poem in performance. By restructuring the conditions in which a poem was being presented and by placing that poem in new proximities to other poems, Deep Curation instigates a radical potential for dynamic and organic re-authorship. [Begin: Instrumental Strings] As the curator of a Deep Curation poetry event, I author the possibility for the poets to re-author their own poetry. [Instrumental Strings continues]\n50:56\tKlara du Plessis:\tDifferent curators have different approaches to curating and to the curatorial. Whether they’re working in visual arts or literary fields. Critic, Sarah Longair’s notion of curatorial authority, [End: Instrumental Strings] for example, imagines the curator’s role as that of resident scholar. The curator is someone who dedicates her life to the preservation and dissemination of a body of work. For her, the curator embodies expertise about a certain collection and thereby gains authority to define and control its public representation. Thinking along very different lines, celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist supports an organic model, providing a space in which experiences are generated according to the individuals displaying or interacting with artworks. Obrist is more interested in connections that may form when a curator comes temporarily into contact with a set of art or literary works. The curator never defines the work, never becomes a spokesperson for the work, but rather supports the audience in creating their own experience and understanding of the work. I want to quote Obrist on his curatorial practice. He says, quote, [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumental] “curating is simply about connecting cultures, bringing their elements into proximity with each other. The task of curating is to make junctions, to allow different elements, to touch.” End quote. Deep Curation allows different elements to touch. I like that. Thinking back to the performative work of Jackson Mac Low, and the Four Horsemen, their experiments also allowed elements to touch, even to merge. But I wonder if they would have liked the term curation. [End: Upbeat Instrumental] I doubt it. Thinking of Deep Curation in terms of curation, as the name, obviously underscores, initiates a methodology at odds with past modes of collaborative poetry performance. Curation has a hipness to it, which some find off-putting. Curation also derives its concepts of collectivity, proximity, and relationality from the exhibition, the gallery space, rather than from performance practice. Curation projects the visual onto the literary, and then waits to see what kind of performance will erupt. Yet, Deep Curation is still in flux [Begin: Instrumental Strings] as a curatorial practice it keeps developing and transforming as my own interests as a curator change. But also as the work comes into contact with various poets and audiences and the world of expertise these individuals bring to the project.\n53:23\tKlara du Plessis:\tDue to COVID-19 Deep Curation has been on a break for six months and once life reconfigures itself, who knows how the project will have changed. I can see Deep Curation taking on gentler forms that are less labour intensive while still embodying the core tenet of creating conversations between poets and poems. I’ve also fantasized about ways of expanding the project, having more time and resources to work with poets for more extended periods of time to progress past the first draft of a performance and to create a truly integrated and rehearsed experimental poetry reading experience. In contrast, I’ve considered ways of creating a solo show. This might be limited to my own poetry, or it might be a way to include other poet’s work, but without their physical presence and performance. It might also be a re-curation of archival audio material from past Deep Curation poetry readings. Hang on to that thought. [Echo effect] Hang on to that thought. [Theme Music]\n54:54\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Klara du Plessis and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. For more work from Klara du Plessis check out their freshly released second book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh from Palimpsest Press, available now. A special thank you to Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Isis Giraldo, Kaie Kellough, Kate Lilley, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin: Overlapping Choral Voices] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand-new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, bringing us mini-stories about how literature sounds. [End Overlapping Choral Voices]"],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"9282","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 S2E5, Cylinder Talks: Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies, 1 February 2021, Camlot and Copeland"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/cylinder-talks-pedagogy-in-literary-sound-studies/"],"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 2"],"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","Stacey Copeland"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Stacey Copeland"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ff305f81-4e58-468c-a0f1-927c9318155b/audio/1b004284-35e0-4c38-b489-61f16a8c2b3d/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:04:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,768,142 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/cylinder-talks-pedagogy-in-literary-sound-studies/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-02-01\",\"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\":\"\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Alexandra Sweny,  “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s Environments Series”\\n\\n— Sound Clips:  Original recordings of Montreal by Alexandra Sweny.\\n\\nSara Adams,  “Henry Mayhew and Victorian London”\\n\\n— Sound Clips: “Victorian Street.” British Library, Sounds, Sound Effects. Collection: Period Backgrounds.  Editor, Benet Bergonzi.  Published, 1994.\\n\\nAubrey Grant,  “Poe’s Impossible Sound”\\n\\n— Sound Clips: Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room, Lovely Music Ltd., 1981.\\n\\nAndrew Whiteman,  “Bronze lance heads”\\n\\n— Sound Clips:\\n\\n—“Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound” March 26, 1976, U of San Diego; accessed from Penn Sound Robert Duncan’s author page. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php)\\n\\n—“Ezra Pound recites Canto 1” 1959; accessed from Penn Sound Ezra Pound’s author page (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— —“The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide” by Richard Siebruth, interview with Al Filreis May 22, 2007. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— Sampled 1940s film music; date and origin unknown.\\n\\n— Original music; composed by Andrew Whiteman, Dec 2020.\\n\\nReferences:\\n\\nEidsheim, Nina Sun.  The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African Music. Duke UP, 2019.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “’The Following Record’: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908.” PhD Dissertation.  Indiana University, 2007.\\n\\nHoffman, J. “Soundscape explorer: From snow to shrimps, everything is a sound to Bernie Krause.” Nature, vol. 485, no. 7398, 2012, p. 308, doi:10.1038/485308a.\\n\\nKittler, Friedrich. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.\\n\\nKrause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little Brown, 2012.\\n\\nPeter Miller, “Prosody, Media, and the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” PMLA 135.2 (March 2020): 315-328.\\n\\nMayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.\\n\\nPicker, John.  Victorian Soundscapes.  Oxford University Press, 2003.\\n\\nPoe, Edgar Allen. “The Bells”, Complete Poems and Selected Essays, ed. Richard Gray, Everyman Press, 1993, pp. 81-84.\\n\\nRobinson, Dylan.  Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Inner Traditions/Bear and Co., 1993.\\n\\nSiegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Rea. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.  Fordham UP, 2015.\\n\\nStoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.  New York University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTeibel, Irv. Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore. LP Record. Syntonic Research Inc., 1969.\\n\\nWorld Soundscape Project – Sonic Research Studio – Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/worldsoundscaperoject.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021.\\n\\nAdditional Sound Clips:\\n\\nCamlot, Jason.  Ambient Music for “Cylinder Talks”.\\n\\n“A Christmas Carol in Prose (Charles Dickens: Scrooge’s awakening )(w Carol Singers [male quartet]).” Bransby Williams, performer. Edison 13353, 1905.\\n\\n“Big Ben clock tower of Westminster – striking half past 10, quarter to 11, and 11 o’clock” (Westminster, London, England). July 16, 1890. Recorded by: Miss Ferguson and Graham Hope, (for George Gouraud). Edison brown wax cylinder (unissued). NPS object catalog number: EDIS 39839.\\n\\nbpayri. “crowd chattering students university loud”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\nHumanoide9000. “Glacier break”, Freesound, 2017.\\n\\nNew, David, and R. Murray Schafer, “Listen.” National Film Board of Canada, 2009. https://www.nfb.ca/film/listen/\\n\\n“Micawber (from ‘David Copperfield’).” William Sterling Battis, performer. Victor 35556 B, 12” disc, 1916.\\n\\nNew, David, director. R. Murray Schafer: Listen, National Film Board of Canada, 2009.\\n\\nsbyandiji. “short alarm bell in school hall”, Freesound, 2014.\\n\\nSpliffy. “Hallway of University in silence”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\n“Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby.” Herbert Beerbohm Tree, performer. Gramophone Concert Record, 10” Black Label Disc, GC 1313, 1906.\\n\\n“The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Len Spencer, performer. Columbia matrix, [1904] 1908.\\n\\nUdall, Lyn. “Just One Girl.” Popular Songs of Other Days, 2012/1898.\\n\\nWesterkamp, Hildegard. “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” Transformations, Empreintes DIGITALes, IMED 1031, Enregistrements i Média (SOPROQ), 1989/2010. https://electrocd.com/en/piste/imed_1031-1.3.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549488664576,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does “listening” mean within the context of the literary classroom?\nIn this episode we join Director of the SpokenWeb Network and Professor at Concordia University – Jason Camlot – in conversation with SpokenWeb podcast supervising producer and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate – Stacey Copeland – to explore how sound studies is being taken up in the literary classroom. Together we listen back to select “Cylinder Talk” sound production assignments created by Concordia graduate students, and unpack the experiences, ideas and discussions that the production and study of sound can incite across disciplines. A 3-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s most recent graduate seminar – Literary Listening as Cultural Technique – the Cylinder Talk draws on a history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with literature studies.The episode features sound work by Alexandra Sweny, Sara Adams, Aubrey Grant and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \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. [Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Ends]\n00:00:34\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. On the SpokenWeb Podcast, we talk a lot about different ways that sound and literature collide, whether that collision takes place in the SpokenWeb archives or through research symposiums, poetry, readings, and literary events. While past episodes have brought us into the university setting through interviews with professors and explorations of student work in the SpokenWeb network, we have yet to really explore how sound and literature collide in the classroom. Whether that’s high school, university, or elsewhere, what are the different ways that sound is being taken up as a learning tool in the literary community? We could even say we’re in a classroom of sorts together [Sound Effect: Classroom Chatter] here and now listening and learning in dialogue through the SpokenWeb Podcast.\n00:01:33\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Bell Ringing] And it sounds like class is about to begin. In this episode, we join director of the SpokenWeb network and professor at Concordia university, Jason Camlot in conversation with SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer, and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate, Stacey Copeland in exploring sound and listening in the literary classroom. Together, we’ll listen back to select “cylinder talks” created by Concordia graduate students and unpack the experiences, ideas, and discussions sparked by the production and study of sound across disciplines. A three-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s graduate course, Literary Listening as Cultural Technique, the cylinder talk draws on a rich history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with the study of literature. Here are Stacey Copeland and Jason Camlot with Cylinder Talks: Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies. [Theme Music].\n \n\n00:02:31\tJason Camlot:\tHey Stacey.\n \n\n00:02:31\tStacey Copeland:\tHello. How are you?\n \n\n00:02:36\tJason Camlot:\tGood. Sorry about that. I was in the wrong room.\n \n\n00:02:40\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, that’s what happens when we have probably five or six different links we’ve used now for the podcast.\n \n\n00:02:47\tJason Camlot:\tExactly.\n \n\n00:02:47\tStacey Copeland:\tAll right, you want to get started? [Begin Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tLet’s go for it.\n \n\n00:02:56\tStacey Copeland:\tPodcast project manager, Stacey Copeland here. I’m joined In our podcast classroom of sorts, AKA Zoom video room, by Jason Camlot, director of the SpokenWeb research network, and likely a familiar voice if you listen to season one of the podcast. So being a student, myself, teacher, a sound scholar, I’m quite interested in the different ways that audio media production is being taken up as a learning tool across different disciplines. Whether that’s a project like SpokenWeb, or I think might be the case with the audio we’ll be listening to today, audio assignments that take students out of the traditional essay writing headspace and into a different mode of engaging with ideas in the classroom. But rather than me guessing at the inner workings of your graduate course, Jason, you’ve brought a selection of student assignments for us to listen to together. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about the course, the assignments, and what we’ll be hearing today? [End Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:03:56\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. Well thanks Stacy. Very much. I’m entering our SpokenWeb Zoom classroom, as you describe it, both as a student and as someone who just taught a grad seminar called (Literary) Listening as Cultural Technique. I should say, I’ve been trying to teach with sound in my literature courses for about a decade now with varying degrees of success. I think the first few times that I taught sound recordings of literary performances in a classroom, I just played them and then expected something to happen and nothing happened because I found that in the students, and myself as well, we weren’t equipped to actually engage critically with those kinds of materials. And so. I called this course, (Literary) Listening, and literary is in parentheses. So it’s a very typographical title I suppose. Literary is really cordoned off from listening as cultural technique.\n00:04:49\tJason Camlot:\tAnd most of the seminar we’re reading theories of listening from disciplines that are not literary. As far as the assignments went, assignment for the entire seminar were really leading towards a final paper. And then there was this assignment that we’re talking about, which I called it the cylinder talk, right. And I’ve done this before. And the cylinder talk, the title, really comes from my own research fairly extensively in early spoken sound recordings and thinking about the implications of media formats in relation to what I would identify as literary forms. Right. So how did the constraints of a particular format inform what one can do in terms of delivering a story or a poem or an argument of some kind. Because cylinders, back in the day, in the acoustic period of sound recordings, sort of pre 1920 and usually much earlier than that —so from the 1890s on —generally held between two and four minutes of sound. The cylinder represents a time constraint as a result of preservation surface. So it’s using a material artifact on which sound was first recorded as a temporal constraint to begin with for an assignment. For the courses where I was doing these cylinder talks, they knew what a cylinder was and understood what the implications were because we’d studied them. So we’d listened to cylinder recordings, right. We’d studied late Victorian, early sound recordings where full Victorian novels were compressed into the timeframe of a three-minute cylinder. How do you deliver a David Copperfield in three minutes?\n \n\n00:06:25\tAudio Recording, “David Copperfield” performed by William Sterling Battis :\tMy dear Copperfield, come in. Come in! I —\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:28\tJason Camlot:\tEarly cylinder remediations of fiction mainly focused on either character sketches— that’s one way in which you compress a 400 page novel into three minutes — or they would focus on key transformation scenes. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde —\n \n\n00:06:47\tAudio Recording, “The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Performed by Len Spencer\tThe fiend is coming! Yes, aye, is here! [laughter]\n \n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:57\tJason Camlot:\t— Or the mesmerism scene from George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby where Svengali is mesmerizing Trilby —\n \n\n00:07:01\tAudio Recording, “Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby” performed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree\tAnd you shall see nothing ,hear nothing, thinking nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali…\n00:07:14\tJason Camlot:\t—or in a Christmas Carol when Ebeneezer Scrooge is transformed from a squeegee Scrooge into a benevolent generous person —\n \n\n00:07:28\tAudio Recording, “A Christmas Carol in Prose” performed by Bransby Williams:\tGod sent dreams to save me from meself. May God in this merry Christmastime be thanked for the reformation that you now begin with Ebeneezer Scrooge.\n \n\n \n\n00:07:42\tJason Camlot:\tAnd so the fiction cylinder, that’s the way they got around the question of constraint and compression. In this seminar, I wanted to have the students engage in a sort of, not a super demanding way, but just to have the experience of working with the digital audio workstation. Even if it means just having sort of two tracks and having to edit, select, engage with digitized sound, to think about both the media, through which we were encountering all of the sounds in the course, and I also wanted them to experience the kind of intensity that audio editing entails. Having to engage in that activity, I felt, represents a way of thinking about methodology. So that it’s sort of a form of listening that to some extent estranges you from the listening, because you may not know how to use the tools that well, so it’s not so natural to use them.\n00:08:32\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s a nice extension of the longer sort of theoretical discussions we’ve been having throughout the semester, about listening as a kind of audile technique or as a cultural technique. So it required them to produce a sound work. So that was sort of one of the goals. And the other constraints, apart from time alone, was they had to present a main idea, argument, or concept that they were going explore in the paper that they were writing. And they had to integrate at least one sound from the area that they were exploring. And I did imagine this not only as a kind of production oriented assignment, but I knew we were going to have a listening session, listening party of sorts in our very last class where everyone will get to hear everyone else’s cylinder talks, but also engage in responding to what they heard.\n \n\n00:09:20\tStacey Copeland:\tYou’ve brought in four talks from the course for us to listen to today, which will give everyone a bit more of a sense of what the students ended up with after engaging in this cylinder talk format. We’re going to play the full talk, which of course is only three minutes. It’s not too long for each one. And then we’ve chosen a bit of discussion to illustrate some of the critical thought that came after that listening experience together.\n \n\n00:09:46\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. As we were listening, of course we were on Zoom, so a bunch of squares showing everyone’s faces, everyone’s video is on. And that was one of the most enjoyable and interesting elements of the several hours that we spent listening together was just watching everyone’s reactions. This was the first time that everyone got to share something they’d made in this way. And so that was, I think, a really special aspect of this last listening session that we did together. So, which is the first one we’re going to listen to?\n \n\n00:10:14\tStacey Copeland:\tI think the first one I have queued up is Alexandra’s talk.\n \n\n00:10:18\tJason Camlot:\tSo Alexandra Sweny was thinking about and reading about environmental soundscape production. I think Alexandra — who is really working on Canadian poetry so this is not necessarily in her wheelhouse — really just became excited about some of the articles that were about environmental sound. And she pursued that topic.\n \n\n00:10:38\tStacey Copeland:\tAlexandra’s talk “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s, Environments Series”.\n \n\n00:10:44\tJason Camlot:\tYes.\n \n\n00:10:44\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:10:47\tAudio Recording, Alexandra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White noise to me has always sounded like falling snow. When I was little waking up after VHS always felt like falling asleep and waking up in the middle of a snow storm. I picture static like a blizzard that surrounds and disorients you. Every sound we hear it exists on a spectrum analogous to colours. White noise, like snowfall, has a wide frequency spectrum and clear tones, a narrow one. According to bio acoustician Bernie Krauss, in a healthy ecosystem in a healthy soundscape, the sound spectrum is full with living creatures, filling every frequency band. In altered and recently developed landscapes, such as clear cut forests or logging paths, the sound spectrum has notable gaps. [Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White  noise helps you forget about all that. Snowfall is an ambient sound and it blankets what it covers audibly just as it does visually. Snow absorbs noise and it isolates and insulates. I use recordings of snowfall to study, read, and write. In a library, snowfall through my headphones would dull the sounds of rattling coffee cups and scraping chairs. It began when I encountered Irv Teibel’s Environment Series, a set of set of 11 long playing records created in the ’60s and ’70s. “Alpine Blizzard” is the title of the A-side on the last record. I could imagine myself isolated as if on top of a mountain, piling text on a page while the snow piled high around me. But this isn’t how the sounds were recorded. Rather than setting the top a prime peak and letting the natural world do the work, colleagues of Teibel recall how he viewed nature as an obstacle to be tackled, wrestled, and refined.\n00:12:51\tAudio Recording, Alexndra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\tRather than any old beach sound, for instance, he wanted the perfect beach sound. A track he eventually mixed with samples across 12 different locations, which were ultimately processed using localizers and equalizers. The sounds broken down into new recombinations and new synthetic waves to cover this places. The result was his first track “Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.” In my essay, I want to contend with the ethics of Teibel’s Environments series, which are among the first and most contentious field recording compositions to be sold in mainstream markets. I ask what are the risks of psychologically ultimate sounded field recordings, which are designed to soothe and calm, but which distance us from the psychologically and acoustically disruptive noises of anthropocentric contact and occupation? How do these ambient and curated soundscapes made for the human, but without the human, frame our relationship to the landscape, both imaginary and real? What are we to make of soundscapes that allow us to forget our place in the world, rather than which remind us of it? [Sound Clip: White Noise].\n \n\n00:13:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tGreat job, Alexandra.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAny first thoughts for us on it?\n00:14:14\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah, I guess I got on thinking about it from one of the additional readings on the bibliography of listening that talked about other field and sound recordings that have come up in the past years and just how the composer stance to the original recordings have changed. I think the article was talking about Derek Charke’s “Falling from Cloudless Skies”, which recorded the sounds of glaciers cleaving and melting. [Sound Effect: Glacier Break] And then songs of the humpback whale also mentioned that article. So I was just thinking about how field recordings have changed to reflect the attitudes that we’re having towards the natural world since the ’60s.\n \n\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tMichael.\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tI thought that the thing was, in some ways, very objectively beautiful because you have this white noise, and then the idea is that all of these —not only these ideas that you’re talking about are like being evoked out of the white noise, but you also have this really — I guess this is what meditation tips in general do is that they have white noise and then they have people evoking landscapes out of them that you’re supposed to visualize. But here you actually told us that they were coming out of the white noise itself, which is really interesting. It literalized the trick that I think that those, that meditation tapes usually used.\n \n\n00:15:18\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Michael Menezes.\n \n\n00:15:19\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you. Yeah. Meditation tapes, just even as a whole, would be a really good example of this that are just designed to put you to sleep and really zone out. I’ve listened to those also in the past.\n \n\n00:15:27\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAndrew Whiteman\n00:15:29\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman\tOn that, what I was thinking, what you were doing is you have sound behind you [Sound Clip: White Noise] and then it fades out and then you bring the sound back again [Sound Clip: White Noise]. And I thought you were tricking it. I thought you were playing us something from the LP series you were talking about. And then I thought you were fading on actual white noise because I find a lot of sort of new laptop based composers or are trying to make fake natural sounds using the sounds that are only available inside the digital audio workstation playing with the nature-culture thing there.\n \n\n00:16:00\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah. And no, that was that was just a recording on my fire escape with the bells that came in right at the end. And I figured I’d put them in because those are very much, they take me out of whatever I’m doing and remind me like exactly what time it is and where I am.\n \n\n00:16:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah. Just to build on everything that everyone’s been saying, I thought it was a wonderful example of a kind of anti-meditation tape or a meditation tape that makes you reflect on all the ethical issues surrounding what meditation tapes are trying to do perhaps. But also I thought rhetorically the way you brought us into the description of what a natural soundscape and it’s sort of diverse frequency spectrum would normally entail going to the silence that memetically performs that. And then when you say white noise makes us forget about all that, rhetorically that whole sequence was really, really effective and powerful because you brought us into like, “Oh, okay, we’re going to hear this sound over and over again, but we’re not going to hear it the same way” because you’re teaching us how to hear it differently. And sort of the implications of what we’re hearing.”\n \n\n00:17:01\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tThe images you actually evoke are not — you start by saying that there are these beautiful nature landscapes but then the white noise is something that is blocking out global catastrophe, like glacier slipping off of mountains. And, I don’t know, the songs of humpback whales was also a very good image.\n \n\n00:17:18\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, I never thought I would hear a student referencing Bernie Krause in a literature course, but there we go. So what is it like listening back to this discussion for you, Jason?\n \n\n00:17:31\tJason Camlot:\tIt brought me right back into the moment of sort of the excitement immediately after hearing the piece for the first time. I really did think that Alexandra’s cylinder — more than others —had a kind of almost ASMR quality to it. Really it was very tactile and also the way she delivered her text was really interesting because she allowed for a lot of space in between sentences. It almost sounded like a poem. So I think I was hearing a little bit more the form of the piece even more than I had the first time. Her selection of sounds really did get to the core of some of the ethical issues that she was interested in exploring.\n \n\n00:18:08\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, before the discussion came in, my mind was already churning all around all the possibilities of what you might’ve been listening to in the course because that sort of close recording, that very ASMR, tactile quality that the white noise track has in Alexandra’s piece really reminded me of Hildegard Westerkamp’s work—\n \n\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tThese are the tiny, the intimate voices of nature. Of bodies, of dreams, of the imagination.\n00:18:38\tStacey Copeland:\t— particularly her Kits Beach piece, which does also have a very poetic flow in the vocal performance. And then the very close recording and very tactile sensation of listening to the barnacles on Kits Beach in Vancouver.\n \n\n00:18:54\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tYou’re still hearing the barnacle sounds. And already they’re changing.\n00:18:59\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd this recording brought me right back there. So then I was so surprised to hear in the discussion that Alexandra just recorded this on her fire escape. And then also the bells, because then I was thinking, well, if you were listening to R. Murray Schafer, maybe the bells were intentional and kind of an ode to 1970s acoustic ecology, but no, it was just her everyday experience.\n \n\n00:19:22\tJason Camlot:\tThere was a longer discussion about the bells after, cause we talked about bells an awful lot in our seminar from Schafer, but also because one of the earliest sort of documentary recordings was of Big Ben tolling [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”] in London in 1890 so, we talked about what, what that meant, what it means to record a bell, what a bell is, especially a publicly heard bell as a means of something that many people in an area can hear, how the bell measures time, et cetera. So yeah, we thought about bells a lot and yet there they areright, just in her neighborhood and she integrated them. We really didn’t do much listening to soundscape recordings in the seminar. The majority of the recordings we listened to were still voice-based in one way or another, even though they may have been quite experimental, but that was all Alexandra following her interest and discovering sounds.\n \n\n00:20:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI love this first example, because it really illustrates some of the ways that thinking through sound studies, regardless of whether you’ve listened to specific acoustic ecologists or sound recordist, like Hildegard Westerkamp and thinking about the World Soundscape Project, and you had a bit of introduction in the course for students around R. Murray Schafer, and round soundscape and those ideas.\n \n\n00:20:43\tR. Murray Schafer from “Listen” (NFB 2009):\tWe are the composers of this huge miraculous composition that’s going on around us and we can improve it or we can destroy it. We can add more noises or we can add more beautiful sounds. That’s all up to us.\n \n\n00:20:58\tStacey Copeland:\tThink about how reading those ideas can then lead to very similar sonic aesthetics in this particular cylinder talk. It’d be interesting to see how that translates across different disciplines as well.\n \n\n00:21:10\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s such a great question. And coming from literature, one of the challenges is to move away from the semantic signal when you’re listening to voice recordings. Alexandra’s interest in moving away from sounds with semantic meaning was a fulfillment of what we were often trying, but failing to do in listening to some of the literary recordings. Another thing that I think I heard in the responses to Alexandra’s was a real interest in trying to identify what Michel Chion would call “causal listening”. I thought you were making the sounds do this, but actually it turned out to be that. And that also is an ongoing sort of frame for our course — thinking about what it means to identify sound as objects or with particular sources.\n \n\n00:21:56\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of see some similar overlaps in these ideas of sonic environment and our relationship to the soundscape and the way that these kind of core ideas that come out of cultural sound studies have been taken up by your students through this literature course. And we hear these themes come up again in the next Cylinder Talk that you’ve chosen for us.\n \n\n00:22:18\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. So this is Sara Adams. This is probably in some ways the most challenging of the projects, because most of the sounds that she wants to write about can never be heard again. Her world is set in the 1840s in Victorian London. Sara is a PhD student and she’s a 19th century scholar. I’m a Victorianist first and foremost, I suppose, still. And so she’s come to work on Henry Mayhew, who was journalist, also an early ethnographer, oral historian, data collector about, I guess, marginal peoples living in urban environments in the 19th century. His best-known work is called London Labour and the London Poor, which is a remarkable, extensive, and expansive document of interviews with people who are living and working in London, but not necessarily in recognized jobs or positions. So many of them are doing things, doing the work in the city that is rendered invisible to anyone above the lower middle classes. The street sweepers, the garbage collectors, people who are selling wares in the streets. A very famous figure for Mayhew who that gets anthologized for some reason, the watercress girl is the one that that gets repeated and anthologized a lot.\n00:23:31\tJason Camlot:\tMayhew —half of his work, or more than half of his work are actual transcriptions of interviews that he held. He writes them in the voices of the people he interviewed. We don’t know how accurate and there’s been a lot of sort of critique of sort of him as a mediator of these voices. So those are sounds that Sara was very interested in exploring as sounds. So actually I don’t think she had thought of them as sounds previously that informed her new investigation for her, I think, and for me, cause I hadn’t thought about Mayhew this way, either. Thinking about where different people who make certain sounds as a result of the labour they pursue, whether they’re perceived as noise or as a kind of meaningful signal in certain ways.\n \n\n00:24:13\tStacey Copeland:\tGreat. Let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:24:14\tAudio Recording, Sara Adam’s Cylinder Talk:\tOver the course of the 19th century, Victorian London experienced an unprecedented growth in population size. Consequently Britain’s largest city was not only choked with dirt and dust, but it was also overwhelmingly “alive with sound.” [Sound Clips: Victorian Street] In the city street markets, butchers, fishmongers and other street sellers shouted over each other, trying to catch the attention of passers by. The raucous symphony of London streets was also filled with bamboo flute players, Oregon grinders, and other street musicians, as well as the clomping of horses hooves, the clattering of carriages and carts, and the distant roar of the new railway. It was truly an “age of osculation” as John Picker argues, full of careful and close listening to a noisy and rapidly changing modern world. While some 19th century writers and intellectuals try to escape from the piercing sounds of the city streets, the journalist Henry Mayhew embraced them, diving headfirst into London’s East End and interviewing street vendors and other impoverished street folk in order to compile an encyclopedic archive entitled: London Labour and the London Poor first published in 1851. London Labour was ultimately an unfinished multi-volume work that recorded the everyday living and working conditions of London’s marginalized, urban poor. Mayhew was explicitly interested in reproducing in print form the real and “unvarnished” voices of London street folk “from the lips of the people themselves.” By deploying carefully detailed and mimetic description while also striving to transcribe his subjects interview answers verbatim, Mayhew attempted to create a literary work that faithfully sounded and re-sounded like a phonograph. Not only did Mayhew seek to bear witness to and preserve the voices of a rapidly disappearing population, but his project also simultaneously pushed the boundaries of what print could do. In my paper, I will explore how Mayhew uses sound to immerse his middle-class audience in the urban underworld of outcast London. How does Mayhew’s use of sound in the text create the conditions of possibility for hearing? What kind of ear witnessing does Mayhew perform in the text and what novel aesthetic ethical or political realities does this osculate of work make possible? I find it fascinating that Mayhew’s text reverberates, not only with the sights of the city, but also equally with it’s sounds, creating an immersive reading experience that grounds its reader firmly in a stable spatial and temporal setting. Mayhew’s text is also striking because it not only records the everyday noises of the city’s quotidian hustle and bustle, but it also trains its ear and by extension it’s reader’s ear on individuals and their personal stories of loss, struggle, and small moments of joy. In this way, Mayhew conditions his readers to differentiate sound from noise, listening from hearing, a sonic and sympathetic movement with profound ethical and political possibilities.\n \n\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tThanks guys. I guess I’m always interested in like, what does it mean to listen? What does it mean to hear? What conditions specifically political arise out of certain kinds of listening? And also what do they not make possible or what does incomplete listening or partial or warped? I mean, it’s always mediated through all sorts of things. And I think in those clips there’s so many different levels of my mediation and like interpretation, but then also Mayhew trying to get towards like an authentic kind of unvarnished, untouched, idea of someone’s sound and someone’s story, but we just know that’s not possible. Right. We know that that mediation fundamentally does distort and that there are implications for that.\n \n\n00:28:39\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\tI’m not too familiar with Henry Mayhew —\n \n\n \n\n00:28:42\tJason Camlot:\tAubrey Grant.\n \n\n00:28:42\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\t—but I know that within that context of the different social reformers at that period, there was a lot of talk of questions of sanitation and cleanliness, of the dangers that the poor brought onto society in terms of illness, in terms of also smells as well and all this stuff. But thinking about in terms of noise — I was wondering there was like a connection between a kind of discourse, the sanitation and a discourse of noise.\n \n\n00:29:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. I guess for both, I was sort of connecting them and actually I’ve done a lot of work on waste and sanitation during this period. So that’s why I was sort of like, “Oh, I never thought of the sonic qualities.” I’ve thought of like material pollution in the terms of like dirt and dust and human waste, decaying weight matter, whatever, but not in terms of noise pollution. A lot of those people and places have been extinguished and have been made obsolete by industry and by industrial processes and by modernity. And that’s actually a really big part of Mayhew’s project was actually to record these people’s voices, and their everyday lives and the details about their mundane to-ings and fro-ings because they all like disappeared basically. Slowly. Like police were more —there’s more police around so there was more policing of like the city and making people move around more and not letting them just sell wherever. There were more laws about street music and who could play where. We have that today still with like red zoning people who are on the sides, on the streets, like asking for money, policing the poor and all sorts of ways,\n \n\n00:30:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tIs sound in any of his [statistical] tables? I don’t recall.\n00:30:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. So they’re not. The closest would be like, he talks about how many carriages are on the road, how many more carriages there are now than there were before. Like for me it feels like he’s kind of putting that osculation, like that idea of like the stethoscope, he sort of applying it to the body politic or at least a very small part of it, of the urban poor in London taking its heartbeat.\n \n\n00:30:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tI just called up cause you were talking about it sort of one of my favorite methods of categorization that Mayhew uses of the population. Right. And it could be interesting to think about what sounds did these four sectors of the population create or do they tend to create right. He calls them the enrichers, the auxiliaries, the benefactors and the servitors. And the thing about Mayhew that’s so cool, right, is that it’s very leveling these categories it’s based on your instrumental contribution rather than your social status. Servitors are the actors, the servants, all of the London poor that you’re talking about, like the street sweepers and scavengers — but the queen is considered a servitor as well. And members of parliament. To think about songs sonic emanations, according to some of these attempts at categorizing populations and the spaces they use, obviously, cause space and going back to Aubery’s point thinking maybe sound is more important to me. I’d really —I’m really excited to look back and think about the status of sound in relation to the other senses in Mayhew.\n \n\n00:31:33\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s great. Listening back to this discussion, you can really hear how excited you are about this topic.\n \n\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Well it reintroduced Mayhew to me in a whole new way. So I was super excited about what —where Sara was going with her work and there’s been some excellent sort of sound studies oriented work in Victorian studies. She mentioned John Picker and John Picker’s book, Victorian Soundscapes does a lot of excellent sort of analysis of noise pollution in the Victorian period and how it relates to identity formation and different sort of […], and  especially the bourgeois subject. But I don’t think he talks about Mayhew — and I really hadn’t thought about Mayhew. And in so many ways it’s such an obvious text to think about from a sonic perspective.\n \n\n00:32:14\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. And I mean, in this discussion, I mean, this is just like a little slice of the very in-depth discussion that the students were having after listening to Sara’s cylinder talk around ideas of noise and the politics of what is defined as noise versus sound, how that relates to the Victorian era, but then also talking about contemporary politics of noise and sound and policing. And it was such a rich conversation to hear coming out of this application of sound studies ideas to say, Henry Mayhew in this particular era. And I was also curious — we hear this politics of noise come up from scholars like Jennifer Stover when we’re thinking about the sonic colour line and the racialized ways that sound is defined as noise in relation to identity. And so it should be —I would think, I mean, maybe I’m just so nerdy that I’m excited about it— quite fascinating to see how these kinds of identity politics unfold in Henry Mayhew’s discussions of sounds and noise in this particular era.\n \n\n00:33:15\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you’re exactly right in your instincts about sort of where some of this may have come from. We talked about Stover, we read Sun Eidsheim’s work The Race of Sound.. And that was a very important book I think for students in the seminar as was Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, which was amazing. The very first thing it does is take down R. Murray Schafer on this question of noise, right. Basically his account of Inuit throat singing as kind of awful noise, right. And so the politics of what is called noise and what isn’t called noise in relation to identity formations and identifications was much discussed throughout the seminar. And I think that Sara was sort of bringing some of that back to the Victorian works that she’s really interested in writing about.\n \n\n00:34:02\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of got on the topic of bells earlier. And this next cylinder talk that you’ve brought in for us brings up to the idea of bells yet again.\n \n\n00:34:11\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. So this is a cylinder talk by Aubrey Grant on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Bells.” There is actually a very recent article in PMLA, which is sort of like one of the major literature journals of the modern language association, on this poem that I assigned for the course, it was published just last year, 2020. So really very recent by Peter Miller called “Prosody Media and the Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe.” Aubrey really dove into readings around prosody, which was sort of a new area to him. So thinking about literary prosody, so the sound in the printed word, right. That’s one way to describe what prosody is —these are things you learn in high school assonance and consonance and rhyme, right. Those are ways of thinking about how sound functions in poetry off the page, but the combination of our course and his discovery of prosody and his already quite mature thinking around signification and theories of language resulted in kind of a mind blowing reading of this poem, using language and signification techniques to communicate sound in ways that he argues are quite unique to Poe.\n \n\n00:35:21\tStacey Copeland:\tSo here is Aubrey’s talk titled “Poe’s Impossible Sound.”\n \n\n00:35:28\tAudio Recording: Aubrey Grant’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Begin/Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”  underplay] In a short story from 1919, Rilke describes his mysterious fascination with a skull he has brought home from an anatomy lesson. Where once it contained within its narrow confines, a brain and an unbounded subconsciousness, it now appeared to him as a hollow structure, an empty vessel. One evening as he passed it flickering in candlelight, he was struck by the realization that he had seen the coronal suture once before. That jagged zigzag pattern of connective fibers that joins the front of the skull to the back was the very same pattern he had seen inscribed on an equally hollow wax cylinder. When, as a child, he had listened to his own voice in all its sonic ephemerality separated from his body for the very first time. What kind of sound would issue from the skull, Rilke wondered, if a phonograph needle were to trace the contours of the coronal suture? What primal sound would be produced if, rather than simply tracing the graphic inscription of a sound that already existed, the phonograph could play the as yet unheard lines, grooves, cuts, and graphemes of nature itself? Setting aside speculation of whether the sound would be noise or music, Rilke’s perspective is decisive. It is only by means of mechanisms, machines, and techniques that it becomes possible to listen, to really listen to the unsounded sounds of the real. More broadly, the phonograph itself and its cylinder of which this talk is a simulation, points to the fact that listening has always been a technique for intervening in the real. In this way, the phonograph is merely the technological exteriorization of a practice of signal processing with its own history. A history which revolves around the question of how we listen. That is, of the techniques we use to filter sounds out of noise, to produce something that we can hear. In my essay, I argue that Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” articulates a transformation in listening techniques marked by a shift from a regime of signs to a regime of signal processing. Taking Friedrich Kittler’s media technical a priori as a starting point, I argue that Poe’s poem is a kind of phonograph avant la lettre, which is both invested in print culture and sonically undermines it. Arguing along lines set out by Eliza Richards, Peter Miller, and Jerome McGann, I will begin by situating Poe’s attention to the mechanics of prosody within 19th century print culture and industrial reproduction. In this reading Poe’s poems are prosodic machines that not only produce an infinite variety of performances, but are themselves technologically reproducible. In a manner analogous to Benyamine’s analysis of cinema it is the very reproducibility of the poetic machine that constructs the cultural modalities of listening in the mid 19th century. However, while holding onto this theory and historical context, I believe that a close reading of “The Bells” will reveal Poe’s attention to a kind of listening that exceeds the boundaries set by written signs and human voices. My reading will center around the orally evocative deployment of onomatopoeia in the poem. Although Poe’s use onomatopoeia to emphasize themes and enhance the musicality of performance has been well-documented, what has escaped notice is the fact that the word bells is not itself onomatopoeic. Rather, it is only through his use of repetition that it becomes so. Like a real bells percussive clapper, which makes its hollow interior ring and resound, the repetition of this mechanical supplement empties the word of signification while retaining its acoustic qualities. What occurs, I argue, is that the graphic inscription becomes an empty vessel. Like Rilke’s skull which channels uncoated frequencies of a primal sound concealed in the materiality of the letter. In other words, the noise of the real and impossible inhuman sound that the signifier normally articulates into signs becomes audible for the first time in Poe’s poem. From sign to signal, this sourceless acousmatic sound may well be the music of the printed words own disillusion into the noise of the coming phonographic age.[End:Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”underplayed]\n \n\n00:39:57\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\tYeah. Talk about repetition.\n \n\n \n\n00:40:03\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tYes, exactly. Exactly. So just a couple of things. Yeah. The sound that I used in the back, I think we’re all familiar with that. We listened to it actually at the beginning of the course, it’s the ending segment of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room. The reason that I wanted to use that segment was because I had intended to actually base part of my thing on that. Cause what I was looking at was like, what is the sound that is sort of like hidden in the voice and how is it revealed or made present through this kind of structure of like repetitive feedback looping and how it dissolves articulation into pure noise.\n \n\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nYeah. Michael.\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Michael Menezes:\tI just thought that your cylinder was like very symbolically lovely. I think that you set up — I mean obviously the background noise thing, it felt like someone turning a large wheel of music in some ways when the wheel makes one revolution of the sound, of the piston hits the thing. And the piston, obviously from your presentation, the piston reminds me of like the mechanical aspect of the bell. And the sound reminds me of the individual trying to like capture this beautiful sonorous noise, just having them connected directly in one machine with no like feeling of humanity in between. And only the skull was like a, was a great image.\n \n\n00:41:12\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tI love the Gothic media theory stuff. I mean, this stuff is great. Ultimately, Michael that’s sort of what I was aiming at. I wasn’t thinking of it as much as a piston, although that works too. Thinking about the way in which like a record [Sound Recording: Surface Crackling] as it turns, or a cylinder, as it turns is a kind of cyclical repetition. And that repetition doesn’t have to just like a bell ringer, like a hammer banging and going like laterally, but it’s actually like a cyclical process.\n \n\n00:41:40\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nA couple of things that came to mind I — just thinking about the relationship between the sign and sounds so really —and the idea of being able to, in a sense, play something like a skull or something in nature. So basically how the sound reproduction technologies seem to evoke and suggest these new possibilities of turning any sign into sort of sonic content. And this is talked about in an article by Theodore Adorno called “The Curve of the Needle.” For him, piano rolls, right, were seen as that source of potential sound [Piano roll music].\n \n\n00:42:20\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nHis way of thinking about it’s sound recording and sort of the bumps on a cylinder or a flat disc are still indexical to original things that made sounds that caused the air pressure to record them, but the piano roll in so far as it was generating sound just from punched holes, suggest the possibility of creating sounds out of nothing. Right. In sense, or just out of random — it made me really think of digital processes. And so this link is to Patrick Feaster’s work, and he —rather than talk about his work as about sound reproduction, he calls it eduction to reduce this, to bring out elicit, develop from a condition of latent, rudimentary, or merely potential existence. So the repetitious sound of your sound piece, in a way is one of the base necessities for educing something because it has to be moving and cyclical in order to generate a sense of continuous sound or sonic quality. So you can’t just have sort of random symbols there has to be some kind of ultimate pattern assigned. Just the concept of sonification in a way is one that it seems could be useful for you to be thinking about in relation to your project.\n \n\n00:43:31\tStacey Copeland:\tWhat are you hearing in listening back to this piece and the discussion, Jason?\n \n\n00:43:35\tJason Camlot:\tOh, it’s funny. I haven’t — the first thing I said when it was done was “talk about repetition”. Right. But what I was referring to there actually was a discussion we’d had about Poe’s “The Bells” previously, which is a poem that is built on repetition. Right. And as Aubrey points out one of the main things that’s repeated is the word “the bells” [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”]. So there are full lines of the poem that are just bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.\n \n\n00:43:59\tJason Camlot:\tSo, just to continue with your idea that really starting with what is not an overly respected poem, Poe’s piece. It was like a recitation staple it’s seen often as not a very deep poem, very surface-y. And that’s one of the points that interests Aubrey very much actually. Discovering prosody, literary prosody as a kind of field of technical discourse around the analysis of poetry and then filtering it through some of these other disciplinary fields like media history in particular, that was extremely productive and generative for him. And I think having to engage in this sound piece exercise also expanded his way of thinking. I mean, I don’t really know, but I’m not sure that he would have taken his thinking as far as he did, if he hadn’t had to go through the process of actually making a sound work himself.\n \n\n00:44:54\tStacey Copeland:\tI do have quite an appreciation for this poem. I think because it was one of the poems that I had to read in high school, very in depth. And I think we took turns reading it aloud in the class, these kinds of things. But at the time, I hadn’t really been thinking about the ways in which Poe is really very thoughtful and thinking about the different textures and materials and the different actual soundings of these different bells. As we were listening to this, I had to pull up the poem again, to jog my memory about some of the descriptive language that he’s using. And some of the, again, prosody and techniques that we might think about and the ways that he’s describing silver bells and golden bells and brazen bells and iron bells. So I think this is really a great poem to go to almost as one of the starter texts you can think about in applying sound studies, concepts, and techniques to poetry and to poetry readings.\n \n\n00:45:46\tJason Camlot:\tI think that’s right. And I think what Aubrey and the discussions we had in this seminar did for my thinking about the poem was to move it out of sort of the elocutionary realm, which is where I would normally sort of stay in thinking about this poem, because like I said, it was a recitation manual staple in the 19th century, which means that people would find it in these parlor recitation books that they would do for their own amusement at home. Right. And this was one of the poems that they would readily read. And there were tons of parodies of the poem as well, cause it does lend itself to that. Right. But it was a kind of staple piece for the performance, the demonstration of virtuosity in elocutionary performance and ability to innocence sound the poem and do justice to the various qualities, tonal qualities of the different metals, for example, that you mentioned. How do you do that with your voice? So you could think of it as if it were a song in the 1990s, it would be a great piece for like Celine Dion to perform, right? Because it would really allow her to show off her voice and in all of its virtuosity. But I think moving it into the realm of thinking about it from the pointof view of signification and of media as Aubrey really pursued it, like you say, made this poem a kind of obvious staple for a literature slash sound studies course.\n \n\n00:47:02\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s definitely a cover that I would love to hear — Celine Dion doing a song version of Poe’s “The Bells.” [Audio Clip: Stacey vocal as Celine] But talking about covers that actually brings us perfectly to the final cylinder talk that you’ve brought for us to listen to today.\n \n\n00:47:19\tJason Camlot:\tThis piece was done by Andrew Whiteman. So Andrew, among all the students in the seminar has the most training in sound recording media. He’s a professional musician and has been for the last 20 years. And so he didn’t attend my workshop on audacity because he really, he knows how to work with digital audio workstations and make sound. But also he’s very interested in engaging in doing sound pieces that involve poetry. So he has a whole art practice that’s around this. Anyways, he sort of fell upon finally a topic that seemed like it would be a good one to pursue and essentially boils down to the question of the idea of the cover. We talk about cover songs — can we talk about cover poems? Or the idea of the poet’s cover as he phrases it. And so, because he was interested in oral poetry, let’s say The Odyssey— like Homer Homeric bardic poetry. He started thinking about an opening canto of Pound’s “Cantos”  which is kind of a cover of a short section of the Odyssey, and then pointed him to PennSound’s archive, where there are recordings of Pound reading that opening “Canto I”as well as some other poets reading portions of it. And so he had a sort of mini archive that he could work with that brought in his interest in a bardic poetry, sort of oral poetic forms, which are formulaic forms. So we can’t think of doing a cover in the same sense because the poem changes every time a bard re-performs it versus the question of someone reading the printed already sort of fixed version of a poem differently, and thinking about that as a kind of cover. And so he focused on Robert Duncan’s sort of lecture on Pound in which he performs Canto I.\n \n\n00:49:06\tStacey Copeland:\tHere is Andrew Whiteman with “The Poetic Cover.”\n \n\n00:49:10\tAudio Recording, Andrew Whiteman’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Audio Clip: Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound] Hi. When I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community. And that is that it’s total interest in Mr. Ezra Pound seems to have faded. [Music Begins] [Sound Overlapping with Ezra Pound recites “Canto I” ] My initiation and the counters. How did I come to hear it? Set keel to breakers forth from a godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also/ Heavy with weeping, [Duncan] I found myself in the prep and a terrifying presence of mighty blue stocking who knew the entire modern scene, which made her vastly superior to the [Pound overlap returns] [inaudible] and in one fell swoop I was initiated to the mysteries of [inaudible] trembling and running [inaudible] Ezra Pound on Telegraph Avenue. Elliott. And found there the 30 cantos, what was then the avant garde. [Enter Filreis interview] A very confused domain of something one might call voice. Which in Pound, one doesn’t know whether voice is sort of actual or metaphorical. Especially — [Dunan returns] And I opened the page and then went down with the ship [Pound returns]And then went down to ship [Dunan] I can’t bear it. This is too much! For a whole week I went — [Pound] And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breathers, forth on godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship/ [Duncan] But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You go to dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah [Reverb effect] . You find it the way they find it in music — [Pound] cadaverous dead, of brides/ Of youths of the olde who had borne much; [Duncan] Most people can’t find it [Pound] Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads/ [Duncan] When Pound’s recordings were made we each found out something we could not know [bell] when we read in the thirties, the forties and so forth. And that is that Pround intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of, a sort of singing, intoning to the line. “And then went down to the ship/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea [music rises]…” [Pound] Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms/ [Overlapping voices] These many crowded about me with shouting/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads read [Overlapping voices] [Duncan] Our American trouble with men, many. I mean, we have what we do that word men many. A man is difficult enough when you get that many in there, men, many mauls with bronze lance — and so. So, I don’t always find the most elegant reading. [Filreis interview?] [Inaudible] Olga’s husband says well, “Sound like you never got out from under the influence of Yates or something like that.” And Pound is really hurt [Small voice: He doesn’t like that] and leaves the room and take his —and then the next day reads in a completely different fashion. Much more relaxed and much more conversational. And you have the two readings there. [Small voice: He took it to heart!] [Duncan] We can overlap so the thing plays a double role. Now. [Filreis interview] He took it to heart. It’s really interesting the first high Yatesian reading, and then the next much more kind of casual and incidentally superior reading. It’s a really interesting. [Small voice: That’s great, and where did you find this thing ?] She sent them to me. [Small voice: Oh fantastic.] [Overlapping voices] [inaudible] [Small voice: I wonder if other stuff will start to surface.] Well I’m hoping. [Duncan] If you don’t find the music you have not found the elegant solution. [End music]\n \n\n00:53:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah, Aaron.\n \n\n \n\n00:53:17\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aaron Obedkoff\tI find it an incredibly potent and effective way to tackle Pound’s enormous influence. I mean, he’s kind of like — when it comes to modern contemporary poetry, he’s like the wizard of Oz behind the screen, he’s just everywhere. And so the way you made him disappear into his progeny, his voice kind of being subsumed under Duncan’s and the like, I found it very, very effective.\n \n\n00:53:39\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Aaron Obedkoff\n \n\n00:53:41\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tWe always get this image of Pound, Aaron as you’re saying, as the wizard of Oz. But in that talk where Olga’s husband, who’s British, who says, “Oh, well, gee, you really can’t get away from Yates can ya?” It’s like, Oh my God, the ghosts, like whether you find them this horrible fascist monster or whether you find him — in whatever way, he looms so big. And this is like a little [Pop Sound] it pricks, the bubble in this image of poor Pound going away with his book and then coming back the next day and changing his reading style. But what’s interesting is we don’t know, like the sound of Pound that we have there where he’s like, this [Imitates Pounds dramatic style] is that him toned down? Like, there’s a whole question there. Was even worse before? Like was even more before? We don’t know.\n \n\n00:54:28\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tWe’re really interested in the way you used space panning and also accelerating to differentiate between — sort of continuing Aaron’s observation about where Pound’s voice was in the mix of his “after-Pound era.” The way where you were using it as a way to actually make your arguments. If you, if you want to talk a little bit about like, whether there was much intentionality or whether you were just going with what sounded good, but I also liked the way you took the Filreis conversation, the talk, which is like one contemporary manifestation of continuing to engage with these recordings, the effect of speeding it up, almost highlighted it’s gossipy nature, or sort of relegated it to a less important discursive register that actually accelerating suggests belittling or something like that.\n \n\n00:55:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tYeah. I think you’re Dr. Freud-ing me really well now because — and also trying to make them talk to each other that’s probably the big thing. I like trying to make different eras to talk to one another where they don’t belong. And so where Duncan says “I was in the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking”, like whoever that is! Someone who initiated him, he uses the word initiate three times, which I put in there because he places himself in vis-a-vis Pound in a religious place. And so when he says “the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking” I have Pounds “Aphrodite. Golden girdle.” Or whatever, to just try and emphasize Duncan’s position as an initiate. And then that is what my paper’s about. How Duncan says the exact same words that Pound says, but his cover of “Canto I” is completely different and signifies in a completely different way.\n \n\n00:56:18\tStacey Copeland:\tThis one has — it’s just so rich. It really is more of a soundscape composition. And this really does show the range that your students brought to the table when they were thinking about the idea of a cylinder talk, where here we have Andrew’s cylinder talk that doesn’t have his voice in it at all. It’s really engaging with the archive and engaging with these ideas of covers, and covers almost as layers of sound layers on top of each other through time through space, through these different contexts that he’s grappling with in these different poetic covers. Tell me a bit about listening back. What’s coming forward for you?\n \n\n00:56:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. I’ve been thinking more like, as you were just saying about what a cover is. Cause I think one of the things that his cylinder talk does so successfully is exactly what he said he was going for, which is communicate the ways in which the same sort of text can not only sound differently, but also through that sound represent an entirely different worldview, literally worldview. So ideology in relation to the world, but also sort of literary worldview, meaning what literature and what talking about literature and what performing literature is supposed to be accomplishing. He layers them for us to sort of understand that we can only partially see or know the meaning of what a sounding of a poem would mean in a particular historical context. That’s one of the things that I hear in this piece.\n \n\n00:57:44\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, every time I listened to this, I feel like I’m hearing something else and it could just be me projecting, but I feel like we are experiencing a bit of Andrew’s personal experience of grappling with these archival sounds. We get the sort of disorientation and listening to the harsh panning back and forth in the first half of the cylinder talk there. And then we also have this comedic moment with the speeding up of the voices, which again could be, I mean, for me evokes the feeling of the monotony and maybe the hilarity that ensues after listening to hours and hours and hours of archival tape in real time. Right. Because its sound. You have to listen and you have to digitize in real time and it can make you a bit loopy.\n \n\n00:58:28\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s what he was referring to when he said I was Dr. Freud-ing him, like, I think he was sort of the point he was making is that he —you can hear his own himself in the positioning that he gives to the sounds in the piece, but he’s also positioning them in relation to how he feels about what he’s doing right now.\n \n\n00:58:45\tStacey Copeland:\tInviting students to engage in audio production — one of my hopes and what I think sound does really well is opening up the doors to allow students to grapple with and experience and describe and share their own embodied experience of engaging with these ideas outside of the very traditional essay writing format that we get engrained with in high school and then carries forward into their undergrads and haunts us later in our academic careers as well.\n \n\n00:59:14\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really true. And I think we’ve heard some of that through the various comments in response to all of the cylinder talks that we listened to. It’s somewhat different from the formulae of knowledge production that they’re used to engaging in. And so I think that’s very quickly associated with putting themselves out there a little bit more, right. That there’s more of themselves in the decisions they’re making, because the decisions haven’t been sort of pre-made for them as to what an essay is supposed to be or what this kind of knowledge production is supposed to have in it. And then also as you point out that it is a very embodied experience because it involves listening. It involves bodily fatigue because that work can really take a long time when you’re sitting at the computer doing the sound editing.\n \n\n00:59:57\tJason Camlot:\tAnd then it makes me think also about the relevance of calling this a cylinder talk assignment rather than a podcasting assignment, because no one knows what a cylinder talk is. Right. It’s sort of a made up idea as a constraint. And I add some—and we did have discussions like say, well, what is a cylinder talk? So that they knew what they could sort of engage in. But people have ideas about what a podcast is already. So in some ways a podcasting assignment would allow them to lean a little bit more on models than an assignment where they have to do a cylinder talk where there aren’t really aren’t any precedents for this. In retrospect, I think that was a productive aspect of the assignment was that there wasn’t even a kind of sonic generic precedent that they could rely upon.\n \n\n01:00:40\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the cylinder as a —.\n \n\n01:00:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah.\n \n\n01:00:44\tStacey Copeland:\t– a very simple constraint that has a very material aspect to it as well. Versus I think if we thought about podcasting more in that way, we might start to create some more interesting things.\n \n\n01:00:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Yeah. Possibly.\n01:00:57\tStacey Copeland:\tI was curious listening through some of the cylinder talks that your students made, how you see this kind of assignment being applied to other courses that you teach, or maybe in the future, other disciplines as well.\n \n\n01:01:10\tJason Camlot:\tI guess it all starts with an exercise in the use of constraints, to generate really interesting creative solutions. The cylinder talk, it’s a cipher or an empty container in a lot of ways. And yet a very restrictive constraint simultaneously, right.The idea of having assignments of constraint and maybe of unfamiliar constraint could be extremely productive across the disciplines. I mean, this seminar was really about engaging with theories of listening from many different disciplines and then thinking about our own discipline from the respective of those readings. But I think the sound assignment was getting at that question [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] and problem and goal in a different way, in a much more practice and sort of embodied way.\n \n\n01:01:56\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the different ways that we can approach our pedagogy. What other assignments can we bring in to kind of shake students awake a little bit? So I guess at this point now it’s my turn to go and listen back through the that we just had.\n \n\n01:02:20\tJason Camlot:\tSorry, we talked too much!\n \n\n01:02:24\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Maybe we should put out an extended cut.\n \n\n01:02:27\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, exactly.\n \n\n01:02:28\tStacey Copeland:\tThis has been a pleasure listening to some of the work that your students put out because this is one of the frustrations always is both as a student and as an instructor, students create these wonderful works and only everyone in the course gets to hear it. And no one else. I’m glad we got to share some of these out in the world for others to enjoy as well. [End Music: Ambient Sounds]\n \n\n01:03:05\tHannah McGregor:\t[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Stacey Copeland of Simon Fraser University and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A special thanks to Alexandra Sweeney, Aubrey Grant, Sara Adams, Andrew Whiteman, and all the students of English 604: Literary Listening as Cultural Technique for their cylinder talks and discursive contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourselves and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"9291","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 S2E11, Revisiting “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”, 2 August 2021, Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study/"],"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 2"],"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":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3d457003-914f-4df1-8fec-3c1cb15f6efa/audio/b7c2eb87-f831-4a8f-a949-3509ce817a0e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e11-revisitingpodcasting.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:04:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"62,182,339 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e11-revisitingpodcasting\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-08-02\",\"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":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549514878976,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode takes us back to a SpokenWeb Project panel presentation from April 2021: “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study.” This panel was organized by Jason Camlot and Stacey Copeland, and led by SpokenWeb Podcast host Hannah McGregor. It used the recently published volume, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry), as an opportunity to think about and discuss the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study – a subject central to the mission of the SpokenWeb Podcast. \n\nIn this episode of the podcast, Jason draws upon the recording of this event to revisit key moments: a presentation by Dario Llinares about the main theses of the book and his reflections on how the landscape of research around podcasting is rapidly developing; brief position papers from respondents Stacey Copeland (SFU), Elena Razlogova (Concordia U), Kim Fox (American University in Cairo), Michael O’Driscoll (U Alberta) and Deanna Fong (Concordia U); and questions and participation from event attendees. You can watch the full event as a Zoom recording on the SpokenWeb Project’s Archive of the Present: https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study-20-april-2021/\n\nHere’s a note from Jason about making the episode and using the Korg Monotron to score it:\n\nIn editing and producing this episode, my goal was to capture the feeling and flow of the original panel presentations and discussion, while speeding up the pace a bit, and creating new thematic sections and transitions, where necessary. To mark transitions between thematic sections I decided to compose some sounds using a lo fi instrument, the Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.  This little device has just a few knobs, switches, and touch ribbon keyboard, but can generate a vast range of sounds.  It is simple, DIY and accessible (anyone can play it), yet it also suggests endless possibilities of sound, pacing, tone and mood; just like podcasting!  It was also just there, sitting on my desk, ready at hand. For these reasons, I felt the Monotron was an appropriate instrument to use for scoring this collaborative discussion about podcasting as a critical medium.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\t Hannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: Intro Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As you, our listeners, may well know at this point, we’re a podcast created by and grounded in the scholarly research of the SpokenWeb project community. It’s natural, then that we’re interested in how podcasting is generally being taken up as a tool, talked about, and studied in academic spaces. It may seem surprising that this is happening, that podcasting is being studied as a form of scholarly production, as an important new mode of knowledge making and sharing. An episode of your favorite podcast feels and sounds so different from the written journal articles and conference papers traditionally used to share academic knowledge. What does it mean when podcasters engage with, infiltrate, maybe mess with and transform the way the production and dissemination of knowledge happens in the academic sphere and what critical work is currently being done to understand the impact that podcasting is having on specialized fields of research, scholarship and teaching?\n01:49\tHannah McGregor:\tJason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb project and he’s helped us think through pieces of this question in past episodes of the podcast. In our episodes, ‘Ideas have feelings, too: Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in Podcasting’ and ‘Cylinder Talks: Podcasting in Literary Sound Studies’, Jason, and his co-producers took us into the university classroom and showed us how students are using podcasting as a tool for critical analysis and communication. Scenes from these episodes demonstrate the emotional and intellectual depth and merit that podcasting has when used as a teaching method and research tool, and raise questions about what podcasting is doing in scholarly contexts. When Dario Llinares invited Stacey and Jason to discuss their cylinder talks episode for his own New Aural Cultures podcast, they got to talking and thinking that it would be fun to organize a panel with a bunch of scholar podcasters to consider the current state of podcasts studies. Is podcasts studies emerging as an actual disciplinary field of study in the way that film studies and radio studies have established themselves in the academy?\n02:57\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does it mean to define podcasting as a distinct field of critical study? Is that something we really want to do? Jason and Stacey went on to organize the panel. They invited Dario to provide some opening remarks based on arguments he first outlined in his co-edited collection, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. Stacey acted as a respondent along with Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, Michael O’Driscoll, and Deanna Fong, each of whom had something unique to say in response to the core question: what is podcasting as a field of critical study? In this new episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Jason has selected and arranged key parts of a conversation that was first heard live on Zoom on April 20th, 2021 in a virtual panel called “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. I, Hannah, hosted the panel and you’ll hear my voice alongside some of my esteemed colleagues who are deeply engaged in thinking about podcasting as a powerful medium of scholarly inquiry. So let’s get on with the episode, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music. ] “Revisiting ‘Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study’”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n04:12\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.] And what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies?\n \n\n04:17\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nHow are shows categorized? How are they discovered across different platforms?\n \n\n04:21\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nA new stage of podcasting, the industrialization of podcasting.\n \n\n04:25\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI want to challenge you to be more open and inclusive.\n \n\n04:29\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech, as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio and Hindenburg.\n \n\n04:36\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nWe felt a clear tension between ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast.\n \n\n04:44\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI hope the audience get in on this. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.]\n \n\n04:51\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHi, everyone. Welcome to “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. My name is Hannah McGregor, and I am going to be moderating the conversation today. For those who don’t know me, I am a professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University, as well as a podcaster as is the case with, I think basically everybody on this panel. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that I’m speaking to you from the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I think in this era of digital events, it’s harder than ever to ground ourselves in the places where we live and work and play, but it’s also more crucial than ever to think about where our knowledge comes from. And that includes recognizing whose territory we’re residing on, for those of us who are living on Turtle Island. So I would like to encourage you to add your own territory acknowledgment in the chat if you would like to do so, or just pop into the chat and say hi to the assembled group and tell us where you’re coming from. We’ve got quite [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] an international gathering here today.[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n06:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOnto the event itself: Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study builds on the recent volume podcasting, New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, to think and engage in discussion about the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study. We are going to begin with some comments from Dario about the book, followed by brief position papers from respondents, Stacey Copeland, Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, and Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. So first up, Dario Llinares is principal lecturer in contemporary screen media at the University of Brighton, and of course co-editor of Podcasting New Aural Cultures and Digital Media and co-producer of the accompanying podcast, New Aural Cultures. Note: this is a SpokenWeb panel that is also co-sponsored by the Media History Research Center at Concordia. So thanks so much from Concordia – to Concordia for helping us to put this together. That is all of the housekeeping stuff, so now I will stop talking and we will hear from Dario up first. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n07:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThanks, Hannah, very much appreciated. And thanks to Jason and Stacey for inviting me and for setting everything up [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and welcome to everybody. Glad you could join us. I was thinking about how to prepare for this event and since taking up podcasting, whenever I’ve given a lecture or a talk in another university or a conference paper, I’ve used only loose notes, usually just bullet points comprised of prompts that point me in the direction of what I want to talk about. This move away from writing a script and reading it out was actually one of the effects of podcasting – one of the effects that it had on my academic practice. So learning how to edit, hearing over and over again, the foibles of how I presented myself orally and how content came out as a result reminded me how much meaning is created and received differently through the speech that articulates thoughts in the moment. Rather than speech that is pre-prepared.\n08:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, on the other hand, if you’re riffing the speaker and listener have to deal with all the hesitations, the repetitions, the mis-speakings, and the possibility that one’s immediate thoughts actually don’t really amount to very much. So, today I’ve prepared a written text, as you can probably tell. And the reason I’ve done this is to try to articulate some of the ideas and questions that influenced the development of the book that I edited with Neil and with Richard: Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media – particularly with regards to what we might mean, what we do, and what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies. The book as a whole was an attempt to draw out and articulate the ways in which we as editors and the authors were making sense of the impact of podcasting practice, to recognize its significance in the cultural landscape because of these practices, and, in turn, an encouragement to think reflectively as to why this significance needs to be examined.\n09:18\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tTo put a name on this, Podcast Studies, was a call to engage with the possible parameters through which critical study could be done. Perhaps the most profound development since the book came out has been the extent to which podcasting, particularly in the United States, is discussed as an industry. The journalistic, popular cultural, and professional production narratives are overtly concerned with monetization, audience expansion, and corporate infrastructure. The focus on this from a critical standpoint is, and should continue to be central to popcast studies. The question of what podcasting is, which probably everyone here is engaged with in some form, is in many ways the foundational question of Podcast Studies, and I’ve tried as many of us have to intellectualize that through research, analysis and self-reflection. But in the end it still does remain somewhat personal and ineffable. Because of this, the introduction to the book does read are speculative. “Are people thinking the same way about this media as we are?” is the question we were implicitly asking ourselves.\n 10:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tIn order to try and schematize what we lay out in the book – I’m thinking about the myriad research I’ve read or listened to in the proceeding few years after the book was published – I offer now three interrelated strands that might help to engage with what Podcast Studies is doing conceptually. These are notionally and intentionally broad in scope. So I ask you for a little of what Malcolm Gladwell calls conditionality in your interpretation of this. These strands are communication, knowledge, and identity. To complicate matters though, I think these three categories can each be broken down in terms of the interrelationship between structure, form, and content. So in terms of communication, we may think of the structures that not only make podcasting feasible, but have manifested what we think of now as an identifiable and discreet medium. This might incorporate technological elements, such as RSS and iTunes, audio recording technology, podcaster apps, podcatcher apps, but also social media and internet functionality.\n 11:28\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow do these structures foster processes of production, distribution, and reception that we identify specifically as podcasting? Communication forms may relate to the aesthetic artifact itself. What do podcasts sound like? Are podcasting forms the same as genres? Aurally, what makes a podcast different from radio or, for example, from a piece of recorded audio that is simply accessible online? How might we consider the experience of listening, both in terms of apparatus the mechanics of how we listen and affect? – and I’m thinking here about the thorny issue of intimacy. Communication content engages with what a podcast episode and series is about. Interestingly, that area of research may look to leave the mechanics of podcasting behind. But isn’t an analysis of a podcast or podcasting that discusses content only – is that really Podcast Studies? To me, we have to think about this in a synergistic fashion. How does structure, form, and content merge in ways that allow us to engage with how podcasts work as a medium?\n 12:35\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tKnowledge, the second strand, reflects on how we might understand the impact of podcasting philosophically or epistemologically. For example, in terms of the structures of knowledge, to offer a student a podcast to listen to, rather than a journal article to read should make us reflect on how knowledge is made available to us and what function does it serve. If we organize our lives around listening to podcasts, how does what we listen to reflect our exposure to knowledge, and then how we might disseminate that knowledge further? It’s clear that a key element of Podcast Studies relates to its pedagogic use. So how might podcasting as a form of knowledge creation help students in the understanding and application of their own learning? What does it offer both in conceptual knowledge and in terms of skills-knowledge? I’m very much interested in the speech, text image relationship. In that context, how universities, the media, and politics frames knowledge is fundamental to the cultural zeitgeist.\n 13:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPodcast Studies needs to contextualize podcasting at heart of this, particularly where speech and knowledge is being fought over ideologically. A critique of big technology companies and their content gatekeeping analytics program decision-making is another question of knowledge structure, form, and content that we also want to investigate. The third strand, identity, relates to what we ask ourselves in terms of who our podcast producers, podcast listeners, and podcast fans. Furthermore, what do podcasts tell us about the lives of the individuals and groups they represent? Structurally, we can think about the demographics of producers and listeners, but a more vital question might be: how do individual subjects or community groups formulate a sense of self through podcasting? What might be the barriers to entry, even considering how we might assume the relative ease of access, there are many cultural, social and economic obstacles to creation, production, and even listening. We doubtedly want to consider and critique the replication of hierarchies of power based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, et cetera. In terms of forms of identity, we might consider the crucial element of the voice.\n 14:49\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow might we analyze the voice as a key tool in podcasting? It’s texture, it’s timbre, it’s materiality, to be sure, but how does the disembodied voice then materialize a sense of embodiedness through its use in podcasting? Podcast Studies must consider what it means to have a voice and to be listened to. And in this sense, it has to advocate openness, equality, and diversity through its structure, form, and content. Of course, we need to think about Podcast Studies in relation to other disciplinary fields. In the introduction to the book that the relationship with radio was a key element, but the need for us was to interrogate and assumed filial relationship. Should Podcast Studies look to disassociate itself from the history, culture, and aesthetics of radio? No, of course not. It really can’t. But if there is to be a usefulness to Podcast Studies, there has to be a criteria of autonomy.\n 15:43\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tEven if we acknowledge that the very term podcasting is a flash of journalistic serendipity. We need to analyze the important influences of other forms of mediums that make podcasting the flexible, hybridized, liminal medium it’s been described as. This brings us to sound [Start Sound Effect: Echoes] itself, and the overlaps with sound orientated disciplines: sound study, sound arts, audiology, musicology are all areas in which Podcast Studies can take methodological and conceptual influence. Indeed, there is an interesting question with regards to how Podcast Studies should articulate the centrality of sound. The nature of sound on an ontological level, may be fundamentally of interest to Podcast Studies analysis. In turn, the recording, editing and production of sound could be envisaged as key to a particular angle of research. Furthermore, the cultural impact, psychological effects, and phenomenological shaping of our material experience through sound might be at the heart of Podcast Studies concerns. [End Sound Effect: Echoes] One of my favourite podcasts recent times was Hannah and Jason and the team at SpokenWeb – their episode on “How we are Listening Now”. Does podcasting make us listen to the world and therefore experience it in specific ways?\n 16:57\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, it is vital that podcasting has a focus on criticality from whatever perspective or approach acknowledges the essential sound artifact or process as a podcast. This, to me, is true of individual podcast criticism, audience research, industry analysis, cultural studies, or media technology. What gives the focus of research it’s “podcastiness” is the cornerstone of the discipline – and I’m still not a hundred percent sure whether I like that word. This may require the researcher to expand, extend, or challenge notions of what a podcast is. And therefore, we must accept and reflect that the parameters of podcasting ontology will continue to be a contested area. Thinking about the impact of one’s own practice of podcasting should also be central to Podcast Studies. But that leads to the question: should Podcast Studies academics be actively using the medium? I guess this argument depends on how much you see the discipline of Podcast Studies needing to push an agenda that podcasting and other forms of non-traditional media practice should be recognized as being both a research tool and a method of dissemination that doesn’t have to default back to the text as a guarantee of rigor.\n 18:10\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis requires us to challenge the mechanisms, both material and structural, of closed source access, publishing and peer review traditions, and attitudes to the very nature of knowledge and learning and their ideological function within academia. Finally, I argue in the book that podcasting sits in a liminal space, not exactly conforming wholly with producers or consumers, with professionals or amateurs, with teachers or students, with interviewers or interviewees. I think it’s important that we see Podcast Studies challenging the traditional status quo, but also reflecting on its place in relation to the highly uncertain digital future that we are all inculcated in. We all know podcasting is great, but that cannot remain an uncontested assumption. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 19:16\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOur first respondent is Stacey. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Stacey Copeland is a Joseph Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication here in Vancouver, Canada, where her research engages with feminist media oral histories and sound archives.\n \n\n 19:35\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nOh, great. Alright. So, thank you Dario. That was really informative and got me tweaking some of the things and thoughts that I brought to the conversation today. So in revisiting the collection, which I have of course my copy fresh, you can kind of see through the background that I’ve chosen to exist in today. I was brought back to the moment I first received the call for chapters back in 2016, a fresh faced master’s student at the time navigating my new found identity formation as a media scholar and a queer feminist. My gender and media studies professor at the time, Dr. Susan Driver, recommended I submit a course paper I’d written about The Heart, which I fangirl over all the time, as a proposal for the book. It seems so long ago now, 2016, a time when there was still a need to argue for the importance of sound as a valuable field of study. Podcasting was still so new in popular culture and podcasts studies, even newer, not quite yet a field of its own back then, and some would argue it still isn’t. Podcast Studies feels like it will always still be emerging.\n 20:52\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nThere’s a sense of newness about it that I, and many others, including Dario, would argue is key to the very ethos of the medium itself. A newness defined on the oldness of other media forms, particularly radio. As Lisa Gitelman so eloquently writes on the newness of new media, quote “This overdetermined sense of reaching the end of a media history is probably what accounts for the oddly perennial newness of today’s new media. ” Unquote. Podcasting is a new media with an old history. And the same can be said about Podcast Studies as an emergent academic field. Now I’m less concerned with defining podcasting as its own unique medium of study, as separate from radio or other media forms, and more interested in the ways in which the growth of interest in podcasting has opened up new or renewed conversations around mediated, spatial politics, platformization, sonic narrative form, and the role of sound-based media in shaping our subjective everyday experiences. In short, how identity and community, knowledge and power, power play out in the podcast arena.\n 22:03\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo I’m intrigued by some of the correlations and overarching themes that Dario has invited us to consider today. Now, what I particularly love about this collection and Dario’s work on podcasting, is that it straddles the two worlds of theory and practice. I truly do believe as scholars, we learn just as much, if not more, by embedding ourselves into the practical aspects of our field of study. Sometimes I’ve learned – something I’ve learned really through my time in radio and podcasts communities and something I continue to practice in my academic work. In the introduction to this collection, Dario, Neil and Richard write, quote, “podcasting imbued in us the enthusiasm of possibility.” And we see this term possibility spark again in Dario’s opening remarks. This line really sticks with me, drawing me back to the forever newness so key to podcast culture. Possibility, a sentiment we often hear in relation to podcasting, listeners and producers alike can hear this possibility, the potentials for podcasting to give space to voices unheard in the mainstream, to engage deeply with niche audiences, and communities across the globe.\n 23:20\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nStill, by approaching the sentiment of possibility with a critical ear, I would argue we must also consider the increasing constraints of the platforms on which podcasting takes place. We’re seeing major giants like Spotify and Netflix now enter the podcasting race. And these are important questions to consider. Echoing Dario’s early remarks on structure in relation to communication, knowledge, and identity, this is one of the key differences we can consider that defines podcasting from other mediums is it’s distribution and discoverability through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and more. Podcasts studies provides a grounding, a community in which to study these platforms and algorithms so deeply entangled in key questions of identity and representation, of possibility. How are shows categorized? How were they discovered across different platforms? And how is this changing now that podcasting has truly entered the mainstream? How long will this sentiment of possibility last and how true is it in practice? In a talk I gave at SCMS last month, I mentioned how in 2019, a search for “queer” as a term on Apple Podcast actually assumed that I was searching for the word queen, which was really opening my eyes to just how interesting these tools can be in study, who they are built for, and how.\n 24:39\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nDid queer not exist as a search term? Or was this a tongue-in-cheek joke coded into the platform by a fellow queer? So, all of this said, I still believe in this sentiment of possibility Dario, Neil, and Richard first wrote about. And as researchers, makers, and listeners, by establishing podcasting as a serious object of study, a cultural practice, we play a key role in shaping how this possibility unfolds into action. So as you scroll through your podcast feed today, I invite you to consider the age old critical question: what do you hear? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 25:24\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Stacey. Our next respondent is Elena Razlogova. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Elena Razlogova is an associate professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, though she is not coming to us from Montreal today, she’s coming to us from Moscow. She is also the author of The Listeners Voice: Early Radio and the American Public, and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture”, an issue of the Radical History Review.\n \n\n 25:57\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you very much. It’s great to be here. I was happy to be invited to participate on this panel. By the way, my background is my parents’ kitchen – that’s why it’s blurred. I’m in Moscow right now and I can’t have a fake background for some reason. So I was really happy to be invited to this panel because I’m a radio historian, rather than a full-on Podcast Studies person –so I’m kind of an interloper here. I’m most excited about podcasting as a fantastic teaching and public dissemination medium. And in my field history, especially, there’s a great variety of podcasts out there that demonstrate to historians alternative ways to tell stories about the past. From Nate DiMeo’s 10-minute Memory Palace that uses dramatic music and sound effects to tell stories about individuals in history, to Hardcore History where just one dude, Dan Carlin rants about history for over three hours at a time. You get professional historians like Jill Lepore and outsiders like Malcolm Gladwell, and you get 99% Invisible, a great podcast about the history of design, as well as More Perfect about the American Supreme court. And all of that is history. I have assigned podcast making in both undergraduate and graduate courses as group work and individual work.\n 27:15\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd podcasts as a term assignment introduces a creative element to coursework. It makes students think about sound effects, diegetic non-diabetic music, proper ways to intro and outro the narrative as well. After making the podcast, they no longer think of interviews as an optional research method. And writing for speaking, as Dario mentioned, writing for speaking aloud makes them better writers as well. So I’m looking at podcasting as a practitioner rather than simply an academic. And I also should say that I actually didn’t ever publish a podcast, but I work as well – I volunteer on campus radio, so I do a little bit of radio. So reading the introduction to the book, and the book itself, several chapters, it’s amazing how much podcasting has advanced since the years since its publication. It may no longer be a liminal medium, and it’s harder to argue for liminality today, than in 2018, because Spotify, for example, has this whole stable of gated podcasts, including the Michelle Obama podcasts.\n 28:20\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tJeremy Moore calls this new stage of podcasts the industrialization of podcasting, where standards, and barriers for entry are much higher and it is more difficult to stand out, as other speakers already mentioned. And research on platformization of podcasting aligns with studies of music streaming and algorithmic recommendations in general. So, I hate to come back to the point, to the question whether podcasting is radio or not, but as a radio historian, I have to come back to it. In the introduction, authors focused on BBC and NPR as radio counterpoint to podcasting. But I would like to come back to independent radio broadcasting rather than large scale government sponsored networks. A few features of independent radio broadcasting seem lost to podcasting, but perhaps can be recovered, such as real-time possibility for community organizing, the critique of commercialism, and border-crossing that pirate, low power, and community radio offers. For radio, national borders matter in a different way.\n 29:29\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd here I’m thinking of Black power activist, Robert Williams broadcasting his Radio Free Dixie from Cuba in the 60s to the still segregated American South, or more recently, Christina Dunbar-Hester’s work on low RFM radio service to local communities, or in [inaudible] Garcia’s work on Spanish-language radio warning of anti-immigration rates via real-time call ins. As well, independent shows and hosts often migrate to podcasting in a sort of “brain drain”. And here I’m thinking of Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show, or Benjamin Walker’s Care of Everything, both migrated from audience supported station WFMU. Or more locally, a show called Audio Smart, that started at CKUT at McGill University, and then was taken from the station and turned it into a podcast. So my question is: compared to these local community radio forums, how do we recover in podcasting the forms of solidarity and activism that these alternative radio forms have been doing and perhaps alternative or independent podcasting is the answer? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 30:40\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing. Thank you so much, Elena. Next up is Kim Fox. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Kim Fox is a professor of practice in the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo, where she primarily teaches audio production and other journalism courses. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 31:04\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you, Hannah. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] I’m really excited to be a part of this and thank you all. I really want to add something very important and build on the conversations that we’re hoping to have here. So thank you for having me a part of this discussion about the current digital cultural phenomenon that we know very closely as podcasting. And I’ve decided to freestyle a little bit, so I’m sure that I will not take up my full time, but perhaps I can get that time back at the end. I do want to kind of build on what Stacey was saying in terms of – about the listening and more or less like where to from here? In this short time, since the book has been published, we see this huge gap in terms of what has happened.\n 31:48\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021::\tI mean, there’s a huge gap in terms of what happened between now and last year, but where the future could go is more symposia like this, where we’re able to have these conversations that are really important, especially as we try to redirect the lens of what is podcasting? You know, and what is Podcast Studies specifically? And I’m also thinking about this multicultural lens. I’m thinking about the women’s centeredness of it, or perhaps a lack of it. And of course, LGBTQ issues, other marginalized communities, who we would think there would be a space for them in this independent world, but as we see the commercialization and capitalism that’s involved in podcasting, that perhaps they too will get left behind with this new platform and in the academic look at the platforms. I’d also like to add about the kind of research that we are seeing in the field.\n 32:50\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd there is a lot of cultural, there is a lot of critical, which is great. Perhaps we want to look at, how do we diversify that? And especially when I start to think about: what will be the Podcast Studies canon? Surely some of those people are in the room. Thank you, Richard Berry. But we’re also thinking about how much more depth will that have and what will that look like? Because we also see from the past what the history of theory, for example, in many fields, if you’re thinking about classical social thought and how do we grab a hold of the field now to help decolonize before it becomes something that we want to avoid that has already happened? Also, we want to think about the critical production that we’re aiming to produce, and looking at it in terms of, is this an opportunity for us to again, make a concerted change? I really liked the points that were made about the embodiment and disembodiment of voices. Again, that’s something that is very valuable to us. But as I wrap up, I do want to say, I want to challenge you as media scholars to be more open and inclusive in your future research. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] So that’s both in terms of content and in collaboration. Thank you.\n \n\n 34:31\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Kim. Our final respondents are Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Michael O’Driscoll is a professor in the department of English and Film Studies in the faculty of arts who teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories, including material cultural studies. And finally, Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, also in Montreal where her research project towards an ethics of listening in literary study intersects the fields of oral history and literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices.\n \n\n 35:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Hannah. Deanna and I would like to use our platform to share our recent experience in producing an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast series. The episode was launched in early April and was titled “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” We’re interested in particular in talking about podcasting as a form of self-reflective critical practice and reflecting on our experiences during this collaboration. We entered into producing this podcast with a specific meta-critical goal, listening attentively to our conversations about listening. We did so with certain presuppositions about the imbrication of theory and practice as mutually constitutive activities. And we did so with a focus on listening through an ethical lens, asking particular questions about how we listen, why we listen, the material conditions of that activity, and with attention to the conventions of listening within the constraints of podcast production. The episode was an open-ended experiment that involved recorded and non-recorded dialogues with scholars who perform, gather, curate, and analyze spoken word performance across a range of audio textual genres. The queer cabaret performance, the oral history interview, the circulation of an archive of Indigenous creators, and scholarly engagements with spoken word recordings.\n 36:39\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThroughout, we felt a clear tension between our own ideals about ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast within the affordances of the medium and the conventions of possible podcast genres. We listened as our interviewees represented their own practices of listening and worked to achieve a certain attunement to the convolutions of critique. And I mean critique in the truest self-reflexive sense of that term, with an openness to difference, to the incalculable, and to the indeterminacy sees this scenario provoked.\n \n\n 37:16\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tSo for me, coming from a background in oral history and literary study, particularly a study of sounded poetry, making this podcast was an important meta-critical experiment that deepened my understanding of my research goals and methods in these fields. Listening has always been at the forefront of my work and as an attendant theoretical concern, paying attention to how we listen, what we listen for and the different modes of listening that are occasioned when we shift contexts from readings to interviews, when we speak of genre or from live events to digital and analog recordings when you speak of media. One of the fascinating outcomes of our foray into the podcasting world was new forms of deep, and I would argue ethical, listening that it invited at every stage of production. Before recording the interviews with our respondents, Michael and I had informal unrecorded conversations with them, both to create a level of comfort and intimacy –there’s that word again – but also to zero in on what we wanted to talk about in the interview.\n 38:10\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis genre of interviewing differed from the meandering type of life story interview that I’m used to conducting. As Michael suggested in our conversations leading up to this panel, what we were listening for in this case was expertise in lieu of, or at least in addition to experience. Our listening practices continued as we edited and transcribed interviews shaping them into a continuous, or at least resonant narrative. I don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio inHindenburg, adding an extra two seconds, pause to let an idea, breathe or editing a sentence to best reflect the speaker’s line of thought – with their permission of course. Underlying each of these editorial decisions is a complex set of ethical questions. How we represent the speakers who give us their ideas and voices, but also how we connect with and create a listening environment for an imagined audience. On the other side, the podcast’s extensive engagement with the voice gave us multiple opportunities to critically reflect on our own practices as scholars and carry those observations forward until the other academic work that we do.\n \n\n 39:15\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPerhaps one of the most provocative moments in the podcast is our conversation with Simon Fraser University scholar, Clinton Burnham, who proposed that while listening is without doubt an ethical imperative, it does not always in and of itself constitute an unalloyed good. That is, Clint reminded us the position of one who listens –and you might think here of judges, priests, analysts – is structurally configured as a position of mastery, a master position in which what is received is put back into circulation in a revalued – you might think extracted refined, reprocessed – form of judgment, absolution, cure and so on. You might extend this insight into all forms of listening, especially those in which a listener, however well meaning, receives the disclosures of those who have been harmed in some fashion. The unaddressed question here is how a listener might disavow, or acknowledge, or act in response to that structural configuration, and how listeners constitute themselves across a range of listening practices.\n 40:21\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd I’m thinking having just listened to Kim’s words that this has perhaps particular resonance with the call to decolonize and diversify. One of our thoughts on this front is that if podcasting remains yet in its formative stages of development, and that question is on the table right now, if podcasting is a germinal cultural practice, studying offers enormous possibility and a little shout out here to Stacey and Dario, even while constrained by its own ideological and historical horizons, the process of podcast production offers rich opportunities for such ethical engagements, born of the very contradictions inherent in this cultural practice. And furthermore, we might ask ourselves whether this kind of self-reflexivity is germane to the practice of podcasting: do we all listen to our listening? Or whether podcasting is itself, a field of cultural production that has only begun to engage [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] in a practice of self-reflexive critical collaboration?\n \n\n 41:33\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing, thank you both so much. There were [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] a lot of really beautiful threads that were weaving through that and a really interesting conversation already starting in the chat about canonicity, which I think is really fascinating. So maybe we can start the round table conversation there thinking about the sort of idea of canonicity. So Dario, maybe you can start us off on this idea: is it time for a podcasting studies canon?\n \n\n 42:05\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question specifically. I mean, I think what’s interesting is whenever you’re talking about canons, these are sort of not neutrally organic developments, but they are an outcome of the – both the structures and the people who are defining what is being talked about, what is being written about, what is the focus of interest. So I think that the idea of there is a group of scholars or a group of works that are going to be forwarded as part of the canon will happen because of the way that universities look to define these are the works that we need to be engaging with. So the question then becomes, how does everybody – as Kim was talking about – how do we open up the possibilities of access, both in an academic sense, and also in a production sense for podcasting to be this inclusive area where we do podcasting, we talk about podcasting, and we self-reflect on how it represents people? And then the analysis of that will hopefully naturally come out as not being a problematic, bounded kind of canonical approach or set of texts. Now, maybe I’m – maybe that’s slightly naive. You know, maybe we need to make that happen more. I guess that’s both– that’s my first sort of opening gambit now on that I suppose.\n \n\n 43:38\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’m really interested in the possibility of an audio cannon. I think Richard Barry mentioned it in the chat because it is a time – and I agree that canon is a terrible word in the sense that it’s always about exclusion. And then it needs to be always attacked and reconsidered, but starting it, it’s kind of exciting to look back three years or five and already knowing what was important. So I wonder what you guys would think. What would you put there?\n \n\n 44:07\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThoughts? What would you put into an audio canon? It’s a fascinating question, I think particularly for folks who teach podcasting, is the sort of the incredibly lateral world of podcasting as a medium, the sort of deep niche listening practices make it difficult to establish shared objects of study that conversations can circulate around.\n \n\n 44:31\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, by audio canon, Elena, do you mean specifically pieces of audio that we would use to create canon over texts or both?\n \n\n 44:39\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nNo, more like a mixtape of podcasts to share with other people.\n \n\n 44:45\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI love that. I love that – we should record them onto tapes.\n \n\n 44:48\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s what the kids call a playlist. So yeah, mixed tape is old school [Laughs].\n \n\n 44:53\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nMixed tape is good. It creates this awareness of looking back – the history of old media and the new media. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] [Sound Effect: Creaking Wood]\n \n\n 45:08\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI wonder if we might [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] – one of the things that was really striking to me about the sort of overlap between all of our panelists’ comments was about the relationship between practice and theory of Podcast Studies. And Laurie has put the question really well in the chat here, that it is important for podcast academics to also be practitioners and Dario your point that that may be more so than for other media. Laurie would like you to expand on that, but I would also love to hear from the rest of the panel about how you think about the relationship between practice and theory in podcasts studies and whether that feels – I think particularly if people coming in from, from different disciplinary perspectives – how’s that different from the relationship between theory and practice in film studies, or in literary studies, or in radio studies, which are all media-engaged disciplines.\n \n\n 46:03\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThat was just kind of born out of experience. And when I was doing podcasting, it was making me look at the way I write and the way I speak, not just in an objective sense, but also the identity of that. But the difference, say between something like film, which is the background that I came from, probably is just for the fact that film has 120 years behind it –\n \n\n 46:23\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs].\n \n\n 46:23\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t–and therefore there’s 120 years of people saying what film is, and you don’t have to start a film studies essay by having to – three or four pages explaining what you think film is –.\n \n\n 46:38\tSeveral Voices:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n 46:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t– in a way, whereas a lot of Podcast Studies papers do because we’re still arguing about it. So, I think maybe that’s where my assertion that having a practical sense of podcasting leads you to a wider understanding of what it is at this point.\n \n\n 46:55\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s really, hasn’t been my position for some time, especially coming from a radio background that I find when people who don’t have that background, they really do teach it from a perspective of like, well, that’s not how it works. Like that’s not how news is made. And once you’re in the room and you know how the meat is made, then you kind of have a better insight and your positionality is so much more informed than your previous self. And also think about this, when anthropologists embed in communities, there’s a reason there’s a certain observation level that takes place from that perspective. And so when I’m trying to coach students into producing audio, storytelling, and podcasts, it really comes from a place of, I know this process and I can help you develop this story into something – into something really interesting. So I think having that practicality under your belt is really useful and it’s something that everyone should venture into, even on a short series, a podcast, or just an interview podcast, whatever. I think everyone should have that experience.\n \n\n 47:58\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo this is a great conversation to have and something that I’m constantly engaging with in my own work. And I think it’s interesting to think about it in the broader sense of media studies as well. So as a media studies scholar, documentary researchers for instance, have been making their own media for a very, very long time. And that’s a field I look to quite often for what that might look like in the podcasting realm as well, both radio documentary and film documentary. And I think what those fields can tell us is podcasting is an interesting place to bring together practice and theory, because it’s also a medium that is very much grounded in a personal practice, in an individual researcher. Even when we’re thinking about large podcast productions, teams are still realistically quite small, maybe five or six people who are actively working on a podcast series together. These aren’t the same as a large Hollywood film production, which would be a much more difficult thing for a scholar to, well get the funds to do, but also the resources and people to actually put it together. So thinking about podcasting, I think in relation to film and radio documentary is quite useful in this way. And we see, of course, people like Siobhán McHugh writing about this. And we need to look to those scholars for some answers around this connection as well.\n \n\n 49:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI just wanted to throw a term into the conversation because I think I’d be really interested in hearing what people think about it. And I keep thinking, as I’m listening to you, keep thinking about the concept and the practice of research creation and I’ll do a shout out to my colleague, Natalie Loveless, who has an amazing book called How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation. I think in many ways there are a whole set of well articulated practices and theories coming from colleagues in the creative and performing arts about what it means to bring practice and theory together in this way in a manner that is very much about the production of research and insights through this. And I think there might be some real opportunity there for thinking about how podcasting might itself constitute a form of research creation.\n \n\n 50:09\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tGreat point, Mike. Yeah, because for myself, I’m coming to the field with this kind of wide-eyed naivete, in that I really, I think only listened to a podcast for the first time in maybe the last six months, before embarking on making my own. [Laughs] But I think as I was trying to suggest in our response, that so many of those ethical decisions, that one makes that one is really attuned to, come from those editorial decisions of figuring out like, oh if we have four guests, do we need to balance things out? What parts of all of these incredible interviews do we keep in? Do we put music beneath people’s speech? Does it enhance the experience that their words? Is it music that they ultimately hate and want to change? Like all of these very, very small material decisions matter in how we’re representing other people’s voices. And, for me, that’s just absolutely essential in grappling with those ethical considerations on a material level.\n \n\n 51:09\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. And there’s wonderful – it’s a beautiful chat and there’s I think really, really significant sort of amplification of those questions of materiality. It’s a great point here from Jennifer Lynn Stover about the way that a focus on practice could become another form of gatekeeping. Because access to the possibility to even experiment in audio composition goes hand in hand with certain material conditions. And it does seem like there is an interesting overlap between this question about practice and this question about canonization, which has to do with what forms and genres and styles and structures to be introduced to our students as the way that podcasts are made. That there is possibility for implicitly creating canons through how we ourselves practice podcast making, or teach podcast making. So these all – just a beautifully tangled [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] set of questions.\n \n\n 52:24\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nLet’s let the audience get in on this.\n \n\n 52:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve got a couple of questions sort of flagged here. So are there sort of emerging recognized genre forums in the podcasting world and where is the experimental genre-defying work happening?\n \n\n 52:42\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWell, I know that PhD student Anne [Inaudible] – I don’t know if she’s here, Anne – but she’s doing work on the genres and forms, which is interesting because I think what she’s talking about is the way in which traditional genre categories related to things like film and television music don’t really work in the same way for podcasting as they do for those media. So there’s a kind of layering of how you would have to think about podcasts in terms of taxonomies and categorizations like that. And I think it’s just indicative as well of the difficulty of that whole process in the way that Apple podcasts, when it did its revamp just seemed to add to the problem.\n \n\n 53:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs].\n \n\n 53:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs]. I think. So, yeah. I mean, I think it’s an, it’s an interesting question about, about genre distinctions in terms of podcasting.\n \n\n 53:32\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI really appreciate that you brought up Anne, Dario because Anne and I have had some really great conversations around this, and Kim’s been in many of those conversations as well as part of our podcast PhDs group. And we’ve been talking a lot about genre, about how we define podcast genre, and how we approach storytelling and narration. And for me, because I guess because my media studies background, I do see quite a lot of correlation between a genre’s set up in TV, film, radio being really just pushed onto podcasting because it’s what’s familiar already. That said, because podcasting is really this messy mishmash network of all of these different media forms put together, we do of course see experimental work being done as well is just less talked about, as we see in all other media forms as well. It’s really about where the money is, and those are the podcasts that we see and hear, versus maybe some more experimental work that’s being done. And I’d encourage anyone interested to maybe look more into soundscape composition work and experimental radio for where those ideas are really coming from.\n \n\n 54:43\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tRichard Barry has suggested three – a sort of typology of podcasting here, which is narrative, conversation, and experimental, which I think is a really sort of interesting non-generic way to break down the world of podcasting. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 55:06\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was wondering [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] what is the space of the critical writing in podcasting, not academic writing, but critical writing. There is some, there are recommendation articles and magazines, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be the place to make the marginal mainstream, because that’s how mainstream manual music happened in particular decades. Not always, but occasionally it does happen that music journalism drives certain genres to prominence. And I think as academics we could participate in that kind of boundary crossing activity.\n \n\n 55:44\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tA good site is somewhere like Bello Collective as a starting point for that. They do pieces that –they do kind of recommendations in terms of kinds of lists and stuff, but there is some what you call journalistic longer form critical writing about podcasts. What’s interesting is that the – it is people who are just interested in podcasting doing the writing as well as producers and some academics. I think the difficulty is if you look at long form journalism in film, again, that is now contracting, it’s all short form listicles type stuff or academia. I mean –and especially the pandemic that sort of, the idea of the long form magazine [Inaudible] all these kinds of things, they’re managing to survive, but it’s such a small kind of base. So I think, again, it’s in terms of academics doing that and just generally producers, whoever’s interested in podcasting, is kind of having to do it off your own back.\n \n\n 56:42\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was just adding in the chat, how I know that there are some journals that are – not only will the journal have a podcast, but in the physical journal, they are accepting podcast reviews as you would with a book review. So that’s one way to get sort of a critical look or maybe a critical conversation going about a specific podcast or series or something like that. And of course, Radio Doc Review, which was mentioned in the chat as well.\n \n\n 57:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s interesting to think about that historical formation that, is it anything about podcasting that doesn’t lend itself to long form critical analysis, or is it just the way the emergence of podcasting aligned with the sort of disappearance of that particular form of critical writing from our media landscape? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n 57:21\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] There is a question in the chat that I actually think will be useful probably for a number of the folks here. This is from Devin Bait. They say, “I noticed that the word intimacy was brought up a couple of times and seemed to carry some weight: why? I’m brand new to Podcast Studies.” [Laughs] Which I love –that I’m brand new. Why is intimacy spoken with such a tremble?\n \n\n 57:54\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, I’m happy to start. [Speaks closer to the microphone] Is it better if I speak like this? Is this a bit more intimate for our particular talk of intimacy? So I put in the chat, I actively avoided using the term intimacy in my provocation today, and that was intentional. So the word intimacy gets thrown around so much in the discussion of podcasting and there’s great work being done by scholars like Alan [Inaudible], who’s just finished up their PhD on podcast intimacies specifically. And we see this term used in radio as well, but less so in public broadcast radio and the kind of radio that reaches out to the masses and more so radio and podcasts that are speaking to you as an individual listener, the individual you in your ears. And that has created some really interesting scholarship around the relationship between headphone listening and intimacy with podcasts and even deep into discussions of how podcasts are produced, among producers as well, being produced for headphones to kind of create this internal sense of a voice in your head, in the experience of listening to podcasts. So there is a ton you can dig into in relation to the term podcasting and intimacy together. But maybe that’ll start off the panel on the subject.\n \n\n 59:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWhen you actually sort of get down to it, what do you really mean when you’re talking about intimacy? And I think with people that are writing a paper and they’re setting out criteria of what they understand by intimacy is fine. Just get on with it! It’s when it’s like oh, podcasts are an intimate medium. That’s too broad and a little bit too problematic, I think.\n \n\n 59:46\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’ll add to that from a bit of a different perspective and maybe this comes from my radio days, but I really got used to the Zoom world and especially all of these black squares, because I just feel like I’m on the radio. And, who’s really listening? Who am I talking to? And occasionally with Zoom, someone will talk back, but with students at eight in the morning, you’re usually just talking to the ether. So that sort of dynamic in that intimacy, when we think about the famous phrase from NPR in their “driveway moments” that either it’s in that car radio space or if you’re wearing earbuds and it is like Dario and Stacey mentioned that – the tenor of the voice, what is it that really makes us feel connected?\n1:00:31\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd even when teaching podcasting and teaching audio storytelling, you’re writing in a certain kind of way, there’s a writing for radio style and that you’re writing for one person, potentially. I tell students now about design thinking, you’re designing this prototype of a listener and then you’re going to talk to that listener so that you really create this connection. So that’s a little bit of what I think about intimacy and podcasting and radio.\n \n\n1:01:01\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Well, I will say for my part on the idea of physical intimacy I definitely affected a calming ASMR lady voice for my podcast [Laughs] which I don’t know why, but it seemed like the thing to do. But on a more social level, I would say the most interesting thing that came out of our podcast was all of the forms of intimacy that happened outside of the episode, that spilled over the container of the episode. Which are the many conversations that we had with the interviewers, getting in touch with bill bisset and Maria Campbell who had excerpts of audio in the podcast, knowing that they were listening to the podcast. So I think actually if we look at the podcast, not necessarily as contained within the media form itself, but as a broader set of social practices, then we get into this really sort of exciting territory of community building and social intimacy, which to me, I think is probably the most exciting part.\n \n\n1:02:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. I love that emphasis. That makes me think back to what Elena was saying about pirate radio practices and the possibility of community [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] formation. And how do we build for community in this asynchronous medium? There has been a wonderful conversation [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and links and resources shared in the chat here. Thank you again so much to all of our wonderful panelists. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:02:42\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nCan everyone on mute and say goodbye? So that’ll be some good sound for the podcast.\n \n\n1:02:46\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nEverybody unmute! We need 46 goodbyes. Let’s go.\n \n\n1:02:50\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs]\n \n\n1:03:01\tVarious voices:\tGoodbye! [Laughs] Bye!\n \n\n1:03:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs] Love this audio. Love it.\n \n\n1:03:07\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s a sound poem if I ever heard one.\n \n\n1:03:07\tVarious voices::\t[Laughs] [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:03:07\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n1:03:26\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb project director, Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Stacey Copeland, Deanna Fong, Kim Fox, Dario Llinares, Michael O’Driscoll, and Elena Razlova for their contributions to the panel discussion featured in this episode. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] From all of us at spoken web, thanks for listening to season two of this SpokenWeb Podcast, and we hope you’re ready for season three, coming soon with brand new episodes from the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":4.5446677},{"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":4.5446677},{"id":"9610","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E11, Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in podcasting, 3 August 2020, Barker, Telaro, Barillaro and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sadie Barker\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/418173666199007392824\",\"name\":\"Emma Telaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/255946fd-ceff-4b6b-a91c-4df32581bc15/sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:08:48\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"66,125,366 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-episode-11_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-08-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bender, John and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Ed. Bender and Wellbery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey.  “A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  209-225.\\n\\nLlinares, Dario. “Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  123-145.\\n\\nRapp, Christof, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan.  “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” CanadianJournal of Communication 36.2 (2011): 207-225.\\n\\nOng, Walter J.: Orality and Literacy–The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Routledge, New York, 1988.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549693136896,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How do concepts make us feel? What is the function of affect in the communication of ideas?\n\nIn this episode, three SpokenWeb graduate students – Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker and Emma Telaro – revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise that was assigned to them by SpokenWeb researcher Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, namely the functions of voice, ambience and the overarching media rhetoric of the podcast as a form. Comprised of recorded zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini-podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from Year 1 of the SpokenWeb podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself.\n\n00:00:18\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with high pitched voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do, eh?\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Relaxing ideas, anxious ideas, loving ideas, and even heated ideas. Feelings aren’t just for people; ideas have feelings, too. Or, at least, that’s what our episode contributors this month aim to explore. If ideas do have feelings, how are they communicated? And in turn, how do different ideas, concepts, make us feel? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, graduate students Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, and Emma Telaro revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise assigned to them by Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar at Concordia University. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma, and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, exploring the connections between voice, feeling, and rhetoric. Comprised of recorded Zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself. Without further ado, here’s the SpokenWeb Podcast season finale: “Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling, and Rhetoric in podcasting.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:23\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping multiple voices] We made a podcast!\n00:02:24\tEmma Telaro:\tUsing our podcast voices and other sounds.\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] And other sounds!\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] Who are we?\n00:02:29\tJason Camlot:\tBegin Music: Light Guitar] Who are we? I’m Jason Camlot, Professor in the department of English and Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound Studies at, well, Concordia University.\n00:02:41\tEmma Telaro:\tI’m Emma Telaro, a Master’s student in the department of English at Concordia University and a research assistant for SpokenWeb.\n00:02:48\tSadie Barker:\tI’m Sadie Barker, a PhD student.\n00:02:50\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd I’m Ali Barillaro, an almost graduated grad student.\n00:02:54\tJason Camlot:\tMaking a collaborative podcast is fun–\n00:02:57\tEmma Telaro:\t–but also challenging.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe logistics of who does what and how to bring everything together is one challenge.\n00:03:03\tAli Barillaro:\tBut perhaps the greatest challenge has to do with–\n00:03:05\tAll Speakers:\t–defining the voice that shapes the podcast. [Music Changes: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass]\n00:03:09\tEmma Telaro:\tIn an audio essay, there is usually a clear narrational perspective.\n00:03:13\tJason Camlot:\tAll the sounds presented are filtered and organized through a single voice, which represents a sonically particular perspective on all that is discussed and heard.\n00:03:23\tAli Barillaro:\tIn our case, we have aimed as much as possible to allow multiple narrational perspectives to be heard and to shape this podcast episode.\n00:03:34\tJason Camlot:\tSo this podcast, the final episode from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, is kind of a meta-podcast about making podcasts. [End Music: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass] In the winter semester of 2020, I taught a graduate seminar on the topic of Literature and Sound Studies. I’d taught courses on sound and poetry before, but this seminar, more than the ones I taught in the past, was committed to bringing interdisciplinary concepts and approaches from sound studies together with literary texts and sound recordings.\n00:04:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] We are [ ]. [Begin Music: Ambient Hum]\n00:04:04\tJason Camlot:\tAs my department’s annual required theory seminar for PhDs—although it consisted of both PhD students and MA students—it was heavy with critical theories and cultural studies about sound and listening. So we read and discussed together selections from R. Murray Schafer, Friedrich Kittler, and Lisa Gitelman. Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills.   Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith. John Durham Peters and Brandon LaBelle. Douglas Kahn and Dylan Robinson, among many others.\n00:04:38\tJason Camlot:\t[End Music: Ambient Hum] We read a few literary works that framed sound, listening, and voice in interesting ways, like Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. And we considered poets whose work moved between print and sound productions, including the talk poems of David Antin, the erasure poems and time-stretching sound collages of Jordan Abel, and the poetry scripts and [Audio, Overlapping, Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] audio-visual live performances of Oana Avasilichioaei.\n00:05:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] The subject is occurence. The subject is the eye that brutesSim      the sky…\n00:05:15\tJason Camlot:\tIn the context of a literature course that aims to think about sound, it’s difficult to do so without having one eye on the print world. It’s difficult to think about sound outside of the generic categories we use to think about printed texts. Podcasting about literary sound is kind of an interestingly messy place to be. Already, asking literature students to engage with sound rather than print works to trouble their relationship to their primary source text. Asking them to think through and present their ideas in a sound-based medium was a further exercise in estrangement. They would be required to learn a whole new media rhetoric, one that involved sound editing, speaking, and recording their ideas in a voice that seemed right to the purpose, possibly the use of music or ambient sounds to reinforce or frame the ideas and arguments they were making, not to mention arranging, balancing, EQing, mixing, and exporting the final product. The results were awesome in so many ways, students made podcasts about [Sound Effect: Siren] noise.\n00:06:18\tSima Meghadadi :\tAh, the hustle and bustle of the city.\n00:06:21\tJason Camlot:\tAnd silence.\n00:06:22\tMarlene Oefinger :\tSilence, then, is not really absent of sound, but the beginning of listening. And when there is nothing to hear, you start to hear things.\n00:06:33\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why most audio books aren’t satisfying.\n00:06:37\tBrian Vass :\tI generally dislike audiobooks. I wouldn’t listen to a recorded book if I could just read the book instead.\n00:06:43\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why Samuel Beckett’s radio plays are awesome.\n00:06:47\tRyan Tellier :\tNow to be somewhat self-reflexive, Beckett’s story is partially about the very need to find a voice.\n00:06:53\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry is as extra as a Lana Del Rey\n00:06:59\tPriscilla Jolly :\tIn this podcast, I’ll speak about the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration in relation to the confessional mode using the work of Sylvia Plath and Lana Del Rey.\n00:07:09\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how the running voice in your head talking to itself is kind of like a never-ending hip hop track.\n00:07:14\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani :\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Hip Hop] Some words just make me feel uncomfortable, like soot. Ugh. That fire debris thing or whatever? You can’t see, but I just shivered saying that. They should really make some kind of visual podcast, like a vodcast, you know? [End Music: Instrumental Hip Hop]\n00:07:31\tJason Camlot:\t[Overlapping, the voices and sounds from the beginning of SpokenWeb Episode 8] At the same time that everyone was working on their own podcasts, I was also at work on one with my colleague Katherine McLeod that eventually got released as episode eight of this podcast series, the episode entitled “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” And I’d already worked on my very first podcast in the fall, episode two called “Sound Recordings Are Weird.” It hadn’t occurred to me how difficult choosing and performing a voice in a podcast would be until I tried making [Audio, Throat Clearing] a podcast myself.\n00:08:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord Alfred Tennyson.\n00:08:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe complexity of voice as a performative and expressive factor in the context of a podcast is about authority, expertise, positionality… All of which Ali, Sadie, Emma, and I discuss later in this podcast. But it’s also about something else, something that for me at least is coming to define what a podcast does to ideas, concepts, and arguments. It has to do with affect and feeling, the proximity of the speaker to her ideas. The proximity of the listener to the speaker sharing an idea. The affective exchange that is inseparable from the conceptual exchange when a podcaster talks about something. Stacey Copeland explains this idea powerfully in a recent article when she observes that–\n00:08:52\tStacey Copeland:\tThere is an inherent intimacy in voice-driven sound work. That seems to be [Begin Distortion] soaking in affect. [End Distortion] The listener puts on her headphones, presses play, and becomes immersed in an affective discourse of human experience through listening and connecting.\n00:09:13\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] So one way in which ideas have feelings is through their expression and effective communication in voice. Another way that we came to realize how ideas have feelings, during the process of making our podcasts, is through the broader sonic affordances of the medium, [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] especially the way we come to obsess with the use of music and ambient sounds in presenting stories and ideas. Podcasting uses sound to help us experience how a concept feels. So that covers voice and feeling as we’ll be discussing those topics in this podcast. When we say the rhetoric of podcasting, we’re thinking of everything that Aristotle included in his definition of the concept of rhetoric as a means of persuasion, which encompassed a) the character of the speaker, [Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] b) the emotional state of the listener, and c) the argument, logos, itself.\n00:10:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe first two elements of rhetoric as a method are pretty well covered by our categories of voice and feeling. I would define the last element—that of argument, or logos—as including the first two, plus the overarching structure, genre, that we choose to use in arranging and shaping our podcast. And also the degree to which this form of communication engages in explicit kinds of reflection upon its own rhetorical affordances and strategies. We may come to feel ideas as tenets of authentic truth, but this is so because the modes of rhetorical persuasion we use have become normalized to a point that we just don’t notice them or think about them anymore. An ideology of rhetoric sets in and a sense of the “end of rhetoric,” as John Bender and David Wellbery had dubbed it, is felt. Sometimes rhetorical protocols can come to seem so useful, normal, so right to community that uses it, that the rhetoric of it seems to disappear altogether.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s through the migration of rhetorical protocols across communities that we can find rhetoric work, interestingly, at cross purposes with its original community. Like when biblical discourse or legal discourse is repurposed by communities of poets, novelists, cartoonists, comedians, it is due to this perpetual migration of rhetorical forms, media, and effects across communities that I think podcasting represents such a powerful tool for scholarly communication and humanities pedagogy at the present time. Podcasting, in practice, is a great way to make us see and feel the rhetorical and media assumptions we use to produce and share knowledge in our scholarly disciplines. A new kind of awareness of the rhetoric of thought has been another outcome of the experience of engaging in podcasting as a form of critical expression. [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] And this is an experience that we all seem to share. So, with these keywords—voice, feeling, rhetoric—briefly explained, and with the basic plan mapped out, first here is Ali Barillaro presenting her podcast on the meaning of applause in poetry readings.\n00:12:29\tAli Barillaro:\t[Theme Music] When I started working with SpokenWeb, I didn’t really know what I wanted to research. So Jason told me to start by listening through the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and to take notes on anything that caught my attention. That ended up being the sounds of applause and the frequently conflicted comments different poets made about the presence of applause in poetry readings. So I spent my first year as an RA trying to come up with better ways of talking about applause because just measuring duration and amplitude didn’t seem good enough to me. If I wanted to find the “why,” if that’s really possible, I needed to look at the wider context. I had already produced a five-minute talk, a one-hour workshop, and a 12-page paper on this topic. On the page, I had to describe the sounds of applause and use screenshots of waveforms and spectrograms. And none of that really does the sound justice. With the podcast, it was a lot easier to weave narration or argument and the source material in and out of one another, which I think makes for a more immersive listening experience.\n00:13:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] [Muriel Rukeyser] Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it’s said that way.\n00:13:53\tAli Barillaro:\tApplause, a sign of approval, an act of support, a cultural indicator worth listening to. In John Bulwer’s manual of rhetorical gestures Chirologia, he explains that “to clap the raised hands one against another is an expression proper to them who applaud, congratulate, rejoice, assent, approve, and are well-pleased used by all nations. This public token has been of old and is so usual in the assembly of a multitude when they cannot contain their joy in silence.” Bulwer’s contemplation of applause, however, quickly takes on a judging tone with concerns about decorum and the appropriateness of the gesture in particular artistic contexts. Addressing the inherent duality of applause, Steven Connor posits that “Clapping one hand on another dramatizes the fact that you are subject and an object simultaneously, a doer and a done to.” Applause, it seems, belongs to both the individual and the crowd. It can be deliberate or uncontained, disregarded or powerful.\n00:14:59\tAli Barillaro:\tIn the context of the archival sounds of reported poetry readings collected by SpokenWeb, we can hear not only poetic voice or textual content. We hear the sounds of interactivity and deception. We hear traces of the relationships between speaker and audience that ground the poetry reading as public, as event. Despite their potential significance, sonic manifestations of audience response, including laughter and verbal address, are not consistently present or consistently treated by poets, series organizers, recordists, and archivists. In 1966, acclaimed Montreal poet Louis Dudek was invited to introduce Henry Beissel and Mike Gnarowski’s reading as part of the poetry series at Sir George Williams University. Dudek attempts to set the tone and establish the appropriate reading series etiquette, as he reflects on his effective response to Beissel’s performance, stating,\n00:15:53\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Strongly, I was impressed and moved by that reading of Henry Beissel.\n00:15:57\tAli Barillaro:\tFrom a position as both audience member and poet, he explains:\n00:16:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Really several times after the poems, I wanted to applaud, only we don’t do that.\n00:16:06\tAli Barillaro:\tHmm. If applause isn’t universally accepted as a fundamental part of the poetry reading, why are there so many instances of applause heard throughout the Sir George Williams collection? Despite concerns of impropriety, applause can function as a demonstration of etiquette or a measurement and influencer of public feeling, as Sarah Balkin claims. Tanya Clement and Stephen McLaughlin frame applause is both enabling an audience’s ability to engage in dialogue with a poem itself and effect its mode of meaning-making, or as a signifier of structures marking the transitions between different elements of a reading. Most examples of applause can be labeled either procedural, referring to moments thought to be appropriate or expected in a reading series, or as purely spontaneous phenomenon. Those spontaneous applause appears to be more appreciative in nature; procedural applause is not exclusively formal or inherently removed from appreciation for the poet, the work, or the performance. Another key feature of applause is the concept of consensus, which implies a communal response from the majority or all of the audience to a given performance.\n00:17:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause]\n00:17:16\tAli Barillaro:\tA noticeable lack of consensus is often perceived as…uncomfortable. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:17:24\tAudio Recording:\t[One person claps] [Unknown Person says, uncomfortably,] Oh! Thank you…\n00:17:25\tAli Barillaro:\t[Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] Caused by what Tia DeNora describes as individuals or small groups of people lacking the skill and practical knowledge necessary for appropriate emotional responses in a given performative context. Moments in the Sir George Williams recordings can be used as case studies to examine consensus, procedural, and spontaneous applause and to begin to unpack what specific sounds of audience response might signify when listened to within the greater context of an entire reading and the series as a whole. Let’s listen to the response to Irving Layton’s “Confederation Ode” read at Sir George Williams University in 1967 as an example.\n00:18:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:09\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton was certainly no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night, “Family Portrait,” receives the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the poetry series collection, a 40-second auditory event so intense we could call it a wall of noise.\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Very Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:28\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton’s opening remarks draw attention to the makeup of the sizable crowd gathered to hear him.\n00:18:33\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my friends and former students in the audience.\n00:18:40\tAli Barillaro:\tA statement elaborated upon in a post-grad article that details the overcrowding of the venue that hosted the university’s then-poet-in-residence. Consensus, then, is not an issue for Layton. What is worth questioning is the spontaneity of the reaction to a poem like “Confederation Ode” that was new at the time of the reading, especially considering Layton classics, like “Misunderstanding” and “The Birth of Tragedy,” are met with no audible response. Beyond finding out who is in the audience, the location and timing of the reading is also crucial to the discussion. With Expo 67 scheduled to begin just over a month after this Montreal performance and with the poem’s bold sexual imagery and overt political satire, Layton correctly assumes he need not explain his intent further than a simple preface–\n00:19:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] My contribution to the centennial year, “Confederation Ode.”\n00:19:31\tAli Barillaro:\t–for the audience to receive his message and respond accordingly. The question still remains open, though. Why did this audience react so strongly to this Layton poem in that moment. The ephemerality of the event and lack of corresponding oral history work makes it hard to firmly pin down an answer, but further inroads can be made with the use of growing audio archives that could potentially allow scholars to trace a poet’s reading history, cross-referencing multiple performances of a given piece and documenting the range of responses from audiences over time and across space. For the “Confederation Ode” applause, further research into Layton’s biography and public sentiment about Expo 67 and the Canadian government more broadly may also elucidate some of the meaningful resonances the performance affected in Layton’s listeners. Thank you.\n00:20:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:20:34\tAli Barillaro:\tWhen Jason, Emma, Sadie, and I got together for a series of Zoom meetings to replay and talk about our podcasts a few months after making them, hearing the episodes quickly conjured up…a few feelings.\n00:20:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I said something to Emma and Sadie about how I realized I kind of sound like some weird robot presenter lady in my podcast. And I… It’s so cringy to listen to ’cause that’s not how I talk normally at all.\n00:21:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] It’s always embarrassing to hear your own voice back, right? You know, to some extent, especially when you’re like, “I’m trying to do my podcast voice.” Right? You know.\n00:21:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I think it’s… I’m trying to sound like a…informational guide. I think there was only one like one or two very brief, brief moments in my mini-podcast that I was trying to break away from that. I remember in one of your comments that one of the parts that you were like, “Yes! That! That’s what you should be going for more” was just me going, “Hmm” at something. You were like, “Yeah! Like that’s, that’s something we would want to hear.”\n00:21:36\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Yeah, it’s ’cause that “Hmm” was so Ali. Right? [inaudible]\n00:21:40\tAli Barillaro:\tOverall, I think the end result was relatively well-produced and that I managed to convey a general sense of the work I’ve done on applause within such a limited timeframe. But the thing that we all kept coming back to was my voice. What exactly was going on there?\n00:21:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] What does that mean, first of all, to be doing a podcast voice? What is it?\n00:22:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] It’s funny ’cause I remember when I was in CEGEP, I had an assignment where my friends and I made a video about composting and I decided to narrate it and it sounded exactly like that. So it’s been like a thing for like a long time. And I don’t know why, like why that’s my go to voice. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s very weird.\n00:22:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Could you do that voice right now? Like on command?\n00:22:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Let me pull up something that I could like read. ‘Cause I can’t do it just like speaking spontaneously. Because that’s not how I talk! Okay. Let’s see. “The contents field serves to describe the audible content, speech, and other sounds of the audio asset.”\n00:22:44\tSadie Barker:\tIt seems so kind of genre-dependent, like your podcast, content-wise was quite academic and it was funny ’cause like listening to it, I actually didn’t notice a difference in voice at all, but then just now when you performed your voice, I really noticed it. So there’s something about like the setting of… The content setting that… Where you kind of assume a certain voice and… Yeah, ’cause it really, it really stood out in this very more casual settings.\n00:23:12\tEmma Telaro:\tI think it’s hard not to do it.\n00:23:13\tAli Barillaro:\tMhm.\n00:23:13\tEmma Telaro:\tI mean, as soon as you have a device in front of you, like tense up and that’s, I think, more often than not what happens.\n00:23:23\tAli Barillaro:\tI guess it’s like, it also feels like a safer way of doing it. Like it feels less vulnerable to have that kind of voice and not just have people listening to what you actually sound like.\n00:23:35\tJason Camlot:\tSo you’re, you’re performing the voice of sort of pure information, would you say?\n00:23:41\tAli Barillaro:\tI want it to be straightforward. I want it to be clear. Yeah, I want people to understand what I’m trying to say to them and I, for some reason, in my head, that’s what that sounds like.\n00:23:52\tJason Camlot:\tWould you say that you’re trying to make your voice almost disappear in the communication of the information so that it’s like, it’s there, but hopefully won’t be noticed?\n00:24:01\tAli Barillaro:\tYeah, I think that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do ’cause for some reason, I guess like my own natural voice doesn’t seem like the best, the best possible option for doing that. And I… It’s, it’s often when it’s something that’s scripted and it’s not like, it’s not theater or something like that. It’s something that is like argumentative or analytical or theoretical. That’s what that voice sounds like in my head. So I’m trying to perform that rather than something that’s more conversational or more natural or more performative in a different way.\n00:24:38\tAli Barillaro:\tEveryone had a lot to say about their own decisions regarding the performance of the role of podcast host or narrator. And I’ll be back later in the episode to lead you through some of our major realizations about voice.\n00:25:04\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Emma Telaro.\n00:25:04\tEmma Telaro:\tThe podcast I created for Jason’s class I named “Conditionally Audible Heat,” though future iterations should have a punchier name. Broadly speaking, my podcast examines the sonification of heat in the archival recording of the 1974 Margaret Atwood reading from the Sir George Williams University’s reading series. The curiosity I felt for this particular tape begins in listening. On the occasion of this performance, the reading is upstaged by an unbearable and unlikely October heat. The introducers, Atwood, stumble over the heat, the crowd shuffles restlessly, and this frenzy infectious makes its way through the audio recording. I found this occurrence mesmerizing and in a fit of note-taking attempted to mark all the moments when heat, though constant, materialized and usurped the reading. And yet there wasn’t a specific quality or sound associated with this heat, but a convergence, rather. So I wondered what in the first place was I listening to? [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling] What does heat sound like? How does it manifest in audio recording and what sensations does it provoke? I listened and listened again. So, I inched towards my driving question: how do we hear heat? I felt that to answer this question, what does heat sound like, to attempt a podcast on the sonification of heat, I had to begin with the event itself. Heat announces itself from the very beginning of the reading.\n00:26:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Henry Beissel] Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system. The hall is going to be too hot.\n00:26:34\tEmma Telaro:\tAnd I wanted to give a sense of the temporality of the event, the time elapsed and distorted by heat as it presses languorously and anxiously onto the reading. I had to find a way to do this, to describe, engage with, and represent 35 minutes of audio in a six-minute podcast. The podcast really took off with the introductory audio collage. Once I decided that my primary task was to sound heat, I clipped elements from the beginning of the recording to create the collage and timed it to fit a sultry musical track I found online. It felt very much like I was assembling quotations. I treated the clips, whether of speech or exterior sound, as fragments and pieced them together. To get the sounds to hit at the right time was a minute task and the more I edged towards the effects I wanted, the more finicky I got. That first sound, the one moment you’ll hear, took ages to place on the right beat and significantly, I selected it because it’s the first voice you hear in the archival recording. I felt strongly about keeping it, that short phrase captures the mood of the reading, the disorder, the tension, and the sound and feel of the room. You’ll notice how the speaker, Henry Beissel, signals the overflow, the body’s mass in the room. And you’ll hear the humour, too, which recurs in the event as necessary relief.\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Sultry Instrumental] [Henry Beissel] One moment. [Music Changes: Bass Joins Sultry Instrumentals] [Henry Beissel] We did try to get a larger hall, but it was impossible to accommodate the overflow we have set up loudspeakers in the little gallery here, how it [inaudible] in the other one, too? [Unknown Person] Outside. [Henry Beissel] Outside there’s loud speakers. So please don’t all crowd into the room. Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system? The hall is going to be too hot. [Music Changes: Xylophone Joins] [Margaret Atwood] I don’t see any reason why this thing should resemble a steam bath. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] If everybody on the chairs would, would shift over this way, and sit on sort of as if it were a bench, then some more people could sit on the edges there. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] It’s fucking hot.\n00:29:06\tEmma Telaro:\tMontreal, October 18, 1974. [End Music: Sultry Instrumental] It’s hot, really hot, an unlikely hot autumn evening. Margaret Atwood is set to perform at the Poetry Series, a reading series organized by the Sir George Williams University’s English department, now Concordia University. The room is jammed. She begins to read.\n00:29:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] Is not one– Oh boy, is it ever hot in here, I can’t stand it, yeah, hmm?\n00:29:35\tEmma Telaro:\tAtwood’s performance is of peculiar interest for two reasons. First, she’s one of the few women invited to read at the series. Second, the reading is overwhelmed by this autumn heat wave. In the recording of this performance, we hear Atwood repeatedly referenced this oppressive heat, and we hear the audience members, too, shuffling and speaking excitedly as they crowd into the room. We hear this especially in the first few minutes of the recording and in the Q and A that follows her performance. The reading itself is cut short to accommodate the unusual weather, which is ironic, perhaps, given our first point.\n00:30:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] I think I better read just three more poems…before we all die.\n00:30:19\tEmma Telaro:\t[Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] In an article written for The Guardian called “Boiling point: why literature loves a long hot summer.” Aida Edemariam writes, “Novelists have used heat waves to create tension, erotic charge, and moments of possibility. It is a time when all the rules change.” Of course, we’re not speaking of a fictional heatwave, but of a real, historical and material manifestation of heat. And yet we might pursue literary analysis and say that the sweaty, hot room acts as a framing device for the poetry reading, or if we want to borrow a term from sound studies, we might include heat in a study of the reading soundscape. But how in the first place does heat sound forth? How do we hear heat? What is the significance of an audible heat? For the most part, we’re listening to the effects of heat. Heat acts on bodies, bodies contribute to heat, voice and movement manifest discomfort or pleasure, or…pleasure in discomfort.\n00:31:16\tEmma Telaro:\tThe audible manifestations of heat, Atwood’s humorous quips, her nervous laugh, the frenzied audience response highlight the sociality of performance. Heat dramatizes the encounter between audience and performer and despite the very real constraint material circumstances of the reading, heat provides a release from constraints. We sense the overflow in the room, which contributes to the sense of possibility that emerges out of close contact with Atwood and her poems. Later, she jokes about being called a “witch” by some critics, which adds fuel to her feminism and speaks to the disarming power of her poetics. In this heat, with Atwood, we anticipate something. Boundaries might be crossed.\n00:32:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy? Has anybody died yet?\n00:32:08\tEmma Telaro:\tHeat helps us imagine what it might’ve felt like to be there. And it is remarkable that we can retrieve the sensation, if only   through recording. Heat is a conjuring trick; it signals presence even in absence. We hear the spatial, temporal, and material circumstances of Atwood’s reading, we hear the body, and of course, we hear the poems. And it all feels quite sweaty.\n00:32:35\tEmma Telaro:\tWe’ve talked about the sociality of performance sounded through heat, but there’s also the various meanings that shift in reading. Heat alters the poems themselves. Where and how you listen matters to how you receive meaning in the poem. Imagine a late summer evening, or if you prefer, a blazing mid-August sun entering deep, deep into the pore of your skin. Can you taste the sweat, smell the humidity? Or is it a dry heat, red and sandy? Are you close to, far from other bodies? How does the clothes feel on your skin? What sounds are there around you?\n00:33:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] “Late August.” This is the plum season, the nights / blue and distended, the moon / hazed, this is the season of peaches / with their lush lobed bulbs / that glow in the dusk, apples / that drop and rot / sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands / No more the shrill voices / that cried Need Need / from the cold pond, bladed and urgent as new grass / Now it is the crickets / that say Ripe Ripe / slurred in the darkness, while the plums / dripping on the lawn outside / our window, burst / with a sound like thick syrup / muffled and slow / The air is still / warm, flesh moves over / flesh, there is no / hurry. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:34:13\tEmma Telaro:\t“Late August” felt like the most fitting and only close, a return to the poem that felt nostalgic and dreamlike. Throughout the podcast, I focused mostly on extra-poetic speech, but the quality of her voice and reading shifts tellingly to [Changes voice to mimic the cadence of Atwood’s voice in the reading] the anxious phonetic pace indicating unbearable heat, slows, when she reads. “Late August” is this langour, this culmination, this release. The beautiful yet dark aura of the plums, ripe. The seductive quality of late August heat that focuses heat as an affective and aesthetic experience. It’s a heat which makes its way through autumn cracks, [Sound Effect: Autumn Bugs] the kind of heat that sometimes surprises us here in Montreal. It’s the heat of the poetry reading, from the bodies in the room, giving grain to the voice, to the poem. I wanted to end here, in “Late August,” to return to the poem, to listening, to feeling. If I speak “Late August,” I think of the swarming of bees by the Lachine Canal, but also the humidity that hangs on, that persists despite the signs of fall. There are sounds to these feelings, to describing these images. It’s perhaps a matter of listening more closely, of finding the right vocabulary for them.\n00:35:36\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Sadie Barker.\n00:35:36\tSadie Barker:\tFor the last four years, I’ve tree planted in northern BC. I would do this between my schooling, where especially more recently, I’ve been thinking and learning about sound studies. And these interests came together last summer when I brought a recorder with me to camp with the intention of recording the day-to-day world of tree planting. So when I wasn’t planting trees, I was walking around camp, interviewing people,–\n00:36:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] Okay, Michelle, we’re recording.\n00:36:05\tSadie Barker:\t–collecting the sounds of camp life, [People Chatting] and just amassing various audio. So I was pretty excited when, in Jason’s class, I had the opportunity to assemble it. Because I already had several hours of tape, I was in many ways advantaged going into this assignment, but I was still apprehensive. I never made a podcast before. While I’d written lots of essays and could appreciate music and sound, I’d never attempted to tell any kind of audio story. As someone that studies multimedia and aesthetics, podcasting made me realize that while I research and write on these topics, I hadn’t really ever diversified or experimented with my own modes of expression. I hadn’t ever really tried to facilitate an aesthetic experience itself beyond formal academic writing. So this assignment made me reflect on [Beeping Alarm] the tendencies, comforts, and familiarities of my own academic modes.\n00:37:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beeping Ends] [Crackly Static]\n00:37:17\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s 5:45 AM, cold, and the clothes you pull onto your shivering body in the pitch black of your tent are damp, coated in dew and sweat from the day before. Outside, the sun has not yet risen, but the gravel pit bears its first signs of life nonetheless. The hum of the generator [Mechanical Clacking] and the few early risers sitting on the breakfast trailer steps, brushing their teeth, smoking cigarettes, chewin’ the fat.\n00:37:49\tAudio Recording:\t[Truck Backing Up] [Unknown Person Sings] Tree planters are giving the trees a newly [inaudible] life. [Laughter]\n00:37:55\tSadie Barker:\tThis is the stretch of calm before the day. In 15 minutes, the breakfast trailer doors will open and people will shuffle through, heaping scrambled eggs and oatmeal onto silver trays to eat in the tent, both anticipating the day to come and cherishing these moments of idleness. At 7:00 AM, everyone will board their trucks and leave for the cutblock  to spend the next 10 hours planting trees. [Wheels On Gravel I could try and describe these 10 hours and the world of possibility they hold, but Charlotte Gill’s book Eating Dirt does it much better.\n00:38:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Country Guitar] [Charlotte Gill] Planting trees isn’t hard. As any veteran will tell you, it isn’t the act of sowing itself, but the ambient complications. It comes with snow pellets or clouds of biting insects so thick and furious it’s possible to end a day with your eyelids swollen shut and blood trickling from your ears. They’re swaying fields of venomous plants like devil’s club and stinging nettle. The work has the bodily effect of a car crash in extreme slow motion. Besides that, the task itself is thankless and boring, which is to say, it’s plain and silent. What could compel a person to make a career of such a thing? I’ve always wanted to find out. [End Music: Country Guitar]\n00:39:16\tAudio Recording:\t[ ] I’m Behnke, I’m from Terrace, British Columbia, and I– My name is Belle –am a second year tree planter– and I’m from Vancouver– My name is Liam Hannah– and I’m a first-year planter– Oh, my name is Alanna– I’m from Toronto– I’ve been planting for seven years– And I’ve been planting for four years– Hey, I’m from Thailand– –for two years– My name is Clara. I am from Thornbury, Ontario– Hi, my name is Sebastian– –planting for a couple of weeks now –I’m from Northern BC– –so this’ll be my first, first year– –and I’ve been planting for, this is my second full season planting.\n00:39:52\tSadie Barker:\tThere are many different kinds of planters. People come from all sorts of places and plant for all kinds of reasons. But most planters will tell you that the happiest part of any season is May, before any of the real work has started.\n00:40:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] So they say there’s three parts to the planting season–\n00:40:10\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Liam.\n00:40:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –and they map onto each month. There’s May, the honeymoon month where everybody’s having a good time and they’re enjoying themselves. They just got here. [People Chatting] They’re partying a lot every night… [People Chatting] [Begin Music: Ukelele].\n00:40:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] You spend so much time with these people, so–\n00:40:30\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Kim.\n00:40:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] –yeah, It feels… Leaving and coming back, it feels like camp as a little kid, like seeing all these people that you’ve connected with.\n00:40:41\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] I think there’s like a creative energy.\n00:40:44\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Belle.\n00:40:45\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] Music and art, I feel like that is sort of always happening in the background of camp.\n00:40:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] People are just pretty cheerful. [Music And People Chatting] ‘Cause everybody’s quite happy, ready to get to know each other and [Michelle says “Wonderwall”] joke around and…\n00:41:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] When you’re around the fire and everyone’s laughing and someone’s playing guitar… And then, again, you just sit back and you just go, “Wow, this…. This is good.” [Michelle] Katie, It’s not, Katie’s all request hour. [People Laughing And Chatting].\n00:41:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:41:28\tSadie Barker:\tAnd then–\n00:41:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –June hits.\n00:41:30\tSadie Barker:\t–it’s the June blues.\n00:41:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And people are getting exhausted and they go downhill.\n00:41:36\tSadie Barker:\tThis is when reality starts to set in, but when the bodily effect of a car crash in slow motion that Charlotte Gill was referencing, starts to occur.\n00:41:46\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] It’s, it’s really hard to justify like the toll it’s taken on my body because I felt so–\n00:41:50\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Michelle.\n00:41:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] –physically able before coming.\n00:41:54\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] I have a huge gash in like the webbing between my thumb and my index finger.\n00:42:00\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Unknown Voices] My feet are regularly cramping– The [inaudible] hurts– Common tendonitis– And it’s like a charley horse in my foot– Drought– I don’t know what I’ve done to my back– Foot pain– Some ribs popped out– So two days ago I woke up and I barely could see out of– Basically my knee started swelling up– –my right eye– –and I took my first day off ever. –it was bitten from a black fly– And so I hobble around and struggle to get in and out of the truck and struggle to get in and out of bed…\n00:42:21\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think? Is it worth it?\n00:42:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle Laughs] I don’t know. [Laughs] I don’t know.\n00:42:33\tSadie Barker:\tThis also when the days start to feel long– [Sound Effect: Rain Falling]\n00:42:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] The time doesn’t fly enough.\n00:42:40\tSadie Barker:\t–really long.\n00:42:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] Well, the worst thing that I find tree planting is…definitely the loneliness\n00:42:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] There doesn’t seem like… No birds are singing or nothing. Everything is just grey and…\n00:42:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] If you have one bad thought on the block, then it can just stick with you all day long.\n00:43:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And it’s always been the hardest job I’ve ever done and probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.\n00:43:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] But like today–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –at some point I sat on the log–\n00:43:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –July hits–\n00:43:14\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I just started laughing–\n00:43:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam]–and it’s the home-coming stretch.\n00:43:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I was laughing by myself for like a big two minutes and then I just stood up again and…planted!\n00:43:27\tMusic:\t[Begin Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso]\n00:43:27\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think, will you be coming back again?\n00:43:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Yeah, see, that’s a hilarious question.\n00:43:35\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] People always say it’s the last season, then they come back.\n00:43:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Obviously I’m saying never again after this season.\n00:43:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] That’s the struggle now where it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll come back. No I won’t. Yeah, I will. No, I won’t.” Back and forth, back and forth. I think–\n00:43:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] I think this is my last year. I think this is my last year, but I said that last year. So. Who know? Everybody always says that.\n00:44:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] I said that—I think it was my third year—that I would never come back and now I’m at four years later so…I guess it does something right. [End Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso. Rain Sound Effect Fades Out]\n00:44:19\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s funny hearing your own voice and podcast, maybe, especially, when it’s your first. I remember at the time of making this not really having a plan, maybe because this combination of sound and text was a new medium for me, not having a deliberate sense of process. But maybe because of that, having a sense of freedom. I knew I wanted to capture the everyday-ness of planting and I was excited by the possibility that I didn’t need to directly argue for the everyday or pose it as a structured thesis necessarily, but that I could present it experientially to the listener. I remember gravitating to certain sounds almost impulsively and assembling them in ways that just felt intuitive. It’s interesting now to hear the sounds that came through and the ways in which they did the sound [Mechanical Clanking] of the generator for me is interchangeable with the sound [Beeping Alarm] of the alarm clock. Both mean early morning.\n00:45:17\tSadie Barker:\tThey mean that the cook is likely starting to make breakfast and you should probably be mobilizing out of your tent. These parallels, I think, was the underlying rationale for putting those sounds in almost overlapped proximity. The sounds of the beer can and the fire and the instruments and banter. Those sounds for me capture the social world [People Chatting] of planting and the sound of the rain [Water Splashing] on the tent in the morning, which is always the first thing you hear and notice because it cues exactly the kind of planting day it will be seem to perfectly sound the ways in which planting is almost always at the mercy of the environment. So, I wanted to forefront those visceral relations between planters and their everyday surroundings and I think podcasting allowed me to do that in ways that were more in accord and representative of planting as itself: an immersive and sensory and experiential medium. [Theme Music]\n00:46:31\tAli Barillaro:\tAs Sadie, Emma, and I talked about our podcasts together with Jason, we found ourselves coming back to three key themes, including what we’re calling feeling or ambiance and rhetoric. But we probably had the most to say about voice, about vocal performance, intent, effects and affect.\n00:46:52\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio Recording] Listening to your, to your natural voice recorded is also kind of scary.\n00:46:57\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:46:57\tAli Barillaro:\tHaving that option to sound like somebody else, I guess in a way, is, is like a safety blanket, sort of.\n00:47:06\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s a really interesting point. I think it’s a great point. And it’s… I find it really… I mean, I’m not surprised, but I find it interesting that clarity and authority means voice evacuated of emotional characteristics or traits, right? You know. Which is also protective ’cause it shows that you’re not vulnerable to emotion, right? So in this version of podcast voice we’re to evacuate our voices of emotion, to communicate authority, clarity, and to somehow twist our personalities into some kind of robotic version of ourselves, you know, maybe avatars against, you know, that more authoritative robotic version of self-performance, but actually is about putting yourself out there and being casual and being yourself.\n00:47:54\tAli Barillaro:\tA lot of that comes from also feeling like sort of inadequately prepared to be that authoritative speaker as a student and for an assignment for a class. The audience was all of us, technically, like the other students, but it’s also Jason. So it’s a little hard to step back from that, even though you’re aware that you can and we were encouraged to do so in the podcast form, it’s very hard to stop doing that.\n00:48:23\tJason Camlot:\tEmma, did you feel you were also engaging in a kind of a different version of yourself, a more transparent or, or somehow, you know, objective version of yourself in your vocal performance in your podcast? Or were you doing a different kind of voice?\n00:48:40\tEmma Telaro:\tI think on some level I was–\n00:48:42\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro.\n00:48:43\tEmma Telaro:\t–just because this was a podcast that was assigned to us within an academic setting. So, and I was talking about heat in my podcast and I, I realized how that can become quickly humourous. I think like you, Ali, I kind of feel like, “Oh, that was a little bit of a missed opportunity. I could’ve made a bunch of like really silly jokes about heat.” But also I was sometimes actively trying to avoid that because I was afraid that that wouldn’t make it not serious. I often do think about that idea of the authoritative voice and how, as a student, it’s difficult to ever feel like you have one. And also like as a woman, having like a high-pitched voice is not necessarily normally seen as authoritative. So it’s something I often think about on the daily, especially at school, because I also find that my voice at the university is not the voice I have when I’m at home with my parents or when I’m at a bar with my friends, it fluctuates so much. And it’s something I pay a lot of attention to. And I think for this podcast, I wanted to find like a medium, like how can I be myself, but also sound like better than I am? Which is maybe like a silly, insecure thought, but it’s a thought that I’m sure everyone has, as soon as they’re being recorded.\n00:49:56\tAli Barillaro:\tI think a lot of us are kind of self-conscious about sounding, not, not too shrill, not too loud, and like not too high-pitched. I think my voice is actually quite deep. Like even now, I’m realizing listening to myself that when I’m talking and I know I’m being recorded, I do often try to, to keep it to the lower registers with my voice.\n00:50:20\tEmma Telaro:\tI used to sing. So it brought me back to being like in a recording studio and it brought me back to that moment, like right before record like that, that sort of… The acknowledgement you have in your head of like, “Okay, well now I’m putting on this performative voice.” And that voice felt a little bit similar to my singing voice because I was trying to like, I think extend the words and circle around the letters in a way that I don’t when I’m speaking casually. So it’s also a fake casual voice, I think.\n00:50:51\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. A performed casual voice, which is a big part of the podcasting voice that we often hear. When’s it acceptable to have emotion like in… For a narrator to have emotion or host to have emotion in a podcast? Because I definitely don’t either in my narrations, at least the ones I’ve done so far, it’s been pretty, it’s been pretty much based on like my grade eight radio assignment, you know? I don’t think I’ve progressed very much in thinking about how I’m supposed to sort of project or what a narrator’s really supposed to be. I think I’m trying to be clear. So I totally get what Ali was saying earlier about wanting to enunciate well at the same time to sound casual or conversational so, so that the text I’m reading doesn’t sound like it’s being read. There’s this kind of attempt to, to strike a really impossible or unnatural thing, balance, between reading texts, so sounding like an actual text that’s being read, but being a voice that’s doing that text in a manner that sounds conversational. I think it’s, there’s a lot of that kind of communicating a sense of reception through how one speaks back to what someone said without always saying, “Yes, I understand. Yes, I like what you’re saying.” It’s coming across through these vocal modes of expression instead, in timbre and in, in register in the voice itself. Earlier in this conversation like Ali, when you’re laughing, you know, about yourself and everything like that, that’s all there. And it’s like, “Oh, that sounds like a podcast voice to me, like much more than the formal narrator’s voice that we all seem to sort of slot ourselves into.” Sadie Barker.\n00:52:34\tSadie Barker:\tThat’s true. The podcasters, like I’m thinking of even someone like Ira Glass, kind of walks this line between being kind of well-spoken, but also can kind of respond naturally and with emotion on the spot and how it’s a really fine balance.\n00:52:52\tJason Camlot:\tIf you were to perform a different podcasting voice to sort of give us an example of what your voice might sound like if you were to redo your podcast, having reflected a little bit on the voice that you did use, what would that sound like?\n00:53:06\tSadie Barker:\t“Wake up everyone, it’s 5:45–” no. I think maybe I would just try to adopt the shifts in energy more… Like I think the, the podcast starts with kind of a lower energy, but it does kind of rise. I would reflect maybe more on my own experiences, my own personal reflections, take less of a back position and come to the fore more.\n00:53:32\tJason Camlot:\tWhat about you, Emma? Would your, your voice change, do you think?\n00:53:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThinking about it now, it was a very literary voice I think I was trying to mimic and I think I was also trying to match it with Atwood’s knowing that I would be putting the clips together. Whereas like, if I were talking about pizza, which I’m also super passionate about, it would be a very different voice. And I’m also thinking like Sadie, I wouldn’t want you to lose that like rising, quiet quality, because it’s as much part of the story as is the other speakers or the content. It is like a question of matching tone or timbre to, to content in the same way that we do when we’re writing. It shifts. But there is always something there that, that speaks of the author, right? Whatever that is. I don’t know. I don’t know if that answers the question. I guess it wouldn’t change, it would, it would maybe change. I don’t know, depends what I’d be focusing on this time.\n00:54:24\tAli Barillaro:\tIf I had to respond to this question, I’d say it might sound something like this:\n00:54:31\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio, Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] Sir George’s then-poet-in-residence Irving Layton was no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night received the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the entire poetry series collection, [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental] a 40-second auditory event so intense I call it a wall of noise. [Thunderous Applause, Previous Music Returns] In his opening remarks, Layton proudly draws attention to the sizable crowd in front of him. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:54:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my…\n00:55:03\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro\n00:55:03\tEmma Telaro:\tIt seemed that the medium, we were dabbling in, podcasting ,demanded that we concentrate feeling, that it was part of the argument, content, and narrative voice of our podcasting selves. The relational, immersive, and affective experience of sound and of podcasting guided or thematic discussion on feeling. Jason asked us to recall moments from our podcasts that were soaking in affect and to reflect on the achievements and challenges of these. We all thought of Sadie’s very successful rendering of the ambiance of camp and in particular of her campfire clip.\n00:55:36\tSadie Barker:\t[Audio, Overlapping With People Chatting] I sampled the sounds of people jamming and then I sampled sounds of people conversing. I think it was really an attempt to describe the sort of social atmosphere of planting that really… It seemed much more informative to use these small sounds, as opposed to saying, “You know, usually there’s 12 people standing around a fire and there’ll be some people playing instruments.” And I don’t know, it just made me kind of reflect on how the smallest sound can be so telling and so much more telling than kind of a lengthy description. I chose this scene because I thought it really captured the ambiance of camp.\n00:56:16\tEmma Telaro:\tSadie aptly negotiates images through sounds so that we feel like we’re there sitting around the campfire. If Sadie sought to sample atmosphere of camp, I focused on the ambiance of a room. My podcast, in a sense, was about feeling the feeling of heat at the poetry reading event.\n00:56:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy?\n00:56:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThe goal was to transmit a listening experience that centred heat, in listening closely to the room, and from there eased into a discussion of the reading event that preserved its heated texture. The heat felt all-consuming, shares much with Sadie’s rain, calling forth sensations, [Sound Effect: Stormy Rain] images, and memories that are otherwise inaccessible. I’ve never been planting in Northern BC, but I can hear the rain on my tent regardless, just like I had not been present nor alive during the Atwood reading and yet I feel I know that heat from that October night. While Sadie and I focused on the field of our particular subject matter, the sound of camp and of heat, of tree planting and of the poetry reading, Ali asks, what does podcasting itself sound like? Ali, quite brilliantly questions the mood evoked by the genre and sets the tone for the experience of listening to an informational form of communication. What remains consistent across our podcasts and in our discussion of feeling is this focus on our affective relationship to sound. The affordances of the medium seem vast in this regard, how to translate, feeling, affect, how to tell. What rhetorical methods might be used.\n00:57:40\tJason Camlot:\tSadie Barker.\n00:57:41\tSadie Barker:\tOur approach with this podcast was to structure it around thematic discussions, voice, and ambience, too. But now we land at structure itself. How do we bring all of these components together to make one coherent, but also hopefully compelling narrative? Just like the structuring of this very podcast determined through brainstorming, zooming, and certainly some trial and error, our approaches to structure were varied.\n00:58:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] It was the same feeling of having to fill up a blank page and like, where do you start? Where do you end?\n00:58:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I wanted to start with a statement.\n00:58:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs be the primary structure.\n00:58:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n00:58:23\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I found it very difficult, found it very hard. I just had a lot to say.\n00:58:27\tSadie Barker:\tBut before we get into any of that, Jason usefully summarizes what exactly we’re talking about when we say “structure” and “rhetoric.”\n00:58:36\tJason Camlot:\tSo when I’m, when I talk about rhetoric, I’m thinking of the handling of different registers so that you create a kind of persistently interesting series of sounds that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish combined with the kind of understanding of a beginning, middle, and end.\n00:58:54\tSadie Barker:\tAnd, as leader of the discussions, he offers some useful soundbites towards structuring this very segment.\n00:59:02\tJason Camlot:\tBut maybe we can each reflect a little bit on the challenges of the overall structure and arrangement of our podcasts.\n00:59:11\tSadie Barker:\tIn doing this reflecting, I started to realize that these categories [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] of voice, ambiance, and now rhetoric and structure, ones that we’d been discussing somewhat separately, were connected, entirely connected. Feeling and ambiance suddenly seemed integral to how my podcast was constructed. [End Music: Intense Instrumental]\n00:59:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] In my case, I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs of the season be the primary structure, but that that was structurally quite ambiguous. And so I had Liam, who is my partner and a planter, describe those emotional arcs in the language that everyone recognizes as the honeymoon and the burnout and the homestretch, just to provide a bit of structure [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] to the listener that keys the transition, right?\n00:59:56\tSadie Barker:\tBut I also realized that voice and its spectrum of intonation and register was key to the structural shifts themselves.\n01:00:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I did really rely on the voices of planters to capture the different emotional registers of those moments. There was an interview with this girl, Zoe, and she was describing a really miserable day on the block. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] And then she kind of goes, “But then I just pick myself up and I start planting” and being really drawn to that “but” because it just captured both in what she was saying, but the intonation, like the shift in register, that really mobilized the next chapter. So it was interesting to think about the content of what people were saying, but then also just how the sound and the way she said that one word cued that we were in a different emotional space.\n01:00:43\tJason Camlot:\tCool. That’s amazing how just a single intonational shift can actually signal, “Okay, new part.” And it shows how much feeling is a determining factor in the segmentation or shaping of argument in podcasting.\n01:00:56\tSadie Barker:\t[Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] And just like with structuring an essay where everyone seems to take a different approach to argument, some brainstorm, others start with the thesis, and others just begin with no particular sense of how, my approach in many ways seem to differ from Ali’s, which was to–\n01:01:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro]–to start with a statement rather than “applause and the sounds of the audience are important and here’s why.”\n01:01:19\tSadie Barker:\tWhich would then orient listeners to her particular stance on the topic at hand.\n01:01:24\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Because most research with recordings of poetry readings are focused on the poets for obvious reasons. So I wanted to start out sort of stating that.\n01:01:32\tSadie Barker:\tAnd while Ali didn’t particularly focus on vocal inflections or registers–\n01:01:39\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I don’t think I was successful in thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking like, “Okay, well, my voice should signal these shifts in the narrative arc.”\n01:01:48\tSadie Barker:\t–she had a strong sense of how the structure of her podcast was mobilized by the complexities of an idea.\n01:01:55\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] The middle section is more about the work that I’ve been doing to figure out how to talk about applause in a way that isn’t just, “Oh, it lasts this many seconds and it’s loud or it’s quiet,” but to come up with terms that are more specific to the qualitative essence of different moments of applause.\n01:02:13\tSadie Barker:\tBut Ali also reflected on how her structure was mobilized through the possibilities of an idea.\n01:02:20\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] And then the ending is sort of where I still am in a way, which is that there’s a lot more [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] that can be done to develop that further. And there’s a lot of exciting possibilities for tracing performances across even just different days or different years or decades and different locations and, and charting sort of the responses from different audiences in different contexts to the same poet and the same work.\n01:02:46\tSadie Barker:\tSo if my approach was to structure emotively and Ali’s was to structure more theoretically, Emma’s further diversified our set of approaches. Emma ended up taking—at least initially—a structured approach to structure.\n01:03:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] I resorted to what I know how to do, which is how to write a paper. So I thought about it. I thought to myself, “Okay, what’s going to be my introduction, what’s the body, and then what’s the conclusion?”\n01:03:11\tSadie Barker:\tBut also found in the process that essay and podcast structure have some fundamental differences.\n01:03:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Except that it was almost more scary ’cause it was just like, how do I, first of all, put sounds onto this platform and then also make them make sense?\n01:03:25\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these differences call for different approaches.\n01:03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] So I had various clips that I liked. I wrote a script. Then in the end I had all these sound bites or clips that I just needed to assemble into a collage. Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n01:03:38\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these approaches rely on feeling in different ways.\n01:03:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] But when you do that there’s not necessarily like a linear structure that you have right away. So it’s also just trusting that the process will reveal itself. I didn’t know how to conclude this in a way that would be engaging and not too formal and not too academics. And that’s when I decided to include the poem “Late August,” which just felt like it needed to be there somewhere. And to end it with that, I think was to go back to like, just to come back to the reading.\n01:04:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] I love that move at the end of your podcast. And it relates to what we’ve been talking about this whole time because it’s a return to a verbal rendering of a mood. So it’s a way, it’s a return to the poem on the page or language, the actual words themselves, communicating what you’ve been communicating through, through the rhetoric of podcasting with using, you know, sound and mixing and all those other things up to that point. So it’s sort of like a return to text, to print, you know, to the power of poetry and words themselves to do what you’ve been doing up to that point with sound.\n01:04:53\tJason Camlot:\tSo that about sums up the conversations we had based on the amazing podcasts that Ali, Emma, and Sadie made. As you heard, our focus was on the mood that’s created through ambient sounds, the overall rhetoric of the podcast, and how voice carries affective expression of concepts. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] By way of closing, we tried a little experiment. Basically the idea was to choose some classic critical terms like things from M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms, and to read them with feeling, with the feeling that we associate with a critical term in question. So here it goes, our kind of beat poetry performance of the glossary of critical and literary terms where ideas have feelings. [Begin Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumental]\n01:05:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature.\n01:05:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Focalization. Focalization. Focalization! Focalization. Focalization? Foooocalization. Focalization. Focalization. Focalization.\n01:06:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Interpolation! You know, like, “Hey, hey interpolation!” Interpolation! [Laughs] There has to be a finger in there, you know, like, interpolation! Yoo-hoo, interpolation. Interpolation!! Oh, that’s terrifying! [Laughs] Hey! How do you..? Interpolation! Interpolation!\n01:06:45\tAudio Recording:\tHi, my name is Id. Iddddddd!! Id. [Exaggerated Inaudible Words] [End Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumentals] [Begin Music: Distorted Electronic Beat]\n01:07:30\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Emma Telaro, and Jason Camelot. A special thanks to everyone who contributed to the SpokenWeb Podcast over the last season. You know who you are. And hey, if you are part of the SpokenWeb network and want to get involved, let us know. Season two is just around the corner, so stay tuned this fall for brand new episodes from all your favourite scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. We’ll also be back with brand new Audio of the Month minisodes with Katherine McLeod from deep in the archives. To find out more about SpokenWeb, [Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here in the fall for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"9618","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E5, The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic, 7 February 2022, Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/70e2056d-21b3-4884-914a-95bc4d3de45e/audio/a045aa72-0908-41c8-a0fb-06f57b214da9/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e5-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:07:56\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"65,286,522 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e5-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-02-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549715156992,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How has the reading series been transformed by the Covid pandemic and its accompanying technologies of virtual gatherings? In this episode, Jason Camlot – SpokenWeb Director and Professor of English at Concordia University – takes us on a reflective listening tour through recordings of the Words and Music Show as it has evolved through the pandemic since early 2020. The Words and Music Show has been organized by Ian Ferrier for two decades to bring performances of literature, art, and music to live audiences at the Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Jason assisted Ian with organizing after Covid sent the series online, and this episode takes us into the in-person and virtual sounds of the Show. In this episode, we listen to the journey of one reading series and its co-curator over the past two years. Join us in reflecting on how the pandemic has changed the ways we share and connect to each other through literature, art, and performance.\n\n00:00:06\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\tInstrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \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. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:00:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How have our experiences of live artistic events changed during the pandemic? The Words and Music Show is a monthly gathering that poet and musician Ian Ferrier has organized for over twenty years. It invites artists to share spoken word poetry, literature, music, dance, and other kinds of performance. Before March 2020, Ian brought the show to audiences in the physical space of Casa del Popolo in Montreal. The pandemic sent this event online and into strange hybrid physical/digital forms, as has happened with so many events that we used to attend in our favourite venues. Jason Camlot assisted Ian in hosting the show online during this pandemic period.\n \n\n00:01:34\tHannah McGregor:\tIn addition to co-hosting the Words and Music Show Jason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb Network and a Professor of English at Concordia University. He uses past recordings of the show to bring us this new episode of the podcast during yet another wave of Covid contagion and shut-downs. Listening to these recordings is a call to reflect back on the many pivots this show and other live events have made over the past two years of Covid-impacted life. Jason wonders aloud whether it’s too soon (and too close to home) to yet theorize about how Covid has transformed reading events, but he suggests it might be helpful to listen back to what organizers, artists, and fans of the show have been experiencing. What does this artistic gathering sound like now? Some of the sounds may be familiar to you: Zoom glitches and tech troubles; the lonely reverberance of a small crowd clapping; coughing fits; the strange absence of ambient conversation; and the background sounds of pets and children, reminders that people are listening from usually-private home spaces.\n \n\n00:02:34\tHannah McGregor:\tArtists and creative event organizers are a tough bunch: they have and will continue to weather the storms of challenges and unknowns in order to share writing, art, and poetry with those who wish to listen. We invite you to listen to this episode with us, as we reflect on the shifting sounds of poetry readings and artistic community – and the power these events continue to have for us all. Here is Jason Camlot with Episode 5 of our third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic”. [Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:03:14\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tHere we go. Four minute venue buzz. Let’s see if it works… [Indistinct Shuffling Sounds] Not a chance.\n \n\n00:03:28\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\n \n\nIt’s not working? [Laughs] Are you sharing computer sound? [Sounds of Ian and Jason Troubleshooting Continue]\n00:03:32\tJason Camlot:\tThat is the sound of me, Jason Camlot, and Ian Ferrier working out some technical effects just before the start of a Words and Music show that we hosted on Zoom in August, 2020.\n \n\n00:03:43\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\t– well, you don’t have the advanced?\n \n\n00:03:45\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tI’m not sure that I do at the moment…\n \n\n00:03:47\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor in Concordia University’s department of English and research chair in Literature and Sound Studies.\n \n\n00:03:55\tIan Ferrier:\tHi, I’m Ian Ferrier and as far as this conversation is concerned, I’m a poet and a musician and a curator of multimedia shows featuring literature, music, poetry, performance, and dance.\n \n\n00:04:11\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tYeah, I think we’re just gonna start this.\n00:04:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tOh, here’s Jay Alexander Brown.\n \n\n00:04:20\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tOh, there we go. [Laugh].\n \n\n00:04:24\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\t[Laugh] Yeah. Let that go for a minute before we start. [Start Music: Instrumental with Voices]\n \n\n00:04:26\tJason Camlot:\tThis episode is about all the shows that Ian and I have hosted online during the pandemic.\n \n\n00:04:32\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tSo, good evening everyone and welcome to the Words and Music Show.\n \n\n00:04:36\tJason Camlot:\tSince 2016, the “Where Poets Read” online listing of literary events in Montreal (curated by my colleague and regular collaborator Dr. Katherine McLeod) has posted details of nearly 800 readings. [End Music: Instrumental with Voices] The last “live” in-person event listed on the site (until very recently) was for the Épiques Voices: Bilingual Poetry Show held at La Vitrola on March 10th, 2020. That amazingly fun and moving bilingual show was co-hosted by Katherine and Catherine Cormier-Larose. I remember the show very well, not only because of the awesome readings by Klara du Plessis, Kama La Mackerel, Alexei Perry Cox, and ten other excellent poets, but especially because it was the last public reading I would attend in person for a period for a very long time. For 593 days, to be exact. More about how that stretch of time ended a bit later in this podcast.[Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding] But first let’s go back to March 2020, a time when we were just beginning to understand the implications of how the pandemic might alter our lives. Between March 12th and March 29th, the “Where Poets Read” listing showed a series of notices for “cancelled” or “postponed” shows. You would find messages on Facebook, like this one from Ian Ferrier.\n \n\n00:05:59\tIan Ferrier:\t[Start Music: Breaking News Music] [Voice Effect: News Anchor Voice] Tonight’s show is not cancelled, only postponed. We are collecting tracks from all the performers who were scheduled to present and preparing the way to present them live in this group sometime in this upcoming week. Stay tuned and stay safe.\n \n\n00:06:12\tJason Camlot:\tAnd then we see a listing for the Words and Music Show online.\n \n\n00:06:18\tIan Ferrier:\tIt took longer than a week, by the way, it ended up being towards the middle or the end of April, before we could get people online.\n \n\n00:06:26\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, this was the first one, right? Like April 20 –April 19th?\n \n\n00:06:30\tIan Ferrier:\tGee, was that it? Wow, that was a good one too.\n \n\n00:06:33\tJason Camlot:\tOr was it…?\n \n\n00:06:35\tJason Camlot:\tThe correct date of that first online Words and Music Show of the Pandemic Period was March 29th, 2020. It featured work by Brian Bartlett, Lune tres belle, Alexei Perry-Cox, Nisha Coleman, and Choeur Sala.\n \n\n00:06:50\tJason Camlot:\tSince that date (based on data some students of mine have been collecting by scouring events postings on social media) there have been thousands of online literary events (readings, book launches, public interviews and panels) hosted from locations across Canada (and across the world) using platforms such as Zoom, Facebook Live, Crowdcast, Instagram and YouTube. If you have ever attended a poetry reading (whether you enjoyed it or not), or if you have ever listened to an episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast before, you will know that public readings and performance are an important kind of literary communication, circulation and community-building. Much of the collaborative research pursued across the SpokenWeb network is committed to preserving, listening to, and trying to understand the many meanings of historical recordings that document literary activity in Canada. In studying the thousands of recordings that constitute our collective archives of literary sound, we find ourselves asking, “What did this event mean?” [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] Sometimes we find ourselves asking even more basic questions, like, “Whose voice is that? [Pause] What’s that sound?” [Pause] But here we are, in a period of major disruption again to just about everything, including to literary events, readings, and gatherings. There seem to be new, urgent questions to ask: What does this pandemic mean for literary performance communities? What does it mean for the way we think about and experience literature, as compared to how we did before, when we could see each other in person without concern of spreading or catching a potentially fatal virus? Even as I articulate the question, “What does this mean?” another question arises simultaneously, not quite drowning out the first one, but certainly obscuring its intelligibility and potential. “What does this mean? Is this a question I should be asking right now? [End Music: Ambient Sounds]\n00:08:53\tJason Camlot:\tBack in May, 2020, my colleague, Katherine McLeod, and I made a podcast for this SpokenWeb Podcast series, an episode called “How are we Listening Now?” –\n00:09:07\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Zoom Doorbell Chime] Hello? [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n00:09:09\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHello? Can you hear me?\n00:09:11\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYep. Hi Katherine.\n00:09:13\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHi!\n00:09:14\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?\n00:09:21\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tUh, no, actually I’m in my office room.\n00:09:25\tAudio Recording, Unknown Voice, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHello from my kitchen!\n00:09:26\tJason Camlot:\t– about what it felt like to live and listen under pandemic conditions [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] just a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic first began March 2020.\n00:09:35\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020 :\tGood evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music.\n00:09:44\tJason Camlot:\tWe actually used the sounds from that first online Words and Music Show, including the performances of Nisha Coleman –\n00:09:51\tAudio Recording, Nisha Coleman, Words and Music, March 2020 :\tIt’s precarious, of course it’s precarious in the best of times. And now we’re entering a new time where it’s sort of precarious for everybody. So I think it’s more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together, singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle or maintaining this connection over the internet.\n00:10:13\tJason Camlot:\t– and Alexei Perry Cox.\n \n\n00:10:16\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020 :\t[Baby Cooing] [Reciting Poetry] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality perfect and conquerous would get through to humankind.\n00:10:23\tJason Camlot:\tIn retrospect, it marked the beginning of a long series of ongoing, and maybe repetitive questions. That episode could go on and on, with only slight modifications to the title: How are we listening, now? And now? [Multiple Repetitions of “and now”] Katherine and I did revisit the episode and expand our thinking around that initial question in a scholarly article recently published in a special “Pandemics” issue of the journal, Canadian Literature. We ended our contribution to the article with a rather upbeat take on the transformative implications of the pandemic upon our scholarly and pedagogical activities. We concluded:\n \n\n00:10:58\tJason Camlot and Katherine McLeod:\t[Simultaneous Voices] Pandemic listening may be a new, tremulous classroom within which we will come to hear, unlearn, and transform our understandings and practices of listening.\n \n\n00:11:20\tJason Camlot:\tOur article is filled with theses of different kinds about pandemic listening, that were developed through a process of listening to the kinds of online conversations about literature that we were having with students and colleagues during the first months of the pandemic. Writing the article necessarily represented an exercise in abstraction and theorization of that early experience (at least I felt it was necessary in preparing the article).\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic Sounds] When is it a good time to reflect on a crisis within which one is still deeply entrenched? When’s a good time to reflect on our experience of the pandemic? Is it too soon to do so? Given that we are in a fifth wave now, and that the Omicron variant has initiated a series of public responses that are reminiscent of the very early period of the pandemic, it may be a good time to listen to what we have gone through, even though we’re still going through it. Perhaps it is still too early to theorize the meaning of the pandemic, but it feels helpful, somehow, to listen to it. [Pause] In this episode, my way of listening to my recent experience of the texture of time, and to the pandemic as it existed for me for an hour or so, on every third Sunday of the month, will take the form of selecting and playing recorded moments from some of the sixteen distinct online Words and Music Show events that I have co-hosted with Ian Ferrier (from my institutional Zoom account) since March 22nd, 2020. [Pause] In selecting moments from pandemic episodes of the Words and Music Show, I have been as interested in listening to the sounds around the performance, as the performances themselves. [End Music: Ambient Electronic Sounds].\n00:13:16\tJason Camlot:\tWe were interested in the sounds that surround the show, as well.\n \n\n00:13:19\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tSo, Jason, will you be doing the fake applause?\n00:13:25\t \nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\n\nOh, I can send you some fake applause if you want.\n00:13:28\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tYeah, sure. Send me some fake applause.\n00:13:31\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tOne sec –I just –Jason, I just sent you a couple of little applause clips.\n00:13:39\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, July 2020:\tHow’s everyone’s weekend been?\n00:13:46\tAudio Clip:\t[Applause]\n00:13:47\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:13:47\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, July 2020:\tIt was like Klara just walked in on a sitcom and –.\n00:13:49\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:13:53\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tBy the way, that’s real life Casa applause.\n00:13:57\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, July 2020:\tOh cool!\n00:13:57\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tAnd I just sent you four minutes of crowd buzz too, which is like just when nothing’s going on –\n00:14:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tRight.\n00:14:05\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\t– and people are talking with each other.\n00:14:07\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tOh, hi Judee.\n00:14:07\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tHey everyone.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tThanks for coming.\n00:14:13\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tYeah! So happy to be here. Jason, that’s a virtual background. I didn’t know.\n00:14:19\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tIt is.\n00:14:19\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tIt’s quite deceptive.\n00:14:20\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tYeah. It’s the Casa del Popolo where the Words and Music show often happens or usually happens. Yeah.\n00:14:28\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\t[Start Audio Clip: Crowd Buzz] There we go! Crowd buzz.\n00:14:31\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tCrowd buzz. We’re creating a virtual atmosphere.\n00:14:35\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tWow, the crowd is so, so loud. It’s hard to hear you guys!\n00:14:38\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\t[Laugh] I know. That’s why we gotta yell.\n00:14:42\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tIn honour of this crowd, I’m gonna go grab myself a beer before this show starts. I’ll be right back.\n00:14:48\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tGood idea. Alright.\n00:14:49\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, July 2020:\tIt’s so crowded. He might find there’s a line up.\n00:14:52\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laugher]\n00:14:55\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\n \n\nHey Kenny, I don’t know if you can hear us.\n00:14:58\tJason Camlot:\tSounds like audience buzz and different kinds of applause captured on tape [End Audio Clip: Crowd Buzz] from past live shows to give a sound of appreciation from a group of people that is practically impossible to produce when on Zoom, [Start Audio Clip: November 2021, Words and Music Crowd Buzz] because Zoom cancels out sound altogether when more than two or three people speak or make noise at the same time, at least with the standard noise cancellation settings on. [Audio Clip of Crowd Buzz continues] We missed those sounds online. [End Audio Clip: November 2021, Words and Music Crowd Buzz]\n00:15:32\tJason Camlot:\tThose first ten months of the Pandemic. Oh my god. Not only were we dealing with the anxiety and intense uncertainty of the virus, not quite knowing what it was all about, and many months away from the first vaccines. But Donald Trump still had a Twitter account (that was only taken away from him on January 9th, 2021). And on May 25th, George Floyd, was murdered. [Silence] Teaching and collaborative research activities, and community work (like being on the Board of the Quebec Writers Federation, QWF) kept me sane by giving me a sense of purpose. But the dull hum sounding feelings of utter purposelessness and helplessness were always there, in the background. Through my participation in the QWF, and with the leadership of spoken word performer and novelist Tanya Evanson, a regular Words and Music performer over the years, I became involved in collaboratively producing a show that featured Black Montreal-based performers, Roen Higgins, Fabrice Koffy, Faith Paré and Jason (Blackbird) Selman. For this QWF, Wired on Words, Throw Collective, and SpokenWeb special “Black Writers Out Loud” edition of the Words and Music Show, we invited these four amazing performers to appear on the legendary stage of the Sala Rossa.\n \n\n00:16:55\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Background Audio: Sounds of the Sala Rossa]\n00:18:01\tJason Camlot:\tOn this night for the recording of the Montreal Black Writers Out Loud event, a little more than two years later, the atmosphere at the Sala was something quite different. Venues were not allowed to have audiences at shows. We were recording the performances from the Sala stage to be webcast as a “live from the Sala Words and Music show” just a few hours later. The only people in the venue were the four performers, the audio and video technicians who were recording the sets, Ian, who was introducing the artists from the stage, and me, because it was thought I might need to Zoom cast the show from there if the recording took longer than expected. We were all masked when I said hi to the performers before they began, and then I watched in the chilly empty space leaning on the bar at the back of the room. The taps were dry. The performances were fantastic. Fabrice Koffey.\n \n\n00:18:58\tAudio Recording, Fabrice Koffey, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\n \n\n[Fabrice performs the work “Je m’appelle Serge…” alternating between French and English]\n00:19:19\tJason Camlot:\tThey were all the more amazing given that each artist has to do their set a second time because the sound messed up during the first recording session, and the error was only discovered after all four sets of the entire hour-long show had been performed. In fact Roen Higgins had to come back another day to re-record her set because she couldn’t hang around to it a second time; she had to get home to a child who was sick. So her set wouldn’t make it out to Zoom and Facebook Live that night. Faith Paré\n00:19:47\tAudio Recording, Faith Paré Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\tHi there guys. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. I wanna say thank you to the Quebec Writers Federation, to Wired on Words and Ian Ferrier, to SpokenWeb Canada and to the Throw Collective. This is really wicked to be able to be in the space again. So as well, thank you to the Sala Rossa team for taking good care of us and Fabrice and Jason and to Rowan who’s here with us in spirit. It was awesome getting to chat with you guys in September and really wicked to be performing alongside some powerhouse poets from Montreal. So thank you for welcoming me into this community as well. I have a kind of suite of poetry for you guys, which is kind of a Black feminist elegizing of the world. And it begins with an epigraph from the poet, Claire Harris. [Begins reading poetry] While babies bleed, this is not the poem I wanted./ It is the poem I could./ Poetry is the stuff of a life lived./ What I have endured is no life./ The insult of that, the salt poured into the wound my mouth was replaced with./ I know the unsolicited tips to smooth my frown lines./ I know to try a smile from every sidewalk, leering guy./ I know the flies I’m bound to catch, how impolite. /No one likes mouth on a Black girl, unless it’s sucking cock or it’s an open grave, best when both./ And when they still see a hanged man in my dangling shin, I need to fix my face/ But my face is already fixed on the doomscroll, /The hashtags wreck, the headline bolded and stampeding through my throat./ When I’m sitting with a pen./ When I try laughter/ When I take a sip of water stolen from somewhere and still smell smoke from the flash bang grenade tossed on the Black girl asleep./ The breathless call for mother of a Black girl when they barked her off balcony/ Black girl, after Black girl submerged in river after river/ Because of their dead names can’t go,/ Can’t go anywhere in the world. /Can’t go when the one door out is my mouth./ Can’t when sound is cowering inside me with canned food, ready to hide years on end./ Can’t. [Intake of breath].\n \n\n00:22:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe Sala show was an experiment of sorts, an attempt to give the effect of a live show delivered from a beloved venue for an online audience. The quality of the performances, and the quality of the audio and video were both great. But there was also something a bit eerie about the juxtaposition of a recognizable, happening venue in which nothing was happening apart from the amazing performances on stage. The silence surrounding the sets was more than just noticeable. It was audible. It was thick. Thick with quiet and absence. [Audio Clip: Person Exhales] . Jason Blackbird Selman\n \n\n00:22:49\tAudio Recording, Jason Blackbird Selman, Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\t[Jason Blackbird Selman performing “Lend me a psychedelic dream…”] Lend me a psychedelic dream./ Lend me pieces of daylight./ Lend me a destruction sweeter than anything I can remember./ Lend me open sounds, a courtyard, Sedgwick Ave. /Bury this knowledge and sound./ A beat that repeats a rhythm that has a mind of its own./ Let the mind grow,/ spread to all five boroughs like a virus, black fire, wild stone rhythm for talk,/ Speak softly. Take over the world./ It was so easy to know you once I began listening to myself,/ the verse became free psychedelic colours and psychedelic graves./ Daisies growing wild from the barrel of a gun shoot stars./ Love is an idle threat shouted to the world who is not like I when delivering themselves to themselves,/ a glass filled with years, this venom filled with love./ I love her so much because she lets me know that I am fading./Ghetto codes and grey days./ The search for search, the sound of sound./ Find yourself in flames evenings on pause, part of something, apart and in parts/ Open the first door./ Let yourself in. [End reading]\n00:25:20\tAudio Recording, Jason Blackbird Selman, Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\tGood evening. It’s good to be here at Sala. It’s always good to be here, in amongst wonderful poets from our city. And all of you are watching right now. I just wanna say thank you to KWF to Ian, Words and Music. And, it’s good that we can do this. But I also really look forward to coming back into the world and having a full audience because we appreciate your virtual support, [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] but we also appreciate your energy and face to face. Cause that does make what we do really worth doing.\n \n\n00:26:06\tJason Camlot:\tI feel honoured to have been one of a handful of people who was in the room to see those terrific live performances before an absent audience. I hooted and yeahed, clapped and cheered loudly through my mask from the back of the room. The reverberation of my solitary response was a bit sad. I could have been an installation in the show currently running at the Montreal Museum of Modern Art, entitled, “How long does it take for one voice to reach another?” For the next month’s show, Ian and I went back to sitting in front of our computers and hosted an event of performers and audience members who were sitting in front of theirs. [End Music: Ambient Sounds] As we realized that online shows meant you could invite just about anyone in the world to perform (on Zoom), I suggested to Ian that we invite the UK-based poet Angela Szczepaniak to join the December 13th, 2020 show. I had just finished editing Angela’s third poetry collection for DC books, and I knew it would be great to hear her read from it.\n \n\n00:27:09\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tShe lectures in creative writing at the University of Surrey, and she has a new book coming out soon called The Nerves Center. So please welcome Angela Szczepaniak.\n00:27:18\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tThank you so much, Ian. And thank you for having me. It’s really lovely to be here from London very late at night right now, for me. Really nice to meet you all too. So, I’ll be reading from my forthcoming book, The Nerves Center, which is a long narrative poem about a performer in the midst of stage fright while on stage and attempting to give a performance. And each act in the sequence of the long poem she, the performer is trying to speak and what she actually says, which takes a form of sound poems. The sounds poems are comprised, I guess I should say, of recordings of panic attacks, that I played into transcription software, which then assigned kind of letters and phrases and words-ish, to it. It wasn’t very good at transcribing, which was very helpful when I was reshaping them into sound poems for the page. What didn’t really occur to me until now – this is my first reading of the work or from this book –[Cough] excuse me – is that I am essentially going to be reenacting lots of panic attacks that I once had [Laugh] long ago, which is a kind of exciting night, I guess, for everyone. [Cough] Excuse me.\n \n\n00:28:40\tJason Camlot:\tIt seemed especially appropriate for the Zoom stage, which might add its own sonic glitches through wavering connectivity. I was excited to hear what the planned silences in the poems would sound like on Zoom. And I was just excited to see Angela, since it had been a while since we’d zoomed, because she had contracted the COVID virus some months before and had been knocked out of commission for quite a while, now.\n \n\n00:29:03\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tI suppose also I should say that panic attack-wise, I very helpfully caught a virus a while ago, which results in me coughing constantly. So that’s what you’re going to hear for a lot of those kind of breathy sound poems. It’s just going to be replaced by coughing today. [Coughs] Excuse me. There are ten acts all together and each one maps onto a specific self-help strategy for managing anxiety and performance anxiety. [Coughs] Excuse me. I will keep this short also given the cough. So The Nerves Center, a novel in performance anxiety. The nerves center in 10 acts, the nerves center in 131 stanzas 2,417 fantic utterances and tonight, especially for you all 9, 381 coughs – and I’m guessing on that. [Angela begins performing] Act one. Act natural. Be yourself. /Speaker stands alone at microphone pin neat, polite,/ Serenity slipping through finger twitchers./Speaker ready self opens mouth. Silence. / Mouth opens this time with resolve./ Silence snaps jaws shut. Speaker opens steady mouth. Finally./ [Exhaling] [Coughing] Regroup reapproach. [Exhaling] [Coughing] Speaker back steps, wheezes, a casual graveyard whistle./ Shuffles a soft shoe, sidles up microphone adjacent to take it by surprise. [Exhaling] [Coughing]\n \n\n00:31:19\tJason Camlot:\tAngela continued performing, despite the discomfort, from several other acts in The Nerves Centre, as we all listened intently to a combination of breathing, coughing, and rich descriptions that frame the staged readings within a vaudevillian kind of world. Angela’s book is very funny, and remarkable for its acceptance without judgement of so many failures in speech, for the sense of hope that each act brings, and for the deep compassion the book shows for anyone who may be struggling to find their voice, for anyone trying to speak and be heard. And here we were, sitting in our own isolated sets, listening to a performance of anxiety and disarticulation that was both deliberate and real, highly performative and absolutely involuntary, at the same time.\n00:32:11\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tI am going to stop there. Thank you everyone for listening. And, were it not for many, many coughing fits I would continue, but I think you get the idea [Laughs] of what this is like. Thank you.\n \n\n00:32:26\tJason Camlot:\tIn many ways, it was the most pandemicky performance imaginable. Painful, beautiful, absurd. It made perfect sense.\n \n\n00:32:34\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tAnd thank you so much for coming. I should tell everybody, Angela’s been telling us a little bit about living with COVID in the UK, which sounds pretty intense with Starbucks open and everything else open and lots of people catching it. And it’s one in the morning for you. So I thank you very much for joining us tonight.\n00:32:50\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tThank you. Thank you so much, everyone for listening to that.\n00:32:54\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tAnd if you wanna catch some more of that, I think The Nerves Center is coming out this winter at some point.\n00:32:58\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\n \n\nYeah. Thank you.\n00:33:01\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio Clip: Fastforwarding Tape Sound] Alright, let’s speed ahead a bit. Lots of shows happened between December 2020 and the special Words and Music Show – SpokenWeb Symposium edition held in May 2021. February 21st, 2021 for Black History Month, we reprised a screening of the Sala Rossa Black Writers Out Loud show, now with Roen Higgins’s performance restored so that all four sets could be viewed together.\n \n\n00:33:25\tAudio Recording, Roen Higgins, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\t[Roen Higgins performing] Ware shell shocked, numb, sick and tired./These are the symptoms of PTSD whether we march, kneel, or speak./ Our voices are unheard in the streets, /every living thing on this earth retreats or reacts or stands still until the threat passes./ So please stop asking our people who are paralyzed to walk with you./ Stop judging others for not speaking up when their vocal chords are shot from screaming,/ Crying for babies, they never birthed yet feel the contractions of these now household names./ I can’t even say all their names as there are too many to remember, but their faces are etched in my mind/ with their mothers cry looped over this never ending soundtrack./ We are forever in labour with pain that our children will never belong or feel accepted,/ that they are guilty and being groomed from preschool to prison./ Before they leave their house they’re reminded by their mamas/ Stand tall, smile, look straight so you won’t come off hostile./ Keep your hands where it can be seen. Move slowly. Never, never run./ Don’t hang out on the streets and keep your hoodie off./ Comply. Answer their questions and cordially and politely./ Whatever you do, just stay calm and keep the camera rolling. Thank you. [End performance]\n \n\n00:35:02\tAudio Recording, Roen Higgins, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\tThank you everyone. Thank you for this opportunity. It’s an amazing time to have a show in these times to be able to come together even virtually while they say we socially distance, we do not distance socially.\n \n\n00:35:13\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\tThank you. Ronan\n00:35:15\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Upbeat Accordion] Sunday March 21st the Words & Music Show is your online welcome to Spring. Tawhida Tanya Evanson is here with a new book. And catch poems, music, art and dance with: Emilie Zoey Baker (Australia), Raymond Jackson (New Orleans) , Marie-France Jacques (Montréal), Visual Art by Francis Caprani . Verse by Kelsey Nichole Brooks . Music by Ramela Arax Koumrouya.\n \n\n00:35:46\tVarious Speakers:\t[Collage of audio of March 2021, Words and Music Show]\n \n\n00:36:59\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2021:\tOkay. Thanks folks. Goodnight for now.\n00:37:01\tVarious Speakers:\tThank you very much Ian! Nice meeting you all. Yeah. Nice meeting you all. Likewise. See you next time. Cheers everyone. Thank you.\n00:37:06\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2021:\n \n\nBye everyone, thank you. We’re going to go off air now. [End Music: Upbeat Accordion]\n00:37:07\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Various Vocals and Musical Sounds] April 18th 2021. An absorbing evening featuring: verse by Sarah Wolfson , music by Geronimo Inutiq , art by Louise Belcourt, David Bateman as Dr. Sad , a new video by Marie-Josée Tremblay , words and music by Ian Ferrier, with a wealth of words, music, video and art, an online show to help us forget 8PM lockup (or is that lockdown?)\n00:37:41\tVarious Voices:\t[Collage of audio of audio from 18 April 2021 show] Should I start now? [Laugh] Yes, you are live! [Laugher] Okay. “They love to laugh together and drink and shop, especially when they were unhappy. She was much less happy than he was.” “In those days. We had a tool for taking the cords off beats. We grew everything. Then even our little toes. If our noses went missing, we replaced them with the most obliging webs.” “I love my grandfather. I hated my parents. He painted all the time. I hung around him.” [Guitar] “We’re just too many and we’re born too fast. Sarah and Will and James and Tina and Ian and John and Michael and Eric and Ty and Sarah, Beth, and Mary.” Bye. Take good care. Bye. Goodnight everyone.\n \n\n00:38:46\tJason Camlot:\tSo now we’re entering May 2021, and the entire Concordia SpokenWeb Team is deep into planning and delivering the annual SpokenWeb Symposium, which, for the second year in a row, was supposed to bring everyone to Montreal to share work, but which, again, had to take place online. The Symposium, with the theme “Listening, Sound, Agency” was a great success, with over 30 panels (so nearly 100 papers presented) by scholars and students from all over the world who were interested in exploring intersections between literary studies and sound studies. The Symposium was great, and then the Summer Sound Institute, filled with all kinds of workshops and research showcases, was also great. But, with all of that done, I was extremely excited to host a special edition of the Words and Music Show, where anyone from the Symposium, or from our research network, could share a poem, a story, a song, or a joke. We sent out a call trying to entice people to participate. And once we had a roster, I asked Ian to prepare one of his radio promo ads for the show.\n \n\n00:39:51\tIan Ferrier:\tOn Sunday May 23rd Wired on Words partners with SpokenWeb to present a special edition of the Words and Music show.\n \n\n00:39:56\tJason Camlot:\tIf this had been a live show, it would have taken place at the Casa Del Popolo, longtime home of the Words and Music Show. Instead, we were online again. Still, it was as close as we would come, that summer, to hanging out, joking around, being silly and creative, together.\n \n\n00:40:12\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah. We have a bunch of different performances from members of the SpokenWeb network. And this is really – it doesn’t replace the gathering and party that we would’ve had if we’d been able to all gather together in Montreal, but it’s meant to have the fun feel of that kind of gathering.\n \n\n00:40:32\tJason Camlot:\tPoet and Simon Fraser University PhD student Cole Mash, hosted it in a way that made it all feel, at times, like we really were at the Casa together.\n \n\n00:40:41\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m just turning my video off so I have a better connection and then kinda having a drink. But yeah! Welcome to the Words and Music show SpokenWeb edition. I personally have actually never seen this show but I’m really honoured and privileged to be able to host it and be a part of it. I hear it’s a pretty good show. We’ve got – we have about 10 or so lucky people who have signed up for tonight’s event. So can everyone please turn their cameras off? [Pause] Okay, great. Everyone turn their mics on. [Pause] Everyone say “Words and Music” all at the same time and see how that goes. [Various voices overlapping: “Words and Music”] All right. All right. That was pretty good actually. I got to hear quite a few people. That was nice. OK. Everyone turn their cameras back on, but make a weird face when you turn your camera back on. [Pause] [Laughter] All right. Very nice. Very nice. So now that I know you’re all listening…\n \n\n00:41:49\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Audio Clip: Jason Camlot Archival Performance] My own contribution to the show is to play a clip from the archive of me performing a song at a Words and Music show that took place nearly 20 years earlier.\n \n\n00:42:00\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo thanks so much Cole. And it’s great to be back on the pin screen. [End Audio Clip: Jason Camlot Archival Performance] And, it seemed appropriate really to –rather than to do something new since we’ve been spending so much time with Ian’s archive of shows– to dig into that and to play something that – play a performance that I did back in 2003. And I was thinking about this– and this is what happens when you listen back into an archive, especially if you find yourself in it. Even if you don’t, if you were at a show or whatever– but I’m thinking 2003, that means my son was probably around the same age as Cole’s son is now. I think of Deana Fong and I think of some of my colleagues and friends now who are starting families and that’s sort of where I was at in 2003, actually, my son was probably a year and a half and my daughter was just born probably about a month before this show. And I chose to play a song that I’ve just been singing in the backyard with my daughter no less than a couple weeks ago. So she’s 16 now and taught herself guitar during COVID and has been writing songs herself. And so we’re sharing our own compositions with each other. And so this is one that I taught her and that she’s sang along with. So it’s from the Words and Music show, April 27th, 2003.\n \n\n00:43:13\tJason Camlot:\tIt was fun to introduce this clip, set it up, and listen to it so many years later with new friends and students.\n \n\n00:43:19\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, 2003\tAnd we’re just gonna play one more song. I want to thank Ian for lending me his guitar. This song is called Derbyland, and Kenny’s gonna be playing arango, which is made of an Armadillo.\n00:43:45\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, 2003:\tA dead Armadillo. [Laugh].\n00:43:47\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, 2003:\tYeah. If you hear some screaming, that’s the Armadillo. [Start Music: Guitar]\n \n\n00:44:07\tJason Camlot:\t[Music Continues: Guitar] It was especially fun and moving to have my old friend and music collaborator tune into the show and to hear his response to a recording that he never knew existed. [End Music: Guitar].\n00:44:17\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, 2003:\tYou know, I’m trying to think back to that time and everything’s a blur, but –\n00:44:22\tJason Camlot:\tMusician, Kenny Smilovich\n00:44:24\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\t– I don’t remember, like how did that end up recorded? Was that sort of the plan or did it just happen that someone recorded it?\n00:44:34\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo Ian recorded pretty much every Words and Music Show almost since its inception.\n00:44:40\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\n \n\nWow. That’s amazing.\n00:44:41\tJason Camlot:\tThis was the longest online Words and Music Show of the pandemic period, by far.\n00:44:46\tVarious Voices:\t[Audio Collage of several performances from the May 2021 show.] [Start Music: Guitar] “When the artist takes matter and builds fence around it in the name of the line, or takes matter into their own hands and abstracts, what results is a manifestation of power in the sense of imposition and not in the sense of strength.” “This poem’s called ‘Asking the Spoon to Runaway Takes Courage: A spoons work is never done. They sit folded in the time waiting as we all do to be picked up.” I should have predicted the death of this city. I couldn’t predict it. Only there had been no such creepy blocks.” Pools and pavement in black ice, random stones steam, faintly. Lime water and liquorish light. Think how the black dust Beth made men dance.” “I have no words, officer lay my tongue. You stole each one in a scamper for escape. When he begged me when your men with the gavelbang voices hounded me. Yes.” “Using my full song to the wise intoxicating yarl and thrall alike. I know the rooms, the words of white. I know the words of flaming light. The words that still the sea at midnight.” [End Music: Guitar] [Start Music: Singing] “I see my from the west down to the east. Any day now. Any day…. [Fade Out Singing] [Start Music: Guitar and Singing] “All of my friends in a plastic, all around jumping train, track, silver effects, bang all back, sleep on a bench in a park on your birthday….” [Fade Out Singing]\n \n\n00:47:11\tJason Camlot:\tAnd yet even after two hours, we were happy to linger, chat, and debrief.\n00:47:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWell, I guess at this point we’ve been together for two hours. It’s gone really quickly and it’s been so enjoyable. I just want to thank, first of all, Cole and Ian for hosting tonight. And Ian, like I said earlier also for just lending us The Words and Music stage for this evening and really to everyone for taking the chance to share something tonight, it’s –I think as Mike put it – it’s a safe environment that we’re trying to create both in terms of sharing ideas, concepts, methods, in our research and our collaborative practice, but also our creativity. And this is just an extension of that. And, since we haven’t been able to join in person this year, it just felt like it would be great to have a space where we could just share some stuff and other parts of ourselves. And I think that really happened tonight. And I’m just so happy that it did.\n \n\n00:48:11\tJason Camlot:\tTo help make the signoff period feel less harsh and abrupt, we engaged in an exercise of imagining each other offline, after the show as a way of saying goodbye, but still keeping each other in mind.\n \n\n00:48:23\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI will say finally, when Katherine and I had a workshop recently, we were sort of trying to address the issue of like, well, where do people go after they disappear from Zoom? You could spend time together and then suddenly you’re in a shared space and then you’re no longer in the shared space. So maybe as a way to lessen the blow of departure I’m gonna suggest that we do the same thing again and ask you, what’s the next thing you’re gonna hear, or the next thing you’re gonna do after leaving us tonight? Katherine, you wanna share what you’re gonna hear next?\n00:48:58\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah, sure. I’m gonna be picking up my little cat, who’s been hanging out and we’re gonna have a little chat. And then, I’m gonna hear the creaking of the door. And I also just feel like putting on some music and continuing to just move and stretch. I feel like it really made me want –I said this after the last time,I was gonna go dance –but I feel like just like moving and stretching, just some music. That’s what I’m gonna do next. Yeah.\n00:49:27\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m gonna go see if my daughter wants to play guitar outside. [Laughs] How about you, Kenny? What’s the next sound you’re gonna hear?\n00:49:36\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’ll probably have a few bites of dinner and then head downstairs and see if I can remember the chords to “Derbyland” by Tarango.\n00:49:43\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs]. Awesome. That’d be great. Klara?\n00:49:48\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m definitely gonna get some ice cream, which means I’ll be opening the fridge and there will be a suction sound from the fridge. [Laughs].\n00:49:55\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs] Nick, what’s the next sound you’re gonna hear after you leave us?\n00:50:01\tAudio Recording, Nick Beauchesne,\nWords and Music, May 2021:\n\nWell my cat’s meowing and I have to keep grinding at my dissertation. So –\n00:50:05\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs] Some grinding, just grinding. [Laughs]\n00:50:08\tAudio Recording, Nick Beauchesne,\nWords and Music, May 2021:\n\n \n\n– not for too long. I’m gonna go do something fun after, but that’s when next,\n00:50:14\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHow about you Faith?\n00:50:15\tAudio Recording, Faith Paré, Words and Music, May 2021:\tProbably the sound of my roommate and I chatting. I’m probably gonna watch a movie tonight, so maybe some horror movie screams and we have some Indian food on the way. So like that kind of straw sound, you know, sucking up like the last bits of like mango lassi I’m very excited for that particular thing. Yeah.\n00:50:35\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tThat’s great. Great array of sounds. Ali, how about you? What’s the next sound you’re gonna hear?\n00:50:41\tAudio Recording, Ali Barillaro, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo probably similar to other people. I don’t know if you can see her, but my cat over there will probably wake up. So I’ll probably hear her – she’s right there. And probably my own excitement over going to eat some food. So sounds of excitement.\n00:50:57\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tFelicity?\n00:50:58\tAudio Recording, Felicity Tayler, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m gonna open the door to this room and walk down my very creepy hallway. And I missed somebody’s bedtime. So either I will hear silent breathing or I will hear a little voice that says “mama?”.\n00:51:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tJudee, how about you?\n00:51:19\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah. Without you all, it’ll just be undiluted fan noises in this apartment with some like thum of traffic. Just steady cars. And I’ll probably walk outside. So I’ll get some door creak and maybe even a cricket.\n00:51:36\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tAnd Cole?\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWell, there’s three unbathed children awaiting me, so there’s gonna be screaming most likely. And then, after that, I hope silence.\n00:51:48\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo it makes it a lot easier – not easy – but a lot easier to say goodbye to you all now. Thanks for a wonderful evening, everyone. And, we’ll see you soon at one of the events this week I hope. Take care, everyone.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\tThanks, Jason!\n00:52:01\tJason Camlot:\tThat particular show did feel as close to a live encounter over Zoom as I’ve had. The livest online event I’ve ever attended. Since we’re just about out of time, let me take you to the last Zoom conversation of what we thought, we hoped, [Start Music: Jay Alexander Brown singing “Beyond beyond”] might be the last online Words and Music Show of the pandemic period, September 19th, 2021. [End Music: Jay Alexander Brown singing “Beyond beyond”]. We thought that might be it, that we would never see each other again, in the flat, tiled, and often inaudible world of Zoom. We spoke to each other as if we were preparing to teleport into another dimension.\n00:52:47\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI’m so excited to imagine that we can start, collaborating, and joining together and seeing things in real life.\n00:52:57\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, September 2021:\tIt also makes one realize just what sort of community there has been created through the online shows. So I felt that through listening to John’s piece, that it actually – it would be different to hear that on the stage. And it’s very intimate that we are able to gather here to listen to it here tonight.\n00:53:16\tAudio Recording, Jay Alexander Brown, Words and Music, September 2021:\tAnd it feels like it’s maintained a sense of community and a sense of continuity throughout the pandemic to have these. It’s – in my opinion, it’s not the same as the vibe you have in a room full of people. But the fact that this show didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth and has kept us all tethered to the phenomenon called Montreal – cuz you know, barely leaving the house, especially last year when I was more paranoid about COVID – I could have been anywhere. Who even knows if you’re in Montreal.\n00:53:52\tAudio Recording, John Sweet, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI’m just – I’m concerned though – if we go back to doing like real live performances, what are you gonna do Jason? I’m concerned. [Laughs]\n00:54:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI only exist here in this square. I mean – I will still be here if ever you return 20, 30 years from now. You know, if you decide to come back, here I will be.\n00:54:15\tAudio Recording, John Sweet, Words and Music, September 2021:\tAnd you’ll look exactly the same.\n00:54:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\t[Laughs] Exactly. Yeah.\n00:54:18\tAudio Recording, Unknown Speaker, Words and Music, September 2021::\tJason isn’t real, John.\n00:54:21\tVarious Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:54:24\tAudio Recording, Jay Alexander Brown, Words and Music, September 2021:\tJason’s gonna show up at Cafe Resonance as a cardboard cut out.\n00:54:29\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs] That’s right. Katherine’s gonna be carrying me on a stick.\n00:54:31\tAudio Recording, Various Voices, Words and Music, October 2021:\tAudience chatter and background noise\n00:54:44\tJason Camlot:\tAfter having co-hosted the Words and Music show online for nearly two years, Ian invited me to perform at the first live show since March 2020 – a show that we thought would be a return to live events on a regular basis.\n \n\n00:54:56\tAudio Recording, Various Voices, Words and Music, October 2021:\tAudience chatter and background noise.\n00:55:10\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, October 2021:\tGood evening, everyone and welcome to our first live show in 18 months. Holy crap. [Audience Applause]. I mean, I look back at that whole time and it feels like a giant hallucination and I wonder where I was I and what was going on. And it’s so nice to see people in a room and to be able to present things for them and to actually jam with other musicians from time to time. All of this stuff is so great. So thank you so much for coming tonight. It’s really nice to have everybody here.\n \n\n00:55:42\tJason Camlot:\tI was quite anxious about participating in this show, not so much about giving a reading as about being in a room with lots of people. Anxious, but very excited as well. I had to arrive a bit late and so I sat in the back of the room for most of the first set. Then at intermission, I moved up to join some friends who were seated in the audience. [Start Music] It felt great to sit at a table and chat with people. I had a new book of poems that was about to come out. So I printed up some flyers that the press had given me and handed them out to people during intermission. Then I went up to the mic in front of people and read.\n \n\n00:56:17\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, October 2021:\t[Audience Chatter and Instrument Tuning Background Noise Throughout] Welcome to our fabulous second set. For this set we’re very, very lucky. When we started this project, the project had going online at the beginning of COVID. I was very lucky to have help from Jason Camlot who’s a fine poet and also one of the core people in a project called SpokenWeb, which is taking audio literature and making a databases up so that people can study it in 30 years and say, wow, those people were amazing, whatever they were. And he’s got a new book, which is just coming out called Vlarf. The reason you have those sheets on your table is – the books not quite out yet, but if you have one of these sheets, you get a big discount in the book, so you can get it later. Please welcome Jason Camlot. [Audience Applause].\n \n\n00:57:16\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, October 2021:\tThanks so much, Ian, thank you everyone. It’s so exciting to be with other people.\n00:57:22\tAudience Member:\tYes! [Clapping]\n00:57:25\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, October 2021:\tLet’s just give ourselves a hand for having made it through the last two years, and as Ian said, we’ve been doing the Words and Music Show on Zoom. I had a background of the Casa, always on my screen as I was hosting it from my basement. And it’s just a great feeling to be listening with people and to have the opportunity to read tonight. [Reading poetry] They keep well in winter and sometimes like jagged mounds, they appear frozen in the lake ice. /And then they suffocate in shallow pits, are digested with wood and transform into charcoal and muck./ My botanical book speaks of exogenous stems plunged into lead./ I don’t in the least want to know what that means. /I prefer to understand them as the grounds trembling scales, the soil thus sung in coral shiver./ [Applause]\n00:58:47\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio of Words and Music Show Audience Plays Underneath] In listening back to the audio of those two most recent live Words and Music Shows, the last shows of 2021. It is amazing to hear just how noisy they are with movement, chatter, tumult.\n00:59:18\tAudio Recording, Words and Music, October 2021:\n \n\n[Audience Chatter and Musicians Tuning Instruments]\n00:59:23\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio or Words and Music Show Audience Plays Underneath] This was the buzz we had been trying to emulate in awkward attempts that were comically artificial due to latency, inappropriate amplitude, and bad timing. Awkward too, because that “venue buzz” as Ian called it, isn’t just background noise. Not really. It is the sound of affect in action. [Audience Clip Swells] The sound of a kind of responsive choreography that captures what it feels like. Maybe even what it means to be together at an event where people get up on stage and share something they made just for you. [End of Audience Audio] When I interviewed Ian for this podcast during the final days of 2021, it was clear that we had no idea where the next Words and Music Show would happen – in person, online, we didn’t know.\n01:00:17\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tHopefully this latest iteration of COVID is as not as dangerous as the ones before, but it sure is virulent from the looks of it. So I feel kind of lost about that. I’ve just – I just think that – I mean the first lockdown, I don’t know how it was for you. I found I was in a bit of shock just cuz I didn’t realize how much of my life had been based on going from thinking of something to making something, to putting that thing out and seeing how it lived in the world to going back and making something else, you know? That was the core of my creative practice and all of a sudden that was gone and I –and until we did those live shows, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it. And it was like, oh yeah, we’re back on stage. And this feels so much better and it’s so much more present. It’s so much more focused. So, I’m gonna– I’m hoping that if we get stuck again, and I very much hope we don’t, but it looks like we probably will – that we can, that I can devise something more interesting to do with that time. Something that I enjoy doing as opposed to the feeling of being stuck indoors.\n01:01:27\tJason Camlot:\tWe talked about how the past two years –and now this recent return to something like a lockdown in Quebec with bars, pubs and restaurants closed to in-person patrons – has taken its toll on the venues that have supported the Words and Music show over the years. La Vitrola (the venue where the Epique Voices show of March 10th, 2020 had taken place) was long gone. The Casa del Popolo had closed its showroom in March, 2020 and tried to make a go it as a shop for a while.\n01:01:56\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tWell, it’s still kind of unfolding. At the moment, it sounds like the two partners in Casa and Sala who were partners themselves or breaking up and they’re running through all the troubles that involves at the same time as these venues that they ran together have basically closed down. Sala is still open, but I haven’t seen anything at Casa del Popolo since COVID happened. I hear the occasional rumour that there will be something in April, but I’m not, I’m not really sure. James Goddart is working there in the office now, so I occasionally ask him, but he doesn’t know either what’s gonna happen. And that would be tough because, for a lot of us in this neighbourhood, that was a place where we could always drop in and catch something or say hello to a friend or meet for coffee or for food or whatever. We did our Mile End Poets Festival – we did at least one or two nights there for almost 10 years too. So I really miss the place.\n01:02:55\tJason Camlot:\tAnd now in the first days of 2022, we have learned that the Ressonance Café, the venue that Ian turned to for the most recent live shows, is shutting down too. The Sala has managed to stay afloat in part through the kind of live streaming and recording sessions that we did for the Black Writers Out Loud show. Just a couple of days ago, CBC reporter, Fenn Mayes published a profile piece on venue covering the long history of the place and interviewing the staff and owners about what it means to them and how they’ve managed to keep going. It makes me a little anxious to read a story like this, which might just as easily be an obituary as a feel good profile piece under the current ongoing circumstances. But the article ends on a positive of note of sorts. The final line being quote, if these walls could talk, they’d sing close quote. I mean, at least didn’t report that the Sala was closing. Even if we could do the next show in person, where would that be? Ian doesn’t know, but not knowing what’s coming next, as far as pandemic circumstances are concerned, does not create even the slightest shiver of uncertainty in Ian about the Words and Music Show.\n01:04:06\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tI think, well, let’s go around the world and find [Unknown Name] from France or something, or track down some people we really like to hear and would normally not be able to bring, I think that’s one quality of it. And another quality is on the shows online. I think it would be worthwhile getting people talking, among, to each other, at the beginning of the show or at the end or something like that, or intermission just to keep part of that spirit alive. Cuz I just notice people actually like to be with each other, and they like to talk and flirt and get huffy or nod or go through all the kinds of experiences they can go through with both with people they know and the joy of total strangers, not knowing who that person is and what they’re gonna bring. [Start Music: Guitar Instrumental, Ian Ferrier, “Rail Music”]\n01:05:00\tJason Camlot:\tThere is a stubbornness of imagination. One might say a resilience of imagination to use a popular COVID period word that characterizes our continued willingness and will to keep creating, gathering, and sharing sounds and stories. It’s not so much that the Words and Music Shows must go on. It’s just a given. The show goes on.\n01:05:32\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, “Rail Music”:\t[Singing] You wake up, find yourself on a train, no memory of how you got on. No knowledge of where you’re going…[Music Instrumental Fades].\n01:06:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb Director Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. A special thanks to Ian Ferrier, and all of the hosts and organizers, artists, performers, and audience members who have engaged in online literary events over the past two years, when we have been unable to gather in person. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The Spokenweb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. And if you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n\n"],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"9587","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E8, How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence, 4 May 2020, Camlot and McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/fe25911a-e576-402d-ae9c-4b96143ad40a/sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,630,039 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-05-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References\\n\\nDolar, Mladen.  A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.\\n\\nLabelle, Brandon.  “Auditory Relations.”  In Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art.  New York: Continuum, ix-xvi.\\n\\nPeters, John Durham.  Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999\\n\\nPetriglieri, Gianpiero.  Twitter Post. April 3, 2020, 7:43 PM. https://twitter.com/gpetriglieri/status/1246221849018720256\\n\\nRowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray.  The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.  Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.\\n\\n“Sounds from the global Covid-19 lockdown.” Cities and Memory. https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/\\n\\nPoetry Recordings\\n\\nAntin, David.  “The Principle of Fit, II” (Part I). 26.:32. June 1980. Recording at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. PennSound. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Antin/Antin-David_The-Principle-of-Fit-II-Side-A_DC_06-80.mp3\\n\\nCox, Alexei Perry. Poems from Finding Places to Make Places. 42:39. The Words & Music Show, March 22, 2020.\\n\\nColeman, Nisha. “The Church of Harvey Christ.” 40:53. The Words & Music Show, March, 22 2020.\\n\\nPlath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Originally released on The Poet Speaks, Record 5, Argo, 1965. YouTube audio. 3:56. Posted December 29, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549767585792,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. In this episode, co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod explore how our contexts and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19.\n\nJason asks his literature and sound studies class at Concordia (via Zoom teleconferencing) how their listening practices have changed, and it just so happens to be the same day they are also discussing the importance of in-person performance before a live audience in the talk poetry of David Antin. Meanwhile, Katherine is noticing that many live poetry readings are now moving online. How are we listening to the world around us, and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? As Katherine and Jason explore these questions together – in recorded, remote conversations – they notice that our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal.\n\n00:00:06\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. From quieted city streets once filled with the hum of commuter traffic to seven o’clock cheers for essential workers to compressed audio on your latest Zoom call, the soundscape around us is changing. Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we invite you to listen in close to the changing soundscape that connects us all.\n00:01:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWe join episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod as they explore how our context and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19. With work meetings, in-person poetry performances, dinner parties, and more moving online, our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal. It has us asking: how are we listening to the world around us and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings, now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? To explore these questions together, here are Katherine and Jason with episode eight of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:39\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tCan you hear me?\n00:02:40\tKlara du Plessis:\tYes.\n00:02:41\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tAlright.\n00:02:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] [Audio, a robotic voice.] To normal. To normal. To normal. Public health. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] [Past Recordings Played One After Another]\n00:02:45\tJason Camlot:\tUh…\n00:02:49\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tHello.\nKlara du Plessis:\t\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tShould be able to hear you…Oh. I think I have it on.\n00:02:54\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t\n00:02:56\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tSo K     lara says she can hear me.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I can hear you.\n00:02:59\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tOkay, good.\n00:03:00\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t     Stay home. Keep at least two metres from each other.\n00:03:04\tAlexei Perry Cox:\t[Baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence  , would get through to humankind.\n00:03:12\tIsabella Wang:\tOh my gosh, you read one of my favourite poems.\n00:03:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I’m just going to pause ’cause my internet just said something about, I think we got a little off sync — [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:03:19\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] Yeah, you just froze, you just froze there … [Overlapping Voices]\n00:03:19\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\tFrom each other. From each other. Stay home from each other.\n00:03:26\tKlara du Plessis:\tBut what I’ve been noticing is that I don’t wanna be listening to things and I’ve been feeling mostly overwhelmed.\n00:03:26\tDeanna Radford:\tThere we go. Can you hear me?\n00:03:45\tNaomi Charron:\t[Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin.\n00:03:45\tHeather Pepper:\tWe’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight!\n00:03:45\tVarious Voices:\t[Overlapping, Distorted and Breaking Up] Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Where’d they go? There was a certain fit. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano]\nA kind of adjusted togetherness.\nVarious Voices:\tJason     s frozen. Side by side. Side side side. …For me,      hearing voice      has really been more important, in this moment. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:04:14\tJason Camlot:\tThursday, March the 12th: that was the last time that I had an in-person conversation in close proximity with someone other than my wife or two teenage children or one of our two little dogs. That was my last 40-plus weight training class. It was sparsely attended, but still there were eight of us there plus our instructor, Lisa Marie. We elbow-pumped instead of high-fiving when the workout was done. We already knew we had to be careful. The next day, the Quebec government adopted an order of council declaring a health emergency throughout the province due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, like millions of people across the globe, we’ve been in a substantial lockdown, at home, ever since. Major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we hear. Among the many disruptions, much of my and everyone else’s daily communication has moved online. Our 40-plus weight training instructor, Lisa Marie, adapted quickly, started a YouTube channel, and has been posting daily workouts every day.\n00:05:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, from Lisa Marie’s workout video] Hello again. So this is going to be day one of the home workout.\n00:05:26\tJason Camlot:\tConcordia University where I work mobilized pretty quickly with efforts to support all faculty members so that we can complete the teaching of our courses online using Moodle chat rooms and Zoom teleconferencing software. It was during the week of March 16th, the first week that the university shut down as I was preparing to move my literature and sound studies graduate seminar online with a class on the poet David Antin, that I began to talk through FaceTime and Zoom with my colleague Katherine McLeod–\n00:05:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi, it’s Katherine here.\n00:05:58\tJason Camlot:\t–on what we were experiencing and what it meant for how we are listening now.\n00:06:09\tMusic:\t[Dreamy Instrumental]\n00:06:10\tKatherine McLeod:\tMy own thinking about questions of how we are listening now came from noticing that some of the poetry reading events that had been scheduled for the spring were starting to move online in different ways. Since 2016, I’ve been publishing a weekly listing of mostly Montreal literary events and readings called Where Poets Read. The last event listed in Where Poets Read that took place in person was on March 9th. It was Épiques Voices, a bilingual poetry reading, an event that I actually co-hosted myself with Catherine Cormier-Larose and little did we know that it would be the last one for a while. After that, readings that had been planned as book launches, at local bookstores like Drawn & Quarterly, VERSeFest in Ottawa, the Montreal Review of Books spring launch, and an Atwater library poetry reading were all cancelled. Meanwhile, reading series organizers were quickly thinking of ways to move readings online. Individual writers started posting themselves reading in YouTube videos or on Instagram Live posts, but within the first days of everything changing, rob mcLennan in Ottawa, Isabella Wang in Vancouver, and Ian Ferrier in Montreal were experimenting with moving entire reading series events online. Instead of the usual posts on Where Poets Read, I started posting links to live streams of readings and I started to wonder how are we listening to poetry readings now, now that we can’t go out to listen to them in person, together?\n00:07:56\tJason Camlot:\tRight, so we’re both thinking about how we’re listening now under the present circumstances of social distancing and self-isolation, and thinking about our new experiences and practices of listening, especially within a range of literary contexts, including reading literature silently at home, teaching and discussing literature in the classroom, and performing literature on a stage at a poetry reading. So let’s turn to our first real conversation about these questions that we held on Zoom on March 26th, 2020, a little more than a week after the government-mandated lockdown and soon after I taught my first virtual class on the work of talk poet David Antin.\n00:08:40\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] Hello?\n00:08:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tHello, can you hear me?\n00:08:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, hi Katherine.\n00:08:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi.\n00:08:47\tJason Camlot:\tWait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?\n00:08:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tNo, actually I’m in my office room.\n00:09:02\tJason Camlot:\tHow’re you doing?\n00:09:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m good, given the situation. But yeah, today felt definitely more like a challenge to get started. Yeah, just… It took more energy to get going.\n00:09:23\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, me too. I had a terrible sleep last night, I kept waking up like almost every hour. So…\n00:09:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tI just made coffee now and I sent myself a text last night to give myself instructions for the morning and they said, “Make coffee, dance, be.” I’ve done the first two and now I am in a state of being.\n00:09:43\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you seem like you’re being–\n00:09:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:44\tJason Camlot:\t–so that’s good. You could check all three off. I like the idea of not only self-isolating, but self-texting.\n00:09:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:52\tJason Camlot:\tSort of like, wow, we’re in some crazy individual loops here, you know?\n00:09:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I only send them as reminders to myself, but who knows, maybe by the end of this I’ll be having a full conversation with me over text.\n00:10:05\tJason Camlot:\tOh, man…\n00:10:10\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Piano]\n00:10:10\tJason Camlot:\tYou can really hear the low-level anxiety and fatigue in our voices.\n00:10:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. So many Zoom conversations seem to have to begin this way now, with these kinds of emotional check-ins. And these are so important because we’re all feeling overwhelmed. But that’s also hard stuff to dive into at the start of a conversation. And I know I find myself saying that “I’m good. Oh, given the situation,” like I do in that recording. And then, when you listen between the lines, you can hear that the real answer to that question is more complicated than ever.\n00:10:45\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s one example of how we’re listening to each other a bit differently these days. Listening maybe with slightly more sensitivity to the other person’s mood. Listening to hear just how anxious or depressed someone is before you embark on an actual conversation about something else.\n00:11:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe did have a real conversation, though, after this affective, close-listening warm-up. I asked you how your class went.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tWe had to go back to teach online this week, so I held my seminar again and it went really well. I was surprised, like, and it was really great to see everyone. Everyone joined, everyone participated, and I think everyone was actually quite grateful because we’ve been reading all semester different theories of sort of how sound is mediated, different sort of audile techniques, you know, ways of listening, listening to voice, listening to other sounds. You know, the idea of soundscapes and the idea of voice and concepts of presence and things like that. I felt it was going to be unavoidable that we talk about what our listening situations are right now. And so since they were kind of equipped with a whole bunch of readings on that, on thinking about listening and sound, I did sort of tell them before class, I sent them all an email saying that the top of the class would be spent… Each of them would sort of give us a little bit of an account of how they’re listening now, sort of what their listening situation is and how their interactions with sounds may have changed as a result of them having to self-isolate.\n00:12:14\tJason Camlot:\tIt seems like we are re-negotiating our relationship to signals, noise, and silence. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] These different categories of sound are all related to each other. One can’t really mean much without the other. Noise is defined in relation to the signal, the thing we’re actually trying to hear. We speak of the signal-to-noise ratio. With a weak reception or a low signal-to-noise ratio, the signal will be lost in surrounding interference or noise, so that we can hardly hear the message or not hear it at all. With a strong reception, a high signal-to-noise ratio, [Sound Effect: Pulsing Tone] the signal will come through clearly and we hardly hear or notice the noise at all. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental]\n00:13:05\tJason Camlot:\tListen to this extended cross-fade of two clips, one of brown noise and another of a sharp emergency signal. It dramatizes the movement from a low to high–\n00:13:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] –signal-to-noise ratio.\n00:13:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, begins with “brown noise”, a soft static-y sound, and fades into the pulsing tone played earlier, the “emergency signal”]\n00:13:34\tJason Camlot:\tAs human listeners, we’re usually pretty good at hearing the signal at the expense of the noise. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] Murray Schafer says in his book The Soundscape that “noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore.” He was thinking about noise within environmental soundscapes, which he thought about as a composer would in terms of acoustic design. One thing that has come to our ears’ attention as a result of living the circumstances of a global pandemic and experiencing locally by staying at home, sticking to our neighborhoods and our own living spaces is the absence of the noises we were so good at ignoring under normal, noisy circumstances. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] The absence of the noises around us effects our mood, our sense of our place in the world, and leads us to compensate with different forms of listening. So we can speak of noise and silence in our sound environments and their effects on how we feel.\n00:14:35\tAli Barillaro:\tI live next to a bar, so normally there’s a lot of noise outside of my apartment on a regular basis even if it’s not like the weekend\n00:14:43\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Ali Barillaro.\n00:14:45\tAli Barillaro:\tSo not hearing people drunkenly shouting at 3:00 AM has been kind of strange. I don’t necessarily mind it not being there because I’m definitely sleeping a lot easier, but it’s definitely weird because that’s kind of been a constant and I’ve lived here for almost two years now. So that’s weird and different.\n00:15:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe absence of either noise or signal becomes present to us in the form of noticeable silence. Biochemist and doctoral candidate in English Marlene Oeffinger.\n00:15:16\tMarlene Oeffinger:\tIt’s almost like I feel with all the news and everything that we’re listening to there’s this constant barrage of noise. And then we were sitting on Saturday evening on the couch in our living room next to the window and usually Saturday evening is… You hear people walking outside talking, you hear cars, you hear planes. And so we were sitting and reading and not listening to the news and I suddenly had to stop because I realized how silent it was. It was dead silent and that’s just something I kind of associate not with the city and definitely not with the area here on a Saturday night. And it was just really completely silent. There was no noise from any neighbour, nothing. And it was almost distracting, the silence. ‘Cause I couldn’t stop listening to the silence. And yeah, I couldn’t even focus on what I was reading anymore because it was so unusual, I felt. It was just such a novel sound for the surrounding. Yeah, and that’s why I guess I just kept listening to it and it kept distracting me really from what I was doing.\n00:16:20\tJason Camlot:\tThe soundscapes outside have changed, but our relationship to the soundscapes within our domestic spaces have also changed. They become more complicated. We’re sensing how strange it can feel when spaces that one depends on for certain kinds of noise don’t sound the same, get quieter, or go silent altogether. But we’re also becoming more aware of our need for spaces that allow us periods of silence. My students told me how they had to work hard to find those spaces and how they’re now having to schedule slots of time for silent work. Thinking, writing, at home. PhD student Lindsay Presswell.\n00:17:01\tLindsay Presswell:\tSo my personal situation in my house is that my partner is a musician [Begin Music: Instrumental Guitar] and so normally he’s kind of here and he has a studio set up just over in the corner. And normally I’m like, I need to be out of the house. Like I have to be in the library or like in an atmosphere which very much feels like I’m working. But we actually have had to carefully negotiate the use of this space. We just started a Google Calendar this morning where I’m like inputting my lectures and like when I need to be sort of reading in silence ’cause I’m a very needy reader, I guess. We’ve discovered, like, putting in these soundproof headphones that he has, so I couldn’t hear the music as he’s working on things on the computer. But what that does is it… He like breathes loudly? [End Music: Instrumental Guitar] [Sound Effect: Heavy Breathing] Like, when those are in his ears, which I’ve never heard him breathe in my entire life. But that’s like a fun new thing.\n00:18:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tBreathing is definitely one of those sounds we don’t usually notice. But Lindsay’s situation spells out just how sensitive we’re becoming to sounds that are usually invisible to our ears.\n00:18:14\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Guitar]\n00:18:14\tJason Camlot:\tMany of my students are engaged in similar kinds of sound-space negotiations, as I am at home with my family. But we also seem to need to fill ourselves with particular kinds of sounds to compensate for the lack of sounds and noise that define our states of normalcy. My sense is people are maybe talking to each other more than they had been even if they’re doing so at a distance. My students were telling me that they’re getting off of social media and picking up the phone in ways that they normally wouldn’t do.\n00:18:42\tPriscilla Joly:\tYeah, I think people want to talk more at this time, particularly my parents. They call, like, very frequently now.\n00:18:50\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Priscilla Joly, a PhD student in English.\n00:18:53\tLindsay Presswell:\tAnd then just in terms of, like, the sort of broader situation, I noticed that my tolerance for noise that also feels fast or jarring has slowed, too. I’m like needing direct, verbal communication more than sending texts. Rather than like reading the news and doing my emails on the commute, I’m like finding time listening to traditional media or calling people as well, which normally I don’t do because I associate speaking like it’s a slow way of communicating. I deactivated my Twitter account very quickly last week because [Begin Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental] I was just like, this is not the kind of… These aren’t the sounds… This isn’t the news that I want to be listening to.\n00:19:42\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Lindsay Presswell. John Durham Peters and his description of the uncanniness that surrounded early telephonic communication—talking into telephones—noted the existential anxiety that came from relying on the voice to do it all. That is, to do all the work of communicating one’s thoughts, feelings, and presence to another person. He talks about the disquiet of a medium defined by strange voices entering the home, the disappearance of one’s words into an empty black hole in the absence of the listener’s face. And he suggests that the telephone contributed to the modern derangement of dialogue by splitting conversation into two halves that meet only in the cyberspace of the wires. And that’s when telecommunications media relied on wires from start to finish. I cancelled my landline five years ago and threw myself at the mercy of wireless communication. Course, there’s still fiber optic cables at work, but wireless communication, the forms of interpersonal exchange we’re now forced to have instead of most and sometimes any form of interpersonal exchange, represent a further kind of derangement. The condensed and proximate signal [Sound Effect: Dial Tone] that came through the carbon microphone of the old-timey telephone in my teenage experience, at least, came to feel intimate in its own powerfully reduced way. The banal, unexpected kinds of disruptions we experience when we try to Skype, Zoom, and FaceTime [Sound Effect: Voices Breaking Up In Call] are too annoying and thinning to live up to Durham Peter’s sort of romantic idea of telephonic derangement. Grandiose concepts of sympathy, relationality, intimate connection are reduced to the irritatingly tinny sounding idea of connectivity. [End Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental]\n00:21:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Katherine McLeod’s voice breaking up during a call, sounding tinny and distorted]\n00:21:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhy was that happening to my voice there?\n00:21:46\tJason Camlot:\tI was wondering about that myself and so I started googling for answers. [Sound Effect: Electronic Interference] Part of it has to do with the way digital information is sent. We’re not getting interference with a continuous signal along the wire here. Our voices are transduced and converted into frequency data and then sent via a wifi signal as data packets, like assemblages of bits of data that add up to the sound of your voice. [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference] The computer waits for packets that represent a good signal-to-noise ratio of your voice. If something interferes with the analog signal that’s sending the data, then the computer, let’s say it’s listening for the right formula of your voice, will have trouble understanding, let’s say hearing the packets of data, will reject them as noise, and then wait for them to be sent again. When this keeps happening, you either get partial delivery of the packets, which sounds weird or complete drop-outs. Sort of like if a Star Trek teleportation goes horribly wrong because all the disassembled molecules of the person didn’t come back together again or like when Ron Weasley gets seriously splinched in that bad apparating accident in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Ron left part of his upper arm behind; we leave packets of our voice signal behind. Still, even if old-style landline telephones sometimes sounded better than cell phones and Zoom, these newer media in the present context of social isolation are making us feel what’s at stake in a scenario that suggests the loss of real old-time hanging out in person. My students were clear in expressing the frustration they felt from bad connections. [End Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference]\n00:23:24\tAli Barillaro:\tMy internet connection’s not the best–\n00:23:28\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:23:28\tAli Barillaro:\t–so listening to people through quite a bit of distortion has been a weird thing to kind of manage and just sort of… I’ve had to kind of let it happen and not let it get frustrating. Dealing with the weird kind of distortions and sometimes when the sound cuts off completely it’ll take a couple of seconds and then restart, but almost as if someone’s pressed fast forward. So trying to keep track of everything is kind of interesting.\n00:23:58\tJason Camlot:\tAnd in talking to my students, I let myself get carried away and waxed philosophical about the existential implications of a weak wifi signal.\n00:24:06\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] Your point about the frustration of communicating with people, especially through wifi-based telecommunication system, which is what we’re doing so much and what the university is having us do right now, I think is super important as well. It’s frustrating when you feel like you can’t have the confidence in the voice continuing. That’s a huge difference between in-person communication. You’re not worried about them breaking up in front of you and it makes you just incredibly aware of the fact that when we’re communicating we’re dealing with signal transduction, which is more than just annoying, actually. It’s kind of existentially traumatic and troubling. It’s like that we don’t know that we can count on the continuity of the person and the communication that we’re engaging in.\n00:24:49\tJason Camlot:\tStill, we are relying on Zoom and Zoom-like platforms as best we can for the social encounters that we crave. Here, I’d say we’re feeling the absence of a different kind of noise that we’re also very good at ignoring and not hearing under normal conditions, but the absence of which we notice in a strong way in these dangerous times. We are noticing the absence of social sounds and that absence becomes a distracting kind of silence. MA student in English Kian Vaziri-Tehrani.\n00:25:20\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani:\tThere’s kind of been sort of an avoidance of silence, if that makes sense. I live in a pretty, like, quiet neighborhood. It’s  Côte-Saint Luc. But yeah, it’s generally like a really, really quiet neighbourhood and I go out my balcony a lot and it’s pitch quiet. So I guess like I just kind of… The TV’s always on or I’m always listening to something and I feel like if it’s too quiet then I’m… Something’s wrong or something’s off about it. Like I’ve just been filling my senses up, I guess.\n00:25:49\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Voices Echoing and Overlaid] I’m thinking in particular of the experience of sounds reverberating within a space that makes us feel we are present in a real, material, and social environment alongside others. Something along the lines of what Brandon LaBelle was talking about when he says that “the sonorous world always presses in, adding extra ingredients by which we locate ourselves.” We are increasingly interested in those interstitial noises that suggest life and movement and social activity. PhD student Sadie Barker.\n00:26:22\tSadie Barker:\tI find I’m much more aware of my neighbours’ sounds in the apartment building and I think interested in them and like inclined to speculate into them or like imagine into them just because… Yeah, I find when I hear like the doorbell ringing, I’m like, “Are people having people over? Are they socializing?” You know, you’re just kind of, yeah, more intrigued.\n00:26:44\tJason Camlot:\tWe might become intensive, causal listeners like Sadie, trying to decipher the causes, the things, actions, activities that go with the sounds we’re suddenly noticing. Or we might just be craving those little otherwise meaningless sounds because they suggest a real person in an actual space.\n00:27:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s like the difference between listening to an archival documentary recording of a poetry reading–\n00:27:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, muffled recording of people laughing and chatting]\n00:27:11\tKatherine McLeod:\t–you can hear all kinds of vibrations in the room other than those of the poet’s voice. Clinking, shuffling, breathing, laughter, applause. Compared to a studio recording, like something Caedmon Records would have made in the 1950s–\n00:27:26\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Sylvia Plath reciting her poem “Daddy”] The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through.\n00:27:31\tKatherine McLeod:\t–where the strong signal of the poet’s voice seems to exist in a sort of vacuum outside of any recognizable sonic space in the universe.\n00:27:42\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Childrens’ Voices Echoing and Overlaid] In this present moment of social distancing, I think we’re craving the noise around the signal rather than the signal itself. We’re being bombarded with all kinds of messages, [Begin Music: Sparkly Instrumental] but really we want the comforting sounds of an actual person in a real environment. Philosopher Mladen Dolar might say we’re craving voice itself rather than the messages that voice carries. [End Music: Sparkly Instrumental]\n00:28:04\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Klara du Plessis.\n00:28:08\tKlara du Plessis:\tI have definitely been phoning a lot more like every day I have two or three telephone conversations with friends who I’m close with, but would usually just text with or something. So there’s definitely this move towards trying to communicate more or to de-distance ourselves, I guess.\n00:28:25\tJason Camlot:\tVoice is that medium made up of accent, intonation, and timbre that carries the message but disappears in the process. Usually we don’t notice it because we’re so focused on the message. In this instance, voice is the noise and the meaning is the signal. It’s like what Dolar says about voice and a heavy accent. A heavy accent suddenly makes us aware of the material support of the voice, which we tend, immediately, to discard. Well, now we seem to be craving the accent. I’m speaking metaphorically here using Dolar’s account of voice as an ever-disappearing, yet undeniably present entity to help describe what we feel when we try to be together on Zoom or Skype or something like that, and sort of are together, but at the same time really aren’t together.\n00:29:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe sounds around the signal, the sounds that add the vibrancy to the social, the sense of a real unique person speaking are what we’re listening for, but even when we hear these sounds, we’re kind of aware that they’re evoking a scenario of actual presence that isn’t happening right now.\n00:29:37\tJason Camlot:\tBecause I’ve been on Twitter a lot more than usual, I read a tweet—this was early April—posted by Gianpiero Petriglieri that suggested we’re so exhausted after video calls because we’re experiencing “the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds are tricked into the idea of actually being together. While our bodies know that we’re not” actually together. He’s suggesting it’s the dissonance of being relentlessly in the presence of each other’s absence that makes us so tired.\n00:30:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis may be especially true during graduate seminars and poetry readings and probably even more so in relaxed meetings like the video conference parties and cocktail hours that have been happening more often.\n00:30:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, same various voices      speaking from earlier] [Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin. We’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight! Okay. Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Duh. Oh, Mickey’s outside, shit! Hang on. I gotta go get the dog. You hear him barking? Jason, you lost, your whole family went away. Where’d they go? Jason’s frozen. No, no he doesn’t move! I know, I know! He does it on purpose! I know! You told me your trick! Yeah, you knew I was faking it. You just couldn’t help it!   Welcome back. [Door Shutting]\n00:31:04\tJason Camlot:\tThat clip we just heard was from the middle of the video conference cocktail hour—or two—I held with some friends just after I taught my first online seminar that I’ve been talking about.\n00:31:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tHearing the clinks of glasses at the beginning, the laughter, the spontaneous references to things happening within the individual spaces of the teleconference participants along with the things happening across those spaces, through the screen, really did evoke the sound of an intimate social gathering for me. At times it sounded like you were all there together. Other times, not so much. It was actually really hard for me to tell who was where.\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tIt was a lot of fun. But hearing each other and seeing each other and ourselves through the flat screens of our laptops made me want to crawl through and be there. Wherever “there” is.\n00:31:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat reminds me of the title of the poem in David Antin’s book Talking At The Boundaries, the one called “what am i doing here?” The one where he asks himself, stepping into a space to create a poem by talking rather than reading the poems from a book, what am I doing here in this ambiance? What’s going to happen? Am I doing poetry here? How are we here together? Am I making art here? Just what exactly am I doing here? But that kind of question, the way he asks it in that poem, maybe it can’t be asked in the same way of the here, now.\n00:32:36\tJason Camlot:\tFollowing that opening conversation with the students in my class, which lasted about 40 minutes and functioned as part sonic listening analysis and part group therapy session, and just before the Zoom cocktail gathering I had with my friends, which was also like a therapy listening session, I did, eventually, segway into a two-hour class about the talk poetry of David Antin.\n00:32:57\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] But let’s start at the beginning, I guess, and let’s start with Antin and ask how do we begin to actually define what an Antin talk poem is and how do we define it as an entity? So let’s begin by thinking about what it is, what’s the artifact, what’s the thing that we’re organizing a conversation around? What could you glean from what you’ve read and listened to as to sort of what the production process of a talk poem is? And maybe that’s one way into beginning to define it. And we can think of it generically, we can think of it other ways, but sort of if we think of what is a talk poem, you know, how does he make them?\n00:33:34\tJason Camlot:\tDavid Antin seemed like a deeply relevant artist to be thinking about just now because his poetry originates in live, in-person talking before an audience. He called himself a talk poet. He would come to a venue with some idea of what he was gonna talk about, perhaps a title or a theme, and a few stories in mind. But then he would just stand there and create a poem before a live audience. By talking.\n00:34:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, David Antin saying his talk poem “The Principle of Fit, II”] I came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’d been thinking about and because I don’t come unprepared to do pieces. On the other hand, I don’t come prepared the way one      comes to a lesson. I haven’t studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit, the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness, the calmness, in certain social, socially structured events as between patients and their doctors or between patients and their diseases. It’s a very close social relation and one that takes a certain education.\n00:34:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you listen really closely, you can hear the tape noises on that recording of Antin doing a talk poem. [Static From The Recording]\n00:34:59\tJason Camlot:\tHe would go into a room with an audience, press record on his tape recorder, and start talking. Not reading, not reciting a written text. Just thinking a poem into existence by talking it out loud in front of other people. That’s the first iteration of the talk poem: actual ephemeral talk in a room filled with real people. He would also record his talks on a tape recorder, hence the tape hiss you noticed in that audible trace of the event. He’d take that tape recorder home, transcribe the talk that was on it, and then shape that typed transcript into a unique-looking printed work without punctuation, with special spacing, designed to make the reader have to reinvoice the original talk back to life by finding the speech and intonation patterns that are not obvious to find in the printed treatment of the original, ephemeral live event.\n00:35:51\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] So, if we continue to ask this question, what is a talk poem, okay, and we’ve just rehearsed in a brief way what the production process of a talk poem is, where is the talk poem? I guess that’s my second question, right? Is it in that event, right? Is it in the tape recorder, on the cassette that recorded it? Is it in the initial transcription of it? Is it in the book Talking At The Boundaries after that event happens? Where is the talk poem? Or is it in, or is it that combination of things? Yeah, Brian, you want to..?\n00:36:22\tBrian Vass:\tI guess thinking about this question also just sort of dovetails to the question that I asked on group chat.\n00:36:28\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Brian Vass.\n00:36:31\tBrian Vass:\tIt seems to me that if the talk poem as a piece of art or as a event, if it hinges to some degree on the reciprocity between Antin as a performer and a speaker and the specific context that he’s in, as he seems to sort of describe that it does, like he says he’s got something in mind, but even the spontaneity and some degree of the improvisation is influenced or inflected by the context, specifically the people in the room, to the extent that that’s true. It seems like the real site of the talk poem is the occasion and everything else, the recording and the transcription are sort of derivations of that, but somehow aren’t fully it because you’re part of it if you’re there. Do you know what I mean? Like the audience is also a part of it. If it’s true, what he’s saying about vibing off of the group.\n00:37:21\tJason Camlot:\tI like that, vibing off of the group. So it’s talking, but as you say, it’s sort of talking with an audience present that seems to be important because of this reciprocity as you put it. But it’s more about him vibing off of them than about actual conversation. It’s not talking for conversation. It’s talking for the sense that he’s not talking in a vacuum. There’s a kind of priority that’s given to that original ephemeral event due to this scenario of talking in person before an actual listening audience.\n00:37:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe discussion we had of Antin seemed so appropriate and relevant to us at this moment, I think, because his art was premised on, depended on the act of talking in the presence of other people. If we think about the new scientific evidence coming in that suggests even asymptomatic people can possibly spread the coronavirus, it makes talking to someone in person a truly perilous scenario. We’re not allowed to talk before large groups of people right now. It’s literally against the law. Literary performance, poetry readings, literary gatherings are not possible in that way. But it sort of got us thinking, you know, some of the students were sort of asked what would David Antin do during COVID-19 crisis? Because he’s not, he wouldn’t be allowed to actually stand in a room before an assembled audience, right? And that was, you know, in many of their opinions and in my opinion, too, crucial to the actual creation of a talk poem. That talk poem requires the presence of others within one space, right, in order to actually to be made in the first place. So like, you know, imagining David Antin on Zoom or Skype doing a talk poem, it’s not quite the same thing.\n00:39:07\tMusic:\t[Gentle Instrumental]\n00:39:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo we can’t do talk poems. We can’t read poems before an actual audience. We can’t talk to strangers or speak moistly. Without talking to people in person how can we share art? How can we share literature? How can we share our work under the present conditions? How can we reach listeners? Today, not only are we listening differently in general, but we’re sharing and listening to literature differently. Think about when you listen to literature in your day-to-day life and has that changed? Just as before, you might listen to an audio book or to a podcast and you might listen to that more than before, but the method of listening probably remains the same. What has changed is that you can’t listen to a live reading or at least not in the same space as the reader and other listeners. Literary events have been cancelled or as we prefer to think of it postponed. But we can still listen to writers reading their works and even participate in a live online reading as an event.\n00:40:15\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] Good evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music. We’re very lucky to have two visitors from the great state of Toronto tonight. So all of this should be really fun. And to lead off the show tonight, I asked this person how she would like to be introduced      and she wanted to be introduced by me telling you that she lives beside a lake.\n00:40:46\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] That was a recording of Ian Ferrier performing his usual role as live host and curator of The Words & Music Show, a monthly cabaret of poetry, music, dance, and spoken word performances that’s been happening in Montreal for the past 20 years. At the end of March, the show went online with performers sending in pre-recorded audio to be played in the live event broadcast via Zoom. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Some of the artists, like storyteller Nisha Coleman, integrated into their performances the circumstances and impact of COVID-19 upon artists who depend upon live events. Nisha’s story was about the time she spent hanging out in a community art collective called The Church of Harvey Christ. And this is how she chose to end her story this time.\n00:41:36\tNisha Coleman:\t[Audio, from a past recording] Now, I’ve told this story a lot of times. It’s one I’ve told at parties and campfires and on stage. And every time I tell it, it’s sort of, I sort of tell it in a different way and it has a different meaning, it has a different sort of takeaway. But I think in this particular telling for me what stands out about this story is the strength of community, right? And, and what The Church of Harvey Christ meant to artists and what it provided for them at that time and how important that community is now. I mean, especially now. Because being an artist, you know, it’s precarious, of course. It’s precarious in the best of times and now we’re entering a new time where it’s sort of precarious for everybody. So, I think it’s more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle, or, you know, maintaining this connection over the internet. Because we need each other, we need to lift each other up. We need to help each other out. We need to promote each other’s work. I think that’s gonna be really important in the next however long. Who knows, right?\n00:42:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tOther performances really emphasized the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private spaces that come with a video conference, reading from home. That was the case with poet Alexei Perry Cox.\n00:43:08\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] …extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18-month-old child on her bed and it’s by the poet Alexei Perry Cox. So I’m going to bring that up now and we can take a listen.\n00:43:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence, would get through to humankind.\n00:43:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tNow, I have to admit that for this particular recording, my screen didn’t display the video, so even though others watched the reading, I was just listening. As a listener, I felt that Alexei’s poem conveyed such presence through its recording. Yes, I was listening to the poem, too, but I was also listening and deeply moved by the sounds of her daughter’s presence in the room with her and the interaction between them.\n00:44:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] A book with a room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. But present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time bringing of life.\n00:44:25\tKatherine McLeod:\tEven more than the words of the poem, I was listening to the sounds around the poem, the sounds of the social and of life. When you’re at a live reading, you’re there to listen to the poetry or prose, but so often the experience of the reading is the atmosphere, the ambiance, as Antin put it, and the conversations around the poems. And that’s much harder to describe, harder to document, and harder to replicate in a digital environment.\n00:44:55\tIsabella Wang:\tIn any other circumstance, when we are, there is this live community happening in the backdrop. I would be more hesitant to just go online and hear the works of a poet reading on the internet because there is that community out there. And I’m like, “Why would I want to like, you know, see this somewhat flat screen of you when I can interact with you in person and engage?”\n00:45:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Isabella Wang, who had the idea to go online with the reading series she helps organize in Vancouver, BC: Dead Poets Reading Series.\n00:45:33\tIsabella Wang:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly series at the Vancouver Public Library. We invite like four or five local poets to come and share the work of a dead poet. And so this happened around the time where everything around Vancouver—I mean everything, like not just in Vancouver, but everything—was getting cancelled. And so of course our reading series was also canceled, too, and we had four readers who no longer could come and share their work. I actually… It’s funny you mentioned rob because I actually got the idea from him. And so when I started hearing that “Oh no, we might not actually be able to put on this reading series at the Vancouver Public Library,” I was like, “Hey, rob is doing this thing. How can we maybe try to, you know, move this online?” And initially we were just planning to feature the four readers who couldn’t read anymore. But then it was kind of intuitive and it made sense. I was like, now that we featured Kathy Mak and Natalie Lim, who were supposed to be on the series, let’s start reaching out to more folks and it just started there.\n00:46:47\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bit of a ghostly series to begin with. [Begin Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental] So how did it work transferring this series into an online environment?\n00:46:58\tIsabella Wang:\tThe reading series has definitely transformed a lot. Some poets were saying how, you know, it’s hard for them to film themselves reading at home just because there isn’t that reciprocal audience thing going on anymore and it’s kind of like numbing. But at the same time, what the digital-like realm is so good at bringing out is a different sense of community where like before we were so limited to audiences just in Vancouver. And so that limited a lot of not only who our readers were, but also what kind of dead poets were being shared and spread. And so for the first time I think we were able to bring in a lot of      our friends from different places that normally we would only get to see on social media anyway. And it was when the series started that I realized, “Oh my gosh, I’ve known you and you and you like for so long. And this is actually the first time I’ve seen you, you know, move and be alive. And this is the first time I’ve ever heard you read.”\n00:48:05\tJason Camlot:\tI asked Isabella about her experience of listening to readings online versus in person.[End Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental]\n00:48:10\tIsabella Wang:\tWhat’s really changed is the interactive environment, that lively, bustling atmosphere that is somewhat changed now with, you know, this going online. ‘Cause I think part of the literary experience is that interaction, that engagement with poets like before and after they read. You know, ’cause it’s nice to hear Fred Wah read, but it’s also nice to just talk to him and make jokes with him, like, you know, by his side in the audience. And that’s not really there anymore. And that’s what’s been transformed mostly into the, into social media now. And so there’s still that, I think, you know, the liking and sharing and commenting. But it’s more invisible, it’s something that is more of an… Like you see it after they post something but it’s not that immediate anymore.\n00:49:09\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really interesting. Yeah, I love the idea of response happening in a different temporal sort of timeframe than the actual event, is really interesting. And also in a different media format, so that instead of leaning over to someone and whispering or nudging them with your elbow and exchanging a kind of feeling about what you just heard, it’s being experienced later in a tweet or something like that.\n00:49:33\tIsabella Wang:\tAnd I think it’s also like the function is kind of different because, you know, when you’ve always had that community that you go to like day in and day out, you know, you love seeing the people you see, but kind of take it for granted. It’s like, “Oh yeah, next week I’ll see them again.” And, you know, there will always be literary events. And I think, I think this period just shows us how      important that community and those like events really are to us. And so part of that, social media like that, commenting and interaction is part of just supporting each other and making sure that we’re still going and there is still a sense of community somewhere.\n00:50:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn a poetry reading, you are listening to the poetry, but you’re also listening to community. So the challenge then becomes how to create and make audible that community online. I was so interested in how Isabella’s idea for taking Dead Poets online came from an invitation to read in an online series that went online on that very same weekend of March 14th–15th, 2020. That reading series is hosted on the online journal Periodicities and the poet behind it is Ottawa-based poet, reviewer, and publisher rob  . Jason and I spoke with rob in a video conference call and we asked him about what prompted him to start this online reading series.\n00:51:08\trob mclennan:\tThere are kind of a few factors in play. I’m one of the organizing reading series, founding reading series, of VERSefest, our annual poetry festival. This year would have been tenth, so… We realized, like, we were ten days out of our opening night and we realized like, yeah, this is not going to happen. We have to shut this down.\n00:51:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tWith the cancellation of Ottawa’s VERSfest, rob felt the absence of readings that would have happened. He was also starting up the online journal Periodicities and had the web space ready to curate a reading series. He reached out to poets and was met with an enthusiastic response of poets sending him videos of themselves reading poems. We asked him about his sense of how listeners are responding to all of this new content. Are they listening? But first one of Jason’s students, poet reading series curator and PhD candidate Klara du Plessis, was asking the same questions when some of these reading events started going online. She mentioned it in Jason’s class, so we thought we’d include her perspective before hearing from r     ob on this question.\n00:52:19\tKlara du Plessis:\tWell, yeah, I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about all these virtual poetry reading series, like multiple different people have started. So they kind of invite poets to read between like five and 15 minutes or so to record themselves reading either their own poetry or poetry by someone who’s already passed away and then these videos are posted online. And so I kind of got into a bit of a Twitter thing where I kind of questioned whether people were actually listening to these recordings or whether it was like something for poets to just be busy, so they’re doing something. And my poll discovered that half of the people said that they were super comforted by listening to these virtual poetry readings and felt a sense of connection and community as a result. And half of the other people said that it was like too overwhelming for them at this time to deal with, you know, listening to strange, like sometimes not very well produced audio recordings. I should also mention that I think I offended a few people with my question so I kind of regretted it after the fact.\n00:53:23\trob mclennan:\tI know early on I saw some social media posts of people saying like, “I appreciate that these things happen, but I just can’t deal with it right now.” You know, one or two other people saying like, “I don’t even know why this is happening.” Which is fine, I don’t expect every human on the planet to say, “This is awesome, I’m in.” That is not the point of any endeavor. But for those who might want it or require it, it is there. And for those who don’t want it, there are other things.\n00:53:52\tJason Camlot:\tI asked rob as he was watching these videos come in, if he noticed a blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private,\n00:53:59\trob mclennan:\tI have noticed that; it becomes slightly more intimate, right? Like as opposed to being public. I like watching people do stuff from inside their houses [Sound Effect: Clattering And Moving] or apartments or their, yeah, like you say, bedroom or from their living room table or their makeshift home office because not everyone has a home office. I find that more interesting than someone sending me a more produced video. I’m open to that. I’ve posted some of those. But I just find them just less interesting than something made just for this, with the limitations of that. So like the artifice is gone and one would hope that maybe that intimacy, like we require it now if we’re not able to get it in other ways. So it’s actually maybe helpful as someone… Whether watching or being the one making the video that is actually making this distance less difficult.\n00:54:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. No, I think that’s such a good point. And it’s, and also realizing that we’re kind of maybe even enjoying those readings a little bit more ’cause we’re not just hearing the person, we’re hearing sort of the space around them and they’re interacting with–\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah!\n00:55:07\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah.\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah, they’re not, they’re not at the same microphone, the same backdrop. It’s actually a little more interesting just watching the limitations of the space. Like, “Oh okay, someone has a smaller space than another person.” And just watching their personal effects behind them and none of those spaces really surprised me. Like, okay, yeah, this person is a little more formal than another person and this person feels a little bit more domestic, say. Yeah, I like it. And yeah, it does feel like a little bit more of a connection, but then maybe we’re just making that, we’re seeking that connection, so we’re finding that connection. That’s fine, too.\n00:55:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tSince the first set of videos [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] were uploaded to r     ob’s YouTube on March 15th, there are now over 70 videos and the collection seems to be growing each day. The videos are becoming an ecology of recordings in that they’re networked sounds and representative of the poetry community that they’re growing from. Listening to literature now and specifically poetry in a digital environment becomes a kind of ecological listening. We’re listening to interconnectedness and relationality and we’re also listening to an evolving digital soundscape. Just as the soundscapes around us are changing, public places that would be bustling are empty and the sound of a plane overhead [Sound Effect: Plane Flying By] suddenly stands out when otherwise it would fade into the background noise. Yes, our Murray Schafer was right. Noises are the sounds that we have learned to ignore. Meanwhile, projects like Cities and Memory are documenting the changing soundscapes. #StayHomeSounds invites you to listen to the sounds from the global coronavirus lockdown. And as we walk through our own neighbourhoods, we may notice streets sounding quieter and the chirping of birds sounding louder. Our sensory experiences of our inner and outer worlds have changed. As we listen inwards to ourselves, we still find ways to connect that try to replicate the social. Outside of our homes, there have been invitations—multiple times now—to the entire city of Montreal to join in balcony singalongs to Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne.” [End Music: Gentle Instrumental]\n00:57:22\tMusic:\t[Alvaro Echánove singing along to a livestream of Martha Wainwright singing “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen]\n00:57:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs the summer arrives, balconies will become even noisier as neighbours converse. We have conversations with neighbours we may never have spoken to before and simultaneously we’re even more connected globally. Our phones and computer screens become the new stages. [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] Live-streamed readings are happening like Poetry in the Time of Quarantine here in Montreal and Sound On InstaReadings Series that’s happening in Vancouver or really over Instagram. And large scale initiatives like Canada Performs have launched for musicians and other performing artists including now, thanks to Margaret Atwood, writers whose shows or book tours have been cancelled in the spring or summer. Unlike the streaming that so often is done without compensation to the artist, artists selected for Canada Performs will be paid $1,000 for their at-home performance to be broadcast on the National Arts Centre’s Facebook page. And yes, they do perform from their own home for us, the collective we, to tune in from our homes and listen together.\n00:58:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tBut as collective acts of singing and of listening draw us to our balconies and our computer screens, we can also find ourselves not feeling like joining in. With all of the possibilities for tuning into live streams, we can feel overwhelmed amid searching for something meaningful to listen to. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Back in the first week when everything was changing, I remembered feeling relieved that people like Isabella and r     ob were creating online readings, but I also remember feeling that I didn’t have the concentration to sit down and listen. And I remember thinking that when I feel more focused, or really when I feel a bit better, then I look forward to listening. When you don’t feel like listening that says something about how you’re feeling. When you ask someone how they are listening and if that’s changed, you’re really asking them how they’re doing.\n00:59:33\tJason Camlot:\tHey, let’s try that out. Hey Katherine, how are you listening?\n00:59:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m listening…fine, thanks. How are you listening, Jason?\n00:59:42\tJason Camlot:\tI’m listening pretty well. Thanks for asking. But let me ask you this. How are you really listening, Katherine?\n00:59:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tWell, Jason, how am I really listening? [Sighs] As much as we try to replicate the social, what we manage to produce within these digital environments is a version of the social that is both entirely real and entirely unreachable. We hear in it both closeness and distance and that is affecting. As much as we might try to listen to something that brings back the feeling of the social and the togetherness of before, we are beginning to face the reality of this change and what this change feels like and sounds like. We are listening differently now. Here. Here. Here.\n01:00:34\tMusic:\t[Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental]\n01:01:00\tNatalie Lim:\tHello from my kitchen! Thank you to Isabella and the whole Dead Poets Reading team for putting together this virtual reading. I’m really excited to be a part of it even though I’m bummed that we can’t see people in person this weekend, but we’re gonna hang out for like ten minutes, I’m gonna read some poetry, I got some water, it’s gonna be a good time.\n01:01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod of Concordia University and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Oana Avasilichioaei, Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Arjun Basu, Naomi Charron, Alexei Perry Cox, Nisha Coleman, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier     , Priscilla Joly, rob mclennan, Heather Pepper, Lindsay Presswell, Deanna Radford, Kian Vaziri-Tehrani, Brian Vass, and Isabella Wang for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":4.5446677},{"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":4.5446677},{"id":"10027","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 Events AV, Virtual Book Launch for CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event, 12 November 2020"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/virtual-book-launch-for-canlit-across-media-unarchiving-the-literary-event/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1OuJPlv2IO5zQ_wUO5LY2SRfrVcdVlY-k\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"camlot-jason-and-mcleod-katherine_canlit-across-media-launch_zoom_cu_2020-11-12.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:21:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"585,009,402 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"camlot-jason-and-mcleod-katherine_canlit-across-media-launch_zoom_cu_2020-11-12\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-11-12\",\"type\":\"Production 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"],"contents":["CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event is an innovative collection that evaluates diverse methods of recording, archiving, and remediating literature and literary culture in Canada.\n\n\nEditors Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod managed to hold one in-person launch for CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event before the COVID lockdown, but they were not able to launch the book with the contributors themselves.\n\n\nOn Thursday November 12, 7pm ET (4pm PT), join nearly all contributors to CanLit Across Media in a virtual conversation that promises to be one of liveliest and \"live\" book launches (on Zoom) you may ever attend!\n\n\nRSVP for the Zoom link here.\n\n\nFind out more about the book and how to order it from MQUP here.\n\n\nContributors:\n\nJordan Abel (University of Alberta)\n\nAndrea Beverley (Mount Allison University)\n\nClint Burnham (Simon Fraser University)\n\nJason Camlot (Concordia University)\n\nJoel Deshaye (Memorial University of Newfoundland)\n\nDeanna Fong (Simon Fraser University)\n\nCatherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada)\n\nDean Irvine (Agile Humanities)\n\nKarl Jirgens (University of Windsor)\n\nMarcelle Kosman (University of Alberta)\n\nJessi MacEachern (Concordia University)\n\nKatherine McLeod (Concordia University)\n\nLinda Morra (Bishop's University)\n\nKaris Shearer (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)\n\nFelicity Tayler (University of Ottawa)\n\nDarren Wershler (Concordia University)"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.mqup.ca/canlit-across-media-products-9780773558663.php\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason, and Katherine McLeod, editors. CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549829451776,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10028","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 Events AV,\nVirtual Listening Practice Guided by Faith Paré, 21 October 2020"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/virtual-listening-practice-guided-by-faith-pare/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Faith Paré","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Faith Paré","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Faith Paré\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1BbWZ_xaWyxZuT5q78ke3YwmSzaoh7c4h\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"Faith Paré_Final_Edited.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:01:00\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,664,737,683 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"Faith Paré_Final_Edited\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-21\",\"type\":\"Production 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"],"contents":["Black Noise: Poetics of Afro-Congregation\n\nIf dispersal created the Afro-diaspora, then who do we become when we are gathered? This SpokenWeb Listening Practice session will feature early thoughts on how Black creators across poetry, music, and performance have explored the soundscapes of congregated Blackness, from the hold of the slave ship to contemporary uprisings in urban centres across North America.\n\nBlack congregation has been a massive anxiety of, and threat toward, state power since Bois Caïman due to fear of revolt. Black congregation has also been a vehicle of social justice and healing. Together, we will first discuss the weaponization of sound against public gathering in the 21st century, before expanding into artistic considerations of how Black sociality serves as an antidote to hyper-individualism in Western economic, political, and cultural realms."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549829451777,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10029","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, All Team Meeting Zoom Concordia, 18 December 2020"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KHEHb7xFqYoqIvot6dcOdstUFlltN6SP\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"all-team-meeting_zoom_concordia_2020-12-18_zoom_0.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:52:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,312,136,429 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"all-team-meeting_zoom_concordia_2020-12-18_zoom_0\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-12-18\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Jason Camlot opened the meeting and introduced Ben Hymes who took over the\nCheck-ins: \nJason Camlot for Concordia University: Nearly done processing Words Music Collection, Allan Lord Collection\nRedescribing Sir Goerge William's Collection so that it works in Swallow\nHosted a number of events like Listening Practices, workshops, performances. Working on managing fellowships for curators and artists in residence.\nFelicity of University of Ottawa: were unable to do collection processing because archives are closed due to pandemic. Focused on event activities.\nBrian: working on automatic methods to diarize recordings.\nYin: Black Writers Out Loud in collaboration with SpokenWeb. Launching poetry on screens.\nMike, University of Alberta: Developing web portal and translating wire frames into design principles; collection processing, completed time stamping and metadata for a new collection from University of Alberta archives; \nInitiating the front end of Swallow\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549829451778,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10036","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 Events AV, Day 1 The Uses of Spoken Audio Collections in Research and Creation: New Literary Methods Keynotes, The Literary Audio Symposium, 2 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Al Filreis","Darren Wershler","Bill Kennedy"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Al Filreis","Darren Wershler","Bill Kennedy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/97812951\",\"name\":\"Al Filreis\",\"dates\":\"1956-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/19971732\",\"name\":\"Darren Wershler \",\"dates\":\"1966-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Bill Kennedy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"day1_session1.wav\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:53:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,961,128,960 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"day1_session1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-02\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549831548930,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["AL FILREIS (U Pennsylvania)\n\n“The Digital Curation of Audiotexts for Literary Research”\n\nThis talk will draw upon the case of PennSound and its approach to collecting, curating and augmenting content in order to establish a compelling digital environment for the study and appreciation of literary audiotexts. Using PennSound as a starting point, the main aim of this talk will be to frame fundamental questions about methodological approaches to the critical study of literary sound recordings, and will outline some strategies that digital spoken word archives may take to enhance research with these audible materials.\n\nAl Filreis is Kelly Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Publisher of Jacket2, and most importantly for the purposes of The Literary Audio Symposium, he is Co-Director of PennSound—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon, Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word.\n\nDARREN WERSHLER (Concordia U)\n\n“A Political Economy of Audio Collections, or, The Politics of Audiotextual Inheritance”\n\nThis talk will both explore the kinds of questions scholars and students might ask of literary audio collections, and work towards theorizing the ideological contexts that inform the formulation of such questions in the first place. Why have literary audio collections emerged as important materials for research and study? How are decisions about which collections will be digitized and preserved made? What are the generational politics that have arisen as a result of the ubiquity of poet’s archives? How do questions about humanities audio collections challenge some of the most basic methodologies that have informed literary studies for over a century? These are some of the questions that will be considered in this presentation with the aim of helping to frame discussion for the day’s work on spoken word collections and methodological approaches.\n\nDarren Wershler is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature (Tier 2) and a co-editor of Amodern. He conducts most of his research through AMPLab: between media & literature, and with the Technoculture, Art and Games group (TAG), an interdisciplinary centre that focuses on game studies, design, digital culture and interactive art. Darren is the author or co-author of 12 books, most recently, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (U of Toronto Press), and Update (Snare), with Bill Kennedy. With Jason Camlot he co-organized the “Approaching the Poetry Series” conference in 2013 and co-authored “Theses on Discerning The Reading Series”, published in Amodern 4 (2015) and has been a Co-Applicant through Camlot’s development of the spokenweb project. His expertise in Contemporary Poetics, Media history and Theory, Digital Humanities, and in questions of digital economy, positions him as an ideal interlocutor with Al Filreis on core questions surrounding the use of humanities audio collections for research.\n\nBILL KENNEDY (Intelligent Machines)\n\n“New Contexts for Old Voices: Rethinking the Literary Archive”\n\nBill Kennedy is the author of two books of poetry (with Darren Wershler and a team of trusty web robots), Apostrophe (ECW, 2006) and Update (Snare, 2010). A longtime literary organizer, Bill ran the Café May Reading Series in Toronto (with Michael Holmes) in the early 90s, and the Lexiconjury Reading Series (with Angela Rawlings) a decade later. He was also a ten-year Artistic Director of The Scream, an alternative literary festival in Toronto that ended its run in 2011. He has edited and designed several award-winning books poetry through Coach House Books. He currently curates the official bpNichol archive (bpnichol.ca, with Gregory Betts).\n\nIn real life, he is the Development Director of Intelligent Machines, a digital consultancy and development agency that works mainly in the arts, education and publishing sectors. He specializes in the theoretical, bureaucratic, technical and design issues that come with building online arts archives. He was the director of the first Artmob team, a York University research project focusing on intellectual property issues in arts archivism. He is currently working on several projects with the University of Berkeley in partnership with the Agile Humanities Agency. He is unreasonably giddy at the possibility of working on an archive of twenty years of Gilles Deleuze’s lectures, newly transcribed from extant audio tapes and translated into English, pending the vicissitudes of funding and the caprice of an uncaring universe.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10037","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 Events AV, Day 1 The Uses of Spoken Audio Collections in Research and Creation: New Literary Methods Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 2 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Deanna Fong","Tony Power"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Deanna Fong","Tony Power"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Tony Power\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"day1_session3.wav\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:40:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,738,286,080 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"day1_session3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-02\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549832597504,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["DEANNA FONG (Simon Fraser U)\n\n“Itinerant Audio-biography: Digitizing, Editing and Managing the Roy Kiyooka Digital Audio Archive”\n\nThis presentation will detail my activities digitizing, developing, annotating, and managing the audio archive of Canadian poet, Roy Kiyooka. Kiyooka’s archival fonds at Simon Fraser University contains over 400 analog audio recordings inscribed on a variety of media: cassettes, mini-cassettes, and reel-to-reels. Recorded between 1963 and 1988, a burgeoning period of literary and artistic production, the tapes record the voices of many of Vancouver’s avant-garde figures, such as Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Carole Itter, Al Neil, George Bowering, Alvin Balkin, and Gerry Gilbert. The focus of my presentation will be on the archive’s non-traditional audio genres, which include conversation, performance, ambient sound, and field recordings. I will outline the material, organizational and ethical challenges that these genres pose, attending to questions of navigation, access, privacy and consent.\n\nDeanna Fong is a poet and PhD student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersections of performance, audio archives, literary communities and intellectual property. She is a member of the federally funded SpokenWeb team, who have developed a web-based archive of digitized audio recordings for literary study. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the Fred Wah Archive, and is currently developing the digital audio archive of Canadian artist and poet Roy Kiyooka.\n\nTONY POWER (Simon Fraser U)\n\n“Literary Audio in SFU Library’s Contemporary Literature Collection”\n\nThe Contemporary Literature Collection in SFU Library’s Special Collections & Rare Books Division is a large, focused, mature collection of 20th & 21st C. avant-garde/’innovative’ poetry in English.  Dating from the founding of the university in 1965, it is comprised primarily of published and archival materials but also includes many audio recordings.  In this talk the collection’s curator will provide some background on the CLC as a whole, its history and definition and the collection policy that informs its contents.  With this as context, he will then describe the audio component of the collection – its size and content, the present state of its digitization, as well as the significance of its considerable overlap (as far as writers recorded) with the Sir George Williams poetry series recordings held in the Special Collections at Concordia University in Montreal.  This presentation will be coordinated with other participants from SFU, and in particular with Deanna Fong’s presentation on the audio holdings of a single author (Roy Kiyooka) held within the Contemporary Literature Collection.  \n\nTony Power is a special collections librarian (M.L.S.) at SFU Library.  Since 2000 he has been curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection. The CLC is a large, focused collection of 20th & 21st C. avant-garde/’innovative’ poetry in English. It is comprised primarily of published and archival materials but also includes many audio recordings\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways.\n\n"],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10038","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 Events AV, Day 2 Digital Preservation: Digitization, Cataloging, Storage, and Access Panel I, The Literary Audio Symposium, 3 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Jared Wiercinski","Tomasz Neugebauer","Tim Walsh"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Jared Wiercinski","Tomasz Neugebauer","Tim Walsh"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Jared Wiercinski\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/40170000303071901556\",\"name\":\"Tomasz Neugebauer\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Tim Walsh\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102517.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"02:06:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"303,144,750 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102517\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-03\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549832597505,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["TOMASZ NEUGEBAUER (Concordia U)\n\n“Selecting an access and digital preservation platform for humanities research in audio and video format: Avalon & Archivematica”\n\nConcordia University Library selected the combination of Avalon Media System and Archivematica as the access and digital preservation platform for revealing aggregation of a vast and diverse range of audio and video recordings relevant to humanities research. Avalon needs to be combined with software designed specifically for digital preservation tasks that ensure the enduring usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility a wide range of media over the very long term. In this presentation (co-delivered by Neugebauer and Wiercinski) we discuss the process of selecting an access and preservation platform and explain which aspects and features of Avalon facilitate the use of humanities audio and video content for unique curation, design and pedagogical-oriented projects.\n\nTomasz Neugebauer is the Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian at Concordia University, where he participates in the design, development and implementation of various library applications, including Spectrum Research Repository. His multidisciplinary research experience is focused on open digital repositories, information visualization, and open source software development. He has published in various scholarly and professional journals, including: PLoS One, Information Technology and Libraries, International Journal on Digital Libraries, International Journal of Digital Curation, Art Libraries Journal, Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Systems and Services: International digital library perspectives, and The Indexer. He was the primary investigator on the “Developing an Open Access Digital Repository for Fine Arts Research in Canada” grant (SSHRC, 2013) and an e-Artexte Researcher in Residence, instrumental in the launch of e-Artexte, Artexte’s library catalogue and digital repository for contemporary Canadian art publications.\n\nTIM WALSH (Canadian Centre for Architecture)\n\n“Selecting an Access and Digital Preservation Platform for Humanities Research in Audio and Video Format: Avalon & Archivematica”\n\nTim Walsh is the Digital Archivist at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), a research museum in Montréal dedicated to the notion that architecture is a public concern. Among his other tasks at CCA, Tim develops and manages workflows and software tools for processing born-digital archives, oversees development and use of CCA’s Archivematica-based digital preservation repository, and facilitates end user access of digital archives in the Study Room. He holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a BA in English from the University of Florida.\n\nJARED WIERCINSKI (Concordia U)\n\n“Selecting an access and digital preservation platform for humanities research in audio and video format: Avalon & Archivematica”\n\nConcordia University Library selected the combination of Avalon Media System and Archivematica as the access and digital preservation platform for revealing aggregation of a vast and diverse range of audio and video recordings relevant to humanities research. Avalon needs to be combined with software designed specifically for digital preservation tasks that ensure the enduring usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility a wide range of media over the very long term. In this presentation to be presented by Wiercinski and Neugebauer, we discuss the process of selecting an access and preservation platform and explain which aspects and features of Avalon facilitate the use of humanities audio and video content for unique curation, design and pedagogical-oriented projects.\n\nJared Wiercinski works as Interim Associate University Librarian (Research & Graduate Studies) at Concordia University where he is responsible for the development and coordination of the library’s user services and projects in support of research and graduate studies. As liaison librarian for the Departments of Music and Contemporary Dance, he supports students and faculty through collection development and research assistance. His research contributions, co-authored with Annie Murray, include publications and conference paper presentations on methodological and multimodal cognitive concerns surrounding the design of web-based sound archives. He was a co-applicant on the “SpokenWeb: Developing a Comprehensive Web-Based Digital Spoken Word Archive for Literary Research” grant (SSHRC, 2012) and a collaborator on the “The Spoken Web 2.0: Conceptualizing and Prototyping a Comprehensive Web-based Digital Spoken-Word Interface for Literary Research” grant (SSHRC, 2010).\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10039","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 Events AV, Day 4 Teaching with Sound: Digital Audio Pedagogy Panel I, The Literary Audio Symposium, 5 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Catherine Cormier-Larose","Kevin Austin"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Catherine Cormier-Larose","Kevin Austin"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/1425168453529466300006\",\"name\":\"Catherine Cormier-Larose\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kevin Austin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102523.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:58:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"283,985,502 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102523\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-05\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549833646080,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["KEVIN AUSTIN (Concordia U)\n\n“Ear Training in Electroacoustics”\n\nThis talk will introduce a variety of issues surrounding ‘ear-training’, or rather, refined hearing, in the domain of electroacoustics (referring to both acoustical engineering and, with examples, electroacoustic music). The starting premise of this talk is that hearing / listening, is all perception. The presentation will frame core questions surrounding ‘how’ auditory perception functions, and therefore considerations of the applicability of different kinds of tools to different data sets. This will include matters of sonic identity and character, and sonic transformation with understanding more deeply various models applicable to pattern identification for manual and automated sound searches.  The talk will also include a brief exploration of how symbolic notation / representation may be approached to develop concepts for multi-dimensional hearing, the fundamental proposition being that ‘how’ we hear will be at the educational core of auditory perception. The refinement of hearing increases the depth of perception, a skill applicable across disciplines, from music to text-sound composition, to spoken literature.\n\nKevin Austin, Professor of Music at Concordia University, is a Montreal-based composer, educator, arts animator and electroacoustics archivist. A specialist in electroacoustics – all areas, composition, theory [electroacoustics and music], ear-training and music history. For 25 years he was the Coordinator of the Concordia Electroacoustic Studies area at Concordia University. He was a Charter and Founding Member of the CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community), and the director of The Concordia Archival Project (CAP). This important initiative, funded by Heritage Canada through Canadian Culture Online, using the Concordia Tape Collection – over 3,000 pieces, has produced the largest single primary resource for the history of electroacoustics in Canada available anywhere in the world.\n\nCATHERINE CORMIER-LAROSE (Poetry In Voice)\n\n“Poetry In Voice: Teaching Poetry With Audio”\n\nThe Poetry In Voice project is a recitation contest for Canadian high schools. Its aim is to encourage young readers and students to become interested and involved in an appreciation of poetry through an engagement in the live, spoken performance of literary works. The project archives every one of its organized live readings, as well as selections from professional poets, as a means of providing modelling materials for its student users. Recordings of the recitations are essential to the project as they stand documentary examples for the students who use the PIV website. 875 Canadian high schools were involved in the PIV project last year; 50 000 students recited a poem at school level as a result of this involvement, and over a half a million people visited the PIV site. This presentation will report on the approach to live and online pedagogy through poetry performance that this project has pursued.\n\nCatherine Cormier-Larose is the Quebec French-language director of the Poetry in Voice project which organizes recitation competitions and online teaching tools to encourage poetry performance and appreciation in high schools across Canada. As the longstanding artist director of Les Productions ARREUH which organizes an annual festival, gala and numerous events of literary performance, she is deeply involved in the development of public reading as an important facet of community culture.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10040","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 Events AV, Day 3 Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization Keynotes, The Literary Audio Symposium, 4 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Steve McLaughlin","Tanya Clement"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Steve McLaughlin","Tanya Clement"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Steve McLaughlin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/335161696233716120004\",\"name\":\"Tanya Clement\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102519.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:57:27\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"281,871,672 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102519\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-04\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549833646081,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["TANYA CLEMENT (U Texas at Austin)\n\n“High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”\n\nCo-Presented with Steve McLaughlin.  Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing large, messy sound archives. In response to this lack, the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project is developing a research environment that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for describing unprocessed spoken-word collections of keen interest to humanists. This paper describes how we have developed, as a result of HiPSTAS, a machine learning system called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization). I describe a use case for finding moments of applause in the PennSound collection, which includes approximately 36,000 files comprising 6,200 hours of poetry performances and related materials. We conclude with a brief discussion about our preliminary results and some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about unprocessed spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.\n\nClement’s research centers on infrastructure information impacting academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools/resources in the digital humanities. Projects include High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship, “Improving Access to Time-Based Media through Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning” project. Important articles include: “Measured Applause: Toward a Cultural Analysis of Audio Collections.” Cultural Analytics 1; “A Rationale of Audio Text.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10; “The Ear and the Shunting Yard: Meaning Making as Resonance in Early Information Theory.” Information & Culture 49; and, “Distant Listening: On Data Visualisations and Noise in the Digital Humanities.” Text Tools for the Arts. Digital Studies 3.\n\nSTEVE McLAUGHLIN (U Texas at Austin)\n\n“High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”\n\nCo-Presented with Tanya Clement.  Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing large, messy sound archives. In response to this lack, the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project is developing a research environment that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for describing unprocessed spoken-word collections of keen interest to humanists. This paper describes how we have developed, as a result of HiPSTAS, a machine learning system called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization). I describe a use case for finding moments of applause in the PennSound collection, which includes approximately 36,000 files comprising 6,200 hours of poetry performances and related materials. We conclude with a brief discussion about our preliminary results and some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about unprocessed spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10041","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 Events AV, Day 3 Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 4 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Ian Ferrier","Louis Rastelli"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Ian Ferrier","Louis Rastelli"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/91437046\",\"name\":\"Ian Ferrier\",\"dates\":\"1954-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106193035\",\"name\":\"Louis Rastelli \",\"dates\":\"1969-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102521.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:51:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"267,929,600 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102521\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-04\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549833646082,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["IAN FERRIER (Wired on Words)\n\n“The Wired on Words Analogue Audio Collection”\n\nAfter curating a spoken word poetry series for over fifteen years, and recording each and every reading and performance over that period, what to we do with the boxes of cassette tapes, mini discs, DAT tapes, and digital audio files on USB that comprise the the collection of audio that documents the events of the series? Ian Ferrier will discuss the nature and significance of the documentation of the Wired on Words reading series that he has curated since 2000, and present his organizations collection as a case study for considering the different kinds of digital development one might take in rendering such a historical series accessible and usable by researchers, artists and the wider public.\n\nIan Ferrier is a pioneer in Canada’s spoken word poetry scene. A musician and composer as well as a poet, he currently tours Canada, the States and Europe in solo performance and with the spoken word/music/dance company For Body and Light. He is a founder of the spoken word and music label Wired on Words, curator and host of Montreal’s monthly Words & Music Show which has been presenting poets monthly since 2000, and director of the annual Mile End Poets Festival which started in 2009. essays have appeared in Journal of the Americas and Canadian Theatre Review as well as in the online Canadian Review of Literature in Performance (LITLIVE.CA), a journal he co-founded in 2009. He has taught at the Banff Centre and is a past-president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. In 2011 he was the recipient of what is now the League of Canadian Poets’ Golden Beret Award for outstanding contributions to spoken word.\n\nLOUIS RASTELLI (Archive Montreal)\n\n“The Audio Materials of Archive Montreal”\n\nThis contribution will present the audio collection held by the non-profit community organization Archive Montreal, which consists of thousands of hours of audio materials relevant to community cultural activities in Montreal from the 1950s to the present in a wide range of formats ranging from wire recordings, reel tape, cassettes, acetates, vinyl, DAT tapes, minidiscs, CDs, etc. How should such a collection be catalogued, digitized and presented online for use in research and community activities? What audiences may such a community-developed collection serve, and how might this collection be enhanced through collaborative efforts around digital preservation platforms and collection aggregation with other kinds of institutions, for example, universities? These are the questions we will seek to explore in bringing forward the ARCMTL materials as a case study for consideration at The Literary Audio Symposium.\n\nLouis Rastelli is the founding director of Archive Montreal (ARCMTL), a non-profit community archive centre which serves as a valuable reference for researchers and provides material for use in exhibits and projects touching on Montreal culture and history. Archive Montreal’s preservation activities involve the ongoing acquisition of independently produced local cultural artifacts and publications in multiple formats. Deeply involved in numerous community outreach activities, including the distroboto art dissemination programme, Expozine: Montreal’s largest annual small press fair, and a weekly Archive Montreal radio show, on which audio content from the archive is played, ARCMTL’s participation will bring extensive experience in the development of a community-focused archive and will contribute not only to discussion of the digital development of ARCMTL’s holdings, but to questions of audience and use of the kinds of archival materials.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10042","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 Events AV, Day 3 Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization Panel I, The Literary Audio Symposium, 4 December 2016 "],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Patrick Feaster","Steven High"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Patrick Feaster","Steven High"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/21877397\",\"name\":\"Patrick Feaster \",\"dates\":\"1971-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/48918685\",\"name\":\"Steven High\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102520.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:50:34\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"265,375,868 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102520\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-04\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549834694656,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["PATRICK FEASTER (University of Indiana, Bloomington)\n\n“Putting Existing Tools to Unanticipated Purposes in Audio Digitization”\n\nAs we go about surveying software applications that are available to us for cultivating our heritage of literary audio in various ways, it’s worth bearing in mind that—with a little creative thinking—we can sometimes put existing tools to uses that differ significantly from their intended ones.\n\nI’ll first illustrate this point in connection with a couple pieces of software recently developed for Indiana University: MediaRIVERS /MediaSCORE, designed to quantify the value and “degralescence” risk of audiovisual collections, and a Physical Object Database designed to track media objects passing through our digital preservation workflow. We created these tools to answer some specific needs which existing software didn’t seem capable of satisfying, but in both cases we’ve ended up putting them to unanticipated uses as our circumstances have evolved—often successfully, but with limitations, as I’ll explain through a brief case study of Orson Welles broadcast recordings held by our Lilly Library.\n\nI’ll then delve into some even more radical cases of repurposing. For the past nine years, I’ve participated in efforts to educe (i.e., “play” or “play back”) older representations of sound on paper, including phonautograms of dramatic oratory recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s and paper prints made from gramophone discs of poetry recited by inventor Emile Berliner in the 1880s. This work has been carried out primarily with software designed for other spheres of application, such as ImageToSound and AudioPaint, both intended to support experimental sound art. I’ll describe the strategies and challenges involved in applying these programs meaningfully to historical inscriptions, as well as some striking results achieved to date by doing so. However, our need to rely on “repurposed” software in this work is now receding. By way of conclusion, I’ll introduce Picture Kymophone, a new program I’ve written specifically for playing phonautograms and other similar sources, and outline some remaining desiderata for the future.\n\nPatrick Feaster received his doctorate in folklore and ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he is now Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative. A three-time Grammy nominee, co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and immediate past president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, he has been actively involved in locating, making audible, and contextualizing many of the world’s oldest sound recordings.\n\nSTEVEN HIGH (Concordia U)\n\n“Beyond the Juicy Quotes Syndrome: Building Digital Tools and Platforms in Partnership with Source Communities”\n\nIf the “archival turn” has taught us anything, it is that archives are not neutral sites of storage and preservation. Extractive approaches to data-collection and analysis risk ignoring the ways in which “the archive itself orders the material within its realm, and the possibilities of knowledge production” (Geiger et al, 2010). We must therefore go beyond what Mike Savage calls the “juicy quotes syndrome,” to engage with the project archive as an object of study and to re-imagine how we design and build them. Building on past work as part of Montreal Life Stories, which recorded the life stories of 500 Montrealers displaced by mass violence, we recently embarked on a new project that will result in the Living Archive of Rwandan Exiles and Genocide Survivors. This online archive will enable researchers and community members to follow threads, identify patterns, track changes, map, and listen in new ways to more than 90 hours of video recorded interviews. We intend to do this in partnership with survivors, forging a methodology around participatory database-building where the coding, access conditions and research infrastructure itself serve both university-based researchers and community needs. A toolkit of inter-operable and freely available open source tools is also being developed, and will likewise be developed in collaboration with the source community.\n\nSteven High is the co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and has spent a number of years on the development of digital tools that will facilitate the analysis of recorded oral history interviews at varying scales. He is also examining the potential of collaboratively produced “living archives” where researchers work closely with ‘source communities.’ He was a member of the Spokenweb research team and contributed to the special issue of Amodern on oral literature.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10043","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 Events AV, Day 2 Digital Preservation: Digitization, Cataloging, Storage, and Access Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 3 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Lee Hannigan","Michael O’Driscoll","Cecily Devereux"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Lee Hannigan","Michael O’Driscoll","Cecily Devereux"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lee Hannigan\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31722451\",\"name\":\"Cecily Devereux\",\"dates\":\"1963-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102518.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:48:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"260,680,098 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102518\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-03\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549983592448,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["LEE HANNIGAN (U Alberta)\n\n“Not Listening: Preliminary Initiatives for Inventorying and Cataloguing Literary Audio Corpora”\n\nThis presentation will identify the core questions one must ask upon preliminary examination of an audio collection. The University of Alberta (UA) has hosted and recorded regular reading events since the mid-1960s and holds a collection of recorded poetry readings consisting of over 100 media objects (reel-to-reel, cassette tape and digital formats) containing at least as many hours of audio. This collection, in the process of being inventoried, seems to hold a coherent set of recordings of the UA Writer-in-Residence Program (WiR) that has run uninterrupted for forty years, a series of recorded readings held during the “Poet & Critic Conference” of 1969, and an extensive set of reel-to-reel recordings that hold local readings by poets from across North America. The core research questions to be explored pertain to fundamental issues in cataloguing, organization and prioritization of the materials, in relation to questions of available resources for digitization and development and the identification of potential audiences for segments of the collection.\n\nPhD candidate Hannigan earned his MA from Concordia University in 2015, where he worked for two years as a research assistant with the SpokenWeb project. His Master’s Major Research Project, titled “The Critical Archive: A textual analysis of the SpokenWeb project,” considered the possibility of studying the literary reading series as a coherent object. Hannigan’s first academic publication (Al Flamenco and Aurelio Meza), titled “Reading Series Matter: Performing the SpokenWeb Project,” will appear in Making Humanities Matter, part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). His Doctoral dissertation will be the first material, theoretical, and sociopolitical analysis of the characteristics of the concept of removal in late-20th and 21st-century American poetry. His presentation on the University of Alberta audio holdings will provide important case study material for the symposium, allowing him to frame core questions that are at the centre of his Doctoral research.\n\nMICHAEL O’DRISCOLL (U Alberta)\n\n“Audiographic Coding, or, Whose Sound is this Anyway?”\n\nProceeding from both Jacques Derrida’s insight the “archivization produces as much as it records the event” and Jerome McGann’s case for “bibliographic coding,” this presentation will consider the status of the digital artifact that is the remediated spokenword object, with particular attention to the “audiographic coding” of the digital file. How does technology listen? And how, in the UAlberta collection, will that listening condition the work of researchers and students of literary performance? SpokenWest will digitize and make publicly available the rich archive of recorded creative readings held at UAlberta since 1969, featuring readings by many authors of international prominence. This panel will introduce the UAlberta collection, which includes four priority fonds, including fifty-six reel to reel recordings produced 1969-82 and twenty-five cassette recordings dated 1973-86, as well as recordings conducted at several major conferences (1969, 1975, 1978) that highlight presentations by major literary figures.\n\nO’Driscoll is co-lead in the development and implementation of a digitized archive of five decades of creative readings at the University of Alberta, and the collaborative design of portable research methodologies and pedagogical strategies focused on the material production, circulation, reception, and analysis of oral literary performance. His disciplinary expertise in the areas of archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies are relevant to the successful outcome of this project. He has extensive experience in the design and execution of major collaborative research projects. As former Associate Dean Research, he oversaw the activities of the University of Alberta’s Arts Resource Centre, a team of nine computing and multimedia experts focused on the support of social science and humanities researchers.\n\nCECILY DEVEREUX (U Alberta)\n\n“SpokenWest: Creative Reading Recordings at UAlberta, 1969-1986”\n\nFrom the late 1960s to the 1990s, the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta developed and maintained a collection of cassette recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work. These materials were part of a larger collection of audio cassettes used primarily for teaching. Materially ephemeral and in some cases absolutely unique, the cassettes represent not only an important record from the department that houses the longest-running Writer in Residence program in Canada, they are also part of a much larger national archive of creative communities in the\n\npost-Centennial era in Canada. They thus serve at this time as a compelling case study of non-professional, intermittent, institutionally housed recordings of late twentieth-century author readings in Canada–and, crucially, of the lives of the media on which they have been reproduced. This paper considers the nature and the implications of anachronistic and disintegrating media for the teaching and study of late twentieth-century literary culture in Canada, and makes a case for the importance of digital preservation for public access to cultural histories.\n\nCecily Devereux is Chair of the Research Board of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de Littérature Canadienne at the University of Alberta. She has been working with student research assistants and colleagues in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta for more than a decade to catalogue, safely store, and move toward the preservation and digitization of the department’s collection of cassette and reel-to-reel recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10044","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 Events AV, Day 4 Teaching with Sound: Digital Audio Pedagogy Keynote, The Literary Audio Symposium, 5 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Jentery Sayers"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Jentery Sayers"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/42150083796914941563\",\"name\":\"Jentery Sayers\",\"dates\":\"1978-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102522.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:45:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"253,174,596 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102522\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-05\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549985689600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["JENTERY SAYERS (U Victoria)\n\n“Prototyping Impressions of Sound: Pedagogy across the Lab and Gallery”\n\nWhile many digital methodologies rely on tools for recording, analyzing, and visualizing sound, they may also prompt us to “remake” or prototype historical audio. Drawing on research conducted across a humanities lab and art gallery at the University of Victoria, this talk foregrounds the pedagogical affordances of such remaking. It focuses on what may have been the first magnetic recording, conducted in Denmark in 1898 during various experiments with volatile impressions on piano wire. Today, no audio from these experiments exists, and all visual evidence of them is speculative at best. However, enough detail remains to re-perform them with new technologies in the present moment. As a form of laboratory research, prototyping early audio becomes an opportunity to learn about its material composition as well as the embodied contexts of its reproduction. Installing these prototypes in a gallery setting encourages people to test them and also attend to how differences emerge across recordings. As a collaboration involving the arts and humanities, this prototyping process ultimately privileges a historical approach to sound that resists empiricism via screen-based tools and instead fosters a shared space for contingencies to speak.\n\nJentery Sayers bring expertise in digital pedagogy that involves teaching with sound in humanities contexts. He is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria. His sound studies publications include, “Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording” (American Literature 85.4) and “An Archaeology of Edison’s Metal Box” (Victorian Review 38.2). He is the editor of two forthcoming collections, Making Humanities Matter (U. of Minnesota Press, Debates in the Digital Humanities series) and the Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (Routledge). He is also the co-editor of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (Modern Language Association, with Davis, Gold, and Harris). At the University of Victoria, he teaches courses in media studies, digital studies, critical theory, and U.S. fiction after 1940.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10045","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 Events AV, Day 4 Teaching with Sound: Digital Audio Pedagogy Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 5 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Annie Murray","Jason Wiens","Jordan Bolay"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Annie Murray","Jason Wiens","Jordan Bolay"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31170924535890151440\",\"name\":\"Annie Murray\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106059085\",\"name\":\"Jason Wiens \",\"dates\":\"1973-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/56158427835306060257\",\"name\":\"Jordan Bolay\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102524.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:57:08\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"137,104,196 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102524\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-05\",\"type\":\"Production 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_":1853670549986738176,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["ANNIE MURRAY (U Calgary)\n\n“Overcoming institutional barriers to engagement with sound and media archives”\n\nIn this presentation, Murray will address some of the barriers that prevent libraries and archives from developing accessible media archives, and will discuss the path that the University of Calgary is taking to overcome them. She will describe a large-scale audio digitization project currently underway, and how it can benefit the literary recordings in our care. She will outline the themes of fundraising, inter-departmental cooperation, relationship building, and risk taking as keystones in Calgary’s approach to developing capacity in the preservation of media-rich archives, with the aim of framing discussion around the prevalence of barriers and the ways around them for large-scale audio digitization projects.\n\nAndrea (Annie) Murray is Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at the University of Calgary. She oversees significant archival and rare book holdings, particularly in the field of Canadian cultural production. As a Co-Applicant on the Spokenweb project (Camlot, PI), she contributed to the development of the first Spokenweb interface, has co-presented project findings at the conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, and has co-authored articles that appeared in First Monday and Digital Humanities Quarterly, with Jared Wiercinski from Concordia University.\n\nJASON WIENS (U Calgary)\n\n“Incorporating Archival Audio Practices in Teaching”\n\nBuilding upon Wiens’ recent course design and implementation, this presentation asks how we might best ask students to examine archival audio sources alongside published literary texts, and then to engage in a digitization project of selections from the archival fonds of literary recordings held in the University of Calgary collections. With the aim of bringing to the classroom an awareness of the material conditions under which literature is produced, my discussion will consider not only how students might integrate archival records in literary analysis but contribute to the archive by institutional digitization projects.\n\nWiens is a Tenure-Track Instructor in English at U Calgary with a research and teaching focus in Canadian literature, archives, pedagogy and contemporary poetry. He has developed courses in which students digitize and curate materials from Canadian writers archives. Wiens’ recent work extends this curricular development to include archival audio holdings, with the aim of exploring their pedagogical applications.\n\nJORDAN BOLAY (U Calgary)\n\n“Re-teaching reading and listening through experimental poetry and audio archives”\n\n“How do you grow a poet?” Robert Kroetsch famously asks in his long poem Seed Catalogue. The second half of the 20th century saw many new poets and types of poetry growing in Canada. Of particular interest to scholars (and of particular difficulty for students) are the formally experimental poets of the post-structural movement, including Earle Birney, bp nicol, and occasional works by Kroetsch (i.e. The Ledger). This paper will examine how audio recordings of these poets’ work, housed in the University of Calgary’s Special Collections Archive, can give direction to students’ readings but also destabilise the notion of singular linear ways of reading or hearing a text. My hope is that this research will demonstrate both the importance of oral readings in the classroom and of audio recordings in the archive.\n\nJordan Bolay is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on the intersection of contemporary Canadian poetics, archives and methodologies of the archeology of discourse and knowledge. He is presently focusing on the writing of Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch and of the Canadian West in a broader sense. His participation in The Literary Audio Symposium will complement his research interests and allow him to apply his knowledge of Kroetsch to a consideration of the possibilities for research and teaching of the Kroetsch audio recordings in the University of Calgary collections.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10047","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 Events AV, Deep Curation II, 14 February 2019"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/deep-curation-2/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Klara du Plessis","Deanna Fong","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Klara du Plessis","Deanna Fong","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2019-02-14 Deep Curation II February 14, 2019.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:52:23\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"940,869,124 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"2019-02-14 Deep Curation II February 14, 2019\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-02-14\",\"type\":\"Production 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Join us for a Deep Curation poetry reading, an experimental approach to literary event organization, the curator selecting the works to be read, as well as the thematic arc of the works' placement and progression in relation to one another.\nThis reading will synthesize poetry and scholarship by members of the SpokenWeb team to form a vibrant, challenging, and cross-genre listening experience. SpokenWeb is a research initiative based at Concordia University's English Department.\n\nReaders: Jason Camlot, Klara du Plessis, Deanna Fong, Katherine McLeod\nCurator: Klara du Plessis"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"On \\\"amplab storage 2\\\"\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549986738177,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10048","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 Events AV, Pussy Listening: Building an Activist Listening Practice, Literary Listening, 13 November 2024"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/institutes/#/spokenweb-futures-new-projects-collections-methods-collaborations"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Nina Sun Eidsheim"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Nina Sun Eidsheim"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/316557652\",\"name\":\"Nina Sun Eidsheim\",\"dates\":\"1975-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"4SPHDR__2411131454_0034.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"02:00:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,432,829,304 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"4SPHDR__2411131454_0034\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-11-13\",\"type\":\"Production 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Nina Sun Eidsheim will offer a workshop entitled “Pussy Listening” as part of Jason Camlot’s new Literary Listening series. 4th Space, Concordia University, Mezzanine, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West. 3pm – 5 pm. Description: “Pussy Listening: Building an Activist Listening Practice” – To be wherever we are in our lives and work now, a large portion of our lives to this point must have been (inadvertently) dedicated to listening correctly and to avoid listening “incorrectly.” This kind of relationship to listening comes from a place of submission and forwards the agenda of those in power. In contrast, “pussy listening” is a life-making and meaning-making action. I assume everybody draws on the magic of pussy listening daily, however, to protect our own safety, we may not don’t recognize it as such. This participatory session is dedicated to recognizing pussy listening."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786752,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10049","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 Events AV, Sounding New Sonic Approaches, 12 February 2024"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/sounding-new-sonic-approaches/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Annie Murray","Klara du Plessis","Mathieu Aubin","Julia Polyck-O’Neill","Jason Wiens","Kelly Baron","Nina Sun Eidsheim","Juliette Bellocq","Daniel Martin","Kristen Smith","Gascia Ouzounian","Ellen Waterman","Katharina Fürholzer","Kristin Moriah","Mara Mills","Andy Slater"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Annie Murray","Klara du Plessis","Mathieu Aubin","Julia Polyck-O’Neill","Jason Wiens","Kelly Baron","Nina Sun Eidsheim","Juliette Bellocq","Daniel Martin","Kristen Smith","Gascia Ouzounian","Ellen Waterman","Katharina Fürholzer","Kristin Moriah","Mara Mills","Andy Slater"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31170924535890151440\",\"name\":\"Annie Murray\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/43152682594823312099\",\"name\":\"Julia Polyck-O’Neill\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106059085\",\"name\":\"Jason Wiens\",\"dates\":\"1973-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kelly Baron\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/316557652\",\"name\":\"Nina Sun Eidsheim\",\"dates\":\"1975-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Juliette Bellocq\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Daniel Martin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristen Smith\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/15149233544176512036\",\"name\":\"Gascia Ouzounian\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106069023\",\"name\":\"Ellen Waterman\",\"dates\":\"1963-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/244144647692026868411\",\"name\":\"Katharina Fürholzer\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/305268048\",\"name\":\"Kristin Moriah\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/1340148523891920970006\",\"name\":\"Mara Mills\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Andy Slater\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"4SPHDR__2402121559_0001.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:03:54\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"19,485,292,484 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"4SPHDR__2402121559_0001\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-02-12\",\"type\":\"Production 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["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 Concordia’s Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, the issue, designed to explore the ways in which 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. The issue is substantial in its contributions to imagining new ways of combining literary studies and sound studies, and it warrants a public celebration.\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. What is the sound of “New Sonic Approaches”? What would this journal issue sound like as a chorus or collage of voices? This event will enact the idea of sounding and performing a scholarly collection as a kind of poetic reading of criticism. Each contributor has been invited to select an excerpt to perform, and the performances will unfold in sequence as a long collaborative work that speaks to questions of literary expression, performance, sounding, and listening.\n\nJoin us for the unfolding of this performance, a live recording session of a future scholarly soundwork, to listen, and at times, to add to the sounds of the event as it unfolds."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786753,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10050","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 Events AV, Eight Voices: Finalists for the First QWF Spoken Word Prize, 4 November 2022"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/eight-voices-finalists-for-the-first-qwf-spoken-word-prize/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Caitlin Murphy","Debbie Braide","Erín Moure","Johanne Pelletier","Liana Cusmano","Lucia De Luca","Raïssa Simone","Roen “Blu’Rva” Higgins"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Caitlin Murphy","Debbie Braide","Erín Moure","Johanne Pelletier","Liana Cusmano","Lucia De Luca","Raïssa Simone","Roen “Blu’Rva” Higgins"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Caitlin Murphy \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Debbie Braide\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Erín Moure\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Johanne Pelletier\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Liana Cusmano\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lucia De Luca\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Raïssa Simone\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Roen “Blu’Rva” Higgins\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"221104-1254_8Voices.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:03:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"9,550,916,668 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"221104-1254_8Voices\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-04\",\"type\":\"Production 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["In an exciting world premiere, the eight finalists for the inaugural Quebec Writers’ Federation Spoken Word Prize will offer short performances showcasing their talents. The prize is open to all forms of spoken word performance, from storytelling to sound poetry, hip hop, and dub. Presented by the Quebec Writers’ Federation and Concordia’s SpokenWeb project, the event will be hosted by poet and SpokenWeb director Jason Camlot. For more information on the performers, see the finalist list below.\n\nIn accordance with public health guidelines, mask wearing is optional, though strongly encouraged. For those that cannot attend in person, the event will be livestreamed on the 4th Space Youtube channel. The 4th Space is fully accessible from the Maisonneuve entrance, with an elevator located at metro level for those travelling underground.\n\nCaitlin Murphy is a writer, director, and dramaturg. She has performed in one-woman shows, stand-up and sketch comedy, and a web-series she created called Mothers Try. Caitlin has also written and directed plays and short films and recently launched a digital collection of her pandemic-related art, Candy for Covid.\n\nDebbie Braide is an energy and development specialist, spoken word poet, World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and British Chevening alumna. An Abuja Literary Society Poetry Slam Champion, she has performed for such organizations as the United States Embassy and VSO International. She is committed to sustainable development and gender equity.\n\nErín Moure is a poet and poetry translator. Her most recent work includes Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz, 2021) and her own chapbooks Retooling for a Figurative Life (Vallum, 2021) and Arborescence (Columba, 2022). Her translation of Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life(Book*hug, 2020) won the 2021 Governor General’s Award for translation.\n\nJohanne Pelletier is a storyteller with work featured in Canada and the US. She is the winner of the GRIT 99-Second Story Grand Slam, the producer of Good Gyn-Bad Gyn: Women’s Health Stories, and an amateur boxing judge. She teaches storytelling to scientists and start-ups.\n\nLiana Cusmano (Luca/BiCurious George) is a writer, poet, spoken word artist, and filmmaker. They were the 2018 and 2019 Montreal Slam Champion and runner up in the 2019 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championship. Their first novel, Catch and Release (2022), was published by Guernica Editions.\n\nLucia De Luca is an English teacher and spoken word poet. She was a finalist at the 2021 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam and recently participated in Brickyard Spoken Word’s mentorship program. As an organizer, she brought McGill University its first slam and, in the summer of 2022, oversaw the Grove Campus Poetry Show.\n\nRaïssa Simone is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). She has competed at numerous national poetry slams and been invited to perform at multiple spoken word shows, including the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, Toronto International Poetry Slam, Hillside Festival, and When Sisters Speak.\n\nRoen “Blu’Rva” Higgins is an award-winning spoken word poet, educator, speaker, and creative evangelist. As the founder of The Elevated Creative, her mission is to elevate others through creative literacy and help them find their flow and tap into their genius zone."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786754,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10051","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 Events AV, NOTA: Next on the Agenda–Writing Futures in Quebec, 4 October 2022"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/nota-next-on-the-agenda-writing-futures-in-quebec/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Rachel McCrum"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Rachel McCrum"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Rachel McCrum\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"221004-0950SW.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"06:40:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,485,623,038 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"221004-0950SW\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-10-04\",\"type\":\"Production 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["NOTA is a conference for English-language writers, publishers, event organizers, and literary professionals to discuss the changing contexts for literature and to explore how writing careers are developed, supported, and sustained in Quebec in 2022.\n\nNOTA Program (10am – 5pm)\n\n• 9.30am: arrival and coffee\n\n• 10.00am – 10.15am: Opening remarks\n\n• 10.15am – 11.30am: Long Literary COVID: How has the pandemic changed our literary practices and communities? Speakers: SpokenWeb: Jason Camlot, Tomasz Neugebauer, Francisco Berizzbeitia; The Violet Hour Reading Series & Book Club: Chris DiRaddo; Metatron Press: Ashley Opheim; Quebec Writers Federation: Lori Schubert.\n\n• 11.30am – 12.45pm: Quebec Writers’ Federation - Have Your Say!\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #1(in person): Building a Career as a Writer (getting published, building a reputation, using an agent, etc.) Facilitator: Tahieròn:iohte Dan David (Kanienkeha:ka)\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #2 (in person): Connecting to the French Literary Community (getting books translated, collaborating, etc.) Facilitator: Julie Barlow\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #3 (online): Making a Living as a Writer (freelancing, mentoring, finding and applying for grants, understanding copyright, etc.) Facilitator: stephanie roberts\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #4 (online): Support Services for Writers (mental health, disabled, queer & racialized writers’ issues, independent authors, etc.) Facilitator: Christie Huff\n\n• 12.45pm – 1.30pm: Lunch (suggestions for venues provided for those onsite)\n\n• 1.30pm – 1.45pm: Special Presentation, TBC\n\n• 1.45pm – 2.45pm: Making the Writing Life Sustainable. Moderated by Rachel McCrum. Speakers: Klara du Plessis, Erín Moure, and tbc.\n\n• 2.45 – 3.00pm: Coffee break\n\n• 3.00pm – 4.15pm: Challenging the Field: Black Publishing and Writing in Canada. Moderated by Firoze Manji. Speakers: H. Nigel Thomas, Kwame Scott Fraser, Dorothy Williams, and Yara El-Ghadban.\n\n• 4.15pm – 4.30pm: Presentation by Espace de la Diversité//Diversity District\n\n• 4.30pm – 5.00pm: Closing remarks"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786755,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10052","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 Events AV, A Belly Full of Vlarf: a Poetry Book Launch by Jason Camlot and John Emil Vincent, 26 November 2021"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page"],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/a-belly-full-of-vlarf-a-poetry-book-launch-by-jason-camlot-and-john-emil-vincent/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","John Emil Vincent"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","John Emil Vincent"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/12560703\",\"name\":\"John Emil Vincent\",\"dates\":\"1969-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"contributors_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"Presenter_name":["Katherine McLeod"],"Performance_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VMlQ7xNMy6JN2li4hkMyeFkril4DAY9W\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"211126-1632.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"02:00:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,188,567,815 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"211126-1632\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-26\",\"type\":\"Performance 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["A Belly Full of Vlarf. Seriously fun readings from brand new poetry books by Concordia faculty Jason Camlot and John Emil Vincent. Hosted by Katherine McLeod.\n\nDESCRIPTION AND FORMAT:\n\nInspired by the long-format readings held at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in the 1960s, this book launch will celebrate two new titles, Jason Camlot’s Vlarf and John Emil Vincent’s Bitter in the Belly (both published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press), with substantial readings and presentations of the books by the authors. Katherine McLeod will moderate the proceedings as the poets alternate between readings of 25 minutes each (x2), allowing the audience to experience a substantial performance with commentary by the authors of these new home-grown collections. Each book creates its own gleefully strange and sadly hilarious world from a wide gamut of emotions and texts. It will be a poetry event of the fun variety.\n\nThe format will be hybrid. 25 in-person attendees, local broadcast to the streets of Concordia, and streamed to YouTube Live.\n\n\nABOUT THE BOOKS:\n\nBitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. Vincent sorts through and tries to arrange cosmologies, eloquence, narrative, insight, only to find fatal limitations. He tries to trick tragedy into revealing itself by means of costume, comedy, thought experiment, theatre of the absurd, and Punch and Judy. The poems progress steadily from the erotic and mythic to the lapidary and biblical, relentlessly constructing images, finding any way to bring the world into the light - what there is of light, when the light is on.\n\nIn Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love. Erasures of massive volumes of prose by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin become concise poems of condensed sadness; a reboot of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy with an imaginary albatross pal; recovered fragments from an apocryphal book of Victorian nonsense verse are pieced together; a Leonard Cohen song about Queen Victoria is offered in a steampunk rendering; and a meditative guinea pig delivers a dramatic monologue in the vein of Robert Browning.\n\n\nJason Camlot is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Animal Library, Attention All Typewriters, and What The World Said. He is professor of English and research chair in literature and sound studies at Concordia University in Montreal.\n\nJohn Emil Vincent has written several books of poetry including Excitement Tax and Ganymede’s Dog. He lives in Montreal and teaches creative writing in Concordia’s Department of English."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/1255713311\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason. Vlarf. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. \"},{\"url\":\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/1262058592\",\"citation\":\"Vincent, John Emil. Bitter in the Belly. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549987786756,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10053","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 Events AV, How Are We Listening, Now? A SpokenWeb Podcast Conversation, 18 June 2020"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page"],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/how-are-we-listening-now-a-spokenweb-podcast-conversation/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Aphrodite Salas"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Aphrodite Salas"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Aphrodite Salas\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Stacey Copeland","Klara du Plessis","Alvaro Echánove","Marlene Oeffinger"],"contributors_names_search":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Stacey Copeland","Klara du Plessis","Alvaro Echánove","Marlene Oeffinger"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/3614174516024815930000\",\"name\":\"Oana Avasilichioaei\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Alvaro Echánove\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Marlene Oeffinger\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Stacey Copeland","Klara du Plessis","Alvaro Echánove","Marlene Oeffinger"],"Performance_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"SpokenWeb_EDIT.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:07:04\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,698,913,056 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"SpokenWeb_EDIT\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-06-18\",\"type\":\"Performance 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["In the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Concordia researchers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod co-produced “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence” for The SpokenWeb Podcast series in order to document our reactions to the changes in our sonic environments during this time of social distancing and self-isolation. Listen to the full episode or tune in to the re-broadcast on the 4TH SPACE Reruns Series on Tuesday June 9 (12noon). Then, on Thursday June 18, 12-noon ET, join Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, and special guests from the podcast - Oana Avasilichioaei, Stacey Copeland, Klara du Plessis, Alvaro Echánove, Marlene Oeffinger, and more - for a virtual conversation via Zoom. Moderated by Aphrodite Salas (Assistant Professor, Journalism, Concordia) and hosted by Concordia’s 4TH SPACE, this virtual conversation will be a lively and interactive opportunity to revisit the question at the heart of this podcast: How are we listening, now?"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549988835328,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":4.5446677},{"id":"10055","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 Events AV, Sounding Signs and Broadcasting Temporalities and Sounding Together, SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, 16 May 2022"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page "],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/spokenweb-symposium-2022"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Michelle Levy"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Michelle Levy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"contributors_names_search":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Aubrey Grant\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristen Smith\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kiera Obbard\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Joseph Shea-Carter \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariel Kroon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Carlos Pittella\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lee Gilboa\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristin Franseen\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter ","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"Performance_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2022-05-16 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day One.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"03:57:39\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,269,521,511 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"2022-05-16 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day One\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-16\",\"type\":\"Performance 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549988835329,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["The SpokenWeb Research Network (www.spokenweb.ca) is excited to host an in-person and virtual graduate student symposium (academic conference) at Concordia University in Montreal, 16-17 May 2022, on the theme of “The Sound of Literature in Time.”\n\nIntroduction to Theme:  The concepts of sound, time and literature evoke a wide range of research questions when considered in relation to each other. Together, they may suggest questions about how sound has been represented in literary works from different historical periods, how time has structured the way literary works sound (as with poetic metre), how readings and recitations sound literature across a span of time, and how time is sounded in different literary cultures and communities. Explorations of non-Western temporal frameworks, as in Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time, and a recent special issue on Black Temporality in Times of Crisis edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, for example, reveal diverse meanings of temporality across cultures. As a concept, sound is always moving through time, and so, descriptions of sound involve the description of time in motion. Even a piece of sound (a sound ‘bite’) must be in motion to be audibly perceptible. As Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound phenomenology observes, “[i]insofar as all sounds are also ‘events,’ all the sounds are within the first approximation, likely to be considered as ‘moving.’” Without motion, sound is rendered silent. This is especially evident in sounds that have been recorded on time-based audio recording media which suggest the possibility of capturing real historical time in mediated form. Media theorists have noticed how the real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what Wolfgang Ernst has called “the drama of time critical media.” An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing.  It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one hears is living in the present, replicating the live sonic event, of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction.  Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time.  Other sound scholars have noted how the temporal qualities of sound immediately raise questions of historical context. For example, Pierre Schaeffer describes a “sound object” as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time” for which questions of “context” apply. Friedrich Kittler’s work on literature and media has insisted that sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our relationship to the past. Time itself becomes a variable to be manipulated with technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction of the record) suggesting that our capacity to manipulate the media artifact not only enables us to process historical “real time” so that it is experienced as a temporal event in the present, but to transform historical “real time” into events of alternate temporal orders, as well.  Most recently, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have explored the history of listening to literature at accelerated speeds by blind audiobook readers, and the technological history of time shifting in speech-oriented sound media. When we are talking about sound, time, and literature, we are considering the intervolved relationship of something we identify as a literary artifact as a kind of event that suggests possibilities of playing, replaying and creating history. \n\nSounding Signs\n\nChair: Jason Camlot\n\nAubrey Grant [IP] (Concordia), “Resounding the Hollow: Repetition and Onomatopoeia in Poe’s ‘The Bells’”\n\nKristen Smith [IP] (York), “Diagrammatic  Codes, Lines, Crosshatchings: Finding Sound in Non-Linguistic Poetry”\n\nKiera Obbard [IP] (U of Guelph), “Close Reading the Sonic Topology of Instagram Poetry with Poemage”\n\nBroadcasting Temporalities\n\nChair: Katherine McLeod\n\nJoseph Shea-Carter [IP] (U of Guelph), “(Re)sounding Text: Time is Away and Sonic Re-Presentations of Literature”\n\nNick Beauchesne [IP], Ariel Kroon [IP], and Chelsea Miya [IP] (U of Alberta), “‘’A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio”\n\nSounding Together\n\nChair: Michelle Levy\n\nCarlos Pittella [IP] (Concordia), “’We’ the People: Collective Lyric Self in 21st-Century Poetry”\n\nLee Gilboa [V] (Brown), “Sound Together: The Chorus as a Possible Framework for Collectivity”\n\nKristin Franseen [IP] (Concordia), “Gossip, Musical Meaning, and (Im)possible Queer Pasts in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Short Fiction”\n\n"],"score":4.5446677},{"id":"10056","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 Events AV, Radical Voices and Sonic Memories and Improvising Language, SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, 17 May 2022"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page"],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/spokenweb-symposium-2022"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Xiaoxuan Huang","Annie Murray","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Xiaoxuan Huang","Annie Murray","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Xiaoxuan Huang \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31170924535890151440\",\"name\":\"Annie Murray\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes","Megan Stein","Thade Correa","Donald Shipton"],"contributors_names_search":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes","Megan Stein","Thade Correa","Donald Shipton"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sophia Magliocca\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Shazia Hafiz Ramji \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kyle Kinaschuk\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Effy Morris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Linara Kolosov\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sarah Cipes \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Megan Stein\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Thade Correa \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Donald Shipton\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji ","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes ","Megan Stein","Thade Correa ","Donald Shipton"],"Performance_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2022-05-17 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day Two.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"03:48:16\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"768,180,704 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"2022-05-17 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day Two\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-17\",\"type\":\"Performance 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\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549989883904,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["The SpokenWeb Research Network (www.spokenweb.ca) is excited to host an in-person and virtual graduate student symposium (academic conference) at Concordia University in Montreal, 16-17 May 2022, on the theme of “The Sound of Literature in Time.”\n\nIntroduction to Theme:  The concepts of sound, time and literature evoke a wide range of research questions when considered in relation to each other. Together, they may suggest questions about how sound has been represented in literary works from different historical periods, how time has structured the way literary works sound (as with poetic metre), how readings and recitations sound literature across a span of time, and how time is sounded in different literary cultures and communities. Explorations of non-Western temporal frameworks, as in Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time, and a recent special issue on Black Temporality in Times of Crisis edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, for example, reveal diverse meanings of temporality across cultures. As a concept, sound is always moving through time, and so, descriptions of sound involve the description of time in motion. Even a piece of sound (a sound ‘bite’) must be in motion to be audibly perceptible. As Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound phenomenology observes, “[i]insofar as all sounds are also ‘events,’ all the sounds are within the first approximation, likely to be considered as ‘moving.’” Without motion, sound is rendered silent. This is especially evident in sounds that have been recorded on time-based audio recording media which suggest the possibility of capturing real historical time in mediated form. Media theorists have noticed how the real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what Wolfgang Ernst has called “the drama of time critical media.” An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing.  It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one hears is living in the present, replicating the live sonic event, of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction.  Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time.  Other sound scholars have noted how the temporal qualities of sound immediately raise questions of historical context. For example, Pierre Schaeffer describes a “sound object” as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time” for which questions of “context” apply. Friedrich Kittler’s work on literature and media has insisted that sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our relationship to the past. Time itself becomes a variable to be manipulated with technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction of the record) suggesting that our capacity to manipulate the media artifact not only enables us to process historical “real time” so that it is experienced as a temporal event in the present, but to transform historical “real time” into events of alternate temporal orders, as well.  Most recently, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have explored the history of listening to literature at accelerated speeds by blind audiobook readers, and the technological history of time shifting in speech-oriented sound media. When we are talking about sound, time, and literature, we are considering the intervolved relationship of something we identify as a literary artifact as a kind of event that suggests possibilities of playing, replaying and creating history. \n\nRadical Voices\n\nChair: Jason Camlot (Concordia U) and Xiaoxuan Huang (UBCO)\n\nSophia, Magliocca [IP] (Concordia) “Discovering Sexual Agency in Caroline Bergvall’s Goan Atom: Linguistic and Bodily Mutation” \n\nShazia Hafiz Ramji [V] (U of Calgary) and Kyle Kinaschuk [V] (U of Toronto), “Sounding the Wind: Acoustic Kinships in Disappearing Moon Cafe” \n\nEffy Morris [IP] (Concordia), “Tone As Tonus: (Un)grammaring Ontology With Kamau Brathwaite’s Nation Language”\n\nSonic Memories\n\nChair: Annie Murray\n\nLinara Kolosov [V] (SFU), “Sixty years of Readings in BC: Access to Memory (AtoM) of the largest SFU sound collection”\n\nSarah Cipes [IP] (UBCO), “Finding Due Balance: Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives” \n\nImprovising Language \n\nChair: Michael O’Driscoll\n\nMegan Stein [IP] (Concordia), “Tender Records”\n\nThade Correa [IP] (Indiana), “Speech is a Mouth”: Notes on the Musical / Experientialist Poetics of Robert Creeley\n\nDonald Shipton [IP] (SFU), “A Night Out of Synch”: Listening and Performance in bpNichol’s “Hour 15”"],"score":4.5446677}]