| 00:17 |
Hannah McGregor: |
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web Podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Okay. Picture an archive. What do you see? Maybe it looks like the library in Beauty and the Beast, all soaring shelves and rolling ladders or maybe you’re imagining Gandalf the Grey blowing dust off crumpled parchment tomes in a stone room lit only by a single candle or, okay, maybe you’ve actually been in an archive, so you’re picturing stacks of numbered boxes and metal rolling carts and maybe that pair of white gloves you have to wear before turning the pages. But whatever you’re imagining right now, ask yourself, how did those boxes get there? Who labeled and cataloged and stored them? Who collected and organized those books and oil, those ladder wheels? Who’s been preserving those dusty old tomes until a wizard gets to them. Archival work, domestic and care work, even the labor of editing and scripting and production behind the podcast you’re listening to right now; invisible labor is everywhere and we absolutely can’t talk about archives without talking about what kind of labor goes into curating and preserving our cultural history. This month our Spoken Web team members reflect on the often invisible or inaudible labor entangled in the Spoken Web archives. The Spoken Web team at university of British Columbia Okanagan invite us to listen in to the personal stories of labour hidden behind the tapes found in their SoundBox collection, in its digitization, editing and creative critical action that bring these archives to life. Here is Karis Shearer and the UBCO team with episode three: Invisible Labour. |
| 02:36 |
Karis Shearer: |
My name is Karis Shearer and I’m a professor at UBC Okanagan where I teach poetry, I teach in the digital humanities, and I’m really interested in literary audio and what, from a feminist perspective, we’re able to discern or hear around women’s labor in the audio archive. I’m the team lead here at UBC Okanagan on the Spoken Web project and I am working with an amazing team of almost 12 people, I think we’re at now, who’ve been working to process the SoundBox collection. And we bring I think, really interesting strengths as a team in both archiving digitization, literary studies, and research creation. As users or as listeners to audio recordings when we access them online in a digital repository, whether it’s PennSound or Spoken Web, I think often we don’t understand or see the labour that is behind that presentation. That is to say the condition assessment of the tape, the digitization of the tape, the editing of the tape, the making of singles if we’re listening to a single. So that’s what this podcast is going to do is to unpack some of that labour behind the scenes. And so what I wanted to do with this podcast was introduce you to the team behind the recording. So you’re going to hear from some of our team members who will talk about what their contributions are and what they’ve been doing kind of in the collection and the work more broadly, but also with respect to a particular recording – it’s a very special one. So what is the Soundbox collection? It’s a collection of about 166 audio tapes that we have here at UBC Okanagan, housed in the AMP Lab. It’s a really interesting collection because unlike some of the other SpokenWeb collections across the network that were formed around a reading series that took place in usually the 1960s, 70s, 80s, at a particular location. Our collection is not formed around a reading series. It is a collection of very conversational tapes, tapes that were made in the classroom. They’re pedagogical recordings, sometimes they’re interviews, they’re often very informal, and they’re messy tapes because there’s a lot going on in them. People are listening to the television, they’re talking over top of each other, they’re at various distances from the reel-to-reel machine or the tape deck. And that makes them challenging to work with, but also very, very interesting. The tape collection, the SoundBox collection that is, came to me through Jodey Castricano, who’s a colleague of mine. I had been sort of talking about how excited I was about the work that was happening with PennSound, and that I knew was just sort of in the process of starting at Concordia, which would become SpokenWeb and how I was hoping to, you know, create a similar archive of audio recordings. And Jodey said to me, she said, “Just a second, I need to go to my basement and get something for you.” And she came up with a cardboard box and in that cardboard box was a collection of tapes that had been given to her by a professor from UBC named Warren Tallman. And Warren Tallman had given those to her in the early 1990s and said, “Someday you’re going to know what to do with these.” And Jodey said to me, “I think, I think this is it.” |
| 06:14 |
Audio Recording: |
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious. / Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose. |
| 07:20 |
Karis Shearer: |
So the clip that you’ve just heard is an interesting example of something that’s come out of the collection. I talked about the collection being conversational and having many voices on it. In this particular clip we have just Warren Tallman and he’s reading a Walt Whitman’s poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ What we hear first though is Tallman recording the poem solo voice and then it seems that he recorded over top of that initial recording. We still have about 20 seconds of the first one, but he recorded over top of it and created a new type of recording where he’s playing Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in the background. So we have music, we have voice, Tallman’s voice, merge together and it’s this beautiful kind of cadence that he’s timed the poem in a way that works very beautifully with the music. What do we know about this recording? We know that Tallman made this recording roughly around 1966 or ’67, we have that labeled on the box and one of the other recordings on the tape is made in 1966. We also know that Tallman was teaching a Walt Whitman graduate course around that time. In his retirement speech, he says “In 1967 I taught a graduate Walt Whitman course. We put on a Walt Whitman reading, really a group effort if there ever was one, so I gave identical first-class marks to each and all 12 participants.” So we obviously need to do more research. You know, we have lots of questions about this tape, what don’t we know. We don’t know for sure that this was connected to that course, but I think it probably was. I suspect that what we’re hearing is him practicing the type of reading and reading aloud that he was inviting his students to do. We also know from other students in his class that reading aloud was a really important pedagogical approach that he took to reading poetry. So he often made students read over and over again to figure out particular stresses and ways of performing poetry. So it seems to me that this is very likely linked to that, and the idea of adding music is a curious thing. Why Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins? Why that music? I hope that we’ll see scholars coming out of music history and theory approaching this and thinking about the relationship between ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ and what we know about Whitman and that particular recording. I’d also really like to know what recording are we listening to? What version of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins are we hearing here. We know for example that Tallman was recording the poem on his reel-to-reel deck. He can’t be using the same reel to reel deck to play Bach. So does he have a record player in the room with him? He has another device that he’s playing the music on. So you can do some work to narrow down what recording or what version of that music he’s playing in the background, and that’s really interesting to me. The other thing that we hear on this recording, which I find fascinating, is the technology. We hear technology making itself present. Warren Tallman moves a little bit too close, I think, to the mic at a certain point and we hear the feedback, early on in the second part of the second recording. We also know that he hasn’t fully erased the tape when he’s gone to tape over, so we also hear voices and the, and the things that were recorded on the magnetic tape in the past, kind of bleeding through in the present recordings. So we hear other voices that weren’t meant to be necessarily part of that and it has a kind of a ghostly effect. So there’s much to say about recording technology as we’re listening to this tape. |
| 11:21 |
Craig Carpenter: |
My name is Craig Carpenter. I’m a poet, a freelance journalist, and a sound engineer. I stumbled onto the Spoken Web project when I interviewed a former student of Karis’s for a short profile I was writing for UBC Okanagan. The story focuses on how Lee Hannigan’s graduate work with Spoken Web began with a work study project digitizing the UBCO SoundBox collection. I was immediately intrigued by the project and emailed Karis asking if there was any way I could be of assistance. Aside from my audio background I mentioned in the early nineties I was a student of Robert Hogg’s who had been a member of the TISH poetry collective in the 60s at UBC. Turns out Bob had recently donated quite a number of cassettes to the collection and he and Karis were quite close. So we met and I started helping out refining the digitization process, suggesting equipment and helping with training and the creation of a digitization module. Because I’m old enough to actually remember editing on magnetic tape, I knew stuff like how to thread the reel-to-reel and I was really keen to listen to these old tapes. So I immediately got to work. We had discovered a lot of the Tallman reels were recorded at an odd speed and after some research figured out that the machine these tapes were recorded on used an unusually slow speed that was meant for speech. And our machine, and actually hardly any machines have this speed when we play them back they sounded like chipmunks. With this particular reel of Tallman reading Whitman, it was one of the first I helped digitize and I was explaining to Karis this work around, I was figuring out how we were going to, you know, slow these chipmunks down. And I noticed faintly in pencil on this reel box the word Whitman. And our machine you can switch from playing tracks one and two to tracks three and four, and so I hit that button switching to tracks three and four, and that’s when we heard the speed shift to, you know, regular speed and the unmistakable voice of Warren Tallman come in. And then this warble of classical music swelling up beneath him and Karis was like, “Whoa, what’s that?” And at first I thought maybe the reel wasn’t properly erased. I remember we used to have these big magnets that you’d flip a switch and you’d zap the reels to erase them, and if you didn’t leave them on the magnet long enough they’d leave these sort of ghost recordings. But that wasn’t the case, and with this one, and Karis’s sort of eyes widening. She says, “No, he’s recording himself, reading to the music and he’s reading in perfect time.” And so I turned it up and we both sat there a little bit awestruck at what we were hearing. It was just so beautiful. And there was this added element to how we discovered it so unexpectedly. But what was really interesting is it’s him reading Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ a poem where Whitman imagines a future where people would be experiencing what he’s seeing. “The men and women I saw were all near me, others the same others who look back on me because I looked forward to them…” And we were both looking at each other jaws dropping eyes, getting wider because really felt like Tallman had recorded it knowing that more than half a century later we would discover this recording. I mean, he was likely making it for his students, but in some way it really felt like he was reciting it to us and that we were looking back on him now because he had looked forward to us just as Whitman says in the poem. So there’s this really special sort of chance-becoming-kinetic kind of feeling with this recording. In terms of the work done on the file to improve the sound, I tried not to do too much because I never want to overprocess anything. But so people can more easily listen without straining I did a few things in post-production on this recording a few more things than I usually would. At times it was difficult to hear what Tallman recites over the music. He’s probably playing the music on a record player and using his tape machine to record with a dynamic microphone and you could hear him getting closer and further away from the mic at times. I did some EQing and I used some very light noise reduction, and then compression. And often with restoring audio, if you do too much, you lose too much coloration, you know, you pull out too many of the frequencies and you lose sort of the presence and the ambient kind of feeling that adds a unique quality to the recordings. Of course with these tapes, we always want to keep a master that will be like a mirror for archival sake. But for the sake of listening back and for presenting the audio to audiences I used, on this one, I used a convolution reverb to bring back some of that presence, which was lost with the noise reduction, and that’s not a usual thing I do, but it’s just something in this case I thought I’d try. It was a new plugin that uses this technique where they shouldn’t impulse through the space that they want to recreate. And in this case, I believe it was a church in Chicago. The jury’s out whether or not it necessarily sounds that much better, but it’s definitely easier on the ears than the original one, which is what we’re going for and hopefully not losing too much of that analog character. |
| 17:18 |
Audio Recording: |
Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high. I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, How curious you are to me. / On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations than you might suppose. / The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, / The simple compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, / every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, / The similitudes of the past and those of the future, / The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, / on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, / The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, / The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others, the life, love, sight hearing of others. |
| 18:50 |
Megan Butchart: |
My name is Megan Butchart and I am a BA student at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. I joined the SpokenWeb project as an undergraduate research assistant in May, 2018 and one of my main roles on the project has been to catalog the SoundBox collection, which is a collection of tapes held at the UBCO branch of Spoken Web. The SpokenWeb collection is sort of unique among the SpokenWeb network in the sense that it’s not really connected to a university library or special collections archive, but rather was a collection of audio recordings which were gifted to Dr. Karis Shearer by various poets and colleagues. And so as a result, it was never organized or cataloged in the same way that most of the other collections in SpokenWeb were, and so one of the first things I did when I came onto the project was to organize the recordings into fonds, which are collections of artifacts that come from the same source, and so in our case donors. And you know, assess the conditions of the tapes and from there I work to create item level descriptions for each recording. So in the early stages most of the collection was not digitized, and so I sort of began by doing a survey of the collection and cataloging whatever information could be learned from the physical artifact itself. So the box, the label on the cassette or reel or any accompanying material. And I really just created a really simple spreadsheet with categories that I felt would be sort of useful in describing these artifacts, so that included sort of administrative metadata, which sort of recorded the relationships between the tapes and the donors and creators. And then I also created sort of descriptive sorts of metadata, so things like the title, date speakers sort of anyone just connected with the making of the tape, venue, checklists, contents, recording medium tape brand, et cetera. And this is something which grew and evolved as I learned more about sort of different playing speeds and different categories of metadata for audio recordings. Anyway, this was the first stage in cataloging the collection, but as I quickly discovered, while this is fine to get a sort of overview of the collection listening is absolutely imperative to generating accurate metadata for these types of objects, which are quite opaque, sort of in and of themselves. As, you know, we found out things have sometimes been mislabeled or perhaps have been recorded over and then original labels haven’t been changed. And so you can’t just take what the object says sort of at face value. So for example, with this particular recording of Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, it was recorded at the end of a tape that has a recording of a bill bissett poetry reading. And in very faint pencil on the back of the box that holds this tape, it says something which is kind of cryptic, it just says ‘music dash voice Whitman experiment’ which in and of itself could kind of mean anything. So now that we are in the process of digitizing the collection at UBC Okanagan I’m going back and sort of filling in those gaps now that we can actually hear what are on these tapes. And this time, you know, I’m using the much more robust metadata schema that SpokenWeb has developed for cataloging tapes, and entering that information into the metadata ingest system or database that SpokenWeb has developed called SWALLOW at the beginning of using the SpokenWeb metadata schema a few of the challenges that arose really had to do with using a sort of standardized set of metadata categories when our collection, you know, had significant differences from many of the other collections in the Spoken Web network. And so something I kind of discovered early on is that the tapes in the SoundBox collection are, in many ways they’re quite amateurish and they’re kind of casually produced. So for example, they’re not, you know, sort of official finite recordings of an official finite reading series, in which each tape holds sort of a single recording of one event, but instead the collection contains many home recordings and sort of things like audio collage. And so very often these recordings are sort of casual conversations among poets or informal living room readings, recordings of lectures, or simply, you know, a collage of audio clips, either from poets reading, or from, you know, the radio. And so one of the challenges of creating descriptive metadata for this particular collection was navigating sort of challenges that were inherent to these types of unpredictable and sort of multiple recordings. And so the bill bissett Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman tape is a great example of this sort of challenge, you know, we have two very different types of recordings in terms of content, and so the context in which each were made, but they were held on the same tape. And so the bill bissett recording is a public poetry reading, the Warren Tallman is a home recording, you know, and he’s got classical music playing in the background while reading the poem. And so really all of this has been a huge learning process for me, but I’ve also found the work really exciting. |
| 24:29 |
Evan Berg: |
So my name is Evan Berg. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UBC Okanagan majoring in visual art and minoring in art history and visual culture. I also hold a documentary film certificate from Capilano University. I became involved in the SpokenWeb project because Karis Shearer, who’s the director, the AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, and the leader on the SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan was aware of my work within the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, as she thought that some of my skills would lend themselves to some of the challenges that they were facing within the lab. Some of those skills involved photography video, both filming and editing and graphic design work. So I was brought on as kind of a ‘do-everything’ person, I didn’t have a necessarily specific role, but one of the ideas was that I would be doing creative engagement within the lab and be able to take on a variety of different tasks that were given to me. Some of those were documenting the archives. So taking documentary photos of our archival objects so that we could catalogue them online. Other things were working with Caitlin Voth and being mentored by Myron Campbell in the design process of both the logo for the Spoken Web project as well as internal logos for the AMP Lab and producing video content. Karis had put a lot of emphasis on creative engagement with the archive in terms of trying to mobilize these archival objects, past just being that, exactly that, archival objects or just sound pieces that would exist online for kind of research purposes. But she wanted some more creative engagement, and so one of the things that I was commissioned to do was focused on a recording by Warren Tallman in which he is reading a Walt Whitman poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And when I first heard the poem it just struck me as being very cinematic, and so I thought that it lent itself very well to some of the stuff that I was doing with video. With this work, I was really thinking about time, and also in the poem itself, Whitman’s poem, it’s discussing kind of these almost mundane moments in life, but then relating them to this kind of much larger universal theme of just human experience. And he’s also talking about people hundreds of years from the point in which he is crossing the Brooklyn ferry, and thinking about the people a hundred years from now who will be doing the same thing. Just thinking of this thread of time of Whitman in the 1800’s, Tallman in the 1960s and then myself in 2019 and kind of adding to this layering where Whitman started the poem, Tallman reads it again, but he’s kind of putting himself into this space – like you can hear the space of the room. He’s adding other kind of artistic elements to this recording by playing Bach in the background, which added a really cinematic feel to the recording. And so I wanted to kind of add myself to this archive And so what I did was I drew on my own experience of never having crossed the Brooklyn ferry, but having lived in North Vancouver and taking the SeaBus from North Vancouver into Vancouver, and that kind of experience that resonated with me when listening to this recording. So this, this poem that is very much about a shared human experience and that was my relation to that human experience of ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And so what I did was in a very short amount of time, just a few days in Vancouver, I went out each evening at kind of sunset and I crossed the SeaBus from Vancouver to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver and back to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver multiple times as the sun was setting. And I recorded, I filmed various people taking this trip. |
| 29:25 |
Audio Recording: |
The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smaller sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others. |
| 30:00 |
Evan Berg: |
Unless you have a reel-to-reel player and have the tapes themselves, the physical tapes, then you can’t listen to these recordings, and so the entire point was to make them publicly accessible but also searchable so that it was user friendly. People could find these things, download, listen to them, but there’s a great amount of labour that goes into that. Also I think this kind of work can be really beneficial to the SpokenWeb project because first of all, there’s so many hours of recordings on these tapes and so sometimes just making a decision to curate one specific recording and then kind of further its accessibility, because in this case, making a video, adding visuals to this audio piece, I could make it more accessible for some younger people who are constantly consuming visual content online. And I think just making the huge collection less intimidating, it offers an entry point for, a more accessible entry point for people first approaching the SpokenWeb project online and seeing these hundreds of hours of the recordings. |
| 31:30 |
Lauren St.Clair: |
My name is Lauren St. Clair, I’m a third and a half yearin computer science at UBCO. I have an interest in sound field recording and the analog format. What brought me to the AMP Lab was actually one of the Tech Talks, part of the Tech Talk series, which was the tape surgery where you got to actually take apart a tape and then turn it into some sort of art piece based off of collage and then you could break apart the tape. I turned mine into a tape loop. So the main reason I went was just an excuse to break apart a tape and try turning it into a tape for the first time. After that I started attending more AMP Lab events, more Tech Talk series and meetings, and then got involved with the larger SpokenWeb project. Later on, after a couple of months of attending events, I was offered the ability to design the SoundBox collection website, which is the collection part of the Audio Media Poetry Lab here at UBCO. And through that we went through a couple iterations of the actual design itself. What’s supposed to be included on the website is information about the authors, the actual recordings, how to get involved with the AMP Lab and its involvement within the SpokenWeb project. And another focus of the website is to make it accessible and a low barrier entry point for those already interested in the collection or those that are just being introduced to the collection for the first time and don’t know about the SpokenWeb project at all. The iterations were mostly things like we need to include this element, how are we going to focus on making sure people are visible in the website and how are we making sure that they’re visible then in terms of the larger SpokenWeb project, so how do we make community something visible apart of this website when we’re introducing people to the project. So another large focus of this is not only making it accessible, but how do we convey the fact that community and undergraduates and students are a part of this project? So right now we’re on the beta of the website and that we have a list of the SoundBox writers and we also have some featured writers, a part of the SoundBox collection, which will have a photo of them, some information about them, and also an audio file taken from one of the collections that we have apart of the SoundBox collection. And then later on we’re going to expand that where we can go through the recordings of all of the writers that we have, such as Warren Tallman, where people will be able to access the Warren Tallman tape. Right now the Warren Tallman tape is not available on the website, but it will be shortly once we expand our website for more writers and audio files to be available. So you need the digitized files and you need the website, and you can kind of think of it and like a project management framework for one of them has a dependency on the other. So you need at least specific things digitized for your beta website in order to have it up and have those things accessible. But also you need to continue on digitization so that would be an interesting balance. Just stay posted for more information about the website, and for what is to come, there will be more provided online as more things are digitized and more rights are cleared. |
| 35:15 |
Hannah McGregor: |
Thanks so much everyone for listening to episode three of the Spoken Web Podcast. It’s been such an exciting process for me starting to bring this podcast to life, working with an amazing team across the country, getting the chance to find out what my colleagues are up to at institutions that I haven’t had the opportunity to visit, and also starting to ask the question of how we might use podcast to tell stories about different kinds of research. If you’re listening right now and there are certain kinds of stories or ideas you would really love to hear more about, please get in touch with us and let us know. You can always reach out to us spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com and if you’re part of the Spoken Web project and you’re listening to this right now, maybe consider sending us an episode pitch. Spoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are the members of the Spoken Web, UBC Okanagan AMP Lab with audio production by Nour Sallam and Craig Carpenter and additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox collection. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and stay tuned for more AMP podcast magic coming soon to Spoken Web a special thank you to AMP members, Karis Shearer, Craig Carpenter, Megan Butchart, Evan Berg and Lauren St. Clair for their candid interviews and contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. |
