| (00:00) |
ShortCuts Theme Music |
[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins] |
| (00:07) |
Katherine McLeod |
Welcome to Shortcuts.
Have you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if the sound was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival in the Alan Lord Audio Collection. First of all, Listening Queerly is a team of student researchers based at Concordia University: Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow. This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC funded Insight Development grant.
They’ve been working with a series of recordings in the Alan Lord Audio Collection, a collection that’s part of SpokenWeb’s audio collections. In 1985, Alan Lord helped to organize the Ultimatum Festival in Montreal. And recordings from that festival are what the Listening Queerly team were listening to when they heard a sound. A sound that sounded almost like a heartbeat, or was it a technical glitch in the recording? Could they be sure? What were they hearing? What’s that noise?
Whatever it was, the reality was that the sound, the noise, had an impact. They couldn’t stop thinking about it, and they talked about it together. What results from those conversations is this episode of ShortCuts. Here is a very special episode of ShortCuts produced by Ella Jando-Saul, taking you on a deep dive into the sound of one memorable recording. [ShortCuts music swells and then ends] |
| (02:02) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
[Sound effect of a heart beating begins]
In 1985, Alan Lord with help from a team of close friends organized Ultimatum, a literary festival that took place from May 1st to 5th at Les Foufounes Électriques, a punk bar that exists to this day in downtown Montreal. Ultimatum was advertised as an event presenting both a new generation of urban poets who utilize video, computers, electro pop music and performance art as an integral part of their mode of expression, and also traditional poets whose work reflects the urgency and electricity of living in a modern urban environment.
Lord invited both Anglophone and Francophone poets from Montreal, as well as poets from Vancouver, Toronto, Quebec City, and New York. The event was recorded on tapes, which have since been digitized at Concordia University. The tape we are listening to today is from the 2nd of May.
[Heartbeat sound effect speeds up and then ends] |
| (03:05) |
Mathieu Aubin |
Hi, my name is Mathieu Aubin and I’m the primary investigator for the Listening Queerly Cross-Generational Divides Project, and I’m also a research affiliate in the English department at Concordia University. |
| (03:17) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
My name is Ella Jando-Saul and I am the project manager for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I am also finishing my first year in the masters program at Concordia University in English Literature. |
| (03:31) |
Sophia Magliocca |
Hi, my name is Sophia Magliocca. I’m a research assistant on the SpokenWeb affiliate project called Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides. I’m also finishing my second year in the masters program here at Concordia University in English Literature. |
| (03:45) |
Misha Solomon |
Hi, my name is Misha Solomon. I’m a queer listener on the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I’m also finishing my first year as a master student in the English literature program here at Concordia, with a creative poetry thesis. |
| (03:59) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
As part of our research, we listened to the Ultimatum recordings and encountered a tape that included a mysterious heartbeat sound on some of the tracks. The poet speaking on those tracks was unannounced, so we were not sure who it might be. At the time, our team included Rowan Nancarrow, who has since left, but who did much of the listening and contributed to our initial discussions about these tapes. |
| (04:29) |
Archival Audio from Alan Lord Archive- [Unknown Speaker] 1 |
[Sound effect of a heartbeat begins to play] With real trees around us, why do we want painted trees? What does art give us that life does not?
[Sound effect of heartbeat ends] |
| (04:43) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
…many months ago, Misha, you’re actually part of the team already, even though it’s the 8th of December, 2022. And we’re having a conversation as we do on a Monday morning about this tape. Yeah, the weird heartbeat noise is really interesting to me because I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not, and it’s doing really interesting things with the poet’s voice.
It’s sort of, I feel like sometimes rhythmically it’s aligning with the rhythm of the poem, and sometimes it’s not, and I find that super interesting, but then we get this like four minutes of just heartbeat, and I find it hard to imagine that that was intentionally just sort of recorded, and there’s the fact that the sound is different. So I’m thinking maybe there’s something that happened to the tape itself, that when we play the tape to digitize it is making this noise. |
| (05:41) |
Sophia Magliocca |
When I found it, when I came across it, I was almost not going to present it at all. The only reason why I decided to present it was because I thought it was a broken tape, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about what a broken tape might look like in this collection.
So my initial impression of it was either it got damaged, you know, the tape itself was damaged and they recorded on something that was already damaged and that’s what happened. Or it was like you said, kind of some way affected when they were digitizing it. And then other ideas I have is that because the heartbeat sound was happening on other tapes too, whether it was related to someone tapping on a microphone or some kind of like something happening in the room, unrelated to the technology, but close enough that it was getting caught. And then, you know, because of that shift to the static background noise, it kind of made that whole committing to one version of this what the heartbeat was really difficult. |
| (06:38) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
Mhmm. |
| (06:39) |
Misha Solomon |
You know, based on the pattern and the inconsistency of the noise, I think we can be relatively sure that the heartbeat sound isn’t actually a heartbeat, but it is difficult for me to separate the sound from being a heartbeat. That’s what it feels like somehow. If I try to think about it logically while listening, I suppose it could be a metronome, but it does lack the regular rhythm. Or as others have said, something accidental, microphone feedback or a mechanical issue with the recording device.
But I keep going back to the idea that there is something so corporeal about the sound. Something like akin to listening to a whale from inside of a whale’s belly. |
| (07:24) |
Mathieu Aubin |
Hmm. I like that irregularity that you’re pointing to. I hear this, and to me also, I don’t know what it is that we’re thinking, like is it a stethoscope? There we go. You know, listening for someone’s heartbeat is, it’s what it sounds like to me.
And it’s interesting that we have a similar experience of listening to that and identifying that as that kind of sound, but like Misha just said, it’s irregular. So if somebody’s heartbeat is indeed that, I don’t know that that’s probably the best thing for them. So for me, you know, I’m thinking about this and listening to this and it seems like it could be intentional, it could be not intentional. Sometimes because of the rhythm of like, I’m thinking of like tape moving around and maybe bumping that sort of irregularity also could be a technological sound that’s being emitted. |
| (08:26) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
I mean, Imeasure the intervals of the heartbeats and I do have to say like, I hope this is a whale and not a human, because if it’s a whale, I mean, I’d have to find out what a regular whale heart rhythm is, but for a human like this, this human’s in a coma or something, I don’t know, it’s way too slow for a human and it is a little bit irregular. There will be moments where it sort of slowly gets a bit faster and then it starts getting a lot faster right before it sort of cuts and then you have applause.
Sort of having done that, I’m rethinking my thought about it being just like the tape sort of spinning and that sort of circularity doesn’t really make sense with the way that it’s shifting around. Like, if it was just slight shifts, it would be like, okay, well tape can’t be at the perfectly same speed all the time. But I think especially that bit where it really speeds up, I’m thinking, okay, maybe it’s intentional if it’s doing this, but in that case, why are there all of these silent moments with just a heartbeat?
[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play]
None of us know much about how sound recording works. So in an attempt to find some answers, we consulted James Healy, the AMP lab coordinator at Concordia University. |
| (09:42) |
James Healy |
The next one was like the metronome, or what I would describe as a metronome. It could have been like in one of those old school drum machines that were made to accompany an organ in church, because it was just like a simple “pum-pum pum-pum-” |
| (09:59) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
[Interjecting] -Yeah- |
| (10:00) |
James Healy |
-pattern, but like the timbre reminded me of like a Roland 808 a lot, which made me think that it’s maybe the same chip as the Roland 808, but a little earlier, because I don’t think that they’re using sort of like this staple hip hop drum machine in the background. I think they’d just be using a fairly rudimentary one, because they just need it for a fairly simple task. |
| (10:27) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
James answered the question we had been laboring over pretty quickly, but he had more to say about these recordings. |
| (10:34) |
James Healy |
There was a really high noise floor in one of them. And then the voice was also saturating sooner than it was in the others, which made me think that it was a different time altogether because they had basically set up a whole bunch of new equipment. |
| (10:51) |
Archival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2 |
Because it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive.
Thank you. [Audience claps] |
| (11:24) |
Archival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 3 |
[Sound effect of heartbeat plays] What’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively by proponents of the arms race than the advocates of the peace movement? [Sound effect of heartbeat ends] |
| (11:39) |
James Healy |
And what I mean by new noise floors, there’s like a “chhhhhh” and it was closer to the level of the voice than it was in the other pieces of audio. Yeah, I think the next thing that interested me, like in audio to audio and knowing that maybe it was a different room was just literally like the reflection times of the room that I was hearing. Like, I can’t be like that’s a five millisecond reflection, but it’s just like, it sounds different. The room, the reverb, right? Like you can tell when you’re just mostly getting a direct source. |
| (12:21) |
Archival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 3 |
[Sound effect of heartbeat plays]
What’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively…[Sound effect of heartbeat ends] |
| (12:25) |
James Healy |
Or if you’re getting some room reflections bled into the direct source as well. |
| (12:32) |
Archival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2 |
Because it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive. |
| (12:36) |
James Healy |
All living things with ears are really good at that. They listen for reflection times to know what type of space they’re in. |
| (12:43) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
The digitized tape labeled U22 is split into multiple files labeled from T01 to T02. The recordings cut suddenly from one performance to the next, often starting and stopping in the middle of the performance.
During our conversation, James and I started to piece these together chronologically thanks to recordings done by CBC’s Brave New Waves team, also held in Concordia’s ultimatum collection, which recorded the whole evening from start to finish with no cuts. This helped us figure out that the poet using the heartbeat sound was Tom Kenyvesh, an experimental performance and video poet who had recently moved from Montreal to Vancouver.
Okay. So your guess would be that like what we have with the U22 recordings that sound really close up is that he’s recording these sort of offsite and then bringing them in to play them.
In that case, like, does it make sense that there are parts of the same event from that day before this? So it’s like Christopher Dudney live and then it cuts and then it’s Tom Kenyvesh sounding very not live. And then on T06 it’s just heartbeat sounds which are playing in the background, um, of T07, which is back to Tom Kenyvesh speaking, but now we hear like the audience, it sounds very live and then it cuts and it’s Bill Bisit, same event. |
| (14:22) |
James Healy |
Yeah. Well that did confuse me, but then Jason mentioned in an email that they actually had like eight tracks on that tape, so that made me think that they possibly used two of the tracks just to record stuff for playback.
And then they just use the other two tracks to record what was going on live in the room, you know? So, and then essentially what you could do is you could take the two tracks that are already recorded, so you want to go out to the PA with them and you could play them via like their own output to the PA while you record on another two tracks what they’re saying.
So it could have been a simultaneous thing and they could have just prepped the two recorded tracks, like beforehand. |
| (15:48) |
Misha Solomon |
[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play]
What I find really interesting about the mystery of the sound is that it’s a reminder of the missing information on these tapes. That these tapes are representative of performances that involved some visual aspect and that that aspect is missing entirely.
And so even when the sound changes or disappears, one could imagine someone in an outrageous outfit playing a percussion instrument in the corner and producing that sound. And we’d never know of that person’s existence unless we found photographic or video evidence. But it would significantly change the tenor of the performance were we to be able to see this producer of the sound if the sound is in fact being produced by someone on stage accompanying the performer, let’s say.
And so it’s just interesting to think about the fact that Ultimatum was this full sense live event, one that even seemed to prioritize the visual in terms of screens being available for performers and all that. But here we’re experiencing it only as audio, which is a kind of mutation of the event into something that is only available to us using one sense. So the sound is an invitation to theorize and that invitation can either be fruitful or, you know, can lead the listener astray down paths to which answers might not be found. |
| (17:17) |
Sophia Magliocca |
Yeah. I love when we think about our project in that way, like that distance that we have in a way retains the privacy of the event, but also invites us in and gives us that intimacy in a really different sensory experience or in a limited one. And when I think about the heartbeat in that way, and whether it’s intentional or not, it does force the listener to really turn or return interior, accept the sound for what it is.
And for a moment it was really nice that we just got to sit and really think about what it could be without having any definitive answers. And think about how it was complimenting the poem and how it was complimenting our experience, you know, so many years down the line of taking that with the limited resources that we have.
And it’s always interesting to have, you know, the real technical terms for what’s going on. But sitting in that mystery, I find, brought us closer and really gave us an opportunity to distinguish the voices and distinguish the settings in a way that, and in a depth that we didn’t always apply to all the other recordings. And this gave us a way into that. |
| (18:20) |
Ella Jando-Saul |
Mm-hmm. And sitting with the mystery, but also just sitting with the sound, however fragmentary it is that we have left to us, is sort of itself an art piece so that whether the heartbeat is intentional or not, it creates this really great experience. Like it is wonderful to hear with the poem regardless of where it comes from. |
| (18:44) |
Mathieu Aubin |
And I love the way that it’s formatted and structured as an art piece, as a poem where these powerful, impactful lines are read and then they’re interspersed with [Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play] these like “bum bums” in the effect of that. And how we’re sitting with that sort of message while trying to figure out that mystery the whole time. |
| (19:11) |
Archival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 4 |
Forgive everything, walk, don’t run, post no bills, leave no fingerprints. In case of emergency stand still, press return. Please don’t touch. [Long pause] Push.
[Heartbeat fades slowly] |
| (20:14) |
Katherine McLeod |
[ShortCuts Theme Music plays] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. This episode of ShortCuts was produced by Ella Jando-Saul. You also heard the voices of Mathieu Aubin, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon, and input from Rowan Nancarrow. Also a special thanks to James Healy. ShortCuts is a deep dive into archival audio distributed monthly on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. It is mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, transcribed by Zoe Mix and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.
[ShortCuts Theme music ends] |
