[{"id":"9281","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 S2E4, Drum Codes [Part 1]: The Language of Talking Drums, 11 January 2021, Miya and Luyk"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-pt-1-the-language-of-talking-drums/"],"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":["Chelsea Miya","Sean Luyk"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya","Sean Luyk"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/3146217844209142580\",\"name\":\"Sean Luyk\",\"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/0d03515b-c5f3-4c36-a680-33aa829dd3b1/audio/6facdb5e-1ccf-45ec-a136-c878d15c7429/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e4-drum-codes-pt-1-full.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:43\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"38,192,736 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e4-drum-codes-pt-1-full\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-pt-1-the-language-of-talking-drums/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-01-11\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References:\\n\\nBabalọla, Adeboye. “Yoruba Literature.” Literatures in African Languages, edited by B. W. Andrzejewski, S. Pilaszewicz, and W. Tyloch, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 157–189.\\n\\nFinnegan, Ruth. “17. Drum Language and Literature”. Oral Literature in Africa. By Finnegan. Open Book Publishers, 2012, 467-484. Web. <http://books.openedition.org/obp/1206>.\\n\\nNgom, Fallou, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, and Mustapha Hashim Kurfi. “The social and commercial life of African Ajami” Africa at LSE Blog, 1 Oct. 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/10/01/social-commercial-african-ajami-culture/.\\n\\nOwomoyela, Oyekan. The Columbia guide to West African literature in English since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. This is How We Disappear. Write Bloody North, 2019.\\n\\nStrong, Krystal. “The Rise and Suppression of #EndSARS.” Harpers Bazaar, 27 Oct. 2020, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a34485605/what-is-endsars/.\\n\\nTúbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. Edwardsville by Heart. Wisdom’s Bottom Press, 2019.\\n\\nVillepastour, Amanda. Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bàtá Drum: Cracking the Code. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.\\n\\nRecordings:\\n\\nAdédòkun, Olálékan. [various tracks].\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. “My Mother’s Music.” Mother Tongue, Titilope Sonuga, 2013.\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. “This is How We Disappear – Titilope Sonuga.” YouTube, uploaded by Titilope Sonuga, 21 August 2017, https://youtu.be/JbLwsLYrjzw.\\n\\nTúbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. “Ọláolúwa Òní reads “Being Yorùbá.” SoundCloud, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/kola-tubosun/olaoluwa-oni-reads-being-yoruba.\\n\\nSound Effects:\\n\\nBBC News. “End Sars protests: People ‘shot dead’ in Lagos, Nigeria – BBC News.” YouTube, 21 October 2020, https://youtu.be/Il5qL7YbawY.\\n\\nBloomberg Quicktake: Now. “Shots Fired in Lagos Amid #EndSARS Protests in Nigeria.” YouTube, 21 October, 2020, https://youtu.be/hu9FzU2TDvQ.\\n\\nThe Dinizulu Archives. “Asante Ivory Trumpets – Ancient Akan Music – Pt 1.” YouTube, 23 March 2009, https://youtu.be/P3XxEefvpr8.\\n\\nfelix.blume. “Dugout On The Niger River In Mali SOUND Effect.” Freesound, 20 January 2013, https://freesound.org/s/174933/.\\n\\nFilmOneNG. “Living in Bondage Trailer 1.” YouTube, 18 October, 2019, https://youtu.be/bQ9pUsXFqoA. \\n\\nLily Pope TV. “MAIN MARKET ONITSHA|| COME WITH ME.” YouTube, 9 July 2019, https://youtu.be/DJ3NyfV7tgs.\\n\\n“Nigerian Crowds – Lagos, native quarter with traffic & crowd atmosphere.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07015037.\\n\\n“Outdoor Clock – Church clock striking, 6 o’clock. (All Saints Church).” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07002268.\\n\\nPasadena Conservatory of Music. “African Roots, African American Fruits: A Musical Journey (Concert Highlights).” Vimeo, 8 March, 2016, https://vimeo.com/158205356.\\n\\nPatrickibeh. “Nigerian Young girls playing ‘Hand-clap’ game.” Wikimedia Commons, 25 February 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nigerian_Young_girls_playing_%27Hand-clap%27_game.webm.\\n\\nProtests.media. “Buhari Must Go Protest in Lagos, 17th of October 2020.” Vimeo, 27 October, 2020, https://vimeo.com/469395263.\\n\\nRueda, Manuel. “Oaxaca whistle language.” Vimeo, 2004, https://vimeo.com/77702616.\\n\\nMuir, Stephen. “City Street Winter Day – Toronto – Bay St And Cumberland St.” Dreaming Monkey Inc.“Wamba Indigenous Music – Repetitive tune using a two tone communication whistle(vocal).” Recorded by John Watkin. BBC Sound Effects, 31 March 1996, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=NHU05003080.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549485518848,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["For hundreds of years, the Yorùbá people of West African have used “talking drums” to send messages across great distances. West African languages are highly musical, full of rising and falling tones. The pitch of talking drums can be adjusted to mimic these tones, so drummers can “speak” to one another. The drummer encodes the language, converting it into drum patterns, and in the process, poeticizes it. \n\nThis two-part podcast series explores talking drums as an art, a technology, and an important tool for speaking truth to power. In part one, poets, musicians, linguists and educators share their experiences of this fascinating musical instrument and its role in the fight to preserve local West African languages. In part two, airing next season, we sit down with a master drummer and learn more about how drums function as information compression tools.\n\n00:18\tTheme 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\n00:18\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. Here on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we have a fascination with language that goes beyond the novel or the codex and into the many texts and technologies that connect us through sound. This podcast itself is a way of connecting, of telling stories and building a community of literature lovers and sound fanatics across the country and around the globe. But there are many other sonic communication technologies beyond podcasts, radio, or even the humble telephone. And some are much older. For hundreds of years the Yorùbá people of West Africa have used “talking drums” to send messages and tell stories. The pitch of talking drums mimics the rising and falling tones of West African languages, allowing drummers to “speak”. The drummer encodes the language, converting it into drum patterns and in the process turns them into poetic and political expression. In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast produced by University of Alberta researchers, Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk, we will hear from poets, musicians, linguists, and educators, as they reflect on the power and influence of this musical instrument, communication technology, and important symbol for West African cultures. The story of the talking drum connects to the story of written and spoken West African languages and the struggle to preserve them. This episode is part one in a two-part series about the talking drum. Here are Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk with Drum Codes [Part One]: The Language of Talking Drums. [Feature Audio Opens with Talking Drum Music]\n \n\n02:29\tChelsea Miya:\tLong before text messages, West African communities used drums to send messages from village to village. I am Chelsea Miya.\n \n\n02:38\tSean Luyk:\tAnd I’m Sean Luyk.\n \n\n02:41\tChelsea Miya:\tIn this episode, we consider the talking drum in the context of the struggle to preserve West African languages, and as a way to speak truth to power and protest oppression.\n \n\n02:55\tWisdom Agorde:\t[Drumming] Drumming for us goes beyond entertainment.\n \n\n02:59\tSean Luyk:\tWisdom Agorde is co-director of the University of Alberta’s West African music ensemble. [Drumming ends]\n \n\n03:04\tWisdom Agorde:\tDrumming brings us together for festivals, storytelling, funerals, maybe dedications and weddings and all of that. But beyond that, the drama, the divine drama connects to the ancestral world, which is the spirit world. And they help our priests and priestesses to get into trance and get information from the spiritual world, which is then communicated back to the living. So the drum could be seen as the bridge between the living and the dead.\n \n\n03:43\tSean Luyk:\tIn West Africa, there is a strong overlap between music and language. African languages, like Yorùbá, are highly musical. The Yorùbá language has three tones:low, mid, and high. Solfege symbols, names for musical notes, are used to teach these tones. Do. Re. Mi. The straps on a talking drum can be adjusted to mimic these tones and communicate messages. [Begin Music: Drumming] Listen to master drummer, Peter, one of our featured guests in episode two in the series, demonstrate the tones on his drum. [End Music: Drumming].\n \n\n04:18\tPeter Olálékan Adédòkun:\tSo this drum has ability to mimic my voice. It can speak. It can say your name. If I want to say your name as Chelsea, Chelsea Miya, I can do that. [Drumming] Yes. So look. [Drumming].\n \n\n04:36\tSean Luyk:\tSpeech surrogates are instruments that mimic the human voice so that players can speak to one another. The talking drum is just one example. Some communities also have traditions of using flutes [Sound Effect: Flute], trumpets [Sound Effect: Trumpet] and whistles [Sound Effect: Whistles] to communicate.\n \n\n04:52\tWisdom Agorde:\tYou know, in those days we didn’t have factories and industries. We didn’t have many cars. So the air was not polluted that much. So the talking drum is going to, is able to travel several kilometers. So, if there is a problem at home, let’s say there is fire at home. If the king wants people to run back home, because there was a problem, he uses the talking drum to call all the people to come back. The talking drum also announces if there is a death in the community. Once you hear the tone of it and the language in it, you know exactly that an elderly person had passed away. And if you know the appellation of that person, you will understand immediately who died.\n \n\n05:48\tWisdom Agorde:\tWhen I was in Ghana, I was quite young when my grandfather died and they were playing the royal drums in front of the family house. Normally when a royal dies, the royal drums will come out and we’ll play to send off that person to the land of the ancestors. So, the funeral started on Friday. So that Friday afternoon, we were preparing to bring the body from the morgue. And I was passing by and they were playing the royal drums [Begin Music: Drumming] and I had no clue. It just a nice sounding drum to me. And I know the drums are being played to honour my grandfather. So one of the elders called me [End Music: Drumming] and asked me my name. [Begin Music: Singing] And like, “is that not your grandfather whose funeral we’re having?” I said, “yes.” And he said, “and you were passing and they called you and you didn’t respond!?” [End Music: Singing].\n \n\n06:55\tWisdom Agorde:\tAt that time I was in the university. I had no clue. City boy doesn’t understand nothing. Apparently they were calling the family name on the drum. Man, I’m supposed to acknowledge that, but because I didn’t understand it, I didn’t respond as I should. So I was just walking by. I had no clue.\n \n\n07:20\tSean Luyk:\tHow are you supposed to respond?\n \n\n07:22\tWisdom Agorde:\tMost often you raise your hand. There are times also when, if you can dance, you will respond to the call through dance.\n \n\n07:32\tSean Luyk:\tOne time, Wisdom happened to see across a funeral procession for an important local chief. [Audio Recording: Crowd Chatter and Noise] He remembers watching the royal drummers on their way to the palace and realizing that they were telling the story of the chief’s life.\n \n\n07:44\tWisdom Agorde:\tI was in front of the palace, that there was a huge funeral. The funeral lasted for more than a week. And every day of the week specific people from different parts of the country came to pay homage to the dead chief. And this particular day I was there, the chiefs arrived from another region and they were in a procession walking to the palace to go pay homage to the body of the dead chief that was lying in state. And whilst they were passing, I realized that when they reach the front of the royal drums, the language of the drum changes. And immediately the language changes the visiting chief or king responds through different kinds of dances. And it was so beautiful. I don’t know what the drums were telling them, but definitely be understood what the drum was saying, and the drummer knows exactly who was arriving and we’ll call that person in name. The royal drummer is also a historian. So the royal drummer wasn’t just calling them. He was also telling history. What that person has done, what their ancestors have done, and how they have survived through the years. I am very sure that the divine drama might have learnt all the drum language from all the visiting chiefs and kings in order to appropriately acknowledge them. Unfortunately we the younger generation don’t know many of those songs right now. And there is that fear that some of these things are lost because during that funeral I saw certain performances I’ve never seen before.\n \n\n10:01\tSean Luyk:\t[Music Begins: Instrumental Drumming] Different communities have their own unique talking drum traditions, their own speaking styles interwoven with sayings and proverbs that have been passed down through the generations. The richness of the talking drum is reflected in the incredible language diversity of West Africa as a whole.\n \n\n10:17\tTunde Adegbola:\tMy name is Tunde Adegbola. I’m a research scientist. [Music Ends: Instrumental Drumming] I work in human language technology with emphasis on speech technologies. Also looking at the implications of speech surrogacy, which is the use of devices other than the human speech apertures, such as drums, whistles, and such to communicate.\n \n\n10:46\tSean Luyk:\tCan you tell us a bit about the history of West Africa and what made it possible for so many different languages to coexist and thrive in the same region?\n \n\n10:54\tTunde Adegbola:\tClose to one third of the 7,000-odd languages in the world are spoken in Africa. And West Africa seems to be an area where a lot of these languages are spoken. Some investigators have recognized up to about 512 various languages spoken in Nigeria. My hunch is that the Niger River [Sound Effect: Water Flowing], which deposits into the Atlantic Ocean in the Niger Delta, is a natural attraction of various peoples in West Africa or in Africa to congregate around and expand out of the Niger Delta, thereby bringing probably various languages that now have to co-exist and walk together. [Sound Effect: Crowd Bustling].\n \n\n11:50\tSean Luyk:\tNigeria is one of the most multilingual countries in the world, but over half of its languages are in danger of disappearing. Tunde is the founder of Alt-i, the African Languages Technology Initiative. His organization is searching for technological solutions to the language crisis. As he explains, colonialism fundamentally transformed West African languages chiefly through the introduction of written forms of communication.\n \n\n12:22\tTunde Adegbola:\tMost, if not all, West African languages had strong European influence in their writing systems. In languages like Hausa, for example, which is probably the second-widest spoken language in Africa, had long histories of exposure to Arabic literature. So there is a tradition of writing Hausa in Arabic script, popularity referred to as the Adjami script. [Sound Effect: Writing].\n \n\n12:59\tSean Luyk:\tAjami is an Arabic script for writing African languages and is about 500 years old. So, although there is an assumption that African cultures are purely oral cultures, written Yorùbá has actually existed for quite some time. It is true, however, that Yorùbá literature only really started to take off in the mid 19th century with the arrival of missionaries. [Sound Effect: Church Bells].\n \n\n13:26\tTunde Adegbola:\tThe coming of Europeans, particularly European missionaries, who saw a great level of importance in developing a literate people, because they were bringing a religion of the book to a people that were either oral societies or as Walter Ong would put it, a society with a high “oral residue”. So there was this need to develop literacy.\n \n\n14:05\tSean Luyk:\tAnd so, Yorùbá writing was reinvented once more, this time using the Latin alphabet. But the characters weren’t the only difference. The Yorùbá vocabulary itself was transformed to accommodate new ideas.\n \n\n14:18\tTunde Adegbola:\tI know that effect on the language and other various West African languages, is the fact that Christianity came in with new ideas. Ideas that were not embedded in the culture. So there was a need to develop words for them. And that also had great effect on the languages. The Yorùbá language that I speak, for example, does not take much account of gender. In the language you wouldn’t have such gender pronouns like he and her, uncles and aunties, nieces and nephews. Apart from fathers and mothers, everybody else is pretty the same. But with the advent of Christianity words for a brother in the fellowship, words for sister in the fellowship, some ideas came and was like [Yorùbá phrase] and [Yorùbá phrase] came into the language.\n \n\n15:35\tSean Luyk:\tSo, on the one hand, the writing system, the Latin alphabet reinforced Christian colonial ideas. But, on the other hand with the advent of writing also came a new generation of Nigerian authors.\n \n\n15:56\tAudio Recording:\tStreet Scene, People Speaking]\n \n\n15:56\tSean Luyk:\tThese are sounds from Onitsha, port city on the Niger River. Today, Onitsha is most famous for being the home of Nigerian cinema, nicknamed Nollywood.\n \n\n16:07\tAudio Recording, Film Clip:\tIf we go down, we go down.\n \n\n16:11\tSean Luyk:\tBut it’s also the birthplace of Nigerian print culture.\n \n\n16:15\tTunde Adegbola:\tImmediately after the European missionaries developed literacy, there was great enthusiasm in writing and lots of Yorùbá people try to write. And many printing presses were established in Ìbàdàn, the capital of Yorùbáland. And you saw a lot of printing presses rising up in small shacks. It was like a Gutenberg revolution in Yorùbáland at that time. And these also permeated the whole country seeping into other areas producing what was known as the Onitsha market literature.\n \n\n17:02\tSean Luyk:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental] In the 1940s to 1960s, Onitsha was the home of the largest outdoor market in West Africa. Market stalls were packed with books and pamphlets all printed on hand presses. This was a period of intense creativity and of pride in one’s local culture. For the first time Nigerian authors were writing novels in Yorùbá and winning huge acclaim.\n \n\n17:24\tTunde Adegbola:\tBut somewhere along the line, [End Music: Instrumental] this excitement in writing in Yorùbá seems to be petering out, and less and less of Yorùbá literature is published these days. People tend to think, they see English as the language of administration, the language of officialdom, the language of education, the language of opportunity. And for that reason, people put lots and lots of efforts into getting their children to speak English, to the detriment of the Yorùbá language.\n \n\n18:07\tSean Luyk:\t[Begin Music: Singing] Speaking Yorùbá, instead of English came with consequences.\n \n\n18:11\tTunde Adegbola:\tI was punished throughout my young age for speaking Yorùbá in school. [End Music: Singing] My good fortune is that my parents were educators and they knew better. My mother taught in a teacher training college and students from the teacher training college would come for teaching practice in our school. My mother would come to supervise them and would speak Yorùbá to me when she met me along the path and the school. And everybody’s expressed surprise that Tunde’s mother who is the teacher of teachers is disobeying the law of not speaking Yorùbá. There was a time in Nigeria when institutions felt English is the way of development, English is the way of modernity, English is the way of opportunities. There was a time that there was a slogan in the educational system and the slogan was “fail in English, fail in all.” So if you took five papers, mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, and did very well in all this, if you failed in English, then you had to repeat the whole class because you failed in English. And this type of retrogressive thinking continues to pervade the educational system.\n \n\n19:48\tChelsea Miya:\t[Begin Music: Drumming and Singing] Yorùbá and other West African languages are continually evolving. The diaspora has been particularly influential. [End Music: Drumming and Singing].\n \n\n19:57\tTitilope Sonuga:\tThere’s always been this balancing that I’ve done between the English language and Yorùbá and recognizing that Yorùbá was acceptable in some spaces. Whereas it wasn’t in others.\n \n\n20:08\tChelsea Miya:\tTitilope Sonuga is a spoken word poet and performer based in Edmonton, Alberta. As she explains, her approach to writing and performing poetry is informed by her Nigerian heritage and her interest in the politics of language.\n \n\n20:25\tTitilope Sonuga:\tI grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, in a household where we spoke predominantly English. Yorùbá, I would say, is a gift that my grandmother gave me. So my grandma was very particular about us speaking Yorùbá. And even though she spoke English, she always pretended like she couldn’t really understand what you were saying if you tried to speak English with her. So there was a way in which like Yorùbá was like the default language and my grandmother’s house. As a child, I regret to say, we were raised to kind of view our mother tongue, our native languages, as inferior to this other, this English language. Right. So there was a sense in which English was the official language that you spoke at school when you were trying to be proper and in certain spaces, the better your English was the more respected. So Yorùbá became relegated to the space of what you spoke at home behind closed doors or with family, but it was kind of an informal language.\n \n\n21:28\tTitilope Sonuga:\tIt took years for me to understand that as a kind of shaming [Audio Recording: Street Scene?] Then we moved to Canada, Yorùbá then became this bridge. It was the way in which we could communicate in public spaces without being understood by other people. It kind of became a refuge as well. So, I would say that my relationship to the language, this shuffling between English and mother tongue has been sort of the balance of my life. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognize what a gift it was that my grandmother gave me. And what a connection it is to my roots and to who I am. I don’t write or create arts in Yorùbá, but I definitely feel like there’s a sensibility of how the language works that follows me. You know, these proverbs and dual meanings and things like that, that I carry. Even in my writing in English, I think Yorùbá is as much a part of me as anything else. And so it kind of, it comes out in my work. Always.\n \n\n22:33\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “My Mother’s Music”:\tMy mother sang when I was born, she welcomed me head first into melody. She chanted like a talking drum. She caught Godspell in gospel. And then she named me Titilope. An eternal love song to her creator.\n \n\n22:51\tTitilope Sonuga:\tI remember even as a kid, just being fascinated by the instrument and the way that it sounds. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched or listened to it being played. It sounds like a voice. Like that’s why it’s called the talking drum. Is that like, if you’re still and listen, there is a language that is happening there that is very similar to what it sounds like to tell a story, to speak out loud. I think to do it well, to do it beautifully is to connect to this ancient oral tradition that Nigeria is so rich with, that all of Africa really is so rich with. [Music Start: Instrumental] The proverbs, the prose, the sayings, the hidden messages, this drum kind of encompasses all of that. Music has been such a big and important part of my creating life. I don’t know a poem that I’ve written that wasn’t written to something playing in the background somewhere, or a song that I had heard that inspires something.\n \n\n23:58\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “This is How We Disappear”:\tThis is how we disappear. We fall backwards into our mother’s mouths. Become them. Become the only stories we have ever been told. Stories about women who stay. Women who endure. Women who offer their bodies into the belly of the beast to protect their children. This is how we go missing. We tumble into… [Music End: Instrumental]\n \n\n24:26\tChelsea Miya:\tCan I ask about “This is How We Disappear”? So like a lot of your earlier work, I think it also has a really powerful, sonic or oral quality, but of a really different kind. How does sound or absence of sound factor in this work?\n \n\n24:43\tTitilope Sonuga:\tWell, that’s an interesting thing. I remember in an earlier edit of the collection, I had a line in there comparing the disappearance of the Chibok girls to like a tree falling in a forest. You know, if a girl disappears and nobody’s there to hear her, did she actually make a sound? The book is about disappearances. It’s about silences really, and silencing. But it is also about celebration and remaking ourselves, the ways that women do that, the world over. I would say when I started working on the manuscript itself, I was very heavily pregnant and had just had a baby. And a lot of those poems were written in the twilight hours. I remember listening to a lot of gospel and spiritual music. Somebody said recently to me about how the book feels like it has a lot of ghosts in it. And it definitely feels like a bit of a haunting. It’s interesting that you talk about silences and sound because there was a lot of both, there was these quiet moments in the world. There was me revisiting the ghost of these women who had disappeared the world over, but also there was this hum of this spiritual [Music Begins: Instrumental] sort of awakening that was happening for me as a new mother.\n \n\n26:13\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “This is How We Disappear”:\tThese women who reinvented joy. Who snapped back our broken bones to the rhythm of a survival song, a song about the audacity of living and loving anyway. We became a whole new kind of creature. Something fearless and fierce. Something bold enough to call down even lightning and dare it to touch us. [Audience Cheering].\n \n\n26:36\tTitilope Sonuga:\tPerformance for me was never an option. It was just like, this is what I know. This is who I am. [Music Ends: Instrumental].,and not just performance to read the poems out loud, but performance that connects to a musicality that is grounded in the talking drum that is grounded in Yorùbá language, and Yorùbá songs, and Yorùbá names and naming. The first poets I knew were these people on the drums singing [unknown word] at weddings. Telling you of your entire lineage, the names and the names and the names of your father’s father, your mother’s mother. These people were my first experience of memorized poetry. They’re people who know, who at a glance can tell you who you are. And they know this stuff [Music Begins: Drumming] in their hearts and minds. They don’t need a page or a paper to tell them.\n \n\n27:40\tChelsea Miya:\tThe talking drum is in some ways inherently poetic. This is because of its unique grammar, which creates room for ambiguity. [Music Ends: Drumming].\n \n\n27:49\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún: :\tYorùbá is a tone language, which means that meaning can be derived from just a slight inflection of the vowels.\n \n\n27:58\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a linguist, poet, and cultural activist. [Audio Recording: Engine Revving] He recently worked with Google to create the Nigerian English version of Siri.\n \n\n28:07\tAudio Recording, Siri:\tNavigating to Hartfield.\n \n\n28:11\tChelsea Miya:\tBut before that, he was a language teacher. He won a Fulbright scholarship to attend grad school at Southern Illinois University in a small town called Edwardsville. While there, he taught Yorùbá to American students and wrote poetry about his experiences. This is a reading of his poem “Being Yorùbá”.\n \n\n28:33\tAudio Recording, Oláolúwa Òní, “Being Yorùba”:\tHow do you teach a state of being? You don’t. You teach instead tone. Do-Re-Mi. Like music on the tongue.\n \n\n28:43\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá explains how the talking drum strips away everything except for the tones, which means that the messages sent by the drummers can be interpreted many different ways.\n \n\n28:54\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tYorùbá is a tone language, which means that meaning can be derived from just a slight inflection of the vowel. And tone is realized basically on the pitch level, on the vowel. So when it would like “igba’, is different from “igba” is different from “igba” is different from “igba”. These are different words. You have got “an egg”, you have “200”, you have “time”, you have “Calabash”. All of those things spelled the same way: I-G-B-A. Except for the tone that you put on it when you speak. So it makes Yorùbá very interesting, especially for those who are trying to learn it for the first time. In English, when you say “go”, it’s still go when you say “go” or “go” or “go” the only difference is when it comes at the end of a question. But in Yorùbá, it’s not just the sentence itself that it changes. It changes the character of the word itself. When you’re playing and talking drum it’s about the same.If I say “igba” on the drum, I can make the same sound, “Re. Me.” I mean, Yorùbá tones — Do. Re. Me. is the same three level tones as you have in music. Which makes [Music Begins: Drumming and Singing] the language sound very musical when you speak it. But what is fascinating, really, especially what makes the language more amenable to poetry [Music Ends: Drumming and Singing] and literary expression, is the idea that you’ve got a talking drum, you can’t see the words that is being said. You are playing a drum and all you have is a tone. And the person listening to it has to figure out from just the tone, what kind of words you’re trying to say. If I say “uh-uh” with a drum, I could be saying “igba”, I could be saying “ohwa” I could be saying “ideh”, a number of different things. But when you put that then in a sentence, or in a song, or in tune, then you leave like so many different possibilities that can happen. And in traditional Yorùbá communities, this has either been a cause of conflict, it has caused wars, or a source of entertainment for those who understand it, consternation for those who don’t.\n \n\n31:11\tChelsea Miya:\tThat’s interesting. So the drummer could be praising someone or complimenting them or insulting them, I guess it will depend on the context.\n \n\n31:21\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tIndeed. There is an example, actually, a famous example, in the 60s, I believe, when the radio Nigeria, the Nigerian Broadcasting Service started they were looking for a signature tune to play before the program starts in the morning. And it went like this, “dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-deh-dum”. And it meant, “this is the Nigerian Broadcasting Service.” But that was the first time an English expression was played with a drum. So the people who are listening to the show, in the radio every morning, many of them literate in the drum culture, couldn’t figure out what he was saying, because it was not a recognizable tune and pattern. So they decided to make up their own interpretations for it. Some people said, it’s saying [Yorùbá phrase], which means “when the Yorùbá dies, who is next in line.” Or something like [Yorùbá phrase] like “your child is little by little becoming criminal”. And there were several interpretations people just made up. Some of them pleasant, some of the funny, some of them just plain insulting. And it caused a lot of consternation among the people, especially people who were in charge of the radio, who were from a different culture of upper class elites who didn’t care about or know about the drum culture, or the colonialists who were just there to have a radio that people can use to communicate. So that’s how sometimes just a simple piece of expression can have different interpretations just because you’re not sensitive or familiar with how it’s used in society,\n \n\n32:56\tChelsea Miya:\tAs Tunde explains, historically the talking drum has also functioned as a powerful tool of political expression. Because of the ambiguity of the messages, the drummers could use their music to critique leadership and speak truth to power.\n \n\n33:12\tTunde Adegbola:\tThere are lots of narratives around the talking drum. There’s a particular saying, [Yorùbá phrase], “that it is only the drummer that can say for sure what he is using his powerful drum drumstick to see.” There are lots and lots and lots of accounts in history where talking drummers have saved whole communities from unfair leadership, wicked leadership, by naming and shaming negative acts in society to the extent that as such people have had to stop what they were doing, because they could not punish the drummer because they had this facility for plausible deniability. And yet everybody knew that the leadership was being blamed for misbehaving.\n \n\n34:12\tAudio Recording, BBC News:\tNigeria’s president has called for calm and understanding after protests against police brutality turned violent on Tuesday evening, with soldiers reportedly opening fire on demonstrators in the country’s biggest city, Lagos.\n \n\n34:27\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá is well familiar with the role of art and poetry in exposing corruption and facilitating political change. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, close to where the #EndSAR’s protest took place. [Sound Effect: Crowd Protesting and Chanting] For months, young Nigerians [Sound Effect: Gun Shots] have gathered by the thousands in these city streets to protest against the notoriously corrupt and brutal police force known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad or SARS.\n \n\n34:58\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tSince September and since, especially this #EndSARS movement, the disappointments and outrage I feel about how the government reacted to the crisis has spurred me in a new direction, and I’ve been writing a couple of forms about that. I feel my despair, my hope, my aspiration. There was one that I wrote in the midst of anger at looking at the flag of the Nigerian nation drenched in blood. It was one of the symbols of the 20th, the outcomes of 20th of October when soldiers went [inaudible]. Nonviolent protestors were gathered at night and opened fire. Somebody bled on the, on the national flag and national flag is green, white, green, otherwise. And the white part was filled with blood and many people have changed their Twitter profile pictures to that image. So I wrote a poem called a “Blood Spangled Banner.” ‘In the white of a flag, the bleeding soul of the moment wept blood near the gaping toll/ Ghosts of the nation’s past haunts in the cries their bodies made in that horrid night, singing the words written to mock their hope/ On the streets, the marauders mark the ground with the cases of the killing rounds /picked up horridly to mask the proof that the promises of vain that leaders make/ that the land is still a butcher’s slab.’\n \n\n36:33\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá’s passion for advocating for local languages, including drum languages, is in a way a part of the same struggle. Much like the #endSARS protestors, he’s fighting for Nigeria to find its own voice.\n \n\n36:47\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tPeople don’t see this kind of literacy as equally as important as writing literacy or reading literacy. But it is a kind of literacy. When people mentioned, for instance, somebody who speaks only Yorùbá or writes in only Yorùbá is an illiterate, we forget that many of those people can actually learn, can actually understand and decode drum patterns, et cetera. So, I’m interested in how this kind of engines, a kind of civilization, survives along with modern ones as a way of moving the culture forward into the future. There are probably fewer people today who know how to read or listen to the drum as the way in the past, but I’m hoping that the medium of technology keeps them relevant and important for the next generation. [Music Begins: Drumming]\n \n\n37:45\tChelsea Miya:\tIn part two of this episode, airing next season, we’ll look more closely at how the talking drum functions as not just an art, but as technology.\n \n\n37:55\tPeter Olálékan Adédòkun:\tWhat makes a master drummer? It has to do with your years of experience, the ability to lead, and your impact on other people’s lives and society.\n \n\n38:06\tChelsea Miya:\tWe’ll also meet a talking drum master and learn about the art of drum making. [Music Ends: Drumming]\n \n\n38:23\tHannah McGregor:\t[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, Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk of the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A big thank you to Titilope Sonuga, Wisdom Agorde, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, and Tunde Adegbola for their generous contributions. And a special thank you to master drummer. Peter Olálékan Adédòkun who provided music for the episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spoken web.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 will see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds."],"score":5.7495356},{"id":"9594","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E3, Drum Codes [Part 2]: Sounds of Data, 5 December 2022, Miya"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-part-2-sounds-of-data/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Chelsea Miya"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/f155a6f6-3a58-44fe-8b40-8536a7c437ab/audio/89995b0d-9cfc-4a2e-a427-ad697eb76aea/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:41\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,663,031 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-part-2-sounds-of-data/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-12-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"content_notes":["No transcript."],"contents":["Audio technology and audio data come in radically different forms. This month’s episode, “Sounds of Data” is a follow up to Season Two’s “Drum Codes” and takes us deeper into the sonic world of data: from the sounds of surveillance to music of the stars to the wireless transmission of drum songs. Featuring interviews with sound artist and poet Oana Avasilichioaei, NASA sonification expert Matt Russo, and speech technologist Tunde Adegbola, each offering a unique perspective on the question: what does data sound like?\n\nSpecial thanks to master drummer Peter Olálékan Adédòkun, whose music you hear in the first half of the episode. Original music and performance clips were also provided by Oana Avasilichioaei and by Matt Russo and his team at SYSTEM Sounds. Thank you, as well, to Sean Luyk, who co-produced the “Drum Codes” episode and played a significant role in conceptualising this follow-up."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"No transcript.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549530607616,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":5.7495356},{"id":"9623","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 S3E8, Academics on Air, 2 May 2022, Kroon, Beauchesne and Miya"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/"],"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":["Ariel Kroon","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya"],"creator_names_search":["Ariel Kroon","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariel Kroon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4d8a0871-f27e-4d7f-825d-1b9962330239/audio/5c6123d8-1c4b-451b-941a-8b331156eb91/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e8-academicsonair.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,954,349 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e8-academicsonair\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive, North West Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"\\t53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive, North West Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Sound FX/Music\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Communications – Greenwich Time Signal, post January 1st 1972.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07042099.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Doors: House – House Door: Interior, Larder, Open and Close.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07027090.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Footsteps Down Metal Stairs – Footsteps Down Metal Stairs, Man, Slow, Departing.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07037171.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Industry: Printing: Presses – Electric Printing Press operating.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07041078.\\n\\nBertrof. “Audio Cassette Tape Open Close Play Stop.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/351567/.\\n\\nConstructabeat. “Stop Start Tape. Player.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/constructabeat/sounds/258392/.\\n\\nCoral Island Studios. “28 Cardboard Box Open” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Coral_Island_Studios/sounds/459436/.\\n\\nGis_sweden. “Electronic Minute No 97 – Multiple Atonal Melodies.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/gis_sweden/sounds/429808/.\\n\\nGJOS. “PaperShuffling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/GJOS/sounds/128847/.\\n\\nIESP. “Cage Rattling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/IESP/sounds/339999/.\\n\\nInspectorJ. “Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/398160/.\\n\\nJohntrap. “Tubes ooTi en Vrak.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/johntrap/sounds/528291/.\\n\\nKern PKL. “Limoncello.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/104864.\\n\\nKyles. “University Campus Downtown Distant Traffic and Nearby Students Hanging Out Spanish +Some People and Groups Walk by Steps Cusco, Peru, South America.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/413951/.\\n\\nLillehammer. “Arbinac.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/album/9f32a891-6782-4a63-8796-cafa323b711e.\\n\\nMichaelvelo. “Packing Tape Pull.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Michaelvelo/sounds/366836/.\\n\\nNix Nihil. “Vocal Windstorm.” Psyoptic Enterprises, 2016.\\n\\nOymaldonado. “70’s southern rock mix loop for movie.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/oymaldonado/sounds/507242/.\\n\\nPsyoptic. “Forest of Discovery.” Thought Music. Psyoptic Enterprises, 2006.\\n\\nSagetyrtle. “Cassette.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/sagetyrtle/sounds/40164/.\\n\\nSuso_Ramallo. “Binaural Catholic Gregorian Chant Mass Liturgy.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Suso_Ramallo/sounds/320530/.\\n\\ntonywhitmore. “Opening Cardboard Box.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/110948/.\\n\\nZiegfeld Follies of 1921. “Second hand Rose” [restored version]. George Blood, LP. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/78_second-hand-rose_fanny-brice-grant-clarke-james-f-hanley_gbia0055858a/Second+Hand+Rose+-+Fanny+Brice+-+Grant+Clarke-restored.flac\\n\\n \\n\\nArchival Audio\\n\\nCarlin, George. “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Indecent Exposure. Little David Records, 1978.\\n\\n“Dorothy Livesay.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 Feb. 1984.\\n\\n“Douglas Barbour.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 10 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Margaret Atwood.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 12 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Marian Engel.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 Jan. 1984.\\n\\n“Linguistic Taboos and Censorship in Literature.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 April 1983.\\n\\n“Phyllis Webb.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 16 Nov. 1983.\\n\\n“Poetry: The Sullen Craft or Art.” Paper Tygers. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 1 Jan. 1982.\\n\\n“Robert Kroetsch.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 23 Nov. 1983.\\n\\n“Rudy Wiebe.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 21 March 1984.\\n\\n“Stephen Scobie.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 26 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Women’s Language and Literature: A Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 4 March 1981.\\n\\n“Speech and Its Characteristics.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 March 1981.\\n\\n \\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.\\n\\nBashwell, Peace. “Weird and Wonderful Scenes from the Bardfest.” The Gateway, November 10, 1981, pg. 13. Peel’s Prairie Provinces, http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/GAT/1981/11/10/13/.\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “CKUA-AM.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/listing_and_histories/radio/ckua-am.\\n\\nFauteux, Brian. “The Canadian Campus Radio Sector Takes Shape.” Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015, pp. 37-64.\\n\\nKostash, Myrna. “Book View.” The Edmonton Journal, 17 Jan. 1981.\\n\\nKirkman, Jean. “CKUA: Fifty years of growth for the university’s own station.” University of Alberta Alumni Association: History Trails, March 1978, https://sites.ualberta.ca/ALUMNI/history/affiliate/78winCKUA.htm.\\n\\nRemington, Bob. “Banning of Radio Show Called Cowardly.” The Edmonton Journal, 26 May 1983.\\n\\n \\n\\nFurther Reading\\n\\nArmstrong, Robert. “History of Canadian Broadcasting Policy, 1968–1991.” Broadcasting Policy in Canada, Second Edition. University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 41-56.\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “A Brief History of Educational Broadcasting in Canada.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.\\n\\nDeshaye, Joel. The Metaphor of Celebrity : Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980. University of Toronto Press; 2013.\\n\\nGil, Alex. “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make” [blog post]. Minimal Computing, 21 May 2015, https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.\\n\\nMacLennan, Anne F. “Canadian Community/Campus Radio: Struggling and Coping on the Cusp of Change.” Radio’s Second Century: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, edited by John Allen Hendricks, Rutgers University Press, 2020, pp. 193-206.\\n\\nRubin, Nick. “‘College Radio’: The Development of a Trope in US Student Broadcasting.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 47–64.\\n\\nWalters, Marylu. CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For. University of Alberta Press, 2002.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549718302721,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In the early 1980s, the University of Alberta funded a series of experimental literary radio programs, which were broadcast across the province on the CKUA community radio network. At the time, CKUA station had just been resurrected through a deal with ACCESS and was eager for educational programming. Enter host and producer Jars Balan – then a masters student in the English department with limited radio experience. For five years, Balan produced three radio series, Voiceprint, Celebrations, and Paper Tygers, which explored the intersection of language, literature, and culture, and he interviewed some of the biggest names in the Canadian literary scene, including Margaret Atwood, Maria Campbell, Robert Kroetsch, Robertson Davies, and many others.\n\nThis episode is framed as a “celebration” of those heady days of college radio in the early 80s. In it, clips from Jars’s radio programs, recovered from the University of Alberta Archives, supplement interviews with Balan and audio engineer Terri Wynnyk. Special tribute will be given to the recently departed Western Canadian poets Doug Barbour and Phyllis Webb through the inclusion of their in-studio performances recorded for Balan’s own Celebrations series. By looking back on the pioneering days of campus radio, this episode sheds light on the current moment in scholarly podcasting and how the genre is being resurrected and reimagined by a new generation of “academics on air.”\n\nSpecial thanks to Arianne Smith-Piquette from CKUA and Marissa Fraser from UAlberta’s Archives and Special Collections, and to SpokenWeb Alberta researcher Zachary Morrison, who worked behind the scenes on this episode.\n\n00:06\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:18\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. \nVoiceprint. Celebrations. Paper Tygers. These are the names of three campus radio shows produced in the late 70s and early 80s at the University of Alberta, and broadcast province-wide. All three explored how literature, culture, and politics intersect: Voiceprint was the first and longest-running of the three, about poetics, speech, and communications theory; “Celebrations” celebrated the 75th anniversary of the University of Alberta in 1983; and “Paper Tygers” was about the practical ins-and-outs of being a writer. They were created by University of Alberta Masters student Jars Balan, and had production teams and guests that ranged from other students—like the show’s audio engineer and production assistant, Terri Wynnyck—to librarians, professors, and writers. \n\nIn today’s episode, SpokenWeb contributors Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya celebrate and share the history of these three campus radio shows they found preserved in the University of Alberta archives. As Jars himself says in this episode, campus radio was an opportunity to share the kinds of thinking and conversations happening inside the university with those outside of it, too. But where were these campus radio shows produced, and how? What, exactly, were the circumstances of their creation? How were they received? And what echoes of campus radio do we hear in scholarly podcasting today? Featuring interviews with producer Jars Balan and audio engineer Terry Wynnyck, and archival audio of Western Canadian poets Doug Barbour and Phyllis Webb, Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea dive into the rich history of campus radio, from conception and script-writing to the physical cutting and editing of tape. \n\nWe invite you to listen to this episode with us and celebrate those early campus radio shows, and the people who made them. Here are Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya with Episode 8 of our third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Academics on Air”. [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song]\n\n02:55\tJars Balan\tHello and welcome to “Celebrations”. [Trumpet Fanfare]\n03:33\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tEvery great Spoken Web story starts with a box of something or other…\n03:37\tChelsea Miya:\tIt’s June, 2021. The Spoken Web Alberta team has gathered together over Zoom. We’re here to witness the unboxing of the archive. Michael O’Driscoll, director of Spoken Web U Alberta, is sitting next to a cardboard box.\n03:52\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tI got these by the way, directly from Jars. I had to drive by his house and picked them up from his front porch and we had a nice socially distanced talk about things. I have been very well behaved. I haven’t even peeked. I have no idea. Ooh, what is in here? And they’ve been sitting here in my office next to me for a, for weeks now. And I, and I have resisted the urge to check.\n04:16\tAriel Kroon:\tThis is me Ariel.\n04:19\tChelsea Miya:\tAnd this is me Chelsea.\n04:21\tNick Beauchesne:\tThis is Nick reporting.\n04:23\tAriel Kroon:\tThe three of us are the producers of this SpokenWeb Podcast episode. We’re also researchers at the University of Alberta where we’ve been digitizing the “Voiceprint” series. Over hours of listening, we feel like we’ve gotten to know this forgotten campus radio show, and its host Jars, pretty well. We’re fans.\n04:41\tChelsea Miya, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tIt makes it feel more…\n04:45\tArielKroon, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tTangible?\n04:45\tChelsea Miya, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tTangible, yeah. And I think it’ll give us a sense of the amount of work but also that the chaos and energy that went into this. [Laughter]\n04:53\tAriel Kroon:\tMichael peels back the cardboard flaps and reaches inside [Sound Effect: Box Opening, Papers Shuffling] He pulls out a stack of tapes.\n04:58\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tSo these are cassette recordings [Papers Shuffling] I would assume of some of the voice of nine different “Voiceprint” broadcasts, some of which we currently have a record of and some of which are entirely new.\n05:15\tAriel Kroon:\tHe also finds stacks of brown manila folders, which resemble case files. Scribbled across each folder is the name of a different episode. And they are stuffed with material.\n05:28\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\t[Papers Shuffling Throughout] So these are clearly the background research papers that were being used to develop ideas and the concepts for the different “Voiceprint” issues that Jars was developing at the time. So there’s a lot here in terms of the context for the developmental stuff, which I think is pretty interesting. Some library reference materials, some background on the history of the printed word, cognitive relations to the printed word. So, all kinds of interesting things, for sure. What else do we have in here? And some time codes for the materials that he was working with… a handwritten set of interview questions for Phyllis Webb [Unknown Voice: Oh that’s cool!] [Pause] –Wow.\n06:25\tAriel Kroon:\t[Start Music: Ambient Atmospheric Music] When we first stumbled upon this archive, or rather were handed it in a cardboard box, we thought the celebrity guests were the coup. We had hours of interviews and performances from Canadian literary stars like Phyllis Webb. These recordings hadn’t been played in decades and hardly anyone knew about their existence. But as we listened to the tapes, we realized that Jars, the host of the show, was himself a fascinating character. Rather than centring on the poets, our episode looks back on the heyday of campus radio culture… and tells the story of how students like Jars and radio aide Terri Wynnyck broke ground by experimenting with radio as a form of public scholarship. [End Music: Ambient Atmospheric Music]\n07:17\tChelsea Miya:\t[Audio Clip: Digital Musical Notes] [Audio Clip: Students Walking, Chatting] There are about 80 different college and university-affiliated campus radio stations across Canada. And each of these stations has their own unique story and history. CKUA radio is Canada’s first public broadcaster. [Start Music: Fanny Brice’s “Second Hand Rose”] It’s story begins on the University of Alberta campus in 1927. The school received a grant from the province to start its own radio station setting up shop in the Department of Extension.Over the next fifty years, CKUA became more than just a campus radio station. From the beginning, they experimented with new formats: radio dramas, square-dancing lessons, even an Alcoholics Anonymous program. The station broadcasts to remote areas, reaching everyone from farmers to fur trappers. But even as listenership expanded, CKUA still maintained close ties with the University. [End Music: Fanny Brice’s “Second Hand Rose”] Brian Fauteux, Professor of Music at UAlberta, explains…\n08:18\tAudio Recording, Brian Fauteux, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tThe university still maintains a couple hours a week for programming, maintaining that sort of focus on radio talks and lectures as well as what they were calling good music, classical music often. This idea that they were uplifting listeners or passing on something that was the domain of the university. So it’s a very unique station in that sense. It’s sort of education as framed by showcasing arts and culture that maybe you wouldn’t hear on commercial radio.\n08:50\tChelsea Miya:\t[Start Music: Rock Music] Then the 70’s arrive. A time of self-expression and rebelling against the man. In Quebec and Alberta, separatism is in the air. The federal and provincial governments clash over broadcasting rights, and CKUA gets caught in the middle. [End Music: Rock Music] At this point, CKUA is operated by Alberta Telephones, which is illegal under federal rules. [Start Music: Instrumental] But just as things are looking dire, ACCESS, The Alberta Educational Communications Corporation, is created. Educational programs have special status under new broadcast regulations. And ACCESS offers CKUA a new license. And so the station was reborn. [End Music: Instrumental]\n09:39\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Sound Effect: Radio Signal Test Tone] CKUA was back on air and better than before! Originally, CKUA had only aired on AM frequencies, which transmit farther, but have poorer sound quality and are best suited for talk radio. [Start Music: Electronic Instrumental] Now, CKUA could broadcast with 100,000 watt transmitters, which were 200 times more powerful than what they had before, and the station aired on the higher bandwidth FM frequencies. With these new transmitters, everyone in Alberta could tune into their shows, and every note could be heard, clear and crisp. It was during this period of intense expansion and revitalization that Jars Balan joined the station. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n10:25\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tNow I did my undergraduate work uh in at the University of Toronto. I did an Honours BA in English Literature there. And my plan was to take two or three years off with a friend and fix up his van and drive to the West Coast, work at the sawmill, make a pile of money, go to Mexico, hang out, smoke a lot of pot, party, and then come back and enter an MA program. It all kind of fell through because when we got to BC the forestry industry was in the doldrums, there was no work and we came back here. I ended up working on a farm near the international airport. In the meantime I found out there were a couple of profs in the English department who are very sympatico to my literary interests: Stephen Scobie and Doug Barbour. So I met with them and I decided, well this a good place to do my MA. So I signed up for an MA in ‘77 and entered the MA program in English/Creative Writing.\n11:21\tAriel Kroon:\tThe Executive Producer of the University’s Department of Radio and Television was Roman Onifrijchuck.\n11:26\tArchival Recording, Jars Balan, Voiceprint, 4 Mar 1981:\tThe problem of sexist language is perhaps most frequently encountered by people working in the field of publishing.\n11:32\tArielle Kroon:\tAs it turned out, Jars and Roman were old friends. They had spent several summers working together as camp counselors at a Ukrainian summer camp.\n11:41\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\t[Sound Effect: Children Playing] It was kind of a bunch of us 60’s guys running a camp, a summer camp, the way we thought we should have gone to summer camp and never did at the, you know, it was pretty loosey goosey, but it was very successful and popular, but we became very good friends.\n11:55\tAriel Kroon:\tJars had just entered UAlberta’s masters program in English, when Roman approached him to ask if he had an idea for a show.\n12:02\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tThe whole purpose of CKUA was to produce programming that highlighted and showcased the work of scholars at the U of A. And so I sketched out this concept for a show called “Voiceprint”. Because I was trying to work towards a materialist approach to poetics [Start Music: Instrumental] by which I meant poetics based on a knowledge of linguistics, communications theory, nuts and bolts sort of use of language and communication strategy and how that can be translated into making poetry more effective. And so Voiceprint for me became that working document that enabled me to work out my theories. Roman liked the idea. They gave me 13 half-hour shows. We started with that in ’79 and that was considered successful. So I said, you know, I can do, I really could use an hour. And they agreed to that. And I fleshed it out into what then became 39 one hour shows in the Voiceprint series.\n13:09\tAriel Kroon:\tBefore he knew it, one show became three. Jars also hosted the “Celebrations” series, interviewing the university’s writers-in-residence, authors like Marian Engel and Margaret Atwood. [End Music: Instrumental]\n13:20\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, 1983-84:\t[Sound Effect: Trumpet Fanfare] Our guest tonight is the novelist and short story writer Marian Engel… Robert Kroetsch… Margaret Atwood… Dorothy Livesay… poet Phyllis Webb…\n13:28\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tAnd so we took advantage of the fact that they were on campus in Edmonton for me to be able to interview them. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.\n13:37\tAriel Kroon:\tHis third radio show, “Paper Tygers”, was about the ins and outs of being a writer. For example, advice on how to find an agent and land a book deal.\n13:46\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, [1 Jan. 1982]\t“Paper Tygers”, a program for creative and working writers.\n13:50\tAriel Kroon:\tWhile completing his masters, Jars was also producing these three radio shows. It was like having another full-time gig.\n13:57\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tI was very lucky. I basically used the shows to pay for my education. I didn’t have to take any tutorials or anything like that. So I wasn’t beholden to my professors for any work. For me it was very important. I wanted to be independent. I was spared the agony of having to mark undergraduate papers which I hated to read and do even though I was an undergraduate once myself. By the time I finished my MA I was supporting myself freelance writing so – I was paid for the Voiceprint, they were $750 bucks a show and I got pretty good at turning out a show a week, which in those dollars was pretty good money and I was able to pay off my student debt and support myself.\n14:41\tAriel Kroon:\t“Voiceprint” was his biggest “hit.” The show was subtitled “Speech, language, communications technology, and the Literary Arts in a Changing World.”\n14:51\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, [4 March 1981]\t[Digital Musical Notes] “Voiceprint”.\n14:54\tAriel Kroon:\tThe topic seemed to strike a chord with listeners, finding a wider audience outside of the university campus. “Voiceprint” ran for three years on CKUA’s Access Radio station. At its peak, it aired every week on Wednesdays at 7pm. This is prime-time for radio shows.Voiceprint earned a glowing review in the Edmonton Journal. The reviewer, quoting Roman, calls it “Sesame Street for adults.” Voiceprint invited the public to confront the ways in which language, politics, and culture intersect. This radio series was unafraid to tackle controversial subjects, such as the subtleties of sexism in language, with a nuanced, academic perspective. As the critic from the Edmonton Journal put it…\n15:35\tAudio Recording, Re-enactment of Edmonton Journal Review:\t[Sound Effect: Typewriter keys] These programs are most assuredly not straight lectures, not a solitary patrician male voice droning on into the fog of the airwaves. “Voiceprint” is, in the jargon of electronic media, a magazine show. The format is the montage: many voices, recurring theme segments, a bit of music, readings, interviews. Jars Balan, an Edmonton poet and editor, is the producer and host. He asks the questions we want to ask of linguists, anthropologists, doctors, classicists, writers…\n16:07\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tWhen you think about it, the concept from the university’s view is a good one! All this work goes on at the university and if you’re not reading academic journals and you aren’t attending lectures, you don’t know what the hell these people are doing. And so this was an attempt to sort of get that out into a wider audience. You’d get somebody, I remember somebody saying, “so I caught your show was driving to Lethbridge from Calgary”… it obviously did reach an audience.\n16:33\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars was the host of “Voiceprint”. But the show was a collaborative effort. At least ten people worked on the production team. Some were students, like Jars. Others were UAlberta staff and professors, whom Jars recruited to produce special segments.\n16:48\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tI took advantage. There were people already involved in producing things in the Department of Radio and Television and I would use them for my program too for voices. So, Anna Altmann, who was a librarian, was somebody who was doing some other recording stuff and I said oh great, would you read these portions of the show, the scripted portions, and did various sound work, narrative work with us.\n17:13\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnna stood out to us, as listeners, because she speaks with a distinct affectation called “received pronunciation.” As heard in this clip, Anna hosted a bibliographic segment, where she would recommended “must-read” books about the different episode topics.\n17:31\tAudio Recording, Anna Altmann, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tIf you’d like to learn more about language and problem of sexism, probably the best place to begin reading is a very accessible book, titled Words and Women.\n17:41\tNick Beauchesne:\tIt turns out her mind was as noteworthy as her voice; she went on to become director of UAlberta’s School of Library and Information Science. And then there was Richard Braun who provided the definitions for some key words. Here he is discussing how sexism is ingrained in language.\n18:02\tArchival Record, Roman Onifrijchuck, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tLet’s look at those two words: male and female.\n18:03\tArchival Record, Richard Braun, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tMale, female. A very annoying thing that happens in English. An intentional misspelling, mispronunciation, to make it appear that “male” is the basic thing and upon it you add the meaningless “fe.”\n18:20\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tRichard Braun was an unusual character that I found in the classics department. He taught classics, but his real passion was etymology and he was great and he was quite eccentric, both looking and just in his manner. But he really enjoyed –I’d give him a list of words that I thought related to the theme of the show and he would look them up, the history of the word and whatever, and talk about it in a very engaging way. I wish I had a picture of him because he looked like a professor [Laughs]. Terri was the person probably I worked most closely with.\n18:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tTerri Wynnyk, the Production Assistant, was also a student at UAlberta, and the tech guru of the team.\n19:04\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\t[Audio of Tape Recording Stopping and Starting Throughout] I think I was the tech guru for Jars because Jars was so technically incompetent. Jars was always living in his head, and he couldn’t figure out how to use a tape recorder.\n19:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tShe remembers the day that she got recruited to work for the campus radio station.\n19:22\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tSo I was studying political science and economics at the University of Alberta. And and one of my sociology classes, the sociology of sex roles, I met this wild and crazy guy named Manfred Loucat who said, “Hey you’ve got to come and work at the university radio station. We’re just opening it up, we’re just opening it up, it’s been closed for a year, It’s been mothballed and we’re going to start it up.” So I ended up being the news director.\n19:49\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd before she knew it, Terri got promoted.\n19:53\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tThis guy, this bear of a guy with a big beard and wild and crazy hair, cigarettes hanging out of his mouth named Roman Onufrijchuk, showed up one day at CJSR. And said, “Do you want a job? Would you like to freelance for me?” And I said, “Sure, what are you paying?”\n20:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tTerri and Jars worked on multiple shows, spending countless hours in the radio studio, which became like a second home.\n20:28\tChelsea Miya:\t[Sound Effect: Audio Crackling] Today’s podcasts can be recorded anywhere. The three of us who worked on this SpokenWeb episode live in different parts of the country: Kitchener, Calgary, and Kamloops. We worked on this show remotely, conducting interviews from home on Zoom. But in the past, campus radio was very much rooted in a specific sense of place. Jennifer Waits is a campus radio historian and a producer of the Radio Survivor podcast. Like Jars and Terri, Jennifer worked on a campus radio station in the early 80s. Only in her case, she was based at Haverford College outside Philadelphia. Her radio program had a smaller following than CKUA. It only aired during lunch-hour in the cafeteria hall. But she still remembers how excited she was, hearing her shows broadcast over the school speakers…\n21:18\tAudio Recording, Jennifer Waits, Interview, [3 Feb 2022]:\tSo I did college radio starting when I was a freshman in college and didn’t really pay any attention to college radio history at the time. But I think what happened was I must have come back to a reunion at some point and had heard sad tales about the radio station falling on hard times… like somebody sold off a bunch of the record collection that I remember being a part of lovingly kind of restoring service from major record labels when I was there in the 80s. And, and so I had this sadness about pieces of the history getting sold off and I think it’s at that point that I got really interested in digging into the history of the radio station. So I kind of embarked on this project and interviewed people from Haverford College’s radio past going as far as the 1940s.\n22:07\tChelsea Miya:\tSince then, Jennifer made it her quest to celebrate and preserve campus radio culture. She’s visited hundreds of stations across America, documenting their different stories. As Jennifer explains, the campus radio studio is a sacred space. It has its own distinct aura.\n22:25\tAudio Recording, Jennifer Waits, Interview, [3 Feb 2022]:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic] There’s often a community feeling at a college radio station, so you might have a couch that’s been there forever. Sometimes I’ve been warned to not sit on a particular couch because of nefarious things that might have happened on said couch. Often you’ve got layers of history on the walls of radio stations, so you might have stickers from bands and from other radio stations, you might have flyers from concerts that have happened or you know, material that has been sent in with records. So promotional items like glossy photos of bands and posters. So you’ll see stuff all over the walls, you’ll often see cabinets that have stickers all over them. What I love are just sort of funky pop culture artifacts. [Laughs] So there might be a troll doll in the record library or a lava lamp. I’ve seen skulls at a lot of radio stations, I don’t really know why. [End Music: Ambient Electronic]\n23:21\tChelsea Miya:\tLike Jennifer, Jars and Terri also spent a lot of time in their campus radio studio. And as they explained, the studio space became part of university lore.\n23:31\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tDid Jars tell you physically where we were located? The Department of Radio and Television was two floors below ground in the basement of the biological sciences building.\n23:40\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tWeIl it was a special place come to think of it because it was in the bowels of the biological sciences building and literally in the bowels, not in the basement, but in the second basement or sub basement. [Laughter] So you went right down to the bottom. And I mean, the building itself is this gargantuan building and you know, as all these biological specimens and in display cases on different floors.\n24:06\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tIt was a warren. It was a rabbit’s warren of offices in this nether world. [Sound Effect: Cages Rattle] We once found a boa constrictor that had escaped. Because up above us was all sorts of science labs and buildings and rabbits and cockroaches and we had so much wildlife [Sound Effect: Animal Noises] two floors below ground.\n24:32\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tPeople didn’t know about it. You would really have to know where – people were shocked when they learned about it. When we’d tell ’em to come and I’d have to have a map to explain to them how to get to the studios.\n24:43\tNick Beauchesne:\tWe asked Terri to elaborate on her duties as the resident tech guru and production assistant.\n24:49\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tJars, I think, would edit the programs and he designed them, but my job was to put them together. We had a Uher tape recorder which was rarely used–it was a small, portable recorder. We had a Nagra which is a Swiss built small recorder that took small reels, but it was portable so we could take that out into the field. And I have a really strong memory of going in the dead of winter with my arm in a cast and this heavy tape recorder trudging through the snow from the Biological Sciences building to the Humanities to interview Rudy Wieb and it took me forever to get there and get my parka off and get the reels done. Poor Rudy. But he was such a prince, such a king of a man, you know, he gave me this fantastic interview. And then he helped me pack up and he even zipped me up because I couldn’t zip myself up with my hand. That tape recorder provided the best recording. Then we had two Ampex decks, reel-to-reel decks. The Ampex were used for editing, so we would listen to the interview first once across, make our notes, and then begin editing out what we didn’t want. We would cut on the diagonal, a little metal bar, it had a slot in it for the tape and a sliced whole. And we would use clear splicing tape to put the ends together. [Sound Effect: Stretching Tape, Cutting Tape] And tape them across. And then we had two Revox reel-to-reel players that handled the large ten-inch reels, and we used them for mastering. So once we had our show complete and edited, we would record the master tape from one deck to the other. The problem with the Revoxes were they had light-sensitive heads. So, if a splice was not very well done and you had a gap and the light came through and hit the head that was playing back, the playback head, it would stop, but only the take up reel would stop, not the letting-down reel. So you get this dump of tape. You just sit and babysit those.\n27:40\tNick Beauchesne:\tToday, podcast producers have access to online sound libraries with countless sound effects available at the click of a mouse. But in the heyday of alternative radio, sound design was done by hand. Campus radio producers like Jars and Terri would have to create sound effects themselves in the studio or track down physical recordings and transfer them from a record onto reel-to-reel tapes. The magnetic tape could then be sliced by hand into samples and remixed. We asked Jars and Terry about the eclectic musical stings and sound effects samples used in “Voiceprint”, “Celebrations”, and “Paper Tygers”.\n28:20\tArchival audio, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\t[Electronic sound effects]\n28:26\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, 4 Jan 2022]:\tThe sounds we used for the different subheadings of the show, were a collective effort. Some of them were my ideas. I’d go looking for something that I thought would work well there. Roman Onofrijchuk was very good, I think Terri helped out. We decided early on with “Voiceprint” [Music: Funky Electronic Reverberation] it was a funky, technical thing that we were doing to go with the sound effects for that. “Celebrations” was just my choice. I thought, well, okay, so it’s called Celebrations.\n28:49\tArchival audio, “Celebrations” Intro Music, 1983:\t[Trumpet Fanfare]\n28:50\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tA fanfare was perfect, that brassy upbeat. I was a member of the Edmonton public library and you could take out records and so I took a whole bunch of classical records that I thought I might find something on and found that particular fanfare which is identified at the end of the show. It was a combination of talents, I guess, that came in to contribute towards it.\n29:24\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tWe listened to different programming on BBC and NPR. We had a library of albums [Sound: Flipping Through Tapes] at radio and TV and of course I had I sort of had access to the stuff over at CJSR, as well. We had things like tubular bells [Bells Chime]. For “Sacred Circle”, I think we had a lot of really mystical and choral music [Choral Singing].\n29:54\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Choral Singing Continues] “Sacred Circle”, by the way, is another UAlberta radio show that Terri worked on. But that is a story for another podcast episode, another paper.\n30:04\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tAnd something would come up from the stuff that was being done at Convocation Hall because, although often they performed –my favourites were the old classics they also performed new music. And new music is very exciting because it could be atonal, [Music: Atonal Sounds] it can be twelve-tone. [Music: Twelve-Tone Sounds] We had a few sound effects albums because now you can get anything you want from the internet. But we actually had a couple of records where you that you could queue up. We got a lot of that. We nearly wore those sound effects albums out using them for every kind of sound we needed. [Music Fades]\n30:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tThese sound effects tapes are probably still gathering dust in the University of Alberta archives. The library’s inventory includes cassettes from 1979, with labels like “English meadow, night in the country,” “ultimate thunderstorm,” and “shell and gun fire.” The experimental sound design of late 1970s campus radio programs also coincides with the rise of the Canadian avant-garde sound poetry scene. The literary guests that Jars invited on air brought their own unique flavours to the show. For instance, as part of the “Celebrations” series, Jars interviewed poets Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour. At the time, Scobie and Barbour were both professors in the English Department. They performed poetry on campus under the shared stage name “Re:Sounding.” And their live shows had quite the reputation. A reviewer for The Gateway student paper describes Scobie and Barbour’s spoken word shows as “unforgettable madness.” The following is my dramatic re-enactment of the performance review:\n32:06\tAudio Recording, Re-enactmnet of The Gateway \t[Sound Effect: Typewriter Clacking] These two English professors think and act primal barbarism (pun intended)… I looked out accompanied by the sound of explosive static in the speakers to find Barbour hopping from one box to another repeatedly yelling something like “B-Bible dible-u,” while Scobie made a long spitting hiss into the microphone… this atavism went on for ten minutes. I was amazed at their vocal stamina… a crude finale to what had been for the most part a tasteful evening.\n32:38\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Sound Effect: Recording Buzz] Here’s a clip from their performance of their poem “What the One Voice” recorded live-in-studio for the “Celebrations” program in 1985.\n32:50\tArchival audio, “What the One Voice,” Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour, Re:Sounding, 1983:\t\n[Overlapping Voices] What the one voice affirms the other denies. What the one voice conceals, the other displays. When the one voice says yes the other says no. When the one voice is silent, the other voice cries. What the one voice believes, the other voice doubts. [Repetition, Voices Diverging and Swapping Lines] The voice of the left mind, the voice of the right. The voice of the right mind, the voice of the left. [Repetition, Volume Increasing and Then Dropping to Whispers]\n33:58\tNick Beauchesne:\tWhen we first heard this clip, Chelsea, Ariel and I wondered if Jars had attended Barbour’s live poetry reading series, hosted in the English Department. His answer caught us by surprise!\n34:10\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [28 Mar 2022]:\tI not only watched them perform. I performed at events with them.\n34:14\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars had created a collection of sound poems for his thesis project. Scobie and Barbour were his supervisors. Under their tutelage, he rubbed shoulders with the rock stars of the Canadian sound poetry scene. Jars remembers taking the stage with the Four Horsemen, fronted by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, who were like the Pink Floyd of avant garde poetry. Jars had invited his family to the event.\n34:40\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 Mar 2021]:\tAll these Ukrainians came, my grandmother among them. And I mean they sat there with their jaws on the floor. [Laughs]They thought these people are crazy! Making these sounds and jumping around on stage and everything like that. Sound poetry explores that area between music vocalizations and literature. I’m interested in these gray areas, I guess, which may be the best way to put it.\n35:06\tNick Beauchesne:\tOne of the great achievements of the “Celebrations” series is a very personal touch to discussing individual authors and poets, their works and their lives – especially as more time passes, and more and more of these people are leaving this world. They leave behind a special “voice print” in the form of Jars’s “Celebrations”. The “Re:Sounding” clip hits that much harder, knowing of Douglas Barbour’s passing in 2021, just a few months before this podcast episode was produced. Another clip from the CKUA archive that touched us was a reading of “Stellar Rhyme,” a poem by the great Phyllis Webb, who also passed in the year 2021.\n35:52\tArchival audio, “Stellar Rhyme,” Phyllis Webb, “Celebrations”, 1983: \t\n[Page Flipping] A ball star, tiny columns and plates falling from very cold air, a quick curve into sky. My surprised winter breath, a snowflake caught midway in your throat.\n36:15\tAriel Kroon:\tJars was also a talented interviewer, and he had a special knack for getting the guests on his shows to open up. He explains that he realized early on that being interviewed for a radio show, even a lesser-known campus show with a studio in the biology basement, could be intimidating. Once he placed a microphone in someone’s face and did a sound check, people would freeze up. So, he took a different approach.\n36:38\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tOne of the things I learned was how to ease them into the interviews. I would meet them when they came in and help them take off their coat and start chatting with them and stuff. We’d sit down, and I’d click on the microphones. And we’d just keep talking about this, that. You know, their time at the university. General stuff. Get them comfortable talking. And I’d just ask, “So tell me how did you get interested in psycholinguistics?” A light would come on in their heads saying, like, oh wow, the interview has begun! And it made it much more smooth.\n37:04\tAriel Kroon:\tOne of Jars’ most memorable guests was poet Ann Cameron. He interviewed Cameron for an episode of Voiceprint called “Women’s Language and Literature: a Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Only a few clips made it into the final episode. But the raw interview file is riveting. They talked for almost an hour. We were captivated by her candid discussion of everything from sexism to motherhood to her contempt for the label of “poetess.”\n37:32\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tDo you object to being identified as a woman writer?\n37:37\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tNo, I am a woman, and I am a writer.\n37:40\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tYou don’t mind having… I mean there are a lot of people who…\n37:43\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tI object to being referred to as a “poetess.”\n37:46\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tMm-hmm\n37:47\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tSomehow a poet, semantically or whatever, a poet has has dignity and pride and has an ability to use words and move people, and a poetess is hung on a hook of iambic pentameter and nobody bothers [Laughs].\n38:12\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tWell, it’s the ending is a… the suffix is a… has a diminutive, derivative quality to it.\n38:21\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tIt…what does really piss me off is when someone comes up and says, “Oh, I read the thing you wrote. My, you write just like a man!” And I used to choke, just choke! And now, I smile demurely and say, “Oh shit, I hope not!” [Laughs].\n38:45\tAriel Kroon:\tThe campus radio shows in the University of Alberta archive are full of gems like these, from Canadian authors who often engage with Jars on a deeply personal level, sharing stories about their work and their lives. These audio artifacts transport us back to a particular moment in the history of Canadian literature, and also a particular moment in the history of alternative radio.\n39:13\tArchival audio, “Voiceprint”, 1983:\t[Sound Effect: Warning Tone] [Announcer Voice] Warning. The following program candidly examples the subject of pornography, censorship, and linguistic taboos. Listener discretion is advised.\n39:23\tArchival audio, Jars Balan,“Voiceprint”, 1983:\tMy name is Jars Balan. And tonight I’ll be exploring the delicate issue of profanity in language and literature. Our guests include several people fascinated by four-letter words, including comedian George Carlin.\n39:36\tChelsea Miya:\tThe final episode of Voiceprint never made it to air. The subject of the episode was “Linguistic Taboos and Censorship”. Ironically, this episode about censorship was what got the show kicked off CKUA. Jars had included a clip from comedian George Carlin’s infamous monologue. You might have heard it. It’s about the “seven words you can’t use in television.”\n39:58\tArchival Audio, \nGeorge Carlin, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” 1978: \n\nArchival audio, George Carlin, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” 1978: Bad words! That’s what they told us they were, remember? That’s a bad word! You know: bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions… and words! You know the seven, don’t you? That you can’t say on television: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Huh? [Audience Laughter, Applause].\n40:26\tChelsea Miya:\tFor the ACCESS-run CKUA station, remember this is the ACCESS that emphasized “educational programming,” airing the Carlin clip crossed a line. They said Jars had “contravened the station’s policy on obscene language.” The Edmonton Journal criticized CKUA for being “too sensitive” about the whole issue. In the editor’s view, the “program in question was a sober academic discussion.” Jars himself is quoted in the article. And he laments the decision as “truly unfortunate.” “Voiceprint” was, he says, “serious radio” and they’d been “castrated!” Again, Jars’s words, not mine. [Sound Effect: Electronic Beeping]. And so… Voiceprint came to an end. Until, that is, it was rediscovered, four decades later, by the SpokenWeb research team. [Boxes Opening] With a little help from Jars..\n41:22\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tWell I think I got about two bankers boxes’ worth of stuff. Because I’ve got stuff in the shed and I’ve got stuff here. So, I could bring this to campus. [Tape Recording Starting]\n41:32\tAriel Kroon:\tJars gave us additional recordings of “Voiceprint”, and folders upon folders of handwritten production notes. Sifting through this material, we were amazed at the sheer amount of work each participant put into producing these shows, often without knowing who (if anyone) would be listening. Nowadays, the lived reality of campus radio from 40 years ago seems so foreign to those of us working on podcasts. For example, we are able to access listener metrics with the click of a mouse through podcasting hosting platforms, and insert audio very easily without having to cut up the physical recording media.\n42:09\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWe often hear [Laughs] all the different terms like “knowledge mobilization,” getting thrown around as really important. Well, what does that actually look like? If we’re thinking about those kinds of aspects of projects being important, we need to start seriously thinking about how we can change our research into more publicly accessible work.\n42:29\tAriel Kroon:\tThis is Stacey Copeland, one of the producers of the Amplify Podcast Network. One of the Amplify Podcast Network’s goals is to have podcasting recognized by academic institutes as legitimate scholarly work.\n42:43\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWhat Amplify is interested in doing is not only bringing scholarly podcasts to light, but thinking about how to make them count as scholarship in more formal ways as well through peer review. So, thinking about the podcast equivalent to a manuscript.\n43:01\tAriel Kroon:\t[Sound Effect: Printing Press Mechanizations] The printed journal or book has long been held up as the gold standard of academic research, how a scholar measured the impact of their research. But these traditional forms of scholarly production can be alienating. As academics, we’re removed from the process of “making knowledge” in a material, hands-on way. Much like Jars and Terri did with campus radio shows like “Celebrations” and “Voiceprint”, today scholars are using podcasting to reconnect with their research and, at the same time, find an audience outside of academia.\n43:35\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tFor me it often means learning how to better articulate my research, in general. If you can’t talk about your research with your grandma [Laughs] then you really need to start rethinking what your scholarship’s bringing to the world and what it’s actually contributing beyond your specific discipline. And, when you start to engage in something like making a podcast, it brings up a lot of those bigger conversations and bigger questions.\n44:03\tAriel Kroon:\tIn addition to her work with the Amplify Podcast Network, Stacey researches the history of queer and feminist radio. She points out how campus and community radio in the 70s and 80s pushed back against the mainstream. In this sense, shows like Voiceprint paved the way for podcasts, as a more experimental alternative to major public and commercial broadcasters.\n44:25\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWhen we’re looking at pre-Internet era, community radio and campus radio in particular played a huge role in creating any sort of space for community and any sort of political discussion that didn’t fit CBC or private commercial radio. So, spaces to have those more local-oriented conversations and also conversations around queer act activism, around racial activism, and politics and movements across different decades in Canada that just didn’t get the airtime on, say, a CBC. And when the Internet didn’t exist, these were the only spaces we could have those conversations.\n45:06\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Start Music: Ambient Music] Jars did not win his battle with ACCESS, and “Voiceprint” was ultimately banned. But he has no regrets. As Jars himself put it, the show “concluded with an exclamation point, which wasn’t necessarily a bad way to go out.” Through ups and downs, highs and lows, Jars still cherishes the memories of his time as a campus radio host. [End Music: Ambient Music]\n45:30\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tRadio is no longer the same thing that it was when these shows were produced. When I think back on the way we edited with a razor blade and tape to do the splicing and how now all of that just done with dials, digitally and you don’t have a tape even is a world of difference. And I enjoyed the tactile thing of of doing the cuts. And I got good at it.\n45:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tFor Jars, campus radio is a chance for academics to connect with the public in a meaningful way, to lend voice to larger social and political conversations which affect us all.\n46:06\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tOne of the things that’s changed about the university is that in an attempt to combat this image of being an ivory tower, academics now realize it’s important to reach out into a wider audience. That if society is going to support universities financially, morally, politically, they need to be able to show the worth of the learning that goes on at the university. And so sharing that knowledge, sharing that experience is very important. And I think more scholars realize that.\n46:35\tNick Beauchesne:\tAfter graduating from UAlberta, Jars continued to write and perform sound poetry. He also went on to teach remote learning courses in Australia. This was before the internet, so Jars would record his lectures on tape, and those tapes would then be mailed to students. To his surprise, being a distance educator was a lot like being a radio host.\n46:59\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tThe fact that I had to record these in a studio and sit for three hours, they are three-hour lectures, it really helped the fact that I was used to sitting in front of a microphone in a studio [Sound Effect: Recording Sounds] , and I could hold forth. I just make notes, spread them out on the thing, and talk.\n47:15\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars later returned to the University of Alberta where he was hired by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.\n47:22\tChelsea Miya:\tAs for Terri, she made the leap from radio to film, devoting her life to telling stories about social justice, women’s rights, and the arts.\n47:31\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tAfter I left radio, I became a documentary filmmaker and I’ve spent my entire career doing that. But I did love radio first and foremost: that was my passion, my heart.\n47:43\tChelsea Miya:\tWe asked Terri if she had any advice for the next generation of aspiring academic podcast.\n47:50\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\t[Start Music: “Limoncello” by Kern PKL] Voiceprint was fun! Voiceprint was so rigorous. The first thing I would pass on is: listen to people, and listen with an open mind. Don’t bring your prejudices to what you’re listening to. Listen with an open mind. And I would say, always speak. Always speak your truth. Be respectful when you speak it, but speak so that you can articulate yourself. Speak so that you can make yourself understood. Speak so that you can express your frustrations in a way that are respected, speak so that you’re not just a dumb human being on this planet, but you contribute to the rest of society. [End Music: “Limoncello” by Kern PKL]\n49:02\tAriel Kroon:\t[Music Starts: “Celebrations” Fanfare] With that, we conclude this brief profile from the campus radio history archives at the University of Alberta. We’d like to thank Arianne Smith-Piquette from CKUA and Marissa Fraser from UAlberta’s Archives and Special Collections. We’d also like to give a special shout out to SpokenWeb Alberta researcher Zachary Morrisson, who worked behind the scenes on this episode. All works cited and contributors can be found in the show notes for this episode. This is myself, Ariel Kroon, on behalf of my colleagues Chelsea Miya, and Nick Beauchesne, bidding you a pleasant good evening. [End Music: “Celebrations” Fanfare]\n49:50\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya of the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr—and next month, this position will be taken over by our new supervising producer, Kate Moffatt. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The Spokenweb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music]"],"score":5.7495356},{"id":"9642","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 S5E8, Algo-Rhythms, 1 July 2024, Miya and Beauchesne "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/algo-rhythms/"],"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 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Chelsea Miya","Nicholas Beauchesne"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya","Nicholas Beauchesne"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nicholas Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/audio/3bb27e3c-35f3-4c40-8683-92081ab60ff5/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-mix-spokenweb-june-21-2024-algo-rhythms.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:42:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"40,345,225 byte\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-mix-spokenweb-june-21-2024-algo-rhythms\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/algo-rhythms/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-07-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SOUNDFX & MUSIC\\n\\nThe score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. “Elegia.” On Remembrance. Created with the Murmurator software in collaboration with Eli Stine. SoundCloud audio, 5:25, 2020, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/elegia.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. “From “From ‘David’”” From Three PFR-3 Poems by Jackon Mac Low for percussion quartet and speaker; performance by UVA percussion quartet. SoundCloud audio, 4:13, 2017, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/from-from-david.\\n\\nPixabay. “Crane load at construction site.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/crane-load-at-construction-site-57551/.\\n\\nSherfey, John, and Congregation. “Nothing but the Blood.” Powerhouse for God (CD SFS60006), Smithsonian Folkways Special Series, 2014. Recorded by Jeff Titon and Ken George. Reproduced with permission of Jeff Titon.\\n\\nSicchio, Kate. “Amelia and the Machine.” Dancer Amelia Virtue. Robotics: Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo. Music: Melody Loveless, Kate Sicchio. Vimeo, uploaded by Kate Sicchio, 2022, https://vimeo.com/678480077.\\n\\nARCHIVAL AUDIO & INTERVIEWS\\n\\nAltmann, Anna. “Popular Poetics” [segment]. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 25 Oct. 2022.\\n\\nJackson, Mac Low. “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin.” Performed by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, bpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974. PennSound, http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mac-Low/CDs/Doings/Mac-Low-Jackson_09_Vocabulary-for-Mattlin_Doings_1982.mp3.\\n\\nO’Driscoll, Michael. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 23 Aug. 2022.\\n\\nOnufrijchuk, Roman. Performing “Tape Mark I,” a computer poem by Nanni Balestrini. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.\\n\\nSicchio, Kate. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 4 Nov. 2023.\\n\\nWORKS CITED\\n\\nBalestrini, Nanni. “Tape Mark I.” Translated by Edwin Morgan. Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts. Studio International, 1968.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. From “From ‘David’” [score]. 2017. http://kevindavismusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/From-From-David.pdf.\\n\\nDean, R. T., and Alex McLean, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Oxford University Press, 2018.\\n\\nHiggins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. University of California Press, 2002.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 23 January 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.c, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 19 September 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.d, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.\\n\\nJohnston, David Jhave. “1969: Jackson Mac Low: PFR-3” [blogpost] Digital Poetics Prehistoric. https://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/26/1969-jackson-mac-low-pfr-3-poems/.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. 1973. Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, CC-47567-68576.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Thing of Beauty, edited by Anne Tardos. University of California Press, 2008. https://doi-org.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/10.1525/9780520933293.\\n\\nO’Driscoll, Michael. “By the Numbers: Jackson Mac Low’s Light Poems and Algorithmic Digraphism.” Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008, edited by J. Mark Smith. McGill-Queens University Press, 2013, pp. 109-131.\\n\\nRusso, Emiliano, Gabriele Zaverio and Vittorio Bellanich. “TAPE MARK 1 by Nanni Balestrini: Research and Historical Reconstruction.” The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, June 2017. https://zkm.de/en/tape-mark-1-by-nanni-balestrini-research-and-historical-reconstruction.\\n\\nStine, Eli, and Kevin William Davis. “The Murmurator: A Flocking Simulation-Driven Multi-Channel Software Instrument for Collaborative Improvisation.” International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2018. https://elistine.com/writing-blog/2018/4/14/the-murmurator.\\n\\nFURTHER READING / LISTENING\\n\\nHiggins, Hannah, and Douglas Kahn, eds. Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. University of California Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520953734.\\n\\nNoll, Michael. “Early Digital Computer Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated,” LEONARDO, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 55-65.\\n\\nReichardt, Jasia, ed. Cybernetic Serendipity. 1968. 2nd edition. Studio International, 1968.\\n\\nRockman, A, and L. Mezei. “The Electronic Computer as an Artist.” Canadian Art, vol. 11, 1964, pp. 365–67.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549758148608,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?\n\nIn this live episode recorded during June’s 2024 SpokenWeb Symposium, producers Nicholas Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.\n\nThank you to interviewees Michael O’Driscoll, Kevin William Davis, and Kate Sicchio, as well as the live studio audience.\n\n00:04\tSpokenWeb Podcast Intro\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:17\tMaia Harris:\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.\n00:31\tMaia Harris:\tMy name is Maia Harris, subbing in for our usual hosts for a very special edition of the SpokenWeb podcast, recorded live at the 2024 SpokenWeb symposium here on Treaty Seven Land.\nEach month, we bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\nHow can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?\nIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, we will venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.\n01:18\tChelsea Miya:\tThanks, Maia. Hi everyone. I am Chelsea Miya.\n01:22\tNicholas Beauchesne:\tAnd I’m Nick Beauchesne. And this is our live studio audience. . .\n01:28\tLive Studio Audience:\t[Cheers and applause]\n01:36\tChelsea Miya:\t[Beat music plays and fades]\nThanks to the “algos,” or algorithms, used in social media to curate content and drive engagements. Most people have at least heard the term, even if they have little understanding of what it means.\nThe concept of an “algorithm” predates computers, originating back in the ninth century. An “algorithm” is understood to mean a set of rules for executing a particular task or a set of operations. You can create an algorithm for getting ready in the morning, baking a cake, or driving to work. As we’ll see later in the episode, algorithms can even be used to generate poetry, compose music and choreograph dances.\n02:14\tNicholas Beauchesne:\tThe clip you’re about to hear is from the University of Alberta campus radio show “Voice Print.” You can learn more about the series and its early contributions to experimental literary radio on the SpokenWeb podcast episode: “Academics on Air.”\nThis particular voice-print episode was themed “Printing and Poetry in the Computing Era,” and it aired in 1981. The archival recording anticipated the hopes and fears for automated computer-generated art that, in some ways, have come to be realized in the present.\n02:45\tAudio from the “Popular Poetics” segment of The Voiceprint episode “Printing And Poetry In The Computer Era,” 20 May 1981; Read By Anna Altmann.\tAlthough documentation is lacking, it is probable that computer poetry was invented simultaneously at various locations in the 1950s by engineers occupied in such language tasks as mechanical translation during the 1960s. However, these developments came to the attention of poets and literary scholars, who then began to explore the literary possibilities of computer technology.\nAlthough somewhat disturbed by the implications of such activity, these pioneers were more fascinated by the superhuman inventiveness of the computer and by the inability of the reader to distinguish with certainty between machine and human products. Although no recognized masterpieces of cybernetic literature have yet been produced, it seems only a matter of time before computer poetry becomes a respected form of verse in its own right. Indeed, the possibility exists that a future Milton or Shakespeare is at this very moment studying computer science at a technical school or university.\n03:44\tNicholas Beauchesne\tThe Milton or Shakespeare of computer poetry may not have arisen yet, but one contender could be open: AI’s ChatGPT, which debuted in 2022. Other AI chatbots entered the mix soon after. Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Co-pilot, and even Adobe Photoshop have an AI-assisted editor mode. These technologies raise fundamental, ethical and existential questions about what constitutes art.\nCan a programmer or a program be a poet? They can certainly try. As ChatGPT told us in the form of haiku:\ncraft with words untold\nChatGPT offers aid\npoetry unfolds\n04:26\tChelsea Miya:\tOur first guest is Mike O’Driscoll, and he’s the Director of SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta. He’s an authority on early experiments in procedural or algorithmic poetry as he explains the “Dada” movement—and that’s “Dada” with a “d,” not a “t” as in “data”—was an anti-art movement. These early coders became infamous for their avant-garde performance pieces. The instructions were generated randomly, not with digital tech since this was before bits and bytes, but with everyday analog tools: paper, a pen, and, oddly, a hat.\n05:04\tMike O’Driscoll:\tTristan Zara, one of the leaders of the “Dadaist” Movement, would pass a hat around the room—think about a Vienna Cafe 1916—and invite audience members to put a word into the hat and then the hat would be gathered and as the words came out of the hat that would construct the poem. That’s a “procedural” poetic. That is a way of making a poem according to a particular rule-driven methodology that might or might not be modified before, during, or after, in terms of human intention and other creative roles that the human participants might play.\n05:48\tChelsea Miya:\tFast-forward to the 1960s. IBM [“International Business Machines”] had just debuted powerful new computing machines, and almost from the get-go, the company founders imagined using these machines to create art. They invited a number of artists to their laboratories, including Jackson Mac Low.\n06:08\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIn Southern California in 1969, Jackson was invited to participate alongside computer technologists in the production of some poetry, which he dubbed the “PFR-3 Poems” [PFR: Phonemic Face Realizations]. These were using film readers that could be read automatically by a computer program that would essentially take the inputs that he produced and randomize them in different ways so he could enter up to a hundred lines of text with up to 48 characters per line. The program would identify units of that text, whether words or sentences and then randomize those and produce poems by displaying on a screen every 10th line produced through that algorithmic procedure. So, that was a very early instance of Jackson Mac Low engaging computer technology to produce a poem.\n07:09\tChelsea Miya:\tAs Michael O’Driscoll explains, this was not Mac Low’s first experiment with computational art, as described by a poet who worked like a computer before computers. Mac Loew had been experimenting with rule-based language games for years.\n07:25\tMike O’Driscoll:\tJackson had already been working by hand for six years before that on what he called his “diastic writing through” method, which was essentially an algorithmic procedure that uses source texts and seed texts or index text to determine which words are pulled out of the source text and displayed on the page of the poem. That procedure depends specifically on the very exacting rule of matching letter positions in words in the seed text to letter positions in words in the source text to determine the material that becomes the poem. That’s a process that Jackson was doing by hand from 1963 and did for the next 26 years by hand. And if anyone wants to try this, I welcome them to try it. But the manic patience it takes to do this is astounding and impressive.\n08:25\tNicholas Beauchesne\tJackson Mac Low was not the only artist who experimented with algorithmic methods. He was part of an experimental art movement called “Fluxus.” Like the “Dadaists” who came before, the Fluxus of the 1960s was more interested in the process of making art than the finished piece. In fact, the art was never finished.\n08:46\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIt’s important to note that much of that performance work was done through collaborative processes that demanded or asked of the performers and the artists a certain level of attentiveness and attunement to each other in terms of what was going on in the moment. So there’s this deeply relational aspect to what’s going on there. There is also a modelling of certain kinds of social or political formations. And so what Jackson is doing there is bringing the procedural into contact with human agency and with human community.\n09:25\tNicholas Beauchesne\tOne of the best examples of Mac’s process in action is a vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Here’s a clip of a live performance featuring an all-star cast of readers, including Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Hagan, and the unmatchable BpNichol.\n09:46\tAudio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\tShare name, nation share name, nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat. Tell them tell us anymore. Tell them Stare, stare. Helen, stare. Tell stare. Stare hen. Be lamb eel. Tell, tell them. Tell them laws tell them rain eel brain reliable metal la, reliable trash, reliable trash, reliable trash, stellar trash, reliable trash, termination. See, stellar trash. She Athens, taste me, taste me.\n10:55\tChelsea Miya:\tAs our live audience can see projected above us, here is the “score” for the performance. The page, as I’ll describe it for our listeners, is a jumble of words, some written in tiny, cramped font, other larger, some angled in different directions, or flipped upside down. Each word is a variation or riff on the name of the person the poem is dedicated to: Sharon Belle Mattlin. Some configurations of letters from her name morphed into elation, emanation, mint, share, shame, and so on. The performers were free to interpret, explore, and respond to these freewheeling scores at the moment of the performance. But always within the bounds of agreed-upon rules.\n11:42\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIt’s a brilliant field of text in which what Jackson has done, is written in by hand all of the words derived from the dedicatee of the piece. The performers that can then move across that page in ways that they are inclined to do, whether they are articulating work words or singing or in the case of instrumentalists that you could hear the flute music. In that case, they are transposing the letters to particular notes that Jackson has determined for them in advance. And so, what you’re getting, in that case, is, again, quite a rule-bound production of the text and its performance. But also, that opportunity for the performers themselves to move across and through that work in ways that they intuit and that they conduct in response to their fellow performers.\n12:46\tChelsea Miya:\tAlgorithmic processes are increasingly reshaping our world. So, we asked Mike what Mac’s work can teach us about the role of human decision makers in our data-driven society.\n13:00\tMike O’Driscoll:\tJackson works deliberately at the limit between “chance” and “choice,” between “procedure” and “intention.” He does so in part to trouble that boundary, to disturb or even deconstruct the boundary between the machine and the human, between the automatic and the “age-gentle.” And he does so for very deliberate political reasons.\nIn part one, I contend that Jackson draws attention to what I’ve been calling the ideology of machine agency. That notion that machines that algorithms, that computers are somehow themselves operative, are somehow themselves “age-gentle.”\nBut this is, in many ways, a kind of illusion that the presumption of machine agency is itself ideological, is itself something about which we should beware.\n14:02\tNicholas Beauchesne\tMike O’Driscoll is editing a new collection of Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Stein Poems, which will feature over 100 never-before-published poems. This new version by MIT Press will hit the shelves in Fall 2025\n14:17\tAudio from “Tape Mark I” by Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint episode “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; performed by Roman Onufrijchuk.\tAeons deep in the ice. I paint all time in a whirl bang. The sludge has cracked aeons deep in the ice. I see gelled time in a whirl. The sludge has cracked all green in the leaves. I smell dark pools in the trees crash. The moon has fled all white in the buds. I flash snow peaks in the spring bang, the sun has fogged\n14:52\tChelsea Miya:\tMac Low’s computer poems continue to be performed and encoded in new ways. Next, we’ll hear from Kevin William Davis, a contemporary composer and cellist based at the University of Virginia. Davis is a big fan of Jackson Mac Low, and he was particularly captivated by his computer poems.\n15:12\tKevin Davis:\tYeah, poetry is actually a really big inspiration of mine. I mean to me, I can read orchestral scores, I can kind of like see them and imagine them in the way that one might sit with a book of poetry maybe sound some of it out, on a score on the piano, maybe you would actually read some of the poetry out loud.\n15:34\tChelsea Miya:\tDavis’ Musicology students didn’t at first share his enthusiasm for poetry and they were kind of baffled when he brought a book of poems to practise. But when they started scoring Mac Low’s computer poems, working line by line to transform the words into sounds, something clicked.\n15:51\tKevin Davis:\tAs a music teacher, I see people struggle with notation constantly. It’s a very difficult thing to turn symbols into movements, in time. And when they were doing these, this Mac Low stuff, it was effortless. That directly, I think, inspired my thinking about, “OK, what if I then turned speech back into music?” Can I get these . . . can I get these uh [laughs] percussionists to execute rhythms that are more complex than they could with actual musical notation?\n16:29\tNicholas Beauchesne\tMac Low not only adopted methods from computing, also music theory. He studied with composer John Cage and sound, as we heard, was integral to the performance of his work. The Fluxus movement itself spanned multiple countries and multiple fields of practice—not just poetry, but also sculpture, dance, and music.\nSo, when Davis and his students decided to remake Mac Low’s PFR (Permutation, Replacement, and Form) poems in a different genre, creating music from the printed words, it was a very Fluxus thing to do.\nInstead of transcribing the words into notes, they created a series of sonic doodles. The new, re-created score looks on the page like a series of loops and squiggles, each shape corresponding to lines from the poem.\n17:15\tKevin Davis:\tMy concept of this was transformation of elements of the poem into movement, which then would result in sound. And so for literally like the drums are tracing out the letters of the poem on the surface of their instruments. And so just different ways, some of them almost silly, just different ways of transforming this movement into sound in that process. Yeah, I spent a lot of time with the words like saying the words. The four poems that were in the collection that I have were each very different. They were very much like movements of a musical work.\nAre we allowed to pause for a second? I think this would be an easier discussion to have with the book, which I was like, I should have grabbed that book.\nHold on just a second. So Know it’s around here somewhere.\n18:06\tChelsea Miya:\tSo behind me are stills from the interview that I did with Kevin over Zoom. And at this point in the interview, Davis left the frame and rummaged around in the background.\n18:18\tKevin Davis:\tOh, here it is.\n18:20\tChelsea Miya:\tAnd he pulled out a copy of Jackson Mac Low’s Collected Works: Thing of Beauty (2008). The pages are scribbled with notes for his performance, just like he would do for a score. Davis’s favourite poem, the one with a lot of annotations, is “From from David.” He confesses he was more than a little nervous about performing the speaking parts. But for this particular poem, he felt it was important to read the actual text.\n18:48\tKevin Davis:\tI’m so much more comfortable playing a musical instrument than speaking. And especially speaking as performance. There are things you find in the experience of reading one of those kinds of texts over and over. It seems like in a lot of ways more about language itself more than just any kind of emotional idea he’s trying to get across. It’s a kind of anti narrative really.\nWhile like I said before, in the reading. I tried to strike a tone. The funniness is just being like kind of pummelled by this absurdity of, you know, just these different transformations of this very simple idea of like is this is David asking what happened. [laughs]\n19:26\t[Audio From From “From ‘David’” Composed By Kevin Davis From Three PFR-3 Poems By Jackson Mac Low For Percussion Quartet And Speaker, 2017; Performance By UVA Percussion Quartet.]\tWhere did David ask what happened? How did David ask? Where did David happen to have asked me? Asking what had been, happened. David asks, had anything happened when David asked who was there? When David asked, how did David ask what happened, what had been happening when David was asking what had been happening, what was happening when David was asking happened? How had David been asked what had happened? When did David ask what had happened? Whom—\n20:08\tKevin Davis:\t[Live reading from the interview] It’s from David. David asked whether anything had been happening. Whom did David ask? What happened?\nWell, it’s like I messed up a couple times. I really, when I did it, especially in the recording and performance, I had to practise some to be ready. It’s not a tongue twister exactly, but it almost gets in that territory. There’s just so much repetition, it can get a little difficult. This one more than any of them is really a lot like reading music. Even the most notated classical piece involves improvisation on the part of the performer. It may be just in small ways.\n20:44\tKevin Davis:\tAnd it made me think about that. This feels like the kind of improvising you do when you play Mozart or Bach or something. And then you kind of like put little ends of phrases that you’re you. But in the moment, if you know it well enough, you’re able to play with it. You’ll all do this end this way this time.\nAnd what I love about this one is that some of the lines have question marks and some don’t. And so you can play around with this thing that’s often unconscious that we do, where we indicate a question through raising the pitch.\n21:23\tNicholas Beauchesne\tDavis’s reading of Mac Low’s computer scores was, in part, inspired by his experiences growing up in Appalachia. One of his first experiences with the live performance of music and voice was at his Baptist Church. When he read Mac Low’s poems, he imagined the relationship between instruments and the voice, the way the spoken text echoes the sounds, as a kind of congregation.\n21:47\tKevin Davis:\tWe did these things, called responsive readings. Have you ever heard of these? So there’ll be whatever text or sometimes Bible verses, and then the pastor will talk and then the congregation, the words will be in bold and you’ll go back and forth. And there are all these hetero-phonic artifacts of like people sort of speaking together. I found them compellingly odd, and it was. It’s such a different way of interacting than singing.\nMe, as a little kid, I thought it was really interesting. Well, it’s just this sound of like 200 people’s voices of all ages kind of like having this resonance together. But like it’s all soft on the edges because of the different ways that people are speaking. And whenever they hit like a “tee” then it’s like “tuh-tuh-tuh.” Right. It’s kind of like dancing around the room, whereas the vowels will all be kind of like these kinds of flowing singing things, you know, like sounds.\n22:51\tChelsea Miya:\tDavis doesn’t just perform computer poems. He also, on occasion, helps write computer programs. Interactive sonic events, people sounding together, have always intrigued him. After reflecting on the parallel practices of church congregations and Fluxus artists, he got to thinking: could these social dynamics of sonic performance be captured and re-created computationally?\n23:20\tAudio from “Elegia” from On Remembrance, 2020; composed by Kevin William Davis using the Murmuration software in collaboration with Eli Stine.\tI worked with a friend, Eli Stein, who’s a fantastic programmer. We came up something that’s a flocking algorithm, a bird flocking algorithm. Fifty little particles of sound, and then they just kind of flock around. You just use that flocking as kind of like a starting point. An agent of kind of chaos to spread things out and then you can stop them, freeze them.\n23:56\tChelsea Miya:\tHave you ever seen flocks of starlings? They move together in this hypnotic way, dancing across the sky, almost like jellyfish or giant misshapen bubbles, stretching and contracting. That behaviour is called Murmuration. And that’s what Davis and his partner dubbed the software: The Murmurator.\nIt’s a tool for creating interactive, multi-channel sound installations. In developing the software, they experimented with increasingly elaborate speaker set-ups, bigger “flocks” so to speak: 50 speakers, then 100, in various configurations.\nOnce you execute the program and the flock takes flight, the particles of sound will move, seemingly independently. The human user, however, is working behind the scenes, “conducting” the performance as it happens by adjusting the settings and creating different flocking patterns.\n24:57\tNicholas Beauchesne\tThere are echoes of these sonic dances in the Jackson Mac Low performances we’ve been hearing. Lately, Davis has been thinking more and more about human-computer interaction and its implications for art and creativity. He’s particularly fascinated by watching computers play games.\n25:16\tKevin Davis:\tI think a lot about chess and how, you know, people were at first very disturbed that no human could beat a computer at chess anymore. But there’s been this evolution of chess playing computers, especially through machine learning, where they’re starting to come up with chess ideas that are coming from an alien planet or something. It’s not things that anybody would have thought of.\nKevin Davis: I would wind up watching these games on YouTube that were like computers playing computers. And first of all, that’s existentially weird, like watching, right? But it’s a strange alien kind of beauty that’s coming out of these games.\n[START MUSIC]\nSo what has happened is now those ideas have reintroduced all kinds of like openings that people maybe had forgotten. There are these ways that like technologies can inspire creativity and actually give people ideas solutions to artistic or creative ideas that they hadn’t considered. Maybe find a part of yourself that you were not able to access.\n26:43\tAudio From “Tape Mark I” By Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint Episode “Printing And Poetry In The Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; Performed By Roman Onufrijchuk.\tThe landscape of your clay mitigates me coldly by your recognizable shape. I am wronged the perspective of your frog feeds me dimly by your wet love. I am raked.\n26:59\tChelsea Miya:\tOur last guest is a choreographer and performer, Kate Sicchio, Associate Professor of Dance and Media Technology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Sicchio explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real-time systems (“About”). We asked her how she made the leap from dancing in her own human body to dancing virtually with technology.\n27:27\tKate Sicchio:\tWay back when I was a high schooler, I had this internship, it was the nineties of the.com boom. So, I worked at what was then a web start-up. It’s so different than what web start-ups are now. [Laughs] But basically, I had this internship where I had taught myself some HTML to make my own geo-cities page. And so they’d give me giant Photoshop files and I would code them into HTML. So that was like my after-school job. And then I also was a dancer. So I would go for my after-school job to dance class and um did a lot of ballet and modern. And then went to do a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in dance and was like, I don’t, I’m not interested in this technology thing, whatever. I’m just gonna be a dancer. And then about halfway through my undergraduate degree, I got injured and I had a bunch of knee surgeries\n28:20\tKate Sicchio:\tI still have knee problems. My knee is really swollen right now as we speak. Um but I had to take six months off from dancing. So I went to my school’s multimedia department. I was like, I know HTML. Do you have any classes I can take? And they were like, take anything. [Laughs] So I started doing actually a lot of video work at the time and then these other sorts of different interactive classes and then when I was well enough to dance, someone kind of mentioned kind of offhand to me like, oh, well, why don’t you combine the dance courses and the multimedia courses? Why don’t these two things come together? And that was my epiphany moment. Like oh yeah, these things could come together. I really started, yeah, working a lot with um in particular video projections and making them interactive in real time. From there I went to the UK to do a master’s degree in digital performance. I kind of kept going on that trajectory and now I’m still doing it like 20 years later.\n29:30\tChelsea Miya:\tCan you describe some of the collaborations that you’ve done with robots and the things that are exciting but also challenging about working with robot collaborators and duetting with them in a sense?\n29:43\tKate Sicchio:\tI work a lot with um Dr. Patrick Martin who’s now at University of Richmond, who is a roboticist. We created our first piece together, it was performed in 2022, called Amelia and the Machine.\n[Audio starts playing. From “Amelia and the Machine,” 2022; danced by Amelia Virtue; robotics by Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo; music by Melody Loveless and Kate Sicchio.]\nSo, that was a duet for a small manipulator robot, which is basically a Rumba with an arm. [Laughs]. And it’s not very tall, it’s under 2 ft tall. Um And then Amelia is the dancer, Amelia Virtue. So, the aim of that piece was just to like, can we do this, can we put a robot and a person on stage together and what will that mean?\nSo, we’re really interested in the idea of human-robot teams. And a big part of that for me is I want them to improvise together. How can they like inform each other’s decision-making about movement together? We actually created this machine learning algorithm where Amelia could teach the robot a new gesture on stage by manipulating its arm.\n30:48\tKate Sicchio:\tSo she literally like grabs the arm, there’s sensors on the motors that can see where she’s put it. She only has to do that three times and then it’s learned it, it stored it, it can call it back later in the performance. So that was our small moment of improv in that piece.\nBut actually to do that became its own engineering accomplishment and that actually became like a new machine learning algorithm, which we call dancing from demonstration algorithm. So, so we had this like small like discovery of this algorithm in the process of making this piece.\n31:26\tChelsea Miya:\tThe role of empathy seems to come up in your design process in terms of imagining how these robots and robot bodies would move differently and perceive the world differently and us differently.\n31:43\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah, I think that’s part of it. Well, I guess you just realize so quickly that they’re not human. [Laughs] And like it’s a thing that comes up a lot. I’m asked like, why don’t you put costumes on your robots? And I’m like, they’re not people, they shouldn’t be seen as people. Let’s not like make them cute little characters. [Laughs]\nEven like the moving of the robot arm, we call it an arm, but it’s nothing like our arm, it doesn’t have the same joints or the same movement pathways. So, even when you’re choreographing the robot arm, you’re just moving five motors. And you become very aware of that very quickly. Like, it’s not an arm.\n32:24\tNicholas Beauchesne\tKate explains that audiences connect to the robot performers in surprising ways. Often, the people who come to her shows will respond in emotional, affective ways to the machines on stage.\n32:36\tKate Sicchio:\tSo, I think because Amelia and the machine start with her physically touching the robot, it really sets up this like very intimate relationship with the robot. And she’s very careful. She’s like is very intentional, right, in teaching it the gesture. She wants to get it just right. So here’s this person touching and teaching this robot. And it does become this like, yeah, they clearly have established this relationship together, Amelia and the robot. And people have read this in all kinds of ways. So, I have a young son. So, um he was a toddler when that piece came out. So everyone was like, this is about you and your son because the robot’s the size of a toddler. And I was like, no, it’s not! But [laughs] But um, but yeah, they just saw a woman and this toddler-sized machine and this intimate thing of teaching a toddler-sized thing. So it automatically read like that to a lot of people. And then also this, um, yeah, this clear thing where they’re dancing together but not like, um, often not in unison that sets up this relationship that they’re different but working together, um, that people really read into as well, yeah.\n33:49\tChelsea Miya:\tHow does being a choreographer give you different insights into technology and code that might not occur to a traditional coder?\n33:57\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah, there are a few ways, I think. One is just expert movers. So I try to teach this to my dance students all the time. You’re an expert mover. People need you to share your insights on the body. So there’s a lot of like systems that are being made now. Even our phones, right? Like we carry around a computer on our body all the time. We have all these gestures that we do to make it work. But these aren’t necessarily being come-up with by people who are very into using their body, right? They might be computer scientists or if you’re lucky, they’re UX designer who’s interested in the body. But usually they’re a UX designer who’s more like, oh, well, if it takes more than three clicks, people get bored. [Laughs] Right? But our interfaces are becoming more and more about the body.\n34:55\tKate Sicchio:\tAnd so there’s this place where dancers’ knowledge really could feed into how we design our technologies. Also, how we understand them. So um I’m really interested in things like how gestures hold meaning or even like an emotion, right?\nSo like if I’m like doing something really heavy and sudden it’s gonna look like a punch, right? So like if I’m gonna design like a gesture on my phone that’s heavy and sudden it’s like I’m angry. That has a whole yeah, design approach to it, right? Or I love to pick on the gesture of Tinder, right?\nSo you’re constantly flicking just like light and indirect and kind of careless. When we say, oh yeah, yeah, I’m swiping. There is a carelessness to that. This isn’t how you’re gonna find a spouse [laughs]. Because you’re just throwing people away. [Laughs]\nSo, yeah, I think about dancers as being able to bring that knowledge to tech and design.\n35:56\tChelsea Miya:\tI was curious too about like, whether your work changes the way you observe and perceive like technology in the, in the world. Do you ever, like, see machines, machines or tech and be like, wow, that’s a beautiful dance?\n36:06\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. Yeah. Actually I do all the time. [Laughs] Yeah, I’m trying to think of something I’ve seen recently where I was like, oh I love this. But yeah, I have. I see these like machine choreography everywhere.\n[Audio from crane loading at the construction site.]\nOh, I saw some really beautiful—they’re always building. Oh, I guess in every city now. But in Richmond we have a lot of building going on. So these cranes were moving, um, and sort of like shifting. They were like counterpoint cranes on the skyline. [Laughs] And I was like, oh look at that dance. [Laughs] Yeah.\n36:39\tChelsea Miya:\tThere is something hypnotic about technology and the way that it moves and this sort of kinetic aspect.\n36:46\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. I think that’s like a draw as a choreographer for me for sure. Because you, you say robot and everyone assumes these kinds of like sudden jerky movements, but they’re so smooth and they do have dynamics and they do have potential for like moving in different ways. That’s what gets exciting as a choreographer. It’s not like just sequencing. You can make a range of dynamics and all the stuff that gets exciting as a mover. Yeah.\n37:18\tNicholas Beauchesne\tKate performs live coated dances where the code itself is projected in real time on the walls ceiling. Even the performer’s bodies. She’s sometimes seated at the side of the stage at a desk with her laptop. Yet even when she decentres herself, her embodied interactions with the computer program, her finger strikes on the keys, even sips of water she takes are a crucial extension of the dance in this nexus of performer performance and audience of process and product. We again, think of the Fluxus movement. We asked her about that movement enduring legacy today.\n37:57\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. And I was also talking about Fluxus prompts the other day in terms of like people talking about AI prompts, like oh, for Midjourney or whatever, giving it a prompt. And I was like, is this just a new way of doing Fluxus art? Like that’s only what they did. They just wrote prompts, right? [Laugha[\nAre we all just Fluxus artists now? Yeah [Laughs].\n38:19\tNicholas Beauchesne\tWhether used for poetry, music, or dance, or any other creative medium, algorithms have such generative potential. Algorithmic art is so peculiar in that it is seemingly chaotic, random, and illogical, yet intensely rule-bound and orderly.\nWe would like to leave the last word to another computer artist, the Italian poet and programmer Nanni Balestrini. The following poem, entitled “Tape Mark I,” is a computer-generated remix of three source texts: Michihito Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, Paul Goldwin’s The Mystery of the Elevator, and the philosophical treatise attributed to the sage Lao Tzu’s, the Tao Te Ching (Balestrini 55). The original “experiment” was performed on an IBM 7070 computer at the Electronic Centre of the Lombard Provinces Savings Bank in Milan in October, 1961 (55). The reader is Voiceprint producer Roman Onufrijchuk, who also read the previous two interludes of computer poetry. Onufrijchuk has an admirable knack for mimicking the monotone, mechanical voice of an imagined computer author and reader.\n39:28\tAudio from “Tape Mark I” by Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint episode “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; performed by Roman Onufrijchuk.\tWhile the multitude of things comes into being in the blinding fireball, they all returned to their roots. They expand rapidly until he moved his fingers slowly when it reached the stratosphere and lay motionless without speaking 30 times brighter than the sun endeavouring to grasp. I envisaged their return until he moved his fingers slowly in the blinding fireball, they all returned to their roots, hair between lips and 30 times brighter than the sun lay motionless. Without speaking, they expand rapidly. Endeavouring to grasp the summit.\n40:08\tSpokenWeb Theme Song\tCan you hear me?\n40:11\tMaia Harris:\tThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Chelsea Miya, a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University’s Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Nicholas Beauchesne, a musician and instructor at the University of Alberta, who also engineered this episode’s audio. The score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.\nNick Beauchesne engineered this episode’s audio and the 2024 SpokenWeb symposium.\nParticipants are our live studio audience.\n41:08\tLive Audience\t[Cheers and applause]\n41:11\tMaia Harris:\tOur usual hosts are Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod, our supervising producer is me, Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcriptionist is Yara Ajeeb.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada.\nStay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for Shortcuts, with the amazing Katherine McLoed, short stories about how literature sounds.\nYou were a wonderful audience.\n41:52\tLive Audience\t[Cheers and applause]"],"score":5.7495356}]