SpokenWeb Podcast

Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds.

My name is Hannah McGregor.

In this episode of the SpokenWeb, podcast producer Jason Camlot explores the affordances of sound design for the presence of presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. The raw audio material for this episode was recorded at an event, a sounding of the special issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.”

It was recorded live in the room and online on zoom and with mics placed all around the room and even outside. But what you are about to hear is so much more than that live recording of the event you are about to hear.

A new sound work.

A new sound work that performs an exploration of the possibilities of working in and with sound.

Archival voices and found sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and manipulated. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new meanings and feeling making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.

Here is episode five of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Sounding New Sonic Approaches, a podcast of a live recording session of a journal issue located in multiple spaces and temporal dimensions.

[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]

Voice 1: Hello? Can you hear me?
Voice 2: I hope you can hear me.
Voice 1: Test, test, test.
Voice 3: If you can’t hear me, I think there are more seats up here.
Voice 4: I’ll try to speak a little louder on my own.
Voice 5: Is it hard to hear back there?
Voice 6: Even with the microphone?

[Multiple voices testing simultaneously]

Voice 1: Test, test, test.
Voice 4: There we go.
Voice 5: If I talk louder into the mic, does that help?
Voice 6: Can you hear that?
Voice 3: It’s hard to tell.
Voice 2: Hello? Can you hear me now?
Voice 4: Is it still hard to hear back there?
Voice 1: Hello? Can you hear me with this mic?
Voice 5: Can you hear me now?
Voice 6: Y’all hear me?

[Laughter, sound stabilizing]

Okay. Hello, everyone. I’m just going to start things up here. Thank you very much.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Concordia University’s Fourth Space. Thank you for joining us for today’s event, Sounding New Sonic Approaches.

[Soft instrumental music continues in the background]

To help situate you, we are streaming this event live on YouTube from Fourth Space, here on Unceded Indigenous Lands in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.

We are also running this event as a live-streamed Zoom meeting—though, as you may have already noticed, this is a bit of an unusual setup for us.

With that, it is my pleasure to hand things over to the editors of New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies, Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod.

Welcome, both of you. Over to you.

We are recording this event here at Fourth Space at Concordia University and online on Zoom. And we’re live with an audience.

Welcome, everyone! Let’s hear a round of applause.

[Applause]

The idea behind today’s event is to create a spoken sound work drawn from our collective special issue of English Studies in Canada. Each contributor will sound their article—either by reading an excerpt from their piece in the journal or by selecting surrogate sounds that capture the essence of their discussion.

[Scattered clapping, sound cues shifting in the background]

[Jason’s voice subtly shifts as different sound devices are introduced]

These sounds will be played through a variety of speakers, both inside and outside Fourth Space.

[A mechanical whirring sound begins in the background]

The audio from these various sources will be captured and sent to a mixing desk, where SpokenWeb audio engineer James Healy will be recording everything on multiple tracks using an RME Fireface digital converter.

This will then be used to create a new sonic approaches sound work, which Katherine and I will be producing as a SpokenWeb podcast episode from today’s performance.

[Persistent clapping continues in the background]

So, that’s the basic idea. Think of this event as a big poetry reading, or maybe an open mic collaborative performance, or even a kind of literary sonic manifesto—but one that’s being recorded from a variety of sources, in multi-track layers.

Special thanks to James Healy, Douglas Moffett, and the Fourth Space team for helping bring this event to life and for creatively reimagining how to record it.

—which also serves as the table of contents for the special issue.

[Echo fades out, sound stabilizes]

When it is your turn, please state your name and the title of your article before reading. Keep it brief, and we’ll smoothly move from one reader to the next.

[Brief pause]

With that—let’s begin.

Start recording.

Sounding New Sonic Approaches, take one.

[A soft whirring sound begins in the background]

Beyond this infrastructural shift, the heightened discernibility of sonic approaches to literary culture has come from a recent interaction and convergence of methods between literary studies and sound studies as a broad interdisciplinary field.

[The whirring sound grows louder, filling the space]

From the outset, we framed literature as an intentionally expansive concept, one that has shaped the diverse case studies featured in this collection—ranging from archival objects to live performances.

[Katherine’s voice begins to distort, subtly warping]

The authors whose work we received and selected for this issue embody this diversity in their approaches.

[Distortion fades, voice stabilizes]

In asking our contributors to—or rather—[laughs]—in asking them to be…

[Soft whirring begins again, subtly shifting in the background]

…thinking sonically, as we put it, we challenged them to write from their perspectives as listeners.

In other words, we asked them to conflate literary studies and sound studies—to do literary sound studies—while critically reflecting on what it means to listen within the context of their discipline.

[Whirring fades into silence]

Annie, do you want to say hi?

[Sound of cymbals and drums from a ritual chant]

The afterlife of performance—

[Cymbal sound repeats, layered with an eerie resonance]

—is riddled with assumptions about life, death, and time.

[Another cymbal strike, now accompanied by a distant, guttural yell]

One major assumption is the possibility of distinction between the live—

[Cymbal strike reverberates]

—and something else. Not so much death—

[Cymbal clangs again, layered with rising tension]

—but an afterlifeness, shaped by various theorizations of media in what we might call the Age of the Zombie.

[Cymbal clang echoes, now joined by chaotic grunts and shouts of exertion]

But we’re not so much interested in how particular instantiations of liveness are produced.

Rather, we’re examining how the afterlife of performance is produced, managed, and maintained—through the application of various cultural techniques.

[The sound of rhythmic clattering, like a drum being struck]

A network of people, using specific hardware, capturing performance in a particular space, on particular kinds of storage media—

[Drum strike repeats, layered with subtle distortions]

—along with techniques such as mastering—

[Drum beat sharpens]

—editing, filing, labeling—

[The sound repeats, layered with an accelerating intensity]

—holding (that is, long periods of neglecting), digitizing, remastering, and circulating—

[The rhythmic pulse builds, overlapping voices chanting and talking]

—all working together to produce our sense of the relative worth of a recording.

A recording of another group of people—chanting, talking, reading.

[Clattering intensifies, layered with cheers and echoes of past voices]

If we examine this assemblage closely, we can see its inner workings—the mechanism that produces literary value.

[Final crescendo, then silence]

Only some of the materials that document poetic practice in the late 1960s have ever crossed the formal archival threshold.

Others have been ignored, lost, or destroyed.

[Faint background noise begins, like shifting paper and distant murmurs]

Some, like the Sir George Williams University series, only became formal institutional records after a chance discovery, followed by validation through concerted scholarly and institutional effort.

[The background noise grows slightly, a textured hum of archival handling]

Being attuned to the concept of the archival multiverse allows us to rationalize the messiness—the expanse, duplication, and incompleteness of literary legacy, especially for event-driven records.

And finally, we can see the role of the Web—how it makes archival content both ubiquitous and messy, introducing new complexities in preservation.

Thinking in a multiverse way allows us to layer and intersect poetic events, poets, and their literary and geographical movements, as well as the movement and proliferation of evidentiary traces of their work.

It invites us to gain comfort with a decentralized model of both preservation and dissemination.

[A whispered echo repeats:]
“…preservation and dissemination.”

[Distant echo repeats:]
“Next will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.”

[Recording of a woman:]
“Thanks a lot, Louis, and thanks, everybody, for coming.”

I’m reading from my article, Archives, Intimacy: Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive.

[A sharp mechanical hum begins, like an electric current surging]

—meaning Lisa Robertson at SFU, I inquired about the different media available in their collections that might allow me to better access Robertson’s—

[More mechanical noise, layered with a subtle distortion]

—personal feminist networks, a key topic in my work.

I’m particularly interested in materials related to poet, curator, and organizer Nancy Shaw, a scholar responsible for many changes in KSW’s operations, especially in its connections to Artspeak, a Vancouver artist-run center.

[The mechanical noise persists, a rhythmic pulsing of archived media playback]

During our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my focus on how KSW intersected with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.

[The machine sound fades, leaving an ambient electronic hum]

During our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my interest in how KSW intersected— [Voice distortion]—with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.

It was explained that the tapes had been annotated somewhat ad hoc over the years. [Voice stabilizes] Again, the experience was heightened and singular—[whirring sound]—made even more so by the privacy of the listening space. Putting on a pair of ear-covering headphones, I pressed play on the first tape—only to realize it had to be rewound first.

[Background noise]

All of these attributes build momentum for the initial moments of listening to—[voice echoes]—the recording. Thank you. [Applause]

Thanks, Colter. Thanks, Jacqueline. This is… This is nice to be here in the living room.

This essay features a reel-to-reel recording of a 1969 classroom lecture during which Canadian poet and playwright James Rainey demonstrates sound collage in relation to his celebrated 1967 play “Colours in the Dark.”

On first encountering the recording, the listener will notice—[sound of something large approaching]—the extraordinarily intrusive presence of a jackhammer, located somewhere near the classroom.

Thanks very much. I’ve already given you about a quarter of the reading on tape and gramophone. [Jackhammer begins]

And fortunately, before the jackhammer started, the first thing I played was from Karl Orff’s “Music for Children,” which begins with nursery rhymes and lists of names that children recite…

The paper is entitled “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in the Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966–1971.”

[Distorted] And we’ll be listening to a recording.

[Faint sound of a man, poet bill bissett, singing in the background]

In the 1960s and 1970s, listening to and recording queer people from a police perspective was a means of documenting and regulating their behavior.

[Background singing increases] Surveillance efforts targeted queer writers, monitoring their activities through bugged homes, wiretaps, and infiltration of their communities. Police forces compiled this data, circulating it across networks to justify increased surveillance.

Similarly, some queer writers performed close listening as a practice of careful consideration—both for meaning and for social potential.

[Singing momentarily increases]

[Fast drums continue]

However, little consideration has been given to the oral performance or audio recording of found or appropriated poetry—whether from the historical moment I discuss here or in contemporary conceptual poetry.

My name is Klara du Plessis.

[Whistling sound] I’m reading from “Do You Read Me, Kaie Kellough: The Words of Music”

[Distorted voice and whistling]

[Voice becomes slightly clearer]

The piece, Maple Leaf Also Reads, instructs that letters indicated by numbers should be stressed to emphasize rhythm. The goal is to repeat until the rhythmic pattern is understood.

[Layered voices overlapping]

D—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—y—o—u.

Understood.

E—a—d—m—a—d—d—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—e—y—o—m—a—e—n—d—o—m—y—o—u.

D—r—o—a—d—o—a—o—o—d—u—e—y—o—u—m—r—o—a—u—r—o—y.

D—o—u—r—y—a—r—e—d—r—o—y—o—u—y—o—a—r—I—o—e—r—e—d—o—y—o—u—r—e—a.

[Voice becomes more coherent]

Each component follows a logical continuation.

Y—o—o—y—o—a—d—and—e.

Sorry, the notes are confusing.

Each component is a continuation of the previous—and once they are strung together, they form a tidy loop that can repeat infinitely.

Producing the two podcast episodes required listening to Gallant’s reading dozens of times, and in doing so, Moffitt noticed a significant aside:

Near the end of the recording, Gallant deviates from the story and remarks–

Following that event, SFU Professor Carol Gerson informed us that the proofs for this story, along with a cassette copy of the 1984 reading, were held by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

With help from Roma Kail, a librarian at Victoria University, we were able to access scans and confirm that these were the exact same proofs Gallant had been reading from.

On page 24, Gallant’s editor had added an interlinear pencil notation between lines 6 and 7, stating:

Is he imagining this?

Just as Gallant had read aloud in 1984.

In the opening pages of Thien’s novel—which explores intergenerational trauma resulting from the Cultural Revolution in Chinese-Canadian communities—[Voice distorts, accompanied by soft piano notes]

Li Ling, the novel’s protagonist, is walking through Vancouver’s Chinatown when she hears Bach’s Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 4 playing from a store speaker.

She feels drawn towards it, as keenly as if someone were pulling her by the hand—the counterpoint of the music binding together the composer, the musicians, and even the silence.

The music, with its spiraling wave of grief and rapture, was everything she remembered.

In the act of listening, he becomes so alive, so beloved that the incomprehensibility of his suicide resurfaces, grieving her all over again.

By her own admission, she had never before experienced such a pure memory of her father, Dong Kai, in the two decades since his death.

Li Ling’s experience in Vancouver’s Chinatown raises important questions about the role of music in literary depictions of intergenerational memory and trauma:

– How does music shape memory recall in novels like this?

– How can listening to the music within literature expand our understanding of trauma and memory transmission?

In this article, I argue that listening within a literary context provides a methodology for understanding intergenerational trauma—one rooted in the sensory experiences that accompany inherited trauma.

These experiences are defined by rhythmic repetition, a new setting, and an emotional distinction that alters perception.

This method focuses not only on the literary depictions of sound but also on how that sound shapes the experiences of future generations.

If traumatic memories are communicated through silences and gaps in declarative or narrative memory, then sound itself becomes the conduit—a means by which these memories are passed down to future generations.

Sometimes, that hole becomes a portal—a doorway to other dimensions and voices. Other times, it is simply a giant mouth, consuming language and eroding meaning, a threat as gleeful and destructive as a child’s indulgent play. These texts introduce disfluent joy, embodying the stutterer’s ruinous relationship with words.

Works like Soult’s Moonshot Sonnet, Bergwoll’s Drift, and Schmaltz’s Surfaces require the reader to meet the poem on the page and actively work through it on its own terms.

By resisting any singular method for interpretation, these works show that both sounding and resisting sound can communicate multivalent, albeit elusive, messages.

– What does listening mean within your discipline?

– How do you understand sonic approaches in relation to disciplinarity?

– What aspects of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field do you translate or transpose into your approaches as a researcher and teacher within a specific discipline of knowledge and university department?

Well, it’s raining heavily, and the sky is extremely dull. What a depressing way to start the day. [Sound of liquid pouring] Time to make my everyday morning coffee—an espresso shot with a bit of lactose-free foamed milk, no sugar. [Sound of ceramic clattering] Super basic.

I don’t like getting up this early. I don’t like it one bit. [Sound of door opening] In fact, I hate it. You know what, maybe I’ll just skip today’s morning class. [Sound of shower running] I’m too tired.

No, I need the grade. What I do slightly appreciate about this pre-8:30 class ritual is its peacefulness—the silence of everyone still asleep.

Anyways, I grab my things and head out to a busy Thursday. [Sound of keys jingling, bag zipping]

The professor just gave us an assignment, so I write it down in my bullet journal, my calendar, and on a sticky note that I put up on my wall.

Organization is the only thing keeping me afloat this semester. Otherwise, I’d get nothing done. [Sound of a pencil writing on paper]

My desk is probably my favourite place to be. The best way I could describe it? If a crazy wizard started hoarding objects from his many journeys.

I have stickers on my wall, art from my favourite artists, tech gadgets, makeup, accessories—honestly, anything of interest to me is somewhere on my desk.

[More background cheers] We need one goal to qualify. With two minutes left, it felt hopeless. People walked out.

But then—minute 94—Mohamed Salah scores, in a moment that will go down in Egyptian history. [Loud cheers, static interference]

My microphone couldn’t handle the reaction. [Cheering and static noise blend together] It wasn’t any tamer on the streets either. [Sound of drums]

It didn’t look like I could drive home tonight, so I decided to sleep over at Andrew’s.

In the PEER Lab—the Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research Lab, which I started a few years ago—we seek to listen to the ways different people and different fields listen.

Our goal is to understand more about how the world appears through specific listening techniques.

One of my main collaborators is the graphic designer Juliette Bellocq. We took the invitation to contribute to this volume as an opportunity for me to learn more about her listening practices.

The piece we created together is called What They Say is What They Mean: Listening to Someone’s Story.

I place myself in a position to translate something I’ve heard, understood, seen, or reconfigured. That means that I have a voice—I am an author, but there is also a co-author.

This co-author can be a client or a community, so listening is essential.

Besides working with the PEER Lab, I primarily work with architects in designing spaces. And the key question when we visit a space or meet with people is: What are their stories?

Listening is our primary tool and resource. [Faint instrumental music begins playing]

My job now is to capture something in the air, make it visible for everyone, and see if it can participate in the culture.

I work to transcribe or crystallize ideas that already exist for all of us.

If I do not listen well, I have nothing to create. Does that make sense?

It’s cross-checking information to ensure that what people meant was actually what we heard.

It’s about understanding group stories before producing anything visual or graphic.

It’s a kind of listening that is meant to engage with something alive.

It should not orient the story but let people say what they want authentically.

It is about understanding their words in the right context before finally proposing something that can participate in the culture it comes from.

So, listening is a way to circumvent assumed knowledge.

I’m Mara Mills, a media studies professor and historian of electroacoustics and disability. My co-author, Andy Slater, is a blind sound artist who records, transcribes, and documents blind listening techniques—or what Andy calls Blind Mode.

This machine was released by the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled in the United States in 1981.

It included a time-stretching or pitch-restoration feature so that blind people could speed-read talking books without distorting the narrator’s voice.

Andy uses sounds from the C1, among many other accessibility tools, in his compositions.

And now, we’ll hear a recording of that.

They were meant for home use—out of sight, hidden from embarrassment.

Much like large print books and the white cane itself, some of us knew the glory of the talking book players.

Everything could sound weird if we let it. [Background sound warps slightly]

Reading is fundamental, but any Paul Anka song could sound like sword fighting against Yamat the Chromatic Dragon on those players.

Just as many of us discovered that sound itself can be an alternative to photographs and paintings.

And they are not that different from contemporary assistive technology. Both can be used creatively—and both can disrupt and annoy.

Phones talk aloud, lid detectors double as theremins, and object recognition apps are often wrong.

Blind folks process multiple sound sources at once because of our use of this tech.

[Voice gets faster and higher] When you compose and perform using these tools, filling the room with blind people’s sounds, you’re most likely making people uncomfortable—which is often the motive of any noise artist.

It gives more meaning to the art and experience.

It’s political. It’s entitled. And it’s not just some guy showing off a thrift store find.

How is my hair? Do any disabled people work here? Am I wearing a red shirt? Can you tell me how to find the bathroom? [Sound of tape rewinding]

Writing about the interactive practices and responsive bodies of scientists, Myers and Dumit describe how researchers engage with experimental media, communicate their findings through narrative and embodied gesture, and develop new forms of dexterity in the process.

Their description matches my embodied experience. I am learning all over again how to listen. [High-pitched sound begins faintly]

We need to account for the complexities of working across Deaf and hearing music cultures. And what draws me to this work is precisely what can be learned in this reciprocal, intercultural encounter.

When I listen to music through the vibrotactile vest, I can only discern a generalized buzzing and rhythmic thumping.

My haptic sense is, it seems, woefully undeveloped.

What does it mean to acquire dexterity in a sensory mode?

Or better—what does it mean to adopt an intersensory approach to listening that encompasses multiple sensory modes?

And what happens when we foreground interdependence as a valid and precious foundation for musical creativity?

These questions animate my desire to reorient audition through bodily listening in place. [Sound of book closing]

Archival listening is listening to archives while reflecting on how you are listening—and how you intend to share what you have heard.

Archival listening listens with a future listener in mind.

Archival listening is a practice of attending to the archival apparatus—holding the sound.

While you were away, I held you like this in my mind.

Archival listening is situating oneself as a listening body in time.

Archival listening understands that there are limits to knowing—and makes room for what cannot be heard. [Static and overlapping voices in the background]

Archival listening takes time.

Archival listeners are removed from the time and space of a recorded event—but having heard its sound, a new memory of that event is formed, and the feeling of hearing it remains.

This podcast is part of our work distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.

It features the voices and sounds of Douglas Moffat, Katherine McLeod, Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Michael O’Driscoll, Mathieu Aubin, Jason Wiens, Klara du Plessis, Kandice Sharren, Kelly Baron, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Juliette Bellocq, Kim Fox, Reem Elmaghraby, Kristin Moriah, Daniel Martin, Kristen Smith, Tanya E. Clement, Mara Mills, Andy Slater, and Ellen Waterman.

Check the show notes for all of those names again—and for a link to the journal issue itself that this sound piece performed.

– Sound designer: TJ MacPherson

– Transcriber: Yara Ajib

– Co-hosts: Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod

If you love us, let us know—rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on social media.