SpokenWeb Podcast

Episode 11

Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in podcasting.

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August 3, 2020

Produced by
Sadie Barker, Emma Telaro, Ali Barillaro & Jason Camlot

How do concepts make us feel? What is the function of affect in the communication of ideas?

In this episode, three SpokenWeb graduate students – Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker and Emma Telaro – revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise that was assigned to them by SpokenWeb researcher Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, namely the functions of voice, ambience and the overarching media rhetoric of the podcast as a form. Comprised of recorded zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini-podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from Year 1 of the SpokenWeb podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself.

Bibliography:

Bender, John and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Ed. Bender and Wellbery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Copeland, Stacey. “A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media. Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. 209-225.

Llinares, Dario. “Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media. Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. 123-145.

Rapp, Christof, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Sterne, Jonathan. “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” CanadianJournal of Communication 36.2 (2011): 207-225.

Ong, Walter J.: Orality and Literacy–The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Routledge, New York, 1988.

Find a list of Ambient Sounds, Music and Additional Recordings used in this episode

– Linked Here.

00:00:18	Theme Music:	[Instrumental Overlapped with high pitched voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do, eh?
00:00:18	Hannah McGregor:	What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb 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. Relaxing ideas, anxious ideas, loving ideas, and even heated ideas. Feelings aren’t just for people; ideas have feelings, too. Or, at least, that’s what our episode contributors this month aim to explore. If ideas do have feelings, how are they communicated? And in turn, how do different ideas, concepts, make us feel? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, graduate students Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, and Emma Telaro revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise assigned to them by Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar at Concordia University. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma, and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, exploring the connections between voice, feeling, and rhetoric. Comprised of recorded Zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself. Without further ado, here’s the SpokenWeb Podcast season finale: “Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling, and Rhetoric in podcasting.” [Theme Music]
00:02:23	All Speakers:	[Overlapping multiple voices] We made a podcast!
00:02:24	Emma Telaro:	Using our podcast voices and other sounds.
00:02:28	All Speakers:	[Overlapping] And other sounds!
00:02:28	All Speakers:	[Overlapping] Who are we?
00:02:29	Jason Camlot:	Begin Music: Light Guitar] Who are we? I’m Jason Camlot, Professor in the department of English and Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound Studies at, well, Concordia University.
00:02:41	Emma Telaro:	I’m Emma Telaro, a Master’s student in the department of English at Concordia University and a research assistant for SpokenWeb.
00:02:48	Sadie Barker:	I’m Sadie Barker, a PhD student.
00:02:50	Ali Barillaro:	And I’m Ali Barillaro, an almost graduated grad student.
00:02:54	Jason Camlot:	Making a collaborative podcast is fun–
00:02:57	Emma Telaro:	–but also challenging.
00:02:58	Jason Camlot:	The logistics of who does what and how to bring everything together is one challenge.
00:03:03	Ali Barillaro:	But perhaps the greatest challenge has to do with–
00:03:05	All Speakers:	–defining the voice that shapes the podcast. [Music Changes: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass]
00:03:09	Emma Telaro:	In an audio essay, there is usually a clear narrational perspective.
00:03:13	Jason Camlot:	All the sounds presented are filtered and organized through a single voice, which represents a sonically particular perspective on all that is discussed and heard.
00:03:23	Ali Barillaro:	In our case, we have aimed as much as possible to allow multiple narrational perspectives to be heard and to shape this podcast episode.
00:03:34	Jason Camlot:	So this podcast, the final episode from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, is kind of a meta-podcast about making podcasts. [End Music: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass] In the winter semester of 2020, I taught a graduate seminar on the topic of Literature and Sound Studies. I’d taught courses on sound and poetry before, but this seminar, more than the ones I taught in the past, was committed to bringing interdisciplinary concepts and approaches from sound studies together with literary texts and sound recordings.
00:04:04	Audio Recording:	[Robotic Voice] We are [ ]. [Begin Music: Ambient Hum]
00:04:04	Jason Camlot:	As my department’s annual required theory seminar for PhDs—although it consisted of both PhD students and MA students—it was heavy with critical theories and cultural studies about sound and listening. So we read and discussed together selections from R. Murray Schafer, Friedrich Kittler, and Lisa Gitelman. Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills. Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith. John Durham Peters and Brandon LaBelle. Douglas Kahn and Dylan Robinson, among many others.
00:04:38	Jason Camlot:	[End Music: Ambient Hum] We read a few literary works that framed sound, listening, and voice in interesting ways, like Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. And we considered poets whose work moved between print and sound productions, including the talk poems of David Antin, the erasure poems and time-stretching sound collages of Jordan Abel, and the poetry scripts and [Audio, Overlapping, Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] audio-visual live performances of Oana Avasilichioaei.
00:05:05	Audio Recording:	[Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] The subject is occurence. The subject is the eye that brutesSim the sky…
00:05:15	Jason Camlot:	In the context of a literature course that aims to think about sound, it’s difficult to do so without having one eye on the print world. It’s difficult to think about sound outside of the generic categories we use to think about printed texts. Podcasting about literary sound is kind of an interestingly messy place to be. Already, asking literature students to engage with sound rather than print works to trouble their relationship to their primary source text. Asking them to think through and present their ideas in a sound-based medium was a further exercise in estrangement. They would be required to learn a whole new media rhetoric, one that involved sound editing, speaking, and recording their ideas in a voice that seemed right to the purpose, possibly the use of music or ambient sounds to reinforce or frame the ideas and arguments they were making, not to mention arranging, balancing, EQing, mixing, and exporting the final product. The results were awesome in so many ways, students made podcasts about [Sound Effect: Siren] noise.
00:06:18	Sima Meghadadi :	Ah, the hustle and bustle of the city.
00:06:21	Jason Camlot:	And silence.
00:06:22	Marlene Oefinger :	Silence, then, is not really absent of sound, but the beginning of listening. And when there is nothing to hear, you start to hear things.
00:06:33	Jason Camlot:	And why most audio books aren’t satisfying.
00:06:37	Brian Vass :	I generally dislike audiobooks. I wouldn’t listen to a recorded book if I could just read the book instead.
00:06:43	Jason Camlot:	And why Samuel Beckett’s radio plays are awesome.
00:06:47	Ryan Tellier :	Now to be somewhat self-reflexive, Beckett’s story is partially about the very need to find a voice.
00:06:53	Jason Camlot:	And how Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry is as extra as a Lana Del Rey
00:06:59	Priscilla Jolly :	In this podcast, I’ll speak about the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration in relation to the confessional mode using the work of Sylvia Plath and Lana Del Rey.
00:07:09	Jason Camlot:	And how the running voice in your head talking to itself is kind of like a never-ending hip hop track.
00:07:14	Kian Vaziri-Tehrani :	[Begin Music: Instrumental Hip Hop] Some words just make me feel uncomfortable, like soot. Ugh. That fire debris thing or whatever? You can’t see, but I just shivered saying that. They should really make some kind of visual podcast, like a vodcast, you know? [End Music: Instrumental Hip Hop]
00:07:31	Jason Camlot:	[Overlapping, the voices and sounds from the beginning of SpokenWeb Episode 8] At the same time that everyone was working on their own podcasts, I was also at work on one with my colleague Katherine McLeod that eventually got released as episode eight of this podcast series, the episode entitled “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” And I’d already worked on my very first podcast in the fall, episode two called “Sound Recordings Are Weird.” It hadn’t occurred to me how difficult choosing and performing a voice in a podcast would be until I tried making [Audio, Throat Clearing] a podcast myself.
00:08:01	Audio Recording:	[Jason Camlot] Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord Alfred Tennyson.
00:08:06	Jason Camlot:	The complexity of voice as a performative and expressive factor in the context of a podcast is about authority, expertise, positionality… All of which Ali, Sadie, Emma, and I discuss later in this podcast. But it’s also about something else, something that for me at least is coming to define what a podcast does to ideas, concepts, and arguments. It has to do with affect and feeling, the proximity of the speaker to her ideas. The proximity of the listener to the speaker sharing an idea. The affective exchange that is inseparable from the conceptual exchange when a podcaster talks about something. Stacey Copeland explains this idea powerfully in a recent article when she observes that–
00:08:52	Stacey Copeland:	There is an inherent intimacy in voice-driven sound work. That seems to be [Begin Distortion] soaking in affect. [End Distortion] The listener puts on her headphones, presses play, and becomes immersed in an affective discourse of human experience through listening and connecting.
00:09:13	Jason Camlot:	[Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] So one way in which ideas have feelings is through their expression and effective communication in voice. Another way that we came to realize how ideas have feelings, during the process of making our podcasts, is through the broader sonic affordances of the medium, [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] especially the way we come to obsess with the use of music and ambient sounds in presenting stories and ideas. Podcasting uses sound to help us experience how a concept feels. So that covers voice and feeling as we’ll be discussing those topics in this podcast. When we say the rhetoric of podcasting, we’re thinking of everything that Aristotle included in his definition of the concept of rhetoric as a means of persuasion, which encompassed a) the character of the speaker, [Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] b) the emotional state of the listener, and c) the argument, logos, itself.
00:10:06	Jason Camlot:	The first two elements of rhetoric as a method are pretty well covered by our categories of voice and feeling. I would define the last element—that of argument, or logos—as including the first two, plus the overarching structure, genre, that we choose to use in arranging and shaping our podcast. And also the degree to which this form of communication engages in explicit kinds of reflection upon its own rhetorical affordances and strategies. We may come to feel ideas as tenets of authentic truth, but this is so because the modes of rhetorical persuasion we use have become normalized to a point that we just don’t notice them or think about them anymore. An ideology of rhetoric sets in and a sense of the “end of rhetoric,” as John Bender and David Wellbery had dubbed it, is felt. Sometimes rhetorical protocols can come to seem so useful, normal, so right to community that uses it, that the rhetoric of it seems to disappear altogether.
00:11:10	Jason Camlot:	It’s through the migration of rhetorical protocols across communities that we can find rhetoric work, interestingly, at cross purposes with its original community. Like when biblical discourse or legal discourse is repurposed by communities of poets, novelists, cartoonists, comedians, it is due to this perpetual migration of rhetorical forms, media, and effects across communities that I think podcasting represents such a powerful tool for scholarly communication and humanities pedagogy at the present time. Podcasting, in practice, is a great way to make us see and feel the rhetorical and media assumptions we use to produce and share knowledge in our scholarly disciplines. A new kind of awareness of the rhetoric of thought has been another outcome of the experience of engaging in podcasting as a form of critical expression. [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] And this is an experience that we all seem to share. So, with these keywords—voice, feeling, rhetoric—briefly explained, and with the basic plan mapped out, first here is Ali Barillaro presenting her podcast on the meaning of applause in poetry readings.
00:12:29	Ali Barillaro:	[Theme Music] When I started working with SpokenWeb, I didn’t really know what I wanted to research. So Jason told me to start by listening through the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and to take notes on anything that caught my attention. That ended up being the sounds of applause and the frequently conflicted comments different poets made about the presence of applause in poetry readings. So I spent my first year as an RA trying to come up with better ways of talking about applause because just measuring duration and amplitude didn’t seem good enough to me. If I wanted to find the “why,” if that’s really possible, I needed to look at the wider context. I had already produced a five-minute talk, a one-hour workshop, and a 12-page paper on this topic. On the page, I had to describe the sounds of applause and use screenshots of waveforms and spectrograms. And none of that really does the sound justice. With the podcast, it was a lot easier to weave narration or argument and the source material in and out of one another, which I think makes for a more immersive listening experience.
00:13:38	Audio Recording:	[Applause] [Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] [Muriel Rukeyser] Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it’s said that way.
00:13:53	Ali Barillaro:	Applause, a sign of approval, an act of support, a cultural indicator worth listening to. In John Bulwer’s manual of rhetorical gestures Chirologia, he explains that “to clap the raised hands one against another is an expression proper to them who applaud, congratulate, rejoice, assent, approve, and are well-pleased used by all nations. This public token has been of old and is so usual in the assembly of a multitude when they cannot contain their joy in silence.” Bulwer’s contemplation of applause, however, quickly takes on a judging tone with concerns about decorum and the appropriateness of the gesture in particular artistic contexts. Addressing the inherent duality of applause, Steven Connor posits that “Clapping one hand on another dramatizes the fact that you are subject and an object simultaneously, a doer and a done to.” Applause, it seems, belongs to both the individual and the crowd. It can be deliberate or uncontained, disregarded or powerful.
00:14:59	Ali Barillaro:	In the context of the archival sounds of reported poetry readings collected by SpokenWeb, we can hear not only poetic voice or textual content. We hear the sounds of interactivity and deception. We hear traces of the relationships between speaker and audience that ground the poetry reading as public, as event. Despite their potential significance, sonic manifestations of audience response, including laughter and verbal address, are not consistently present or consistently treated by poets, series organizers, recordists, and archivists. In 1966, acclaimed Montreal poet Louis Dudek was invited to introduce Henry Beissel and Mike Gnarowski’s reading as part of the poetry series at Sir George Williams University. Dudek attempts to set the tone and establish the appropriate reading series etiquette, as he reflects on his effective response to Beissel’s performance, stating,
00:15:53	Audio Recording:	[Louis Dudek] Strongly, I was impressed and moved by that reading of Henry Beissel.
00:15:57	Ali Barillaro:	From a position as both audience member and poet, he explains:
00:16:01	Audio Recording:	[Louis Dudek] Really several times after the poems, I wanted to applaud, only we don’t do that.
00:16:06	Ali Barillaro:	Hmm. If applause isn’t universally accepted as a fundamental part of the poetry reading, why are there so many instances of applause heard throughout the Sir George Williams collection? Despite concerns of impropriety, applause can function as a demonstration of etiquette or a measurement and influencer of public feeling, as Sarah Balkin claims. Tanya Clement and Stephen McLaughlin frame applause is both enabling an audience’s ability to engage in dialogue with a poem itself and effect its mode of meaning-making, or as a signifier of structures marking the transitions between different elements of a reading. Most examples of applause can be labeled either procedural, referring to moments thought to be appropriate or expected in a reading series, or as purely spontaneous phenomenon. Those spontaneous applause appears to be more appreciative in nature; procedural applause is not exclusively formal or inherently removed from appreciation for the poet, the work, or the performance. Another key feature of applause is the concept of consensus, which implies a communal response from the majority or all of the audience to a given performance.
00:17:11	Audio Recording:	[Applause]
00:17:16	Ali Barillaro:	A noticeable lack of consensus is often perceived as…uncomfortable. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]
00:17:24	Audio Recording:	[One person claps] [Unknown Person says, uncomfortably,] Oh! Thank you…
00:17:25	Ali Barillaro:	[Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] Caused by what Tia DeNora describes as individuals or small groups of people lacking the skill and practical knowledge necessary for appropriate emotional responses in a given performative context. Moments in the Sir George Williams recordings can be used as case studies to examine consensus, procedural, and spontaneous applause and to begin to unpack what specific sounds of audience response might signify when listened to within the greater context of an entire reading and the series as a whole. Let’s listen to the response to Irving Layton’s “Confederation Ode” read at Sir George Williams University in 1967 as an example.
00:18:09	Audio Recording:	[Thunderous Applause]
00:18:09	Ali Barillaro:	Layton was certainly no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night, “Family Portrait,” receives the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the poetry series collection, a 40-second auditory event so intense we could call it a wall of noise.
00:18:28	Audio Recording:	[Very Thunderous Applause]
00:18:28	Ali Barillaro:	Layton’s opening remarks draw attention to the makeup of the sizable crowd gathered to hear him.
00:18:33	Audio Recording:	[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my friends and former students in the audience.
00:18:40	Ali Barillaro:	A statement elaborated upon in a post-grad article that details the overcrowding of the venue that hosted the university’s then-poet-in-residence. Consensus, then, is not an issue for Layton. What is worth questioning is the spontaneity of the reaction to a poem like “Confederation Ode” that was new at the time of the reading, especially considering Layton classics, like “Misunderstanding” and “The Birth of Tragedy,” are met with no audible response. Beyond finding out who is in the audience, the location and timing of the reading is also crucial to the discussion. With Expo 67 scheduled to begin just over a month after this Montreal performance and with the poem’s bold sexual imagery and overt political satire, Layton correctly assumes he need not explain his intent further than a simple preface–
00:19:27	Audio Recording:	[Irving Layton] My contribution to the centennial year, “Confederation Ode.”
00:19:31	Ali Barillaro:	–for the audience to receive his message and respond accordingly. The question still remains open, though. Why did this audience react so strongly to this Layton poem in that moment. The ephemerality of the event and lack of corresponding oral history work makes it hard to firmly pin down an answer, but further inroads can be made with the use of growing audio archives that could potentially allow scholars to trace a poet’s reading history, cross-referencing multiple performances of a given piece and documenting the range of responses from audiences over time and across space. For the “Confederation Ode” applause, further research into Layton’s biography and public sentiment about Expo 67 and the Canadian government more broadly may also elucidate some of the meaningful resonances the performance affected in Layton’s listeners. Thank you.
00:20:25	Audio Recording:	[Applause] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]
00:20:34	Ali Barillaro:	When Jason, Emma, Sadie, and I got together for a series of Zoom meetings to replay and talk about our podcasts a few months after making them, hearing the episodes quickly conjured up…a few feelings.
00:20:48	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] I said something to Emma and Sadie about how I realized I kind of sound like some weird robot presenter lady in my podcast. And I… It’s so cringy to listen to ’cause that’s not how I talk normally at all.
00:21:03	Audio Recording:	[Jason Camlot] It’s always embarrassing to hear your own voice back, right? You know, to some extent, especially when you’re like, “I’m trying to do my podcast voice.” Right? You know.
00:21:11	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] I think it’s… I’m trying to sound like a…informational guide. I think there was only one like one or two very brief, brief moments in my mini-podcast that I was trying to break away from that. I remember in one of your comments that one of the parts that you were like, “Yes! That! That’s what you should be going for more” was just me going, “Hmm” at something. You were like, “Yeah! Like that’s, that’s something we would want to hear.”
00:21:36	Audio Recording:	[Jason Camlot] Yeah, it’s ’cause that “Hmm” was so Ali. Right? [inaudible]
00:21:40	Ali Barillaro:	Overall, I think the end result was relatively well-produced and that I managed to convey a general sense of the work I’ve done on applause within such a limited timeframe. But the thing that we all kept coming back to was my voice. What exactly was going on there?
00:21:59	Audio Recording:	[Jason Camlot] What does that mean, first of all, to be doing a podcast voice? What is it?
00:22:03	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] It’s funny ’cause I remember when I was in CEGEP, I had an assignment where my friends and I made a video about composting and I decided to narrate it and it sounded exactly like that. So it’s been like a thing for like a long time. And I don’t know why, like why that’s my go to voice. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s very weird.
00:22:25	Audio Recording:	[Jason Camlot] Could you do that voice right now? Like on command?
00:22:28	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] Let me pull up something that I could like read. ‘Cause I can’t do it just like speaking spontaneously. Because that’s not how I talk! Okay. Let’s see. “The contents field serves to describe the audible content, speech, and other sounds of the audio asset.”
00:22:44	Sadie Barker:	It seems so kind of genre-dependent, like your podcast, content-wise was quite academic and it was funny ’cause like listening to it, I actually didn’t notice a difference in voice at all, but then just now when you performed your voice, I really noticed it. So there’s something about like the setting of… The content setting that… Where you kind of assume a certain voice and… Yeah, ’cause it really, it really stood out in this very more casual settings.
00:23:12	Emma Telaro:	I think it’s hard not to do it.
00:23:13	Ali Barillaro:	Mhm.
00:23:13	Emma Telaro:	I mean, as soon as you have a device in front of you, like tense up and that’s, I think, more often than not what happens.
00:23:23	Ali Barillaro:	I guess it’s like, it also feels like a safer way of doing it. Like it feels less vulnerable to have that kind of voice and not just have people listening to what you actually sound like.
00:23:35	Jason Camlot:	So you’re, you’re performing the voice of sort of pure information, would you say?
00:23:41	Ali Barillaro:	I want it to be straightforward. I want it to be clear. Yeah, I want people to understand what I’m trying to say to them and I, for some reason, in my head, that’s what that sounds like.
00:23:52	Jason Camlot:	Would you say that you’re trying to make your voice almost disappear in the communication of the information so that it’s like, it’s there, but hopefully won’t be noticed?
00:24:01	Ali Barillaro:	Yeah, I think that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do ’cause for some reason, I guess like my own natural voice doesn’t seem like the best, the best possible option for doing that. And I… It’s, it’s often when it’s something that’s scripted and it’s not like, it’s not theater or something like that. It’s something that is like argumentative or analytical or theoretical. That’s what that voice sounds like in my head. So I’m trying to perform that rather than something that’s more conversational or more natural or more performative in a different way.
00:24:38	Ali Barillaro:	Everyone had a lot to say about their own decisions regarding the performance of the role of podcast host or narrator. And I’ll be back later in the episode to lead you through some of our major realizations about voice.
00:25:04	Jason Camlot:	[Theme Music] Emma Telaro.
00:25:04	Emma Telaro:	The podcast I created for Jason’s class I named “Conditionally Audible Heat,” though future iterations should have a punchier name. Broadly speaking, my podcast examines the sonification of heat in the archival recording of the 1974 Margaret Atwood reading from the Sir George Williams University’s reading series. The curiosity I felt for this particular tape begins in listening. On the occasion of this performance, the reading is upstaged by an unbearable and unlikely October heat. The introducers, Atwood, stumble over the heat, the crowd shuffles restlessly, and this frenzy infectious makes its way through the audio recording. I found this occurrence mesmerizing and in a fit of note-taking attempted to mark all the moments when heat, though constant, materialized and usurped the reading. And yet there wasn’t a specific quality or sound associated with this heat, but a convergence, rather. So I wondered what in the first place was I listening to? [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling] What does heat sound like? How does it manifest in audio recording and what sensations does it provoke? I listened and listened again. So, I inched towards my driving question: how do we hear heat? I felt that to answer this question, what does heat sound like, to attempt a podcast on the sonification of heat, I had to begin with the event itself. Heat announces itself from the very beginning of the reading.
00:26:30	Audio Recording:	[Henry Beissel] Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system. The hall is going to be too hot.
00:26:34	Emma Telaro:	And I wanted to give a sense of the temporality of the event, the time elapsed and distorted by heat as it presses languorously and anxiously onto the reading. I had to find a way to do this, to describe, engage with, and represent 35 minutes of audio in a six-minute podcast. The podcast really took off with the introductory audio collage. Once I decided that my primary task was to sound heat, I clipped elements from the beginning of the recording to create the collage and timed it to fit a sultry musical track I found online. It felt very much like I was assembling quotations. I treated the clips, whether of speech or exterior sound, as fragments and pieced them together. To get the sounds to hit at the right time was a minute task and the more I edged towards the effects I wanted, the more finicky I got. That first sound, the one moment you’ll hear, took ages to place on the right beat and significantly, I selected it because it’s the first voice you hear in the archival recording. I felt strongly about keeping it, that short phrase captures the mood of the reading, the disorder, the tension, and the sound and feel of the room. You’ll notice how the speaker, Henry Beissel, signals the overflow, the body’s mass in the room. And you’ll hear the humour, too, which recurs in the event as necessary relief.
00:27:56	Audio Recording:	[Begin Music: Sultry Instrumental] [Henry Beissel] One moment. [Music Changes: Bass Joins Sultry Instrumentals] [Henry Beissel] We did try to get a larger hall, but it was impossible to accommodate the overflow we have set up loudspeakers in the little gallery here, how it [inaudible] in the other one, too? [Unknown Person] Outside. [Henry Beissel] Outside there’s loud speakers. So please don’t all crowd into the room. Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system? The hall is going to be too hot. [Music Changes: Xylophone Joins] [Margaret Atwood] I don’t see any reason why this thing should resemble a steam bath. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] If everybody on the chairs would, would shift over this way, and sit on sort of as if it were a bench, then some more people could sit on the edges there. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] It’s fucking hot.
00:29:06	Emma Telaro:	Montreal, October 18, 1974. [End Music: Sultry Instrumental] It’s hot, really hot, an unlikely hot autumn evening. Margaret Atwood is set to perform at the Poetry Series, a reading series organized by the Sir George Williams University’s English department, now Concordia University. The room is jammed. She begins to read.
00:29:28	Audio Recording:	[Margaret Atwood] Is not one– Oh boy, is it ever hot in here, I can’t stand it, yeah, hmm?
00:29:35	Emma Telaro:	Atwood’s performance is of peculiar interest for two reasons. First, she’s one of the few women invited to read at the series. Second, the reading is overwhelmed by this autumn heat wave. In the recording of this performance, we hear Atwood repeatedly referenced this oppressive heat, and we hear the audience members, too, shuffling and speaking excitedly as they crowd into the room. We hear this especially in the first few minutes of the recording and in the Q and A that follows her performance. The reading itself is cut short to accommodate the unusual weather, which is ironic, perhaps, given our first point.
00:30:11	Audio Recording:	[Margaret Atwood] I think I better read just three more poems…before we all die.
00:30:19	Emma Telaro:	[Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] In an article written for The Guardian called “Boiling point: why literature loves a long hot summer.” Aida Edemariam writes, “Novelists have used heat waves to create tension, erotic charge, and moments of possibility. It is a time when all the rules change.” Of course, we’re not speaking of a fictional heatwave, but of a real, historical and material manifestation of heat. And yet we might pursue literary analysis and say that the sweaty, hot room acts as a framing device for the poetry reading, or if we want to borrow a term from sound studies, we might include heat in a study of the reading soundscape. But how in the first place does heat sound forth? How do we hear heat? What is the significance of an audible heat? For the most part, we’re listening to the effects of heat. Heat acts on bodies, bodies contribute to heat, voice and movement manifest discomfort or pleasure, or…pleasure in discomfort.
00:31:16	Emma Telaro:	The audible manifestations of heat, Atwood’s humorous quips, her nervous laugh, the frenzied audience response highlight the sociality of performance. Heat dramatizes the encounter between audience and performer and despite the very real constraint material circumstances of the reading, heat provides a release from constraints. We sense the overflow in the room, which contributes to the sense of possibility that emerges out of close contact with Atwood and her poems. Later, she jokes about being called a “witch” by some critics, which adds fuel to her feminism and speaks to the disarming power of her poetics. In this heat, with Atwood, we anticipate something. Boundaries might be crossed.
00:32:01	Audio Recording:	[Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy? Has anybody died yet?
00:32:08	Emma Telaro:	Heat helps us imagine what it might’ve felt like to be there. And it is remarkable that we can retrieve the sensation, if only through recording. Heat is a conjuring trick; it signals presence even in absence. We hear the spatial, temporal, and material circumstances of Atwood’s reading, we hear the body, and of course, we hear the poems. And it all feels quite sweaty.
00:32:35	Emma Telaro:	We’ve talked about the sociality of performance sounded through heat, but there’s also the various meanings that shift in reading. Heat alters the poems themselves. Where and how you listen matters to how you receive meaning in the poem. Imagine a late summer evening, or if you prefer, a blazing mid-August sun entering deep, deep into the pore of your skin. Can you taste the sweat, smell the humidity? Or is it a dry heat, red and sandy? Are you close to, far from other bodies? How does the clothes feel on your skin? What sounds are there around you?
00:33:16	Audio Recording:	[Margaret Atwood] “Late August.” This is the plum season, the nights / blue and distended, the moon / hazed, this is the season of peaches / with their lush lobed bulbs / that glow in the dusk, apples / that drop and rot / sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands / No more the shrill voices / that cried Need Need / from the cold pond, bladed and urgent as new grass / Now it is the crickets / that say Ripe Ripe / slurred in the darkness, while the plums / dripping on the lawn outside / our window, burst / with a sound like thick syrup / muffled and slow / The air is still / warm, flesh moves over / flesh, there is no / hurry. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]
00:34:13	Emma Telaro:	“Late August” felt like the most fitting and only close, a return to the poem that felt nostalgic and dreamlike. Throughout the podcast, I focused mostly on extra-poetic speech, but the quality of her voice and reading shifts tellingly to [Changes voice to mimic the cadence of Atwood’s voice in the reading] the anxious phonetic pace indicating unbearable heat, slows, when she reads. “Late August” is this langour, this culmination, this release. The beautiful yet dark aura of the plums, ripe. The seductive quality of late August heat that focuses heat as an affective and aesthetic experience. It’s a heat which makes its way through autumn cracks, [Sound Effect: Autumn Bugs] the kind of heat that sometimes surprises us here in Montreal. It’s the heat of the poetry reading, from the bodies in the room, giving grain to the voice, to the poem. I wanted to end here, in “Late August,” to return to the poem, to listening, to feeling. If I speak “Late August,” I think of the swarming of bees by the Lachine Canal, but also the humidity that hangs on, that persists despite the signs of fall. There are sounds to these feelings, to describing these images. It’s perhaps a matter of listening more closely, of finding the right vocabulary for them.
00:35:36	Jason Camlot:	[Theme Music] Sadie Barker.
00:35:36	Sadie Barker:	For the last four years, I’ve tree planted in northern BC. I would do this between my schooling, where especially more recently, I’ve been thinking and learning about sound studies. And these interests came together last summer when I brought a recorder with me to camp with the intention of recording the day-to-day world of tree planting. So when I wasn’t planting trees, I was walking around camp, interviewing people,–
00:36:02	Audio Recording:	[Sadie Barker] Okay, Michelle, we’re recording.
00:36:05	Sadie Barker:	–collecting the sounds of camp life, [People Chatting] and just amassing various audio. So I was pretty excited when, in Jason’s class, I had the opportunity to assemble it. Because I already had several hours of tape, I was in many ways advantaged going into this assignment, but I was still apprehensive. I never made a podcast before. While I’d written lots of essays and could appreciate music and sound, I’d never attempted to tell any kind of audio story. As someone that studies multimedia and aesthetics, podcasting made me realize that while I research and write on these topics, I hadn’t really ever diversified or experimented with my own modes of expression. I hadn’t ever really tried to facilitate an aesthetic experience itself beyond formal academic writing. So this assignment made me reflect on [Beeping Alarm] the tendencies, comforts, and familiarities of my own academic modes.
00:37:17	Audio Recording:	[Beeping Ends] [Crackly Static]
00:37:17	Sadie Barker:	It’s 5:45 AM, cold, and the clothes you pull onto your shivering body in the pitch black of your tent are damp, coated in dew and sweat from the day before. Outside, the sun has not yet risen, but the gravel pit bears its first signs of life nonetheless. The hum of the generator [Mechanical Clacking] and the few early risers sitting on the breakfast trailer steps, brushing their teeth, smoking cigarettes, chewin’ the fat.
00:37:49	Audio Recording:	[Truck Backing Up] [Unknown Person Sings] Tree planters are giving the trees a newly [inaudible] life. [Laughter]
00:37:55	Sadie Barker:	This is the stretch of calm before the day. In 15 minutes, the breakfast trailer doors will open and people will shuffle through, heaping scrambled eggs and oatmeal onto silver trays to eat in the tent, both anticipating the day to come and cherishing these moments of idleness. At 7:00 AM, everyone will board their trucks and leave for the cutblock to spend the next 10 hours planting trees. [Wheels On Gravel I could try and describe these 10 hours and the world of possibility they hold, but Charlotte Gill’s book Eating Dirt does it much better.
00:38:30	Audio Recording:	[Begin Music: Country Guitar] [Charlotte Gill] Planting trees isn’t hard. As any veteran will tell you, it isn’t the act of sowing itself, but the ambient complications. It comes with snow pellets or clouds of biting insects so thick and furious it’s possible to end a day with your eyelids swollen shut and blood trickling from your ears. They’re swaying fields of venomous plants like devil’s club and stinging nettle. The work has the bodily effect of a car crash in extreme slow motion. Besides that, the task itself is thankless and boring, which is to say, it’s plain and silent. What could compel a person to make a career of such a thing? I’ve always wanted to find out. [End Music: Country Guitar]
00:39:16	Audio Recording:	[ ] I’m Behnke, I’m from Terrace, British Columbia, and I– My name is Belle –am a second year tree planter– and I’m from Vancouver– My name is Liam Hannah– and I’m a first-year planter– Oh, my name is Alanna– I’m from Toronto– I’ve been planting for seven years– And I’ve been planting for four years– Hey, I’m from Thailand– –for two years– My name is Clara. I am from Thornbury, Ontario– Hi, my name is Sebastian– –planting for a couple of weeks now –I’m from Northern BC– –so this’ll be my first, first year– –and I’ve been planting for, this is my second full season planting.
00:39:52	Sadie Barker:	There are many different kinds of planters. People come from all sorts of places and plant for all kinds of reasons. But most planters will tell you that the happiest part of any season is May, before any of the real work has started.
00:40:07	Audio Recording:	[Liam] So they say there’s three parts to the planting season–
00:40:10	Sadie Barker:	This is Liam.
00:40:10	Audio Recording:	[Liam] –and they map onto each month. There’s May, the honeymoon month where everybody’s having a good time and they’re enjoying themselves. They just got here. [People Chatting] They’re partying a lot every night… [People Chatting] [Begin Music: Ukelele].
00:40:28	Audio Recording:	[Kim] You spend so much time with these people, so–
00:40:30	Sadie Barker:	This is Kim.
00:40:31	Audio Recording:	[Kim] –yeah, It feels… Leaving and coming back, it feels like camp as a little kid, like seeing all these people that you’ve connected with.
00:40:41	Audio Recording:	[Belle] I think there’s like a creative energy.
00:40:44	Sadie Barker:	This is Belle.
00:40:45	Audio Recording:	[Belle] Music and art, I feel like that is sort of always happening in the background of camp.
00:40:51	Audio Recording:	[Liam] People are just pretty cheerful. [Music And People Chatting] ‘Cause everybody’s quite happy, ready to get to know each other and [Michelle says “Wonderwall”] joke around and…
00:41:04	Audio Recording:	[Markus] When you’re around the fire and everyone’s laughing and someone’s playing guitar… And then, again, you just sit back and you just go, “Wow, this…. This is good.” [Michelle] Katie, It’s not, Katie’s all request hour. [People Laughing And Chatting].
00:41:27	Audio Recording:	[Liam] And then–
00:41:28	Sadie Barker:	And then–
00:41:29	Audio Recording:	[Liam] –June hits.
00:41:30	Sadie Barker:	–it’s the June blues.
00:41:32	Audio Recording:	[Liam] And people are getting exhausted and they go downhill.
00:41:36	Sadie Barker:	This is when reality starts to set in, but when the bodily effect of a car crash in slow motion that Charlotte Gill was referencing, starts to occur.
00:41:46	Audio Recording:	[Michelle] It’s, it’s really hard to justify like the toll it’s taken on my body because I felt so–
00:41:50	Sadie Barker:	This is Michelle.
00:41:51	Audio Recording:	[Michelle] –physically able before coming.
00:41:54	Audio Recording:	[Markus] I have a huge gash in like the webbing between my thumb and my index finger.
00:42:00	Audio Recording:	[Overlapping Unknown Voices] My feet are regularly cramping– The [inaudible] hurts– Common tendonitis– And it’s like a charley horse in my foot– Drought– I don’t know what I’ve done to my back– Foot pain– Some ribs popped out– So two days ago I woke up and I barely could see out of– Basically my knee started swelling up– –my right eye– –and I took my first day off ever. –it was bitten from a black fly– And so I hobble around and struggle to get in and out of the truck and struggle to get in and out of bed…
00:42:21	Sadie Barker:	And what do you think? Is it worth it?
00:42:28	Audio Recording:	[Michelle Laughs] I don’t know. [Laughs] I don’t know.
00:42:33	Sadie Barker:	This also when the days start to feel long– [Sound Effect: Rain Falling]
00:42:37	Audio Recording:	[Zoe] The time doesn’t fly enough.
00:42:40	Sadie Barker:	–really long.
00:42:43	Audio Recording:	[Markus] Well, the worst thing that I find tree planting is…definitely the loneliness
00:42:50	Audio Recording:	[Zoe] There doesn’t seem like… No birds are singing or nothing. Everything is just grey and…
00:42:56	Audio Recording:	[Kim] If you have one bad thought on the block, then it can just stick with you all day long.
00:43:01	Audio Recording:	[Liam] And it’s always been the hardest job I’ve ever done and probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
00:43:07	Audio Recording:	[Zoe] But like today–
00:43:10	Audio Recording:	[Liam] And then–
00:43:10	Audio Recording:	[Zoe] –at some point I sat on the log–
00:43:13	Audio Recording:	[Liam] –July hits–
00:43:14	Audio Recording:	[Zoe] –and I just started laughing–
00:43:15	Audio Recording:	[Liam]–and it’s the home-coming stretch.
00:43:16	Audio Recording:	[Zoe] –and I was laughing by myself for like a big two minutes and then I just stood up again and…planted!
00:43:27	Music:	[Begin Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso]
00:43:27	Sadie Barker:	And what do you think, will you be coming back again?
00:43:32	Audio Recording:	[Alanna] Yeah, see, that’s a hilarious question.
00:43:35	Audio Recording:	[Kim] People always say it’s the last season, then they come back.
00:43:37	Audio Recording:	[Alanna] Obviously I’m saying never again after this season.
00:43:42	Audio Recording:	[Michelle] That’s the struggle now where it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll come back. No I won’t. Yeah, I will. No, I won’t.” Back and forth, back and forth. I think–
00:43:50	Audio Recording:	[Liam] I think this is my last year. I think this is my last year, but I said that last year. So. Who know? Everybody always says that.
00:44:02	Audio Recording:	[Alanna] I said that—I think it was my third year—that I would never come back and now I’m at four years later so…I guess it does something right. [End Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso. Rain Sound Effect Fades Out]
00:44:19	Sadie Barker:	It’s funny hearing your own voice and podcast, maybe, especially, when it’s your first. I remember at the time of making this not really having a plan, maybe because this combination of sound and text was a new medium for me, not having a deliberate sense of process. But maybe because of that, having a sense of freedom. I knew I wanted to capture the everyday-ness of planting and I was excited by the possibility that I didn’t need to directly argue for the everyday or pose it as a structured thesis necessarily, but that I could present it experientially to the listener. I remember gravitating to certain sounds almost impulsively and assembling them in ways that just felt intuitive. It’s interesting now to hear the sounds that came through and the ways in which they did the sound [Mechanical Clanking] of the generator for me is interchangeable with the sound [Beeping Alarm] of the alarm clock. Both mean early morning.
00:45:17	Sadie Barker:	They mean that the cook is likely starting to make breakfast and you should probably be mobilizing out of your tent. These parallels, I think, was the underlying rationale for putting those sounds in almost overlapped proximity. The sounds of the beer can and the fire and the instruments and banter. Those sounds for me capture the social world [People Chatting] of planting and the sound of the rain [Water Splashing] on the tent in the morning, which is always the first thing you hear and notice because it cues exactly the kind of planting day it will be seem to perfectly sound the ways in which planting is almost always at the mercy of the environment. So, I wanted to forefront those visceral relations between planters and their everyday surroundings and I think podcasting allowed me to do that in ways that were more in accord and representative of planting as itself: an immersive and sensory and experiential medium. [Theme Music]
00:46:31	Ali Barillaro:	As Sadie, Emma, and I talked about our podcasts together with Jason, we found ourselves coming back to three key themes, including what we’re calling feeling or ambiance and rhetoric. But we probably had the most to say about voice, about vocal performance, intent, effects and affect.
00:46:52	Ali Barillaro:	[Audio Recording] Listening to your, to your natural voice recorded is also kind of scary.
00:46:57	Jason Camlot:	Ali Barillaro.
00:46:57	Ali Barillaro:	Having that option to sound like somebody else, I guess in a way, is, is like a safety blanket, sort of.
00:47:06	Jason Camlot:	That’s a really interesting point. I think it’s a great point. And it’s… I find it really… I mean, I’m not surprised, but I find it interesting that clarity and authority means voice evacuated of emotional characteristics or traits, right? You know. Which is also protective ’cause it shows that you’re not vulnerable to emotion, right? So in this version of podcast voice we’re to evacuate our voices of emotion, to communicate authority, clarity, and to somehow twist our personalities into some kind of robotic version of ourselves, you know, maybe avatars against, you know, that more authoritative robotic version of self-performance, but actually is about putting yourself out there and being casual and being yourself.
00:47:54	Ali Barillaro:	A lot of that comes from also feeling like sort of inadequately prepared to be that authoritative speaker as a student and for an assignment for a class. The audience was all of us, technically, like the other students, but it’s also Jason. So it’s a little hard to step back from that, even though you’re aware that you can and we were encouraged to do so in the podcast form, it’s very hard to stop doing that.
00:48:23	Jason Camlot:	Emma, did you feel you were also engaging in a kind of a different version of yourself, a more transparent or, or somehow, you know, objective version of yourself in your vocal performance in your podcast? Or were you doing a different kind of voice?
00:48:40	Emma Telaro:	I think on some level I was–
00:48:42	Jason Camlot:	Emma Telaro.
00:48:43	Emma Telaro:	–just because this was a podcast that was assigned to us within an academic setting. So, and I was talking about heat in my podcast and I, I realized how that can become quickly humourous. I think like you, Ali, I kind of feel like, “Oh, that was a little bit of a missed opportunity. I could’ve made a bunch of like really silly jokes about heat.” But also I was sometimes actively trying to avoid that because I was afraid that that wouldn’t make it not serious. I often do think about that idea of the authoritative voice and how, as a student, it’s difficult to ever feel like you have one. And also like as a woman, having like a high-pitched voice is not necessarily normally seen as authoritative. So it’s something I often think about on the daily, especially at school, because I also find that my voice at the university is not the voice I have when I’m at home with my parents or when I’m at a bar with my friends, it fluctuates so much. And it’s something I pay a lot of attention to. And I think for this podcast, I wanted to find like a medium, like how can I be myself, but also sound like better than I am? Which is maybe like a silly, insecure thought, but it’s a thought that I’m sure everyone has, as soon as they’re being recorded.
00:49:56	Ali Barillaro:	I think a lot of us are kind of self-conscious about sounding, not, not too shrill, not too loud, and like not too high-pitched. I think my voice is actually quite deep. Like even now, I’m realizing listening to myself that when I’m talking and I know I’m being recorded, I do often try to, to keep it to the lower registers with my voice.
00:50:20	Emma Telaro:	I used to sing. So it brought me back to being like in a recording studio and it brought me back to that moment, like right before record like that, that sort of… The acknowledgement you have in your head of like, “Okay, well now I’m putting on this performative voice.” And that voice felt a little bit similar to my singing voice because I was trying to like, I think extend the words and circle around the letters in a way that I don’t when I’m speaking casually. So it’s also a fake casual voice, I think.
00:50:51	Jason Camlot:	Yeah. A performed casual voice, which is a big part of the podcasting voice that we often hear. When’s it acceptable to have emotion like in… For a narrator to have emotion or host to have emotion in a podcast? Because I definitely don’t either in my narrations, at least the ones I’ve done so far, it’s been pretty, it’s been pretty much based on like my grade eight radio assignment, you know? I don’t think I’ve progressed very much in thinking about how I’m supposed to sort of project or what a narrator’s really supposed to be. I think I’m trying to be clear. So I totally get what Ali was saying earlier about wanting to enunciate well at the same time to sound casual or conversational so, so that the text I’m reading doesn’t sound like it’s being read. There’s this kind of attempt to, to strike a really impossible or unnatural thing, balance, between reading texts, so sounding like an actual text that’s being read, but being a voice that’s doing that text in a manner that sounds conversational. I think it’s, there’s a lot of that kind of communicating a sense of reception through how one speaks back to what someone said without always saying, “Yes, I understand. Yes, I like what you’re saying.” It’s coming across through these vocal modes of expression instead, in timbre and in, in register in the voice itself. Earlier in this conversation like Ali, when you’re laughing, you know, about yourself and everything like that, that’s all there. And it’s like, “Oh, that sounds like a podcast voice to me, like much more than the formal narrator’s voice that we all seem to sort of slot ourselves into.” Sadie Barker.
00:52:34	Sadie Barker:	That’s true. The podcasters, like I’m thinking of even someone like Ira Glass, kind of walks this line between being kind of well-spoken, but also can kind of respond naturally and with emotion on the spot and how it’s a really fine balance.
00:52:52	Jason Camlot:	If you were to perform a different podcasting voice to sort of give us an example of what your voice might sound like if you were to redo your podcast, having reflected a little bit on the voice that you did use, what would that sound like?
00:53:06	Sadie Barker:	“Wake up everyone, it’s 5:45–” no. I think maybe I would just try to adopt the shifts in energy more… Like I think the, the podcast starts with kind of a lower energy, but it does kind of rise. I would reflect maybe more on my own experiences, my own personal reflections, take less of a back position and come to the fore more.
00:53:32	Jason Camlot:	What about you, Emma? Would your, your voice change, do you think?
00:53:35	Emma Telaro:	Thinking about it now, it was a very literary voice I think I was trying to mimic and I think I was also trying to match it with Atwood’s knowing that I would be putting the clips together. Whereas like, if I were talking about pizza, which I’m also super passionate about, it would be a very different voice. And I’m also thinking like Sadie, I wouldn’t want you to lose that like rising, quiet quality, because it’s as much part of the story as is the other speakers or the content. It is like a question of matching tone or timbre to, to content in the same way that we do when we’re writing. It shifts. But there is always something there that, that speaks of the author, right? Whatever that is. I don’t know. I don’t know if that answers the question. I guess it wouldn’t change, it would, it would maybe change. I don’t know, depends what I’d be focusing on this time.
00:54:24	Ali Barillaro:	If I had to respond to this question, I’d say it might sound something like this:
00:54:31	Ali Barillaro:	[Audio, Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] Sir George’s then-poet-in-residence Irving Layton was no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night received the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the entire poetry series collection, [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental] a 40-second auditory event so intense I call it a wall of noise. [Thunderous Applause, Previous Music Returns] In his opening remarks, Layton proudly draws attention to the sizable crowd in front of him. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]
00:54:59	Audio Recording:	[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my…
00:55:03	Jason Camlot:	Emma Telaro
00:55:03	Emma Telaro:	It seemed that the medium, we were dabbling in, podcasting ,demanded that we concentrate feeling, that it was part of the argument, content, and narrative voice of our podcasting selves. The relational, immersive, and affective experience of sound and of podcasting guided or thematic discussion on feeling. Jason asked us to recall moments from our podcasts that were soaking in affect and to reflect on the achievements and challenges of these. We all thought of Sadie’s very successful rendering of the ambiance of camp and in particular of her campfire clip.
00:55:36	Sadie Barker:	[Audio, Overlapping With People Chatting] I sampled the sounds of people jamming and then I sampled sounds of people conversing. I think it was really an attempt to describe the sort of social atmosphere of planting that really… It seemed much more informative to use these small sounds, as opposed to saying, “You know, usually there’s 12 people standing around a fire and there’ll be some people playing instruments.” And I don’t know, it just made me kind of reflect on how the smallest sound can be so telling and so much more telling than kind of a lengthy description. I chose this scene because I thought it really captured the ambiance of camp.
00:56:16	Emma Telaro:	Sadie aptly negotiates images through sounds so that we feel like we’re there sitting around the campfire. If Sadie sought to sample atmosphere of camp, I focused on the ambiance of a room. My podcast, in a sense, was about feeling the feeling of heat at the poetry reading event.
00:56:31	Audio Recording:	[Audio, Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy?
00:56:35	Emma Telaro:	The goal was to transmit a listening experience that centred heat, in listening closely to the room, and from there eased into a discussion of the reading event that preserved its heated texture. The heat felt all-consuming, shares much with Sadie’s rain, calling forth sensations, [Sound Effect: Stormy Rain] images, and memories that are otherwise inaccessible. I’ve never been planting in Northern BC, but I can hear the rain on my tent regardless, just like I had not been present nor alive during the Atwood reading and yet I feel I know that heat from that October night. While Sadie and I focused on the field of our particular subject matter, the sound of camp and of heat, of tree planting and of the poetry reading, Ali asks, what does podcasting itself sound like? Ali, quite brilliantly questions the mood evoked by the genre and sets the tone for the experience of listening to an informational form of communication. What remains consistent across our podcasts and in our discussion of feeling is this focus on our affective relationship to sound. The affordances of the medium seem vast in this regard, how to translate, feeling, affect, how to tell. What rhetorical methods might be used.
00:57:40	Jason Camlot:	Sadie Barker.
00:57:41	Sadie Barker:	Our approach with this podcast was to structure it around thematic discussions, voice, and ambience, too. But now we land at structure itself. How do we bring all of these components together to make one coherent, but also hopefully compelling narrative? Just like the structuring of this very podcast determined through brainstorming, zooming, and certainly some trial and error, our approaches to structure were varied.
00:58:10	Audio Recording:	[Sadie Barker] It was the same feeling of having to fill up a blank page and like, where do you start? Where do you end?
00:58:15	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] I wanted to start with a statement.
00:58:16	Audio Recording:	[Sadie Barker] I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs be the primary structure.
00:58:21	Audio Recording:	[Emma Telaro] Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.
00:58:23	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] I found it very difficult, found it very hard. I just had a lot to say.
00:58:27	Sadie Barker:	But before we get into any of that, Jason usefully summarizes what exactly we’re talking about when we say “structure” and “rhetoric.”
00:58:36	Jason Camlot:	So when I’m, when I talk about rhetoric, I’m thinking of the handling of different registers so that you create a kind of persistently interesting series of sounds that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish combined with the kind of understanding of a beginning, middle, and end.
00:58:54	Sadie Barker:	And, as leader of the discussions, he offers some useful soundbites towards structuring this very segment.
00:59:02	Jason Camlot:	But maybe we can each reflect a little bit on the challenges of the overall structure and arrangement of our podcasts.
00:59:11	Sadie Barker:	In doing this reflecting, I started to realize that these categories [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] of voice, ambiance, and now rhetoric and structure, ones that we’d been discussing somewhat separately, were connected, entirely connected. Feeling and ambiance suddenly seemed integral to how my podcast was constructed. [End Music: Intense Instrumental]
00:59:29	Audio Recording:	[Sadie Barker] In my case, I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs of the season be the primary structure, but that that was structurally quite ambiguous. And so I had Liam, who is my partner and a planter, describe those emotional arcs in the language that everyone recognizes as the honeymoon and the burnout and the homestretch, just to provide a bit of structure [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] to the listener that keys the transition, right?
00:59:56	Sadie Barker:	But I also realized that voice and its spectrum of intonation and register was key to the structural shifts themselves.
01:00:05	Audio Recording:	[Sadie Barker] I did really rely on the voices of planters to capture the different emotional registers of those moments. There was an interview with this girl, Zoe, and she was describing a really miserable day on the block. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] And then she kind of goes, “But then I just pick myself up and I start planting” and being really drawn to that “but” because it just captured both in what she was saying, but the intonation, like the shift in register, that really mobilized the next chapter. So it was interesting to think about the content of what people were saying, but then also just how the sound and the way she said that one word cued that we were in a different emotional space.
01:00:43	Jason Camlot:	Cool. That’s amazing how just a single intonational shift can actually signal, “Okay, new part.” And it shows how much feeling is a determining factor in the segmentation or shaping of argument in podcasting.
01:00:56	Sadie Barker:	[Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] And just like with structuring an essay where everyone seems to take a different approach to argument, some brainstorm, others start with the thesis, and others just begin with no particular sense of how, my approach in many ways seem to differ from Ali’s, which was to–
01:01:13	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro]–to start with a statement rather than “applause and the sounds of the audience are important and here’s why.”
01:01:19	Sadie Barker:	Which would then orient listeners to her particular stance on the topic at hand.
01:01:24	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] Because most research with recordings of poetry readings are focused on the poets for obvious reasons. So I wanted to start out sort of stating that.
01:01:32	Sadie Barker:	And while Ali didn’t particularly focus on vocal inflections or registers–
01:01:39	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] I don’t think I was successful in thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking like, “Okay, well, my voice should signal these shifts in the narrative arc.”
01:01:48	Sadie Barker:	–she had a strong sense of how the structure of her podcast was mobilized by the complexities of an idea.
01:01:55	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] The middle section is more about the work that I’ve been doing to figure out how to talk about applause in a way that isn’t just, “Oh, it lasts this many seconds and it’s loud or it’s quiet,” but to come up with terms that are more specific to the qualitative essence of different moments of applause.
01:02:13	Sadie Barker:	But Ali also reflected on how her structure was mobilized through the possibilities of an idea.
01:02:20	Audio Recording:	[Ali Barillaro] And then the ending is sort of where I still am in a way, which is that there’s a lot more [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] that can be done to develop that further. And there’s a lot of exciting possibilities for tracing performances across even just different days or different years or decades and different locations and, and charting sort of the responses from different audiences in different contexts to the same poet and the same work.
01:02:46	Sadie Barker:	So if my approach was to structure emotively and Ali’s was to structure more theoretically, Emma’s further diversified our set of approaches. Emma ended up taking—at least initially—a structured approach to structure.
01:03:02	Audio Recording:	[Emma Telaro] I resorted to what I know how to do, which is how to write a paper. So I thought about it. I thought to myself, “Okay, what’s going to be my introduction, what’s the body, and then what’s the conclusion?”
01:03:11	Sadie Barker:	But also found in the process that essay and podcast structure have some fundamental differences.
01:03:18	Audio Recording:	[Emma Telaro] Except that it was almost more scary ’cause it was just like, how do I, first of all, put sounds onto this platform and then also make them make sense?
01:03:25	Sadie Barker:	And that these differences call for different approaches.
01:03:29	Audio Recording:	[Emma Telaro] So I had various clips that I liked. I wrote a script. Then in the end I had all these sound bites or clips that I just needed to assemble into a collage. Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.
01:03:38	Sadie Barker:	And that these approaches rely on feeling in different ways.
01:03:42	Audio Recording:	[Emma Telaro] But when you do that there’s not necessarily like a linear structure that you have right away. So it’s also just trusting that the process will reveal itself. I didn’t know how to conclude this in a way that would be engaging and not too formal and not too academics. And that’s when I decided to include the poem “Late August,” which just felt like it needed to be there somewhere. And to end it with that, I think was to go back to like, just to come back to the reading.
01:04:06	Audio Recording:	[Jason Camlot] I love that move at the end of your podcast. And it relates to what we’ve been talking about this whole time because it’s a return to a verbal rendering of a mood. So it’s a way, it’s a return to the poem on the page or language, the actual words themselves, communicating what you’ve been communicating through, through the rhetoric of podcasting with using, you know, sound and mixing and all those other things up to that point. So it’s sort of like a return to text, to print, you know, to the power of poetry and words themselves to do what you’ve been doing up to that point with sound.
01:04:53	Jason Camlot:	So that about sums up the conversations we had based on the amazing podcasts that Ali, Emma, and Sadie made. As you heard, our focus was on the mood that’s created through ambient sounds, the overall rhetoric of the podcast, and how voice carries affective expression of concepts. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] By way of closing, we tried a little experiment. Basically the idea was to choose some classic critical terms like things from M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms, and to read them with feeling, with the feeling that we associate with a critical term in question. So here it goes, our kind of beat poetry performance of the glossary of critical and literary terms where ideas have feelings. [Begin Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumental]
01:05:48	Audio Recording:	[Multiple Voices] Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature.
01:05:59	Audio Recording:	[Multiple Voices] Focalization. Focalization. Focalization! Focalization. Focalization? Foooocalization. Focalization. Focalization. Focalization.
01:06:09	Audio Recording:	[Multiple Voices] Interpolation! You know, like, “Hey, hey interpolation!” Interpolation! [Laughs] There has to be a finger in there, you know, like, interpolation! Yoo-hoo, interpolation. Interpolation!! Oh, that’s terrifying! [Laughs] Hey! How do you..? Interpolation! Interpolation!
01:06:45	Audio Recording:	Hi, my name is Id. Iddddddd!! Id. [Exaggerated Inaudible Words] [End Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumentals] [Begin Music: Distorted Electronic Beat]
01:07:30	Hannah McGregor:	SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb 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 Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Emma Telaro, and Jason Camelot. A special thanks to everyone who contributed to the SpokenWeb Podcast over the last season. You know who you are. And hey, if you are part of the SpokenWeb network and want to get involved, let us know. Season two is just around the corner, so stay tuned this fall for brand new episodes from all your favourite scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. We’ll also be back with brand new Audio of the Month minisodes with Katherine McLeod from deep in the archives. To find out more about SpokenWeb, [Theme Music] 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 in the fall for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.

Sadie Barker, Emma Telaro, Ali Barillaro & Jason Camlot

Episode Producer Bios:

Sadie Barker is a PhD student at Concordia, working at the intersections of aesthetic and affect theory, sound and decolonial studies. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies. She is increasingly interested in the affordances of podcasting to mediate interdisciplinary spaces.

Emma Telaro is an MA student at Concordia in the department of English, and a RA for SpokenWeb. She is interested in the disruptive potential of sound and of silence in the literary. This is her first official podcast.

Ali Barillaro is an MA student in English at Concordia University and a SpokenWeb RA interested in both the study of comics in the social media age and the sounds of audience response in the context of poetry readings.

Jason Camlot’s most recent critical works are Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), and the co-edited collection, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019). He is the principal investigator and director of The SpokenWeb and Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.