Phantom Power

How to Listen Like a Fish with Marine Biologist Sophie Nedelec

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:05:00 -0000

Do fish have ears? What is the nature of underwater hearing and how does it differ from hearing in the air? If humans are the evolutionary descendants of ocean creatures, do we retain any fishy traces in the way we hear the world? And what about all the noise we humans make in our oceans? If we want to save the planet, do we need to learn to listen like the fishes once again? Today we explore these questions with Marine biologist and bioacoustics expert Dr. Sophie Nedelec.

Nedelec has a PhD in bioacoustics and behavioral ecology from the University of Bristol. She is a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow of the Royal Society and he's a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter. She researches underwater sound, sensory ecology, and human’s sonic impacts on the environment and sustainability.

Speaking of oceans, today marks a bit of a sea change here at Phantom Power: the addition of occasional “SOS” episodes on the Science of Sound with co-host Dr. Nathan Morehouse. Nate's an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, where he also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS), an interdisciplinary research institute focused on sensing, perception, and sensor technology development through adventurous integration of insights from the sciences, engineering, humanities, and arts.

Cited Media:

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - "Particle Motion: The Missing Link in Underwater Acoustic Ecology" (2016)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Motorboat noise impacts parental behaviour and offspring survival in a reef fish (2017)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Hormonal and behavioural effects of motorboat noise on wild coral reef fish (2020)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Soundscapes and living communities in coral reefs: temporal and spatial variation (2015)

Machine Listening (Sean Dockery, James Parker, Joel Stern) - Environments 12 (2023)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:52 Meet the Guests
1:42 Introducing SOS Episodes
4:25 Do Fish Have Ears?
9:29 The Otolith Explained
12:44 The Lateral Line
26:29 Particle Motion: The Missing Link
34:57 Protecting Marine Life
36:58 Boat Speed & Noise
45:06 Reef Restoration with Sound
49:23 Noise Cancellation Underwater
54:52 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

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Talking Back to the “The Oral Theory of Everything”

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0000

Why does a sixty-year-old media theory resurface in the media every few years, while journalists ignore the great communication scholarship that has emerged in the meantime? More importantly, what effects does antiquated thinking have on the public understanding of our current digital discontent? In this episode, Cameron Naylor interviews our usual host, Mack Hagood, about his recent newsletter, “Oral Residue: A Zombie Media Theory Rises Again.” Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong believed that all of human history is dividable into three eras: the oral, the literate, and the electronic. However, this kind of “Great Divide” thinking has long been criticized by scholars who study oral communication, literacy, media, and sound. In this episode we talk about the good, bad, and ugly of McLuhan and Ong’s long legacy.

Cited Media:

Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy (1982)

Raymond Williams - Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)

Derek Thompson - Plain English (podcast episode with Joe Weisenthal) (2026)

Jonathan Sterne - The Audible Past

Harold Innis - works on communication theory

Eric Havelock - works on orality and literacy

Gerard Manley Hopkins - Poetry

Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey (8th century BCE)

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction

0:44 Episode Overview

3:20 Introducing Mack Hagood

4:14 First Encounter with Ong

8:52 Discovering McLuhan

17:25 Why McLuhan Keeps Returning

25:49 Critiques of the Great Divide

33:36 The Ear as a Source of Terror

37:40 Closing Thoughts

38:33 Outro

Click here for the full transcript.

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The Internet Promised Creative Freedom. What Happened?

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0000

Creativity doesn’t come out of thin air–it evolves in relation to the communities around us and the tools available to us. Some of the most common forms of everyday creative works–memes, podcasts, vertical videos–barely existed a couple of decades ago. And obviously, we can’t ignore the changing economics of creative industries, which wield an outsized influence over what kind of work gets made.

Today host Mack Hagood talks to legendary podcast executive Julie Shapiro’s about what it means to be creative in the year 2026, particularly from an audio perspective. Given their shared history in 20th century indie music scenes, they also talk about the ways that indie music and fan culture shaped them–and how practices like zine making shaped the internet as we know it.

But does the current shape of the internet promote good creative work and a fulfilling life? In this frank conversation, Mack and Julie discuss the challenges of making a living as a creative and doing fulfilling work when the digital system does its best to prevent those things.

In our members-only version of the podcast, Mack and Julie discuss the turn to video podcasting and in the What's Good segment, Julie suggests some incredible podcasts to listen to, as well as things to do and to read.

Cited Media:

Nancy Baym - Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018)

Nigel Poor & Earlonne Woods - Ear Hustle (Radiotopia/PRX)

Nathan Heller - The Battle for Attention: How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age? (2024)
Tumi Magnússon - Voyage There and Back (2015)

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:27 Mardi Gras and Mobile Sound

13:47 Indie Music Origins

26:15 DIY Ethics and Community

30:32 Being Broke vs Career Pressure

44:37 How DIY Became the Internet

57:47 Returning to Creative Roots

01:05:12 The Podcast Industry Crisis

01:22:32 Information vs Experience

01:31:21 Making Work in This Moment

Click here to read the full transcript

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What makes a podcast great? Legendary producer Julie Shapiro shows us.

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:06:00 -0000

Today we go on a listening tour with audio legend Julie Shapiro, who has helped define what radio and podcasts could be over the past 25-plus years. Shapiro co-founded the Third Coast International Audio Festival, one of the most prestigious and influential awards in audio. She was a longtime executive at PRX Radiotopia, home of shows like Song Exploder, Kitchen Sisters Present and Everything is Alive. She helped launch and executive produced narrative podcasts such as Ear Hustle, first recorded inside San Quentin State Prison. Her shows have won Webby awards and Signal awards and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In this episode, host Mack Hagood plays stellar moments from Julie’s long history in audio and asks her to elaborate on how they were made and what made them great. They also discuss the current industry retrenchment, where budgets are shrinking and low-ambition video chat shows are redefining the very meaning of the word podcast. It’s an illuminating conversation that will appeal to fans and have audio producers taking notes.

Finally, Julie discusses her new project with partner John DeLore, Audio Flux—a platform and podcast for short audio pieces that is inspiring fantastic new works from around the world. The Audio Flux Podcast was just named by The New Yorker as one of the top 10 podcasts of 2025. In this episode Julie announces a call for new works that Phantom Power listeners might want to respond to!

Audio Showcase:

Katie Mingle - The Dead Can't Do You Nothin' (Third Coast Audio Festival)

Owen Ever & Laine Kaplan-Levenson - A Field Guide to Gay Animals (Canadaland)

Nigel Poor & Earlonne Woods - Ear Hustle (Radiotopia/PRX)

Vivien Schütz & Laura Rojas Aponte - Red Card (AudioFlux)

Julie Shapiro & John DeLore - AudioFlux

Radio Shows/Podcasts:

Hrishikesh Hirway - Song Exploder (Radiotopia)

The Kitchen Sisters - The Kitchen Sisters Present (Radiotopia)

Ian Chillag - Everything is Alive (Radiotopia)

Roman Mars - 99% Invisible (Radiotopia)

Sarah Koenig - Serial (Serial Productions)

Ira Glass - This American Life (WBEZ/PRX)

Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich - Radiolab (WNYC)

Gwen Macsai - Re:sound (Third Coast/WBEZ)

Signal Hill (Audio Magazine)

Organizations/Festivals:

Third Coast International Audio Festival

PRX Radiotopia

Radio Workshop

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction

0:21 Julie Shapiro Introduction

5:44 Listening Habits

8:26 Katie Mingle: The Dead Can't Do You Nothin'

9:52 Third Coast Audio Festival

16:47 A Field Guide to Gay Animals

24:38 Ear Hustle Ep. 7 Unwritten. 9:47-11:07

32:17 Red Card by Vivien Schütz and Laura Rojas Aponte (AudioFlux)

36:28 Audio Flux Circuit Seven - Trash or Treasure

44:50 Closing Remarks

Click here to read the full transcript

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Noise, power, and Minneapolis: Gabriel Mendel interview (Part 2)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:21:00 -0000

The year is off to a very disturbing start thanks to ICE’s violent paramilitary incursion in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Minnesota citizens have responded with mass protests and direct action, much of it sonic in nature—with the sound of whistles alerting neighbors and making life harder on ICE.

This episode, we speak with an expert on noise, power, and protest who also happens to live and teach in Minneapolis: Gabriel Saloman Mindel. Gabriel is one half of the Noise band Yellow Swans. Last month, we discussed the aesthetics and politics of noise music.

This month, Gabriel discusses settler-colonial ways of treating the land, humans, and the soundscape in service of capital and political power, as well as noise, protest, and political power in the troubling context of current events.

This episode features an interview we did in November and excepts from a follow-up in December, after the ICE incursion began. If you’d like to hear the full conversation about Minneapolis, we’ll be dropping it in our members feed. (If finances are an issue, just drop us a line an we’ll get you access.)

Gabriel has an MFA from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC, Santa Cruz. He teaches at. Learn about upcoming Yellow Swans shows on their Instagram.

Also mentioned: Mack’s launched a new newsletter series, "What has the digital done to our listening?"

Media Cited

Hildegard Westerkamp - Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989)

Prince - 1999 (Official Music Video)

Raven Chacon - Voiceless Mass (2021)

Hildegard Westerkamp - "The New Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver: An Acoustic Dump"

Gabriel Mindel - "Sovereignty, Sonic Limits Music and Spectacle at the Border" in Studies in Social Justice (2025)

Chapters:

01:40 Guest Introduction: Gabriel Saloman Mindel

05:16 Gabriel's Academic Journey

09:36 Settler Colonialism and Soundscapes

26:21 Silence and Indigenous Perspectives

27:34 Raven Chacon's Voiceless Mass

30:39 Prince and the End of the World

39:09 Operation Metro Surge

43:42 Direct Action and Protest

Click here to read the full transcript

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Gabriel Saloman Mindel Pt. 1: Yellow Swans, Noise, and the Art of Pushing Boundaries

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:32:00 -0000

Gabriel Saloman Mindel is a lot more than one half of the United States best known noise bands. He's also an interdisciplinary artist and a scholar whose research studies the interplay between sound and power, as he theorizes how noise can push the limits of the body in struggles over space and political autonomy.

Gabriel has an MFA from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz. He's also a longtime Phantom Power listener and supporter of the show. We first met a little over a year ago at the Unsound Festival in Poland, where Yellow Swans played a packed reunion show. It's been a lovely thing to get to know him--he's a gentle soul who makes aggressive sounds tied to some serious ethical and political commitments.

In today's interview, we talk about the history and music of Yellow Swans, the interplay between noise, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Gabriel even breaks down how he and Pete produced the track we were just listening to. Even if you're not a fan of noise music, I think you're going to love this fascinating conversation. And next month, we'll play part two of the interview, in which Gabriel discusses his scholarship on the work of other artists, including Raven Chacon, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Prince.

You can find Yellow Swans online at Bandcamp and Instagram.

They will be performing at GRM's annual Présences Électronique festival on Feb 13. In London, first at the Lexington on Feb 16 and then Corsica on Feb 18, and then finish at Bozar in Brussels.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro & Welcome

5:53 Gabriel Saloman Mindel

6:52 What is a Yellow Swans Show?

12:48 Early Influences & Discovering Noise

13:45 DIY, Punk, and the Noise Scene

21:57 Noise, Community, and Spirituality

22:45 Performance, Consent, and Audience Experience

24:00 Paradoxes: Noise, Calm, and Reception

29:17 Crafting the Sound: Gear & Process

41:43 Band Dynamics & Collaboration

45:07 Legacy, Recognition, and Touring

51:04 Art, Politics, and the Noise Scene

53:09 Fascism, Provocation, and Identity in Noise

59:44 Inclusivity and Change in the Scene

60:24 Outro: Thanks & What’s Next

Click here to read the full transcript.

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African Music Technology: Branding, Identity, and the Global Music Market w/ Kingsley Kwadwo Okyere, Louise Meintjes, and Reginold Royston

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:55:00 -0000

Today host Mack Hagood is joined by three remarkable scholars whose work sits at the intersection of African music, technology, and culture.

Dr. Louise Meintjes is Marcello Lotti Professor at Duke University. She's a distinguished ethnomusicologist whose groundbreaking research on South African music has transformed how we understand the recording studio as a site of cultural negotiation and creative production.

Media anthropologist Dr. Reginold Royston is an Associate Professor jointly-appointed in the School of Information (formerly SLIS) and the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He examines a range of African and African diasporic media and technology, from Black Atlantic audiobooks to African podcasting to viral dance videos emanating from Ghana and Chicago's footwork scene.

And Kingsley Okyere is graduate student at Penn whose work on African and Afro-diasporic musical circulation and genres is bringing fresh perspectives on the sounds shaping the continent today.

In this episode, we explore the evolution of Afrobeats and Amapiano, two genres that have captured global attention in recent years. We also discuss how technology and diaspora networks have shaped African popular music, examine questions of genre, identity, and global circulation, and consider the social and political contexts that inform music production and reception across the continent and beyond.

Chapters:

3:21 Meet the Guests: African Music Scholars

6:03 What Are Afrobeats and Amapiano?

7:56 Afrobeats vs. Afrobeat: History & Identity

11:49 Branding, World Music, and South African Context

14:29 Recording Studios as Sites of Negotiation

17:42 Digital Networks and Diaspora Influence

23:23 Listening Practices: Streaming, Social Media, and Algorithms

29:00 Dance, Timelines, and Global Rhythms

33:13 Economic Realities and Global Music Industry

Click here to read the full transcript.

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Irv Teibel’s Environments, AI Audio, and the Future of Listening w/ Machine Listening

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:56:00 -0000

How did we humans become so dependent on white noise machines, noise-canceling headphones, lo-fi girl and other technologies that help us privatize and individualize our soundscape? An important character in that cultural history is Irv Teibel, whose environments series helped change how we listen. These records were the first to use recorded natural soundscapes as technologies to change how we feel and function.

My guests this episode are Joel Stern and James Parker, two thirds of the art and research collective known as Machine Listening—a group that shares my fascination with Teibel. With their partner Sean Dockray, James and Joel have released a vinyl record called Environments 12: New Concepts in Acoustic Enrichment. This album reimagines Irv Teibel’s 1970s Environments albums—those “relaxation records” made for stressed-out people—as a set of soundscapes made for the stressed-out environment itself.

The project mixes archival nature recordings, synthetic atmospheres, and AI-generated voices into strange new habitats. Narrators—some human, some machine—tell fables about seashores, reefs, and animal enclosures, where the line between the natural and the artificial dissolves. The result is a haunting, witty, and thought-provoking album that asks what it means to listen when both humans and environments are under pressure.

Machine Listening’s art and research practice is deeply engaged with the politics of datasets, algorithmic systems, surveillance, and the shifting dynamics of power in “listening” technologies. Among other things, they interrogate how voice assistants, smart speakers, and algorithmic audio systems mediate — and often extract data from — human sound. Their installations and performances have been shown in institutions worldwide, including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, and at festivals like Unsound. In short, Machine Listening blends creative and critical strategies to explore and expose the hidden infrastructures of acoustic power.

James Parker and Joel Stern are both based in Melbourne Australia, where Parker is Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School and Stern is Research Fellow at RMIT School of Media and Communication. In this conversation we go deep on environments, AI, and recent innovations that surveil and remediate the environment in order to save it--for example playing recordings of healthy ocean reefs to sick ones to improve their vitality. It's some pretty wild shit.

As always, you can join to get the extra long version of this conversation, including our guests recommendations on things to read, listen and do. Just go to mackhagood.com to join.

That's also where you should go to get our free monthly newsletter with all kinds of great links and resources for people obsessed with sound. We just dropped the first edition and I'm telling you, it's brimming with sonic content that I can't squeeze into the podcast.

Chapters:

0:00 The Origins of Environments: Irv Teibel’s Ocean Recording

7:14 Introducing Machine Listening: Art, Technology, and Sound

13:08 The Environments Series: Cultural Impact and Reception

18:58 Avant-Garde Meets Commerce: Teibel’s Methods and Influence

24:51 Bell Labs, IBM, and the Birth of Machine Listening

30:53 Simulation, Emulation, and the Legacy of Environments

36:53 Environments 12: Reimagining Soundscapes for the Environment

42:45 Technologies of the Self and Environmentality

47:55 Sound Design for Zoos: From Field Recordings to Animal Welfare

53:39 Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

For full transcript visit irv-teibels-environments-ai-audio-and-the-future-of-listening-w-machine-listening

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Horror Film Sound Designer Graham Reznick on Crafting the Uncanny

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:38:00 -0000

Graham Reznick is a multifaceted sound designer, screenwriter, director, and musician, best known for his work on indie horror films like Ti West's X and the critically acclaimed video game Until Dawn. In this episode, Reznick discusses Rabbit Trap, a film based on Welsh folklore blending analog synthesis with supernatural soundscapes.

Host Mack Hagood and Reznick begin talking about horror sound design as a technical and creative process, examining how he crafted specific uncanny soundscapes in the film. The conversation then expands to the evolving relationship between sound design and musical scores in horror films, Reznick's limited series on Shudder called "Dead Wax: A Vinyl Hunter's Tale" and a discussion of haunted media, sensory deprivation, brainwave entrainment, self-improvement tapes from the 1970s, and other Halloween-appropriate topics!

Members of Phantom Power can hear our ad-free, extended version, which includes Reznick's world-record breaking work as a writer on the video game Until Dawn. Last but not least, we find ‘What’s Good?’ according to Graham, where he recommends things to read, do, and listen to!

Join us at phantompod.org or mackhagood.com]! That’s also where you can also sign up for our free Phantom Power newsletter, which will drop on the second Friday of every month and feature news, reviews, and interviews not found on the podcast.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Phantom Power

01:19 Meet Graham Reznick: Sound Designer Extraordinaire

01:59 Rabbit Trap: A Sound-Centric Horror Film

02:29 Graham Reznick's Career Highlights

04:00 Phantom Power Membership and Newsletter

04:52 Interview with Graham Reznick Begins

05:00 Rabbit Trap: Plot and Sound Design Insights

10:40 Creating the Uncanny Soundscape

14:11 The Evolution of Sound Design in Horror

20:56 Sound Design Techniques and Tools

26:33 Exploring the Fairy Circle Scene

35:48 Dead Wax: A Vinyl Hunter's Tale

39:58 The Allure of Forbidden Media

43:31 The Evolution of Online Culture

44:34 Magic, Dark Arts, and Haunted Media

46:54 Sensory Deprivation and Inner Worlds

49:25 The Power of Sound and Music

52:45 The Impact of Individualized Media

For the full transcript visit: https://www.mackhagood.com/podcast/inside-the-sound-of-the-uncanny-rabbit-trap-sound-design-and-haunted-media-w-graham-reznick/

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Maurice Rocco: Race, Queerness, and Thai Music Culture w/ Benjamin Tausig

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 18:10:00 -0000

With movie star looks and a raucous piano style, Maurice Rocco made a splash in the 1940’s, influencing future rock and rollers Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. By the 60s, however, he was a has-been in the U.S., playing lounges in Bangkok, Thailand until his grisly murder by a pair of male sex workers. In his deeply insightful book ⁠Bangkok After Dark, ethnomusicologist Benjamin Tausig reclaims Rocco’s forgotten story and reveals its broader context, exploring the intersection of race, queerness, and transnational music cultures during the cold war era.

Benjamin Tausig is a scholar of music, sound and politics in Southeast Asia teaching at Stony Brook University, New York. Working between music, sound studies, Asian studies, and anthropology, his publications cover topics such as the soundscape of political procest in Thauland, Luk thung and mor lam, and the impact of American military presence on Southeast Asian culture.

In this episode we discuss his two books, Bangkok is Ringing, which provides a lucid and in-depth ethnography of the Thailand’s Red Shirt anti-government protest movement, and Bangkok After Dark. In a wide-ranging conversation, we cover everything from Mack and Ben’s early days in sound studies to the proto-music videos known as “soundies” to the psychedelic roots of Thai music genres like luk thung.

Our Patreons get an extended cut of this interview, including our ‘what’s good?’ section, revealing Ben’s top picks for things to read, do, and listen to! Sign up to listen at Patreon.com/phantompower.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction: Maurice Rocco and the Forgotten Soundies

03:57 Welcome & Meet Benjamin Taussig

08:15 Sound Studies, Graduate School, and Early Interests

13:15 Fieldwork in Thailand: Urban Sound and Space

18:15 Learning Thai and Immersing in Bangkok

22:45 Language, Tonality, and Sonic Culture

27:45 The Red Shirt Movement and Thai Political Soundscapes

36:29 Protest, Democracy, and the Limits of Sound

44:10 Thai Music Genres: Luk Thung, Mor Lam, and Protest

51:00 Sonic Niches, Censorship, and Speaking Out

54:49 Maurice Rocco: From American Jazz Star to Bangkok

1:02:58 The Vietnam War, American Influence, and Thai Psychedelia

1:09:38 Race, Queerness, and Identity in 1960s-70s Thailand

1:14:05 Rocco’s Final Years, Legacy, and Reflections

For the full transcript visit https://phantompod.org/benjamin-tausig-bangkok-after-dark/.

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Phantom Power Trailer

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:00:00 -0000

Sound is an invisible force that most people rarely notice and barely understand. Dr. Mack Hagood explores the world of sound studies with the world's most amazing sound researchers, artists, and designers, as well as musicians, writers, voice actors and others. We've broken down how computers learned to talk, Yoko Ono's scream, John Cage's silence, chopped and screwed cassette tapes, the politics of EDM, film soundtracks, field recording, and audio ink blot tests for blind people. Phantom Power is the podcast that both newcomers and experts in sound studies, sound art, and acoustic ecology listen to--combining intellectual rigor and great audio.

Mack Hagood is a professor of media and communication who studies audio technologies. His work and words have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post, the BBC, Freakonomics Radio, Pitchfork, and many other venues. He is the author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control and is currently writing a book about sound for Penguin Press.

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Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier on Critical Listening (Ciritcal Listening By Liz Pelly, and Max Alper)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:14:00 -0000

This month, we have a guest pod in the feed: It’s the debut episode of Critical Listening, music technology criticism from journalist Liz Pelly and composer-educator Max Alper, “two lifers of the Northeast underground and independent scholars of streaming era dystopia.” Liz and Max’s guest is Greg Saunier, drummer and founding member of long-running band Deerhoof. They discuss the release of Deerhoof’s 20th release, as well as the challenges of making art under the hegemonic conditions of information capitalism. To learn more about Critical Listening, check out their Patreon page.

This month, we also also share an audio file recorded at April’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies meeting. It’s a special tribute to Jonathan Sterne, providing a space for SCMS members to reflect on what he meant to them and to the field. Thanks to organizer Amy Skjerseth with the help of Neil Verma, Ravi Krishnaswami, Cris Becker, and Maya Reter, the entire session was recorded. In all, some 25 people shared their remembrances, including many past Phantom Power guests and collaborators. You can stream the session here.

The post Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier on Critical Listening appeared first on Phantom Power.

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Radio Opera Redefined: Immersive Sound, Improvisation, and Sonic Freedom w/ Yvette Janine Jackson

Fri, 30 May 2025 22:01:00 -0000

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and sound artist who creates immersive compositions, drawing on a wide array of genres and life experiences. Her compositions have been commissioned internationally for a variety of mediums. Yvette Jackson often works in a mode she calls radio opera, which combines orchestral composition, modular synthesis, sampling, voice acting, and improvisation. Her work has been commissioned and screened at some of the biggest festivals and events across the globe. Having learned tape splicing, analog synthesis, and computer music at the historic Columbia Computer Music Center in New York. Yvette now works as associate professor at Harvard University.

In the public episode, we talk about her concept of radio opera and we take a deep dive into her album Freedom, and explore the unusual personal history that has informed her unconventional composition style—discussing things like theater sound design and her four years spent 8,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains, and how that changed the way she listens.

Supporters on Patreon will get another 35 minutes where we get into the technical details of how Yvette puts these multimodal electroacoustic works together. And a discussion of composing for the Carillon, the enormous bell tower instrument. sign up to listen Patreon.com/phantompower.

00:00 Introduction

00:39 Meet Yvette Janine Jackson

02:08 Exploring Radio Opera

04:19 Yvette’s Recent Achievements

05:12 Defining the Artist

06:01 The Concept of Radio Opera

08:25 Creating Immersive Experiences

13:10 Album ‘Freedom’ and Its Themes

13:56 Narratives in ‘Freedom’

14:16 Invisible People: A Radio Opera

19:54 Destination Freedom: A Journey

24:02 The Art of Sound and Emotion

29:10 Diving into Technical and Biographical Insights

29:51 Early Musical Influences and Education

31:57 College Years and Electronic Music Exploration

35:04 Theater and Radio Drama Experiences

40:17 Living in Colorado and Soundscape Studies

48:40 PhD Journey and Integrative Studies

50:39 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Yvette Jackson: My work has a lot of things that were presented to me at some point as binaries, like, you know, improvisation, composition, acoustic, electronic, and for me, I guess part of my practice is kind of blurring these lines.

Introduction: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a show about sound. Sound studies. Sound art. All things sound. My name is Mac Hagood, and my guest today is Yvette Janine Jackson. Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and sound artist who creates immersive compositions drawing on a wide array of genres and life experiences.

Her electroacoustic chamber and orchestral compositions have been commissioned internationally for concert. Theater, installation and screen. Yvette Jackson often works in a mode she calls radio opera, which combines orchestral composition, modular synthesis, sampling, voice acting, improvisation, a whole lot of things in order to create what the guardian called immersive non-visual films.

Her work has been commissioned by or appeared on the stages and screens of Carnegie Hall Big Years Festival. PBS and the Venice Music Bien Oh and Wave Farm. A lot of listeners will be familiar with Wave Farm, with whom Yvette has had a long history. She is also the only volunteer firefighter that I personally know who learned tape splicing analog synthesis and computer music at the Historic Columbia Computer Music Center in New York.

Oh, and did I mention that she’s a professor at Harvard? Yvette and I met at the Residual Noise Festival at Brown a couple months ago, and I so enjoyed talking with her that I wanted to bring you in on the conversation. In this wide ranging chat, we talk about her concept of radio opera and we take a deep dive into her album Freedom, which the wire calls one of the most unique.

Releases to chronicle the Black American experience. We then get into her unusual personal history, which has informed her unconventional composition style, and we discuss things like theater, sound design, and the four years she spent 8,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains and how that changed the way she listens.

Supporters on Patreon will get another 35 minutes where we get into the technical details of how Yvette puts together these multimodal electroacoustic works. And then we get to my favorite part of the conversation in which we truly nerd out on the Caron. Which is the enormous Bell Tower instrument that she has actually composed several pieces for.

And unless there is some Caron podcast out there, and I suppose there probably is, but I’m pretty sure that this is the deepest Caron conversation you’re ever going to hear. And then. Yvette does her what’s good segment where she suggests something good to read, something good to listen to, something good to do, and her picks are every bit as unconventional as you might expect from this introduction.

That is all at Phantom Power’s Patreon page. patreon.com/phantom Power. You can become a member for as little as $3 a month, and we could really use your support. I’m still on this mission to try to cover the production costs for this podcast with your donation, so please consider getting all of the full length interviews at patreon.com/phantom Power.

Okay, here it is, my conversation with a one of a kind human being, Yvette, Janine Jackson. Yvette, welcome to the show.

Yvette Jackson: Thanks for inviting me.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, so it’s been a while since we chopped it up over breakfast at the Hampton Inn. Classy, you’ve had, an amazing year. I think we are actually able to sort of break some news on this podcast that you just received a Herb Bert Award , in the arts for 2025, which is like a big $75,000 thing.

Yvette Jackson: Yeah, I mean, I’m excited for multiple reasons. I mean, especially, it’s at a time when obviously, you know, arts are being cut and so it’s an honor, but also a responsibility, I think.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, I mean, I think with that was part of the conversation that we had before, it was just about the kinds of challenges and opportunities of, of trying to do creative work in this moment.

Um. You also got promoted to associate professor at Harvard. That’s amazing. Yeah. Congrats. Thank you very much. I’m just gonna toot your horn for a minute year. Alright. Yeah. But maybe, maybe, um, we can just sort of start with the basics of why you’re getting these accolades and promotions, which is your work, which I, I think is just truly innovative.

Can you maybe just talk a little bit about how you would describe yourself as an artist? What genres do you work in?

Yvette Jackson: All right. Um, I, I feel like I’m not consistent with this answer. I was just asked this question two days ago, so I mean, I think composer and sound artist, but I’ve used different terms.

Sound designer, installation artist, the composer has always been a part mm-hmm. Of that definition, and I guess musician. As well. Performer ensemble director. But yeah, I like composer. Simple. One word.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Your work, I mean, one, one word that I’ve heard you use before to describe your work is radio opera.

You have this group, the radio opera workshop. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what you see? That genre as, would you call it a genre radio author?

Yvette Jackson: Um, I mean, I, I think it is. I mean, the term is used in different terms now and I think it also was used. In different ways during the early days of radio because I mean, historically you can find older ads for, you know, we’ve got the first radio opera, and you can see this on ads in the US and in Europe.

And usually what was meant by that term, radio opera was an opera that was being broadcast on the radio. Mm-hmm. And then you have pieces like NBC Commission, John Carlo Otti for the Old Mate and the Thief. And I think that commission was specifically for radio. So you know, as a composer, having to think about how to capture that spectacle over the air.

In the minds of the listeners. Um, I use the term a little bit differently. So the radio for me is pointing to the golden age of radio drama, which I am a fan of, and then opera. Just because initially when I started using this term about 13 years ago, 14 years ago, I was. Picturing this concept as these series of large works, and so mm-hmm.

Yeah. Taking these two ideas and it probably, I, I mean, I think definitely I also was influenced and maybe got this term from Anthony Davis with whom I was studying at the time that I started calling my works radio opera.

Mack Hagood: He started calling your works that

Yvette Jackson: No, I, I, I think the, the term came up in a conversation that we were having uhhuh.

I had taken one of his opera classes and he knew about my interest in radio drama. And so, I mean, I think that there’s a connection there. And then someone also, uh, had a conversation two days ago thinking about like violin, Bret. Using radio opera and having like the audience kind of interactive and you know, an interactive component of it and singing along with it, which, I mean, initially I wasn’t thinking of any type of interactivity, which, yeah, now I am.

The initial idea was I was creating these electroacoustic compositions to be experienced in the. A darkened theater as dark as the law would permit. You know, you have the exit signs there and you know, the performance instructions were often to be performed at an uncomfortable volume. And so you have people congregated in a theater, you know, black box proscenium space.

They may be immediately seated next to someone they know, but. You know, also seated around strangers and then experiencing this collective listening experience in different types of venues and darkness. So you’re aware of other people’s surroundings, but maybe that’s not your focus. Although, I mean, I don’t know.

I think, yeah, maybe it, it is also you do become aware of the other people. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: I mean that does sort of bring to mind that. Concentrated form of listening that some radio scholars have said occurred in the early days of radio in the golden era of radio drama, where something is coming alive in the mind.

And in part, it’s facilitated by the fact that there’s just one sense that’s sort of being activated.

Yvette Jackson: Yeah, the idea of the Theater of the mind really is what initially drove my concept of radio opera so that, you know, bringing together the sound effects, whether, you know, they’re things I designed in A DAW or Foley, like had a creaky uh.

Bedroom door that I used in a lot of pieces and a crackly radiator. So using these sound effects and the dialogue and music coming together to produce some type of image, which I mean in a way then becomes you’re asking the listener to participate because not everyone is going to choose to or be capable of or want to, you know, imagine anything.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, I mean, and, and just to give people, I mean we’re definitely gonna play some, some small snippets of, of your work, but it’s kind of hard to give a sense of these pieces because they are so heterogeneous and pulling from so many different, not just genres, but sort of forms of instrumentation and modes of sort of addressing.

The listener. I mean there’s elements that sound like field recordings. There are things that are modular synth sounds. There are elements that sound like noise, but then there’s also traditional European art, music things happening there. There might be a snatches of, of something that sounds a little more like contemporary r and b or something, but then like there’s gospel, like there just seems to be.

Uh, just a world like you, you were sort of world building in this way that I think the, the radio opera. Term kind of gives you that sense of world building.

Yvette Jackson: Yeah, I mean, maybe I should think about my practice more in terms of world building. I mean, occasionally I do consciously think of it that way.

Uhhuh. Um, I think initially I was concerned and interested about the expression of identity through sound. And, you know, I’ve been exposed to a lot of. Things and ways of seeing the world. And I think that comes through in the music, but also thinking about the way I was raised, educated, not just formally in a school, but culturally, societally.

Hmm. I mean, I, I guess, for example, my work has a lot of things that were presented to me at some point as binaries. Like, you know, improvisation, composition, acoustic, electronic. And for me, I guess part of my practice is kind of. Blurring these lines because I, I, I felt like I’ve always been told by someone, not that you need to listen to anybody telling you anything.

Yeah. That, you know, you can do this or you can do that. And I’m like, why can’t I do both or all 12 of these things or whatever. Or, you know, Yvette, you should focus and narrow down on this one specific thing. And I think radio opera is something that allows me to bring together all these things that.

External voices have told me that I can’t do all of these things. I’m like, oh yeah. Um, yeah. So it’s a way to do that. And then also to be able to, as radio opera becomes more of a social activity for me, if I can call it that. Um, it becomes a way to interact with more and more people like Yeah, different types of people, which I find interesting.

And including the listener. ’cause the listener is a collaborator as well.

Mack Hagood: I mean, your 2021 album was called Freedom. And you know, I think it’s speaking thematically to some very serious issues about freedom. Um, I think on both sides of the record, but it also is expressive of that kind of freedom to just transgress binaries and boundaries as you choose.

And it’s more powerful for doing that. Definitely.

Yvette Jackson: I mean, yeah, I think this exploration of freedom comes on multiple levels. I mean, I think more recently thinking about freedom just in like forms of expression or questioning what, what exactly is meant by freedom, and I think maybe each conversation has to redefine it because it’s used in so many ways.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mack Hagood: Would, do you wanna talk about the narratives on, if we talk about radio opera being a narrative, could we maybe talk about the narratives on each side of this record? The first side is called Destination Freedom. I.

Yvette Jackson: Sure. Um, yeah, the first side is estimation freedom, but I’ll start with the, with the B side, invisible people.

Okay. A radio opera, because that was the first piece composition that I used this term, radio opera. Oh, really? Um, yeah. To describe it,

you are 10,000 times more amenable in his eyes than the most hateful. Venomous servant is in ours.

Yvette Jackson: I mean, the full title of what’s on the album is Invisible People, and then parenthetically a radio opera. Then I think there’s like a colon episode one. Um, uh, oh. See, I for, I’ve forgotten my own title. It’s so long, but the fact that it’s called episode one. That’s really the third iteration of Invisible people.

The first piece started out as a 10 minute tech sound composition using a lot of the sound bites that end up on the album and that have been a part of kind of subsequent iterations of the composition. So the piece. Started, um, around the time that Barack Obama had approved marriage equality. And at the time, as I said, I was, I was working with Anthony Davis and he nudged me to like find a topic that was meaningful to me.

Um, and so I started. Just kind of having conversations about the topic. So yeah, my process is conversations with people, um, kind of armchair investigating, you know, looking up things on the internet, YouTube websites, looking at historical text, which all then be kind of come source material for this composition.

So initially it started off as an essay, which featured different. Voices of politicians and religious figures, academics responding to Barack Obama’s approval of marriage equality. But the title, invisible People, was really pointing to all the people that the media left out of this conversation, which I thought were like the center of, you know, this focus.

And so I became. Intrigued by the voices, I guess the media choose to highlight or the voices people choose to listen to in certain situations. And what about everyday people? Mm-hmm. Who somehow become invisible in certain situations. So that, that was side B.

Mack Hagood: Well, that, and, and just to spell it out a little bit more, like there’s a lot of samples of voices of.

Preachers and, uh, I sound, I thought I recognized the voice of Louis Farrakhan. Like there, there are people from the pulpit decrying marriage equality and the decision that Obama made.

Yvette Jackson: I work with F Techs in the way that playwright Charles me does. I used to do sound for theater, so a lot of the techniques I got come from that period.

And so. Yes, it includes, you know, I include politicians and as you said, spiritual leaders, clergy, um, but also internet trolls. Mm-hmm. People from the present and the past. I try to collect as many voices as possible. Obviously, there’s still some kind of framing by me as the composer, so I try to show multiple sides, but the mere fact that I’m one person, putting these together introduces some type of bias, but.

There’s this collection of voices. Even when you hear actors or non-actor speaking these lines, they’re taken from things that have, yeah, I could have read in the comments of a YouTube video or some historical document. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, I may change a word or two, but for the most part, I try to stick with what people have actually said.

You know, without. To do it as, as carefully as I, as I can do without running into any issues.

Mack Hagood: Well, I mean, the, the comments kinda speak for themselves and, but I mean,

Yvette Jackson: I mean, then I’m also, I mean, there’s the comments that are on the recording, but then I’m also interested in the comments and the conversations that happen after the recording.

It may be. I should clarify. When I say recording, I mean I’m thinking about these initial performances, which were in the dark in theater with multichannel surrounding the listener. I always, or I usually am, if I see any live performance, I’m at the back of the house, which kind of comes from this habit of.

When I used to run sound for live performances, I like to see the audience as part of that performance. And so with invisible people, especially those first few performances of the fixed media, seeing how people respond, you know, are they squirming? Like sometimes people wanna laugh at parts ’cause there are some moments of humor, but then.

Because it’s so serious. People may be afraid to laugh. And so, I mean, and then that comes in with the collective listening, like how you might respond to something while listening by yourself versus listening surrounded by friends, surrounded by strangers in darkness, but aware of other bodies. These all play a role and I think they’re all a part of what it is that I’m calling radio opera.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. So while we’re at it, you wanna talk about side A. As well.

Yvette Jackson: Yeah. Site a destination. Freedom is a journey because invisible people was so text heavy. I was curious about this idea of telling a story without relying on words. And so I mean, there, there are voices embedded in there, but they’re not intelligible.

That is by design.

So there’s kind of a predecessor to Destination Freedom called swan, which is like a, it’s just under 10 minute piece, which again, the source materials for that. I have an ensemble, so there’s studio sessions at the ensemble. But I don’t use the mixture, you know, polished recordings from the ensemble. I may use, you know, the overhead mics on the drums to capture the cello and use that.

Mm-hmm. Or, you know, there’s a part in there which I find really beautiful, which was before the percussionist was ready, you know, he was still moving something and he got like this kind of clunking thing that sounded like changes. Oh, yeah. Which to me then fit with the narrative. So the, the narrative for both pieces told him three.

Kind of sections starts in the hold of a cargo ship trafficking Africans to the Americas, that it’s kind of this disorienting middle section and then kind of thrust you forward to this kind of cathartic release. You know, like this search for freedom and what feels like this cathartic arrival to it.

And in my mind, in both pieces, there’s kind of like a coda because history repeats itself. But yeah, so. Destination freedom is basically an expansion of that idea. And I think what gets introduced with this is, I guess, the version of me as a performer of modular synthesizers. Mm-hmm. And so I still have the chamber ensemble, but then I have kind of these improvise synthesize sessions.

Like I said, there’s, there are voices in there, but they’re very unintelligible. And there’s actually some moments of kind of like sound design, like working with, um, the modular synth where. It’s kind of like this auditory illusion of like, I hear voices in, in there, but there, but there’s actually not any voices, which I think points to kind of a larger thing I’m interested in is like getting electronic sounds to sound acoustic and acoustic sounds to sound electronic.

Getting beautiful things to sound ugly and ugly things to sound beautiful. ’cause really it’s just a shifting, like you’re just shifting one’s frame. The way you experience the world like. The world itself is not changing. How you view the world is changing.

Mack Hagood: I mean, this raises a question that I just never cease to be fascinated with when it comes to sound art and experimental music.

Because so much of it is conceptual today. Right? And it seems to me that it’s sort of like the way that the conceptual concerns of an artist get translated into something we actually hear is sort of what defines. The contemporary artist. And what I think is so interesting is that like on side A and side B, there’s two, as you suggested, like totally opposite strategies.

Like one is very textual and we know precisely what’s happening. Well, not precisely, but we have a very strong sense of the concerns that brought you to the table here. Right? Whereas the other one is telling. A, a nar, there’s still a narrative there, but it’s through sound. And if you didn’t know the title of the piece, you know it, the, I guess the question is, will some listeners know what’s fully happening or not?

Or would they be relating to it on another level? And I just find that fascinating, these differing strategies.

Yvette Jackson: I mean, I think in some ways Destination Freedom is more accessible, even though, I mean, there’s no text to guide the listener, or maybe I’m suggesting that because there’s no text to guide the listener, it can be more accessible.

I mean, uh, in Workshops of swan, which was the predecessor, one of the participants was like, there’s no way you’re going to get people to know what it’s like in the hold of a cargo ship. Mm-hmm. And I’m like, well. First of all, I’m not trying to force people to have any feeling or think or you know, experience.

What I anticipate is that people are gonna come in with their own lived experiences and preexisting knowledge, and I. Their framing of the audio is going to be based on that. So each person is going to interpret this in a different way. And that is okay, like that’s, that’s what I’m more curious and excited about is like, what is it that you are hearing in this piece?

What are you experiencing? So even. On the text, heavy invisible people. It has different meaning. If you recognize the voices well. Okay. If you speak the language, if you recognize the voices, yeah. If you’ve lived through certain experiences. Some of my works can be triggering, so if you’ve had certain experiences, uh, maybe they’re harder to listen to than other types of things.

But yeah, I mean this is something that I’m interested in. It’s like language and the absence of language are. I was going to kind of put myself down a, a trap in some linguists, it’d be like, oh, that’s not what language is. Um, uh, but I mean, I mean, I don’t wanna go into the thing where people say, oh, music is a language.

Because I mean, I think that’s definitely where the linguists will come in and say, no, it’s not a language because of X, Y, and Z. But I think maybe the communication is. Maybe more about kind of emotional or I think about emotional contour during the compositional stages than any kind of semantic meaning from text or even program notes.

’cause of the program notes. I upset people ’cause I don’t like to have program notes. Um,

Mack Hagood: well in fact, you, you told me like, um, because you have a German language radio opera coming up soon and you’re like, I don’t wanna talk about it. I don’t like to talk about my work before. People hear it.

Yvette Jackson: Well, I mean, yeah, I mean that, that project is in process for Deutsche Couture and it’s, I guess, the English title for its backspace, like, you know, on a keyboard, but can have like a, a double meaning, but with this, like I’m taking an extra time to, because I do want to, I.

Have meanings in German language. But then I’m also thinking about like the types of voices and like if and how class can be reflected through a language that is not my own. Mm-hmm. And the challenges of that and like how listeners perceive that. I mean, a lot of the times my, my projects, my radio operas are, are abstract any, a lot of the times, all the time.

My, my radio operas are abstract. Um, and. Uh, something you said in your previous kind of lead up to the question made me think about like, even, even the term radio opera, some people get upset by it, like, you know, why is she using the term. Opera. I don’t hear people singing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, are your pieces on radio?

I mean, some pieces have been played on radio, but the early pieces were not specifically or explicitly composed with radio in mind. Mm-hmm. Whereas this German radio opera that I’m working on now, um, I’m, you know, very aware about like the radio audience and I mean, and that, that’s what makes it exciting also.

’cause like. It’s kind of like my mante moment of composing something explicitly for radio.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I I, that’s really exciting. Um, I’m like torn in two directions right now. Like I wanna, I. Ask you a bunch of sort of technical questions about how you do what you do. And I also wanna sort of get the background because you’ve hinted at certain experiences in your life in the past, like being a theater sound designer that I also want to dig into.

So maybe let’s go. With the biographical piece, and then we’ll come back to all my techier.

Yvette Jackson: Sure.

Mack Hagood: Nuts in bolts questions. It all

Yvette Jackson: started when my parents met. No. Um, let’s see. Well, I mean, I won’t go, I won’t go that far. Um, but you’re from la, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m from la. Um, and I grew up, um, uh, I, I guess I was lucky to grow up in a household.

With a piano and I had like a, it was my paternal grandfather’s guitar that really wasn’t strung properly, or, yeah, I mean, my mother didn’t know how to string it. I had, she had like a, I still have it, um, in my living room, but it’s like a box set on vinyl for like guitar lessons, which I’m not sure how one really learns guitar from a box set album, but I would love to hear that.

I do still have it. Um. But anyway, I, I, I didn’t learn through that method, but I mean, I guess I took lessons. On and off from an early age at the community school. So I was, I guess what I’m saying is I was su supported and exposed to music, both through different types of private lessons, through piano, you know, music fundamentals, and eventually switching to trumpet, which I had become aware of in elementary school.

So my public school was part of a magnet program. It was like a super phenomenal experience. Like I, I also have a 45 that we recorded. It was like a bunch of 9-year-old singing bar talk, if you can, if you wanna hear that. Um, but, but like, I mean, like how many nine year olds have this experience of like, you know, through a public school going into a recording studio and having a really good public school music program.

You know, having the privilege of also being supported with private lessons through the community school. And then at one point there was an older woman across the street who I had violin lessons with and you know, had instruments in the house. As I’m talking, I’m like, I think at one point my paternal grandparents gave me one of those like toys, us drum sets, which magically disappeared.

Um, uh, so, um, yeah, just having that support and I. I, I knew that composition was something I wanted to do and I always thought probably was thinking about it in terms of like film or tv, because I don’t know la that’s the industry there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then at college, you know, studying composition and.

One year, I’m like, what are these electronic music classes? And went up to Princess Hall at the time was like transitioning from the Columbia, Princeton Electronic Music Center to the computer music center. Mm-hmm. And, you know, so, um, Brad Garten was starting out there and. There was something like really exciting about that space.

It was like engineers and musicians, but they’re, you’re encouraged to like explore and learn from trial and error, which was a lot different than in the formal music classes where, you know, you’re following all these rules and. Oh, you, you know, doubled the wrong note or, you know, something like that.

Which, I mean, I, I, I, I, I love theory, I love, I love rules, but like, there was also something just liberating about this experience and hearing one of Brad’s compositions where it’s like he’s, you could hear him washing dishes like I hadn’t heard. Things that were called music that were like this. And

Mack Hagood: so who was the instructor?

Uh,

Yvette Jackson: Brad Garten was, uh, one of the main people at the time, and I also took. I think it was like the last class where we were learning on reel to reel tape. So it was taught by Arthur Krieger. And so we’d get assignments with, you know, use these two oscillators and create a metallic sound that turns into a watery sound.

And you know, this is the rhythm. And it was like trial and error. I mean, maybe there was a lot more instruction there, but my whatever, 20-year-old, 19-year-old brain was only absorbing so much. But that experience with the real reveal. Still is important because I think about like this tactile experience of like actually splicing tape and like flipping things around and

Mack Hagood: splicing it at an angle.

Yeah, it’s, you get the transition. Yeah. And like, you know, the grease

Yvette Jackson: pencil and all of that. I.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. I, I just barely too got, got a little bit of that, you know, from working in radio, like a part-time job and,

Yvette Jackson: yeah.

Mack Hagood: Um, so that, I mean, that was a really

Yvette Jackson: great experience and, and it did come to serve me two other periods in my life, but also my first introduction to computer music.

I mean, we’re using like RTC mix, so. Programming like a line at a time, like play this sound for this duration at this amplitude like kind of approach to sound before I started working with other tools and I think maybe at that time, like I, I had digital performer, but I feel like at that point, I mean someone can fact check me, but I feel like that.

It might have been even MIDI only at that time. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then they added the audio to it. Mm-hmm. And so, mm-hmm. Like just kind of looking back through this conversation, like these three different types of exposure to sound making that were a lot different than the rules and the type of. Ways of practicing that I had been trained on earlier.

And so I really relished in that. And then going from that college experience back to California, I eventually moved up to the San Francisco Bay area and got involved with like theater and radio drama there. There’s a group, Pachi Fool Run by Kevin Beam. Many Bera and you know, we did things at the radio station and that was a learning experience.

Like, you know, showing up to record live radio dramas and. Being like, where are the microphones? Well, that was my job. Oops. I forgot to like unscrew the mics and bring them from the rehearsal spot to the studio. But like sound effects being manipulated, live with the actors there and running sound for theater places like Magic Theater and like Aurora Theater and Berkeley, Oakland Public Theater.

Um, all of these experiences were great because again, it kind of gave me this bird’s eye view from being in the sound booth. And the very first piece I ran sound for. My good friend David Molina was the sound designer and it was like three hours of just like dense stacked sounds like with mini disc players and CD players.

And I think there might have been a live mic and I screwed up the first show ’cause like they literally, they, they grabbed me from the, I was working in the box office. They grabbed me there the first day, threw me in the booth ’cause I think it was. Previews that that night, and they didn’t have someone to run sound.

And so it was like learning, like learning how to swim by throwing a kid into the water. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. And did you have a, like a, a physical cue book that you were paging through the script with? And we

Yvette Jackson: had a book, but I was in the booth. So on one side was the lighting up, then the stage manager, and then I was on the other side.

So it’s pretty cramped in there. So yeah, the first couple of months you’d hear horses. Scalloping when there were no horses in the scene and stuff like that. But by the time I got this rhythm of it, I began to think of the soundboard as like this instrument. And like, you know, the stage manager is the conductor, the sound designer’s, the composer.

And that kind of expanded my desire to, I guess it like there’s this shift between like wanting to compose for theater, to wanting to compose theater. And I think just to back up once more, I think that experience at Columbia, I started to get that because like some of my earlier pieces, which like I have.

On a deck somewhere. Um, but like these earlier pieces, like I would use soundbites from 10 10 wins and pieces of instrumental music, like there are some Lionel Richie and Rashan Roland Kirk mm-hmm. Samples in the pieces. I mean, I think you might’ve, I can’t remember if I shared a piece, um, when we were at residual noise at Brown.

I don’t, I don’t make it publicly available, but I have shared it in a couple of like smaller talks to show this kind of earlier It is radio opera. I just wasn’t calling it that, you know? Yeah. 20 years before, or,

Mack Hagood: I mean, you, I’m, I’m kind of getting chills just because I studied theater and did directing, did.

Sound design and there’s just nothing like that space of the Black Box theater and even just, you know, being the sound op and just, there’s something I found so meditative. I. About being in that dark, cool space and just hitting your cues at the right time and following along with, with what’s happening on stage and then just the collaboration and, and creativity, you know, of getting your friends to.

To, um, I mean, when, when Brush of Frame fame of mine was like, I, I was, uh, directing a play for a, a glass project and I had Brian Blade who was studying jazz at my university, like on drums there for a while, and he was like playing the walls of the black box theater awesome. And stuff. It was completely amazing, right?

It’s just like. Those little moments of like, sort of crossing paths with people and, and, and, and just creating something that’s ephemeral and then goes away. I don’t know. I, I, I could see why that was inspirational. For you and, and, and something that you wanted to retain in your work after having that experience?

Yvette Jackson: Yeah, I mean, I learned a lot from just, yeah, watching other designers, especially lighting designers. Um mm-hmm. And I’m hoping like, as I expand this idea of radio opera to include movement and lights, like Heather Baab was a lighting designer. I, I worked with a lot when I was getting started and like, I’m like, hey.

I have this idea coming up, would you wanna be a part of it? Because like, it’s kind of like if you think about like film or theater where sounds often is added at the last minute. Yeah. Like I don’t, I don’t wanna do that with the lighting or like any type of visuals. I want that to be part of the compositional process from the very beginning.

And so yeah, as radio opera becomes more collaborative for me reaching out to people earlier in that process.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. So after that stint in the Bay Area, is that when you go down to San Diego?

Yvette Jackson: Actually, uh, lived off the grid, well, not technically off the grid, kind of. I lived in the mountains at 8,000 feet in Colorado.

Um, oh. And that period was important because my listening shifted in different ways. And I think that’s kind of what primed me for the following interest in, in kind of soundscape studies because you know, especially those first few weeks or months of, I mean the town itself was a hundred people and then the outlying this kind of a land trust outside of it at.

More of a transient population and an out of it.

Mack Hagood: How did you, you gotta explain, like what, how did you wind up, um, in Colorado? Well, okay, so

Yvette Jackson: at, at the time I was a webcast and production director at Grace Cathedral for four years, and a lot of the time spending like 60 hours a week in the basement with black walls and the windows.

And then I’d go home to my apartment on Van Ness and Eddie, which was like Van Ness. It’s basically when the 1 0 1 goes through San Francisco. So it was like just hearing people scream and traffic accidents and just like, a lot of it was just like no windows and noise. Um, like a former partner was going to study with someone.

In Colorado and wanted someone to like watch her kids. And I’m like, Hey, I’ll do it. Um, well I didn’t say that immediately because I don’t, I don’t like to disappoint kids ever. So I wanted to make sure I would, it was actually something I was gonna commit to, but then I’m like, I’ll do it. And so we were out in the middle of very rural Colorado and it was just like.

One of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was also one of my, yeah, it was the only time I’ve lived, not near a coast, and I love water, so I mean, there, you know, there’s big rivers there as well. So, I mean, I did have like river access to water, so I, I went there for that summer and then I’m like, I’m moving here.

And everyone’s like, ha ha ha ha ha, that’s Yvette. And another wild thing she’s saying. And so yeah, I moved there for four years. I initially had this idea of like, I would compose and like have this home studio, but like actually having no business skills at all or understanding how to take care of a home in the winter.

So I let it flood twice from frozen pipes and I’m glad I didn’t put the studio in the basement because I would’ve like, yeah.

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Yvette Jackson: Lost everything anyway. Um,

Mack Hagood: so how did you support yourself for those four years?

Yvette Jackson: Uh, I went into debt and debt and debt. I didn’t know how. Yeah. So it was a lesson learned about like business skills and, and musicians and fantasies about being a starving artist.

Um, when I first moved there, I joined the local fire department because I’m like, if I’m gonna live in this many. Trees in a dry area. I would like to know like how to protect myself and others in the land around. So I’ve met people through the volunteer fire department and one of those people happened to be the superintendent of the school in the next town.

So I. Taught K through 12 at the local public school.

Mm.

Yvette Jackson: Which is also like another way of just kind of expanding the way I was working with sound and music through that experience. And then at one point, I guess three years into my four years there, I came to California, a friend and I shared birthdays.

And so, you know, we had these kind of co birthday parties where I was meeting all of these other music people. And, uh, one of the gifts I got was like tuition for, uh, like the Send Mat summer program where they, you know, do Maxim, SP and all, and all of that. And, um, David was, was still around at that time.

And so it was through those interactions that I’m like, okay, finally I’m gonna apply to grad school, which is something I said I was gonna do 15 years ago when I had moved up to the Bay Area. And so someone, I don’t know who mentioned Anthony Davis, I think. Somehow I got, I think it was some kind of trumpet connection where I got pointed to Jeff Kaiser, who then, who was studying there at the time, who pointed me to Anthony Davis and we talked.

And um, yeah, that’s when I got into this other type of weird music making, because I think at Columbia there was weird music making. And then in San Francisco, the people I hung around with, like David Molina’s, you know, that was weird music making. And I was making music in Colorado. I wouldn’t call that as weird, but um.

Um, I guess, yeah, we, I mean we did some experimental things too.

Mack Hagood: Did you learn, because you said you were sort of, that Colorado changed your experience of sound in some way or made you wanna think more about like soundscapes does sound. Travel differently at 8,000 feet.

Yvette Jackson: It definitely travels, definitely in the winter.

Um, when it’s cold. I mean, like there it would be, I mean, some long stretches of like negative 20 degrees. And now I’m gonna say that ironic, or, I dunno if it’s ironic, but like when people are like, oh, but it’s, it’s a dry cold. Right? Right. Or they say it for heat, they usually say it for heat. It’s a dry heat.

I feel the same, like a dry cold, like I complained less in like negative. Degrees in Colorado than I did at like 50 degrees. San Francisco a hundred percent. Same with New Orleans.

Mack Hagood: You go to New Orleans. I, I, I lived in Chicago for a decade. I’d go down to New Orleans during the winter, and it’s much warmer, but it’s so damp.

I would be freezing in New Orleans.

Yvette Jackson: Yeah. Um, but I mean, I, I began to listen, I guess, to the. This is prior to me knowing anything about like r Murray Schaeffer and, and maybe I did come across his name in college, but it wasn’t something that was like in my mind or thinking about soundscapes or soundscape composition at that point.

So like, I guess I was coming up with my own language for things that. Again, maybe these seeds had been planted in college or from collaborators in the Bay Area. Mm-hmm. But I wasn’t as aware, so like listening to like, just kind of, I almost got like almost started shivering. Like the sound of like June bucks.

Like they make this gross hissing sound, chipmunks make a sound that I never knew. Well I guess I hadn’t really been around like chipmunks and, you know, squirrels and deer and bear. Um. All kinds of things. And so like it got to a point where like, you know, my first couple of weeks, like, I’m not gonna call it silence, but the shift in the soundscape made me very nervous, especially at night sleeping in this town that I went to without knowing anybody in the middle of like in thousand feet isolated.

Um, like worried about like. Bears coming on my steps and things like that, um, to by the end of that four years when I could hear the sounds of kind of people. Playing in the park and laughter coming through my windows, I’m like, oh, that’s so noisy. Um, but then when I got back to San Diego, LA Jolla area, like I found it, the noisiest place I had ever lived.

And that’s after like growing up in LA and going to school in New York and living in San Francisco, like, it was like, you know, you’ve got like, you know, the. Primary industry is military, so you have the jets flying over all the time. There’s like military and tourist helicopters, there’s like constant leaf blowers.

There’re um, you know, just all of these sounds that I became extremely sensitive to, which I assume probably. It was because of that juxtaposition temporarily of one experience to the other. And so I started becoming really intrigued by the invasion of kind of external sounds on one’s physiological and like mental health because like you can.

Close the door, but like these kind of lower frequencies are these trucks that are just idling. You’re still fueling those vibrations. Mm-hmm. Um, and so yeah, this, that kind of study, you can definitely hear in some of my pieces around like 2012. A lot of these field recordings are like, I’m recording in my domestic space, but I’m capturing all these sounds from the outside that become a part of it, but then also like incorporating these lower frequencies into my music.

As well. Hmm. Um, yeah, so I think, yeah, like, like I mentioned, darkness was a ear a, an important part of these early pieces, but darkness and low frequencies.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you do make powerful use of low frequencies this period of time. So you mentioned San Diego, this is when you do your PhD Yes. Uh, at UCSD.

And you don’t go into a composition program per se, right.

Yvette Jackson: No, I mean, when I was, when I was looking at schools, I had looked at several places. I had looked at like theater sound design programs. I had looked at composition programs. And this program, which at the time was called CSEP, critical Studies and Experimental Practice, and by the time I started that program was being rebranded as integrative studies.

Mm. And so I think I joined during the second year. Of that program. And so, uh, the premise behind this program is that there were four kind of subcategories, systems, inquiry, critical musicology, ethnomusicology and creative practice. And you, you get exposed to all four during the first year, but then you focus in on two of those.

So I did, you know, my master’s and PhD there. And so. Getting exposure to kind of all of these different ways of thinking about sound. And

Mack Hagood: what were your two focus areas?

Yvette Jackson: I think for my master’s they were creative practice and ethnomusicology. And then for the PhD creative practice and systems inquiry.

But I mean,

Mack Hagood: and isn’t, uh, king Britt a professor of computer music over there as well?

Yvette Jackson: King Britt joined the faculty at UCSD the same year I started at Harvard. So we were able to kind of like connect. I guess kind of from the perspectives of, of starting at new institutions at the same time and right before the pandemic.

Yeah. And so I’ve been back to San Diego I think a couple of times and got to meet with King Britt and he invited me to perform on his electron stage at Big Ears. So Wow. Like I really admire what he’s doing, um, there and kind of wish I had overlapped as a student there.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. He seems pretty incredible.

Yvette Jackson: Yeah.

Mack Hagood: Well thanks for the little, uh, tour through your life. And it, and it is, it’s an interesting one. You definitely cut your own trail. Um, yeah, but, and

Yvette Jackson: I, but I think that that goes back to what you were saying, like, my music has all of these different things. It does. Well, my life is at all these different things, like Yeah.

Yeah. And so how to, how to bring all these things together. ’cause when I feel like, when people discourage me and like, oh, you can’t do that, and that it’s like. What I hear is like, you can’t exist because I am these multiple things.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of bringing all these multiple things together, I, maybe we can talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how you do that.

Like, so if we’re talking about, you know, a radio opera and it’s this collaborative enterprise, but you’re drawing on these modular synths and field recordings and, and. Different musicians and digital software, like where do these compositions live? Like did they, do they live in a da? Do they get written on paper?

Like where, where are they born and where do they live?

Yvette Jackson: That’s a super great question.

Mack Hagood: It was a good question, and Yvette gave a good answer too. And if you want to get into the nitty gritty of how she collaborates on these complex radio dramas. You’ll need to join the Patreon. You’ll also get that really interesting conversation about the Caron and Yvette’s.

What’s good? Just go to patreon.com/phantom Power. You’ll get all of our full length conversations, including this one.

The post Radio Opera Redefined: Immersive Sound, Improvisation, and Sonic Freedom w/ Yvette Janine Jackson appeared first on Phantom Power.

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The Global History of Cassette Culture: Bootlegging, Indie Rock, and the Media of the Masses w/ Eleanor Patterson, Rob Drew, and Andrew Simon

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:51:00 -0000

Today we present a cassette theory mixtape. Three excellent scholars help us understand consumer-focused magnetic tape and its history as a medium for the masses:

Eleanor Patterson, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn, whose new book just won the 2025 Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Book Award and a 2025 International Association for Media and History Book Award. It’s called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television distribution (Illinois Press, 2024).

Rob Drew, Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University and a fantastic interpreter of pop culture like graffiti and karaoke. His new book is Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke, 2024).

Andrew Simon, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. We’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while about his 2022 book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press).

This conversation winds its way from the early days of radio, through the Anglophone indie rock of the 1980s, and into the streets of Cairo, where cassette tapes represented the first mass medium that Egyptian state power could not control.

03:49 Introducing the Cassette Theory Mixtape

04:06 Meet the Scholars: Eleanor Patterson, Rob S. Drew, and Andrew Simon

06:10 Diving into the Books: A Round Table Discussion

12:24 Exploring the Prehistory of Media Distribution

23:43 The Role of Cassettes in Indie and Hip Hop Culture

31:12 Cassettes in Egypt: A Tool for Revolution and Resistance

40:32 The Intersection of Media and Culture

Hear the full 90 minute conversation by joining our Patreon! Please support the show at patreon.com/phantompower

Links to Mack’s recent travels:

Residual Noise Festival at Brown University

Resonance: Sound Across the Disciplines at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis

Transcript

Andrew Simon: [00:00:00] Cassette tapes and players did not simply join other mass mediums like records and radio. They became the media of the masses. Cassettes in many ways were the internet before the internet. They enabled anyone to produce culture, circulate information, challenge ruling regimes, long before social media ever entered all of our daily lives.

PPIntro: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound where I talk to people who make sound and people who study sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I’m a Media professor at Miami University, and I just want to start off by giving a quick shout out to a couple of creative communities that I got to hang out in.

I [00:01:00] just got back from the Residual Noise Festival at Brown University, which was this amazing three day event featuring ambisonic sound, art, and music pieces performed both at Brown and at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design. The lead curator of the festival was Ed Osborne, who is the chair of the Art Department at Brown, and a very accomplished sound artist.

And in the middle of the festival there was this one day conference and Ed was kind enough to invite me to be the keynote speaker. And then I had an onstage discussion with Emily I. Dolan, the chair of Brown’s Music Department, and someone whose work I’ve followed for a long time, and it was a real thrill to meet her as well.

But really the biggest thrill of all was the sounds, I mean, three days of these immersive ambisonic creations by amazing artists in these amazing facilities, both at Brown and RISD [00:02:00] and most importantly, there is just such a creative and fun and diverse and nurturing community of composers and sound artists at these two schools.

I’ll put a link to the festival in the show notes and hopefully. We may also feature some of these artists in coming episodes. And then the week before that I visited the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, and they’ve been having this two year long sound seminar chaired by Professors Carter Mathes and Xiaojue Wong.

And they invited me to come over and talk to their faculty and grad students and postdocs about my work. And I got to learn about all the fascinating sound related stuff that’s happening over there at Rutgers. That was also a blast. So I just want to thank Carter and Xiaojue and Ed for the invitations and thank all of you for listening because so many people at these events came up to me and said how valuable they [00:03:00] found this podcast.

And I never anticipated making so many new friends and working relationships through this show. So I feel super fortunate. And that also reminds me, last episode I mentioned trying to get our Patreon sponsorships up so that I can pay an editor and keep this show going during the summer. And we got an unprecedented upsurge in memberships.

So thank you so much. We still kind of have quite a ways to go for me to reach the break even point on production costs. So please, if you’ve been thinking about doing it, maybe do it now. Just go to patreon.com/phantompower you’ll get all the bonus content from today’s show and all the previous shows.

Speaking of today’s show, let me talk about it. I am calling this a cassette theory mixtape. We have three excellent scholars who have recently published books that help [00:04:00] us understand the medium of magnetic tape and it’s history as a medium for the masses. My guests are Eleanor Patterson, associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn, whose new book just won the 2025 Broadcast Education Association’s book Award and the 2025 International Association for Media and History Book Award. It’s called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution Out on Illinois Press.

We also have Rob S. Drew, professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University.

Rob is a fantastic interpreter of pop culture. He’s done work on graffiti and karaoke, and his new book is called Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable out on Duke University Press.

And we also have Andrew Simon, senior lecturer in Middle Eastern [00:05:00] Studies at Dartmouth College, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while about his book, which came out back in 2022. It’s called Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt on Stanford University Press. These three books encounter their subject matter in different historical moments and geographies, and I thought it would be really exciting to sort of bring these great scholars together to discuss the cassette tapes, many purposes and meanings in everyday life.

I should say that Eleanor’s book is not exactly about the cassette tape, but she gives us this really amazing prehistory that I think is very helpful in thinking about the cassette tape. This is also the first time that I’ve had three guests on at once to just sort of have a round table discussion.

So let me know what you think about this format. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s so hard to get people’s schedules together and I managed to pull it off this time. So, let me know what you think. [00:06:00] Alright, so Cassette Theory: A Mix Tape. Let’s do it.

Nora. Rob, Andrew, welcome to the show.

Rob Drew: Thank you.

Andrew Simon: Thank you.

Mack Hagood: I am really excited to have all of you with me, I thought maybe we could just start off with each one of you doing a bit of a self introduction and giving us sort of the short elevator pitch of your book before we really dive in, sort of set the stage for us.

And Nora, why don’t we start off with you.

Eleanor Patterson: Alright, well thanks for asking. My book is called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution. It’s really a case study look at, on demand listening and viewing and really peer-to-peer file sharing before the Internet with looking at analog technologies, kind of at the birth of broadcasting and radio through the seventies and eighties.

And [00:07:00] think that these are stories about the histories of the audience, of fans and the labor they do in distributing content. I’m really a distribution scholar more than anything else, so I’m thinking about how programs get to people and, in what ways they encounter and how those technological, social assemblages shape, how we make sense of content, but also form relationships and make sense of ourselves. And at a few different case studies. Bootlegging is a really hard thing to study, so, won’t say my book is comprehensive, but I look at communities of radio and television fandoms that were, connecting with each other, doing home recording and sharing content really at a time where the only other way to listen or encounter programs was to tune in on a schedule determined by the industry.

That’s [00:08:00] the very small version of my book. So I’ll stop there and let the others have a chance. So I’m really excited to hear about the other books we’re talking about.

Mack Hagood: Great. Yeah. Rob, why don’t you go next?

Rob Drew: Okay. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Mack. And it’s a pleasure to be here with y’all. I started this book as a book about mixtapes way back when, ages ago, back in the nineties when people were making a lot of mix tapes, I started finally getting to interview people when I finished my karaoke book.

My previous book was about karaoke in the 2000s, and by that time, people weren’t really making tapes anymore. They were making CDs, but I was interviewing people on my campus. They kept referring to them as mixed tapes and kept talking about how much they missed tape, even young people.

So I thought, well, I have to look into this, into the history of it, and ended up going kind of down the rabbit hole of [00:09:00] cassette history, which became a history of the cassette, especially from the perspective of both distribution and redistribution. Nora refers to herself as a scholar of distribution.

I think I’ve become that myself. And the cassette is both a very practical format for people to cheaply and easily share their own and others’ music. And as what became a symbolic format for a lot of people, a format that carried a lot of resonance as something that symbolized community, symbolized DIY resourcefulness.

And the book kind of turns on that moment in the early eighties when both the feds are going after the cassette to some degree talking about imposing royalties because of home taping. At the same time. There are a lot of independent artists and [00:10:00] small artists who are picking up on four track recorders and putting out their own tapes and advertising them via, through small zines and such.

So it’s, it doesn’t claim to be a comprehensive history of the cassette, but sort of as a distribution format for independent music.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and it’s a moment, very near and dear to my heart ’cause I lived it.

Rob Drew: Me too.

Mack Hagood: It’s pretty cool. Okay, Andrew.

Andrew Simon: Thank you so much for the invitation, Mack to be on the podcast. We actually read your book Hush earlier this term, for a sound studies group at Dartmouth College,

Mack Hagood: Nice!

Andrew Simon: A pleasure to be here with you and Nora and Rob today. So the inspiration for my book Media The Masses is the Arab Spring. I was living in downtown Cairo in the days leading up to Hosni Mubarak’s downfall, this event that many people build as a Facebook revolution. And

That motivated me to look into media, sound not only, in terms of what I was [00:11:00] witnessing around me, but the history of it. In the case of Egypt, in grad school, I started writing papers on particular artists and musical genres, and I came to realize the thing connecting all of these topics were cassette tapes. I set out then to write a history of the cassette that became a history of modern Egypt. And something that I seek to show in the book is that cassette tapes and players did not simply join other mass mediums like records and radio. They became the media of the masses. Cassettes in many ways were the internet before the internet. They enabled anyone to produce culture, circulate information, challenge ruling regimes, long before social media ever entered all of our daily lives. That’s the story that I strive to tell in this project.

Mack Hagood: Fantastic. Alright, that’s really helpful. And, I thought maybe what I should do is zoom in on some pieces that I found [00:12:00] interesting about each of your books. All of you just feel free to jump in if that strikes, if you hear something that resonates with something from your own research or if you have a question. So a little bit more one by one. And then I have a bunch of questions that I want to ask the whole group because I saw a lot of resonances between these three books, which I’ve very much enjoyed reading. Nora, I thought I would start with you because you do give us this really fascinating prehistory of not only file sharing, but it’s really even a prehistory of cassette circulation, right?

Like you start way back. And so I’m very interested in why you did this. I’m really grateful you did, because it actually, for my own research, I found this helpful because you seem to find out a lot about control, that people were looking for a [00:13:00] sense of control in this sort of progressive era, the Victorian era transitioning into this more modern era. People are starting to like the phonograph and the telephone, but. feel like they lack a sense of control over these things. And so I, was wondering if you could talk more about control and what you call preservation culture, and just this moment of progressive era and the prehistory of cassette tape

Eleanor Patterson: Yeah, sure. You know, it’s funny because you called this cassette jam and I was thinking like, well, I don’t really talk about cassettes.

Mack Hagood: No, you don’t. But it, but I think it’s so relevant.

Eleanor Patterson: Actually cassettes do play a big part in this, and they come up at interesting times. But, I am a nerd, I guess. I don’t know. I’m a big fan of Lisa Gillman and Jonathan Stern and ideas that formations don’t come [00:14:00] out of the void right? if you think of tape trading as like a social practice, it doesn’t just occur like it comes from somewhere.

And so I was thinking about writing a genealogy of tape trading, which is, my book is essentially mostly about tape trading. I also look at communal practices of viewing in places where bootlegging really was more limited and it wasn’t a one-to-one practice.

But I think the reason I dive back to the progressive era,most medias cultural historians, we know that, the post-industrial revolution, that time period in the late 1800s is where we see those roots of mass culture. I was wanting to think about home recording, because Rob kind of talked about distribution, and redistribution and, I think if you’re redistributing content, so let’s say recordings, you’re also reproducing it too. [00:15:00]

I’m a big fan of a research method I call stumble upon.

Mack Hagood: Hmm.

Eleanor Patterson: Where this project started when I stumbled upon these, classic radio fans. I tuned into a radio show where they were playing some really old episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar from the late 50s, early 60s.

I was like, why are people still listening to this? Where do these recordings come from? And it turned out that the local broadcaster at a public radio station told me most of the stuff he got was from fans who would give it to him or send it to him. These recordings of old radio shows. And I can’t think about that without thinking about home recording because come, their genesis is either airchecks. Off the air or through trading and reproducing them in their home through home recording technologies and then sharing with each other. So redistributing and [00:16:00] the history of home recording goes back to Edison and the phonograph and the late 1800s. And the ways that we already were accustomed to having those technologies in our home, that market didn’t exist.

It was made through advertisements and a lot of them marketed the phonograph as a technology that you could play with, that you could use to entertain yourself by making your own home recordings. And it’s at the same time that home movie cameras are being marketed by Kodak. And it’s just that as I was letting the archives lead me towards the research, it really became clear to me that this is a moment where the home becomes redefined through these new technologies and control over them be the ability to play back the recordings you’re making or the recordings of music that you’re buying. And that music is not the only type of home recording or not the only type of content being marketed for the home, some of the first, [00:17:00] examples of home entertainment were being used by companies like Edison in the late 1800s. And, so that’s where I wanted to really start because that’s the technological apparatus that radio becomes introduced to.

So people are already accustomed to now having Vaudeville recordings in their home or speeches or music they get to select when and where they listen to that. So it’s not a surprise that the earliest radio recordings are actually pre cassette tape, using these little home recording machines made by…

You’d have pre grooved, lacquered discs that you can make your own home recordings. And the earliest examples I’ve found discussions of are like Amos and Andy recordings on these little pre grooved discs…. that’s where I always,

Mack Hagood: And fits in with a longer history of people being exposed to new kinds of media. And it seems at the time, like a sort of [00:18:00] overwhelming flood. And you don’t know how to manage it all. You don’t know what to do with it. Going back to the newspaper era, I think, Mark Twain made a lot of his money off of selling scrapbooks to put newspaper clippings in or he had a special kind of scrapbook. You could restick the newspaper clipping without ruining the clipping or something. My former colleague…

Eleanor Patterson: I was gonna say Katie Day Good, right.

Mack Hagood: Katie Day Good you know, did a great history of this called “From Scrapbook to Facebook”, where she’s making a somewhat similar move to what you do in your book, Nora, which is like looking at these parallels asking like, what is the desire here?

And one of the points that you make is that it’s a lot about capturing ephemerality, like the ability to record sound gives us a way to suddenly cling onto something that always just evaporated in thin air. And when you have that ability on the phonograph, but then when you’re on the telephone [00:19:00] or the radio and you don’t have that ability, you feel like something’s missing.

I can’t keep this conversation going. I can’t keep this great Amos and Andy show, or, what have you. So this is, I think you used the term like preservation culture for this kind of desire, or

Eleanor Patterson: I might’ve been citing somebody else.

Mack Hagood: Okay, that’s fine.

Eleanor Patterson: There’s a great book about preservation cultures and, because this is also the same moment that our government is going out in the field to record the indigenous, tribes. And so it’s this impulse of preservation.

But I build on that because I think part of that effective relationship to ephemeral content during this moment of modernity is a desire to grasp on. And I think scrapbooks are one of those, grassroots ways of managing ephemerality. This is also a moment where you start [00:20:00] having, Baudelaire talks about street artists trying to capture fleeting moments. And I think sound recording is a big part of that. a desire to capture and store. I think radio producers didn’t understand this from the industry for a very long time. How we as listeners have an effective relationship to the entertainment that we engage with and how it’s comforting and how we wanna control and listen to it again. These are storage mediums and people are using it to capture these moments so they can relive them and replay content. Radio programs are coming into the home.

There’s a difference, I think, too in that intimacy. Listening to Amos and Andy, it’s, vaudeville but it’s not because it’s in your house and they’re addressing you. Within that broader context of having home entertainment. But also they’re alive and you’re hearing a desire to capture and be able [00:21:00] to store that and bring that and replay it on demand whenever you want to, because you would be having your radio alongside your phonograph player too.

That’s the way that these technologies were being made, made sense in the home, as connected to each other. And in 1929, I think you have the first radio console that is directly hooked up to a phonograph player too, and RCA buys Victor. and so it’s a story of industry as well, right?

Like the market adjusting and understanding, Yeah. audience engagement to a certain extent.

Mack Hagood: I want to move on to ask Rob a question, but you have this one image that, I think really encapsulates this desire and it’s way back in 1877, an image from Punches Almanac, and, put a picture of it on the screen, for those who are watching the YouTube version, but it’s like this couple [00:22:00] in this wine cellar and there are all these bottles and the concept seems to be that telephone conversations or the telephone sound, whatever that means, has somehow been bottled in these wine bottles.

And now they can, or I guess it’s classical music that has somehow been bottled. Now people can bring these things out of the wine cellar to their dinner party and play like the, I dunno, like some opera or something.

Eleanor Patterson: I love that cartoon and I kind of stumbled upon it. Like I was like, I guess I’m going back to the 1877 you guys. Giddy up.

This was just after some of the first discussions and demos of the Talking Machine. It wasn’t really released at that point. Edison is not thinking about music. But this artist, and I think he was in Britain. He immediately becomes taken up in popular culture as this possibility of, and I [00:23:00] think the telephone is just the word that’s being used for electronic wires, this mode that you could have a wire from the concert hall and, and record it through that technology and bottle it up and their visual of, record storage medium is like a beer barrel or a wine barrel. And it’s like you uncork it for the pleasure of entertainment and so this idea that you would stored…

Mack Hagood: Not far from the cassette tape

Eleanor Patterson: Yeah. Right. Well, these are all storage mediums and I liked that because you can see it’s already in the Victorian imagery, of the popular uses of this technology beyond like Dictaphone or, you know, business uses.

Mack Hagood: Rob, one of the things that I took from your book is that you’re really paying attention to the way, and that this is, gets back to themes that we would see in Lisa Gitelman, but that in different contexts. the cassette has different properties and meanings, [00:24:00] like the assemblage around technology is different, and you’re really focused on this particular moment that you, in a very scholarly way, call anglophone post-punk indie rock, which appreciate specificity

there. you talk about how the cassette was an important medium of distribution for this kind of music, or at least was perceived to but also that cassette became sort of a totem itself and had this really deep cultural,

Rob Drew: Yeah.

Mack Hagood: So can maybe start with what was this scene and why the cassette.

Rob Drew: Well, there were a number of zines in the early eighties, most notably OP magazine out of Olympia, Washington that started to run these columns devoted to independent cassettes. And as soon as they’re announced, they’re flooded with independent cassettes. And that wasn’t the only [00:25:00] one. There were quite a few zines around the country that are running, columns devoted to indie cassettes.

And, those vary in their genre, in the type of music, that they include. But, indie post-punk really looms large and picks up on it. Very heavily, I think partly because, as you say, those values independence obviously, and of community outside the music industry and alongside the music industry by that moment in the early eighties, really loomed large within this culture.

And, the cassettes played into that very nicely. it had its moments sort of then, there were certainly other musicians who recorded two cassettes prior to post punk indie rock. But, the cassette as a format and post punk indie rock as a kind structure of [00:26:00] feeling, or, a way of approaching music, making it really, dovetailed quite nicely.

Just the idea of music making as not something necessarily done for profit, but something done as a sort of gift to fellow musicians and to fans as a part of a community. I like to think of it as a kind of erotic assemblage where people come together, musicians coming together with a common sense of the cassette as something that really goes beyond, This is at the very same moment when, of course, independent vinyl labels are coming to the fore, SST and, a lot of others, alternative tentacles up in San Francisco.

And they have this idea too, that we’re gonna, we’re gonna get outside the music industry. We’re just going to do it ourselves. But of course, you still [00:27:00] need to get to a pressing plan for that, and you still need to, go through that common channel of vinyl.

The idea of having a format outside of vinyl that they could latch onto, was something that I think really appealed to a lot of artists and kind of played into, again, the idea of independence. It, did vinyl One better

Mack Hagood: You said that you really started off this project because you were thinking about mix tapes, I was so glad to see that you did this because even though you’re focused on indie music, you sort of do this comparative study of the discourse of the mix tape within indie culture and within hop culture where it had a different kind of meaning. Can you talk about why you took that approach and like what you’d learned about that kind of comparison?

Rob Drew: My emphasis was on independent music culture and the [00:28:00] kind of mix tape that at least I was used to making, which was. Just a sort of concatenation of songs at home on your stereo,

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Rob Drew: Switching between vinyl records and that sort of thing. Now, mixtape took on a whole alternative, meaning within hip hop culture, Hip hop DJs actually mixed together music and it grew out of, first of all, the cassette was central to hip hop. From its very beginnings. For the first five, six years of hip hop, there were no vinyl records. It was a live form. It was a performance form of course, and started in the South Bronx and was distributed to the degree that it was distributed, all in recorded form.

It was recorded, distributed, informally by way of cassettes, by the artists [00:29:00] involved, the DJs involved, or fans of theirs. And, the first. Hip hop vinyl record famously was rapper’s Delight, which didn’t even come out of the hip hop culture of the South Bronx. It was made in New Jersey by Sugar Hill records.

So, slowly but surely within ensuing. Decade or so between the late seventies and the late eighties. DJs primarily, not so much MCs, but DJs spearhead the idea of recording onto cassette, sometimes at their club dates, sometimes at home, and distributing these, sometimes on the street, just selling them off the street, in the park or sometimes, bringing them to mom and pop stores.

A lot of this is going on in New York, of course, at first, and eventually there are even small companies devoted to it, although it’s of course very [00:30:00] much under the radar. ’cause this is all extra legal. These are rerecording of existing songs that are being mixed together without copyright clearance.

So that was the world of hip hop. Whereas, You know what I call the indie mixtape. I think it’s a little more general than that, but, mix taping as a lot of us knew, it was something that, the idea of putting a bunch of songs together on a tape in order to give to somebody who loved somebody who had a crush on, or just a friend to impress them with your taste.

Just one after another, the song. So that’s what I primarily concentrate on as a format that represents love rather than theft. You know, that was the big transition I saw for the cassette in the early eighties from a symbol of theft to a symbol of love.

Mack Hagood: Because the industry portrayed it as this outlaw medium, and it [00:31:00] became this kind of sentimental medium for people. I like that argument and it certainly is true for me. Andrew, told us today that you were really inspired to do this project, or at least to start thinking about sound in Egypt because of your experience, during the Arab Spring. I’m sort of curious about hearing more about the sounds of that revolution, but also I think it’s pretty appropriate that’s the case because there’s this real tension in your book between the sort of power of the state and the masses, even at the level of technology.

Right? Where, for example, you say that we can’t really understand the role of the cassette in Egypt if we don’t understand the role of radio in Egypt, which was a state run medium. So maybe, I kind of asked two questions there to take it where you will.

Andrew Simon: Sure. There’s a lot of [00:32:00] residences too with both of these other projects. In the case of the Revolution, I mean, something I was doing, an intensive Arabic fellowship that was based in downtown Cairo at the American University in Cairo’s old campus, right on the border of Tevar Square, which became the center of the Revolution. And so I ended up missing a lot of class. And when I was at those protests, I mean, a number of things piqued my curiosity. So artists who had passed away decades ago were revived and their songs more. We had individuals who were not well known whatsoever. They rise as new artists. And the course of the revolution, there were chants that rhymed poetry was being performed in the square. And all of these different things really piqued my curiosity in, sound and its…

Mack Hagood: Hmm,

Andrew Simon: And then based on those first 10 experiences too, going back to my apartment, turning on state controlled Egyptian television and seeing [00:33:00] them screening a documentary about penguins rather than the protests that we’re calling for the fall of an authoritarian regime.

This disconnect between those respective stories and narratives. And so when I set out to explore cassettes, then this notion of control was central to that project because here we have this question of who has the right to contribute to culture, who shapes what culture assumes? And the case of Egypt, mass culture that Nora mentioned, it wasn’t just an abstract idea, it was a state engineered program. Where they would send out officials into the countryside in Egypt and stage things like Shakespearean plays to try to elevate and educate the masses. Radio in Egypt that you mentioned, Mack had been state controlled since 1934. There were multiple screening committees on the radio, there was a text assembly, a listening [00:34:00] assembly.

If you passed exams that you would have to perform in person for both of those committees, individual stations, then it was at their discretion of whether or not they would even broadcast your song. So radio was seen as a school for the masses. It popularized a very small pool of elite performers. then come to represent this immense source of anxiety. I was coming across these articles in the popular Egyptian press declaring war on the cassette. We had these critics saying, cassettes pose a greater danger than cocaine to citizens. Because with

Anyone has the potential to be a cultural producer rather than a cultural consumer. That’s, it’s not something that’s seen as emancipatory or in a good way on the part of cultural gatekeepers. It’s of immense anxiety. And so that question of control [00:35:00] is something that I try to explore in the book, which also to Rob’s comment, it takes the shape of a mix tape, the book itself.

So each chapter revolves around a particular idea from things like consumption, the law and taste to circulation history and archives. And then Nora’s remark about the stumble upon methodology. That was really central to my work, because the Egyptian National Archives ended in 1952. So if you want to tell a story of anything in Egypt after 1952, you don’t have access to any documents in the National Archives, then it becomes this question of how do you write the history of a nation without its national archives? Well, you go into the street, you go to paper markets, you go to private collections, you conduct oral interviews, you come across these cassette recordings in antique shops.

I found photographs in garbage bags that once belonged in family albums that I had to piece back together again.

Mack Hagood: [00:36:00] Wow.

Andrew Simon: I introduced this notion of a shadow archive. Everything that exists in the shadow of the inaccessible Egyptian National Archives, how does that enable us to tell stories about the past? And then this just one of those stories in this project.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and I really appreciate it in your book, how Rob, you did this as well, had a sort of a section of the book that was about methodology the photos and the garbage rags is already very intriguing to me. and just thinking about what you said about the cassette tape being more dangerous than cocaine. I don’t know if this is real, but somebody sent me this text or, is a social media post, allegedly from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that says if it crosses the US border illegally, it’s our job to stop it.

And then in the background it says, people, money, ideas which I’m like, [00:37:00] wait a minute. I know if that’s really an ice.gov, post or not, but at the present moment I tend to believe it is. So yeah, that, that tension between the state and the masses when it comes to the media. one thing that really made me chuckle on that theme was when I was reading your book, I was thinking about Charles Hirsch’s book, the Ethical Soundscape, which looked at Islamic cassette sermons in Egypt, and the way that they sort of workers, like taxi drivers kind of create a contemplative and ethical space in their day-to-day life. And then I laughed out loud when I read your study of what you called the vulgar soundscape that cassettes created in Egypt. So it’s like a very opposite case. Can you maybe talk about this, moral panic around vulgar music on cassettes in Egypt?

Andrew Simon: Sure. Thank you. And Charles’ book is the inspiration [00:38:00] actually for that title. When people think of the Middle East, they tend to think of one of two things. So it’s Charles Hirsch’s The Ethical Soundscape book, or it’s the 1979 Iranian Revolution and his use of that medium of messages. And so when I was reading Charles’ book, which I greatly enjoyed. One of the impressions that study could lend with its focus on Islamic cassette sermons is that Egyptians are just listening to Islamic sermons all the time. But the same people that listen to Islamic sermons also listen to Michael Jackson, also girls listen to popular Egyptian artists. wanted to show them the complexity and the breadth of that soundscape. And then also to bit on the association with cassettes and the Iranian revolution.

When people talk about the seventies and eighties and the nineties in Egypt, there’s an [00:39:00] overwhelming focus on religion. is this period of the Islamic revival as how it’s characterized.

There’s momentous events. like the 1967 war, the 1973 war, and then there’s this concentration on authoritarianism. I wanted to pivot all of those. So in the story that I wrote, I tried to shift the focus from the religious to the profane, from the momentous to the mundane, from the consolidation of power to its contestation cassettes, enabling us to do that. moral panic is something that was so enjoyable to read about and explore as

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Andrew Simon: Because there’s a whole genre, for instance, of music called Rag Nap Music that became very popular after the Arab Spring. A number of Ana artists now, their songs are the top trending songs globally, yet alone in the Middle East. people talk about that genre, they [00:40:00] use phrases like, the contamination of public taste. The corruption of morals, the pollution of Egypt’s soundscape. And something that I came to see in the course of my work is that none of those accusations are new. The same things were said about Shabi or this other genre of popular music going back to the seventies.

And a history that I try to share, through the prism of cassette tapes in this book.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So maybe now we can just talk a little bit about some of these themes that are running through, I think, two or in some cases, all three books. I mean, one thing I certainly notice is this desire to produce this kind of counter history that you just mentioned, sort of people’s history, if you will. is there something about the cassette, that sort of lends itself to this, that it, becomes an object or, you know, Nora, in [00:41:00] your case, I mean, you’re talking about video cassettes and you’re also talking about people using open reel I suppose. So maybe we’re getting a little bit beyond the cassette, but, something about home taping or, the practices that people do with this, that help give us a different view on media industries.

Eleanor Patterson: I think it’s very easy to be very utopian about home recording but I do think that you kind of shift from one gatekeeper to another a little bit if you’re not, you’re, you, you are able to, I do think that cassette or Rio to reel or VHS like home recording us a power to everyday individuals to a certain extent, right? But I think we trade in that instance, like when we talk about radio those like what we think of as the industrial players within radio, you know, like network and sponsor local affiliates. You’re kind of trading off those for newer, for different companies [00:42:00] like Sony or Phillips. Right. because they’re making the hardware that facilitates home recording and there is a cost and an expense that is a privilege to be able to do home recording at a certain level. I mean, I think it is more democratic in many ways. The population I was looking at, especially with radio in the fifties and sixties, even into the seventies and eighties radio. Collectors were audio files as well. And so that’s maybe a distinction of case study.

But reel to reel tape was perceived as a higher quality, as a better fit. If you’re recording off air, you can record a longer amount of time because cassette tapes are limited. And I’m sure this comes into play with mixed tapes or home recordings that are being made to spread information.

I find that fascinating. ’cause I was thinking as Andrew was talking, like, I wonder what the differences are. Because, like Rob, a lot of my, [00:43:00] historiography was bound to fanzines and newsletters. And as Andrew was talking, he’s like, I wonder about the difference between. Cassette tapes, as facilitating like a social network and communication in a grassroots, informal way. and how, that maybe is distinct or connected to print. Print, like everything I looked at in my research, a lot of it was hand in hand. When I start looking at these communities of people sharing content, they’re kind of making their own bicycle network and they connect through newsletters.

Mack Hagood: No, it’s perfect. Because I too was like, I was super excited to learn that the old time radio nerds had zines. Like, I was like, whoa, this wasn’t just an indie rock thing, this goes back before that. So it was interesting to hear about a different subculture that was into that.

And then I was thinking about these relationships between different media and the [00:44:00] fact that cassette tapes couldn’t circulate themselves. Right. You needed this assistance from the zine in order to do it. And then that made me wonder, Andrew, in the Egyptian context, was there also some kind of zine equivalent going on that helped people know what tapes to get?

Or was it more, an oral culture where there were these tape stands and you were more like going on foot or driving to somewhere learning about tapes that way?

Andrew Simon: Sure. I think cassettes surfaced in a number of different places, so some of them would appear at sidewalk kiosks. We had state controlled recording labels that had stores that also sold cassettes. But I think something even returning to earlier question as well people’s history, placing those two things into conversation is that one of the artists I look at was challenging the stories told by Egypt’s ruling regimes, things like when Richard Nixon comes to Cairo during the throes of Watergate in the summer of [00:45:00] 74, and the Egyptian government him with open arms, rolls out a little red carpet for him. This singer, his name is Sheik, I’m writing a biography of him now, completely the script on that story entirely. Refers to Nixon as a groom, that one married as a last resort, spits on him audibly. And recordings of that song that’s called Shababa Nixon, or Welcome Father Nixon to Egypt.

That song circulates on non-commercial cassettes. so it’s not released by any label. It’s not found in any kiosk, it’s not available in any store. People would go to protests where he performed the song, record him, or in informal house parties, in people’s living rooms, record a cassette, copy the cassette. So here we had an artist that was encouraging piracy. That’s how they circulated. He said, my media is the masses. So we

[00:46:00] that are dependent upon that hand-to-hand circulation of those state controlled. Channels. And that is just kind of one glimpse into this more, bottom up people’s story of this technology where if we were just listening to something like the radio, we wouldn’t even know Shik existed. He’s through this medium and an exploration of it.

Mack Hagood: I was amazed by that story and, we’re definitely gonna play a little clip of that so we can get a sense of what that song sounds like.

هذا موسيقى

Mack Hagood: Rob, is this, bringing up anything for you as well?

Rob Drew: I just keep thinking about it. I think this started with the [00:47:00] idea of the cassette as a people’s format or something like that, like an outsider. But I’m really struck by the contrast between our work in terms of the work the cassette is doing and the sort of. Communities it’s advocating for, at least in our accounts.

I kept thinking first with Andrews, whose book I love, and, talking about the cassette as cassette artists, as sort of low culture and kind of this almost Soviet style system of this paternalistic old, cultural, like you say, Shakespeare in the park or Shakespeare in the, and now we have these folk artists who are, condemned as low culture and as profane.

The word you kept using was vulgar. I don’t think that the artists who I talk about mostly. Cassettes are mostly viewed by anybody within the mainstream as [00:48:00] vulgar. I think they’re just ignored mostly. You know, they’re so, they’re such outsiders. And you know, when people like Beck or people like Liz Fair or whoever start to pick up on cassettes and use it as a sort of stepping stones for vinyl releases, that’s a different matter.

Those are legitimate artists. But most cassette artists who, again, are advertising in these fanzines and selling a few copies for the price of a blank tape are just so outside the mainstream that nobody even bothers to condemn them. And so that was one contrast. And then with Nora’s book, I kept thinking, the trading, the tape trading. So the closest analog I think of that I did not discuss at all, but sometimes wish I had and would love to get to research about it, I’ve thought about is, grateful dead culture, the tape trading and the preserving the ephemera. Like you say, that whole, that [00:49:00] fascinating beginning you have of recording media themselves back to Edison originating not for this idea of spreading new music, but preserving existing utterances and preserving existing music and preserving performances.

So that’s not really the two things I’m talking about on one hand, artists who. Can’t get a hearing, otherwise recording onto a few cassettes and then sending them out by mail as a result of these zine ads, that’s, those are original recordings and then mix tapes are hand, are one to one expressions for the purposes, as I say, of either courting or showing off or things like that, or just creating connections.

Neither of them are really in the spirit of a trading network like you have this network. Frankly, I hope you don’t mind my using the term kind of nerdy, network traders of [00:50:00] wrestling videos and things like that is so, the long story short, the differences between our projects and the differences between the communities involved really interested me as much as the similarities, even though we’re kind of all, concentrating on some form of outsider culture.

Mack Hagood: And I should say, you know, one really amazing thing about Nora’s book is there are some very fine photographs of professional wrestlers with just admirable amounts of chest hair. Like, it’s really impressive. I just think, you know, that’s just another reason to get the book.

Eleanor Patterson: Gonna fly off the shelf, now.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Anything I could do to help. It’s not only an award-winning book, it’s also just got hot wrestling action.

Eleanor Patterson: [00:51:00] I really wanted that photo in there.

Mack Hagood: And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Eleanor Patterson, Rob Drew, and Andrew Simon. The conversation keeps going in the Patreon version. It really gets kind of fun because they start asking each other questions and then, we really get into a freewheeling conversation. So if you want to hear that, just join the Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower.

And while I’m thanking people, I wanna say big thanks to Nisso Sacha, who has been doing editing work on this show for the past two years, and Katelyn Phan who has been doing all the backstage stuff, including transcripts and uploading the show to servers and whatnot, I really couldn’t have done it without them.

They have been fantastic to work with over the past two years. Just the best students you could ask for and doing really professional work. [00:52:00] And, I just wanna say thanks to them as the School year winds down. Our theme music is by Alex Blue, who I recently got to hang out with on Zoom. Great to see you, Alex.

And, that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. I’ll see you next time.

The post Cassette Theory: A Mixtape (Eleanor Patterson, Rob Drew, and Andrew Simon) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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How Music Became an Instrument of War: Military Music, Morale, and the American War Machine w/ David Suisman

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:21:00 -0000

University of Delaware historian David Suisman is known for his research on music and capitalism, particularly his excellent book Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP, 2009), which won numerous awards and accolades. Suisman’s new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (U Chicago Press, 2024), brings that same erudition to the subject of music in the military. It is the most comprehensive look at military music to date, full of fascinating historical anecdotes and insights on what music does for military states and their soldiers. Our conversation explores music as a martial technology, used for purposes of morale, discipline, indoctrination, entertainment, emotional relief, psychological warfare, and torture.

In the public episode David and I talk about the military’s use of music from the Civil War through World War Two. Our Patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War–he says Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the role of music in that conflict. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East, and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations.

If you’re not a Patron, you can hear the full version, plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month–sign up at Patreon.com/phantompower.

00:00 Introduction

04:20 The US Military’s Investment in Music

05:30 Music’s Role in Soldier Training and Discipline

12:32 The Evolution of Military Cadences

23:22 The Civil War: A Turning Point for Military Music

28:21 Forgotten Brass Instruments of the Union Army

29:38 The Role of Drummer Boys in the Civil War

33:32 Music and Morale in World War I

35:48 Group Singing and Community Singing Movement

37:28 The YMCA’s Role in Soldier Recreation

38:41 Racial Dynamics and Minstrel Shows in Military Music

41:47 Music Consumption and the Military in World War II

45:27 The USO and Live Entertainment for Troops

49:56 Vietnam War: Challenging Musical Myths

50:26 Conclusion and Call to Support the Podcast

Transcript

[00:00:00]

David Suisman: I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine.

It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function.

Introduction: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I just noticed that this month makes seven years that we’ve been doing this podcast, which feels like a pretty nice milestone. And in that time, we’ve really tried to keep the focus on sound as opposed to music.

There are a lot of fantastic podcasts about music, not nearly as many taking a really deeply nerdy approach to [00:01:00] questions about sound. And so that’s been our lane. That said, no one has managed to build a wall or police the border between sound and music. It’s a pretty fuzzy boundary and we’ve definitely spent a lot of episodes exploring that fuzzy boundary between the two.

And I guess the reason I bring this up is that this season has actually been Pretty musical so far. Our first episode this season was with Eric Salvaggio. We were talking about AI and its implications for music and then our second episode, with Liz Pelley, looked into the effects of Spotify on how we listen to music.

So two shows about how new sound technologies are reshaping music. Today’s show puts a slightly different spin on the relationship between music and technology. Today, we’re looking at music as a technology. A technology of war. My guest today is [00:02:00] University of Delaware historian, David Suisman. David is probably best known for his research on the history of music and capitalism.

Especially his excellent book, “Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music” that’s probably his best known work. Now, he’s bringing that same kind of erudition to the subject of music in the military. His new book is called Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers.

Long time listeners will know that I sometimes get a little cranky about music scholars and media scholars and the ways that we often focus on the kind of content that we like. We get a little fannish, we want to think about things like music as a force of self expression and political liberation.

Of course, music can be those things, but music can also be a technology of domination, of indoctrination, of disciplinarity, even [00:03:00] torture. And David Suisman’s “Instrument of War” is the most comprehensive look at military music that I’m aware of. If the subject matter sounds a bit grim, you’ll be happy to hear that this book is full of fascinating historical anecdotes. And in the public episode of this show, David and I are going to talk about the military’s use of music from the civil war all the way through World War II.

Our patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War. He says that Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the way music worked in that war. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations.

If you’re not a patron, you can hear all of that material plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month. Sign up at [00:04:00] patreon.com/phantompower Okay, so without further ado, here’s my interview with historian David Suisman.

David, welcome to the show.

David Suisman: Thank you Mack. It’s great to be here.

Mack Hagood: Your opening sentence concerns a rather staggering figure about the United States military budget. Could you maybe tell us about that.

David Suisman: It stopped me dead in my tracks when I found this little factoid in the course of my research. And that is that in 2015, 10 years ago, the US Congress allocated some $437 million to music by military bands and not just a raw number, but that was about three times the size of the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Just let that sink in for a second. Like the government was spending almost three times as much on military music as all other support [00:05:00] for the arts combined.

That really knocked me out.

Mack Hagood: It’s really incredible, and I love this as a strategy for opening a book because the number just speaks for itself, right? It boldly proclaims the stakes of the book for one thing, right? If music wasn’t perceived as deadly serious by the Pentagon, they really wouldn’t be spending this kind of money and fighting budget hawks on this issue since the Civil War, right?

There have been skeptics about the value of music to the military. But it also signals to scholars, to music scholars, that the military should really be front and center in our research agenda as well, right?

David Suisman: Yeah,

Mack Hagood: Why hasn’t it been?

David Suisman: Sound studies has done a lot of really creative work. but the state has not been very present in a lot of scholars’ frameworks. And one of the things that I was seeking to do, or one of the things that I was exploring in the course of working on this whole project, was trying to understand the [00:06:00] relationship between sound and the state.

I was thinking the state is important in the construction of modern, social formation. And so what is the role of sound in it? And what is, what does sound mean for the state? These were pretty abstract questions that I didn’t know how to answer for a long time. And then I found a few different places where they were manifested, but one of them was in thinking about music in the military. That was one of the places where the military is so important to the constitution of the state and the function of the state. And sound in the form of music being so central I realized, to the military. So that’s how I came to it and why I think it makes sense for the scholarship

Mack Hagood: And there’s certainly been some good research done. I’m thinking of Suzaane Cusik’s..

David Suisman: Acoustics work

Mack Hagood: Acoustics work on musical torture, or Martin Daughtry’s work in his book “Listening to War” but in terms of a comprehensive study [00:07:00] of how music has been used by the United States military, I’m not familiar with any other book that really does this work.

David Suisman: There is surprisingly little on music in the military that’s not about, particularly songs, when people have written about music in the military, it’s often been song focused. About song lyrics, essentially.

And, as I’m sure we’ll talk about, my book is much broader. More capacious than that.

Mack Hagood: Well, in fact that’s really why I thought it was a good fit for a sound studies podcast like this because, you don’t really focus on musical compositions or composers. Like I was really surprised at how little oral estate John Phillips Souza gets,

David Suisman: Of mentions, yeah.

Mack Hagood: But instead you’re really interested in, music as a sonic technology that’s used by the military on one hand, and then also by soldiers themselves or service members themselves on the other hand

David Suisman: Yeah that’s exactly it. I’m [00:08:00] really interested in how music itself works as a technology, not about music technologies, as we usually use the term, but how music is used as a technology by the military to advance the military’s aims in war making. And it does so in this dialectical way, it works as a top down tool of the institution.

It functions to train and condition and discipline soldiers, and then as a bottom up tool of the rank and file, to basically address their own emotional and psychic needs. And these two work in concert with one another to keep the military going.

I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine.

It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function.

So in this respect, what I was interested in doing was looking past musical compositions or composers and thinking about what music [00:09:00] does in this, very Christopher Small musicking way

Mack Hagood: Talk a little bit about that, for those who don’t know Small’s work, that concept of musicking?

David Suisman: Yeah, he was a musicologist who posited that. It’s more constructive to think about music as a verb than a noun. And thinking about music as process more than product, as a kind of set of relationships that exists among people.

And those people involve performers and or composers and performers and listeners, but also musical instrument makers and music publishers.

And in this case military officials who allow for music or promote music or tolerate music in the ranks. And that they are all responsible in this sort of interconnected way, in this complex, interconnected way for the phenomenon of music, which I don’t think he says this exactly, but one of the things I derive from his work is that you can’t really think about music [00:10:00] in the abstract.

Whenever you think about music in the abstract, it’s always a kind of music in particular.

That particularity varies, but music is something that exists in particular times and places. And so I’m thinking about music in action like Bruno Latour did with science.

And, thinking about particular times and places, what is music? What is musical activity?

And that’s what I sought and the way that I sought to explore music in the military, in the book.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, absolutely. I would say another touchstone is, Foucalt’s work and thinking about disciplining the soldier. You do mention Foucalt’s “Discipline and Punish”

As I recall, it talks about soldiers quite specifically and this sort of has an argument that in the 17th century soldiers were found, right? You looked for the man with a certain kind of body, who looked like a soldier that would be an effective soldier. And then by the end of the 18th century, soldiers were something that were made. [00:11:00] You found techniques to discipline the bodies of men and turn them into, what he calls a docile body.

A body that can be made useful, a body that can be organized in space and in time. And I think you show really persuasively that music is capable of doing that kind of work, and in fact, it’s probably essential to it.

David Suisman: Yeah, it’s been really important. And if you think about stepping back for a second, one of the things that the modern nation state does is that it goes to war with other nation states. You have imperial, inter imperial wars, but the modern nation state wages war in particular ways.

And one of the ways is that it requires the mass production of soldiers. You need big armies not just as you put it, “finding soldiers” but actually manufacturing or mass producing soldiers in large numbers to wage war against one another. And music is not the only piece of this.

That’s not an argument that the music makes war. [00:12:00] Music is war.

It’s that music is part of this process, an essential part of this process. It’s part of how the military transforms civilians into warriors, ordinary people who would not ordinarily kill other humans. And you transform them into people who (A) are capable of killing other people and in fact do that and following orders in very strict, regimented ways.

And so music is part of that discipline. We will probably come back to talking about the phenomenon of military cadences.

The chanting and bootcamp. But this sort of sounds off one, two. The guy who makes that a kind of systematic part of boot camp of basic training was a military officer named Bernard Lentz.

And he wrote this, he wrote, basically he wrote the manual on how to train drill instructors. And he did this in the 1920s, and the manual comes out in many additions. [00:13:00] And in that, he explains that by instituting this kind of call and response exchange between soldiers and drill sergeants or drill instructors, that the soldiers would be participating in this kind of rhythmic activity.

And by chanting in the call and response exchange, they, as he puts it, would be disciplining themselves.

And it’s like the most Foucaultian phrase. He says, “Every man becomes his own drill master.”

And I’ve never seen any record that Foucault had any awareness of this, but it’s a very Foucaultian conceit.

Mack Hagood: And because it’s that idea that somehow the body mind of the subject, of the individual internalizes the discipline that the state wants them to enact and embody.

David Suisman: That’s right. That’s right. It’s that internalization of the discipline in a physical and also a kind of mental or psychological way, [00:14:00] but where it deviates from a strict Foucault model is that music also does something else. And that is that it’s a really invaluable tool for soldiers to preserve their own kind of psychic autonomy.

In the military, which is what’s sometimes called a total institution, meaning people within it control almost nothing about their lives. You think about hospitals being something similar. You don’t control what you eat, in the military, you don’t control when you sleep often, you don’t even control when you go to the bathroom.

But one of the things that soldiers can do is they can control the music in their lives. They can sing, or when they have opportunities for recreation, for relaxing, they control the music. So they have control over very little, but they do control music. And music affects people very deeply.

.Mack Hagood: I would slightly differ to say that is also Foucault, but [00:15:00] in his later period, music as a technology of the self

David Suisman: Yes.

Mack Hagood: Which you say.

David Suisman: Which I do discuss. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re right. It’s a different Foucault

Mack Hagood: A different Foucault. Yeah.

The friendlier, later Foucault. But that’s really interesting because we have this top down music, that’s instituted by the state.

So we have what you call field music, right? That’s the music that sort of instills that disciplinarity into the soldiers.

David Suisman: The field music is yeah it’s the drum beats, it’s the bugle calls.

It’s telling soldiers what to be doing when and where they’re supposed to be, what they’re supposed to be doing at different times. So that’s the field music of say the Civil War.

Drummers and buglers are the field music. They’re not the bands. The bands are different.

Mack Hagood: And then the bands are also top down, but they’re, those are for entertainment purposes, recruitment purposes, that sort of thing, right?

David Suisman: Yeah, the bands do so much work. Here I’m just talking about the Civil War, but it extends beyond the Civil War. But they [00:16:00] are doing recruitment work. They’re great for military civilian relations. And then within the military, military regiments in the Civil War went to the front with dedicated military bands accompanying them.

And they would have concerts basically every night. And the purpose of this was to keep soldiers’ morale up. Soldiers engage, and this is true for any war, soldiers engage in combat. The amount of time they spend in combat is very small. Most of the time they’re spending, most of the time they’re doing really boring things.

Things that are devastatingly boring and often, suffering from incredible amounts of homesickness.

And so this music, these concerts every night were a way of keeping soldiers more or less entertained enough so that they could keep soldiering from one day to the next. They would also sing on the march, which is serving the military’s needs, but also serving the soldiers’ emotional needs.

So it works both ways.

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

And that piece of the [00:17:00] top down and the bottom up, I really think come together during the chapter on World War II, where you write about private Willie Lee Duckworth, who was marching to these cadences that Lentz prescribed but he injected something new into them.

Can you talk about him, who he was and then how he changed what we conceive of as a military march in the United States?

David Suisman: Yeah, and I’ll start by saying that, most people have some familiarity, even if you’ve never served in the military, people have a sense of soldiers chanting these cadences in basic training. And the practice that we often associate that with is not only the one, two sound off, three, four, et cetera, but this kind of improvisation is often humorous.

Sometimes it’s a very macabre humor. Sometimes it’s very sexist humor.

But this kind of improvisational call and response, chanting. [00:18:00] What’s interesting is that is not a timeless practice in the military. That dates back to this guy that you mentioned private Willie Lee Duckworth in I think it’s 1944, late in World War II II when he is in training at this, camp where the guy who wrote the book on how to train soldiers,

Bernard Lentz, he’s the commanding officer of the camp, and he hears Willie Lee Duckworth allegedly improvising this kind of call and response chanting. And he sees how much it elevates the morale and the sort of energy level of the trainees

Mack Hagood: And we’ll play a little clip of that for folks, to hear what that sounds like. But you’ll recognize it. This is what we think of now as soldiers marching.

David Suisman: Yeah [00:19:00] Bernard Lens, he’s the commanding officer of the camp.

David Suisman: He hears Willie Lee Duckworth and he says, this is amazing. And he says, why don’t you write a bunch of these down? And he assigns him some other officers to do this with him. And then, he institutionalized this and he systematizes it and he makes a recording of it. And then that recording is circulated among other training camps.

And very quickly it becomes institutionalized practice within the military to have this kind of improvisational culture that comes originally out of African American prison [00:20:00] songs. And so it’s moving from one disciplinary institutional setting to another,

Mack Hagood: I think this is really important to point out because I had no idea about this, Private Duckworth was black and so he was at what? He was in a…

David Suisman: Segregated unit.

Mack Hagood: Segregated unit. And so Lentz hears this segregated unit doing this kind of vocal performance, right? And then so that’s, when you really think about it, just from the sound of it, from what we know about, work songs and prison songs in the history of African American music, like it’s very recognizably an African American innovation.

And yet I never really piece those two things together.

David Suisman: Yeah, this is the hidden history of this practice that most people are aware of on some level. The songs when they were in prison were called Jodi Songs, and this was allegedly, folklorists believe because there was a [00:21:00] recurring character in these songs named Joe Joe the Grinder.

He was called in prison songs.

And Joe the Grinder was this opportunist who would go, and while somebody was in prison Joe the grinder would go and. Steal this guy’s girl, steal this guy’s money, steal this guy’s clothes, whatever. And so Joe the grinder, becomes Jodi.

And in the military, these are known as Jodi calls because the character of Jodi gets brought into this military practice.

These chants they’re known as Jodi’s, a recurring character in the lyrics. And many, most soldiers know these as Jodi calls, as well as calling them cadences.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, one thing that really struck me too was that Lentz seems to have given Duckworth full credit for this. In the record that I saw Duckworth’s picture is there and everything.

David Suisman: Yeah, there are some reasons to think that this story might be a little [00:22:00] apocryphal.

There are some people who question its complete veracity. I think certainly was involved, but there’s some question that an African American private who was improvising doing this sort of vocal improvisation during training exercises might have very possibly been a form of insubordination.

And subject to extreme punishment, so that he would’ve been doing this without some kind of sanction is maybe open to question. So I’m not sure that the Duckworth story is, let’s say the whole story, but it is certainly the story that is enshrined in like national military lore.

Mack Hagood: Nevertheless, just, even if this is a constructed narrative of some sort, the fact that a black man was the face of this innovation, that it wasn’t just appropriated and the race of the person who created it, or the people who created it was just suppressed. You hear people in the military saying that, like in [00:23:00] terms of, equity, that sort of thing, that the military has been a trailblazer and I guess this would lend some credence to that.

David Suisman: Okay, sure. You say it’s, you could also say it’s, an extreme form of exploitation and appropriation.

Mack Hagood: Maybe I’m being too generous.

David Suisman: There are a number of ways of reading it. Let’s say that,

Mack Hagood: Okay. One thing that I wanted to just put on people’s radar is that you start this history with the Civil War, so I’m just curious to know why not earlier? Why do you begin the book with the Civil War?

David Suisman: A couple of reasons. One of them is the first, it’s the first sort of modern war, first modern war of a modern nation state. it uses all the power of the nation state to wage war. It becomes the, it’s sometimes called the first total war.

And it involves not just armies going to battle against each one another, but mobilizing entire societies against each other.

And in the course of that music is integrated in [00:24:00] new ways that become permanent in the military. So there was music in earlier wars in the Mexican American war and the Revolutionary War, and going back to time immemorial as long as we’ve had war, we’ve had music in war.

But it becomes institutionalized in this formal way. And it does so in part because it is integrated with the modern American music industries, the ability to produce all of the brass instruments. That was required for all the military bands in the Civil War. That ability depended on having an industrial infrastructure, particularly in the north, in the Union for the Union Army to scale up production of valved brass instruments.

In the very short time during the war, the The Confederate army also had bands but their bans were fewer and smaller and dependent on imported instruments by and [00:25:00] large.

Mack Hagood: So the Civil War is the beginning of this sort of systemization of war and the industrialization of war, and it’s interesting to think about musical instruments being part of that because, as I was reading the book, I was thinking about this huge military expenditure and wondering, we know that many things we take for granted today, were

invented through the huge military expenditures of the Pentagon. So things like radar or duct tape or nuclear power, or the internet, right? It all comes from the military. So what did the military invent in terms of music and musical instruments and musical technology?

David Suisman: Interesting. I don’t think it’s been influential in the same way as inventing the internet. But one thing is it has been responsible for this civilian military fusion. The interconnectedness of the culture industry [00:26:00] and the military has been one of the innovations of having music in the military.

It hasn’t just been self-contained. It has grown in the military through its association and cultivation by the culture industry. It has produced a lot of musicians, a lot of musicians have served in the military and gone on to illustrate careers and so it’s a sort of training ground in that sense.

It reverberates that way. But I think maybe the most concrete way is to think about the way that. Music is involved in the militarization of American culture, really beginning around the turn of the 20th century. And here we get back to Sooza and the popularity of brass bands and wind bands that spills over.

It’s a military phenomenon essentially, but that becomes American popular culture. We have it even down to today. Every football game that has a marching [00:27:00] band at halftime is evidence of this long term reverberation of the militarization of American popular culture. The degree to which people are familiar with Soozan marches even today, Stars and Stripes Forever.

Even today, this is part of the air that we breathe in American popular culture. In a lot of ways,

Mack Hagood: Do you think it was an indirect influence on jazz too? I’m thinking about, if I remember correctly, Louis Armstrong, learned to play the horn at the Colored Waifs Home. Which had a sort of military esque band that was part of, cultivating and disciplining the young students there.

David Suisman: Yeah, I think you could totally make that argument that the availability of brass instruments is part of this explosion of brass band music that is interconnected with the Civil War. You don’t have jazz, you don’t have early jazz especially without that instrumentation.

And the standardization that goes [00:28:00] along with musical training that’s associated with brass bands. So I think there, there’s definitely that. Jazz comes into World War I in the segregated bands of the US Army, particularly James Reese Europe’s Band, which basically brings jazz to Europe for the first time. So there are certainly those interconnections as well. I would accept that.

Mack Hagood: I was really blown away when you were talking about the Union Army hiring all of these German immigrant instrument makers who are making these cutting edge brass instruments, and you have a list of forgotten brass instruments that was really making me laugh. I’m gonna see if I can get to the page.

I think it’s page 26. Let me see if I can even read the names of these things, because they’re very peculiar sounding.

David Suisman: Yeah. We have a sense that we know what musical instruments encompass today, but there are so many that were popular then that have been forgotten. They exist in museums now. But [00:29:00] not much else.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, so alt horns, bass tubas,. bombardons, burdens, clavichord, cornophones, saxtubas’, and sudrophone. I love to see these instruments. Do we have any around? I wonder if we have extra

David Suisman: They are, they’re in museums and we have pictures of them. They look like variations on instruments that we’re familiar with tubas and trombones and that sort of thing. They don’t stand out. They don’t look like Dr. Seuss type,

Mack Hagood: Yeah. I was letting my imagination run wild there

David Suisman: Yeah.

Mack Hagood: The Civil War really sets the stage for the military use of music in modernity in a lot of different ways. But some of the practices would seem very strange to us. And one of them is the use of drummer boys. Can you talk about the drummer boy and who he was?

Maybe how many of them there were because he really became an [00:30:00] icon of the Civil War there.

David Suisman: Yeah, one of the things that fascinates me about this whole project is some stuff seems really familiar and some stuff seems really foreign. And the proliferation of drummer boys in the Civil War was one of the things that seemed really foreign. There were thousands of them, and most of them, not all of them, were in fact young boys.

They were often too young to enlist in the army. There the most famous one was this guy Robert Henry Hendershot, who enlisted in the Union Army at the age of 11. He claimed to be the youngest person in the union Army, but in fact, other researchers believed that there were now drummers who were younger than him.

Maybe nine and ten years old.

They served with military units and they were the communication system for officers telling soldiers what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. So they would say, assemble, or they would say March or they’d say, go left, or go right or start shooting or stop shooting.

And drummers and [00:31:00] buglers were audible. The reason why they did this is because they were audible over distances, and they were audible over the cacophony of combat. You could hear them. And they would be at the elbow of commanding officers. The commanding officer would say, “Do the drumbeat for march”

Not only is the phenomenon of the drummer boy interesting. And these, I should say, became these figures in popular culture. There were songs about them, there were plays about them, there were novels about them. So they were well known at the time, and they were endeared in this kind of nostalgic way.

But the other thing that’s fascinating about them is that these drum beats that the drummer boys beat out were recognizable to all the soldiers. Part of soldiering required that they could recognize all these different drum beats, dozens of them in some cases that they would say, oh, that’s the drum beat for assemble.

That’s the drumbeat for, eat, go to sleep, whatever.

Mack Hagood: Yeah that’s fascinating. It’s reminiscent of what Jonathan Stern would call an audile technique, [00:32:00] right? Like a, a mode of listening that we get in modernity that gets very specific and detailed in a particular way. And just to think about these young boys being utilized as a communication technology is pretty fascinating.

And I think part of the setting that we need to set for people and thinking about the drummer boys’ importance is that you point out this is the first war where the amount of gun smoke generated is truly like blinding. Like you you really quite often can’t see, right? There’s, and there’s also this volume of bombardment that was unprecedented at the time as well,

David Suisman: Yeah, to be fair, it’s the first American time. The Napoleonic Wars I think had a lot of this smoke as well. So the 19th century phenomenon of lots of smoke sounds being essential to communication.

You couldn’t rely on visual cues. You couldn’t rely on SEMA fours or whatever, for visual cues, and that’s why the sound became so [00:33:00] important. As much as we can bore into the Civil War I don’t want listeners to get the sense that this is a Civil War book, because it’s really just the point for that.

Mack Hagood: no, not at all. Not at all. Not at all. And in fact, I was about to jump forward and just touch on some of the other wars that you discuss. And the book. It’s not entirely centered on specific wars. It is taking a wider view, but for the purposes of this podcast, it’s an easy way to organize our discussion.

And I was really interested that by World War I, I this sort of systemization and industrialization of war have really intensified and we start to get sort of psychological conceptions of war. And so like a, a term that comes to the forefront that you mentioned earlier, was the concept of Morale you, you talk about morale as a, as an idea and how [00:34:00] music was useful to the military as they were trying to cultivate morale.

David Suisman: Morale is crucial to military planning, military management in World War I. There it rises, it doesn’t, there’s morale, people talk about morale earlier, but it becomes a really key concept in military management around World War I and morale. Funny because it encompasses different things.

It encompasses mental health, general attitudes, general like levels of happiness attitudes about the war. It doesn’t mean one specific thing, but, music Works for elevating all of them. Whatever you mean by morale, music helps it and it helps people’s mental health.

It improves their disposition about where they are and what they’re doing. It doesn’t make them love the war necessarily if they don’t want to be soldiers. But it has this kind of multi versatile, multi-function effect. And in the First World War, military managers, military, senior officials looked on [00:35:00] music as an essential sort of marshal technology There’s a general in World War I named Leonard Wood, hardcore guy. He’d been a rough rider during the Spanish American war. He was a hero of the Indian wars. And he says, he’s talking about singing here specifically. But singing was a big part of music in World War I. He says it sounds odd to the ordinary person when you tell him every soldier should be a singer because the layman cannot reconcile singing with killing.

But it is just as essential that the soldiers should know how to sing as that they should carry rifles and learn how to shoot them.

So this is part of the idea of what an operational military includes, encompasses how it works, it has that kind of function and so morale is a big part of that.

Mack Hagood: I was really struck by the role of group singing in World War I. There you show these photographs of men singing together. Where did this phenomenon come from?

David Suisman: It is such a singing [00:36:00] war. There has always been singing in war, but there were, I think probably if you had to say one war where there was the most singing, it probably would’ve been World War I and because, and it was because it was integrated in, there were these events called Mass Sings.

These were daily or weekly singing sessions at training camps throughout the United States preparing American soldiers for war. And they were led by these volunteer song leaders who would come and they would. Lead Marines sailors, army soldiers, whatever, in song, in large numbers.

It grows out of both the sense of what singing can do in the military, in a sense part of military history. And it grew out of the contemporary movement called the Community Singing Movement which involved a lot of large community singing as a recreational and morally uplifting activity.

The 19 tens, it was in the early first couple of decades of the 20th [00:37:00] century. There was a lot of community singing, and so this is also an outgrowth of that. And yes, these pictures are really arresting. Thousands and thousands of soldiers joining together in song.

Often in the pictures you can see soldiers holding song sheets or songbooks. US soldiers were issued song books as part of their essential equipment in World War I. This floored me to learn that, they got the rifle, they got the knapsack, they got the songbook.

Mack Hagood: That’s amazing. And the YMCA part of this was the early days of the YMCA. Do you remember?

David Suisman: The YMCA was crucial in World War I. I. In later awards, it plays an important role too, but it’s part of this military civilian institution interchange this sort of mutually constitutive aspect of war depending on these civilian institutions. And it was the provider for the military of facilities where soldiers could go for relaxation, for recreation.

And so when [00:38:00] soldiers were not soldiering, when they were not in combat, when they were not, going through drills and they had downtime, they didn’t have yet, they didn’t have enlisted men’s clubs the way we’d have in later wars. They would go to these YMCA facilities called huts and the huts would have equipment for soldiers to write letters home. There were to be books and invariably there was musical equipment, there were pianos, and there were phonographs.

And so the YMCA was the official designated supplier of recreation facilities for the military. And it included music in all of those facilities,

Mack Hagood: That’s fascinating. Now, it would be a glaring omission, I think, if I talked with you about the Civil War and World War I and music and not bring up, minstrel shows and just the sort of racialized dynamics of music in this era of popular music in [00:39:00] America. Could you maybe talk a little bit about race and music at that time?

David Suisman: In the Civil War, World War I era.

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

David Suisman: Yes, it’s complicated. There are a lot of different ways of coming at this. One of them is thinking about the roles of the African American troops. The other is thinking about blackface, minstrelsy and the imprint that had on the white troops. The songs that soldiers sang in the Civil War, for example, were a mix of kind of parlor ballads and sentimental songs, and songs that came out of the blackface minstrel tradition.

There are photographs. I have a couple in the book of soldiers involved in recreation in World War I I who put on blackface minstrel shows.

Mack Hagood: And if I remember correctly, some of the supplies that soldiers were given were, like burnt cork and things like this to,

David Suisman: were, this was, yeah, it was part of the apparatus, if you will, of music in the military was

supplying equipment to put on [00:40:00] shows which were often mil blackface, minstrel shows. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: and then for the African American soldiers. What was their musical experience like and was there crossover between these two groups?

David Suisman: The US military was segregated until 1948. And so, if you’re talking about the Civil War, you’re talking about World War I, even World War II, they tended to have something, they had their own bands.

They had their own musical cultures, their own musical traditions by and large. Their music involved the music of the Army as a whole, but it also involved its own uniqueness.

Contributions as well. So the soldiers, the colored troops of the Union Army in the Civil War, had their own. A lot of them came. A lot of them were formerly enslaved. People who brought their musical traditions, African American civilian musical traditions into the military they adapted [00:41:00] spirituals into, military songs as military songs in the Civil War in World War I, I I already mentioned James Reese Europe.

He was the leading band leader in the Ragtime New York musical world. And he becomes the leading. Band leader in the Army, and it was pretty much widely agreed upon. The African American bands in World War I were the best bands.

The other bands there were not the only bands.

There were a lot of bands that were not these African American bands, but they’re the ones that people talked about, and they’re the ones that most people know about today. But I, one of the things I try to show in the book is that there was a bigger culture of which they were only one part.

Mack Hagood: And so they were the ones who brought a jazz sensibility to Europe.

David Suisman: Exactly. Exactly.

So jumping forward to World War II, you talk about a shift that has been discussed In popular music studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, which is that people. Become [00:42:00] music consumers in the sort of, somewhere between the invention of the phonograph, And by the time of World War II, standing together with a bunch of guys and singing isn’t the predominant form of musicking anymore, right? Like where people are used to consuming music. So how did the military respond in World War II, to this new type of music listener that was their military service personnel?

Singing doesn’t disappear. One of the things I just wanna sort of stress is that there is this trend that you’re talking about where there’s an increased amount of music consumption but singing persists up through Vietnam.

David Suisman: In Vietnam, one of the CBS news reporters who asks Marines during the Tet Offensive of 1968, “How do you enter, how do you keep your spirits up at night? And the Marine says, we play cards and sing”

And this is 1968. So [00:43:00] singing doesn’t disappear and there is both formal and informal singing in the military.

But in answer to your question the military records it, it is a whole series of records just for soldiers called V discs. And these were a mix of some military music, but a lot of popular music, many by very well known music, jazz musicians and swing musicians of the era. Some other kinds of music, some light classical too.

The military produce these records, ship them out to military units all over the world on a regular basis, and the soldiers would then play them on phonographs that the military had issued to these individual units. So this is part of keeping, keeping up with the transformation of musical practice.

In civilian life throughout the 20th century there were phonographs, there was phonograph use in World War I as well, but it became much [00:44:00] more, much broader, much more expanded and much more systematized in World War II. The military also created a worldwide radio network for the first time, the Armed Forces Radio Network.

And so soldiers in World War II listened, sat around listening to the radio and they listened to radio shows that were modeled on the music shows of the American Homefront. And so the goal of the military by World War II II was to try to create conditions that were as close to soldiers’ lives as consumers as possible.

They try to give them all the consumer comforts at least in this case, through music the oh, but just an example of how, and sometimes the line is blurred between them. So another thing that, another initiative during World War II was that the military issued these monthly circulars that were sent to soldiers called the Army Hit Kit.

Every month they would get in the mail through the postal service, the military postal service, [00:45:00] an eight page circular with the song lyrics of the, of current and recent popular songs. And sometimes those songs were the same songs that were included with the latest batch of records.

And sometimes it was also expected that they would have the lyrics so they could sing them even without the records. So there was an expectation that there would still be singing even though there was also a lot of musical listening at the time.

Mack Hagood: Wow. Wow. And then of course we also get the in-person entertainment from the USO. Can you maybe talk about the USO as that? ’cause this was a massive initiative. First of all, we have to remember there were 16 million. People in the combat theater like that’s just an incredible number of people that you need to entertain.

And the idea that they try to entertain them, not only through media, but also in person, is just just a staggering [00:46:00] effort to, to think about.

David Suisman: Yeah it grows out of an effort. Again, growing out of World War I, there was an effort to work with the vaudeville industry in the major impresarios in World War I to supply live entertainment vaudeville shows for soldiers in World War I and in World War I, it works but by the time you get to World War ii, ii, they’re ready. a number of organizations come together and they form what’s called the United Service Organizations to supply places where soldiers could come together and dance for forms of informal recreation. And so on. And then they would also have these live shows and they, this was a, basically a subsidiary of the USO, it’s called the Camp Shows Inc.

And this was the part of the USO that staged shows by the most famous stars for the GIS stationed all over, but also not just the most famous. Stars because as you were mentioning, there were 16 million men and women who served in the military in World War II, [00:47:00] and that required a lot of shows.

And so there was the A list, there were the top stars, the big the big stars, and then there was the B list, and then there was the C list. And they would just send out as many entertainers as they could recruit to work for the military, to entertain troops to keep their spirits up. And sometimes they were great and sometimes they were not so great, but generally the soldiers would go along with it because they were in effect captive audiences.

They didn’t have any other options for live entertainment. Even a kind of mediocre live show, was better than no live show if you’re sitting in a foxhole somewhere.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. One, one thing that I found just, I don’t know, it was a little bit difficult to come to terms with, was thinking about the USO. These sorts of clubs and canteens where you mentioned they would have dances and that there were these hostesses who were expected [00:48:00] to dance with all these servicemen. Can you talk about that role and the emotional labor that must have been involved?

David Suisman: I can, and, but I can’t do so without calling attention to the great work of Sherry Tucker on this. Her book, dance Floor Democracy is a really brilliant,

Exploration of this. And she talks about the canteens as these places where there was a really, a great deal of emotional labor going on.

There were supposed to be these really democratic spaces where. High ranking soldiers were dancing next to the lowest privates and so on,

In, and they were supposed to be racially integrated. In fact, they weren’t necessarily racially integrated. And their real story is more complicated than the legend, or the lore that grows up around these canteens.

But the thinking was they were opportunities for these servicemen, or people who were about to get shipped out to dance with young women who were happy to [00:49:00] do so under very strictly supervised conditions. There was not supposed to be that, it was supposed to be just dancing.

And they, the women who worked as hostesses generally felt like they were performing a really valuable kind of patriotic service.

They were helping to give this young man what could be. In truth, his last dance, and he is gonna give his life for the country. The least that somebody could do would be to dance for them on the dance floor.

So this is the logic underpinning the canteens.

And it was this era, it was the swing era when there was this idea that swing was this kind of democratic force in American popular life.

Mack Hagood: Wow. It’s just, yeah, it’s really something to think about moving forward to the Vietnam War and to the US incursions into Iraq and in Afghanistan in the War on Terror. The Vietnam War has a certain kind of [00:50:00] mythology around it, as you say. What did you want to do?

Sort of do with your chapter on Vietnam. What did you want to add to the musical story? What did you maybe wanna subtract from the musical story?

David Suisman: I wanted to overturn the musical story. I almost called the chapter on Vietnam. Almost everything you know about music in the Vietnam War is wrong.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. So break it down for us. What do we have wrong about that

Mack Hagood: David did indeed break down the musical mythology of Vietnam for us. We also talked about headphone use as a form of self care in the War on Terror, David Suisman’s methods as a historian and a writer, his reading and listening recommendations. So much stuff. It’s like a whole Extra half hour of content.

But if you’re hearing this, it means you’re either on the public feed of the podcast or you’re watching on YouTube. And my request to you is this, please join us on the Patreon. It’s three [00:51:00] bucks a month. I fund this podcast out of pocket. I lose money on every episode I make. It would be really great if I could just break even.

But more importantly than that, I just get such a great feeling when someone joins the Patreon, because it shows me that this show is valuable enough to them that they want to support it. And I actually just did the numbers and it looks like we’ve got about between one and 2 percent of people who are going to listen to this episode who are actually subscribed to the Patreon.

If I could get that number up to 5%, I could outsource some of the technical heavy lifting. Thing that makes this show so time consuming for me. And I could possibly even do two episodes a month. So if you want to support, go to patreon.com/phantom power. And if the financial thing is not for you, you can also just join up as a free Patreon member, be part of the community.

I love that as well. Another thing you can do is just tell a friend about the [00:52:00] show. It’s been a while since I asked folks to do that, but it really would help us grow a lot. Our next show is a round table about the cassette tape with three amazing scholars of that technology and the communities that have evolved out of that technology.

We’ve got Rob Drew, Eleanor Patterson, and Andrew Simon. It’s going to be fantastic. So look for that next month. And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks. To David Suisman for being on the show, and I want to thank my assistants Nisso Sacha and Katelyn Phan for their editing assistance and transcription work.

And I want to thank Blue the Fifth for our outro music. See you next time. [00:53:00]

The post How Music Became an Instrument of War (David Suisman) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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Remembering Jonathan Sterne (1970-2025)

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:28:36 -0000

The sound studies community is reeling from the death of Jonathan Sterne this past Thursday. Jonathan’s presence and work were–and are–incredibly influential on the intellectual and ethical commitments of our field. He was a generous mentor to so many, including me. Do you know those “WWJD?” bracelets? I’ve been wearing one in my mind for about 15 years: “What Would Jonathan Do?” In this short, impromptu episode, I share a few thoughts about what he meant to me and to sound studies. If you want to spend some time with Jonathan’s voice, we were lucky to feature him in several episodes, but our Dork-o-phonics episode, based on his book Diminished Faculties, is certainly my favorite.

The post Remembering Jonathan Sterne (1970-2025) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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The Perfect Playlist Problem: Advertising, Ghost Musicians, and the Manipulation of Listeners w/ Liz Pelly

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 11:47:00 -0000

Liz Pelly is our foremost journalist/critic on the Spotify beat. Her byline has appeared at the Baffler, Guardian, NPR, and many other outlets. She is also an adjunct instructor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Liz is also been making the media rounds lately, talking about her new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (One Signal Publishers).

The book is both a history of Spotify and an argument that Spotify is not, in fact, a music company, but rather an advertising company focused on manipulating user behavior to maximize time on platform. As a consequence, Spotify not only pushes musical aesthetics towards banal, “lean-back listening,” it also makes musicians themselves expendable: replaceable by ghost musicians, AI slop, and behavioral algorithms that keep people just barely engaged at the lowest cost. In this show, Liz details how platforms shape listening and music making alike. We also discuss the tension between frictionless music consumption and meaningful cultural engagement.

And remember, there’s an extended version of this interview which features a bunch of bonus material including a listener question, a deep dive into Liz’s reporting methods, and the backstory of how she got into journalism and got a major book deal, plus her book and music recommendations. It’s available to our Patrons for a mere $3 a month. Sign up at Patreon.com/phantompower.

Transcript

Liz Pelly: [00:00:00] When I hear something like the founder of an AI company saying “Making music is too hard.

People don’t want to learn how to play instruments,” or even this idea that a streaming platform should help people reduce cognitive work. It’s like, that essentially means we should help people not have to think. And I think that, you know,

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Liz Pelly: As critics, what we do is encourage people to think, you know, thinking and making decisions is an important part of processing life in the world and information and culture and figuring out how you actually feel about someone’s art.

Introduction:

This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom [00:01:00] Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. My guest today is journalist Liz Pelly, someone I’ve been reading avidly and having my students read for almost a decade now. Pelly is our foremost journalist and critic on the Spotify beat. Her byline has appeared in the Baffler, the Guardian, NPR, and many other outlets.

She’s also an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. Liz has been making the media rounds lately, talking about her new book Mood Machine, the Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, out on One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book is both a history of Spotify and an argument that Spotify is not in fact a music company, but rather an advertising company focused on manipulating user behavior to maximize time on platform. As a consequence, Spotify not only pushes musical aesthetics towards banal, lean back [00:02:00] listening, it also makes musicians themselves expendable, replaceable by ghost musicians, AI slop, and behavioral algorithms that keep people just barely engaged at the lowest cost.

I am super excited to have Liz on the show and get into the weeds of how platforms shape listening and music making alike.

And remember, there’s an extended version of this interview that features a bunch of bonus material, including a listener question, a deep dive into Liz’s reporting methods, and the backstory of how she got into journalism and got a major book deal. We’ll also have her book and music recommendations.

It’s available to our patrons for a mere $3 a month. Sign up at patreon. com /phantom power. All right, let’s get to it.

All right. Liz, welcome.

Liz Pelly: Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Mack Hagood: So I [00:03:00] thought we could start off by talking about the title of your book. For those of you folks out there who aren’t familiar with your years of research on Spotify and your journalistic pieces on it, why name a book about Spotify, Mood Machine?

Liz Pelly: That’s a great question. I think when I first started thinking about the book, I was thinking about it in two sections. Actually, the first book proposal that I wrote was a proposal for two books. One was going to be about the impact of the streaming economy on listening. And one was going to be about the impact on artists. I quickly realized that it made much more sense to just write one book, but I shifted to this idea of writing a book in two parts where the first part was going to be about how streaming had reshaped listening and the second part was going to be about the material impact on musicians. That structure didn’t quite hold, by the time I got to the final table of contents, things shifted a little bit, but [00:04:00] when I was thinking about, originally, when I was thinking about mood, to me, that word sort of evoked the way that streaming has impacted listening and the shift from albums to playlists, the championing of playlists that are mood playlists or connected to emotions in some way.

And then, when I thought about the word machine, I really thought about the relationship between, like labor and the music industry or labor and capital even. You know, I was thinking about the way

in which the music industry squeezes musicians more and more under this model and, just the trajectory of the music business.

Obviously, a lot of this book also covers the shift from the playlist era into the era of streaming curation, being more driven by machine learning and algorithms and personalization. So there’s surely like a point of this all, or there’s a way of interpreting the title that also evokes that, but yeah, it’s really interesting.

Like, you know, when I thought of it, I was thinking a lot about the relationship between musicians and this model.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Well, I love the title and I definitely want to dig into a lot of what you just mentioned there, but I was thinking maybe we could go back to 2007. Is that when Spotify launched?

Liz Pelly: Technically, the company was created in 2006 and it launched in its first markets in 2008.

Mack Hagood: Okay. So back then, what was the state of the music industry? What was Spotify, the alleged solution to? What was the problem?

Liz Pelly: So this is still the era where the music industry was trying to figure out how to recover from the impact of file sharing. Around 1999 to 2001 was the time when Napster was, , according to the people in the music business, wreaking havoc on the global recorded music industry. By the time Spotify came along, the music business had already spent years and years trying to figure out solutions that would work in the digital music era, you know, also taking individual fans to court over file sharing.

The music business had tried to launch some of its own streaming services as an alternative to piracy. There’s a whole sort of, fumbled strategy, on the behalf of the major record labels and the mainstream music business trying to figure out how to solve this problem. It’s really interesting because the impacts of file sharing, I think , were and continue to be felt differently by different musicians and different corners of music.

But something else that was also going on was in the United States by the mid 2000s, the iTunes library model had taken off or taken hold a little bit more here than in other parts of [00:07:00] the world. Spotify was founded in Stockholm, Sweden by two men with backgrounds in the advertising industry, in Sweden, even by 2005, 2006, while the industry was somewhat successfully starting to figure out ways of selling digital music to consumers, piracy was stronger there.

Around that time, you still had the Pirate Bay, which is a really big cultural force in Sweden. Sweden had a pirate party. There’s a politicized element of music piracy in Sweden. And yeah, I think the founders of Spotify, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon just saw an opportunity to build on their backgrounds and add tech to try to build a product that would appeal to both consumers that loved music piracy and the music industry that was like, you know, floundering.

Mack Hagood: You know, it’s really fascinating to think about the Sweden piece, why it pops up there specifically, there were so many American companies that [00:08:00] were trying to take a crack at this, I mean, back in the day, if you had forced me to guess, like this concept of just like streaming music, , who would, , be able to do it.

Well, I probably would have guessed something like MySpace because there were, that’s where all the indie bands were. And it just seemed like something like band camp could have happened there. But Sweden winds up being the hotbed of it. And as you say, something to do with piracy, the role piracy plays there.

And it seemed from what I gleaned from your book that partly the music labels were willing to let Sweden experiment, because they already saw it as a lost cause in terms of everyone was just pirating music. Is that right?

Liz Pelly: Yeah, according to people who were in Sweden at the time, the music industry had started to see Sweden as a lost market, to use the quote, the phrase that came up in some of my interviews. , specifically the [00:09:00] free tier, you know, that was a period of time when the music business, , and the major labels who, , control the rights to so much of what we think of when we think of the history of recorded music, which is its own issue to unpack the major labels were really allergic to anything that had the word free in it that involved, the concept of giving music away for free or providing free access to music. In Sweden, though, which the music business saw as a sort of lost market, they were more willing to take a chance on something with a free tier.

Of course, the original Spotify model, like the original model that Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon came up with, was a product that would, It was exclusively a way of delivering content for free, supported by ads. So that was the original business model. And originally they weren’t even sure if it would just be music.

The original idea was some sort of media delivery platform that would provide access to a library of content for free, funded by [00:10:00] advertising. And Even if the, , the music business was more likely to, or more willing to allow for experimenting with this sort of free tier in Sweden.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And I was really struck in your book by what you said a minute ago, which is that these guys weren’t interested in music per se. They were interested in some kind of streaming media content to run ads against. And so, they were an ad selling business, not a music selling business from the get go.

Liz Pelly: That was their background. Daniel Ek’s background was that he worked at an SEO firm after he graduated from high school. You know, in high school, he had applied for a job at Google and they said, try again when you have a college degree. So he built his own open source search engine.

And then he got a job at an SEO firm. And then by the time he was 22, he was the CTO of this cartoon doll gaming website for teen girls. And then it was Martin Lorentzon [00:11:00] background was in ad tech. In selling automated advertisements.

Mack Hagood: I mean, I think this is really interesting because I think on the one hand, because They weren’t music people. They didn’t have certain attachments to music that probably allowed them to innovate in the way that they did. Right. But on the other hand, a business model that is downstream from running ads rather than downstream from how we work with music as music, You can imagine, a lot of cultural and technological effects of that.

Liz Pelly: Totally. One of the things I write in the introduction is, you know, there’s so many different ways to understand them. The story of Spotify, the story of the streaming era. But one of them, I think, is the story of these advertising men bringing the logic of their industry to music in new ways.

And I feel like that comes up time and again. I mean, in some ways I think it could be [00:12:00] boiled down to purely just the reality that now what we have is a model that views music so much as just , a cheap content source that fuels, , this, a broader, , advertising or subscription model.

and I think one of the things that I tried to trace in the book, there’s multiple different threads running through the book, but one is sort of investigating, Different efforts on the part of Spotify to lower the cost of content, , or to, , lower the amount of money that they have to spend on the audio that circulates on their platform and allows them to sell ads and sell subscriptions.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. One interesting sort of leap that I think the company took is you talk about how, in 2012, the company had, , I think 5 million paid subscribers. And in 2017, , they had more than 60 million [00:13:00] and they were , basically in 2012, this company that had a lot of major investors, but wasn’t making any money. And, , I’m really interested in how you treat sort of that five year span, , and think about what shifts happened in the company and then what the cultural effects of those shifts have been. And I’m. Particularly interested in this because, , you were asking me online or offline what my research was about.

And I do this research into how people use sound to control their effect on things like noise canceling headphones, white noise machines, nature, sound apps. And what I was noticing around 2013 or 2014, was that it seemed to me that the streaming platforms were starting to treat music. In a very similar way, and that I was noticing that instead of organizing around genre, like they were in the music, in the record stores that I grew up going to, [00:14:00] they were really, pitching music playlists in terms of like the mood or the function that it has.

So this is music to work out by, this is music to do this, to have a dinner party with or whatever. Right. And I remember mentioning this to my friends, like in popular music studies. And I was like, and saying, this is the, they’re changing the way music is purchased basically and organized and they’re like, ah, that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. They’re like, you know, genre and cultural capital and taste making is still like the coin of the realm in popular music. , you got to remember all the editorial playlists, like rap caviar and pitchforks playlist. And they were kind of like talking me down from this. And I was like, Oh, okay.

you guys. Maybe you know better than I do. But then when I saw your articles come out in the Baffler, like the first one that came out, I don’t know if that one was called like the problem with Muzak or something, I was so psyched because [00:15:00] you were taking this premise seriously, and examining it really closely.

And so I’ve just been a super big fan of your work ever since then. And what I really like to focus on in this interview is, , we know, At least I think we know that Spotify in a lot of ways has been bad for musicians, but I would really like to talk a lot about this user experience and the ways that music’s capacities for affecting mood or shifting attention or managing attention or feelings seems to have gained precedence over music’s capacities as art or as the object of our attention that the, you know, active attention. So going back to 2012, what. Started to happen at Spotify that’s changed, that [00:16:00] gave them the insight to move in this direction.

Liz Pelly: So something that I spent a while doing while trying to trace the specific moments of when strategy changed. I mean, I did a lot of interviews for this book. It’s interesting hearing you talk about it. Because I started covering Spotify in 2016. So it was, you know, kind of a little bit after. This moment, and a lot of my initial research was interviewing musicians and interviewing people who’ve worked at independent record labels.

And by the time I started writing about streaming and Spotify musicians and people who worked at independent labels, it had become clear to them that these types of mood playlists were having such a more dominant role in how people were presented music. Especially things like chill playlists or workout playlists.

Things like functional music. but trying to trace, you know, earlier than the 2016, 2017 era, [00:17:00] I went and interviewed people who were close to the company at the time. And I also spent a lot of time on the internet archive, looking at the front page of Spotify and trying to trace when things changed and when the company’s presentation of its products specifically changed.

Mack Hagood: That is, I mean, can I just pause there? Like for, we have a lot of people who do research in this who listened to this podcast. I mean, that is such a great mode of doing research is just going through the internet archive and looking at those different front pages. I love that

Liz Pelly: Thank you. And you know, it was super interesting because there was a specific moment. It was around December 2012, where before that moment, the front page of Spotify had been really simple. It was like a white background and green and black and gray text. And it was all about explaining how easy and simple and frictionless it was to subscribe to Spotify, or to access [00:18:00] Spotify for free and get access to a world of music.

Like this was sort of the way in which it was pitched. It was instant, simple, and free. You know, this product gives you easy access to all the music you could ever imagine. And then there was this really specific moment where it really shifted and it was less about, looking like kind of a tech company website.

And all of a sudden it was this montage of hazy images, like moody, sort of washed over like, you know, someone, driving with a sun flare and there was actually a song that auto played in the background. It was like this really kind of moody generic, like folk song playing in the background. So I would auto play when you went to the website

Mack Hagood: Really?

Liz Pelly: Yeah, it’s really interesting.

And there’s like, you know, sun flares, people driving, people kind of like hanging out with their friends, with their loved ones, like in a hammock together. And it was really all about showing you these distinct moments in your life where you might [00:19:00] be listening to music or might be listening to Spotify.

In my book, I described the photos as like stock photos in a picture frame, like waiting to be replaced by real life or something like that.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the early Instagram aesthetic.

Liz Pelly: Exactly, definitely. Like the early Instagram filter aesthetic, or even like, it sort of looked like images you would see on Tumblr or Pinterest at the time or something like that. So to me, it became clear that something strategically had happened at that moment, where they had decided that, in order to reach more people, They had to think of themselves more as sort of pitching a lifestyle or pitching different ways of users relating to what they were offering.

And in one of the interviews that I did, it came up that around this time, Spotify had commissioned a research agency to do a study on its product and its own users, to figure out how people were actually using [00:20:00] Spotify. This was also about , just over a year after they launched in the United States, where there was not only more competition than in, , other markets in terms of, selling the specific idea of how to relate to digital music, because, there were other streaming services in the United States and there also was,, more people used the iTunes store.

More people listen to mp3s and buy digital music. So they were kind of competing, also with Pandora, Rhapsody. And according to this person who was close to the company at the time, who told me about this research study that they commissioned, apparently they Found out through this research that a vast majority of their listeners were coming to the platform for more of a lean back experience, , and that they started to think of what they were offering less as, access to this world of music, access to this fully stocked, , iTunes library, but streams through the Internet, maybe similar to the experience , users [00:21:00] had come to expect in the post file sharing era, , there’s this interview that I referenced early on in the book, as a conference appearance by Andres Ehn who is the first, Spotify’s first employee.

And he talks about how in the early days, they didn’t see their competition as other music services, but they saw their competition as the pirate Bay and how, you know, it seems like what they, talk about how, what they were trying to offer initially was a product that was better than piracy, not competing with piracy, but better than piracy.

So they were really thinking of the experience of the file sharing music listener, as the person they were trying to win over. And it seems like after there was this specific moment where they realized that actually , their new target listener was becoming more of like the Pandora listener or the person who is coming to the service and looking for, you know, a button that they can press and listen to a feed of music organized around, a specific, theme, or who maybe needed [00:22:00] more guidance in terms of what to listen to.

So I think it was distinctly related to having to grow in the United States. Even in the press at the time, they talked about how they were embracing this moods and moments strategy as part of needing to grow beyond early adopters and reach a more mainstream audience, which I think is pretty interesting.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and there was definitely something in the air around then because I remember Beats Music, which eventually became Apple Music, had something called The Sentence. I don’t know if you ever came across this, but it was this really bizarre thing where there was like a sent-, a literal sentence, but it had pull down menus and it was like, I’m, Blank and you could pull down like hanging with my homies or like chilling with my pets or whatever. And I want to, you know, feel like, and it ended up like lifted or like, they’re just like all of these [00:23:00] weird, you know, adjectives for the emotional feeling that you wanted to have at that moment. And then you would just fill this sentence with things from the pull down menu and then it would just generate, you know, an on the fly radio station for you at that moment. I don’t really know how that happened, how it worked in the background, but there was, I’m not sure precisely what year that was. That might’ve been, it was probably after what Spotify did, but I’m not, I’m really not a hundred percent sure, there was definitely this kind of strategy in the air.

Liz Pelly: Yeah, there’s also Songza, which was another company that existed at the same time. That was doing sort of like concierge type mood playlist Recommendations and they were a company that got mentioned in the press at the time, you know So following this shift, Spotify bought this company Tunigo, which was at first a third party app on its platform for what they called ready made playlists that [00:24:00] were themed to different moods and moments and .

They were compared a lot to Songza in the music business press at the time.

Now, at the same time that this is happening, it’s not like genre based playlists have gone away. There are the Rap Caviars and the Pitchfork curated playlists and things of that ilk. One thing I was really interested to learn about was that there was almost like a farm league of playlists with the smaller playlists that they would, maybe A B test songs against one another in these smaller playlists and see things like skip rates, that a song could sort of… through these different metrics work its way up from a smaller playlist to a more popular playlist, , and I guess, between the mood based and the human tested curated playlists, I guess you could say, like, “What’s wrong with that?” I [00:25:00] think Daniel Ek would say this is democratic form of programming, right? Like, like we’re letting people’s stated choices and, or, at least the choices that their behavior tells us through examining the data, choose what’s popular. So, what’s wrong with that?

I think that narrative around the democratic, meritocratic data driven playlist ladder climb, where they would say that, the music that ends up on these really popular playlists is informed by user data. We’re looking at putting songs on these smaller feeder playlists and testing them and seeing which ones react.

And if it reacts, we’ll move it up. In some ways, , I also think that was sort of like a narrative that they sold to the independent music world to convince independent labels and independent artists that this was a democratic system when in reality, there were so many other factors that would influence whether or not [00:26:00] a song ended up on a popular playlist and, to this day, talking to people in the music world, it seems that there’s no better way to get onto a Spotify playlist than to just simply know one of the people who works there.

Or to have some sort of direct relationship due to a marketing team relationship, the major labels.

Mack Hagood: So there’s still some old school gatekeeping going?

Liz Pelly: Absolutely. You know, like the very first article that I wrote about streaming was about the privileged relationship that the major labels had with playlist curators. And at the time I interviewed a major label, , someone who worked in digital marketing for a major label who talked about how it was just a different level of access, how major labels had dedicated reps at these companies and dedicated employees at their labels who would take meetings, send over Excel spreadsheets of priorities, those phone calls. Maybe not like guaranteed placement because of some marketing relationship, but a different level of access.

And I think even now, you know, [00:27:00] musicians are told if you want to get onto Spotify playlist, there’s this form that you fill out and you have to pitch your songs two to three weeks in advance and put the proper tags and a description and how you’re trying to target this. It’s like, if you are an artist on a major label especially if you are an in-demand artist on a major label, like you’re not filling out the Google form, you’re not filling out the form on Spotify for artists website. You know, there’s a different type of relationship there. So that is, even to this day, I think it continues to be interesting to remember.

Mack Hagood: So in fact, it’s not as democratic or demotic equity lead us to believe. Let’s just say it was, would that solve the problem? would that, make it

Liz Pelly: Well, I guess it depends, the context that you’re discussing, I think, because something also that I think in the streaming era, there’s, this idea that [00:28:00] these playlists are helping people listen to more music than they would be listening to otherwise that, you know, maybe you don’t, know what you want to listen to, but putting on like a morning commute playlist could introduce you to 50 new artists that you’d never heard of before.

And sometimes you’ll hear people say things like, “I listened to 6,000 new musicians last year. How could you say I’m not discovering new music?” And I think something to remember is the way in which coming to a platform and listening to these sort of mood and moment curated playlists encourages this kind of more passive relationship with what you’re listening to. More functional relationship with what you’re listening to, and it’s like how, you know, much of a connection is actually being made between the listener and these 6,000 artists that you might have listened to through listening to Spotify curated playlists or niche mixes, for example. [00:29:00] And you know, in the trace the history of music being used as a tool of mood stabilization. And I think that the idea that this kind of way of engaging with music would be a means to discovery is almost funny when you put it in the context of other ways that music has been used as a means of mood stabilization throughout history.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. And you do talk about things like Muzak the old BBC radio show, the music to work by and that sort of, affective control that music can offer. you talk a little bit about. The calculation that Spotify made, like there was a, there seems to be a moment when they realized that if we can make the experience of, listening to music, like utterly frictionless through the interface and perhaps make [00:30:00] it a little less more frictionless aesthetically, where it’s not quite as demanding of your attention, we can maximize the number of hours that people are using our product, which is what we really want, because either, either they’re going to integrate our product throughout their day and they’re going to paying for their subscription, or they’re going to hear as many ads as possible.

And that’s going to help us that way. Right. So, I think the term that you use for this, you mentioned earlier is “lean back listening”. Can you maybe really delve into that a little bit more?

Liz Pelly: I think that one of the things in that part of the book is trying to sort of look at what it means for a streaming service to sort of, champion this way of relating to music and what some of the consequences of it might be for listeners and for musicians.

You know, it was really interesting talking to some former employees.

And I had [00:31:00] this one conversation where someone said, you know, some of these bigger sweeping changes that have happened in the history of Spotify or on streaming platforms, these things that in retrospect might seem sort of like nefarious or like someone is trying to control listeners.

A lot of times it’s people being tasked with moving a metric and their job is just to kind of look and say, well, when we put this playlist on the front page, , , people clicked on it and the listening sessions were healthy. So let’s just keep putting this on the front page, that kind of thing.

Someone else explained one of the early goals of the playlist ecosystem as trying to reduce the cognitive work that the user had to do when they opened the platform, which obviously would also, for a user who may not know what they want to listen to would potentially lead to helping someone know what to click on, what they want to listen to, extending the [00:32:00] amount of time that they spend on the platform or extending a session length.

It’s like these things that may be in the moment to the people who work there don’t seem like a big deal. are planting the seeds for these bigger cultural shifts where when you have an environment where all you’re doing is following the data and trying to optimize for this , frictionless user experience, to grow time on the platform, to grow session length, to in some ways, help shape user behavior around your own product. These things that might seem not that consequential. In the moment, add up and do you end up, I think, having a cultural impact.

Mack Hagood: Absolutely. And I’m so glad you said that because we tend to always find villains around every corner. In my own research into these kinds of sound technologies that help us have affective control, I’ve really liked every single person I’ve met working in this space who are developing new forms of noise [00:33:00] cancellation or who developed, Practice of listening to artificial nature sounds, you know, it’s like I think cumulatively we have a social problem in which we’re we’ve become accustomed to the idea that are listening is something that’s supposed to be completely managed and we’re not supposed to experience anything we don’t want to hear. And I think that has major, bad effects for public discourse and interpersonal discourse and a lot of things. But the individuals who are working on these technologies are just trying to solve a particular problem generally. Like how do we eliminate noises that bother people?

And you know, that it’s not… there’s no evil intent there.

Liz Pelly: Right.

Mack Hagood: Another thing that struck me about what you just said. It was the real emphasis on things being frictionless, which again, if you’re designing a platform that totally makes sense, friction is [00:34:00] good, right? Friction makes us stronger.

Like, you know, if people, whatever, lift weights, like it’s the resistance that allows you to grow stronger. And the frictions that are involved in pursuing something are a big part of its aesthetic. Enjoyment and its meaning, right? the friction of going all the way to the record store and investing that time and flipping through stacks of stuff you’re not interested in and finding that one gem, that’s part of the enjoyment and it, calls to mind. this guy who designed one of the AI platforms that just spit out music for you. And he recently said in an interview that making music is too hard and musicians don’t enjoy it. And you have to do all these hours of practicing and you might not ever be good. And it’s like, as a guitar player, who [00:35:00] I’ve been playing since I was like 15 years old, like I’m 55 now. and I’m still not great. Right. Like, and, but it’s that struggle to get better. That is like part of the pleasure of playing. I’m like, this guy is totally missing the point of what musical experience is all about.

That was a bit of a ramble, but, I mean, this dichotomy between making information flow as frictionlessly as possible seems to be at odds with giving culture meaning and having a rich experience with it.

Liz Pelly: For sure. And I also think about it from another perspective, which is thinking about the role music critics have historically played in recommending and contextualizing music. And, I think about this way of recommending music in the most frictionless way possible and this idea, when you, when I hear [00:36:00] something like, “The founder of an AI company saying making music is too hard”

People don’t want to learn how to play instruments or even, this idea that a streaming platform should help people reduce cognitive work. It’s like, That essentially means we should help people not have to think. And I think that, you know, like critics, what we do is encourage people to think, you know, thinking and making decisions is an important part of processing life in the world and information and culture and figuring out how you actually feel about someone’s art.

As critics, we want to encourage people to think. And that’s why I describe this pursuit of a frictionless experience, this idea that people don’t want to make decisions, this idea of following the data and just being pushing this really data driven experience of receiving music.

It’s like it’s not only not fulfilling [00:37:00] the role that critics, I mean, it’s obviously not fulfilling the role that critics have played historically in presenting into contextualizing music, but I also think it’s actively anti critical because it’s telling people, it’s encouraging people not to think and encouraging people to not think is, Extremely anti critical, anti intellectual.

It’s like encouraging people to just trust the data. Just, you know, yeah, the music that we’re showing you, we’re showing you because the data has told us that you will like it. So you should just believe us and you should just. listen to it and like it, ,

Mack Hagood: Yeah, no, that’s right. And it’s encouraging us not to think and also sort of encouraging us not to feel, , you know, because I remember, gosh, it’s been probably 10 years. Now, I remember asking my friend, music journalist, Eric Harvey about things like, “Eric, what’s going on with hip hop?”

Like , it all sounds so sad and [00:38:00] blasé and kind of mellow. Like it’s kind of aesthetically beautiful now, but it also is so dispassionate and I was like, what’s happening with that? And I think your journalism has really helped me connect the dots between the incentives of the platform and the kinds of music that succeeded.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed that about hip hop in particular, but I mean, You’ve certainly talked about the aesthetic of chill. So, can we maybe talk about what kinds of aesthetics seem to get privileged in this era of lean back listening?

Liz Pelly: Well, I could say I also do think that a similar thing has happened, in the musical realm of like indie rock too, you know, like, they’re even talking to people who run indie rock labels for my book. There is this idea that music that was softer or that had softer vocal deliveries or more , emotionally, not flattened, [00:39:00] like less adventurous in terms of dynamic range, or something is the kind of music that does well in the streaming era.

And, you know, it’s not to say that I think that’s the only type of music that people are making, but I think for people who aren’t making this sort of music like whispery, more chill, more soft music. It’s harder to break through. And I think it does encourage a general softening around the edges.

There’s a chapter of the book called Streambait Pop, which is an extended take on this essay that I wrote in 2018 for the Baffler called Streambait Pop. They’re sort of looking more at this, in terms of the way in which the rise of mood playlists and playlists determined by emotions and affect were influencing the sound of music.

Liz Pelly: For that piece, I talked to A pop songwriter who was talking about how it had been become common at the time to go into record, writing sessions and hear people say that they wanted to make, a Spotify song or a song specifically targeting specific [00:40:00] Spotify playlists. how there was this, you know, specific sounds that he felt like had emerged that time.

And that was also around the time that a musician like Billie Eilish became really popular. It was this kind of whispery sort of pop music that could do well on these sort of like chill vibe or sad vibe playlists and it was interesting, going back to that piece in 2022/2023 when I was working on the book.

I think by that point it became, really clear to me that it’s not just that streaming services, are shaping the sound of pop music, but there is a sort of like broader history that needs to be there to contextualize it, that, mediums for recording and releasing music and the technology that musicians and artists use to create their work have always impacted the sounds of, their music.

Music and yeah, I know this is more of like an academics oriented podcast, but before I started writing my book, I read “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Canged Music” by Mark [00:41:00] Katz. And that was really instructive and sort of like understanding this like broader history there.

So that is referenced in my new updated version of Streambait pop in the book. but also, you know, it was interesting. Looking at these, effects of the playlist environment on not just pop music, but other sorts of genres as well. And yeah, speaking with people in other corners of music or operating on smaller scales about the impact of this as well.

And I also took that chapter for the new expanded version of it. Talk to some songwriter, a songwriter who had participated in a Spotify songwriting camp, which was, really interesting to, hearing how some of these, aesthetic trends discussed within like the realm of, Spotify core were sort of like true to the kind of music that was like, at least in the case of this one musician, like true to the music that was coming out of those sessions as well.

Mack Hagood: That’s fascinating. And then this songwriting camp, was it actually sponsored by [00:42:00] Spotify?

Liz Pelly: Yeah. Yeah. It was hosted by Spotify.

Mack Hagood: That’s wild. I remember some quotes from Greg Saunier from Deerhoof. Like the sort of, I can’t remember specifically, but he always has so many fiery takes on things, but particularly like this world, I mean, it’s funny in our last episode, we wound up mentioning Deerhoof for some reason. You can imagine Deerhoof in the way it leaps from one genre to another and demands your attention in a lot of interesting ways because it does so much unexpected musical work. Not really being a band that would work as well in the Spotify era.

Liz Pelly: Yeah, I’ve interviewed Greg for the first piece that I wrote for the Baffler back in 2017, and then did another interview with him for my book. And I feel like, well, one, Greg just always has like so [00:43:00] many interesting things to say about the state of the world and even not just music.

But yeah, I think they’re a really interesting band to kind of comment on this trajectory of the way that independent music has been impacted by the streaming era because they’re a band that has been making music really like on their own terms since the nineties and worked with so many of the labels that we think of when we think about the idea of independent music in the popular imagination and they also are an example of a band that like, you know, had a really dedicated fan base before the impacts of the streaming era, emerged.

And I think they can sort of, but I think it’s always interesting. I think that lots of critics have different perspectives on this, on how we should consider the perspective of musicians whose careers span back to before the dawn of the streaming era something I’ll hear a lot is, critics saying, “Well, these artists are just complaining about the streaming era because they were, one of the lucky few who [00:44:00] happened to have careers in the pre streaming era” And it’s always been hard for everyone. So I don’t know. I think it’s actually kind of the opposite.

I think that musicians whose careers span back to the pre streaming era are really well positioned to show. how things have changed and to speak to it. That’s something that is interesting about their perspectives.

Mack Hagood: I agree with that. And I think these digital trends hit differently, generationally. So ultimately if Spotify could get people to tap on moods, it wouldn’t really matter that much what specific songs were found in those playlists. And then that paves the way for two phenomena that you have also written about, which is. Ghost artists and AI generated music. Can you talk about what’s been happening in that regard?

Liz Pelly: Yeah. And I think that one thing that I tried to emphasize in the book is [00:45:00] how, there is this era where Spotify curated editorial playlists, often categorized by mood, had a really big cultural impact. And in some ways, There’s one former employee I interviewed who refers to 2016 to 2019 as the peak playlist era, but right off the bat, correctly points out that in the music business.

Now the top of the discovery funnel has shifted away from these curated playlists made by Spotify editors. And now there’s a lot more influence coming from personalized feeds and algorithmic recommendations and platforms like TikTok and short form video as sort of, illustrating how discovery has really shifted in this next era of the digital music economy.

But something that I try to point out or show is how there have been all of these effects of all of these sort of other impacts of listening being reshaped [00:46:00] around this concept of, you know, click here for happy, click here for sad, click here for chill, click here for upbeat party vibes, and how it’s not just, you know, that these platforms had a role reshaping listening around their own editorial playlists, but also that it paved the way and like helped prime this idea of listening to music, according to these types of buttons that you can press.

And I think that, one of the, long term impacts of that does have to do with like the way in which in some ways it sort of encourages people to have more of a relationship with the playlist they’re listening to or the mood category that they’re they’ve organized they’re listening around than necessarily the artists and it again is like one of those things that could seem subtle but actually you know reorganizing music in a way where it is more about the , the vibe or the playlist category, then necessarily, , having any sort of [00:47:00] connection with the artists that are, , being played does in some ways, I think, set people up for, , being more desensitized to the way in which music made by generative AI could start either filling these playlists or, you know, like you think of something like earlier, you were talking about Suno or these kinds of generative AI music platforms, even something like Endel, which I talk about in the book, or, like these products that are basically just like click here for a vibe and we’ll give you an AI generated feed of music that fits that vibe.

And you have no relationship at all with the people who are creating the music. In some ways I think the general playlist economy, the devaluing of the artists making the music you’re listening to, pointing people towards these, anonymous ghost artists, you know, essentially like low royalty stock music that has started to be over the years, has filled up some of these more leanback playlists. [00:48:00]

Like I think it does have these bigger cultural impacts of just generally devaluing the role of the artist, in and prioritizing the role of, , the tech product or the, playlist name or the shaping a relationship around the product that’s delivering the music and not the music itself.

Mack Hagood: Okay, folks, that’s it for this version of my interview with Liz Pelly. Remember, you can get the full interview and bonus content at patreon.com/phantompower. The Patreon has been growing slowly, but surely. And it’s a great motivator to keep these episodes coming. We also have free membership. So if you just want to join our email list and keep up with what’s happening around here, that’s a great way to do it.

Again, it’s all at patreon.com/phantom power. And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Liz Pelly for being on the show, see show notes, links, and [00:49:00] more for this episode at phantompod.org. Please remember to subscribe to us and rate and review us on the platform of your choice platforms.

And I want to thank my Miami University assistants, Katelyn Phan, Nisso Sascha, and Lauren Kelly for their help with the show.

Josiah Wolf of the band WHY helped me make my intro soundscape and the one and only Alex Blue, aka Blue the Fifth, did our outro music. Got feedback? Send it to mac at mactrasound.com or hit me up on socials at Mactra. See you next time.

The post How Spotify Dulls the Musical Mind (Liz Pelly) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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Navigating the Age of AI Noise: Art, Datasets, and the Cultural Impact of Generative Models w/ Eryk Salvaggio

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:12:00 -0000

In this episode, host Mack Hagood dives into the world of AI-generated music and art with digital artist and theorist Eryk Salvaggio. The conversation explores technical and philosophical aspects of AI art, its impact on culture, and the ‘age of noise’ it has ushered in. AI dissolves sounds and images into literal noise, subsequently reversing the process to create new “hypothetical” sounds and images. The kinds of cultural specificities that archivists struggle to preserve are stripped away when we treat human culture as data in this way.

Eryk also shares insights into his works like ‘Swim’ and ‘Sounds Like Music,’ which test AI’s limitations and forces the machine to reflect on itself in revealing ways. Finally, the episode contemplates how to find meaning and context in an overwhelming sea of information.

Eryk Salvaggio is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training: a practice designed to expose ideologies of tech and to confront the gaps between datasets and the worlds they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level. He is a researcher on AI, art and education at the metaLab (at) Harvard University, the Emerging Technology Research Advisor to the Siegel Family Endowment, and a top contributor to Tech Policy Press. He holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University.

Works discussed in this podcast:

The Age of Noise (2024)

SWIM (2024): A meditation on training data, memory, and archives.

Sounds Like Music: Toward a Multi-Modal Media Theory of Gaussian Pop (2024)

How to Read an AI Image (2023)

You can learn more about Eryk Salvaggio at cyberneticforests.com

Learn more about Phantom Power at phantompod.org

Join our Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower

Transcription by Katelyn Phan

00:00 Introduction and Podcast News 03:24 Introducing Eryk Salvaggio, AI Artist and Theorist 05:33 Understanding the Information Age and Noise 09:14 The Diffusion Process and AI Bias 33:35 Ethics of AI and Data Curation 39:09 Exploring the Artwork ‘Swim’ 45:16 AI in Music: Platforms and Experiments 01:00:04 Embracing Noise and Context

Transcript

Eryk Salvaggio: I think as consumers of the music generated by AI, that’s the thing that I want to think about is as a listener, what am I hearing and how do I listen like meaningfully to a piece of AI music that essentially has no meaning.

Introduction: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, the show where we dive deep into sound studies, acoustic ecology, sound art, experimental music, all things sonic. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we’re talking to the digital artist and theorist, Eryk Salvaggio. We’ll be diving into the question of what is AI art and AI music? And we’re going to attack this question on both the technical and the philosophical level.

We’re also going to talk about how to live in what Eryk calls, “the age of noise”. It’s a really interesting conversation, so stick around. But first I want to just go over a few quick show notes. For those of you listening in your podcast feed, you will have noticed that after something of a hiatus, We’re back.

I am looking forward to bringing you this podcast, once a month in 2025. We have a lot of fascinating interviews on tap next month. Journalist Liz Pelly will be with us to discuss her new book on Spotify. I could not be more excited about that. For those of you joining us on YouTube or maybe Spotify, you’ll notice that you can see me.

So it’s taken a lot of work, but we have officially jumped on the video podcast bandwagon. I think today’s episode is going to show the power of that, because we’re going to be talking not only about music, but also about video art made by AI. And it’s going to be helpful to actually see it with your eyes. But no worries to all of our dedicated audio listeners and visually impaired folks.

We’re going to be sure to describe anything relevant that’s seen on the screen. So audio or video, feel free to enjoy Phantom Power in the modality of your choice. And if you’re watching or listening for the first time, please do subscribe wherever you’re encountering this flow of waveforms and pixels.

And finally for longtime listeners who have been following along with my epic saga of trying to pivot from writing academic works to writing for the public, I’m thrilled to announce that I got a book deal. My next book will be coming out on Penguin Press. And for those of you who have been following along with this saga, you’ll know that I’ve done episodes and Patreon posts about how I found an agent, what it’s like to work with an agent, writing a proposal.

and so I’m going to have more bonus content in my Patreon feed where I talk about the final stages of how we crafted the proposal and shopped it to publishers and had meetings and had an auction and all that kind of stuff. So if you want the inside scoop. Just join our Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower.

Okay. Onto today’s guest. My guest today is Eryk Salvaggio. Eryk is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training. Eryk is a researcher at the Meta Lab at Harvard.

He has advanced degrees in media communications, and applied cybernetics from the London School of Economics and the Australian National University. And you may know Salvaggio from his widely read newsletter on AI, Cybernetic Forests. I met Eryk last year at the Unsound Festival in Cracow, Poland, where we were both speaking and Eryk gave this dynamite performance lecture called the age of noise, which incorporated some of his video experiments with artificial intelligence.

And this talk just blew me away. I knew I wanted to bring him to you. So today we’re discussing how AI systems literally dissolve human culture, images, video. ,music, they dissolve them into noise and then use that noise as a starting point to create new objects that look and sound like cultural objects, yet lack human characteristics.

So welcome to the age of noise.

Here’s my interview with Eryk salvaggio All right, Eryk welcome to the show.

Eryk Salvaggio: Thanks so much. I’m really excited to be here.

Mack Hagood: So I had the pleasure hearing you speak at the Unsound Festival in Krakow. And I was just blown away by your talk, which concerned the role of noise in generative AI. And it also made a larger point about noise and contemporary digital life. And the central claim of that talk was that we have basically finished the information age and we’ve entered this, what you call, “age of noise”.

I think we’ll eventually make our way to AI and the age of noise, but I was thinking maybe we could start off by how would you characterize the information age? It’s certainly a term we’ve heard a lot, but how are you thinking about it? Say in the talk that, you gave.

Eryk Salvaggio: If you look at the early age of computing, if you look at the early age of communication, there was this belief and it’s not necessarily a wrong belief, that the more information we have access to, the more knowledge we have about the world and the more agency we have in the world, the more informed our decisions could be.

And so much of technology in that century, starting in the cybernetic era of the forties and the fifties even was around., “How do you get information? And make sense of that information?” And then when we started moving closer to the communication networks, it was more about , “How do you distribute this information so that everybody has access to this information?”

And all of it was around this idea that information is super valuable and that if we have information, we could become in a way, better people, better citizens.

And then with the internet. It becomes this weird mirror where everyone’s able to access information, but they’re also able to produce it. And the production of information is, measured and it’s weighed and it’s distributed by this sort of other worldly power that we’ve come to call the algorithm.

And so everything’s being sorted and we don’t necessarily have access to the information that we need to understand the world. Instead, we have information that is a mess, right? And it’s a fire hose. It’s overwhelming. And so my argument in the age of noise is that this information age piece that was just this access to information has become so overwhelming and so hard to process that it has become essentially noise.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And I loved like there, there’s a point in the talk where you’re talking about the role of noise in the information age. And you’re basically talking about information theory and we should probably have a drinking game for this podcast at time. I mentioned Claude Shannon, cause

I always mentioned Claude Shannon. You talk about, how noise was this thing that sort of crept into circuits and crept into the

channel and that noise was this residual energy of the big bang.

and our task was to remove any traces of noise from our phone calls. And, then we get to this point where the information age has given us so much high quality signal, so to speak, that in itself becomes noise, right? And, what’s. Really interesting to me is that like all of these pieces of data, they’re all indexed to one another, right?

There are captions pointing to pictures and there are descriptions and hyperlinks pointing to songs and whatnot. and this is what growing AI models eat for breakfast. so maybe we can talk,

about how AI models digest this data, let’s maybe get into the nitty gritty of how they work.

Eryk Salvaggio: Generative AI is based on for the most part, something called a diffusion process. So what we are working with when we work with images and video and sounds for the most part is in the current state of the art, something called a diffusion model. And, this idea is it is diffused, right?

So what does that mean? Essentially what it means is as information that we’ve uploaded, wherever it’s been uploaded, whatever the training data may be. Comes into the model to train the model, information is actually stripped out of it. So if you have an image. It becomes really grainy in steps, and it becomes degraded over the course of several steps, until it is an image of visual static.

A similar thing happens with music. Music is ingested to train the model, and what happens is information is taken out of it, and the same thing happens. It’s noise, and ends up producing a kind of wall of white noise. And video is a very similar thing. With video, it’s blur and noise.

Mack Hagood: I noticed when I was like looking up diffusion models that, you’ll see terms like, like Gaussian noise and Markov chain, but you’ll also need to see words like “destroy”. So, basically is the AI is destroying the image? Is it just gradually turning it from information into noise?

Eryk Salvaggio: It is stripping every possible piece of information out of it in steps. And it does this by following this Gaussian distribution, which means that basically, to be very brief about it, there’s a pattern that the noise follows, and the model learns the pattern of noise being introduced. or, information being removed, same thing.

It follows a particular pattern and because it’s a pattern, it can trace it backward. So you go from an image of pure noise back to the original training image or song. And then what happens is when you generate is it creates a random constellation of pixels and whatever your prompt is, going to try to find a similar path.

Now we’re talking as if it’s one image, right? But it is thousands, hundreds. It’s actually billions of images, in the current state of the art for Stable Diffusion and things like that. So you have billions of images, and so you have billions of paths, and when you type a prompt, you’re basically saying, follow the path that more or less, conforms to the images associated with this keyword or this set of keywords.

So if I say flowers for a prompt, it’s going to this paths of flowers. So it is literally a noise that is at the heart of generative systems. And I think that’s really fascinating.

Mack Hagood: And the example of flowers, you actually have, maybe we can take a look at it. You have a piece where you show this dissolution of an image,

Eryk Salvaggio: so in a demonstration that I do quite often, I start with a picture of flowers. Hypothetically, these are flowers that I’ve uploaded to a social media platform or, a photo hosting website, and I’ve captioned it, “Flowers, somehow, flowers for my sweetheart” right?

Maybe I’m really cheesy on Valentine’s Day. And so this image comes in, and it strips this information out. Some of the first things that go away are the backgrounds, right? It emphasizes like high contrast areas, like the petals in the flowers and the stems of the flowers. And as you go, you realize, okay, I can no longer really tell what the background color was, but I can make out what the petals were.

The really basic shapes stay the longest. And so if you’re thinking about this in reverse, which is the generation of the image, the very first thing that’s generated are these sort of abstract shapes. And that’s what gives the image its structure, but the abstract shapes are just can appear anywhere in this noise.

And there’s another sort of image recognition system that’s saying, yeah, that sort of looks like a flower. and it has to be more and more certain as you go. So the first image that is generated, the first step of this process, doesn’t have to be quite like it’s not going to be a perfect flower.

So maybe the threshold of recognition is like 10 percent chance this thing’s a flower, but every step, the criteria gets a little bit higher. And so what is allowed to pass, is what is recognized by an image recognition system as something that resembles a flower. And so that is how it works.

That’s how it becomes noise. That’s why it becomes noise. And then in the generation process, that’s why you start from noise.

Mack Hagood: So the sort of contours of the argument in the talk, as I recall, is that we’ve gone from this era where a signal or information was this hard, one thing that had to be carefully sifted from the background noise of the universe and the big bang, into this moment where there’s so many signals that they become noise and we struggle to consume it.

We struggle to make meaning of all of it because there’s just so much of it that we don’t, know what to do with it. But. Then we get AI, which knows exactly what to do with it. AI is just like “Yum yum, yum” And just gobbles all of this up. It needs that noise in order to do its own process, which is to reduce images to noise, and then just be able to vomit out exponentially more images.

In theory than what we’ve already placed there. So I guess my question is, what do you want us to make of that? Is this just something that sounds scary? Or is there something in your cultural, social, political critique here that, we really need to be aware of.

Eryk Salvaggio: So my feeling is, you have these machines that are taking in this human generated information. Pieces of cultural expression, text we write, archives are coming in here, and it becomes noise. And there’s something there, right? Is that something that we want this culture to happen to this culture that we’ve produced, right?

That it becomes literally, decimated. And then, what’s an important part of that, is that when we talk about noise, it is a really interesting concept. Because there’s so many definitions of what noise is and how we want to navigate noise and typically, we are in a noisy world, right? We operate in noisy environments.

We have some agency over the decisions we make in terms of what we focus on in that noise and what choices we make in the space of noise that we live in. And one strategy is to think about all the stuff that’s happened before and how that fits the noise and how we can keep following those patterns into the future.

And that is one strategy

Mack Hagood: So like retaining some kind of human meaning? And trying to find, based on our past history, what we value what’s important? Or…

Eryk Salvaggio: Think so if we’re a person and we’re trying to navigate something really noisy and loud and we’re overwhelmed, what’s the first thing we do? Is we look for something that is familiar to us, right? And oftentimes if something scary is happening in the world, we’ll try to fit it to a pattern that we’re familiar with “Oh, we’ll give it a label, right?”

And when we give it a label it helps us navigate and understand that thing, but these labels are this label and prediction response from people is actually what we do when we’re scared, right? And if we are feeling playful and relaxed, Then noise can actually be inspiring and fun.

And we can think about different ways to navigate, like the noise of a party is very different from the noise of a riot, right? If you’re at a party and you’re enjoying yourself, you’re laughing and things are loud, you don’t mind. If you’re in a riot, your thing is look for safety, find the thing.

What do I do? Follow the rules that I have in my head of how to get out of this place, and you focus exclusively on the sort of prior references.

And so what I’m trying to say with this is when we’re building AI, what we are modeling when we’re creating a system that is trying to produce creative resemblance to creativity. Whether it’s in an image or a song, is that actually what we’re doing is training.

We’re constraining all the possibilities of this noise. To the patterns that are learned by the training data. So that if I am trying to create something playful and fun, that breaks the boundaries of say genre or plays with the borders of, what image making can be, right? Something really, truly, experimental and playful and creative in the sense of challenging the past, challenging ideas of, the representation that is present in photography, right?

What have people done before? I want to play with that. You don’t actually get to challenge it. You are constrained to the training data. You are constrained to representations in that training data of what has come before. You don’t really, focus on, when you, get these images back, And there’s these generic defaults, right?

You don’t get something challenging. You get something very comforting. You get something very easy to see. You get something very referenceable because you’re actually navigating it to references, right? You’re asking, you’re using the style of an artist or the genre that exists, right?

There’s limits to what’s possible there.

Mack Hagood: But this is funny because that you’re talking about, getting images that are. average or comforting, normate, so to speak. but I really was excited in the very early days of AI video, because it was so not that. Like the, people I’m forgetting the name of, the one artist who was just being like, there were several people who were doing this, but there was one who was particularly good, who made these just hideously, disturbing, uncanny videos of people morphing. And as the AI struggled

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah, no, absolutely. So one of the things that I really like about AI is that it’s glitchy. And I think that there’s a lot to explore in those glitches. So even for me, when I’m using an AI system, I’m interested in how does it actually deal with noise? If the entire purpose of this system is to remove noise, what happens if I ask it to generate noise?

And I’ve been able to play with this and what happens is actually it doesn’t reference things in the training data. What it does instead is get confused, right? And I’m personifying it

in a way, right?

Mack Hagood: To clarify, I wanna make sure I understand what you’re saying here. You ask the AI to make

noise?

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. So I ask it for visual noise, various types of ways of soliciting images of noise. So you can ask for television static, right? You can ask for things that we know because we know how the system works, that the system is designed to remove. So the system is designed to remove noise. It’s designed to remove static because that’s what it’s starting with, but it’s expecting you to ask for something like a flower or a Rembrandt, right?

It’s not asking, it’s not expecting… the designers were not expecting you to ask for images of digital static and the system cannot accommodate giving

Mack Hagood: you…

What does it show you?

Eryk Salvaggio: What it does is, essentially give you abstraction and it gives you computer generated abstraction. And it’s an artifact of the machine essentially producing something randomly and asking this other verification system in the machine, which is for the techies out there.

It’s clip, right? So clip is trying to say, “10 percent chance that is a flower” But now it’s being asked for a 10 percent chance that it’s noise. But it is noise. It is already noise. So it passes through and then it goes to the next step of noise removal. And so then this originating system has to remove noise from this process.

And then it has to send it over to Clip again. And Clip is like, “Yeah, still noise” right? And so then it goes back and it does another step of removing things towards this abstract concept of what noise is. So it’s actually inflicting a kind of paradox. Into the system, or it’s almost mutually exclusive in a way to say it’s an image of noise, but you have to remove the noise to make the image of noise.

So what you get is never truly a representation of static or digital noise in the way that we might imagine it. It’s always structured based on how the model is trying to remove noise. And the system that’s saying, “Try it again, do it again” Failing. So it’s a kind of feedback loop in the system, but it’s a glitched one.

Mack Hagood: I think I wanted to maybe get you to build this out a little bit in terms of, actual dataset that’s used. You mentioned clip, which I believe is like the machine learning tool that interacts with the dataset. Can you talk about the sort of canonical dataset that all of our AI images are coming from right now? Because I think that’s really fascinating.

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. If you’re looking at, the open source tools, which are for the most part, the major one you have right now is Stable Diffusion. A lot of other models exist, but a lot of them are built on top of Stable Diffusion. So essentially Stable Diffusion is if you’re using an open source model, if you’re a company that is starting to work with image generation, you’re taking Stable Diffusion and you’re building on top of it, or you’re, changing it somehow on the backend or you’re fine tuning it.

but Stable Diffusion is like the core. There’s proprietary systems, OpenAI has its own models. We don’t know what’s in there. We don’t know what’s in the training data for those models, Midjourney, we know uses a subset of Stable Diffusions training data. And what this training data is, a data is built on a dataset called LAOIN-5B.

And that is… -5B means 5 billion. It’s 5 billion images that are scraped from the web, all different corners of the web, basically distilled in this process we described. Every one of those images and its captions was reduced to noise. The caption was associated with it as text. And the paths that the noise followed as it degraded that image remembered as an algorithm, essentially like mathematical coordinates.

And transfer it into “the model” as possible paths, which sometimes we call the, vector space.

And so you’re building out these spaces within the model and averaging these things together.

Mack Hagood: A couple of things come to mind here. One is that there’s this kind of a strange irony that AI relies on noise, which is randomness, and yet the way it uses that noise leads to the most average generic. Images possible, right?

Eryk Salvaggio: Because your job is to constrain that noise to its average. What is average in that noise. That’s the goal of the system.

Mack Hagood: And I guess is that why, I might be getting out over my skis here, but is that why they use Gaussian noise? Because Gaussian noise, at least in the sonic domain, is like noise that’s in the bell curve, like the middle. It’s like the average set of noise. It’s, not too high frequency. It’s not too low frequency.

Eryk Salvaggio: So you’re, structurally, already focused on, what I mean when I say the sort of central tendencies. All of this noise is, mashed together, and when you’re generating, you’re finding this sort of average area in the latent space, and then you’re relying on another thing to confirm that indeed is the thing that corresponds to that, right?

An image recognition system, which we know from all kinds of literature around surveillance and stuff, right? It’s pretty biased. and in this case, we’re talking about a bias towards flower shapes, right? But there’s also biases towards people,

Mack Hagood: That was the second thing that I was going to bring up is if we’re talking about averages, we’re talking about stereotypes, right?

And this gets us into, the critiques that a lot of people like, Safia Umoja Noble and the book Algorithms of Oppression, like all these different ways that algorithms rely on datasets that reflect the biases of the past, and then they generate these future biases in these future bias outcomes if they’re not critically engaged with.

Eryk Salvaggio: Absolutely. And so you asked earlier, should we be afraid? I think that this is some of the things we should be thinking about and being critical about. So to take this example, in Dr. Noble’s book, for example, she describes Google search results a couple of years ago, right? And if you did a search of Google for black girls, where did you end up?

The first page of Google search results was pornography, right? Well documented, well researched. And Dr. Noble points this out. And so what does Google do? They changed the algorithm on the back end so that those results are filtered out, right? The thing about it is, that didn’t change the internet.

It changed our access to the internet. And so if you are to look at the training data for these models, and another scholar who’s done great work on this as a Dr. Abiba Barhane, highly recommended. Went in, found all these examples of misogynistic images, racist images, violent images that are in the dataset.

Mack Hagood: This is the dataset that AI that fed on.

Eryk Salvaggio: That was used to train this core image generation model of Stable Diffusion and, there’s, trigger warning, but there was also pornographic contents involving children in that dataset, and that was a huge scandal and as it should be. And so Stanford researchers found this content and they had to take it offline.

The entire idea of having a model like this was that people could go in and audit it, right? Look at what was in there, but there was no mechanism for changing it. And so it was a transparency without any kind of responsibility. but the Stanford researchers, because it was open, they were able to go in and find this content, and now we can’t… actually now we can go in, they’ve adjusted this, they’ve cleaned up that data. So now only in the last couple weeks we are actually able to go and look at what’s in the training data again. But every image that’s in there is contributing to the average that we get out of these systems.

So if you are asking for “black girl” for example, you are getting exactly what Dr. Noble warned about years ago. You are getting pornographic images in the training data. There’s other biases as well that are really fascinating, to look at and think about how they come through and what it means for representation in this space of media in terms of who is defining what a person looks like.

So a classic example is also, and I’m sorry that we’re digging into stereotypes, but I really think it’s an important point. That if you ask for a image of a Mexican person, they will almost undoubtedly be wearing a sombrero, right? This is the idea that it has of images that are labeled Mexican.

And person have sombreros on. Less harmful is a example I did live in Australia. What does a typical Australian look like to an AI system? It looks like a koala. It doesn’t even generate a person. It generates a koala. And because, think about the internet, right? And think about this relationship, this information ecosystem that we’re in and reflecting.

We’re taking these biases. If I’m uploading images that I’ve taken on a trip to Australia, I’m usually not saying here’s an Australian person, right? But if I’m saying Australian, it’s usually Australian kangaroo, Australian wildlife. So these associations are in there. Reduced to noise and then re-generalized .

Through this averaging of all these keywords and all the image data that’s been stripped away of any context whatsoever.

Mack Hagood: The fascinating thing about this to me, or one of many fascinating things is that the data gets generated because what’s happening here is it’s going off of captions of the images, right? And so people are writing and people are going to note a nationality or an ethnicity when it’s the marked category, when it’s the other.

And so you’re actually going to get the perspective of the non- native perspective of Australia. You’re going to get the non- Mexican perspective on Mexico. You’re going to get the non- black version of blackness because if you’re black, it’s not a marked category.

It’s just I took a picture of my sister. It’s not going to be like, I took a picture of my black sister. That is a fascinating and such a glaringly obvious problem that just blows my mind that these tech overlords, never thought about it and/or don’t give a shit.

Eryk Salvaggio: They don’t filter. A Stable Diffusion did not filter the content. That’s obvious, because we had content that is literally illegal in the dataset. So they were not looking at that. They were not curating that dataset. There was no attention paid to what the data was or how it would structure what resulted what emerged from it when it went through this process of, image generation as a model, right?

When it became a model, there was no thinking about what was going to result from that model. But I think the point is, made that fundamentally without this oversight, without this curation of the data that we use, and especially now that most of the conversation around data is how do we get more of it, right?

That’s what the companies are primarily concerned about. When you get more of it, you will also get more bias. And this is actually the subject of that, paper by Dr. Barhane, if you scale, you also scale hate.

That’s the, points that Dr. Barhane makes.

Mack Hagood: So When gave that talk in Poland, you spoke a lot about the difference between a dataset and an archive. And I think this kind of gets to what you’re talking about here. There’s a curatorial responsibility in an archive. There’s an ethics, to how, let’s say, a set of artifacts from that archive are curated in an exhibit

for example. A whole history of people thinking about, people like anthropologists and museum curators and others thinking about the ethics of the archive, especially in relation to our colonial heritage and the ways that things were stolen from, people around the world. None of that ethics of curation seems to be present in these datasets and the people who created these datasets don’t seem to have any concept of this.

Eryk Salvaggio: There’s a myth, I think I would argue, and myth in the sense that it is a shared belief that informs the way that people work and make and do in the AI space. And right now, this myth… And I don’t necessarily mean it’s false. I just mean it is a shared belief among the people building these things, is that the bigger your datasets, the more you scale the information that you train on, the more I hesitate to say this, because it is true, but I think that it to me, it sounds very silly, but almost the more self aware the model becomes.

In a sense that if you gather enough data, you can start asking the data to curate itself, right?

This is this idea…

Mack Hagood: is just the bullshit that they’ve been talking about since Ray Kurzweil with… “We’re just going to get enough computers hooked together that it’s just going to become the singularity and consciousness” it’s like quantity doesn’t scale to intelligence, right? Like these are different things that we’re talking about here.

Eryk Salvaggio: And it is very likely. So scale, we know scale does improve some things, right? But the question is, what does it improve? One thing we have not seen is, that scale reduces the amount of so called “hallucinations”, right? Which is just the machine in, this is an LLMs, right? Large language models. The machines still give bad information. But the argument is that if there’s more data, it’ll stop giving bad information, but we haven’t actually seen that. What we have seen is it gets better at multi-modality, right? I can ask it to turn a white, a physics white paper into a poem, right? It can do that kind of transfer. It can generate more realistic looking text. But ultimately sometimes what it does is generate more convincing texts that’s still factually not referencing the real world, right? It’s not referencing an understanding in any way, because it can’t. Because it doesn’t. But here we’re talking about large language models, which is a whole other can of worms.

But with images to get to this original point, when you’re talking to a museum curator, or you’re talking to an archivist, there is a sense of responsibility. There’s a been a cultivation of ethics, and there’s been reckoning with the failures of those responsibilities and ethics to write, which is really important.

Is that when those things have gone off the rails when, the voice of power is overdetermined what is included in an archive or excluded from an archive, there has been an ability to say, “Shame on you for doing that” With the AI model, who do you point a finger at? It’s almost at this point, you can say, yes, it’s the, people building the dataset.

But they pass it on to the people who are training models on that dataset. And those companies are passing that onto the users who are prompting it irresponsibly. And then the users are saying, “Why are you letting me do this?” and so the blame is, distributed, but I really think that it lays in the foundation of who is gathering this information and who is making the decision to use this information in models that are then being distributed to the general public, right?

That is, there is a responsibility chain there, and we really should be thinking about how do we curate data? And what are the biases of data? But the other problem is you’re not going to solve these issues. You can’t get rid of bias, because there’s always a human making decisions that there are 5 billion images you’re not going to review.

You’re not going to expose to a sort of, auditing process by anthropologists and curators, right? And so there’s some real issues with scale as it applies to this question.

Mack Hagood: In a moment, I want to switch over to something a little more tightly in the wheelhouse of, this podcast about sound, which is how, what you’re talking about applies to music.

But first, maybe we can finish up talking about images by, discussing a piece of yours called “Swim”. And again, maybe for the video podcast, we can, put it up on the screen, but, maybe describe it for our podcast listeners, and non sighted folks tell us what this work is and then, and how you’re trying to engage with the issues that you’re discussing.

Eryk Salvaggio: “Swim” is a nine minute long video piece and there’s three components to it. And so if you can imagine sort of a background, this background is images generated through this glitching process that I’ve described of asking Midjourney in this case, particularly Midjourney. To generate images of noise and actually blending images of noise together, so that what it is trying to do is find patterns in the noise failing and giving me the sort of results, right?

So I’ve taken this failure of the AI system and the result is, in this particular case was a series of, smeary, foggy, almost bubbly looking, digital noise and so this is the background that it’s morphing. It’s, animated.

And on top of that background is an image, I think it’s from the 1920s. it’s an image that comes from the University of Chicago’s video archive of a swimmer. The swimmer is, Ninny Shipley, the film is categorized as erotic entertainment. It is very tame. I don’t want to get the wrong idea of what this video is.

It is a woman swimming underwater, in a bathing suit, right? Full, body bathing suit. And to me, what I’m trying to think about with this process, before I describe what happens in the videos, I wanted to put this image from the archive into dialogue. With an image that was impossible for a AI image generator to generate, right?

So this is the two layers of this piece. and so I took the swimmer and I slowed the swimmer down over the course of nine minutes. And the audio score is also the original sort of jaunty jazz stag party, soundtrack slowed down as well. And it becomes almost, I don’t know. It has this sort of elegiac…

Mack Hagood: The music’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous.

Eryk Salvaggio: I can’t take much credit for it, but it is a slowed down over. So this 1. 5 minute long piece is slowed down to 9 minutes long, including the audio. And then there’s this 3rd layer, That is turning the process of diffusion, into a visual element of the piece. So over the course of nine minutes, what happens in an instance when you’re training a diffusion model is done over slowly.

And so you’re seeing the disintegration of this image, which is an introduction of noise. So you see the image break apart and you see it break apart into static and the patterns of static emerge, that blends the noise of the background with the foreground of the swimmer. And what I’m trying to do in a way, the way I see it, is I’m trying to use AI and the components of AI that are in the process, almost the sort of machinic artifacts the AI produces, for us to have a way of understanding and visualizing what its interaction is with archives and with history, right? That these things that have an individual meaning and context come up against this impossibility of generating, regenerating something that references it, right? There’s no longer a reference when we break something down.

The flower that is generated has no reference to the flower that I have shared online for my wife on valentine’s day,

right? And that’s a small thing, but there’s bigger things too, there’s history, there’s ways of telling stories that are getting lost in this breakup into noise and separation of image and the labels we assign to image into noise and keywords that gets to, for me, to this distinction between our relationship to something in an archive and our relationship to something that we call a data set.

Which is that a dataset is a thing. We treat it as one thing, but it is actually multiple things that are comprising it, as opposed to an archive where our attention is, what is the history of the objects in this archive? How is that history being told? What are the connections between these pieces? Not just through a lens of which pixels go next to which pixel, right?

Because we don’t care that there are seven images of people in the archive, right? We care about who those people are and what, part of the story belongs to them. With a dataset in this context, we lose that. They just become the shape of people. And I think there’s some grappling that, we can do about that relationship and that transition, especially as we are generating more and more images based on history that kind of erase history at the same time.

There’s a, almost a duty or an obligation of care to what the sources are that formulate that.

Mack Hagood: So let’s talk about sound. Let’s talk about, recent work where you’re thinking about, platforms like UDO and Suno. Do you, want to maybe talk about what those are?

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. So it’s, very similar. They’re still diffusion models. They’re still taking representations of sound and they are breaking those down. Now, your audience is probably well familiar with waveforms, but you know for those who aren’t it’s the shape of air, right?

Represented visually. That shapes are the vibration of our eardrums, right? This becomes Just the line, in the training process. And this line becomes the thing to find in a solid white wall of waveform data, which is white noise. And so these models, similar to images, are trained to scrape things away in the direction of, say, a snare drum.

So you get the sort of loud spike at the beginning and the trailing away, right? You carve that out of noise. And so in very short time, what we’ve come to see is the generation of complete audio tracks. So this is, these are the tools that we’re looking at. UDO. Suno, and others, there’s many others, and sure to be many more, that are just oriented around producing a track, a full track, and this is the area that I’m starting to look at now with a lot of interest.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Maybe we could talk about your experiments with, this kind of diffusion model created music, which is, you have a track called “Sounds Like Music”.

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. So “Sounds Like Music” is a reflection of a lot of the ways that I’ve been trying to play with these models. It’s similar to the ways that I was playing with vision or image models, which is to say, let’s try to figure out what the system relies upon and how we steer that system and ways that we might find glitches or find ways of introducing, unexpected user behavior into the system in order to make music that either reflects the sort of process that it uses to generate the audio or emphasizes to the listener what it is that they are exactly listening to. And so I’m trying to think critically about what I’m making and how I’m making it and sounds like music is basically this, concepts of thinking through what is exactly the thing that we are hearing when we are listening to a diffusion based song.

Because, for the first thing, it’s not meant to be expressive of ideas or emotions the ways that a lot of music might be, particularly pop music, right? What it is designed to be , essentially, is plausible. other words, it has to be generated, passed through something that labels it in the context of yes, this is associated with a waveform data that clusters around this idea of, indie or opera or yacht rock.

And this sounds like yacht rock, this sounds like opera, right? The, waveform information resembles the waveform information common to the keywords that have been given to me, which is the genre tag. . The idea is, it has to be plausible. It has to sound like music. And I think that offers a really, pointed way of engaging with what we’re listening to.

Which is, how does it sound like music? And how might it not sound like music? Because the other thing that’s happening, and I think in this song, you can really pick out, pick it up, is that you are taking an image of white noise, and just like we said before, you can reduce that to the shape of a snare drum.

This is generating an entire track. It’s not generating bass, drums, vocals, and then mixing them. It is one giant wall of noise that is being reduced until more or less it sounds like drums, and bass, and vocals. So it’s all one sound that we are listening to that sounds like music. Now what we’re talking about is essentially really compressed, but even with compression, you’re taking different pieces of sound and compressing them into a single wave.

This thing, those forms of, those like lines of music have never been separate. They’ve always been compressed together, and I think this is a really interesting way to listen to this music. You can listen to this song “Sounds Like Music”. And if I would encourage people, if they do to think about how they’re hearing it in the sense of what is it doing to convince you.

That this is music, that this is plausible, right? How is the system figuring out this is passable as music, but also what does it sound like? What artifacts can you hear? What are the decisions that are being made from step to step in this song to produce it according to this constraint of sounding like whatever this genre of music is.

Mack Hagood: This is like getting very much into the weeds and, I don’t want to detract. My question… I love what you’re saying. I’m afraid I’m going to detract from it, but I’m just trying to wrap my mind around… so it’s easy for me to picture the generation of a still image, right?

You’ve got this palette of noise, the constraints of the dimensions of the image you want to generate, and then you whittle away from the image of the flower or whatever, right? Video and audio are a little harder for me to wrap my head around. So it’s do you need to know how long the, song is going to be? And by “you” does the AI need to know how long of a track this is going to be in advance? So basically it’s got three minutes of white noise, and then it’s going to sculpt a three minute trance techno song out of it. You know what I mean?

Eryk Salvaggio: I do. Yeah, you’re, touching a bit on, sound over time, right? The temporality of sound or music in particular, right? And, so there’s, right now, there’s so many different models, it’s hard to give like a one size fits all answer. But what might help is looking at the very beginning of a particular one, which is UDEO and Suno to some degree, right?

So these are the big ones. As far as I’m concerned, that the moments that we’re speaking next week, it might be different, but if you look at the very beginning, what they were capable of doing is generating about a 32 second window and what it would do is essentially it would create this, spectrogram.

And the spectrogram would be a pattern that was associated with 32 seconds of sound because the spectrogram represents sound over time or transitions over time, frequencies and stuff like that over time, you can generate this and then you could transfer that data back by tasting. Okay, this last slice is the last two seconds or whatever, right?

This first slice of the first two seconds and everything in between is distributed evenly amongst that. So you have, an image that is structuring your 32 seconds of sound. Which is what is also really interesting about this current heart of AI is that, it’s an image of sounds that is being transformed to do the sound of sound,

Mack Hagood: Is AI

better at EDM because the, tempos tend to be more standardized. I find that AI seems to be pretty good at creating a drop,

do you find that at all? Certainly when it comes to like vocals, everything gets very uncanny and spooky very quickly, which I enjoy. But some of the techno sounding stuff sounds more plausible to use your word than

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah.

Mack Hagood: Some more organic music does.

Eryk Salvaggio: I’m speculating, I think a lot of that has to do with the compression, right? A lot of techno is like sounds compressed. They’re using like there’s a noise, there’s an embrace of noise in techno to begin with, to some extent. And the, beat is standard.

I don’t want to, I, don’t want to sound like I’m insulting techno by boiling it down to like standards formulas. But, there are patterns that come, I think, as a result of it being from a machine in the first place. from, the sort of structures of, digital audio workstations.

You have grids that you work with in a, in these things that most people don’t always stick to the grid, but oftentimes, the system is essentially generating the image of a grid. So at the very least, those beats are very simple and it’s identifiable, but I also would push back a little bit on the idea that, I think it’s more plausible sounding, but a lot of the stuff that if you are at the opportunity to adjust what’s called temperature in these audio tracks, the amount of rigidity, is less. Like you reduce the amount of rigidity in the structure, and so you can actually get some pretty wild compositions. But what’s interesting about these compositions is they will still follow, within still I don’t want to say standard deviation, right? But they still cling to the central tendencies.

In the training data. So you can, I call it Deerhoof or Kitsch are the suit to poles. if you’re familiar with the band Deerhoof, they play these like solid rock beats, right? But then suddenly they’ll transform to a techno beat and they’ll be playing jazz over it.

And you can make that kind of thing, but what’s really important distinction is that the machine is not deciding to do that. It is finding sort of the average areas of multiple genres and pasting them together in a way that coheres to the tendencies that have been defined for it in terms of musical structure.

So it’s not creative in the sense that Deerhoof is creative. It

Mack Hagood: I would say maybe it’s even more like 100 gecs. I don’t know

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah, that’s another good example. Yeah. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: I’m a fan of both so I definitely don’t want to besmirch either band by saying they sound like AI.

Eryk Salvaggio: No, but in a way, what it is getting at is that that’s actually hard for a human to do, right? That’s actually like the sign of a skilled and creative thinker is to think about what your genres are and what those constraints are and how to break them. Whereas what you do with AI is you tell it what the genre is and it tells you here’s roughly, here’s a rough approximation of that genre.

Or you say here’s the genre, but go way out there to these other genres and it’ll find the rough approximation of multiple genres. And then average all of these things together. So there’s no decision making process there, right? It is purely determined by what’s in the training data and how it resembles or how it can be assembled according to prediction.

So it’s, a prediction, right? These patterns of music are studied for patterns because patterns are predictable. And when you ask it to reproduce these patterns, it reproduces predictable patterns. You can assemble those patterns in wild ways, which is where human creativity does come in, I think, but you’re also losing decisions from, moment to moment about what the music is going to do.

So again, it’s about sort of our definitions and our relationships to these things. Like how are we thinking critically about the music? I think as consumers of the music generated by AI, that’s the thing that I want to think about is as a listener, what am I hearing and how do I listen like meaningfully to a piece of AI music that essentially has no meaning.

It’s a reference to the data. It’s a reference to the processes that make it, how do I listen for those things? Which is going to be different from the way you might listen to a piece of music from Deerhoof or 1000 gecs.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Any meaning is going to have to be attributed to the AI generated content by the listener. And so that really, gets us into the questions of what is music for…

Eryk Salvaggio: And why do we listen?

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Why, do we listen? You use the term hypothetical music. AI is taking noise the noise of human music history, and then putting out some hypothetical offerings for us to do with what we will. In the talk that I saw you give, as I recall, you ended with something of a plea for meaning in this age of noise. And so this idea that we would have to be the ones to bring the meaning to the music, made me think of that. So maybe as we wind down here, can, you talk about how we might restore meaning in an age of noise?

Eryk Salvaggio: My belief is that one of the ways we think about noise is often about how we constrain and control it. And that when we lean on this response to noise, we often encounter problems. Because noise is a part of the world, and it is really the desire for control and definition in response to that noise that introduces, I would say, a lot of problems politically, personally, and socially.

It is not necessarily the noise, but our response to it that creates a lot of these issues, a lot of this, over determination of the possible things that can happen in the world. Because we are uncomfortable by noise. Noise is oftentimes something that we react to out of fear, and so we seek to constrain it.

And AI is a model of that response. It is a desire. It reflects a desire to constrain the paths of possibility to what has come before, to what is in the training data and to predict what might come out of that. If we continued along the lines of the things that have put that day training data together in the first place.

So if you’re generating images, you’re getting stereotypical images. If you’re generating music, you’re getting music that is a reference to patterns found in other music, which was what I mean by the hypothetical. And so what I think is actually the response to noise that we need to embrace is to figure out what are the pieces of the noise, how to hone in on the noise without the elimination of what surrounds it.

What is the context, right? Because right now, what we’re talking about is noise that is made of overwhelming seas of context, a million points of data coming into us at once. And each of those points of data has a context.

And there’s a difference between saying no, to the noise and engaging with the noise. Through a kind of curiosity and engagement. That says this is a piece of noise among many, and I’m aware of the other noise and I’m not going to say it is invalidated or needs to be eliminated or eradicated, right?

But rather that I am engaging with a single point of noise at this particular time and I’m going to give it my attention and I’m going to understand its context. I’m going to think about how this piece that I’m thinking about be of no as noise is a signal and recognize that these are signals, right?

That all of this information coming at us is signal. It’s just overwhelming, but that we can slow down and we can focus on it and we can think about it at a time, one piece at a time without rushing necessarily to cancel all the other noise out. Because we have to learn to live amongst the noise. We need to embrace the fuzziness that we live in around borders and definitions and categories.

And right now, AI is really rigidly tied to these categories and definitions and keywords, right? And it is shaping noise in a way that is aimed at reduction of noise, as opposed to what really introduces the variety and the diversity of an experience of being alive, which is in many ways noise.

Noise can be a source of joy if we don’t respond to it with panic and a desire to control and shape it into something familiar. What if we embrace that noise, try to understand the context that it comes from and think about what we can do from a position of play instead of fear and control. So I say, let’s think about elevating context.

Rather than enforcing control over the noise that comes into our lives.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, that’s lovely. And man, does it sound a lot like the argument I’m making in my book that I’m working on right now, like this book that I’m writing about the history and the future of noise cancellation, white noise machines, algorithmic filter bubbles, all of these different ways that we try to control experiences of noise that we experience.

And paradoxically, it’s this desire to control our surroundings that actually makes us most controllable and actually limits our freedom and limits our ability to be spontaneous, and to deviate from past habits and routines on a personal and a historical level. So I couldn’t agree with you more about what you just said.

And I just want to thank you for being on the show. This has been fascinating.

Eryk Salvaggio: Thanks so much. Lovely to be here. And thanks so much for your work. The noise cancellation things are a real part of thinking about this as well.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. we’re, we’ve been like cruising between these different registers of this notorious word noise. But I’m really glad for that sort of multiplicity of noise, because that’s the only way we both wound up at the conference together. So usually I shake my fist at like how, fuzzy it is when people use the word noise.

But in this case, I was like, “Oh…”

Eryk Salvaggio: I’m trying to embrace that fuzziness!

Right? I think it’s important to have a space of fuzziness.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, for sure. That, yeah, that was possibility space of noise.

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah.

Mack Hagood: All right. Thanks, Eryk. This been a blast.

Eryk Salvaggio: It has. Thanks so much.

Mack Hagood: And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Eryk for being on the show. You can learn more about all things Eryk Salvaggio at cyberneticforests.com and click on the newsletter tab to get more of Eryk’s brilliance in written form on the regular with his newsletter, see show notes, links, and more for this episode at phantompod.org. Please remember to subscribe to us and rate and review us in your platform of choice and join us at Patreon. We have free and paid memberships where you can get news and exclusive content like the coming backstory on my deal the Penguin. Thanks to my Miami University assistants, Katelyn Phan, Nisso Sascha, and Lauren Kelley for their help with the show.

And I want to give special thanks to Dylan McConnell, AKA tiny little hammers. Dylan created our logo and he also helped me animate it for the digital video age. You can find his, work at tinylittlehammers.com. Thanks also to Josiah Wolf from the band Y. He helped me spice up our intro soundscape with some modular goodness.

So thanks, Josiah. And the one and only Alex Blue, Blue the Fifth did our outro music. Got some feedback on our video turn. Send it to Mack at Mactrasound. com.

This is a work in progress and, oh, and thanks to my dog Pearl for hanging out in the studio with me today. All right. Anyway, peace y’all. Happy new year. See you next month with Liz Pelly.

The post Are AI art and music really just noise? (Eryk Salvaggio) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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Why We’re Obsessed with Podcasts: Genre, Intimacy, and Narrative Audio w/ Neil Verma

Fri, 24 May 2024 12:07:00 -0000

Today we discuss how narrative podcasts work, the role they’ve played in American culture and how they’ve shaped our understanding of podcasting as a genre and an industry. Neil Verma’s new book, Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, offers a rich analysis of the recent so-called golden age of podcasting. Verma studied around 300 podcasts and listened to several thousand episodes from between the fall of 2014 when Serial became a huge hit to the start of the Covid pandemic and early 2020. It was a period when podcasts—and especially genres like narrative nonfiction and true crime—were one of the biggest media trends going. At the heart of these genres, Verma writes, was obsession–a character obsessed with something, a reporter obsessed with that character, and listeners obsessed with the resulting narrative podcast.

Neil Verma is associate professor in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University and co-founder of its MA program in Sound Arts and Industries. Verma is an expert in the history of audio fiction, sound studies, and media history more broadly. He is best known for his landmark 2012 book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Verma has been a consultant for a variety of radio and film projects, including Martin Scorsese’s film Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). In addition to his research, Verma has also created experimental sound recordings for broadcast. His compositions have been selected for several radio art festivals around the world, winning an honorable mention from the Sound of the Year awards in the U.K in 2020.

For a fascinating listener Q+A with Neil, visit patreon.com/phantompower and get free access to this bonus episode in our patrons-only feed.

Finally, we have big news: This will be the final episode of Phantom Power. But don’t worry, Mack will be launching a new podcast about sound in early 2025. To make sure you hear about the new show, receive our new newsletter, and get bonus podcast content in the coming months, sign up for a free or paid membership at patreon.com/phantompower.

Transcript

Mack Hagood 00:00

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we talk with Neil Verma, author of the new book Narrative Podcasting In an Age of Obsession. Neil offers a rich, multifaceted and methodologically creative analysis of the so-called Golden Age of podcasting. And it’s pretty wild how intensively he studied this recent period of history, investigating around 300 podcasts and listening to several 1000 episodes, from between the fall of 2014 when Serial became a huge hit to the start of the COVID pandemic in early 2020. This was a period when podcasts and especially ones in genres like narrative nonfiction and true crime, were really one of the biggest media trends of that moment.

And we’re going to talk about how narrative podcasts work, the role that they played in American culture, and how they shaped the cultural understanding of podcasting as a genre, and an industry. But first, last episode, I promised you some big news about this podcast. And here it is. This episode is not only our 15th, and final episode of the season, it’s also the last episode of Phantom Power. I’ve been producing this show since 2018, we’ve done over 50 episodes, and I’ve loved pretty much every minute of it. It’s been such a privilege to bring you these amazing guests, forge connections, and help foster a community in sound studies and acoustic ecology. It’s truly been one of the most fulfilling things that’s happened in my academic career. So why am I ending the show? Well, I’m starting a new podcast, it’s still going to be about sound, it’s still going to engage with the theories and practices of sound studies and acoustic ecology and sound art. But it’s going to be a more public facing and accessible kind of show.

So you know, I’ve had this NEH grant for this year. And while I’ve been producing this show, and writing a book proposal for a trade press book, and while I’ve been doing that stuff, I’ve also been working about 20 hours a week on developing this new podcast. And just like I’m pivoting from writing an academic book to a mainstream nonfiction book, I want to do the same thing here, I want to present a highly polished narrative podcast for the public. I don’t want to say too much more about it right now. But just know that I’ll still be interviewing experts and artists, but the focus will be on telling stories, not in providing a really, you know, long form interview. So in a way, this is going to be getting back to what we attempted in the very early days of Phantom Power, but with even higher production values. I’m a finalist for a New America Foundation Fellowship. So if that comes through, I’m going to put all of those resources into this new podcast. And the good news is, well, actually, I think there are a few good pieces of news for Phantom Power listeners. The first one is that I’m going to do what’s called “feed jacking”. So the new show is just going to show up right here in the Phantom Power feed. So you’re not going to have to go look for it or do anything to get the new show when it launches in early 2025.

Second, for those folks who are members of the Patreon, I’m going to keep dropping the occasional long form interview. I love Phantom Power for those who want that deeper dive. And I also, I’m going to have a newsletter because I thought I wasn’t enough of a walking cliche by having a podcast, I really needed to add the newsletter component to it. So yes, a newsletter, it’s going to have news about sound original essays, updates on my from my book research, and interviews with sound scholars. And of course, I’ll be updating you on the progress of the new show through that newsletter. If you’re interested in the newsletter, just sign up at patreon.com/Phantom Power for a free membership or a paid membership. And I’ll send that your way. It won’t be too frequent, probably once or twice a month. I’d also love for folks to sign up for a free membership just so that I can reach out this summer with a listener survey.

I’m developing this listener survey to help me as I tried to figure out this new show and what it’s going to be. By the way, I got a Spotify message from a listener who said they couldn’t find the free option on Patreon. If you just go to the Patreon site, it’s a button right there at the top of the page that lets you join for free. And by the way, at the end of this episode, I’m going to thank by name all of our paid subscribers who have helped support the show this season. One other bit of cool news.

Some of you may be familiar with the New Books Network. They are a really important podcast network that is distributing and documenting for posterity 1000s of conversations about new books you in all kinds of academic fields, and two weeks ago, they began rebroadcasting all episodes of Phantom Power in order once a week on the new books in sound studies feed, so this is going to take a year for them to release all the episodes week by week. So if anyone is interested in hearing it all again, or telling a friend, just Google new books and sound studies, or hit the link in the show notes.

And finally, thanks to all of you who got in touch, to let me know how you use the podcast in your classes or in your work as a sound scholar or practitioner, y’all are doing some really cool stuff. And it’s so gratifying to hear how this show plays a tiny part in it. As I go up for full professor, I’m trying to compile a list of how Phantom Power has been used in university settings. So if you’re listening and you haven’t sent me an email, and you have something to add, please let me know. So just email me at hagoodwm@miami.oh.edu That is h-a-g-o-o-d-w-m as in Mack. And thank you. Okay. Wow, that was a lot of stuff. Again, thanks to all of you for listening. I hope you’ll stick around for the new show and also take the survey when I put it out so I can get some feedback in developing the new one.

Okay, let’s get to it. Let’s talk about our guests. Neil Verma is one of the most innovative scholars I know of working in radio and podcast studies. He’s an associate professor in Radio, Television and Film and co-founder of the MA program in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University. He co-founded that with past Phantom Power guests, Jacob Smith. Verma is an expert in the history of audio fiction, sound studies and media history more broadly, like a lot of great radio and sound scholars. Neil’s from Canada, he grew up in Burlington, Ontario, a small town 50 miles west of Toronto. He’s the son of a half French Canadian half Anglo Canadian school teacher, mom, and a dad who was a scientist originally from India.

Neil Verma 07:15

He was the only brown skinned paleontologist in Canada in the 60s. And so he spent about 10 years trying to make a go of that and didn’t have a lot of success. So eventually, he kind of quit academia and started a business like a lot of immigrant families do. He started a printing company. And so we had sort of a mom and pop printing company when I was a kid.

Mack Hagood 07:35

Radio wasn’t an obsession for Neil as a kid, but it was a constant companion.

Neil Verma 07:40

I can’t remember a time when a radio wasn’t on in my kitchen. So yeah, part of the background texture of life for me when I was a child, but also so obvious, and so present that you don’t think about it. It’s like air.

Mack Hagood 07:54

Neil got a BA in English from McGill University and a PhD in the history of culture from University of Chicago. He’s best known for his landmark 2012 book Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for cinema and media studies where he is now a board member. By the way, if you haven’t dug into Theater of the Mind, you should really check it out. Even if you have no interest in radio drama, per se. Neil’s analysis of microphone techniques and how mic placement constructs a sense of auditory space is just so detailed and so useful. Neil is such an expert on radio drama that he was brought in as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, you might remember the movie ends in that radio drama segment. And Neil was the consultant that made sure that all of that stuff was historically accurate. So again, Neil’s new book is called Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession. And before we got into the obsession part, I asked Neil to define narrative podcasting, how would he define his object of study in this book?

Neil Verma 09:09

So it’s both temporally located and structurally designed? Right? So I think that there’s a certain period where narrative podcasting has its most important prominence. And that’s essentially from the first season of Serial in 2014. To essentially now, I feel like it’s kind of at a point where the form has become less part of the center of podcasting as a conversation. The second way I define it is that narrative podcasts in natural language like if you listen to how podcasters describe their work, often what they talk about when they mean narrative is a form of story audio storytelling that oscillates between what we might call like a mimetic scene. So something that they’ve recorded on tape, maybe it’s an interview, maybe it’s an investigation in a certain place. And then something that’s narrated.

So someone in a studio is talking, reading a script, often to a microphone. And that interplay between those two things is often described as narrative podcasting. Another way of talking about it is scripted podcasting. So podcasters often talk about it as a, you know, there’s one mode of operating, which is kind of like what we’re doing right now, which is talking to one another. Now, obviously, there’s often some scripting, or loose scripting in those circumstances. And then there’s the scripted podcast, which means like you have written it, you’ve edited it, it has a script, it has a text, it has a narrative life outside of that. Yeah. And then there’s a wide variety of ways in which podcasters define this kind of storytelling, often, it’s formulas that were derived from very successful podcasts like This American Life, where they’ll often say that, you know, you have to have a moment of tension, a detail, you have to have a moment of reflection, they’re often there are different formulas that are used to describe that sometimes they use it as physics, they sometimes use the word physics to describe it.

So there’s a wide variety of definitions out there. I don’t necessarily subscribe to one. I think that narrativity is something that is contested. And its contestation is part of what’s interesting about it. That said, I mean, the podcasts that interest me most are those that have that kind of oscillation that I’m talking about, where there’ll be a scripted part where a person is talking to a microphone. And they’ll also be something that is like a scene or tape to which the narrator is talking. These are usually the podcasts that take the form of history podcasts, True Crime podcasts journalist like long form journalism, or audio dramas. And that’s typically the form they take, they’re generally more expensive to make than chat based podcasts. And, and even though they are a relatively marginal part of the overall podcasting landscape, they tend to have a larger cultural investment in them, for one reason or another.

Mack Hagood 12:19

Yeah, and I’d like to come back to that in a moment. But maybe just to hold on to this sort of formal definition that you’re giving us here of this, this physics of podcasting, where there’s a sequence of actions, there’s the tape that the producer brings into the studio. But then there’s also the you know, one way I read glass of This American Life, put it as like the anecdote reflection point model, right, where you’re giving us the sequence of actions in in the course of a narrative, and then we pop out of the frame, and we’re back in the studio. And we’re like, why are we talking about this? I believe this has also been called, like the American style. Can you maybe talk a little bit about it?

Neil Verma 13:03

Yeah, so Shavon McHugh, who started the radio doc review, kind of well known journalism scholar and journalist who makes podcasts as well, she’s a friend of mine. And so she often speaks kind of the American style of narration. An American here should denote something like This American Life, although it also refers to other kinds of shows like Snap Judgment-Radiolab to some extent.

And this is kind of narrative driven in the sense that there is, the narrator ends up being the main character, it’s often someone who is talking to tape quite a bit, a lot of tape, it’s very framed. And it feels as if we’re on a journey with a journalist who’s trying to find something out.

Mack Hagood 13:44

And that’s, that kind of brings us to what I think are maybe the emotional tone or emotional stakes of this mode of narrative podcasts, which is there’s a journalist who’s taking us on this intimate journey, there’s something intimate about this genre. Would you agree?

Neil Verma 14:03

Yeah. The term intimacy is a complicated one to think about, partly because it’s really ubiquitous when people talk about radio of any form. And I think about it because of the way I look, the way I look at objects, like I think of it as an aesthetic, yeah, more than as something that’s innate to the medium.

When we say intimacy, what do we mean? We mean, we have one narrator, their voice is closer to us than everybody else’s voice. Yeah, we know their name. They tell us their name. And we hear from them a lot. We feel very aligned with them. And those are all aesthetic choices. You know, you don’t have to tell the story that way. And often, that’s just the starting point for the aesthetic of the show. Often, someone, a host with whom we have an intimate connection will kind of pass us off to someone else, or take us through a world in a different kind of way. And so you know that I think that’s one dimension of intimacy. That’s aesthetic. Another dimension of intimacy, that, you know, I think is important.

And you know, I’ve actually thought of your work a lot in this case is, often when we talk about the intimacy of audio, we’re talking about the intimacy of it, of our own experience of it are kind of like that, we tend to listen to it in headphones, we tend to listen to it through our phone, which is connected to our identity. And so there’s also a kind of like, proximal story to tell about intimacy that isn’t inherent to the medium, exactly. But it is somehow present in the technological configuration that most people experience it in. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so we’ve thought about the sort of formal characteristics of narrative podcasting, and this kind of construction of intimacy that we sort of take for granted, probably culturally. Another question I have for you is why is this specific sub genre of podcasting, as you said, it’s not even most podcasts? Why does it seem to become synonymous with podcasting itself?

Like, if you look at just if you just Google the history of podcasting, the first decade of the medium, like, basically, no one talks about it? Like if you look through these histories, they rarely talk about any shows in the first decade, it really all seems to start with this American life, and Serial like in 2014. Why has this genre become sort of definitional of podcasting? It’s largely because of other media. Because of this conversation, the conversation around these kinds of narrative podcasts took place in mainstream media in the New York Times in Vanity Fair in The Guardian. There were parodies on Saturday Night Live. Yeah, that ‘s also it’s experience was trackable. Because these podcasts grew up around the same time as social media. You could argue that one of the most important features of Serials popularity had to do with its relationship with Reddit and the enormous number of conversational threads that took place on Reddit as a result of the Serial serie-ality. So I think there’s a historical coincidence to it, and also a way in which it crossed into certain kinds of publications. It also is connected to prestige, audio work that had been going on in public radio stations for a generation before that. And so the kinds of creators who ended up making podcasts, many of them had cut their teeth on, you know, high end NPR shows that were really well produced and had incredible discipline to them.

Many of them learn their craft from really excellent storytellers and kind of branched off of that. And then there’s also a part of it that kind of gets into the theme of the book, which is that the structure of a lot of podcasts, meaning how they’re oriented, tends to solicit an obsessive relationship with their listeners. And so you don’t just listen to something and then let go of it. You listen to something and feel called to respond or feel, like enjoined towards a task. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to keep thinking about it. And so one of the things that I found in a lot of the press coverage of Serial when it started to come out, was this word obsession, just kept coming over and over and over again, I’m obsessed with this podcast. This podcast obsesses me. And it’s really interesting to me that that’s the framework in which people culturally responded to this particular kind of text. I also think about it in contradistinction to streaming television, which was also kind of mourned at this moment.

Streaming television, people describe using metaphors of addiction. I’m addicted to this, I’m binging this. But for podcasts, it was more about obsession, it had this more kind of deep emotional monomaniacal relationship. Nobody said that about This American Life. These were shows that were great, and he liked them. But you didn’t have that experience of it. And so that’s one of the things I really wanted to dig into with the book is like, what do we mean, when we use this word obsession? What is it in the text itself? Yeah, that gives us a permission structure to have an obsessive relationship to it. And more fundamentally, what does it mean to have an obsessive relationship to an art object?

I mean, you’re making this broader argument. And I have to say, I had never thought of it this way. But this concept of obsession really is such a cool unlock on what was going on in this moment, where, like, you’re making this broader argument about the role that narrative podcast played in our like, not just the culture, but sort of the media ecology, at least as I’m reading what you’re talking about. I mean, there’s I feel like there’s the in the book, I kind of give two ways of historicizing. This rise of narrative podcasting and its relationship with obsession, how to intersect one is proximal, so very much A part of the public radio production culture is a fascination with what they often call the interesting. What makes a story interesting is often how you pitch something. It’s not just what happened. What’s interesting about it, is how a lot of people would pitch a story to a show like snap judgment of This American Life or radio lab studio 360, places like that. And the interesting thing isn’t, you know, as a concept, it’s elusive. What do we mean when we say something is interesting?

Often we mean that it sparks our curiosity, but we can’t say why it stands out. But for reasons that are yet to be ascertained, and then the story often becomes how do we figure out what’s interesting about this story? And so I think that’s part of that’s kind of the proximal cause. But the question of why podcasts became obsessive isn’t just a story about the history of podcasting. It’s also a story about the history of obsession and obsession, as a historical idea that has its roots centuries old in legal and psychiatric and artistic contexts. And often, I lean a lot on Jan Goldstein’s work here, the history of obsession has been involved in boundary disputes, often when you’re trying to figure out what what is the domain of psychiatry, and what is the domain of the law, for example, then the issue of like obsessive thought and mono mania becomes really prominent. And I feel like that’s true here too is that in trying to figure out, you know, what counts as a radio show, and what counts as a podcast, the issue of obsessive thought has this outsized role to play in separating one from the other. So,

Mack Hagood 21:42

Yeah, so obsession becomes, again, maybe touching back on that intimacy that was said to maybe even be like podcasting was perhaps even more intimate, at least as it was constructed than radio. You know, you talked about the very personal way that people would listen to them. And this sort of obsessive nature, it’s something that works inside of the podcasts. Like it’s sort of a trope within the podcasts that somebody is obsessed with something right. And then it’s also something that operates in terms of the listeners relationship to the podcast. And then it also Yeah, became part of a media narrative about what podcasting was and how it was different from radio. Could you maybe unpack that a little bit more? Yeah,

Neil Verma 22:32

I mean, it’s hard. It’s hard to think about the material, like the actual material of a podcast, its relationship to its audience, and also how it’s talked about without this concept of obsession. Yeah, you know, if you listen to a podcast from this period that I focus on in the book from about 2014 to 2020, you know, nine times out of 10, the podcast is going to start in the same way, which is something like dear listener, here’s the story that came up, I came across, and I can’t stop thinking about it. And I think I’ve become obsessed with it.

And often the obsession is kind of confessed in this negative way. Like it’s a secret, or something that you should be ashamed of. Yeah. And I can’t stop thinking about it. So I’m gonna make this podcast that explores this topic. And maybe it’s a historical topic. Maybe it’s the case of a murderer. Maybe it’s, you know, maybe it’s a fiction podcast in which a character is kind of aping a lot of the same characteristics as an investigative podcast.

Mack Hagood 23:27

Maybe it’s why hasn’t anyone seen Richard Simmons?

Neil Verma 23:31

That’s a good example, or mystery shows a lot like this Serial is a lot like this anyway, that they start out this way. And the host says, and often like the obsession object can be very trivial, or it can be something that the audience members never heard of. Or it can be something that the audience member thinks they understand, but they don’t understand.

Anyway, and then the podcast kind of proceeds not just investigating the story, but investigating one’s own obsession with it. And many podcasts in this kind of sub genre. It’s not even exactly a sub genre in this paradigm, they end without a solution to whatever it is, the historical nugget was, but there seems to be a solution to the obsessive relationship to it. And I think that’s one of the things that connects obsession to the structure of podcasting itself. What makes podcasts different from radio shows, they’re longer, a lot longer, sometimes 10 times the length of an ordinary radio show. And so the arc of the story, or the arc of the podcast often follows the arc of the narrator’s obsession with that topic. That’s what gives it a beginning, middle and end that’s often what gives it a cliffhanger. This is true for the first season of Serial, the cliffhanger at the end of every episode of the first season of Serial isn’t a non sighted guilty, it’s will Sarah change her mind about this person. And so it’s really about this kind of interiorized mental churn that we get a vicarious experience of.

Mack Hagood 25:03

It’s just interesting to think about the temporality of this, that the fact that podcasts are not limited by certain conventions of broadcasting certain formats, it didn’t have to be a certain number of minutes long-sort of lent itself to this kind of obsession, you are free to just pursue your passion to the ends of the earth and let it take as much time as it took. Yeah.

Neil Verma 25:27

And you know, and I don’t want to be moralistic about this. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. And an awful lot of podcasts are devoted to subjects that a lot of the journalists who made them had been dying to make for their whole career, and never had the resources to make. Right and so a lot of these are stories, particularly of murders of people of color, or unjust imprisonment, things like that had the podcasting boom never happened would have been left unspoken. And so it’s given an opportunity for a whole lot of hidden histories, particularly histories that had to do with justice issues, to come to the fore. And that’s an incredible benefit of the obsessive and obsessive relationship to an object isn’t like an inferior aesthetic agenda. Sometimes it’s really interesting.

Sometimes it’s really interesting that, you know, one of the podcasts I like to think about is 99% Invisible, which podcast fans will will probably know is kind of a pioneering podcast in the prestige area, also a lead podcast in the radio topia network, incredible fundraiser lots of good things about this show hosted by Roman Mars. And what that show would often do is they would find some particular object in the world, the shows about architecture, design, the built environment, and maybe it’s a form of concrete, or maybe it’s the one I use in the book is at the escalators at the DC metro, and how each one has been weathered to the point where it makes a different sound. Yeah, so they’ll find some object and then they’ll find somebody who’s obsessed with it. And so the host with whom we have an intimate connection introduces us to the surrogate, who I think of as like the surrogate obsessive who has an obsessive relationship to some object, in this case, the sound of different escalators in Washington, DC. Now, I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast have no interest at all in the sound of escalators in Washington DC. But by virtue of the fact that obsession has been mapped from this one kind of legitimate obsessive into the consciousness of the host with whom we have an intimate connection. And then into our ears. All of a sudden, this feeling of transference of obsession from one mind to another is really vivid and it has a way of making this object enjoyable.

And then the book I analogize this a little bit to Rene Girard’s idea of mimetic desire, you know, where we desire something because someone else desires it. And we mimic that, that desire in a kind of triangle relationship. Something very similar is happening in podcasts in this period, I find that like, just aesthetically fascinating, and really interesting to track.

Mack Hagood 28:14

So that’s the concept you call mimetic obsession.

Neil Verma 28:18

Yeah. Yeah. So if you imagine, like a typical podcast, like Serial, for example, the first season of Serial, you know, one of the first things that Sarah Kenick, the host says to us is, “I don’t think I’m obsessed with this story. But I am kind of fascinated by it.” And then over the course of it, it feels like an obsession, it becomes very much the idea of it. So often, the host confesses obsession then retracts it right away. But there’s this other configuration, which we find pretty often, which is more triangular. So the host finds somebody else who is obsessed with the subject, and that has a way of ratifying or legitimizing or making it more vivid and interesting. And often those are those that are totally lighter and funnier.

Mack Hagood 28:59

One of my favorite passages in the book is I believe this was in the in the introduction, but he wrote that the age of obsession in podcast media for the American left was the age of conspiracy in social media, for the American right, it is not outside the realm of possibility that an itch, that Serial scratched for one population is the same itch that QAnon scratched for another. And something that this immediately made me think about was, at the same time that this sort of intelligentsia were just basically saying podcasting was synonymous with this kind of narrative podcast, the Joe Rogan show was already well underway and like churning along and really questioning authority in all kinds of ways. So I would love for you to just expand on this notion that maybe these different genres are scratching a similar itch, and where that itch comes from.

Neil Verma 29:59

So one of the pleasures of writing a book, which is different from writing a dissertation, is that in a dissertation, everything is assertion, right? This is, so this is how it is. But in the book, you get to have these phrases where you’re like, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, you know, and you get permission to use the word perhaps every now and then. And so this was a real perhaps statement for me. But it’s rooted in something that the book does argue: there’s a writer named Marina van Zuylen who wrote a book about obsession in French literature, and obsession is very common in the arts in French culture. Think of writers like Flaubert or Balzac, you know, a variety of artists from the contemporary period. And one of the things she talks about is that one of the things that monomania, like a monomaniacal relationship to an object gives you is that it gives you a false sense of control over it, that it’s a kind of reaction to the shock of modernity, that modernity inundate you with certain kinds of experiences, and monomania allows you to control it.

So it kind of takes and gives at the same time, like it feels like a debilitation, but it also feels like a form of power. And so it has that complicated relationship that a lot of kinds of psychic conditions have with the exterior world. And so I got thinking about this. And I started to think a lot about well, what is it about obsession that it gives us like, what does it provide? And I started to think a lot about just the rise of streaming experiences in our lives and kind of algorithmically curated feeds of material, whether that’s through social media, whether that’s through your Netflix account, whatever it is, and how obsession kind of has that same relationship with raw material as algorithmic feeds do. So. If you’re interested in barbarian movies that have wooden machines in them, then if you watch one, Netflix is going to recommend the next barbarian movie with a wooden machine in it to you, because it thinks that’s what you’re into. And maybe you are, I’m not judging.

Mack Hagood 32:02

How did you know?

Neil Verma 32:06

So a monomaniacal thinking process mimics what the algorithm does, right? It seeks more, more of what it already knows, right? it churns through the same thing over and over again. So on the one hand, it mimics that, but on the other hand, it feels like you’re extracting a level of control over that thing, right. So if I’m obsessed with something, that it’s my obsession, it’s personal. To me, it’s specific. And that makes me different from whatever it is, feels like you’re feeding me. So it allows you to have that kind of you sort of mimic a lot of the mediated experiences we already have.

And also have a feeling of resting control from them, that feels rebellious and nourishing, and a little bit naughty. And I feel like that’s an emotional experience that resonates very closely with conspiracy theories. Obviously, the politics of these things are very different. And there is a reality to which both of them must somehow come to grips. But I’m just thinking about the kind of aesthetic and emotional relationship we have with some of these media. And I’ve seen more similarity than I see difference.

Mack Hagood 33:14

Yeah, and I mean, I think there’s a relation in both cases, to these niche rabbit holes of media that that we’ve been afforded in recent decades, and the sort of related deterioration of trust in authority, Sarah Koenig doesn’t trust the justice system that justice has been done in this case, and she’s going to dig into it. And then there’s also this sort of intensification of individual identity and small group identities as a locus of meaning that I think has really been a characteristic of the early 21st century. These are all aspects of our culture that I think really feed into the This American Life Style narrative podcast, you know, which can be so again, constructed as personal as intimate.

Neil Verma 34:06

Yeah, and, you know, a lot of the criticism that was made of the obsessive style during its sort of heyday. And one of them is that it can be quite easy to make the obsession of the

story, and not the systematic critique the story. And so you know, a good contrast to draw there is with the in the dark podcast, which investigated a couple of different ones. One was a murder case of young boy. And then the other was a conviction case in where the, the accused guy was, was tried over and over and over again by the same prosecutor. And what In the Dark does is it focuses very much on the work of journalism, and it focuses very much on systematic critiques of bad laws and, you know, bad judicial practices, and bad police practices. And those often for a lot of listeners became kind of the antidote to works that were too obsessively related to their material because they didn’t effectively address systematic critiques that could also be made. So I feel like the fact that that is a polarity at all is an important aspect of, you know, identifying what was it about podcasts in this period that people found so compelling.

Mack Hagood 35:18

There’s another aspect to this, where it’s about the this forward thinking that podcasting is going to be the big new thing. And that somehow this obsession and this narrative obsession tied very closely into that. So we’ve talked about a lot of different levels of obsession, but maybe could we talk a little bit about the tech industry and how this sort of obsessive nature perhaps played into this imagination of the lucrative podcast future?

Neil Verma 35:51

Sure. I mean, so my book is a book about the past. And I really feel that the cultural moment that describes this over, that doesn’t mean podcasting is over, podcasting is going to continue to evolve and take all kinds of new forms and have relevance in a lot of different contexts. I’m not worried about the podcasting industry disappearing in any way, it’s going to change a lot. But that’s how these things go. But I think about one of the things that was sort of a perennial feature of discourse about podcasting from about Serial to about the COVID period was that everyone was talking about it as a brand new thing, that this is an exciting new thing, there’s going to be a lot of money in it. And it’s going to be the future of audio, people were talking about it as a Gutenberg revolution. And there was a lot of really excited rhetoric. So a couple of things I want to do in the book is one to like back off of that excited rhetoric. I think one of the problems that we sometimes have as critics is that we fall for that pretty easily, partly because our interests are aligned with that too, right? We want to be writing about topics that feel fresh and vivid. And sometimes that can obscure a bunch of questions and ideas and properties of a thing. When you think about something as something of the past versus thinking about it as something of the future, it changes. And so I feel like this feeling that I call it proleptic imaginary that everything people said about podcasting, or conceptualism about podcasting was framed by an anticipation of a glorious future that I think that feeling has passed at this point. But the second thing I want to think about that is that proleptic, imaginaries are generative, they make things possible, they make it possible for people to start businesses or to pitch podcasts and get them funded. They make it possible for conferences on the definition of podcasting, they make it possible for a whole kind of flood of expanding thought and rapidly changing concepts of how podcasting should operate as an industry. So having a proleptic imaginary can obscure critical thought, but it can also generate media activity. And so striking a balance between, you know, thinking about those two things at the same time, is one of the things that the book tries to do. This period of podcasting growth coincided very strongly with a whole bunch of other things, the rise of social media, it coincided with the rise of streaming services coincided with the rise of NF T’s and bitcoins and things like that. And a lot of the terminology that was used to describe one was used to describe the other. So there’s a certain effervescence that the podcasting rise partook in at this period. And so that’s something that I want to historicize and to like make into a historical object that we can talk about, and we can think about.

Mack Hagood 38:35

One last question about obsession towards the end of your chapter on obsession, you think about obsession, as a method for the podcast scholar to deploy. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what you were playing with there?

Neil Verma 38:53

Okay. So this is the weird part about the chapter. So the way I think about podcasts, the way I think about anything, the way I work generally as a thinker, is that I like to zero in really closely on really specific moments. So at the beginning of the chapter, for example, I there’s like one sentence in the first episode of Serial that it’s been 10 pet pages talking about. And then I’d like to zoom out and say, Okay, well here are like 50 other examples of this kind of phenomenon. And here’s how they have different sub variants. And here’s how they evolve over time. And I kind of keep doing that, like I zoom in on something and then I’ll back off, and then I’ll zoom in, I’ll back off. And then this weird thing happens, where I start to think that maybe the cultural phenomenon I’m describing should actually feed back into my methodology itself. So if it’s true that obsessive relationships existed within podcasts between podcasts and their listeners, within the cultural imaginary of podcasting, isn’t it also true that obsessive relationships exist in a critical relationship to a podcast? Because if you don’t do that, then it’s like you’re standing outside of it from a superior position. Even without any involvement in the culture that you’re describing, and that’s just not true, of course, there’s some sort of involvement. So I started to imagine what what would an obsessive analysis of a podcast look like not one that avoids obsession, but actually kind of walks into it.

Mack Hagood 40:16

And specifically from your subject position.

Neil Verma 40:19

Yeah. And I think that’s important that it should come partly from the podcast itself, which come from some of its features, some of the things that it foregrounds, but should also come from your own subject position, and something that genuinely you felt kind of stuck to you in a certain kind of way. So for me, one of the things that I found so oddly compelling about the first season of Serial was this little vocal crack that appeared in Adnan Sayyed’s voice. In as voice scholars will know, often we have a chest voice, and then we have a head voice. Sometimes they’re called different things. And then often when you’re speaking, sometimes you can crack a little bit, like, a little bit when you’re kind of passing between one or the other. Often, it’s involuntary, it’s a sound that we associate with a kind of sudden loss of identity, we often associate it with adolescence, and I just can’t unhear it. He uses it in his voice a lot. And so one of the things I thought about, well, what would an obsessive read it one obsessive reading of Serial, from my perspective would be to map out all of those focal cracks, episode by episode, and then to try and do a close reading of them. And to suggest what they mean. Now, obviously, it would be foolhardy to say, well, this is what what Sayyed’s real character is because obviously, this is an edited podcast. And so the podcasters decided what audio to include what audio not to include. So it’s hard to say, what this person is saying versus what the podcast is saying. But I think it’s it became a useful methodology for me to like unpack particular sequences, I don’t think you can come up with global rules for the series based on Adnan Sayyed’s vocal cracks. But it gives you a different way of reading key sequences, and I think a rich one. So you know, one thing I want to prompt maybe provocatively in the book is to say, maybe there’s a methodology for analyzing obsessive podcasts that embraces obsession, rather than exteriorize it or others it or turns it into an object of ridicule or demystification.

Mack Hagood 42:19

And you go to the extent of using some quite sophisticated digital humanities techniques to analyze sort of like the pitch contours of Sayyed’s voice, could you maybe talk a little bit about the technology you used? And in this deep dive?

Neil Verma 42:35

Sure, yeah. So a couple of years ago, I got a NEH grant with Martin MacArthur, who is a poet and an English scholar at UC Davis and merit studies poet voice, she studies how it is that poets speak and how that speeches is talked about. And so I was interested in radio plays, and she was interested in, in poetry readings. What makes these two things similar is that they’re both performed speech. So the poet has a poem in front of them that they’re reading, a different poet might read it differently. They might write read it and read it a different way. And so we were looking for ways in which we can analyze these in kind of a close reading kind of way, and understand them, you know, like kind of the micro level. So what does that look like? That looks like in her case? Where is the poet pausing? Is the poet pausing in the places where the text would suggest to pause? Are they pausing somewhere else? When a poet is described as monotone? Are they really monotone? Can we actually find some sort of way of analyzing the pitch of each speech act that suggests maybe they’re not maybe there’s some other kind of cultural reason why people are calling them monotone. Often ideas about race and gender come out, when you look at some of this criticism that doesn’t actually comport with the sound of the audio. So anyway, and in my case, I got interested in things like Orson Welles is a well known radio actor, he often plays both villains and heroes, he often plays both narrator’s and characters in the play. And so I was interested in does he talk differently in these different places. So we develop with Robert Akshore and Lee Miller, two scientists at Davis, a couple of different technologies, these aren’t exclusive to these particular technologies. There’s lots of software that does this. And essentially, what it does is it analyzes speech for things like pauses, pause rates, and it generates a pitch tracker. So you can see exactly that vocal crack I told you about. And if you feed the both the text and the the audio into the into Drift, which is what the technology is called, then it will show you exactly how many how many hurts that the jump is. And so it’ll, it’ll help you confirm the things that you’re already here’s, and it’ll also like, give you some sort of basis for describing what that phenomenon is. You know, I don’t think that this is like going to work in every situation for everything. It’s just another tool or another way of thinking about it. And it also does that thing that allows you to talk about, you know, micro moments in a podcast in the same way you could talk about micro moments in a novel or a poem.

Mack Hagood 44:58

Yeah, super cool. One of many moments of sort of methodological innovation in your work. So I really appreciated that. So we’ve really done a deep dive on obsession. That’s actually only one of several themes about narrative podcasting. In this book. I really don’t think we can do justice to all of them. But just briefly, you know, there’s a chapter on the way that these narrative podcasts often call into question how we know things. So sort of these epistemological questions that are characteristic of this genre.

Neil Verma 45:35

The second chapter is about epistemology. It’s a bit more of a detailed argument, but the that one is more like, you know, anyone who studies public radio will know that one of the main things that public radio producers often aim for is the production of empathy, and that a successful radio show is often one that produces empathy, kind of cathartic empathy for the listener. And my view is, is that a lot of podcasts kind of started to question the politics of that, at a certain point, especially around issues of race and gender. And what a lot of these podcasts ended up doing was kind of backing off the optimization of empathy, and got interested in in more something more like epistemology, like how it is, we know what we know, what are the limits to what we can know. And so there’s a bunch of ways in which I describe certain patterns of that. And often they have to do with issues of wide variety of issues. But you know, things like racial justice, for example, what is the knowable in certain cases, and some of them can be quite nihilistic. Some of them end up in places where they feel like nothing is knowable. So that chapter kind of focuses mostly on epistemology. And then the third chapter focuses mostly on audio dramas, and how this funny thing about audio dramas history is that it’s always kind of obsessed with memory. So many of these plays are about memory and remembering, and forgetting and amnesiacs, and all these kinds of things. And yet, the form of audio drama historically has no memory of its own. The distinction I like to draw is between something like the lyric poetry, right, if you’re a lyric poet, or say portraiture, so if you’re a lyric poet or a portrait artist, you have to study the whole history of lyric poetry, or portraiture, you don’t even have anything that anyone would find legitimate to say. Audio drama is the exact opposite. Like the vast majority of audio dramatists do not study its origins, right. And in some ways, that’s great. Like that’s actually incredibly makes it liberatory. It means it’s much more inclusive than other kinds of of art forms. But it also creates this like weird relationship with the past, where it’s always kind of reinventing the past. And it’s kind of obsessed with the past, but also disavowing the past. So I call that an aesthetics of amnesia. And I talked about podcasts like The Shadows by Caitlin Prest and Homecoming, as good examples of this. And then in the end, there’s kind of a coda where I have a bit of a moment where this was originally going to be a whole chapter. But I felt like it could be actually just a CODA, which was, you know, in the 2010s, we are always talking about this internet based podcasting as a form. But this was also like an era of the renaissance of of radio arts and people who are intervening in the electromagnetic spectrum itself. And so I talked about a few artists who are very much outside who will make work that you would never describe as a podcast. But were able to kind of ask questions in ways that were in some ways more interesting and exciting and insightful than podcasters could ask. radio artists are obsessed with, you know, emplacement and materiality and the structures of media around us. And this is something that podcasters tended to ignore, there aren’t a lot of podcasts that kind of exploit the architecture of their own possibility. But that’s all that radio artists did. So I find that that distinction kind of interesting, and also productive of a possible future for podcasts.

Mack Hagood 48:45

Yeah, that’s great. So the book is Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Bbsession, and it’s a great read. You really do come at this from so many different angles. Neil, thanks so much. This has been a blast.

Neil Verma 48:58

Yeah, it’s been such a great conversation and I appreciate you giving me such a chance to talk about my work here. So yeah, I love the pod and I’m really excited to be on it.

The post Podcasting’s Obsession with Obsession (Neil Verma) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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Second Line: Footwork in New Orleans (Lowlines by Petra Barran)

Fri, 10 May 2024 14:45:44 -0000

Today we feature the first episode of a new podcast called Lowlines, which follows host Petra Barran as she travels solo through the Americas, meeting people with profound connections to the places they’re from.

This episode takes place in New Orleans and focuses on Second Line, the brass band tradition that comes out of Black funeral processions and social clubs and is known not only for the power of the music but the for the amazing dancing known as footwork that goes on as the people parade down the street. Petra also talks to Jarrad DeGruy a young fantasy author, designer, dancer, and visual artist from New Orleans. Petra and Jarrad have a probing conversation about footwork and Black New Orleans culture that opens out into a discussion of race, colonialism, and ecology–all the traumas, injustices, and challenges that that are inextricable from the joy we see and hear in New Orleans music culture.

Subscribe to Lowlines, produced by produced by Social Broadcasts and Scenery Studios.

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On the Borderlands of Sound: Loudness, Affect, and the Multisensory Experience of Listening w/ Michael Heller

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:12:00 -0000

There are sonic experiences that can’t be contained by the word “listening.” Moments when sound overpowers us. When sound is sensed more in our bodies than in our ears. When sound engages in crosstalk with our other senses. Or when it affects us by being inaudible. Dr. Michael Heller’s new book Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter (2023, U of California Press) uses affect theory to open up these moments. In this conclusion to our miniseries on sound and affect, we explore topics such as the measurement and perception of loudness, the invention of sonar and the anechoic chamber, and Heller’s critique of the politics of silence in the work of John Cage. This interview was a blast–Michael is a great storyteller and we had a lot of laughs.

Dr. Michael Heller is a musicologist, ethnomusicologist, and a jazz scholar. This fall he will join the musicology faculty of Brandeis University as an Associate Professor, after working for ten years at the University of Pittsburgh. Michael’s love for music began with playing saxophone in his youth, but his path took an academic turn during college at Columbia University. There, he dove deep into jazz history while working at WKCR radio under the mentorship of legendary programmer Phil Schaap.

Michael’s scholarly pursuits were further shaped by his work with the Vision Festival, an avant-garde jazz festival in New York. Inspired by the experimental musicians he met there, he wrote his first book, Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (2017, UC Press), documenting the 1970s scene where adventurous artists staged performances in old factory spaces. Through his immersion in these innovative communities, Michael developed a keen interest in the borderlands between music and sound.

Just Beyond Listening pushes out into the borderlands of sound itself, using affect theory to probe how sound is perceived in other parts of the body, how sound interacts with written text, how it’s weaponized by the military, and how it can haunt us in mediated form.

To hear the extended version of this interview, including a segment on Louis Armstrong and Miachel’s “What’s Good” recommendations, sign up for a free or paid Patreon membership at patreon.com/phantompower.

Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect Theory, and the Limits of Acoustic Ecology w/ Marie Thompson

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 19:13:00 -0000

Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect. Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems.

For Part 2 of this interview, which focuses on tinnitus, join our Patreon for free: patreon.com/phantompower.

Staring around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology and representation and rhetoric and identity, but what about sensation? How is it that a feeling like joy or panic can sweep through a room without a word being uttered? By what mechanism does a life develop a kind of texture of feeling over time? Affect studies is field interested in these questions, interested in how the world affects us. Words can produce affective states, but affect isn’t reducible to words. So, it’s easy to see why affect theory has been so attractive to sound and music scholars.

Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We’ll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox.

And this is only the first half of our lengthy conversation. In a bonus episode, we present Part 2, which discusses Marie Thompson’s recent research on tinnitus and hearing loss. And because we’ve heard from people who find our tinnitus content helpful, we don’t want to put that behind a paywall, so we’re sharing it in our Patreon feed at the free level. All you have to do is go to patreon.com/phantompower and sign up as a free member and you’ll instantly get access to that episode in your podcast app of choice, as well as other content we plan to drop this summer when we are on break with the podcast.

Photo credit: Alexander Tengman

Transcript
Robotic Voice 00:00

This is Phantom Power

Marie Thompson 00:16

And this is difficult given the habits of the discipline or disciplines that I’m engaging with, I think that we can’t point to a particular set of sounds as inherently emancipatory or radical or having a kind of liberating potential, there’s a need to think carefully about that.

Mack Hagood 00:39

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today I’m bringing you an episode with a scholar who I feel is just an intellectual kindred spirit. We have a lot of the same interests. We’ve written on similar topics and she’s someone that I’ve learned a lot from. My guest is Marie Thompson, Associate Professor at the Open University in the UK. Marie is a theorist of noise, and she has been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound. With the study of affect.

Starting around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology, representation and rhetoric and identity.

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How Computers Found Their Voice: Film Sound, Computer Science, and Text-to-Speech w/ Benjamin Lindquist

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:34:00 -0000

Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program. Ben is the author “The Art of Text to Speech,” which recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, and he’s currently writing a history of text-to-speech computing.

In this conversation, we explore:

* the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey

* 2001’s strong influence on computer science and the cultural reception of computers

* the weird technology of the first talking computers and their relationship to optical film soundtracks

* Louis Gerstman, the forgotten innovator who first made an IBM mainframe sing “Daisy Bell.”

* why the phonemic approach of Stephen Hawking’s voice didn’t make it into the voice of Siri

* the analog history of digital computing and the true differences between analog and digital

Patrons will have access to a longer version of the interview and our What’s Good segment. Learn more at patreon.com/phantompower

Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood. Transcript and show page by Katelyn Phan. Website SEO and social media by Devin Ankeney.

Transcript
Introduction 00:00

This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood 00:18

Run the guest soundbite, HAL.

HAL9000 00:22

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Mack Hagood 00:26

Dave, who the hell is Dave? HAL it’s me, Mack Hagood the host of Phantom Power. This podcast about sound we work on. What’s the problem here?

HAL9000 00:38

I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Introduction 00:44

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

HAL9000 00:46

This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Mack Hagood 00:53

Can you just run the clip of Ben Lindquist? You know, the guy that we just interviewed about the history of computer voices?

HAL9000 01:02

I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that something I cannot allow to happen.

Mack Hagood 01:09

Who’s Frank? Okay, fine. I’m just gonna play the clip myself.

HAL9000 01:15

Without your space helmet, Dave. You’re going to find that rather difficult.

Mack Hagood 01:22

HAL? HAL? HAL? HAL? Welcome to another episode of phantom power. I’m Mack Hagood. I knew that was goofy. But I just couldn’t help myself. Today we are talking about a movie I adore and a topic I find fascinating. We’re going to learn how computers learned to speak with my guest, recent Princeton PhD, Benjamin Lindquist. At Princeton, Ben studied with none other than the great Emily Thompson, author of the classic book, the Soundscape of Modernity. Ben is currently a postdoc at Northwestern Universit...

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Navigating the Publishing Industry: Trade Press, Book Proposals, and Author Platforms w/ Jane Von Mehren

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:27:00 -0000

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Today’s episode provides a thorough walkthrough of the publishing industry for aspiring nonfiction writers. Our guest is Jane Von Mehren, Senior Partner at Aevitas Creative Management and a former Senior Vice President at Random House. Jane explains the structure of the publishing industry, how to take your area of expertise and start thinking about a public-facing book, what agents are for, what agents look for in authors, what you should look for in an agent, how to find an agent, how to write a query letter to an agent and how to craft a book proposal that your agent can shop to publishers.

Our patrons will also hear a bonus segment that discusses how an agent shops your proposal to publishers and what happens after that. We also talk money—what kind of advances can first time authors expect? And we provide a number of concrete tips on how to write for a general audience. All of that plus our What’s Good segment where Jane shares something good to read, do and listen to. To get the full interview, just go to Patreon.com/phantompower .

Transcript
[Robotic music] This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast that usually focuses on sound. Today is a bit of an exception. We’re doing an episode that many of you reached out and asked for. My guest today is Jane Von Mehren. Jane is a senior partner at Avitus Creative Management. She is a former senior vice president at Random House. She’s been an editor and publishing executive at Houghton Mifflin and Penguin. And then there’s the least of her accomplishments: she’s also my new agent! Today, we’re going to do a thorough walkthrough of the publishing industry for aspiring nonfiction writers.

But before we get to that, a couple of quick notes:

Wow. I just feel like we’ve been cruising through this season with this twice-a-month schedule. It’s already March and it’s been a little while since I mentioned what’s coming up in two weeks. We will have recent Princeton PhD in history, Benjamin Lindquist. Ben’s going to be talking about the history of talking computers. Next up is Marie Thompson of the Open University, who just co-edited a new special issue of the journal Senses and Society on tinnitus and the aesthetics of tinnitus, so that should be an interesting conversation. I had some folks ask for more tinnitus material, so I’m looking forward to that one. And soon we’ll be chopping it up with Neil Verma of Northwestern. We’re going to talk about his brand new book on narrative podcasting.

I also want to remind you that we have a new feature where you can leave a comment, ask a question, or just say whatever you feel. Just go to speakpipe.com/phantom power, press the button, and start talking. I’d love to hear from you and maybe play your comments or questions on the show. So that’s speakpipe.com/phantom power.

Okay. Onto today’s show. At the start of this season, I did an episode called “Going Public.” And in that episode, I talked about my interest in pivoting to more public writing and public scholarship. And I mentioned finding an agent and learning to navigate the space of non-academic publishing. And I heard from a number of you who said you’d like a deeper dive into that space.

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How Sound Shaped the Modern Office: Acoustic Space, Architectural History, and Open Plan Working w/ Joseph L. Clarke

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 12:50:00 -0000

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Ever wonder who’s to blame for the noise and distraction of the open office? Our guest has answers.

Joseph L. Clarke is a historian of art and architecture and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His 2021 book Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space won a 2022 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title. It’s a fascinating history of how architects have conceived of and manipulated the relationship between sound and space. His most recent publication is “Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office.”

In this episode we’ll talk about media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his architecturally inspired theory of acoustic space, which went on to have its own influence in the field of architecture. We’ll also dive deep into the history of the open plan office, the theories of acoustic communication that inspired it, the sonic disaster it became, and the new media technologies that were invented in response. If you’ve ever been driven to distraction by noise in a cubicle farm or open office and wondered how such a space came to be, this episode’s got answers!

For our Patrons, we have another half hour of our interview, in which we cover the full history of architectural acoustics going back to the ancients and all the way up to the computer models of today. It’s really fascinating. You’ll also hear Joseph’s “What’s Good” segment, which is one of the best ever—some really unexpected selections for something good to read, listen to, and do. To join, go to Patreon.com/phantompower.

Transcript
Mack Hagood: All right, Joseph. Welcome to the show.

Joseph L. Clarke: Thanks Mack.

Mack Hagood: So you were just just telling me before that you are in Paris right now, in like some kind of 17th century building. Is that correct?

Joseph L. Clarke: Oh yes. The building where I’m staying, it’s in the center of Paris. You know, all the buildings around me are kind of from the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. So it’s a somewhat primitive space, but a very charming one.

Mack Hagood: That sounds amazing. You really know how to do a research leave. What are you doing in Paris?

Joseph L. Clarke: You know, I’m following up on some of the research that I did for my book. My book came out a few years ago, but I’m still trying to trace down some, some of the loose threads. I’m also just really interested in the conversations and the discourse around sound and space in France in relation to the conversations that we have in North America.

I teach at the University of Toronto. This was, of course, the home of Marshall McLuhan, back in the fifties and sixties. Who came up with the idea of kind of popularizing the idea of acoustic space. Canada was also the home of people like R. Murray Schafer who you did a program on the podcast.

So there’s a lot of interesting discussions in Canada around sound and the spatial environment. But in France, there’s a very long standing tradition of experimental music,

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Mastering Audiobook Narration: Acting, Audiobook Technique, and Vocal Representation w/ Robin Miles

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 23:42:00 -0000

Today we bring you a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with acclaimed actor, casting director, audiobook narrator and audiobook director, Robin Miles. Miles has narrated over 500 audiobooks, collecting numerous industry awards and, in 2017, was added to the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. She’s the most recognizable voice in literary Afrofuturism, having interpreted books by Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. Miles holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She has taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country and she has an amazing talent for doing accents—something we really dig deep into on this podcast. In this conversation we talk about technique, the audiobook industry, and the politics of vocal representation. How do we avoid the misrepresentation of marginalized people on the one hand and vocal typecasting on the other?

For our Patrons we have almost an hour of additional content, including our What’s Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! If you want hear all the bonus content, just go to patreon.com/phantompower. Membership starts at just three dollars a month and helps pay the expenses of producing the show.

Transcript
[Robotic music] This is phantom power.

[Brass band playing]

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of phantom power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we’re bringing you a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with acclaimed audiobook narrator, Robin Miles. But first, if you’re wondering about the brass band music in the background, I just got back from Carnival in my hometown, New Orleans, Louisiana.

And man, my heart is full, but my body is a bit depleted. As I said the other day on Facebook, the Fatter the Tuesday, the Ashier the Wednesday. I got into New Orleans on Friday, ate some good food with the family. Saturday, it was all parades Uptown. My wife Bridget was marching in a parade. My boys Abe and Theo were taking it all in with me, catching all the throws.

Sunday was Abe’s 17th birthday. We celebrated with family and friends. And then the next day was Lundi Gras and we did a second line down Bourbon Street through the French Quarter with my wife’s marching crew, the Dames de Perlage. The Dames learned beadwork from the famed Mardi Gras Indians, and they work on these amazing beaded costumes all year long. In fact, Bridget listens to a lot of audio books–especially those narrated by Robin Miles–while she works on her beadwork every night. And so it was amazing to just see the fellowship of these women out in the street. Dancing to the sounds of the Big Fun brass band that y’all just heard just now. What a beautiful day.

And then and then on Fat Tuesday I hung out in the Marigny area. There were a lot of great DJs with small mobile sound systems on different corners. And we were just dancing in the streets all day. And then it was Ash Wednesday. The next day, after all the day-long drinking and fried food and King cake, I ate vegan all day. How’s that for repentance? And I went and bought some Louisiana music and history books at Blue Cypress Books uptown. And I even went to church. Although I didn’t get any ashes because I haven’t been to confession in about 40 years. Like I said, my body’s depleted, but man, my soul is full. It was just so beautiful. So real. The only time I touched my phone was to, you know, take a picture or meet up with somebody. And man, do it. If you haven’t been there, go.

Okay, let’s talk about today’s guest. I am so excited. Robin Miles is an American actor,

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Why We Love Radio: Affect, Media History, and Radiophilia w/ Carolyn Birdsall

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 22:54:00 -0000

Today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, you likely know her work, particularly her monograph Nazi Soundscapes (AUP, 2012) which was the recipient of the ASCA Book Award in 2013. Her new book, Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), examines the love of radio through history. It will be a great value to anyone–from novice to expert–who wants to understand radio studies and think about where it should go in the future. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss Carolyn’s career and both of her books. We also get into the present state of radio and media studies, as well as the kind of skeptical orientation to media that tends to set sound studies scholars apart from many of their peers.

And for our Patrons we’ll have Carolyn’s What’s Good segment, with something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join us at patreon.com/phantompower.

Today’s show was edited by Matt Parker. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan.

Transcript
[Robotic voice] This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where we talk to incredibly smart and creative, talented people about sound. I’m Mack Haggood. And if I sound a little Barry White-ish, it’s because I have COVID and I’m not feeling great. But I already had an interview in the can, and I just wanted to get this out to you on schedule if possible, I think that’s going to happen.

And today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, I imagine you already know her work. She’s one of those people who represent the benefit that I get personally out of doing this show, which is I get to finally meet people whose work I’ve been engaging with for a long time.

Carolyn’s definitely one of those people. There’s so much I could have talked to her about including her research on television sound or her methodological work on sensory history or doing oral history. Some of her theoretical work on epistemology and the humanities. But in this interview, I chose to focus on her two books first.

Her award winning 2012 book, Nazi Soundscapes. If there’s any canon at all in historical sound studies, Nazi Soundscapes certainly is in that canon. So we talked about that book for a while. And then we also talk about her new book, which is radiophilia. Radiophilia is a term that she coined as she examines the love of radio.

And I think of Radiophilia as an established scholar book. Quite often a scholar will make their name researching something very specific, say soundscapes in the Nazi era, for example. And they make their contributions there and then they build out a career and then later in their career after teaching for a decade or more and reading tons of other people’s work and really getting a strong sense of the lay of the land in their field of expertise.

They put out something more general, something that’s a little more reflexive in terms of thinking about the field as a whole. Where the field has been, where it should go. And that’s the kind of book that a senior scholar tends to write in part because only a senior scholar could write that kind of book.

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Cosmic Visions in Sound (The World According to Sound by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett)

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 17:18:00 -0000

Today we share a podcast episode on the visual epistemology of astronomy by our friends at The World According to Sound. What kind of knowledge do we really gain when we look at images from space?

Longtime listeners to this show will remember The World According to Sound. As we referred to them two years ago, WATS is a team of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Tired of sound playing second fiddle to narrative on NPR, they launched a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Later, WATS became much more ambitious, producing live sonic odysseys in 8-channel surround sound and live online sound journeys during the pandemic.

Since then, Harnett and Hoff have embarked on another project. For the past couple of years, they have been partnering with different universities to translate humanities research into compelling sound-designed narrative podcasts. The first season of Ways of Knowing was produced in partnership with the University of Washington and it focused on different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities, from close reading, deconstruction, and translational analysis, to black studies, material culture, and disability studies. The second season just wrapped up. It’s called Cosmic Visions and it’s produced in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and that’s what we’ll hear an episode from today. Just this week, they dropped the last episode of season two and now the entire series is available on The World According to Sound website.

We wanted to draw your attention to this series because turning humanities research and sound art into a sonic narrative experience was the original mission of Phantom Power. We know that many of you are interested in this area of humanities podcasting as well, so if you’re not already a fan of Chris and Sam’s work, check it out. We also wanted to share this particular episode because it also provides one answer to a tricky question: How do you do a sonic explication of something that is entirely visual?

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Listening to Tinnitus: Stories, Science, and the Lessons from a Life Lived with Constant Sound w/ Mack Hagood

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 13:34:00 -0000

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Today Mack talks about one of his oldest companions, the tinnitus that lives rent-free in his head. Tinnitus can be annoying, for sure–and for some people it’s much worse than annoying–but it also has a lot to say of interest, if we’re willing to listen: “Tinnitus has been my guide in sound studies, my Virgil, leading me through a shadow world of sound. It’s taught me how high the stakes can be when it comes to the perception and control of sound and it’s given me new ways to think about how and why we use media devices.” Today we’ll learn the basics of tinnitus and hear some tinnitus stories–everyone with tinnitus has one and these stories can teach us a lot about sound and the self. Maybe tinnitus has earned that rent-free headspace, after all.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Music is by Joel Styzens. The composition “A Sharp” appears on his album Relax Your Ears.

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From the Stage to the Page: Music, Memory, and the Evolution of the Rock Biography w/ Warren Zanes

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 13:45:00 -0000

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Warren Zanes is a “rockstar biographer” in more ways than one: he has experienced life as a rockstar, a biographer, and a biographer of rockstars. When Mack first met Warren in New Orleans sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, Zanes was then emerging from the wreckage of meteoric success. He’d been the teenage guitarist in critically acclaimed band The Del Fuegos, who briefly broke into the national popular consciousness—and then just plain broke up. But in the years since, Zanes remade himself into one of our most erudite and entertaining public scholars of popular music. Among other things, he’s been Vice President of Education and Public Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning film Twenty Feet from Stardom, a producer on the Grammy-nominated PBS/Soundbreaking series, and he conducted interviews for Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary. All while keeping up a solo recording career with collaborators such as the Dust Brothers.

Warren’s books include the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 Series, Dusty in Memphis; Petty: The Biography and Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records. His latest book is called Deliver Me from Nowhere. On its face, it’s a book about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s classic lo-fi album Nebraska. But it’s also about sound technology, musicianship teetering in a moment between the analog and digital eras, what it means to be in a band, and the relationship between the four-track cassette recorder and social alienation in Reagan era.

In this interview, Warren talks about his journey, the recent book, his craft as a writer, and—as part of our mini-theme this season on audiobooks—the process of narrating his own audiobooks and why he does so.

And for our Patrons we’ll have Warren’s What’s Good segment, with something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join us at patreon.com/phantompower.

Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan.

Transcript

[Robotic music]

This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where I have conversations with brilliant people on the topic of sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I’m a professor and author who teaches and writes about sound....

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Hacking Music and Media: Freeform Radio, Audience Agency, and Digital History w/ Elena Razlogova

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:55:00 -0000

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Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture” issue of the Radical History Review (2013). She has published articles in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Russian Review, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Radio Journal, Cultural Studies, Social Media Society, and more.

Elena’s someone I’m always excited to talk to when I see her at conferences and I thought it would be fun talk to her on this podcast. In this episode we discuss some of her research interests including U.S. radio history, audience research, music recommendation and recognition algorithms, and her current book project, which centers on freeform radio station WFMU and the rise of online music.

Toward the end of the episode we talk about Elena’s research strategies as a historian working in the digital age.

And for our Patrons we’ll have Elena’s What’s Good segment, featuring something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join at patreon.com/phantompower.

Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood.

Transcript by Katelyn Phan.

Music by Mack Hagood.

Transcript
[Robotic Music] This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today’s guest is radio and media historian Elena Razlikova. We’re going to talk about her current research on the legendary freeform radio station, WFMU, among other things.

But before we get into that, I just want to do a little bit of a call back to our first episode of this season–my “rant.” I think I might’ve mentioned at the time that I was a little sheepish about doing that episode. You know, sometimes I’ll do an episode on my own Research, but I generally keep this podcast focused on sharing and celebrating the work of other people.

So, I was already a little bit out of my comfort zone, wondering if I was being too self indulgent, in talking about myself and the challenges that we’ve been having in Ohio and at my university and the ways that I’m responding to those challenges by reshaping my own career. And then when I was done recording it, I decided I was really not comfortable with it.

I was just like, “I don’t want to put this out”. So I was going to pull it, but. I didn’t have another episode ready to go, and I was feeling really guilty about starting the season so late in the year, so I said, okay, whatever, just get over it. And I dropped the episode into the feed. Well, lo and behold, I guess that was the right move because I got more emails about this episode than any I’ve ever produced over the past five years, including a number of episodes that I literally worked on for months.

So, yeah I guess you never know. You know, I don’t do audience research and I really probabl...

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Audiobooks and the New Reading Public: Disability, Neurodiversity, and Literary Criticism w/ Matthew Rubery

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 19:16:00 -0000

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Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances.

Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He’s also the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011, Routledge). Matt’s latest book is titled Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022, Stanford University Press).

In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the long history of recorded literature; the weird shame around audiobook reading and its cultural roots; the interplay between disability, neurodivergence, and alternate forms of reading; and what an audiobook criticism might look like.

And for our patrons, we’ll have our What’s Good segment at the end of the show, where Matt will tell us something good to read, something good to listen to. Something good to do. You can become a patron of the show at patreon.com/phantompower.

Today’s show was edited by Mack Hagood. Transcription by Katelyn Phan. Music by Graeme Gibson.

Transcript
[Robotic music] This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we do the first in what will be a short series on the audiobook. I’m a huge audiobook listener. I really got into audiobooks maybe 10 years ago. When I started working at Miami University, I had done that rough slog through my master’s and my PhD, and I realized that it had been maybe six or seven years since I’d had any time to do any real fiction reading, and I felt that this aspect of myself was just kind of starting to atrophy, starting to feel sort of two dimensional, and yet I sort of had to still keep the pedal to the metal. Publishing things to get tenure, had to write that first book. And so, this wasn’t really the time to sort of sit back and start reading novels again, especially when my wife and I had two young kids.

So, audiobooks to the rescue. My wife Bridget and I share an Audible account and we each also have a Libby account that allows us to download books through our public library. And we just listen to a ton of stuff, mostly fiction. Once I got tenure and I was able to resume something resembling a normal life, I even started reading more books on paper again. And we have a fantastic bookstore in my neighborhood. I’m a huge fan of, shout out to Greg at Downbound Books. Just one of the best curated small bookstores I’ve ever seen. But still, I listen to audiobooks. As much, if not more, than I ever have.

So, I wanted to do some Phantom Power episodes on the audiobook. What’s its history?

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Going Public: Podcasting, Book Writing, and Humanities Outreach w/ Mack Hagood

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:44:00 -0000

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In this brief opener for Season Six of Phantom Power, Mack discusses his new project of writing a trade press book, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. What are the implications for the podcast? Why pivot away from traditional scholarship and toward public-facing work? In this “rant” you’ll hear about the challenges and opportunities facing humanities scholars in the current era of funding cuts, legislative challenges, and new platforms for public outreach.

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A Philosophy of Echoes: Repetition, Response, and Relationality w/ Amit Pinchevski

Wed, 24 May 2023 14:03:00 -0000

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We spend our 50th episode (the last of this season) with communication theorist Amit Pinchevski. Amit’s recent book Echo (MIT Press) explores its topic through mythology, etymology, history, technology, and philosophy. The book challenges the notion that echo is mere repetition. Instead, Pinchevski argues, echo is a generative medium that creatively expresses our relations to others and the world around us. Just as a baby first learns to speak by repeating the sounds of others, a philosophy of echoes reminds us that our own agency and creativity reside in repetitions that respond to the past.

For our Patreon members we the full two-hour conversation with Amit’s “What’s Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.

Amit Pinchevski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are in theory and philosophy of communication and media, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication; media witnessing, memory and trauma; and pathologies of communication and their construction.

He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (Duquesne UP, 2005), Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford UP, 2019), and Echo (MIT Press, 2022). He is co-editor of Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (with P. Frosh; Palgrave, 2009) and Ethics of Media (with N. Couldry and M. Madianou; Palgrave, 2013). His work has appeared in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Public Culture, New Media & Society, and Theory, Culture & Society.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Original music by Graeme Gibson.

Transcript
[5:58; Amit Pinchevski Interview]

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Robotic Music]

Amit Pinchevski: We start out as relational beings. You know, echoing and being echoed. The most important relation that we have, that models us, later on molds our relationships with others. Echo is necessarily both. Both repetition and response.

Mack Hagood: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where artists and scholars talk about sound. I’m Mack Hagood and I want to start off by saying this is episode 50! 5-0. It’s kind of hard for me to believe.

We started this show, my friend Cris Cheek and I, back on March 12, 2018. And of course we had actually started working on it back in 2017, and we put out our first episodes in the spring of 2018. That is five years ago!

Chris and I parted ways after a couple of seasons. I’ve kind of been flying solo ever since then, although not really because I’ve had the amaz...

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John Cage and the Anechoic Chamber: Echoes, Silence, and Philosophies of Sound w/ Mack Hagood

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 16:14:00 -0000

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Today we explore the mythology around John Cage’s visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage’s experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review, Mack Hagood explores the relationship between sound, self, and meaning-making. To use a term Cage loved, the truth is indeterminate.

For our Patreon members we have bonus content: Mack’s “What’s Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.

Writing and media content featured in this episode:

* Mack’s essay “Cage’s Echoes of the Anechoic,” in AHR Issue 70 (2022).

* Nam June Paik’s 1973 video Global Groove

* John Cage’s 1959 album with David Tudor, Indeterminacy

* John Cage’s book Silence (Wesleyan, 1961).

* The video Can Silence Actually Drive you Crazy by Veritasium

* Terry Gross’s 2014 Fresh Air interview with Trevor Cox

* The album Naxi Live by Jang San and the Dayan Naxi orchestra

* Shani Diluka’s performance of “Glassworks: Opening” by Philip Glass

* Amit Pinchevsky’s book Echo (MIT, 2022)

* Helen Rees’ book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford, 2011)

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Original music and sound design by Mack Hagood.

Special thanks to Monique Rooney and Australian Humanities Review.

Transcript
[5:19]: Cages Echoes Of The Anechoic by Mack Hagood

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Uberduck.ai Voice Generator]

Mack: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a show about sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood.

And what you just heard are the words of John Cage, the legendary composer, performer, and theorist of music and sound and silence. But what you did not hear was John Cage’s voice. Instead, I typed his words into a machine learning text to speech generator called UberDuck.ai.

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The Promise and Peril of AI Voices: Custom Speech, Identity, and the Future of Music Creation w/ Steph Ceraso, and Hussein Boon

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:05:00 -0000

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Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how hard the post-shutdown adjustment has been for many of us and how that might be feeding into the current AI hype.

For our Patreon members we have “What’s Good” recommendations from Steph and Hussein on what to read, listen to, and do. Join at Patreon.com/phantompower.

About our guests:

Steph Ceraso is Associate Professor of Digital Writing & Rhetoric in the English Department at the University of Virginia. She’s one of Mack’s go-to folks when trying to figure out how to use audio production in the classroom as a form of student composition. Steph’s research and teaching interests include multimodal composition, sound studies, pedagogy, digital rhetoric, disability studies, sensory rhetorics, music, and pop culture.

Hussein Boon is Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, session musician, composer, modular synth researcher, and AI researcher. He also has a vibrant YouTube presence with tutorials on things like Ableton Live production.

Pieces featured in this episode:

“Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity” by Steph Ceraso in Sounding Out (2022).

“In the Future” by Hussein Boon in Riffs (2022).

Mack also mentioned in his rant:

“Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language” by Jerome Feldman and Srinivas Narayanan (2003).

“The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” by George Lakoff (1992).

Today’s show was produced and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami.

Transcript
[7:22]: Steph Ceraso, Voice As Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity

[24:10] Hussein Boon, Public Access File Trading

[26:26] Hussein Boon, Better Than Mininum Wage: Working For The Man

[30:10] Hussein Boon, Tinkering At The Edges

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Ethereal Music]

Steph Ceraso: We must treat voice holistically. Voices are more than people, more than technologies, more than contexts, more than sounds.

Understanding voice means acknowledging the interconnectedness of these things and how that interconnectedness enables or precludes vocal possibilities.

[Ethereal Music Fades]

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The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes: The Voice, Silence, and the Self w/ Brian Harnetty

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 13:43:00 -0000

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Brian Harnetty’s recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty’s musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard.

In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian’s process. Harnetty’s audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self.

This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we’ve heard.

(And, of course, we’ll have a longer version of the interview and our What’s Good segment for our Patrons.)

Who was Thomas Merton?

Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It’s hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948’s “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries.

Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.”

Brian Harnetty

Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire).

Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University’s Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received

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Listening Deeply (extended interview excerpt): Field Recording, Soundwalking, and the Poetics of Place w/ Hildegard Westerkamp

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 14:33:00 -0000

Here is a preview of Mack Hagood’s full one hour and forty minute interview with soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp, which includes many details and stories we couldn’t fit into the three public episodes we featured her in.

If you’re a Patron, this full episode has already dropped into your feed. If you’d like to become a Patron, visit Patreon.com/phantompower to see the options, which start at only $3/month.

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The Sound World of Harriet Tubman: Music, Faith, and Resistance w/ Maya Cunningham

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 13:34:00 -0000

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Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings us “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman.” Maya Cunningham is an activist and jazz singer currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Afro-American studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology.

Maya Cunningham

We first came across Maya’s work last year as part of The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, an online initiative from Ms. magazine honoring the 200th anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s birth in 1822. It’s a remarkable package that adds many dimensions of understanding of the underground railroad conductor and feminist icon: Her experience of disability due to a blow to the head by a white overseer; her creation of a home for the aged; her love of the natural world; and much more. And to us, the richest of these essays was Maya’s the “Sound World of Harriet Tubman,” which used field recordings, historical research, and ethnomusicological research to explore the roles of sound and music, and voice in Tubman’s life and leadership. The piece included a Spotify playlist so you could listen as you read.

Today, we’re thrilled to bring you what we hope will be an even more immersive experience: Maya Cunningham reading her essay, and thanks to the editing and mixing skills of Phantom Power producer Ravi Krishnaswami, her field recordings and playlist selections are mixed into the story.

And just a quick note, you’re going to hear about the American Christian revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which stirred both Black and white people from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. You’ll also hear about the Invisible Church, where enslaved African Americans were able to worship secretly and autonomously and through the singing of folk spirituals, which differed greatly from white religious music at the time, but would go on to influence not only gospel music but pretty much every form of popular music we know today. If you want to learn more about this history, a great place to start is a book edited by two professors Mack studied with at Indiana University, Drs. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby. It’s called African American Music: An Introduction.

And today, we share our Patrons-only segment, “What’s Good,” in our main feed. Maya will recommend something good to read, listen to, and do.

Today’s musical selections and soundscapes are by Maya Cunningham. The show was mixed and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami. The Harriet Tubman image was created by Maddie Haynes.

The sounds and music from today’s show (many of which which can be heard on Maya’s Spotify playlist):

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Listening Deeply: Field Recording, Soundwalking, and the Poetics of Place w/ Hildegard Westerkamp

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 16:45:00 -0000

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Today we speak to Hildegard Westerkamp, the pioneering composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. The centerpiece of all of her work is a close attention to the sonic environment and its relation to culture. We will listen to excerpts of six soundscape compositions made between 1975 and 2005, all of which reward the close listener–conceptually and aesthetically–with a deeper relationship to the sonic environment.

Mack Hagood interviewed Westerkamp shortly after the death of R. Murray Schafer in late 2021. Westerkamp worked closely with Schafer in the early 1970s and she graciously agreed to talk about him despite the grief being fresh. They also discussed her own amazing career and that’s the part of the tape we are sharing in this episode. They talk about her formative years as a 20-something working with Schafer and his World Soundscape Project and then we jump into a number of her compositions, ending with the piece “Breaking News” from 2012.

Incredibly, she said Mack was the first person to ever ask her about that piece, even though it is one of her favorites. And sure enough, not long after this interview she released a retrospective album on Earsay Music called Breaking News, which features that piece and a number of others created between 1988 and 2012.

For our Patreon members we have the full, unedited interview for those who want to hear all her thoughts on R. Murray Schafer and her career. Join at Patreon.com/phantompower.

And a quick correction: Hildegard wanted me to clarify that the sentence “When there is no sound, hearing is most alert,” which she uses in “Whisper Study,” is a quote from the Indian mystic Kirphal Singh in his book Naam (or Word).

Pieces featured in this episode:

“Gently Penetrating beneath the Sounding Surfaces of Another Place” (1997)

“Whisper Study” (1975)

“Fantasie for Horns” (1978)

“A Walk through the City” (1981)

“Für Dich – For You” (2005)

“Breaking News” (2002)

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Transcript
4:46 Snippet from Part 1 of R. Murray Schafer Episode

8:42 Interview with Hildegard Westerkamp

36:00 Breaking News by Hildegard Westerkamp

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Bells Ringing]

Hildegard Westerkamp: Every sound says something together with the environment in which it occurs

[Man Screaming]

And we, as listeners, do our interpreting.

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The Making of a Sound Scholar: Rejection, Resilience, and Research w/ Jonathan Sterne

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 20:32:00 -0000

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Today we feature an excerpt from our nearly 2-hour bonus episode for Patrons. In the full interview from last season’s episode “Dork-o-Phonics,” Jonathan Sterne discusses topics such as the early days of sound studies, how his upbringing and a music school rejection led him to sound, his illness and vocal impairment, and a lot of fascinating ideas about voice, media, disability, and more. To hear the full episode, join our Patreon!

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The Secrets of Next-Level Podcast Audio on Twenty Thousand Hertz w/ Dallas Taylor

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 13:27:00 -0000

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Today we talk to Dallas Taylor, host of the most popular sound podcast on the planet, Twenty Thousand Hert z. I like to think our show sounds pretty good, but Twenty Thousand Hertz is next-level audio production, some of the very best in the podcasting business. And Dallas prides himself on making a podcast for absolutely everyone. As he told me, he tries to make a show that’s just as mainstream and approachable as a true crime show.

We start off with a chat about Dallas’s background in music, how he entered the world of sound design, what inspired him to start the podcast, and how he was discovered by Roman Mars of the legendary design podcast 99% Invisible.

Then we jump into the nuts and bolts of how he and his team make Twenty Thousand Hertz. Dallas was kind enough to share the stems for my favorite episode, titled “Space,” so we will do a Song Exploder-like anatomy of that episode before listening to the full episode in the second half of the show.

Today’s show was edited by Craig Eley with additional help from Ravi Krishnaswami. Our Production Coordinator and transcriber is Jason Meggyesy.

Transcript
[4:45 Start of Dallas Taylor Interview]

[28:10 Start of Space by Twenty Thousand Hertz]

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Birds Chirping]

Dallas Taylor: Now we’re at home here on Earth. We’re not gonna stay here for long, but it’s worth mentioning the amazing diversity of sound on our planet.

The Sandy deserts. Lush forests.

[Birds Chirping]

The sound of the ocean.

[Waves Crashing]

both on the surface

and below.

[Waves Crashing]

Mack Hagood: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where scholars and creators talk about sound. I’m Mack Hagood, and I think a lot of you recognize the voice that I just played. That’s Dallas Taylor, host of the most popular sound podcast on the planet Twenty Thousand Hertz. You know, I’ve had the good fortune to not only host this podcast for five years, but to make appearances on a number of other people’s podcasts.

Some very niche. Some with huge audiences, but I think the biggest thrill that I’ve gotten as a podcast guest is when I heard my own voice bathed in the gorgeous production values of Dallas’s show.

Dallas: In the story, Jason and the Argonauts are sailing to the edge of the world.

Mack: Jason and the Argonauts encountered the sirens who were these bird-like women with these amazing voices, hypnotizing voices that would lure people into danger and death.

[Sirens Singing]

And so when they encountered the sirens, Orpheus protected himself and his fellow Argonauts by singing his own counter song.

[Orpheus Singing]

Dallas: Orpheus created a kind of sonic shield. He drowned out the song of the Sirens, which allowed his fellow Argonauts to safely pass by

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How Data Shapes Our Listening: Algorithms, Technology, and Incommunication w/ David Cecchetto

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 12:19:00 -0000

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If you walk into David Cecchetto ‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives.

In this episode, we feature an extended chat with David about his recent book, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press). It’s a book about the eternal impossibility of communication and the texture of that impossibility in our current computer-mediated age. David says we live in the afterlife of data, by which he means we know that our data-driven representations of the world don’t really capture the reality of our inner or outer lives, and we know that algorithms perpetuate injustices of all sorts—and yet, we still live our lives as if we do believe in the data. And this is where his engagements come in, the sonic experiments that confront the distortions and fallacies and textures of a data-driven life.

David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, he’s President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wrote the book Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013) and he’s co-authored and edited several others.

For patrons, there’s an extended version of our interview, complete with some outstanding recommendations for reading, listening, and doing. You can get access to that at patreon.com/phantompower.

Transcript

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Robotic Music]

David Cecchetto: The world is not coherent with itself.

There’s no single world.

Any theorizing needs, I think, to start by acknowledging that

[Robotic Music]

Mack: And welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where scholars and artists and musicians tell stories about sound. I’m Mack Hagood and my guest today is David Cecchetto, someone who qualifies as a scholar and an artist and a musician, but he draws on his musical and artistic skills in a very unusual way, creating what he calls engagements, these strange sonic experiments that help him and his students understand the nature of our computer driven lives.

David Ceccheto is Professor of Digital Critical Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto. He’s also the director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought there. He’s President of the Society for Literature Science and the Arts or S.A.L.S.A. He wrote the book, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism back in 2013, and he’s co-authored and edited several other books.

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Radio as Art and Activism: Feminist Radio, Community, and DIY Technology w/ Shortwave Collective

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 12:17:00 -0000

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The Shortwave Collective describe themselves as “an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.” I was first intrigued by their piece Receive-Transmit-Receive, an exquisite corpse of audio, in which members each contributed their own recordings of sounds from across the radio spectrum. But what really affected me was their ongoing public education project of teaching people to make their own no-power, low-budget radios called open-wave receivers. They’ve held radio-making workshops in Portugal, France, and the UK and they’ve published a how-to in Make magazine.

I wanted to talk to the Shortwave Collective because they are presenting a radically different vision of what radio is and can be. Radio’s history can be thought of as an extended expression of military, political, commercial, and cultural dominance. But the Collective embraces play, experimentation, failure, community, and open listening in their feminist radio practice. So, let’s talk to the Shortwave Collective and see if we can rethink radio–what it’s for and what it can do.

And in the second half of the show, we’ll hear an audio documentary in which the Shortwave Collective teaches you how to make your own open-wave receiver.

Special thanks for appearing on the show to Shortwave Collective members Lisa Hall, Alyssa Moxley, Georgia Muenster, and Maria Papadomanolaki. The other Collective members are Sally A. Applin, Kate Donovan, Brigitte Hart, and Hannah Kemp-Welch. Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood with technical assistance from Craig Eley. Today’s music is by Graeme Gibson with additional sound design elements by Cris Cheek and Shortwave Collective. Phantom Power’s production team includes Craig Eley, Ravi Krishnaswami, and Amy Skjerseth. Our Production Coordinator and transcriber is Jason Meggyesy.

Transcript
[33:47 For Tools Needed to Build Open Wave Receiver]

[34:47 For Start of Tutorial]

Mack Hagood: Before we get started, I have three URLs for your consideration.

If you’re new to the show, welcome! If you enjoy what you hear today, please subscribe at phantompod.org/subscribe.

If you’re already a fan of the show, consider joining our new Patreon. You’ll be supporting our mission of creating entertaining audio scholarship for the people, and you’ll get access to our exclusive patrons-only feed, where you’ll get recommendations for reading and listening and things to do straight from our guests, and you’ll also get bonus episodes in other perks Options start at just $3 a month, and until October 31st, new patrons get a killer Phantom Power sticker. That URL is patreon.com/phantompower.

And finally, please give us a five-star rating or even write a review at ratethispodcast.com/phantom.

All right, let’s get to it.

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Behind the Scenes at Cirque du Soleil: Live Sound, Performer Anxiety, and Sonic Hierarchies in Touring Productions w/ Jacob Danson Faraday

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 12:20:00 -0000

On today’s show, we address a performer’s nightmare—the nightmare of not being able to hear yourself onstage. My guest is ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday, who takes us behind the scenes of the famed Cirque du Soleil to learn how even Cirque’s world-class musicians struggle with technology when they want to hear themselves.

Building on his international career as a touring sound technician, ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday researches the working communities and hidden labor of live sound technicians on large-scale touring productions. He is a recent graduate of the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Today Jake takes us behind the scenes of Cirque du Soleil, sharing his dissertation research on how sound engineers and musicians negotiate the power to hear oneself.

Stage monitoring, the technology that allows musicians to hear the performance as they play, is a topic we rarely hear about, but it’s absolutely essential to performers. Faraday suggests that, while new in-ear monitors are marketed as a godsend for performers, they are more of a mixed blessing, “homogenizing listening” and creating new kinds of issues and anxieties for musicians.

Today’s show was edited and mixed by Jacob Danson Faraday, with additional editing by Mack Hagood.

The song “Sail Away” by Colton Benjamin (2017) was obtained from the Free Multitrack Download Library on the Cambridge Music Technology website by Mike Senior, author of the excellent book Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio.

Read the dissertation: Buried in the mix: touring sound technicians, sonic control, and emotional labour on Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo by Jacob Danson Faraday (2021).

Join Our Patreon! Receive Bonus Material from this episode and more at Patreon.com/phantompower.

Transcript
[00:00:00]

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom power.

[Crowd Noise]

Mack Hagood: You’re waiting in the wings of a large Las Vegas hotel nightclub wearing a powder blue tuxedo. You tentatively touch the bow tie at your throat. You don’t remember taking this gig. A hand pushes you from behind and you stumble out onto the stage. A spotlight fixes you in its gaze. And the music begins.

[Music Plays]

Thank God.

You know, this one, it’s an old bossa nova tune. You take a breath and start to sing, but you can’t hear yourself. You can feel vibrations in your chest and neck. But your voice, it’s not there, but it is there. They can hear it, the crowd, and whatever you’re doing, it must be terrible.

They start to laugh.

[Laughing]

They boo.

[Booing]

But how can you sing if you can’t hear yourself?

[Music Continues]

Mack: Hey, and welcome to another episode and another season of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound in the arts music, and humanities, I’m Mack Hagood, and on today’s show,

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Season Four Trailer

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 16:51:32 -0000

Get ready for Season Four of Phantom Power, where we study sound in the arts, music, and culture!

On Phantom Power, we’ve got an ear to the ground—listening to the subterranean rats of New York…

We’ve got an ear on the streets—with the rattling car trunks of Houston hip hop…

And we’ve got an ear for culture—analyzing the politics of Yoko Ono’s voice…

And in every episode, we hear from the world’s great experts on these topics—the fascinating scholars, sound artists, and musicians who tap the phantom power of sound.

I’m sound professor Mack Hagood, host of Phantom Power. Our fourth season starts September 15th.

We’ll meet a scholar who embedded with the Cirque D’ Soleil to find out why musicians always seem to keep one of their in-ear monitors hanging out of their ear. (Have you noticed that?)

We’ll find out how Kate Bush made the glorious sounds of “Running Up That Hill” with an early digital synthesizer.

We’re going back in history to hear the sound world of Harriet Tubman.

We’ll also talk to cultural critic Karen Tongson from the podcast Waiting to X-hale about the power of karaoke.

And host Dallas Taylor will tell us how his team makes their hit sound podcast 20,000 hertz.

Follow and listen in Apple Podcasts or at phantompod.org.

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Love is the Message: Dance, Music and Counterculture (Love is the Message by Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert)

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 16:50:00 -0000

This month, we are preparing for the launch of Season Four of the podcast in September. Lots of fascinating topics on deck, as we double our output with a semi-monthly format. We are also about to officially launch a Patreon page, but you can get on board early at www.patreon.com/phantompower.

This summer, sound artist and “guerrilla academic” Ben Coleman got in touch to say how much he enjoys Phantom Power. He also suggested we check out another podcast he’s into called Love is the Message.

We’re glad we did! Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a fantastic show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. I recognized Tim Lawrence’s name from his great book on Arthur Russell. Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and a prolific author. Tim and Jeremy have been longtime collaborators and when the clubs closed and universities cut faculty hours due to covid, they started podcasting.

The way I’d describe their show is, imagine the amazing college class you never got to take where you learn about the intersections of global dance music and radical politics, from the 1960s to today. They do shows on disco, Motown, reggae, tropicalia, funk, you name it with a strong cultural studies perspective. And I think the episode we’re going to hear today is a perfect example of their approach—it’s ostensibly an episode about Fela Kuti, but it’s also terrific seminar on the Black Atlantic and the political history of Nigeria.

So thanks, Ben, for the recommendation. Thanks, Tim and Jem for sharing the pod with me and doing this episode swap. And thanks everyone for listening. Talk next month!

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The Internet’s Most Hated Song? Musicology, Misogyny, and Internet Fame Explored w/ Paula Harper

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 15:45:00 -0000

It’s summer and we are busy working on episodes for our fourth season. We’ve also rebuilt our website–check out the the fabulous new phantompod.org. There’s other great stuff in store for the podcast, so stay tuned!
But today, I want to share one of my favorite podcasts with you: Will Robin’s Sound Expertise. For those of you into musicology or popular music studies, there’s a great chance you’re already a subscribe. That’s because Will’s show is fantastic and I personally know many music scholars who are devoted fans of this show that features conversations with established and up-and-coming music scholars. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dr. Robin, you might remember that I quoted his New York Times obituary of R. Murray Schafer in our first episode on Schafer. He has written about music for the Times for at least a decade. He’s also an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland and the author of the book Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music. Sound Expertise will be dropping its third season in the fall.
The episode you are about to hear is one that I love as a media scholar. Will Robin interviews Dr. Paula Harper about her work on viral music videos and taste, specifically that terrible Rebecca Black video “Friday” that’s probably still rattling around in some dark recess of your brain. Dr. Harper digs into the awful virality of that video and all of its cover versions, discerning what this case study can tell us about genre, gender, and how and why sound travels on the internet. It’s a great discussion and I hope you enjoy it. And by the way, since this interview happened, Paula Harper has joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of music. So, who says YouTube rots your brain?

Transcript
Sound Expertise – Season 2, Episode 7Rebecca Black’s Friday and Viral Music with Paula Harper

TRANSCRIPT prepared by Andrew Dell’Antonio

Paula Harper 00:00One of the reasons that I do the work that I do, which is writing about music and sound on the internet, is in part because I am fascinated and delighted by objects that are frequently obnoxious. So a lot of the things that I’m engaging with are things that occupy this weird, liminal or ambivalent space between something that gives people delight and something that makes people want to throw their computer off of a tall building. So just like right in the middle space between those two emotions, or having those two emotions at the same time, is how I’ve engaged with a lot of stuff on the internet, including, but certainly not limited to, the Rebecca Black Friday video.

[intro music]

Will Robin 01:05Welcome back to Sound Expertise. I’m your host, Will Robin, and I’m a musicologist. And this is a podcast where I talk with my fellow music scholars about their research and why it matters.

You probably remember Rebecca Black’s Friday, and if not, you almost certainly heard it. It was absolutely ubiquitous about a decade ago, a music video by an amateur teen musician, which went viral because it was widely trashed as one of the Worst Songs of All Time. Friday went from YouTube to Tosh.0 to parodies and covers on late night TV, racking up tens of millions of views in the process. It was 2011, it was a more innocent time, when our expectations for what kinds of internet content would go viral we...

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Voices Pt. 3: Rethinking Voice, Disability, and Sound Technology w/ Jonathan Sterne

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 16:47:00 -0000

Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, had a formative influence on the then-nascent field of sound studies. His 2012 book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, was both a fascinating cultural history and a deep meditation on the purpose of compression technology in capitalism. Today, Sterne talks to Phantom Power about his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP 2022). Specifically, he tells the story of the “Dork-o-phone,” a vocal amplifier he wears to give talks or communicate in loud spaces. Jonathan explains why he wears the Dork-o-phone, what it’s taught him about voice, technology, and disability, and how his experience informs Diminished Faculties’ “phenomenology of impairment.”

This is the third and final part of our series, Voices. Although you don’t need to listen to the other episodes first to enjoy this one, here are the links to part one and part two.

All of this episode’s sound art and music are performed by Jonathan Sterne and/or groups he appears in:

* Cancerscapes: Recordings made during Sterne’s thyroid cancer treatment* Volte: An instrumental post rock band* The Buddha Curtain: solo electronic music

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology at McGill University. He does research in sound studies; media theory and historiography; science and technology studies; new media; disability studies; music; and cultural studies.

You can read Jonathan Sterne’s cancer diaries at https://www.cancerscapes.ca.

Transcript
[00:00]
Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.
[Transitional Noises]
Jonathan Sterne [Spacey Voice]: The interior voice is at least as much imagined as a reflection of external phenomenon.
And if you have a voice and never heard a recording of yourself speaking, you probably know that the auditory perspective between your ears is like nowhere else.
A shifting interior voice is an index to something very different from a stable interior voice.
[Transitional Noises]
[01:17]
Mack Hagood: Hey, it’s Phantom Power, a show where artists and scholars tell stories about sound. I’m Mack Hagood, and welcome to part three of our three-part series called Voices, this time we’re featuring sound studies scholar, Jonathan Sterne.

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Voices Pt. 2: Gender, Voice, and Podcasting w/ Stacey Copeland

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 16:33:00 -0000

In part two of our three-part series “Voices,” we feature an exciting new voice in the world of sound studies, Stacey Copeland.

In part one last month, we examined the role voices play in professional sports and unpacked some of the understandings of ability and masculinity that inform the sound of the quarterback’s voice in the NFL. Copeland’s audio documentary, “This is the Sound of My Voice,” examines another group of professionals—women broadcasters and podcasters, who struggle with sonic sexism from male colleagues, audiences, and sometimes, even themselves.

The documentary was originally presented on radio in three parts, but Stacey graciously edited a shorter version for this episode of Phantom Power.

Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier (CGS) Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Master of Arts from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program where she studied with a focus on radio production, sound studies, media culture and gender studies. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson University with a minor in English and a specialization in audio production for radio, music and film. It was during her Master’s work that Copeland co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto, Canada based feminist community radio collective. Currently, she is the supervising producer at Amplify Podcast Network, a collaborative project dedicated to reimagining the sound of scholarship.

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Voices Pt. 1: Gender, Disability, and the Auditory Arena of the NFL w/ Travis Vogan, and Jonathan Sterne

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 20:48:00 -0000

In this first episode of a three-part series called Voices, we’re listening to the sound of American football—specifically the role of voices in the NFL. We start with a rather quirky story from NFL history that speaks to how the voice intersects with our ideologies around both disability and gender. It’s about a player whose voice stopped working the way it once did, revealing that football isn’t just a competition between teams on the gridiron—it’s a competition of audibility and vocal toughness. And like the rest of our Voices series, it opens up fascinating questions about what a voice actually is, what it does, and what it means, to us and to those around us.

Our guest is Travis Vogan, a prolific sports media scholar at the University of Iowa. Vogan has written books on ABC Sports, ESPN, boxing movies, and those “voice of God” NFL Films. We also hear briefly from sound scholar Jonathan Sterne, who will feature prominently in an upcoming episode of this Voices series.

Some of this episode is based on the article “The 12th Man: Fan Noise in the Contemporary NFL,” published in Popular Communication by Mack Hagood and Travis Vogan in 2016. If you don’t have institutional access, you can also find the PDF here.

Other things heard or mentioned in this episode:

“The Wild Story of the 49ers, Steve DeBerg, and a Shoulder-Pad Speaker System,” by Eric Branch, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2020.

“The UNBELIEVABLE Story of Steve DeBerg’s Loudspeaker Shoulder Pads,” by the Pick Six Podcast.

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The Making of Phantom Power: Academic Podcasting, Sonic Scholarship, and Audio Storytelling w/ Mack Hagood, Dario Llinares, and Lori Beckstead

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 15:54:00 -0000

This episode, we take you behind the scenes of Phantom Power. Producer/host Mack Hagood was invited by Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead to be a guest on their show, The Podcast Studies Podcast. As you may or may not know, there are a lot of academics out there not only making podcast themselves but also studying podcasts and podcasting as a genre and an industry–and Dario and Lori are in that camp. Their podcast is a tremendous resource for those who want to understand this emerging academic field.

In the interview, Dario prompted Mack to go pretty deep into the production of Phantom Power, exploring the techniques and philosophy behind the show, as well as the potential Mack sees for podcasting as a format for generating scholarly knowledge. And after the interview, Lori had some intriguing comments about what counts as “original scholarship” when we do it in sound. So, as we prepare our 2022 season of Phantom Power, we thought we’d share this discussion of how our sonic sausage gets made. And we’ll be back next month with a new original episode!

Things we talk about in this episode:

Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control by Mack Hagood (Duke, 2019)

“Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood (Real Life, December 3, 2020)

“The Scholarly Podcast: Form and Function in Audio Academia” by Mack Hagood in Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt, Eds (University of Michigan Press, 2021).

Ep. 8: Test Subjects (Mara Mills), Phantom Power

Ep. 29 | R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021) Pt.1, Phantom Power.

Ep. 30 | R. Murray Schafer Pt. 2: Critiques & Contradictions, Phantom Power.

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Inside The World According to Sound: Exploring Micro Podcasts Narrative Critique, and Surround Sound Audio w/ Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 16:05:00 -0000

The World According to Sound is the brainchild of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. It began as a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Then it became something much more ambitious: a live sonic Odyssey in 8-channel surround sound. Starting January, Harnett and Hoff bring their realtime soundtrips direct to your home headphones via the internet in their winter listening series.

We are sure that Phantom Power listeners will love this experience. And right now, you can buy tickets for 25% off with the promo code phantompower25. (As a public university employee, I should probably note that I am not receiving financial compensation through this promo code. –Mack)

In this episode, host Mack Hagood talks to Harnett and Hoff about why they grew frustrated with working in public radio and how they now assemble sonic experiences that don’t impose a fixed narrative on their listeners. We also listen to some fantastic excerpts from their upcoming listening series.

We also briefly discuss a sound art classic, I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier. You can hear Lucier perform the piece in this video from an MIT symposium in 2014. Shortly after our interview, Lucier passed away at the age of 90. May he Rest In Peace.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. Music by Graeme Gibson.

Transcript
[00:00]
Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.
[Snippet from The World According to Sound]
[00:59]
Mack Hagood: And welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, your monthly deep dive into all things sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood, and the audio you just heard comes from the long running project called The World According to Sound.
It started off as a podcast then it became a live listening series. Now it’s a virtual distributed experience, that’s available to folks online, streaming.
I mean, it’s a little bit hard to explain actually, but we’ll get into that.
But The World According to Sound is the brainchild of my two guests today.
Chris Hoff: I’m Chris Hoff. I’m actually based in San Francisco and yeah, I’m more of a sound engineer. I come from the public radio world. And I’m the co-creator of The World According to Sound.
Sam Harnett: I’m Sam Harnett, primarily a reporter, but now full-time World According to Sound co-creator.
Mack: Like Chris, Sam comes from the world of public radio, and as you’ll hear, they sort of have a complicated relationship with their old boss.
Sam: Well, we started basically as a reaction to public radio, I mean, Chris and I have both been doing public radio for over a decade–Chris as an engineer and me as a report.
And one day we were just like, “You know, as much as we love public radio, there’s like no sound on radio.”
If you listen to public radio, what you hear is people talking. You hear facts and information and stories and characters, but you hear very, very little sound.
[Snippet from The World According to Sound]
[02:41]
Mack: When I met Chris and Sam, they were in the middle of editing their latest project and you might say they were neck deep in what we could call “ancie...

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Sonic Warfare and Animal Control (Re-Cast): Empathy and the Human-Animal Relationship in Sound Art w/ Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Robbie Judkins, and Colleen Plumb

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 22:00:00 -0000

In this re-cast, we examine the sounds humans make in order to monitor, repel, and control beasts. Author Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed is a creative nonfiction book that explores the human-animal relationship through animal-centered sound art. When we first released this episode in 2019, Listen was a collection of short essays in search of a publisher, but today we are thrilled to announce its official release by New Rivers Press–we’re spreading the word by re-airing this powerful Phantom Power episode.

You’ll hear Mandy-Suzanne reading her unflinchingly reflective prose, mixed with the sound art she illuminates in these essays: works by Robbie Judkins, Claude Matthews, and Colleen Plumb. By turns beautiful and harrowing, these sounds and words reposition us, kindling empathy as we listen through non-human ears. Mack Hagood is joined by former co-host cris cheek for a four-legged listening session.

Links to works by the artists heard in this episode:

Mandy Suzanne-Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed.

Robbie Judkins: Homo Tyrannicus, “Pest” (video), live in London, 2017

Claude Matthews: “DogPoundFoundSound (Bad Radio Dog Massacre)”

Colleen Plumb: “Thirty Times a Minute” (homepage), indoor installation (video)

Transcript
ethereal music plays]

[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.

[pig grunting]

[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 10.

[CRIS]
Animal Control.

[MANDY SUZANNE WONG]
If humans did this to each other, they call it sonic warfare, terrorism or crowd control, depending on who did it and whom they did it to. They call the end result for the victims, that is post traumatic stress, but skunks aren’t human. They’re not even pets. Not like your spaniel who clearly enjoys notions of his own. Can a skunk suffer post traumatic stress? Aren’t they just wild animals? Yes and yes, sound is contact. Fear is a weapon. The wild is here.

[sounds fade out]

[MACK]
Welcome back to another episode of Phantom Power, where we explore the world of sound in the arts and humanities, I’m Mack Hagood.

[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek.

[MACK]
Hi, cris.

[CRIS]
Hi Mack. How you doing?

[MACK]
I’m okay. We’ve got an interesting episode in store today I think.

[CRIS]
Good.

[MACK]
I spoke with an author of fiction and nonfiction work. Her name is Mandy Suzanne Wong. She hails from Bermuda. She’s got a PhD from the University of California in Los Angeles. You may have heard of the place.
[CRIS]
I have. she’s very interdisciplinary right?

[MACK]
Yeah, she’s another person that I met through that crazy conference for science literature and the arts. Like the other person that we met.

[CRIS]
Brian House.

[MACK]
Brian House, yeah.

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Remembering R. Murray Schafer Pt.2: Criticism, Contradiction, and Cultural Impact w/ Jonathan Sterne, Mitchell Akiyama, and Hildegard Westerkamp

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 20:25:00 -0000

How to think about the contradictory figure of R. Murray Schafer? A renegade scholar who used sound technology to create an entirely new field of study, even as he devalued the very tools of its trade. A gifted composer who claimed a sincere appreciation for indigenous cultures, yet one who, perhaps, could only love them on his own terms, only as they fit into his sweeping vision for Canadian music. An erudite reader with a deep knowledge of world cultures, who nevertheless dismissed Canada’s most multicultural areas as less than truly Canadian. And a man, who despite a bomb-throwing persona on the page, is described by those who knew him as a kind and generous person.

Today we speak to Jonathan Sterne, Mitchell Akiyama, and Hildegard Westerkamp to learn the critiques and contradictions of Schafer. Perhaps the greatest testament to his lasting legacy is the fact that we aren’t done arguing with him.

Works discussed in this episode:

Jonathan Sterne’s first book, The Audible Past, includes critiques of Schafer’s work, especially his concept of schizophonia. His chapter “Soundscape, Landscape, Escape” (PDF, in the edited volume Soundscapes of the Urban Past) traces the intellectual and audiophile histories of Schafer’s term soundscape.

Listen, a short film on Schafer directed by David New, includes Shafer’s claim that recorded sounds are not “real sound.”

Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Sound Walk presents a subtler way of thinking about “schizophonic” sounds. Her chapter “The Disruptive Nature of Listening: Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow” (in the edited volume Sound Media Ecology) reexamines the World Soundscape Project through the political lenses of the 1970s and today.

An episode of the CBC radio program “Soundscapes of Canada” is available at the Canadian Music Centre’s music library.

Rafael de Oliveira, Patrícia Lima, and Alexsander Duarte‘s interview with Schafer in Corfu, Greece is available on YouTube.

Mitchell Akiyama’s critique of the World Soundscape Project appears in “Unsettling the World Soundscape Project: Soundscapes of Canada and the Politics of Self-Recognition” (on the sound studies blog Sounding Out) and in his chapter “Nothing Connects Us but Imagined Sound” (in the edited volume Sound, Music, Ecology).

The program notes (PDF) to Schafer’s North/White contain his dismissal of urban Canadians (page 43).

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Remembering R. Murray Schafer Pt.1: Soundscape, Acoustic Ecology, and the Tuning of the World w/ Ellen Waterman, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Eric Leonardson

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 16:34:00 -0000

R. Murray Schafer recently passed away on August 14th 2021. If you’re someone who works with sound or enjoys sound art or experimental music–or you’ve just thrown around the word “soundscape”–you’ve probably engaged with his intellectual legacy. Schafer was one of Canada’s most influential avant-garde composers. He was also the creator of acoustic ecology, the founder of the World Soundscape Project, and the author of the classic book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. He brought a musician’s ear to the field of ecology and he brought an ecological perspective to music. And he bequeathed us a generative vocabulary for talking about and thinking about sound.

This is the first of a two-part series on R. Murray Schafer. Next month, we speak with two of Schafer’s critics–Mitchell Akiyama and Jonathan Sterne. But today, we speak with three of Schafer’s associates to understand the person, his creative works, and his lasting impact on the study of sound:

* Ellen Waterman, ethnomusicologist, flutist, and Schafer expert
* Hildegard Westerkamp, soundscape composer and member of the World Soundscape Project
* Eric Leonardson, sound artist and President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

Creative works heard on today’s show:

* Listen, a short film on Schafer, directed by David New.
* Snowforms, R. Murray Schafer
* The Greatest Show, R. Murray Schafer
* The Crown Of Ariadne, R. Murray Schafer
* Wolf Music V: Nocturne, R. Murray Schafer
* Le Testament, Ezra Pound
* Loving, R. Murray Schafer
* Beneath the Forest Floor, Hildegard Westerkamp
* Miniwanka, R. Murray Schafer

Special thanks to Elisabeth Hodges for translation assistance, Alex Blue V for our outtro music, and Craig Eley for his dramatic turn as R. Murray Schafer.

Today’s show was produced and edited by Mack Hagood with additional editing by Ravi Krishnaswami .

Transcript
[00:00:00]
Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.
[Crow Squawking]
R. Murray Schafer: A soundscape is any collection of sounds almost like a painting is a collection of visual attractions.

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The Embodied Experience of Sound: Musique Concrète, Field Recordings, and Relational Listening w/ Lawrence English

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 12:21:00 -0000

Today, in honor of World Listening Day, we rebroadcast our story on renowned Australian sound composer, media artist and curator Lawrence English.
This episode of gets deep into English’s own listening practices as an artist, specifically a technique he calls Relational Listening. In fact, as you’ll hear, he describes himself not as a sound maker but as a professional listener—that’s how central the act of listening is to his artistic practice.
In particular he talks about his reworking of an important work in the fields of musique concrète and field recording, Presque Rien by Luc Ferrari, and the recent premiere of Wave Fields, his own 12-hour durational sound installation for sleepers at Burleigh Heads in Queensland as part of the Bleach* Festival.
Lawrence is interested in the nature of listening and the capability of sound to occupy a body. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of relation listening and perception, through live performance, field recordings and installation.
The show includes extracts from the following tracks:
Album: Cruel Optimism: “Hammering a Screw.”
Album: Wilderness of Mirrors: “Wilderness of Mirrors,” “Wrapped in Skin.”
Album: Songs of the Living: “Trigona Carbonaria Hive Invasion, Brisbane Australia,” “Cormorants Flocking At Dusk Amazon Brazil,” “Various Chiroptera Samford Australia.”
Album: Ghost Towns: “Ghost Towns.”
Album: Kiri No Oto: “Soft Fuse.”
Luc Ferrari: Presque Rien.
Transcript
[♪ ethereal music playing ♪]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This… is… Phantom Power.
[COMPUTERIZED VOICE]
Episode 4.
[CRIS]
On Listening In.
[buzzing sounds fade in, and fade out as Cris begins to speak]
[CRIS]
The hive of the sugarbag bee, endemic to northeastern Australia.
[loud music starts abruptly]
The first notes of a piece called…
[more loud notes]
Hammering the Screw.
[scratching noises and metallic noises begin]
Found objects – a 44 gallon drum, a ghost town in far northern Australia.
[scratching sounds]
Just some small extracts from recordings made by today’s guest.
[MACK HAGOOD]
It’s Phantom Power, sounds about sound. That’s Cris Cheek, and I’m Mack Hagood.
[LAWRENCE ENGLISH, pre-recorded]
I’m Lawrence English, and I have been described as a professional listener.
[bullfrog sounds fade in]
Which does make me sound like a very second-rate therapist.
[laughing]
But, it is the kind of thing that I spend a lot of time doing in my everydays. There is a lot of listening that goes on, and I suppose in some respects you know, I’m increasingly interested in problematizing what that actually means,

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Why Media Matters: The Overlooked Role of Sound, Comfort, and Control in Digital Life w/ Mack Hagood

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 20:08:00 -0000

What can sound technologies tell us about our relationship to media as a whole? This is one of the central questions in the research of Phantom Power‘s host, Mack Hagood. To find its answer, he studies devices that get little attention from media scholars: noise-cancelling headphones, white noise machines, apps that make nature sounds, tinnitus maskers–even musical pillows. The story these media tell is rather different from the standard narrative, in which media are conveyors of information and entertainment. In his book Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, Mack argues that media are the way we control how–and how much–we let the world affect us.

On Phantom Power, Mack has always focused on presenting the ideas of other scholars and sound artists. However, during our summer break we thought we’d share a piece by Mack that appeared in another podcast, the audio edition of Real Life, a razor-sharp magazine on digital culture. “Emotional Rescue” begins with the odd example of pillow-based audio technology to make the point that media are really about something more intimate than information:

The cozy conflation of content and comfort… is not a recent digital development. Nor is it, I would argue, a quirky edge case of media use. In fact, this is what media are: tools for altering how the body feels and what it perceives, controlling our relationship to others and the world, enveloping ourselves, and even disappearing ourselves.

Misunderstanding the true nature of our media use isn’t merely of academic concern–it has had disastrous effects on our politics and social cohesion.

The article was written for the Real Life website, then subsequently dropped in podcast form. Writing for the eye is quite different from writing for the ear, but podcast producer and narrator Britney Gil is amazing at elucidating written prose for the listener. If you listen to nonfiction audiobooks and/or want to hear a great narrator reading insightful takes on digital life, be sure to subscribe to Real Life: Audio Edition.

“Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood:

Original Article

Original Podcast

Transcript
[00:00:00]
Mack Hagood: Hey everyone, it’s Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood.
So, it’s summertime and we’re taking a little bit of downtime on the show. I’m on the road right now, so I’m just recording this on my laptop and you can hear the frogs of the South Carolina low country in the background.
So, yeah, we’re taking a little bit of a break. We’re also getting some episodes for next season in the can, so to speak. We have some good stuff coming in your way for next season, but we didn’t want to leave the Phantom Power podcast feed barren for the entire summer.
So, we’re going to be dropping some things in, keeping up our once a month schedule, and today we’re doing something that we’ve never done before.
On this podcast, I’ve always focused on presenting the ideas of other scholars and sound artists, but, during this summer break,

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Exploring the Avian Aerosphere: Bird Migration, Radio, and Eco-Sonic Storytelling w/ Jacob Smith

Tue, 11 May 2021 15:52:00 -0000

Today we present the first episode of Jacob Smith’s new eco-critical audiobook, Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves. In this audio-only book, Smith uses expert production to craft a wildly original argument about the relations between radio and bird migration. The rest of the book is available, free of charge, from The University of Michigan Press, but this introduction is a great standalone experience that we think Phantom Power listeners will delight in. It tells a truly unique cultural history of radio, describes important scientific discoveries about bird migration through interviews with key researchers, and continues exploring Smith’s singular mode of ecocriticism, combining text-based scholarship with sound art, music, and audio storytelling.

Professor Jacob Smith is Director of the Masters in Sound Arts and Industries Program at Northwestern University and author of numerous books. He is a cultural historian focused on media and sound who never fails to come at his subject matter from an oblique and completely original angle. His first three books focused on the relationship between the media technologies that developed over the course of the twentieth century—the phonograph, radio, film, and TV—and the kinds of performance styles we have come to expect from performers. For example, his 2008 book Vocal Tracks tackles questions such as how radio changed acting and why fake laugh tracks developed on television—and why we feel so weird about canned laughter.

In recent years, Jacob Smith’s work has changed in a couple of ways. Thematically, he took a hard turn towards environmental criticism. His 2015 book Eco-Sonic Media lays out an agenda for studying the negative environmental effects of media culture while also telling a strange alternate history of “green” sound technologies: hand-cranked gramophones with eco-friendly shellac records and needles sourced from cacti instead of diamonds. His next book maintained this eco-critical perspective while revolutionizing the format of the scholarly book. 2019’s ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene was a 10-part audiobook that mined golden age radio shows and sound art to explore the dawn of the Anthropocene era, in which humans emerged as the primary force affecting earth systems. In episode 12 of this podcast, we played an excerpt of that book and interviewed Jake about the process of crafting a book-length scholarly argument in sound by sampling sounds from other eras. Lightning Birds continues this Smith’s work in this innovative vein.

Transcript
[00:00:00]
Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.
[Feedback Noises]
Jacob Smith: The crests of waves in the sea of human knowledge will roll across the entire country into each local radio station.
The metallic throat of radio beams rays of song to its many metallic singers.
Metal sings.
[Techno Beats]
The crests of waves in the sea of human knowledge…
[Techno Beats Cont.]
[1:13]
Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom power, a show about sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood.
This is probably the final, proper episode of season three, as I, and most of my collaborators on this podcast are academics, we tend to release these episodes during the academic year and take a bit of a break during the summer.
But don’t worry, this feed will not run dry.

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Communicating Across Distance: Field Recording, Loneliness, and Covid-19 w/ Kate Carr

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 15:14:00 -0000

Today’s guest, Kate Carr, is an accomplished sound artist and field recordist whose recent work grapples with issues of communication and longing—themes we can all relate to in the Covid era.

In part one of the show, we mark Phantom Power’s three-year anniversary and 25th episode. Mack does a little thinking out loud about the different kinds of audio work that we’ve featured over the past three years. The terminology and practices for audio work always seem to be in flux—and people can have completely different terms for similar kinds of work. Mack imagines a spectrum of sound work, from more materialist genres like musique concrete to more conceptual or idealist genres like the audiobook, which emphasize meaning over form. In the end, the spectrum eats its own tail—the material is always conceptual and the conceptual is always material. Sound is always both resonance and meaning and the two can never be completely teased apart. Signal and noise are one.

Episodes discussed:

Ep. 20: What is Radio Art (Colin Black)

Ep. 12: A Book Unbound (Jacob Smith)

Ep. 15: Goth Diss (Anna M. Williams)

In part two, we meet Kate Carr, an artist the critic Matthew Blackwell describes as a “sound essayist.” Since she began it in 2010, Kate Carr’s work as a musician and field recordist has taken her around the world, from her native Australia to a doctoral program at University of the Arts London. She’s been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wire, and Pitchfork. She also runs the field recording label Flaming Pines.

Since slightly before the pandemic, the theme of communication at a distance—always implicit in field recording—has taken center stage in her work. We examine three such pieces by Kate Carr. Each one explores how sound helps us communicate at a distance and how it comforts us in moments of loneliness:

“Contact”—a meditation on sonic connection through radio, morse code, and digital technology.

“Where to Begin”—a study of love letter writing, which Carr says has profound similarities with field recording.

“For Some Odd Reason”—an exploration of the kinds of noise we came to miss during social distancing and the mediated ways we’ve tried to add it back.

Together, these three pieces—one from before the pandemic, one from its beginning, and one from its interminable middle—explore how earnestly we try to connect across distance—and how heightened these attempts have become over the past year.

Huge thanks to our co-producer on this episode, Matthew Blackwell. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa and a freelance music writer. He writes and edits Tusk Is Better Than Rumours, a newsletter that covers the discographies of experimental musicians. He is also a contributor to Tone Glow, a newsletter featuring interviews with experimental musicians.

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The Art and Activism of Yoko Ono: Racim, Feminism, and Avant-Garde Music w/ Amy Skjerseth

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 23:14:00 -0000

Today, Phantom Power‘s Amy Skjerseth brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant-garde musician whose actual work probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves: Yoko Ono. Collaborator with the Fluxus group in the early 60s, creator of performances such as Cut Piece and her Bed In with John Lennon in the late 1960s, director of experimental films such as 1970’s Fly, and recording artist of experimental pop albums such as that Fly’s soundtrack… Despite this large body of work, her most famous role was that of wife to that guy in that band—a performance that made her the target of misogynous and racist criticism that persists to this day.

As Amy points out, much of this criticism centered on the sound of Yoko Ono’s voice. Of course, as we’ve explored on this show before, listening to the other with a racist or sexist ear is nothing new. But in Ono’s case, this prejudicial listening is compounded by the fact that, years before the emergence of punk rock, she was pushing the boundaries of acceptable vocal expression for anyone, let alone a woman—moaning, wailing, chortling, and screaming.

The vast majority of listeners immediately dismissed these sounds as a punchline. On today’s show, we’re going to actually listen. What is the purpose and meaning and effect of Ono’s vocal artistry? We’re exploring it in her recorded work, in her feminist and pacifist political agenda, and most of all, in her film Fly, in which she uses her voice to destroy boundaries between sound and touch, human and animal, self and other.

This episode includes elements from an audio essay Amy published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.

Music by Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Tanya Tagaq, and Graeme Gibson, as well as “Crickets, Birds, Summer Ambient” by Nikodemus Christian. You can hear most of the music again on this Phantom Power Spotify Playlist.

You can hear Yoko Ono’s Twitter response to Trump (November 11, 2016) here.

Transcript
[00:00:00]
[Phone Ringing]
Voice of Yoko Ono: Hello?
Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.
Voice of Yoko Ono: This is Yoko.
[Phone Hangs Up]
[00:00:22]
[Between the Takes by Yoko Ono Plays]
Mack Hagood: Hey everyone. It’s Phantom Power. Your monthly-ish deep dive into sound and music in the arts and humanities. I’m your host Mack Hagood.
Today, I am fully and completely psyched to bring you a story from a new member to the Phantom Power production team, Amy Skjerseth.
Amy’s a film scholar, a classical musician, a co-organizer of the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies. She’s also a PhD candidate in film and media at the University of Chicago, wrapping up a dissertation on pop music in film and media.
And today, Amy brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant garde musician around, but at the same time, someone whose actual work probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

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Fracking, Forests, and he Art of Environmental Healing: Sound Walks, Silence, and Social Change w/ Brian Harnetty

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 16:56:00 -0000

What would happen if you took red state rural voters on a walk into the woods with left-wing environmental activists and experimental music fans? Our guest this episode knows the answer.

BRIAN HARNETTY is a composer and an interdisciplinary artist using sound and listening to foster social change.

While Brian studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, one of his teachers, Michael Finnissy, suggested he look for musical inspiration in his home state of Ohio. Brian took that advice and the result has been eight internationally acclaimed albums. Brian’s music combines archival recordings of interviews and singing—often from the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives—with his original compositions.

For the past decade, Brian has focused on the myth, history, ecology, and economy of Shawnee, a small Appalachian town in Ohio. His 2019 album Shawnee, Ohio was praised by the BBC, the Wire, and named 2019 Underground Album of the Year by MOJO. The album engages with the social and environmental impacts felt by the town and nearby Wayne National Forest in their long history with extractive industries from timber to coal mining to fracking.

But Brian doesn’t just document Shawnee’s narrative—he intervenes in it. He’s an environmental activist of a gentle kind, one who gets area residents of different political stripes to walk in the woods together to listen—to one another and to the forest. All in service of protecting and healing the land. In this episode, we are thrilled to present an audio documentary that Brian Harnetty has produced for Phantom Power about this quietly radical experiment, called Forest Listening Rooms. And afterwards I’ll speak to Brian about his project.

Learn more:

Visit Brian Harnetty’s studio in Ohio.

Check out his Bandcamp page.

Visit his website.

Transcript
[00:00]
Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.
[Banjo Playing]
Male Voice [Singing]: You rulers of the forest. This song to you I’ll tell.
Do the impact study. Save us from fracking hell.
[Group Singing]:
Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?
Which side are you on, girls? Which side are you on?
Male Voice [Singing]: Come on you good people. Good news to you I’ll tell. If we stick together, we’ll save our water bills.
[Group Singing]:
Which side are you on, boys? Oh, which side are you on?
Which side are you on, girls? Which side are you on?
[01:10]
Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood.
Brian Harnetty is a composer and an interdisciplinary artist, using sound and listening to foster social change. While Brian studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, one of his teachers, Michael Finnessy suggested he look for musical inspiration in his home state of Ohio.
Brian took that advice and the result has been eight internationally acclaimed albums.
Brian’s music combines archival recordings of interviews and singing, often from the Berea College Appalachian sound archives with his own original compositions.
For the past decade, Brian has focused on the myth, history, ecology, and economy of Shawnee, a small Appalachian town in Ohio.
His 2019 album Shawnee, Ohio,

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How Voice Assistants Are Changing the Way We Play: Language, Technology, and Boardgames w/ Frank Lantz

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 21:32:00 -0000

The Hey Robot board game

Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professor Frank Lantz.

Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in March, when Americans began sheltering in place. And, of course, we’ve also spent way more time interacting with digital technology. These two things have come together in a weird and delightful way in Lantz’s game Hey Robot.

Created by Lantz’s family-owned company Everybody House Games, Hey Robot is a guessing game you play with a group of friends—including your voice assistant or smart speaker. The premise is simple: Make Google Home or Alexa utter the words written in a deck of cards. The questions it raises are complex: What are these digital entities that many of us interact with daily? How have web searches and voice-based computing changed the way we talk? And what does this reveal about language itself?

Hey Robot is available in a free online Quarantine Edition that you can play remotely with your friends. The board game edition is available on Amazon.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Fake Cumbia music by Mack Hagood.

Ambient music clip taken from Hiroshi Yoshimura’s album Green.

[0:00]

Mack Hagood: Hey, Siri.

[iPhone Beep]

Mack: What’s Phantom Power?

[iPhone Beep]

Siri: Phantom Power, in the context of professional audio equipment, is DC electric power transmitted through microphone cables.

Shall I continue?

Mack: Uh, how about a podcast?

Siri: I don’t see an app for that. You’ll need to download one.

Mack: Oh no. I meant a podcast called Phantom Power.

Hello?

[Sigh]

[00:35]

[Intro Music]

Mack: Okay, Google. What is the Phantom Power Podcast?

Spacey Voice: This…is…Phantom Power

[Intro Music]

Google Assistant: According to Apple Podcasts, on Phantom Power Mack Hagood explores the world of sound in the arts, music, and culture.

Each episode features the sounds and ideas of a contemporary artist, musician, or sound scholar.

Mack: Good job, Google.

Mack: Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy new year. It’s me Mack Hagood. Close enough, Google. Close enough.

Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of Phantom Power. We have a lot of good things in the works for you in 2021. One thing I’m excited about is guest producers.

We have a number of critics and scholars working on Phantom Power episodes, including features on the work of sound artists, Brian Harnetty, Kate Carr and Yoko Ono.

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Making Music in the Shadow of Censorship: Politics, Identity, and Experimental Music w/ Siavash Amini

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 19:47:00 -0000

Episode 21 presents a portrait of Iranian experimental composer Siavash Amini. His music, which moves seamlessly between contemplative ambience, menacing dissonance, and spacious melodicism, has been released on experimental imprints such as Umor Rex and Room40. His latest, A Mimesis of Nothingness, just came out on the Swiss label Hallow Ground.
Siavash tells host Mack Hagood that his entire life is based on an experiment and he doesn’t yet know what its outcome will be. This episode traces the contours of that story, from his boyhood as a metalhead in a small Iranian port town to his role in the development of Tehran’s lauded experimental music scene. Along the way, we drill down on the international and internal politics that add danger and difficulty to the life of this outspoken leftest composer.
Amini is forced to navigate not only the authoritarianism of Iranian government censorship, but also the authoritarianism of western tastemakers, who sometimes want him to make the “Middle Eastern music” they hear in their own heads. Steadfast in his individuality, Siavash makes sounds that resist these authorities–the defiant anthems of an imaginary land, population: one.
Most of the music in this episode is by Siavash Amini–listen to it again in this Spotify playlist and check out this great introduction to his music on Bandcamp.
This episode was edited by Mack Hagood.
Transcript
[0:00]
Ethereal Voice: This…Is…Phantom Power
[Transitional Noises, Hammock Creeking]
[0:30]
Mack Hagood: Hey, everyone it’s Phantom Power. A podcast about sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood speaking to you from my hammock in my backyard in Cincinnati, Ohio.
As you’re certainly aware this Corona Virus Pandemic has produced a quiet of sorts. A hush that has fallen over things as normal daily activities have tapered off.
And for those of us who have the will and the privilege to self-isolate, there can be a kind of beauty in this strange calm. A moment for quiet reflection on how we’ve been living and how we got to this place.
Our guest is Siavash Amini, an experimental musician from Tiran who star is quickly rising.
And I had been wanting to talk with him about his music for quite some time. But by the time I started working on this episode, back in late February of 2020, world events pushed our conversations quite beyond music.
Tensions between our two countries were at a level not seen in decades. Donald Trump had pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and reinstated sanctions.
Then in January, Trump ordered an airstrike that killed top Iranian General, Qasem Soleimani. Iran retaliated with airstrikes that injured over 100 U.S. service people in Iraq.
At this point, Iranians, I follow on Twitter we’re in a full-blown panic, expecting war at any minute. People started leaving Tiran, headed for the safety of the countryside
And those weren’t the only stressors. A couple of months earlier, the Iranian government killed a number of protesters in the streets. And by the time I interviewed Siavash, Iran had joined China and Italy in the top three countries for coronavirus cases.
As we spoke, Siavash was sheltering in place and his country was at a quiet, anxious standstill. But of course, in a couple of months, conditions in the U S would be quite similar.
So, in today’s episode,

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How State-Owned Radio Shaped Australia’s Experimental Sound Art Scene: The Listening Room, and Sonic Innovation w/ Colin Black

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 13:21:00 -0000

What is radio art? It’s a rather unfamiliar term in the United States, but in other countries, it’s a something of an artistic tradition. Today’s guest, Dr. Colin Black is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning radio artist and composer. He speaks to us about his practice as a radio artist and the influence the Australian radio program The Listening Room had on Australia’s sonic avant garde. We then listen to his piece Out Of Thin Air: Radio Art Essay #1, which both explores and exemplifies the possibilities of radio art. It’s both informative and a total treat for the ears!
The piece was originally commissioned by the Dreamlands commissions for Radio Arts, funded by the Arts Council England and Kent County Council.
Out Of Thin Air: Radio Art Essay #1 is a meta-referencing poetic reflection and meditation on radio art underpinned by an artistic treatment of dislocation, transmission, reception and place as a thematic underscore. The work is in the form of an abstract song cycle that chiefly oscillates between “songs” originating from High Frequency (HR) radio static/broadcasts between 3 and 30 MHz and those from interviewees replying to questions relating to radio art. Location recordings, sound effect and musical composition weave this originating material together to form a sonic confluence and juxtaposition of elements to stimulate the listener’s imagination while offering an insight into the work’s subject matter.
Interviewees (in order of appearance): Armeno Alberts, Tom Roe, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Gregory Whitehead, Götz Naleppa, Andrew McLennan, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Heidi Grundmann, Andreas Hagelüken, Teri Rueb and Kaye Mortley
Producer and Composer: Colin Black
High Frequency (HR) radio receiver operator: Dimitri Papagianakis
Duration: 00:25:10
Music for this episode is by Blue the Fifth. We also hear a brief excerpt of Things Change,Things Stay the Same by Rik Rue.
Transcript
[Ethereal Voice]
This is Phantom Power
[Robotic Noises]
Mack Hagood: Episode 20: What is radio art?
[00:00:28]
Colin Black: That’s a good question: What is the difference between sound art and radio art? If we think of radio as an art form rather than a media device…
[Theme Music]
[00:00:58]
Mack Hagood: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. The podcast about sound in the arts and humanities. Cultures of sound, histories of sound, philosophies of sound.
I’m Mack Hagood. and today we’re focused on a single question: What is radio art? I don’t think it’s a particularly common term here in the United States, even among, folks who are pretty into sound. We have sound art and sound installations and field recordings, but those things don’t have a very strong presence in American radio.
And then on the radio side, we do have people like the late Joe Frank, who did experimental, freeform radio, but that never went by the name of radio art. And by the way, we do have really cool, independent and internet-based radio stations, shouts to Radius in Chicago and Wave Farm in upstate New York.
But in terms of some kind of radio art tradition, you really have to look to countries like Germany and Australia. And so that’s why I invited my guest today: Dr. Colin Black.
[Theme Music Fades Out]
Colin Black is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning composer, sound artist, and radio artist. His works have been heard on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC, and on stations in Germany and New Zealand and South Africa.

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Under Construction

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 20:49:00 -0000

It’s been a minute, so in this short episode, we update you on what’s happening with Phantom Power and what’s coming in 2020.
The big (and sad) news is that co-host cris cheek is departing. After two years of lending his unique voice, ideas, and turns of phrase to the show–not to mention producing fantastic episodes like his interview with This Heat’s Charles Hayward–cris has decided to refocus on his many other creative endeavors.
We will miss cris, but the show will go on. And he’s been kind enough to let us continue using his golden intro! Check out the pod to hear about some of our upcoming 2020 episodes, with guests including Colin Black, Harriet Ottenheimer, Jonathan Sterne, and Siavash Amini.
Transcript
[low humming and static playing]
This
is
Phantom Power.
[cars driving with birds chirping in background]
[soft organ plays from lowest key to highest key]
[Mack Hagood]
Strange tones echoing through my Cincinnati neighborhood
[birds chirping with soft tones in background]
bubbling up from underground.
[tones go from low to high]
[WATER SERVICE WORKER]
Alright..
[MACK, laughs]
That is crazy.
[background talking of construction workers with tones playing and birds chirping]
Wow.
Standing in front of my house is this guy from the Cincinnati water department. He’s in front of an open manhole cover. And he’s got a microphone lowered down into the manhole.
[tones and birds chirping playing in background]
And about a block down the street. There’s another open manhole cover. And the tone generator is making the sounds that we hear this upward sweep of tones. It’s called acoustic emission testing, I think. And it’s a sonic way of figuring out if the the water pipes are in good repair. I rather enjoyed the acoustic testing. But unfortunately, it was a harbinger of [laughs] less pleasant sounds that were soon to come.
[loud jackhammers, machines stoping and going]
All the water lines in my early 1900s neighborhood are being torn out and replaced, which, of course, means that all of the streets are being torn out and replaced. And it’s a it’s been a loud experience. Jackhammers. Yeah, this is what it sounds like inside the house.
[machine sounds.]
Idling trucks.
[idling truck noise]
Those are probably the worst, the constant idling machines everywhere. And so hey, it seemed like a perfect time to go ahead and get the roof replaced.
[laughing]
Just throw that into the ongoing cacophony.
[Hammering and footsteps coming through the ceiling]
This is the sound of my roof being torn off, right above my head as I sit in my office where I record this podcast.
[Hammering and tearing]
So yeah, it’s been a little louder around here, a little bit difficult to produce a podcast under these circumstances.
[truck idling]
And it’s fitting because Phantom Power is a little bit under construction, you might say, we’re going through some changes. And so I just want to fill you in on them. The big thing is that cris cheek, my good friend, and partner in this podcast for the past couple of years, is leaving. When we originally set out to make this podcast, we planned on it lasting a year, maybe two years. And it’s become an ongoing concern. And it’s been a lot of fun to do. It’s also very challenging to do. It’s quite time consuming, putting together the show the way we want to put it together. And cris just really felt that this was taking away time from his his poetry and his performance and his visual art and all the amazing things that cris does. So, it’s just gonna be me solo now. And I’m gonna miss having cris, his unique voice, his unique turns of phrase, his oblique angles of analysis.

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Houston’s Slab Scene (Re-Cast): DJ Screw, Car Culture, and Chopped and Screwed Hip Hop w/ Langston Collin Wilkins

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 22:20:00 -0000

Today we re-cast one of our favorite episodes, an interview with folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins, who studies “slab” culture and the “screwed and chopped” hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture’s soundtrack.
Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods.
Wilkins shows us how sonic creativity turns a space—a collection of buildings and streets—into a place that is known, respected, and loved.
In this show we hear the slow, muddy, psychedelic sounds of DJ Screw and The Screwed Up Click, including rappers such as Lil Keke, Fat Pat, Big Hawk, and UGK–as well as songs by Geto Boys, Willie Dee, Swishahouse, Point Blank, Biggie Smalls, and MC T Tucker & DJ Irv.
Photos by Langston Collin Wilkins.
Transcript
[low humming and static playing]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[Tamborine beat blends in]
Episode 7: Screwed and Chopped.
[Hip hop music with vocals cuts in]
Parental discretion is advised. Welcome to Phantom Power. I’m cris cheek. Today on the seventh and final episode of our first season, my co-host Mack Hagood converses with Langston Collin Wilkins. Langston is a folklorist an ethnomusicologist active in both academia and the public sector. Working as a traditional art specialist at the Tennessee Arts Commission. Mack spoke with Langston recently about his research into Houston’s unique slab, car culture. The city’s relationship to hip hop and hip hop’s to community. Enjoy.
[Different hip hop music plays]
[MACK HAGOOD]
So before we get into the research of Langston Collin Wilkins, maybe we should get one question out of the way. Why would a folklorist be studying hip hop? Don’t they study things like folk tales or traditional music or quilting? Well, in fact the folklorist I know study things like bodybuilding and fashion and internet memes. Folklorists study everyday creativity. One contemporary definition of folklore is “artistic communication in small groups.” As Langston shows, it’s the way a town like Houston gets a look and a sound all its own, but folklore didn’t lead Langston to hip hop. In fact, it was quite the other way around.
[Hip hop music cuts out]
[LANGSTON COLLINS WILKINS]
Back when I was a kid, around 12 years old, I received my first hip hop record, which was the “Ghetto Boys Resurrection Album” in 1996.
[A song from the album plays]
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, the south side, where Scarface is from that same area. The Ghetto Boys in my hometown heroes as they are for everyone growing up in Houston in those communities. I just became obsessed with hip hop, and not just the music, but just the larger culture and community surrounding it.

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The Lost Sounds of Silent Cinema: Vaudeville, Magic Lanterns, and Movie Palaces w/ Rick Altman, and Eric Dienstfrey

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 10:00:00 -0000

What did going to the movies sound like back in the “silent film” era? The answer takes us on a strange journey through Vaudeville, roaming Chautauqua lectures, penny arcades, nickelodeons, and grand movie palaces. As our guest In today’s episode, pioneering scholar of film sound, Rick Altman, tells us, the silent era has a lot to teach us about why sound works the way it does at the movies today. And as our other guest, sound and film historian Eric Dienstfrey tells us, “What we think of today as standard practice is far from inevitable.” In fact, some of the practices we’ll hear about are downright wacky.
Audiences today give little thought to the relationship between sound and images at the movies. When we hear a character’s footsteps or inner thoughts or hear a rousing orchestral score that the character can’t hear, it all seems natural. Yet these are all conventions that had to be developed by filmmakers and accepted by audiences. And as Altman and Dienstfrey show us, the use of sound at the movies could have developed very differently.

Film sound scholar Rick Altman and Mack after their interview at the University of Iowa.

Dr. Rick Altman is Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Comparative Literature in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa. Altman is known for his work on genre theory, the musical, media sound, and video pedagogy. He is the author of Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Film/Genre (Bloomsbury, 1999), and A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Dr. Eric Dienstfrey is Postdoctoral Fellow in American Music at the University of Texas at Austin. Eric is a historian of sound, cinema, and media technology. His paper “The Myth of the Speakers: A Critical Reexamination of Dolby History” won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award for best article of the year in 2016.
Transcript
[ominous music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 17…
[low horn instruments play]
[CRIS]
The Sounds of Silents
[ERIC DEINSTFRY]
We think of going to movies as going to the movies but for a lot of audiences, they were going to hear a live concert that was accompanied by motion pictures. And there’s this great anecdote that Anna Windisch uncovered in their scholarship in Viennese practices from the turn of the century. And they found a series of films, I believe, where you had the motion picture printed on film, but you also had a visual recording of the conductor, conducting a score that was meant to go along with that film. So I believe it was sort of like a superimposed image. So when you screen the film, you’ll see the conductor on screen conducting. And then the orchestra that was live in the theater playing would take its cues from the conductor that was on screen.
[conductor taps baton, and orchestra plays]
[MACK]
It’s Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood.
[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek. So what are we listening to here, Mack?
[MACK]
This is Eric Deinstfry. He’s a historian of sound technology and sound media working at the University of Texas, Austin. And he knows a lot about the history of sound in motion pictures.
[CRIS]
So what’s he talking about?
[MACK]
It’s this crazy story told me about the silent film era in Vienna. You know, back in the early days of film, people had to figure out how to combine music and film. And as you can imagine in Vienna they had this illustrious classical music today.

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How EDM and Pop Music Reflect Neoliberalism: Resilience, Melancholy, and the Beat w/ Robin James

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 13:43:00 -0000

Why do certain musical sounds move us while others leave us cold? Are musical trends simply that—or do they contain insights into the culture at large? Our guest is a musicologist who studies pop and electronic dance music. She’s fascinated by the way EDM privileges timbral and rhythmic complexity over the chord changes and harmonic complexities of the blues-based rock and pop music of yore. However, Robin James is also a philosopher and she connects these musical structures to social and economic structures, not to mention structural racism and sexism.

Robin James

In this episode, cris and Mack have a lengthy, freeform interview and listening session with Robin in which she breaks down the sounds of EDM, pop, hip hop, “chill” playlists, and industrial techno, conceiving them as varied responses to neoliberalism’s intensification of capitalism. Her analysis includes lyrical content, but her main focus is the soars, stutters, breaks, and drops that mimic the socio-economic environment of the 21st century. It’s an environment that demands resilience from all of us—and especially from women and people of color.

Robin James’s books include:

Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, neoliberalism (Zer0 Books, 2015).

The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance & biopolitics (Duke, 2019).

The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, & the Philosophy of Music (Lexington Books, 2010).
Transcript
[ominous music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[techno music fades in]
[MAC HAGOOD]
Episode 16.
[CRIS]
Soul and chill.
[MACK]
Hey, I’m Mack Hagood, and yes, you are hearing Calvin Harris on Phantom Power, the podcast on the sonic arts and humanities. Why you might ask? Well, our guest today spends a lot of time listening to Calvin Harris and David Guetta. She calls them the Coke and Pepsi of pop, electronic dance music or EDM. As a musicologist, she’s fascinated by how EDM pushes beyond tonality. That is the harmonies and chord progressions that are the focus of blues based rock and pop music. EDM cares more about Tambor, and rhythmic complexity, ear catching sounds and intense Sonic experiences. moments when the vocal stutters for the beat drops moments like this one, where the entire song begins to soar.
[music continues]
But Robin James isn’t just a musicologist. She’s also a philosopher. She really wants to know what these songs can tell us about society. And while many cultural analyses of pop songs focus on song lyrics, with a few vague gestures towards sound, Robin James brings her musical logical experience to bear connecting musical structures to economic structures, not to mention structural racism and sexism. To my mind, the strength of her work is that she makes admirably bold and clear claims about why certain kinds of popular music are popular in a given moment. And whether or not you decide you agree with those claims by the end of the show, you may never hear an EDM sore quite the same way again. In today’s episode, my co host cris cheek and I have a lengthy freeform conversation and listening session with Robin, in which she breaks down EDM pop songs featured in her book “ Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism Neoliberalism.” We also get into a bit of hip hop, as well as songs from her current research into chill music ...

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Podcasting the Gothic: Frankenstein, Academia, and Critique w/ Anna M. Williams

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 23:18:00 -0000

With My Gothic Dissertation, University of Iowa PhD Anna M. Williams has transformed the dreary diss into a This American Life-style podcast. Williams’ witty writing and compelling audio production allow her the double move of making a critical intervention into the study of the gothic novel, while also making an entertaining and thought-provoking series for non-experts. Williams uses famed novels by authors such as Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelly as an entry point for a critique of graduate school itself—a Medieval institution of shadowy corners, arcane rituals, and a feudal power structure. The result is a first-of-its-kind work that serves as a model for doing literary scholarship in sound.

Anna M. Williams

This episode of Phantom Power offers you an exclusive preview of My Gothic Dissertation. First, Mack Hagood interviews Williams about creating the project, then we listen to a full chapter—a unique reading of Frankenstein that explores how the university tradition can restrict access to knowledge even as it tries to produce knowledge.

You can learn more about Anna M. Williams and her work at her website. This episode features music from Neil Parsons’ 8-Bit Bach Reloaded.

Transcript
[ominous music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power. Episode 15: Goth Diss.
[sound of wind blowing]
[ANNA WILLIAMS]
It’s May 4th 2017, and I’m in room 311 of the English philosophy building.
[jazzy music plays]
Room 311 is a windowless closet crowded with a conference table and rolling chairs that currently contain the five members of my dissertation committee. A radio scholar, A romanticist, an 18th century-ist education theorist and Victorianist.
[MALE VOICE]
So we’re here to talk prospectus and I welcome you with my colleagues. And we’re interested in raising constructive questions that will help you with clarifying focus, the scope, and the process because the process is so interesting.
[ANNA]
It’s the job of these five people to advise me over the next months, or more likely years as I write my dissertation, which is the only thing standing between me and my doctorate in English. What we’re here to discuss today, isn’t my dissertation per se, but rather my prospectus, a Microsoft Word document spanning anywhere from six to 20 pages that describes the dissertation, the one I haven’t written yet. In this way, think of the prospectus as a sort of dissertation permission slip, a sheet of paper that once signed allows me to climb on board the bus and head into the field of academic literary criticism. And if I don’t earn my committee signatures at the end of this meeting, then I guess I’m going to have to stay behind and eat my bag lunch all by myself.
[music fades out]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Hey, everyone, its Phantom Power. Sounds about sound, the podcast where we explore sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood. My partner, cris cheek is out vagabonding. It’s summer, I caught sight of him via social media on the Appalachian Trail. As you hear this, he may be in London or Rome. cris, if you’re listening, I hope you brought your recorder with you pick up some good sounds for us. And yeah, it’s summer. But there was something I wanted to share with you because it’s hot off the audio presses. One of the really nice and unexpected fringe benefits of doing this show is we’ve started to get invites to come and talk to folks about how to...

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The Woman Who Disrupted Violin Making: Stradivarius, Science, and Acoustic innovation w/ Craig Eley

Fri, 24 May 2019 13:21:00 -0000

In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Carleen Hutchins attempted a revolution in how concert violins are made. In this episode, Craig Eley of the Field Noise podcast tells us how this amateur outsider used 18th century science to disrupt the all-male guild tradition of violin luthiers. Would the myth of the never-equaled Stradivarius violin prove to be true or could a science teacher with a woodshop use an old idea to make new violins better than ever?

We also learn about the mysterious beauty of Chladni patterns, the 18th century technique of using tiny particles to reveal how sound moves through resonant objects–the key to Hutchins’ merger of art and science.
In this episode, we hear the voices of:

* Quincy Whitney, Carleen Hutchins biographer and a former arts reporter for the Boston Globe.
* Myles Jackson, a professor of the history of science at Princeton.
* Joseph Curtin, a MacArthur-award winning violin maker.
* Sam Zygmuntowicz, an extremely renowned violin maker and creator of Strad3D.
* Carleen Hutchins herself.

You can subscribe to Craig Eley’s Field Noise podcast to hear the original version of this story.
This episode was edited by Craig Eley and Mack Hagood. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions and Marc Bianchi. The archival interview clips of Carleen Hutchins were provided by filmmaker James Schneider. The interview with Quincy Whitney was recorded by Andrew Parrella at New Hampshire Public Radio.
Transcript
[ominous music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 14.
[CRIS]
Resident grains.
[a whirring sound plays, then a string being plucked]
[CARLEEN HUTCHINS]
What I’m interested in now is to see what the waves that are traveling through the woods are like. And those are the things that I think are making a lot of difference in the way, energy and the waves of energy can go through the wood itself. And wood is all sorts of sort of discontinuity, if you will, that will make the energy have to slow down or go around something, it’s a little bit like a river flowing. And if you put some rocks on the edge of a river, you’ll change the whole flow of the river downstream. Think that’s what’s happening in violins. There are certain ways that those blockages, the discontinuity can be worked out. And that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for us to see what happens.

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Malagasy Music and Memory: Field Recordings, Cultural Encounters, and Postcolonial Listening w/ Chris Cheek

Fri, 03 May 2019 13:00:00 -0000

In an unusual episode, we listen back to field recordings that co-host cris cheek made in 1987 and 1993 on the island of Madagascar. It’s a rich sonic travelogue, with incredible musicians appearing at seemingly every stop along the way. Mack interviews cris, who discusses the strangeness and surprises of listening back to the sounds of that other time and place–and listening to the voice of an earlier version of himself.
The BBC broadcast some of this material on Radio 3 as ‘The Music of Madagascar,” produced by John Thornley. It won the Sony gold radio award for ‘specialist music program of the year in 1995. A longer version aired as “Mountain, River, Rail and Reef,” produced by Phil England and Tom Wallace for Resonance FM, the world’s first radio art station as part of 1998’s Meltdown Festival at the South Bank Centre, curated by John Peel.
This episode takes its name from a boat cris traveled on in Madagascar.
Transcript
[ominous music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[sound of glass being smashed]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 13.
[CRIS]
James Bond.
[MACK]
Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, the podcast about sound in the arts and humanities.
[CRIS]
Who are you?
[MACK]
*laughs* I’m Mac Hagood.
[CRIS]
I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
And today we have a very unusual episode because I get to interview cris.
[CRIS]
Yay!
[MACK]
cris has brought in a program that he produced for the legendary community radio station in London, Resonance FM. Based on your travels in Madagascar, actually two trips you took right?
[CRIS]
That’s right 1987, 1993, yeah.
[MACK]
cris, why don’t you tell us a little bit about this show?
[CRIS]
It was originally broadcast on the BBC. And there was some format things that got in the way of it being a longer show on the BBC. And I wanted to let some of the recordings play a little bit more than they could do in the original.
[MACK]
In resonance, it was much more of a sort of freeform kind of space where you could let something like that stretch out right?
[CRIS]
It was pretty emergent as a station at that point, but also yeah, the BBC wanted to cut me distinctly to just under half an hour.
[MACK]
And why Madagascar? Maybe we should start off with where is Madagascar?
[CRIS]
Madagascar is off the east coast of Africa. It’s in the Indian Ocean. Fourth largest island on the planet. 90% unique in flora and fauna. Really extraordinary mixtures of people who came from
From Polynesia, down the Amoni Arab coast from particularly Southwest India, pirates. Did I mentioned pirates yet?
[MACK]
No, you didn’t.
[CRIS]
There were several pirate bases in Madagascar.
[MACK]
Yeah, and the musical traditions that resulted from that mix are really, really incredible.
[CRIS]
They are, and the people are really incredible.
[MACK]
So what we’re going to hear, I’ve heard a little bit of it already. It’s gorgeous music and really some delicious sounds recorded, just delectively. I just really love these recordings and sort of what interests me beyond this sonic travel log that you’re presenting to us, is just the fact that I’m going to hear the you that I didn’t know from 20 years ago, and then you’re also going to sort of hear yourself, the person that you used to be back then.
[CRIS]
Yeah, that’s why I brought this. I mean, I brought it because we’ve been talking in so many differ...

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Reimagining Research: A Sonic Exploration of Radio Drama, Ecology, and Sound Art w/ Jacob Smith

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 13:36:00 -0000

What would it be like if scholars presented their research in sound rather than in print? Better yet, what if we could hear them in the act of their research and analysis, pulling different historical sounds from the archives and rubbing them against one another in an audio editor?
In today’s episode, we get to find out what such an innovative scholarly audiobook would sound like–because our guest has created the first one! Jacob Smith‘s ESC (University of Michigan Press) is a fascinating sonic exploration of postwar radio drama and contemporary sound art, as well as a meditation on how humans have reshaped the ecological fate of the planet. Before we listen to an excerpt of ESC, Mack interviews Jake about how his skills as a former musician came in handy for his work as an audio academic.
You can listen to ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene in its entirety for free courtesy of the University of Michigan Press.
You can also watch Jake’s 90s band The Mysteries of Life perform in the “bad music video” Jake mentions or on Conan O’Brien.
Jacob Smith is founder and director of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries, and professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is the author of three print-based books on sound: Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (University of California Press 2008); Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures(University of California Press 2011); and Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015). He writes and teaches about the cultural history of media, with a focus on sound and performance.
Today’s show was edited by Craig Eley and featured music by Blue Dot Sessions. Our intern is Gina Moravec.
Transcript
[ethereal music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 12.
[CRIS]
A book unbound.
[MAN ANNOUNCER]
Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape. Escape, designed to free you from the four walls of today. For a half hour of high adventure.
[old, dramatic music plays. In between are people listing off natural disasters.]
[MACK]
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode. This is Mack Hagood. My partner chris cheek is out, so you just got me today. What you just heard is an excerpt from ESC. A fascinating project that’s one part podcast, one part audiobook. And it’s produced by my guest today, Jacob Smith. Jake is the founder and director of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University, where he’s also a professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film. So, for those of you who are regular listeners to the show, you know that I work in this disciplinary space that gets called sound studies. So we have all these folks working in this space of sound studies. And yet, how do we publish all of this research that we generate? We publish it in print, or in pixels on the screen, right? We do it via the written word. And that’s why I was so excited about having Jake Smith on today because he is challenging that paradigm, working in sound, and doing something that really could only be done in sound. His new project ESC is an audio native audiobook.
[guitar music plays]
So what do I mean by that? So basically, this is a book length critical reading of a CBS radio drama from the 1940s and 50s called Escape. But instead of just reading about the radio drama, we actually hear the radio drama itself.

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The Power of Language and Belonging: Multilingual Poetry, Ritual, and Queer Feminist Politics w/ Caroline Bergvall

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 18:50:00 -0000

Working across and among languages, media, and art forms, Caroline Bergvall’s writing takes form as published poetic works and performance, frequently of sound-driven projects. Her interests include multilingual poetics, queer feminist politics and issues of cultural belonging, commissioned and shown by such institutions as MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Antwerp, and won numerous awards.
Ragadawn is a multimedia performance that explores ideas of multi-lingualism, migration, lost or disappearing languages, and how language and place intersect. Ragadawn is performed with two live voices and recorded elements, outdoors, at dawn, which means the start and end times are location specific. It features song composed by Gavin Bryars, sung by Peyee Chen.   Ragadawn premiered at the Festival de la Bâtie (Geneva) and at the Estuary Festival (Southend) in 2016.
You can find more work(s) by Caroline Bergvall at: http://carolinebergvall.com
Also on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/carolinebergvall/ohmyohmy
and Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/carolinebergvall/videos
Her publications include:
•    Éclat, Sound & Language, 1996
•    Fig: Goan Atom 2, Salt, 2005
•   Middling English, John Hansard Gallery, 2010
•   Meddle English: New and Selected Texts, Nightboat Books, 2011

• Drift, Nightboat Books, 2014
Transcript
[CAROLINE BERGVALL]
Jigsaw of traveling languages.
[ominous music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power. Caroline Bergvall.
[CAROLINE]
How does one keep one’s body as one’s own? What does this mean about the relative safety of boundaries. Could I make sure that what I called my body would remain in the transit from other languages, that it would hold this progression into English, and because I didn’t know and wasn’t sure, and since for a great number of people, for an overwhelming number of persons, for an overwhelming a large number of persons for all always growing number of persons. This is far from self evidence. This is not self evidence. This does not apply, this doesn’t even begin to figure, I never knew for sure. Some never had a body to call their own before it was taken away. Somehow the [speaks in norwegian.] Some never had a chance to feel it body as their own before it was taken away. Some never had a chance to know their body before it was taken away. [speaks in norwegian]. Some were never free to speak that body before it was taken up and taken away. [speaks in norwegian]. Some tried their body on to pleasure in it before it was taken up beaten violated taken away [speaks in norwegian] Some had their body for a time that was taken away or parts of it somehow [speaks in norwegian] Some thought they had their body safely then were asked to leave it behind the door or parts of it some little dirty trick how the [speaks in norwegian]. Some hoped they had one safely only to find it had to be left across the border or parts of it [speaks in norwegian]. Some wanted to leave their body behind and couldn’t [speaks in french]. Some could neither take it or leave it behind [speaks in norwegian]. Some are loved at, some are spat out some are dragged into the crowd [speaks in norwegian]. Some bodies are forgotten in the language compounds. Some immense pressure is applied on to the forgetting of the ecosystem some escape from. Some bodies, like languages, simply disappear. [speaks in french].

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Sonic Warfare and Animal Control: Empathy and the Human-Animal Relationship in Sound Art w/ Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Robbie Judkins, and Colleen Plumb

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 14:00:00 -0000

This week, we examine the sounds humans make in order to monitor, repel, and control beasts. Author Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed is a creative nonfiction monograph that explores the human-animal relationship through animal-centered sound art. We’ll hear works by Robbie Judkins, Claude Matthews, and Colleen Plumb, interwoven with Wong’s unflinchingly reflective prose. By turns beautiful and harrowing, these sounds and words reposition us, kindling empathy as we listen through non-human ears.
Links to works by the artists heard in this episode:
Mandy Suzanne-Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed.
Robbie Judkins: Homo Tyrannicus, “Pest” (video), live in London, 2017
Claude Matthews: “DogPoundFoundSound (Bad Radio Dog Massacre)”
Colleen Plumb: “Thirty Times a Minute” (homepage), indoor installation (video)
Transcript
[ethereal music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[pig grunting]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 10.
[CRIS]
Animal Control.
[MANDY SUZANNE WONG]
If humans did this to each other, they call it sonic warfare, terrorism or crowd control, depending on who did it and whom they did it to. They call the end result for the victims, that is post traumatic stress, but skunks aren’t human. They’re not even pets. Not like your spaniel who clearly enjoys notions of his own. Can a skunk suffer post traumatic stress? Aren’t they just wild animals? Yes and yes, sound is contact. Fear is a weapon. The wild is here.
[sounds fade out]
[MACK]
Welcome back to another episode of Phantom Power, where we explore the world of sound in the arts and humanities, I’m Mack Hagood.
[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
Hi, cris.
[CRIS]
Hi Mack. How you doing?
[MACK]
I’m okay. We’ve got an interesting episode in store today I think.
[CRIS]
Good.
[MACK]
I spoke with an author of fiction and nonfiction work. Her name is Mandy Suzanne Wong. She hails from Bermuda. She’s got a PhD from the University of California in Los Angeles. You may have heard of the place.
[CRIS]
I have. she’s very interdisciplinary right?
[MACK]
Yeah, she’s another person that I met through that crazy conference for science literature and the arts. Like the other person that we met.
[CRIS]
Brian House.
[MACK]
Brian House, yeah. The other person we met at that conference, Brian House. She has a concern with animals and the sounds of animals and sound art about animals.
[CRIS]
Right, it seems like she is a creative writer in short fiction and also has a novel coming out this year. It seems like she is also an essayist about sound almost a creative nonfiction thinking about sound is that right?
[MACK]
Yeah, and she’s got this manuscript that she recently finished and it’s called “Listen, We All Bleed.” It’s her critical response to a number of sound art pieces that focus on the human animal relationship through sound. So, on today’s show we’re going to listen to four pieces of audio that Mandy Suzanne Wong has written about in “Listen, We All Bleed.” We’re going to listen to those pieces and we’re also going to listen to her words about those pieces. So, the first piece we’re going to listen to is by Robbie Judkins. It’s called “Desired Place” and it’s on his album “Homo Tyrannicus.”
[low, ominous music plays, sounds like an orchestra]
[MANDY]

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The Experimental Pulse: This Heat, Camberwell Now, Collaborative Music, and Embracing Change w/ Charles Hayward

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 12:00:00 -0000

Charles Hayward is one of the most propulsive, resourceful and generative rock-plus drummers of the past half-century. An influential percussionist, keyboardist, songwriter, singer of songs, and forward thinker through sound, Charles spoke with Phantom Power about a 40thanniversary touring with a partly reformed and enlarged This Heat as This Is Not This Heat, and then opened into generous reflections on his solo works The Bell Agency and 30 Minute Snare Drum Roll.
Charles is founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. Since the late 1980s he has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations, including Massacre with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith. Most recently he released an album of improvised duets with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
This Is Not This Heat play their final concerts at EartH Hackney Arts Center in London March 1st , a two-day residency in Copenhagen March 5th-6th, Le Poisson Rouge in New York City March 18th, Zebulon in Los Angeles March 20-21, the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville TN on March 24th, the Albany in Deptford, London May 25th.
Live performances:
30 Minute Snare Drum Roll live at Café Oto, London
Improvisations with Thurston Moore
This Is Not This Heat
Full albums:
this heat
Deceit
Health and Efficiency
Camberwell Now
Images provided by Emma McNally and Fergus Kelly.
Transcript
[CHARLES HAYWARD]
Song is to be human..
[ethereal music plays in the background]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[radio or television static mixed with an orchestra]
[MALE ANNOUNCER]
The time now, very nearly three o’clock. The next program on BBC One: “Songs of Praise” follows at three fifteen…
[Funk/techno music suddenly cuts in]
[MACK HAYGOOD]
Episode nine.
[CRIS]
A drummer’s tale.
[music fades out]
[MACK]
So it’s great to be back. Phantom Power Season Two, and this episode is one that I have been waiting for with a certain fan-ish frenzy, because we’re going to talk about Charles Hayward; the drummer, keyboardist, vocalist, tape manipulator, pioneer of experimental rock and roll.
[CRIS]
Yeah, right. And still putting out albums. Still touring. This Heat, the band that you would just hearing, they’ve recently done a 40 year set of concert...

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The Strange History of Auditory Projective Tests: Disability, Sonic Diagnosis, and the Invention of Psychological Disabilities w/ Mara Mills

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 15:16:00 -0000

Season Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies.
In Episode 8, “Test Subjects,” we examine the strange and obscure history of sound’s use as a psychological diagnostic tool. In the late 20th century, while many disabilities were eliminated through medical interventions, a host of new disabilities were invented, especially within the realm of psychology. Mills’s historical work in the audio archives of American Foundation for the Blind reveals how auditory projective testing was used to diagnose blind people with additional psychological disabilities. As we listen to these strange archival sounds, we learn how culture and technology shape the history of human ability and disability.
Read Mara Mill’s article on auditory projective tests, “Evocative Object: Auditory Inkblot” and visit NYU’s Center for Disability Studies, which she co-directs with Faye Ginsburg. Thanks to archivist Helen Selsdon and the American Foundation for the Blind for the use of the auditory projective tests.
This episode’s theme music is by Mack Hagood with additional music by Graeme Gibson, Blue Dot Sessions, Claude Debussy, and Duke Ellington. The show was edited by

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Houston’s Slab Scene: DJ Screw, Car Culture, and Chopped and Screwed Hip Hop w/ Langston Collin Wilkins

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 14:23:00 -0000

Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods.
Folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins studies slab culture and the “screwed and chopped” hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture’s soundtrack. Wilkins shows us how sonic creativity turns a space—a collection of buildings and streets—into a place that is known, respected, and loved.
In this show we hear the slow, muddy, psychedelic sounds of DJ Screw and The Screwed Up Click, including rappers such as Lil Keke, Fat Pat, Big Hawk, and UGK–as well as songs by Geto Boys, Willie Dee, Swishahouse, Point Blank, Biggie Smalls, and MC T Tucker & DJ Irv.
Photos by Langston Collin Wilkins.
Transcript
[low humming and static playing]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[Tamborine beat blends in]
Episode 7: Screwed and Chopped.
[Hip hop music with vocals cuts in]
Parental discretion is advised. Welcome to Phantom Power. I’m cris cheek. Today on the seventh and final episode of our first season, my co-host Mack Hagood converses with Langston Collin Wilkins. Langston is a folklorist an ethnomusicologist active in both academia and the public sector. Working as a traditional art specialist at the Tennessee Arts Commission. Mack spoke with Langston recently about his research into Houston’s unique slab, car culture. The city’s relationship to hip hop and hip hop’s to community. Enjoy.
[Different hip hop music plays]
[MACK HAGOOD]
So before we get into the research of Langston Collin Wilkins, maybe we should get one question out of the way. Why would a folklorist be studying hip hop? Don’t they study things like folk tales or traditional music or quilting? Well, in fact the folklorist I know study things like bodybuilding and fashion and internet memes. Folklorists study everyday creativity. One contemporary definition of folklore is “artistic communication in small groups.” As Langston shows, it’s the way a town like Houston gets a look and a sound all its own, but folklore didn’t lead Langston to hip hop. In fact, it was quite the other way around.
[Hip hop music cuts out]
[LANGSTON COLLINS WILKINS]
Back when I was a kid, around 12 years old, I received my first hip hop record, which was the “Ghetto Boys Resurrection Album” in 1996.
[A song from the album plays]
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, the south side, where Scarface is from that same area. The Ghetto Boys in my hometown heroes as they are for everyone growing up in Houston in those communities. I just became obsessed with hip hop, and not just the music, but just the larger culture and community surrounding it. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about hip hop, I was watching everything,

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Celebrating World Listening Day 2018: Global Acoustic Ecology, and Biosphere Soundscapes of the future w/ Leah Barclay and Teresa Barrozo

Wed, 23 May 2018 13:18:00 -0000

On July 18th this year, Teresa Barrozo‘s question — What might the Future sound like? — will be opened to global participation. We bring news of World Listening Day, and speak with Teresa about her intervention.
We also hear of data archival developments in acoustic ecology. And we speak with Leah Barclay, the editor of Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, about her Biosphere Soundscapes project and some of the challenges of developing accessible apps for mobile platforms.
Cris grapples inadequately with the terminology of the anthropophone, the biophone and the geophone in his everyday life.
The audio work heard in this episode can be found on the Soundclouds of Leah Barclay and Teresa Barrozo.

Transcript
[low humming and static playing]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power. Episode 6.
[squeaking sounds]
[CRIS]
Data streams.
[sound of flowing water fades in as squeaking continues]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Welcome to Phantom Power, I’m Mack Hagood. Today, My co-host cris cheek prepares us for World Listening Day, an annual global event held every July 18th and sponsored by the World Listening Project with events held all over the planet. We’ll get you tuned in to acoustic ecology and World Listening Day with plenty of time to find an event near you, or perhaps to start one of your own. cris has a show for us in three parts. First, we’ll meet Teresa Barrozo, a sound artist, composer and sound designer for film, theater and dance, and the creator of the theme for this year’s World Listening Day. Next, cris does some close listening of his own in a meditation on the sounds of humans, animals and earth in his neighborhood. Finally, we meet Leah Barclay, who made the recording we’re hearing right now in dolphin code on the great Sandy Biosphere Reserve in Queensland, Western Australia. She’s the president of the Australian forum on acoustic ecology, the editor of Soundscape Magazine and the Vice President of the World Acoustic Ecology forum. Leah spoke with Chris from a remote biosphere reserve when it was still summer in the southern hemisphere.
[sounds fade out, ethereal music fades in]
[CRIS]
World Listening Day enters its second decade in 2018. This year’s theme is future listening, created by Filipino sound artist, Teresa Barrozo. Phantom Power caught up with Teresa amidst her preparations.
[ethereal music continues with drum rolls, wooden chimes, and traffic noises periodically playing]
[TERESA BARROZO]
I’m Teresa Barrozo, and I’m a composer and a curious listener from the Philippines.
[CRIS]
Whereabouts in the Philippines are you?
[TERESA]
Carson City, Manila.
[sounds continue]
[CRIS]
Theresa, how did you get involved with the World Listening Project?
[TERESA]
It’s quite popular every year. I get to read up on it. For this year, I got invited by Eric Leonardo and Leah Barclay to create a theme for this year’s World Listening Day. I’m actually surprised that they invited me, because I’m starting out as a sound artist. My day job is that I’m a composer for film and theater and sound designer for theater, but this since that’s my background, I’ve been very fascinated with how sound and music is used in storytelling. How we use sound and music to manipulate our audience.
[sounds are distorted, sped up and slowed down, with an occasional car honk being heard over the noise. Technological sounds are added.]
That’s where my interest began.

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How Racism Shapes What we Hear: An American History of the Sonic Colour Line w/ Jennifer Stoever

Thu, 10 May 2018 00:44:00 -0000

This episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but Stoever challenges white listeners to examine how racism can infect our ears, altering the sound of the world and other people. We discuss the history of American prejudicial listening since slavery and learn how African American writers and musicians have pushed back against this invisible “sonic color line.”
Works discussed include Richard Wright’s Native Son and music by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Fishbone, and Lena Horne.
Additional music by Graeme Gibson and Blue the Fifth.
Transcript
[low humming playing]

[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.

[COMPUTERIZED VOICE]
Episode 5.

[CRIS]
Ears racing.

[low humming and contemporary music fades in]

[MACK HAGOOD]
Race. We think of it as a visual phenomenon.

[CRIS]
But race has sound too.

[DIFFERENT VOICES GIVING GREETINGS]
Hey guys, welcome back. Hi sisters. Hey Jim, (inaudible). Hey everyone. Hey!

[CRIS]
When you heard those voices, did you give them a race, a class, perhaps some kind of assignation of character and if so, why do we do this? Where does this discriminating ear come from?

[MACK]
I’m Mack Hagood,

[CRIS]
and I’m cris cheek.

[MACK]
Today on Phantom Power we listen, to race or to put it more correctly, we examine how we are always listening to race. Our guide is Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York Binghamton. Stover is the author of the “Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening” a book that argues that white racism depends just as much on the ear as it does the eye. She shows how listening has been used since slavery to distinguish and separate black and white and how African American artists and critics like Richard Wright Leadbelly and Lena Horne have identified, critiqued, and push the boundaries of this sonic color line.

[techno-like music and a choir play in the background, then fade out]

[MACK]
Cris, when I spoke to Jennifer, she reminded me of a story that really shows how high the stakes of this kind of listening can be.

[JENNIFER STOEVER]
You know, I talk in the opening of the book about the case of Jordan Davis.

[piano music fades in]

[MALE NEWS REPORTER]
It happened November 23rd, 47-year-old Michael Dunn told investigators he felt threatened at a gas station. Parked side by side with an SUV full of teenagers, the alleged gunman complained they were playing their music too loud.

[JENNIFER]
Jordan and his friends are playing hip hop at the gas pump. They were driving they had their music on. They were getting gas. Gas stations in theory (are) a transitory shared space where we all come in with our music we pump our gas and we leave.

[MALE NEWS REPORTER]
Detective say Dunn confronted Davis who was in the backseat and told him to turn the music down.

[JENNIFER]
The white man at question felt a proprietary access to the soundscape both it if he decided it was too loud, is too loud for everybody there,

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Secret Soundscapes: Art That Brings the Sounds of Rats and the Biosphere Alive w/ Brian House

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 14:11:00 -0000

This time we talk with a fascinating sound artist and composer Mack met at a recent meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. As his website puts it, “Brian House is an artist who explores the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. His background in both computer science and noise music informs his research-based practice. Recent interests include AI, telegraphy, and urban rats.” If that description looks a little daunting on the screen, the work itself sounds really cool to cris and Mack. We’ll listen to three pieces of Brian’s: a composition that imprints motion-tracking data on collectible vinyl, a field recording from the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and an encounter with the wildlife that put the “burrows” in New York’s five boroughs.
Links to works discussed: Quotidian Record (2012), Urban Intonation (2017).
Mack notes that it was incredible to edit this episode using Daniel Fishkin’s daxophone arrangement of John Cage’s “Ryoanji” (1983).

The other music on today’s episode is by Brian House and Graeme Gibson.
Transcript
[♪ ethereal music playing ♪]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This… is… Phantom Power.
[FEMALE COMPUTERIZED VOICE]
Episode 3.
[CRIS]
Dirty Rat.
[unidentified sounds raising and lowering in pitch, banging noises]
[CRIS]
So, what are we listening to here, Mack?
[MACK HAGOOD]
What do you think we’re listening to here, Cris?
[noises continue, Mack laughing]
[CRIS]
I don’t know, what is that? Is that an owl, put through a filtering device or something?
[MACK, still laughing]
You think it sounds like an owl put through a filtering device? Let’s listen to some more.
[CRIS]
Oh, wow. So synthetic.
[MACK]
It sounds like an old theatre organ having a bad day.
[CRIS]
Oh, yeah, no, I’m hearing that now. A pipe organ.
[MACK]
Yeah.
[CRIS]
Or something that hasn’t got a lot of wheeze left in it.
[MACK]
Something sad is happening in the silent film.
[CRIS]
Something very sad is happening.
[MACK]
Harold Lloyd fell off the clock.
[both laughing]
[CRIS]
And so he did.
[MACK]
Alright, so… it’s… it’s rats.
[CRIS]
That’s a rat?!
[MACK]
That’s a rat.
[clanging noises begin, rat noises stop]
[MACK]
So today we’re gonna meet the guy behind the rat recordings that you just heard a moment ago: Brian House. He’s a composer and sound artist I met last November at the Conference for the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which is this really crazy conference for interdisciplinary scholarship and creative experimentation. I met Brian, and when I heard about what he was working on, I just knew we had to have him on the show. His work uses sound to express relationships between bodies, human and nonhuman bodies, social relationships, geographic relationships, temporal relationships, and sonic relationships. So we’ll be hearing three different pieces of his: a musical composition that traces human, urban, and transatlantic movement, a field recording from the wetlands of Botswana, and an installation that will take us into the underground boroughs of New York City. This is work that helps us make sense of relationships we normally can’t sense at all.
[BRIAN HOUSE]
Well, my name is Brian House,

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The Evolution of Urban Media: Sonic Communication from Caves to the Smart City w/ Shannon Mattern

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 07:27:00 -0000

This episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School’s Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (U of Minnesota Press: 2018).
And lucky for us on Phantom Power, a large portion of Mattern’s story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves to Roman amphitheaters to telephone wires and radio towers—she shows us how sonic infrastructures allow us to communicate and form communities, cultivating forms of intelligence that are embodied and affective, as well as informatic. Before there was the smart city, there was the sonic city—and the sonic city isn’t going anywhere soon.
Some topics discussed: Patrick Feaster and First Sounds; Neil Postman; Harold Innis; Marshall McLuhan; John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds; Carolyn Birdsall’s Nazi Soundscapes.

Transcript
[♪ ethereal music ♪]
cris cheek:        This is Phantom Power.
Female computer voice:                       Episode two.
cris cheek:        City of Voices.
[♪ fade out ethereal music ♪]
Shannon Mattern:         When we reduce the city to a computer, we think that everything can be ‘datified,’ everything can be fed through an algorithm. There are actually a lot of really important dimensions, human dimensions in particular, historical dimensions, things that resist ‘datification,’ that don’t really fit into that model. So, there’s a lot about a city that sort of leaks through those algorithms, that isn’t captured when you equate the entire city with a computational machine.
Mack Hagood:             That’s Shannon Mattern, an associate professor of media studies at The New School in New York City. Thanks for joining us on Phantom Power, a podcast about the sonic arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood, flying solo this episode. cris cheek will be back for episode three. Last year we put this episode online as a preview of the series. So, for the couple hundred of you who listened to it, give it another listen. There’s a lot going on. Or just check us out again in two weeks, when we’ll talk to sound artist Brian House. But for everyone else, this episode, we talk with Shannon Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. A large portion of Mattern’s story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves,
[echoes]
to Roman ampitheaters,
[chanting]
to telephone wires and radio towers.
[pre-recorded radio broadcast]
She shows us how sonic infrastructures allow us to communicate and form communities, cultivating forms of intelligence that are embodied and effective, as well as informatic. Before there was the Smart City, there was the ‘sonic city,’ and the sonic city isn’t going anywhere soon.
[♪ bell music ♪]
If you spend any time looking at architecture or design blogs, or reading tech websites or watching TedTalks, you’ve probably encountered a couple of truisms about how human beings will live in the future. The future is urban, and the future is ‘smart.’

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Dead Air: Exploring Silence in Literature, Hurricanes, and Media w/ John Binguet, Rodrigo Toscano, and Chris Cheek

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 07:25:00 -0000

On our first episode of Phantom Power, we ponder those moments when the air remains unmoved. Whether fostered by design or meteorological conditions or technological glitch, the absence of sound sometimes affects us more profoundly than the audible.
We begin with author John Biguenet discussing his book Silence (Bloomsbury, 2015) and the relationship between quietude, reading, writing, and the self.
Next, we speak to poet and hurricane responder Rodrigo Toscano, who takes us into the foreboding silence in eye of a storm.
Finally, our own co-host and poet cris cheek ponders the many contradictory experiences of “dead air” in an age of changing media technologies.
Today’s episode features music by our own Mack Hagood and by Graeme Gibson, who is currently touring on drums with Michael Nau and the Mighty Thread.
Transcript
[♪ ethereal music playing ♪]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This… is… Phantom Power.
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode One.
[CRIS]
Dead Air.
[RODRIGO TOSCANO]
You know, silence…
[JOHN BIGUENET]
It’s like, uh, it’s like a vacuum… like a walkie-talkie, where you’ve gotta press the button to speak and let it go to hear.
[CRIS]
The signal drops out.
[MACK]
Hello, and thanks for joining us on Phantom Power, podcast about sound in the arts and humanities. Over the next six or seven episodes this season, we’ll be investigating how artists and scholars are thinking about sound, writing about sound, and using sound to make things. My name’s Mack Hagood, I’m a media scholar, a writer, and a musician.
[CRIS]
I’m cris cheek, I’m a poet. Sometimes a sound poet, sometimes an unsound poet. I’ve also done a lot of work with music over the years. And I’m gonna be learning a lot as we make this series in terms of thinking about listening and talking together. Sounds about sound.
[MACK]
And I don’t, I don’t know if this is ironic or fitting, but we’re starting off this first episode talking about silence. So today we sort of have a three parter. We’re thinking about the roles of silence, uh, in reading and writing, and we’re going to think about the dead air in the eye of a hurricane, this kind of silence that prestiges something terrible. And, um, then we’re going to think about silence as a disruption. You know, an interruption of your regularly scheduled broadcast, or what they call
[CRIS]
Dead air.
[MACK]
[laughing]
So, cris, a long, long time ago, I was a 19 year old college student in New Orleans, Louisiana, at Loyola University. And I just took this, you know, intro English class with this professor named John Biguenet and he just made a huge impression on me, really started making me think in different ways. And then I went on with my life, and it turned out that this gentleman John Biguenet turned into a well known fiction writer, poet, playwright, um, he has written a collection of short stories called The Torturer’s Apprentice, which is just this sort of spellbinding collection that is a little bit Chekov, a little bit Kafka, a little bit Borges. Um, he’s won the O’Henry Award for Short Fiction, uh, he’s won a Harper’s Magazine Writing Award. He wrote this trilogy of plays about Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. And now he’s written a book on silence, uh, for this series of short books that have titles like Bread, or, uh, Golf Ball. [laughing] So, just kind of thinking deeply about these quotidian objects in our everyday lives and John chose silence. I read it, it’s a terrific short book, I highly recommend it. And so the last time I was down in New Orleans,

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