When: Tuesday, April 15th, 3.30pm ET / 12.30pm PT to 5.00pm ET / 2.00pm PT — 1 hour of listening followed by a 30 minute Q&A with producer Adam Hammond
Where: The Amplab, LB 646 at Concordia and On Zoom | Register in advance for this meeting: https://concordia-ca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYpf-mopz0oEteCUHnUX3eqHppf7arl7l-N
Join us for the premier of “They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land" on Tuesday, April 2nd. Listening Parties are a way to be present and listen together, as a collective experience. You will have the opportunity to hear from the producer himself about the processes behind and within the creation and content of his episode. We'll start by listening to the newest episode at 3.30pm ET/12 Ppm PT, and at 4.30pm ET / 1.30pm PT we'll have a Q&A with Adam. Follow us at @SpokenWebCanada and use the hashtag #SpokenWebPod to join the conversation.
About the episode:
T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is arguably not a poem at all. To some readers and critics, it’s more like a play: a collection of voices thrown together without quotation marks or speaker tags. That’s how Eliot himself saw it; his working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices. The work comes alive in performance, where each reader must decide for themselves where one voice gives way to another, and what characterizes each voice. As a result, each reading is unique.
In this podcast, Adam Hammond asks if computers can help us to decide which readers are best at “doing” the voices in the poem. Looking at performances by such readers as Viggo Mortensen, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Guinness, and using tools such as Drift and Gentle, he asks whether Eliot’s own reading of the poem — dry, monotonous, and hopelessly formal to the human ear — might sound more interesting to a computational listener.
