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]]>Throughout these last weeks of getting together with friends during the holidays, the MLA convention in Vancouver, and working out the initial stages of an extensive archival project concerning Canadian poetry recordings (of which I’ll be posting news here soon), it seems I’ve been in an ongoing dialogue about sound. One thing that has come up in all of these dialogues with friends and colleagues is what books are we reading, what’s good, and why. As I keep promising, and then promptly forgetting, to send people the names of books, I thought I’d simply post them here. Below is a list of the books and articles I’ve read over the last 16 months or so that are related to sound studies – many of which I’ve read in preparation for comprehensive exams on phonopoetics (with Jason Camlot) and sound studies (with Jonathan Sterne). I’ve no doubt missed a few, but plan to continue to add to this list in the time ahead in the hopes that it might be a useful resource to others.
–Michael Nardone
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Adorno, Theodor. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” October 55 (1990): 56-61.
Adorno, Theodor. Sound Figures. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Adorno, Theodor. Essays on Music. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Want, 1977.
Baus, Eric. “Granular Vocabularies: Poetics & Recorded Sound.” Lecture, Naropa University, 22 July 2013. Web.
Benjamin, Walter. Radio Benjamin. Trans. Jonathan Lutes. London: Verso, 2014.
Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bernstein, Charles. “Making Audio Visible: The Lessons of Visual Language for the Textualization of Sound.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, (16), 2006, 277-89.
Cage, John. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
Casillas, Dolores Inés. Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy. New York: NYU Press, 2014.
Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Connor, Stephen. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Davidson, Michael. “‘By ear, he sd’: Audio-Tapes and Contemporary Criticism.” Credences 1.1 (1981): 105-120.
Davidson, Michael. “Technologies of Presence: Orality and the Tapevoice of Contemporary Poetics.” Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 196-224.
Demers, Joanna. Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Voice that Keeps Silent.” Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.
Dworkin, Craig. A Handbook of Protocols for Literary Listening. New York. Arika/Whitney, 2012.
Dyson, Frances. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Eichhorn, Kate. “Past Performance, Present Dilemma: A Poetics of Archiving Sound.” Mosaic 42.1 (2009) 183-198.
Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening.” Senses & Society 6:2 (2011). 133-155.
Erlmann, Veit. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010.
Evans, Steve. “The Phonotextual Braid.” Jacket2, 25 March 2012.
Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Fox, Aaron. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Gopinath, Sumanth. The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2013.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010.
Grubbs, David. Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
Kahn, Douglas and Gregory Whitehead (editors). The Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.
Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Keil, Charles and Steven Feld. Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Kreilkamp, Ivan. “A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness.” Victorian Studies 40.2 (1997): 211-244.
Mackey, Nathaniel. “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol.” Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Mattern, Shannon. “Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place.” Space and Culture 14.1 (2011): 27-50.
Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
Migone, Christoff. Sonic Somatic: Performancs of the Unsound Body. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2012.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersion into Noise. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011.
Novak, David. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Ochoa, Gautier, Ana María. Aurality: Listening & Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin, ed. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Rodgers, Tara. Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noise. Trans. Robert Filliou. Read on UbuWeb.
Schaeffer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994.
Schlichter, Annette. “Critical Madness, Enunciative Excess: The Figure of the Madwoman in Postmodern Feminist Texts.” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 3:3 (2003). 308-330.
Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011.
Severin, Laura. Poetry Off the Page: 20th Century British Women Poets in Performance. London: Ashgate, 2004.
Smith, Jacob. Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Sterne, Jonathan, ed. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Sterne, Jonathan. Various essays collected on his personal site: http://sterneworks.org/text/.
Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Taylor, Timothy D., Mark Katz, Tony Grajeda, eds. Music, Sound and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema and Radio. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Weiss, Allen S. Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia. Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Weiss, Allen S. Experimental Sound and Radio. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000.
Weiss, Allen S. Phantasmatic Radio. Durham, Duke University Press, 1995.
Vazquez, Alexandra T. Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Vocler, Juliette. Extremely Loud: Sound as a Weapon. Trans. Carol Volk. New York: The New Press, 2013.
Voegelin, Salomé. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum Press, 2010.
Wheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
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]]>The following is an excerpt from the middle of my paper “Fugitive Sound: The Phonotext and Critical Practice,” read at the MLA convention in Vancouver, for the panel Weird Media.
–Michael Nardone
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In regard to poetry and poetry criticism, we’re in a moment of considerable or growing interest in and engagement with poetry phonotexts produced in a variety of formats. I see this growing interest mainly due to the specific format that the majority of poetry phonotexts now circulate – the MP3 – and to the specific digital collections that curate – perhaps the better word is publish – these phonotexts, such as PennSound, UbuWeb, and SpokenWeb. In addition to these collections, there have been a few critics who for years have argued for the importance of critically engaging the phonemic aspects of works, and the social and technological infrastructures that support these performances and their media. Yet, despite these digital repositories and despite the contributions of these writers, literary critical practices for engaging the sonic aspects of poetic works are still rather limited and remain largely unexplored.
An example will help illustrate these particular limitations. I’ve recently completed an essay on the American poet, composer, and multimedia artist Jackson Mac Low. The essay focuses on a specific 1971 reading by Mac Low in Montréal. During the reading, Mac Low collaborates with a up to a dozen people at once of people on his improvised, constraint-based score-poems. Mac Low is rather well-known for these kinds of multivocal and participatory performances, but what makes this performance remarkable is his other “collaborators”: 4 reel-to-reel players that he is constantly manipulating and playing throughout the performance: he actually refers to them as collaborators several times during the performance. On the four reel-to-reel players, Mac Low is playing from his personal reel-to-reel collection of his own performances. In reading one of his “Simultaneities,” Mac Low plays four distinct prior performances of the poem. In this sounded aspect of his performance, Mac Low is not simply aiming to produce a certain palimpsestual or palimtextual noise, though, throughout, there are many moments of cacophony. Instead, this practice is a way to open up the site of the performance to other collaborators, to extend and tune the acts of listening in that space and time to other spaces, other times, and to develop ways to relate and respond to those sounds in their own performance of the poem.
Examining the breadth of criticism on Mac Low’s works, one can find exceptional passages thinking through the pluriformity of a Mac Low poem, recognizing them as multimodal: the poems exist simultaneously as instructions for performance, as performance, and, often, as some kind of text-document that is produced out of performance. Here, the sonic aspects of Mac Low’s works are always acknowledged as being a crucial part of the performances, yet the sounds are not in and of themselves directly addressed. Two exceptions are found in the writings of Tyrus Miller and Hélene Aji, who detail specific performances and the concept of sound in the those works. Yet, despite the great care with which Aji and Miller discuss the sonic aspects of Mac Low’s repertoire, neither writer actually listens to the works. When they discuss the sounded elements of Mac Low’s works, they rely solely upon the scores for performance: either the poem-text or the instructions for performance. This is to say that each time Aji and Miller discuss sound in Mac Low’s works, they are writing about an abstraction of sound based upon what Mac Low intended as author and composer, as opposed to the sounds produced in performance in and of themselves. This is also to say that for all of the attention that Aji and Miller give to the specificity of Mac Low’s instructions for performance, they willfully ignore the imperative that Mac Low pronounced on numerous occasions to be his primary admonition for performance: “Listen! Listen! Listen!”
This is only one example, but this approach is very much the case in critical writings if they choose to engage with the sounded elements of poetic works in the first place.
The omission of the phonotext exposes a certain critical limit in textual scholarship as being unable to engage the pluriformity of poetic works. Even media-centred anaylses like the ones of Mac Low’s poetic repertoire insist upon the centrality of the written document, the grapheme and substrate of paper. This omission makes a certain degree of sense: Literary scholars are, after all, trained to read closely and interpret texts. Yet this reliance upon a conception of the poetic text as primarily a graphemic document, especially when considering the expanded field of poetic practice, seems an inadequate endeavor at its very outset.
So, what I want to begin to develop here is a media-centered approach to think about specific modes of textuality, inscriptions across an array of formats – here, I’m looking to Friedrich Kittler, Johanna Drucker, and Jonathan Sterne – and to combine that approach by paying close attention to writers working today at the interface of literary studies, performance studies, and black studies – Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, Alexandra T. Vazquez, in particular – who think about phonotextual production over series of lived, embodied events.
It is the latter set of writers – with particular attention to Moten –I’ll focus upon in these remaining moments – and this is a cursory sketch at the moment – and I want to do so specifically with regard to a concept of fugitivity. To do so, first, I want to route – note ROUTE, as opposed to its homonym ROOT (see Gilroy) – a concept of the fugitive back through the early history of sound recording technologies. Thomas Edison, in his initial reflection on the phonograph entitled “The Phonograph and Its Future” (1878), writes these opening sentences: “Of all the writer’s inventions, none has commanded such profound and earnest attention throughout the civilized world as has the phonograph,” then notes the “almost universal applicability” of the instrument’s “foundational principle”: “the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive.” Shortly thereafter, Edison lists his five “essential features of the phonograph”:
- The captivity of all manner of sound-waves heretofore designated as “fugitive,” and their permanent retention.
- Their reproduction with all their original characteristics at will, without the presence and consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any period of time.
- The transmission of such captive sounds through the ordinary channels of commercial intercourse and trade in material form, for purposes of communication or as merchantable goods.
- Indefinite multiplication and preservation of such sounds, without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source.
- The captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source of their origin.
Counter to this idealized captivation, and against the rhetoric of enslavement and commodification of sound in which Edison steeps the dream of his phonograph’s future, Fred Moten [in his Theorizing Lecture “Black Kant (Pronounced Chant)”] imagines a “lawless phonography,” a trajectory of sound moving with “dispossesed and dispossessing fugitivity in its very anticipation of the regulative and disciplinary powers to which it responds.” Here, Moten theorizes, via Foucault, how sound is not “totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it, it constantly escapes them.”
I see Edison’s and Moten’s articulations of the fugitive as limit cases for considering the regulation and migration of sounds and of the phonotextual object. Embedded in Edison’s techno-fantasy are actual inscriptions, though they are impermanent and format-specific retentions of not “all,” but specific and contingent characteristics of performance. The sound recording instrument itself is a part – in certain instances, a collaborator, in others, a warden – of that performance’s reiterations. Here, one could imagine Edison’s machine-centered perspective as a precursor to Kittler’s own writings on sound recording technologies, writings that are exceptionally important for their scrutiny of how and what machines are actually doing, yet fraught for their notable absence of the political economy and the cultural practices in which the machines are produced and used.
At the core of Moten’s notion of fugitive sound is an acknowledgment of differential inscriptions, a sense of inscription that is technological, and also affective, embodied. Yet, there are inscriptions; there is a capture: there needs to be a mark, a marking, a marked body for a sound to resound. Here – in beginning to construct notions of a phonocritcal practice –one might ask: What is inscribed? How is it inscribed? What exceeds a specific inscription, and what are the means by which it is exceeded. To bring this back to poetry sound recordings, here, one is reminded that the phonotextual object is a record of – and a record produced by – dynamic living agents. To perform a poem is not simply to ossify one’s voice to the record, but to lay down your voice in the hopes of being revisited, or being revised (see Vazquez).
In Moten’s emphasis to depict the cultural techniques by which sound-waves are captured – how they are “governed and administered,” to use his own terms – in some occasions “without consent,” to use Edison’s repeated phrase – one confronts a politics of recording and recorded sound that ought to be a point of reflection for any critical engagement with a phonotextual object. Who is recorded? How is it recorded? What is the subject of the recording’s relationship to those who are recording and the technologies they are using to record? So, again, to bring this back to the poetry sound recording, this is an interesting point to think about institutions that produce and archive the recordings – there is a big difference between PennSound or Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room and, say, Andrew Kenower’s A Voicebox, a collection of recordings that is not financially supported in any way and emerges out of a very specific non-institutional space of community poetry readings, and I think this is something that needs to be considered further, and is simply one of many points to think about in terms of the regulation of sounds.
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]]>Initial remarks for the second gathering of the High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship institute at the University of Texas at Austin, May 27-28, 2014.
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Given my position in today’s proceedings and the specificity of the papers that follow, I thought I might transition from Tanya to begin the morning’s papers with some general remarks on sound recordings, poetics and critical practice directed specifically toward ARLO and our work as a research cluster.
In these remarks, I hope to do a few things: to reflect on this past year of research activity and the confluence of this group of people who are all pursuing various aspects of recorded sound; to begin to frame the discussions that follow in terms of what kinds of research we might be able to produce through this confluence, individually and collaboratively; and, finally, to advocate for a kind of grey literature, a mode of technical reports that might facilitate a discussion of where we can go from here and what we can produce through our researches.
(In mentioning technical reports in the humanities, I’d like to acknowledge Nick Montfort’s article on specifically this topic that was published in the first issue of Amodern.)
My remarks focus in on three specific questions: What are we trying to produce here as researchers? What have we generated in the past year that might provide direction for future research? And how can we organize the communications between us so as to realize particular trajectories of the research with our various repositories of sound and ARLO?
In regard to the first question – what are we trying to produce here as researchers? – in our experiments with tagging, clustering, and our individual tests, there have been a number of occasions in which I’ve had to remind myself that we don’t exactly know what we’re attempting to produce through experimentation with ARLO. There’s not one specific end to work toward.
I see this is a productive situation to be in. It means that researches can be directed toward a number of outcomes that take place on various levels or trajectories: relating to archival or technological aspects of the sound recordings, to the more theoretical dimensions of working with sound and performance, or to the development of linguistic or pedagogical tools.
I wanted to emphasize this simple point because – at least in the PennSound gang that’s been in regular dialogue over the last year – sometimes I think we might overlook certain small but important things we’ve generated in our experiments and dialogues while in the process of trying to work out some kind of major breakthrough.
So, while in the process of running experiments toward that breakthrough – say, in which we teach ARLO through machine learning to maintain our various repositories (ie. being able to notify us of redundant files, or to track down tampered recordings through thousands of files) or in which one or some of us model(s) a well-tested experiment with ARLO that changes how we approach phonotextuality – let’s not overlook the steps along the way that might produce a critical tool or technological tool (or both) for working with sound recordings.
Which is to say, let’s keep in mind the second question – what have we generated in the past year that might provide direction for future research? Here, I have in mind a few examples that have stuck out in the last year’s experiments and dialogues:
Visualizing Sound. There are many aspects or angles of this discussion that come to mind. To begin with the most basic, both in our meeting last year and the in the meetings since, one thing that we continue to discuss are the various surprises we have working with visualized sound. Often, say, in working with tagging, we catch various aspects of a recording that we never would have heard without that kind of close listening. Or, especially in the clustering experiments, there have been a number of times we can’t quite hear some aspect of a recording until we see it visualized or its difficult to hear an affinity between two recordings until we see them visualized. This activity has stemmed numerous discussions, many of which could be exceptionally productive if brought into a classroom setting.
Here, I’m imagining a simple tool in which people use ARLO in its most basic way to visualize excerpts of sound recordings. In this instance, let’s use a PennSound recording as the example. Alongside of working with the text of a poem, students would be able to, say, visualize two different readings of the poem. With these visualizations they could then begin to talk about rhythms in the read poem or identify patterns in it. Or the difference between the two recordings of the poem in relation to the text. They could discuss the trace of the technology that is present in the sound recording and move toward a discussion about media. What I’m envisioning here is the production of tools to decenter the emphasis on the page-text in pedagogical settings in an attempt to advance engagement with sound and performance and technology.
The Gender Button. This issue turned into an interesting and somewhat divisive discussion that took place during our initial tagging experiment of whether or not one should assign a gender to the speaker heard. The argument to assign a gender was to assist with a machine learning in which ARLO would be able to pick up on specific tonal ranges in which, for example, a “high tone” and “male” tagged clip would not get confused with a “moderate tone” and “female” tagged clip (as they might be visualized similarly); the argument not to assign gender to a voice having to do with the problematic conception of gender implied by such a tagging, the problematic binary that is maintained in such a conception, as well as the act itself of assigning gender to a voice, which many would argue is a enactment violent or violating form of judgment.
Here, I can imagine the discussions that were carried out in regard to this tagging could play an important role in an article on ARLO experimentation, one that would consider the gender politics of the voice and sounds in general, an issue that to the best of my knowledge is understudied or has not been sufficiently addressed. (The only example I can think of off the top of my head is Tara Rodgers’ Pink Noise.) This topic was one that has been addressed from different positions and with great nuance, and yet it’s one that has sort of slipped through the cracks in working toward other goals, which I think is unfortunate. It also leaves something to be said about documentation of our activities and the report-based mode of internal communications that I will come to in a moment.
Poetry / Not Poetry. This, like “the gender button,” was part of the tagging project that most of the PennSound gang carried out. Like the proposed gender button, it operated on a kind of binary logic in which one listens to a two to four second clip from PennSound and decide whether the sounds heard are Poetry or are Not Poetry. The purpose behind such tagging was to see if it might be possible to teach ARLO to recognize what is Poetry and what is Not Poetry. The possible results of such machine learning aside, I found endeavor of the tagging itself to be an interesting project, particularly when one considers that many of the poets included in PennSound are ones who are often trying to always work beyond the more normalized or historical confines/classifications of what is and what isn’t poetry – formally, textually, rhetorically.
Here, again, I can envision a simple pedagogical tool in which students listen to a clip of sound – visualized or not – and make the decision to label that clip as Poetry or Not Poetry. Mixed in with more normalized metered verse recordings could be recordings, say, from talk poets David Antin or Robert Ashley, or from the ritualized performances of Cecilia Vicuna or bill bissett, or from Laurie Anderson’s poem-opera United States. The results from the students’ tagging could provide a truly compelling way for them to consider poetry and to do so based in a way centered upon its sounding.
So, to return to the bigger picture here, I’m arguing that while trying to make that individual or collective research breakthrough we keep in mind the discrete points we cross along the way and harness those points to develop either written research or to produce digital humanities tools that can have a direct pedagogical impact in getting students to experiment with sound recordings. I’ve used examples from discussions of poetry sound recordings, but see this working just as well working with sound recordings for Indigenous languages and folklore recordings and others.
Now, all of this leads to the final point I want to make, which is in regard to the inscription of research activity as we carry out individual and collective projects. I simply want to suggest that we begin to utilize a mode of publishing amongst us as a way to work toward more official research production and publication that goes beyond this group.
Above, I took up the term technical report, which I think the example coming out of science-based research is useful in our own research setting. For our own purposes, this mode of publishing can be something as simple as maintaining a site – a simple wordpress site would work fine – where individually we begin to publish every couple of weeks or once a month short reports that relay between us what we are thinking about and what we are doing. (It would be an exceptional start to begin with the talks/notes we’re presenting today.) What I’m imagining here is a central document of our overall research activities: the short reports, which I’d say are central to this publishing mode, but also notes on experiments, minutes from the monthly meetings (as well as the sidebar chats that happen during those meetings) and the occasional updates from Tanya, David and others.
With these working notes or short reports we can begin to find concrete points to engage and support one another’s research activities, develop possible collaborations, and produce citable texts that can provide a base for more official research articles or the production of pedagogical tools.
I know Tanya has offered access to the main HiPSTAS site and Al has encouraged us to publish on Jacket2. I think that both of these sites are exceptionally helpful for disseminating the more official research that extends beyond this specific community. The mode of publication I’m suggesting, though, is something a little less polished and more internally directed toward the HiPSTAS community: technical reports so that we can begin to build off of one another and find points of convergence to develop ideas in a kind of laboratory-styled model of research production.
(Here, I’d like to acknowledge Darren Wershler who has introduced me to this style of research production in the humanities, an approach he’s advocated and explored in a number of ways – the site I’m writing this on, AmpLab, being just one realization.)
In remembering that we don’t specifically know what we’re trying to produce through experimentation with ARLO, and in realizing that their can be a number of outcomes that take place on various levels or trajectories of the research, and, finally, in noting the special circumstances of all of us coming together through this project and each one of us bringing a different set of skills to the table that in a more highly collaborative setting could produce something beyond what we may have originally envisioned in working with this project, this report-centered mode of publishing will help direct the various trajectories of research toward more official articles or toward the realization of tools that could have a profound effect on the way that the language arts are conducted.
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Cover Image: ARLO Visualization of lines from N.H. Pritchard’s “Gyre’s Galax” with accompanying text.
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]]>This week I’m finally collecting the various threads of notes I’ve been making throughout the summer on Jackson Mac Low, the soundscape of his 1971 Montreal reading/performance, and the critical strategies of working with recorded materials that his performance makes audible. I feel as though I could take another three months on these subjects, as every day of additional reading seems to lead to another vast space of perspectives I hadn’t yet considered, whether about Mac Low himself or about the production of sounds in general.
I’ve always been attracted to Mac Low’s work for the specific reason that the poems look and sound like nothing else I’ve seen or heard before. It’s exactly this reason that I was drawn to write about his Montreal performance: when listening around to the 80+ recordings housed on the SpokenWeb site, Mac Low’s reading is singular. No other reading goes on for so long, no other has this many readers, no other features the use of tape cassette materials, and no other reading is so cacophonous as this. Here is a brief excerpt from the two-hour-long recording:
These singularities open up a space to consider the poetry reading and what sounds resound there, and also – through Mac Low’s exceptionally detailed introductions to compositions and his selective curation/utilization of recorded materials – how we might engage critically with the phonotext. In regard to the first point, I am interested in who makes the sounds, what sounds in the room are included into being part of the poem, and the new forms of participation that Mac Low provokes. In the second, I want to pursue how Mac Low’s use of recorded materials sets an example to consider in our current circulation of phonotexts. Here I consider two specific aspects: one, in which a person’s engagement with phonotexts carries through toward the production of other new phonotexts, and two, a theory of the poet as listener, as one who composes by means of a practice of listening.
I hope to post further excerpts from this writing soon.
Image credit: Excert from “A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore,” Jackson Mac Low.
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]]>This past week, in thinking about the soundscape in terms of the poetry reading and the poetry phonotext, I went back to look at some of the initial information I compiled during the High Performance Sound Technology For Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin at the end of May. An NEH-sponsored gathering initiated by Tanya Clement, the HiPSTAS Institute brought together groups focusing on historical recordings, indigenous language preservation, poetry and phonopoetics. I wanted to take part in the institute simply to see what work people were doing across disciplines to critically approach the phonotext. Also, I was interested in simply getting together with the other poets and poet-scholars there to have the time and space to talk about these things face to face.
My initial application for the program was to focus on tactics for phonocritical practice. Over these last years, with the development of several digital sound archives and repositories – PennSound and SpokenWeb being the two with which I’m most familiar – there has been extended discussion on the archival and pedagogical implications of the phonotext, yet a critical vocabulary to approach the phonotextual object has only begun to be articulated. I wanted focus on certain strains of already emerged phonocritical practice that I have begun to write about, while learning as much as I could from those gathered at the institute.
With the introduction to a new software in development called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization) that would be experimented with during the institute, my interests shifted in an unexpected direction. ARLO was developed for classifying bird calls and using visualizations to help scholars classify pollen grains. ARLO has the ability to extract basic prosodic features such as pitch, rhythm and timbre for discovery (clustering) and automated classification (prediction or supervised learning), as well as visualizations. One example of ARLO was particularly interesting: an excerpt of William Carlos Williams reading from a poem was matched as having a tonal/frequency affinity with a short excerpt of Allen Ginsberg reading. A WCW poem and a Ginsberg poem have little in common in terms of their appearance and organization on the page, but sounded affinity makes sense knowing that both WCW and Ginsberg were both from the same area of northern New Jersey and that WCW was a major influence and mentor as a poet for Ginsberg.
This introduction enticed me to focus on one particular facet of phonocriticality: through the search and matching function of the ARLO software, I wondered if I might be to think about community poetics through sound, through a concept of sounded affinity. A few guiding questions to this were: If poets who share a common locale, a common dialect, place of community formation, syntactical style or rhetorical mode, might I be able to trace this out through ARLO? How might I use ARLO find affinities outside of schools or tendencies in poetic practice? Would ARLO be able to track affinities across gender lines? Finally, would I be able to use ARLO to perhaps map specific sounded features of distinct poetic modes or practices?
I have begun to compile test sets. A single analysis through the entire PennSound database can take over a day, and there are a number of kinks presently being worked out on the software in Austin. So, I will hopefully have more than an introduction to present in the coming weeks. Additionally, I would like to address the epistemological problem of utilizing an ocularcentric analysis of sound. For now, I’d like to present just a few shots of ARLO visualizations to present some of the phonotexts and their features I’ve been examining.
Visualization of speech from Spicer’s 1st lecture: “Yeats is probably the first modern to take the idea of dictation seriously.” This is an example of spoken language not in a lyric poem.
Visualization of Fred Moten’s poem “gary fisher“: “rodvan took me for doubles and doubles. / doubles and doubles and double and doubles in alleys.” Noting the visualized sonic slide between words, one that does not exist in the spoken language of Spicer’s lecture. Whereas the discrete unit in Spicer is visualized at the level of the word or phrase, here, the discrete unit is the line, the black unsounded gap being the (line)break.
N.H. Pritchard’s poem “Gyre’s Galax,” like Moten’s has that similar sonic slide across the line.
For the moment, I am noting the visualized sonic motion that is similar in terms of how the line carries forward in the Moten and the Pritchard examples. Might this sonic diffusion from word to word, phrase to phrase – as opposed to the shorter discrete units – across the line be a qualitative affinity between the two? Might I find the shorter discrete units of the Spicer lecture have a resemblance to, say, a David Antin talk?
This research continues.
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]]>“When power founds its legitimacy on the fear it inspires, on its capacity to create social oder, on its univocal monopoly of violence, it monopolizes noise.” -Jacques Attali
These last two weeks, I’ve been reading on themes of the soundscape, noise, and sonic weaponry. As part of my final directed study with Professor Kay Dickinson, and to prepare for my sound studies comprehensive exam, the works that I’ve been looking at are: Jacques Attali’s Noise, Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity, Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare, and Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise.
I first became interested in concepts of the soundscape and noise through close listenings of recorded poetry readings. As I listened to more recordings, the poet’s reading of the work became just one of several sonic dimensions upon which I might critically focus. Audience interactivity, atmospheric noise within and outside of the reading space, room tone, these have all become points of engagement for close listening to the poetry phonotext. I have become interested in how a poet, say, might interact with or incorporate these paratextual sounds into their work, or, alternatively, choose to refuse them into the space of their work. I believe that this negotiation with sounds supposedly exterior to the poem might, when unpacked, reveal particular aspects about not only the poet and her/his practice, but also about the context for a reading. I will go into more depth with this line of thought in weeknotes soon as I prepare a paper on Jackson Mac Low’s 1971 reading in Montreal, in which I focus on specifically this topic.
The soundscape/noise writing that I’ve been working on this week is on the long range acoustic device, or LRAD. Last year, while beginning to concentrate on the poetry phonotext, the Quebec student strikes were going on, and I became fascinated with how much of the battle between state forces and protestors took place within a sonic field. I wrote on one aspect of this topic here. This may seem like a whole other trajectory from the kind of literary phonocritical practice I began with above, but these kinds of critical listening are closely related. With this current writing, I had planned to first simply write about the LRAD, and to think of it and its sound in terms of Attali’s coded noise and Deleuze and Guattari’s refrain. As I began to research more into the LRAD, I became more interested in specific mediated examples of its production and the ways it has been used since its development as a technology. The many infomercial-like videos on the internet that offered a general overview of this sonic weaponry and its uses have become particularly interesting for me, as here one can see the packaging of this weaponry, how media attempts to normalize such violence, and the specific sets of concerns that this weapon is aimed to defend. Take, for example, this video:
In this video, there is the intense digital blert-alarm in repetition of the LRAD. There is the husky, militarily succint straight-talk of the host Terry Schappert, and the carefully manipulated phrases of the corporate spokesperson Robert Putnam that have been heavily edited in post-production. There is, also, the synthesizer score to the video that is meant to clean off the edges of the transitions, as well as to boost sensation and anticipation: this is Monday Night Football for prime time TV, this is a video game that is the world which is a video game.
Barely discernible is another field of sound, one that continues throughout the video, a sound so common that it’s easy for the ear to not even register it. Throughout the parking lot presentations, the monologues by host and corporate spokesperson, there is an ambient background shushing noise. It is so constant, so consistent in its tone that it is nearly imperceptible, so perfectly embedded into the site. It is a highway and the shushing is the continuous movement of automobiles across it. Though unintended in this clip, it is the official soundscape of this production, and one might say of the LRAD itself. It is the atmospheric tone from which the intense digital blert of the LRAD is borne, the soundscape this weaponry has been developed to serve and protect: the petrocapital ambient soundtrack.
In the weeks ahead, I will continue with this writing, and hope the works above, accompanied with Michael Watts’s discussions of petrocapitalism, will open new spaces to think critically about the petrocapital soundscape.
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]]>I began the week listening closely to the Lisa Gitelman and Craig Dworkin lectures and dialogue that I recorded last year while both were at Concordia.
Between Blankness & Illegibility:
The dialogue brings together Gitelman, a scholar noted for her work on media history, and Dworkin, a critic, editor and writer of late 20th century innovative poetry and poetics. Before this meeting, both Dworkin and Gitelman have focused on the materiality of their subjects: Gitelman on media technologies, the machines that inscribe all kinds of cultural perspectives into their production of communications; Dworkin on the materiality of language itself (as written, as typed, as printed), the materials upon which this language is printed, and the cultures through which that material is disseminated.
For this convergence, both focus on The Blank: blank space, fillable space, the empty sheet upon which and/or with which one communicates. Gitelman’s talk opens up the field of literary studies to the wider culture of print. “Books are for lots of things,” Gitelman states at the start of her lecture. The blank that one fills with writing is a kind or genre of book that exists in so many variations: lesson and exercise books for schoolchildren, personal diaries, calendars, ledgers, daybooks, order and invoice books, scrapbooks, and blank books of all kinds to facilitate the work done in various occupations from tailors to geographers, plumbers to trappers. Gitelman makes an important differentiation between the blank books and other printed works, ones, say, that are the usual object of study in an English department: “They [the blank books] are designed, printed and used, not authored, published or read.” In this talk, Gitelman provokes us to look at the publics active in the culture of print (one outside the limited frame of specifically literary production), and also to consider how we might analyze the layers and intentions of cultural inscription involved in the production and circulation of blank/fillable books.
Dworkin’s talk is full of pataphysical trickery and Derridean wordplay. To develop his concepts on the blank page, he begins with a discussion of a blank book. Yet this blank book does not exist outside of being a prop for a film: it is the fictional blank book written by the fictional poet Jacques Cégeste in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée. Here is the clip from Orphée that Dworkin discusses:
There are many directions to go in with the Dworkin talk: it’s a great piece, and I hope this recording will be of use for the growing number of people working critically at the juncture of conceptual poetics and media theory. In this space, I’d like to focus on his statement: “Blank books typically are not blank.” This is a distinction held in common by both him and Gitelman. There is ink on the cover or pages. In Gitelman’s example, this ink is used to frame or coerce specific operations, designated acts of labor, certain kinds of writing. In Dworkin’s example, this ink is used to trigger what he calls “mechanisms of social and moral reflex in the best avant-garde tradition of trying to piss off the bourgeois.” Cégeste’s book, Nudisme, might lure the “prudish bourgeois reader” by announcing some possibly bawdy subject within its pages, only to make a fool of that same reader by offering him nothing: no text, no salacious story, not even a picture. This same trick on the bourgeois reader is also a trick on the poet reader: expecting, perhaps, a book of unadorned, plain-spoken language still functioning in a lyric mode, Cégeste again refuses to satisfy the reader’s expectations in a proto-conceptualist gesture of assembling a book that offers itself to a thinkership – as opposed to a readership – to surmise why this book is stripped of any signifying language and what the absence itself might signify.
In other projects, I sent a few of my recordings – of Lisa Robertson, Charles Bernstein, and Juliana Spahr – to be included in the PennSound archive. As I begin my doctoral research – which will be a social history of the EPC, UbuWeb, and PennSound, focusing specifically on the contemporary exploration of phonopoetics and what Danny Snelson has aptly termed “the little database” – I hope to produce and curate more and more recordings and transcripts. In these last years, as both a critical and creative practice, I have come to regard the audio recording and the transcript as my favourite mode of composition. In the following weeks, here in these notes, I hope to get into this more, examining specifically the social aspects of this kind of composition, the multivocality it presumes, the spatial aspects that are important to scrutinize, and the close listening practice of how to address both what is and isn’t audible in that space.
Following from this, as part of my final directed study with Kay Dickinson and in preparation for my comprehensive field examinations, I have been reading and thinking about the soundscape: this week reading, again, in Attali’s Noise; several pieces in Aural Cultures, edited by Jim Dobnick; a number of pieces in Music, Sound, and Technology in America; and beginning to read in Veit Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance. As I go through my notes here, perhaps I will post some excerpts of interest on this page. At this moment, one thing that has resonated with me out of this past week’s reading is the reminder to always consider the tactile aspects of sounds. Andra McCartney, in her contribution to Aural Cultures, brings up a story of going to a school for deaf children and witnessing a dance in which the children take of their shoes so that they can feel the vibrations of the amplified music through their feet, and respond to it in dance through this sensation. The vibrational, tactile aspect of sound will be important for the three writings I am working out during this summer: one on the human microphone, one on Jackson Mac Low’s 1971 performance in Montreal, and a paper on the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).
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