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Today Mack talks about one of his oldest companions, the tinnitus that lives rent-free in his head. Tinnitus can be annoying, for sure–and for some people it’s much worse than annoying–but it also has a lot to say of interest, if we’re willing to listen: “Tinnitus has been my guide in sound studies, my Virgil, leading me through a shadow world of sound. It’s taught me how high the stakes can be when it comes to the perception and control of sound and it’s given me new ways to think about how and why we use media devices.” Today we’ll learn the basics of tinnitus and hear some tinnitus stories–everyone with tinnitus has one and these stories can teach us a lot about sound and the self. Maybe tinnitus has earned that rent-free headspace, after all.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Music is by Joel Styzens. The composition “A Sharp” appears on his album Relax Your Ears.

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Warren Zanes is a “rockstar biographer” in more ways than one: he has experienced life as a rockstar, a biographer, and a biographer of rockstars. When Mack first met Warren in New Orleans sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, Zanes was then emerging from the wreckage of meteoric success. He’d been the teenage guitarist in critically acclaimed band The Del Fuegos, who briefly broke into the national popular consciousness—and then just plain broke up. But in the years since, Zanes remade himself into one of our most erudite and entertaining public scholars of popular music. Among other things, he’s been Vice President of Education and Public Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning film Twenty Feet from Stardom, a producer on the Grammy-nominated PBS/Soundbreaking series, and he conducted interviews for Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary. All while keeping up a solo recording career with collaborators such as the Dust Brothers.

Warren’s books include the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 Series, Dusty in Memphis; Petty: The Biography and Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records. His latest book is called Deliver Me from Nowhere. On its face, it’s a book about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s classic lo-fi album Nebraska. But it’s also about sound technology, musicianship teetering in a moment between the analog and digital eras, what it means to be in a band, and the relationship between the four-track cassette recorder and social alienation in Reagan era.

In this interview, Warren talks about his journey, the recent book, his craft as a writer, and—as part of our mini-theme this season on audiobooks—the process of narrating his own audiobooks and why he does so. 

And for our Patrons we’ll have Warren’s What’s Good segment, with something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join us at patreon.com/phantompower. 

Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan.

Transcript

[Robotic music] 

This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where I have conversations with brilliant people on the topic of sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I’m a professor and author who teaches and writes about sound....

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Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture” issue of the Radical History Review (2013). She has published articles in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Russian Review, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Radio Journal, Cultural Studies, Social Media Society, and more. 

Elena’s someone I’m always excited to talk to when I see her at conferences and I thought it would be fun talk to her on this podcast. In this episode we discuss some of her research interests including U.S. radio history, audience research, music recommendation and recognition algorithms, and her current book project, which centers on freeform radio station WFMU and the rise of online music. 

Toward the end of the episode we talk about Elena’s research strategies as a historian working in the digital age. 

And for our Patrons we’ll have Elena’s What’s Good segment, featuring something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join at patreon.com/phantompower. 

Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood. 

Transcript by Katelyn Phan.

Music by Mack Hagood.

Transcript

[Robotic Music] This is Phantom Power 

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today’s guest is radio and media historian Elena Razlikova. We’re going to talk about her current research on the legendary freeform radio station, WFMU, among other things.

But before we get into that, I just want to do a little bit of a call back to our first episode of this season–my “rant.” I think I might’ve mentioned at the time that I was a little sheepish about doing that episode. You know, sometimes I’ll do an episode on my own Research, but I generally keep this podcast focused on sharing and celebrating the work of other people.

So, I was already a little bit out of my comfort zone, wondering if I was being too self indulgent, in talking about myself and the challenges that we’ve been having in Ohio and at my university and the ways that I’m responding to those challenges by reshaping my own career. And then when I was done recording it, I decided I was really not comfortable with it.

I was just like, “I don’t want to put this out”. So I was going to pull it, but. I didn’t have another episode ready to go, and I was feeling really guilty about starting the season so late in the year, so I said, okay, whatever, just get over it. And I dropped the episode into the feed. Well, lo and behold, I guess that was the right move because I got more emails about this episode than any I’ve ever produced over the past five years, including a number of episodes that I literally worked on for months.

So, yeah I guess you never know. You know, I don’t do audience research and I really probabl...

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Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances. 

Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He’s also the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011, Routledge). Matt’s latest book is titled Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022, Stanford University Press). 

In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the long history of recorded literature; the weird shame around audiobook reading and its cultural roots; the interplay between disability, neurodivergence, and alternate forms of reading; and what an audiobook criticism might look like. 

And for our patrons, we’ll have our What’s Good segment at the end of the show, where Matt will tell us something good to read, something good to listen to. Something good to do. You can become a patron of the show at patreon.com/phantompower.

Today’s show was edited by Mack Hagood. Transcription by Katelyn Phan. Music by Graeme Gibson.

Transcript

[Robotic music]  This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we do the first in what will be a short series on the audiobook. I’m a huge audiobook listener. I really got into audiobooks maybe 10 years ago. When I started working at Miami University, I had done that rough slog through my master’s and my PhD, and I realized that it had been maybe six or seven years since I’d had any time to do any real fiction reading, and I felt that this aspect of myself was just kind of starting to atrophy, starting to feel sort of two dimensional, and yet I sort of had to still keep the pedal to the metal. Publishing things to get tenure, had to write that first book. And so, this wasn’t really the time to sort of sit back and start reading novels again, especially when my wife and I had two young kids. 

So, audiobooks to the rescue. My wife Bridget and I share an Audible account and we each also have a Libby account that allows us to download books through our public library. And we just listen to a ton of stuff, mostly fiction. Once I got tenure and I was able to resume something resembling a normal life, I even started reading more books on paper again. And we have a fantastic bookstore in my neighborhood. I’m a huge fan of, shout out to Greg at Downbound Books. Just one of the best curated small bookstores I’ve ever seen. But still, I listen to audiobooks. As much, if not more, than I ever have. 

So, I wanted to do some Phantom Power episodes on the audiobook. What’s its history?

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In this brief opener for Season Six of Phantom Power, Mack discusses his new project of writing a trade press book, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. What are the implications for the podcast? Why pivot away from traditional scholarship and toward public-facing work? In this “rant” you’ll hear about the challenges and opportunities facing humanities scholars in the current era of funding cuts, legislative challenges, and new platforms for public outreach.

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We spend our 50th episode (the last of this season) with communication theorist Amit Pinchevski. Amit’s recent book Echo (MIT Press) explores its topic through mythology, etymology, history, technology, and philosophy. The book challenges the notion that echo is mere repetition. Instead, Pinchevski argues, echo is a generative medium that creatively expresses our relations to others and the world around us. Just as a baby first learns to speak by repeating the sounds of others, a philosophy of echoes reminds us that our own agency and creativity reside in repetitions that respond to the past. 

For our Patreon members we the full two-hour conversation with Amit’s “What’s Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower. 

Amit Pinchevski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are in theory and philosophy of communication and media, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication; media witnessing, memory and trauma; and pathologies of communication and their construction.

He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (Duquesne UP, 2005), Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford UP, 2019), and Echo (MIT Press, 2022). He is co-editor of Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (with P. Frosh; Palgrave, 2009) and Ethics of Media (with N. Couldry and M. Madianou; Palgrave, 2013). His work has appeared in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Public Culture, New Media & Society, and Theory, Culture & Society.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. 

Original music by Graeme Gibson. 

Transcript

[5:58; Amit Pinchevski Interview]

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Robotic Music]

Amit Pinchevski: We start out as relational beings. You know, echoing and being echoed. The most important relation that we have, that models us, later on molds our relationships with others. Echo is necessarily both. Both repetition and response.

Mack Hagood: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where artists and scholars talk about sound. I’m Mack Hagood and I want to start off by saying this is episode 50! 5-0. It’s kind of hard for me to believe. 

We started this show, my friend Cris Cheek and I, back on March 12, 2018. And of course we had actually started working on it back in 2017, and we put out our first episodes in the spring of 2018. That is five years ago! 

Chris and I parted ways after a couple of seasons. I’ve kind of been flying solo ever since then, although not really because I’ve had the amaz...

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Today we explore the mythology around John Cage’s visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage’s experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review, Mack Hagood explores the relationship between sound, self, and meaning-making. To use a term Cage loved, the truth is indeterminate. 

For our Patreon members we have bonus content: Mack’s “What’s Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower. 

Writing and media content featured in this episode: 

* Mack’s essay “Cage’s Echoes of the Anechoic,” in AHR Issue 70 (2022). 

* Nam June Paik’s 1973 video Global Groove 

* John Cage’s 1959 album with David Tudor, Indeterminacy 

* John Cage’s book Silence (Wesleyan, 1961).

* The video Can Silence Actually Drive you Crazy by Veritasium 

* Terry Gross’s 2014 Fresh Air interview with Trevor Cox 

* The album Naxi Live by Jang San and the Dayan Naxi orchestra 

* Shani Diluka’s performance of “Glassworks: Opening” by Philip Glass 

* Amit Pinchevsky’s book Echo (MIT, 2022)

* Helen Rees’ book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford, 2011)

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. 

Original music and sound design by Mack Hagood. 

Special thanks to Monique Rooney and Australian Humanities Review. 

Transcript

[5:19]: Cages Echoes Of The Anechoic by Mack Hagood

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Uberduck.ai Voice Generator]

Mack: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a show about sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood. 

And what you just heard are the words of John Cage, the legendary composer, performer, and theorist of music and sound and silence. But what you did not hear was John Cage’s voice. Instead, I typed his words into a machine learning text to speech generator called UberDuck.ai.

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Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how hard the post-shutdown adjustment has been for many of us and how that might be feeding into the current AI hype.  

For our Patreon members we have “What’s Good” recommendations from Steph and Hussein on what to read, listen to, and do. Join at Patreon.com/phantompower. 

About our guests:

Steph Ceraso is Associate Professor of Digital Writing & Rhetoric in the English Department at the University of Virginia. She’s one of Mack’s go-to folks when trying to figure out how to use audio production in the classroom as a form of student composition. Steph’s research and teaching interests include multimodal composition, sound studies, pedagogy, digital rhetoric, disability studies, sensory rhetorics, music, and pop culture. 

Hussein Boon is Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, session musician, composer, modular synth researcher, and AI researcher. He also has a vibrant YouTube presence with tutorials on things like Ableton Live production. 

Pieces featured in this episode: 

“Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity” by Steph Ceraso in Sounding Out (2022). 

“In the Future” by Hussein Boon in Riffs (2022). 

Mack also mentioned in his rant: 

“Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language” by Jerome Feldman and Srinivas Narayanan (2003). 

“The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” by George Lakoff (1992). 

Today’s show was produced and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami. 

Transcript

[7:22]: Steph Ceraso, Voice As Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity

[24:10] Hussein Boon, Public Access File Trading

[26:26] Hussein Boon, Better Than Mininum Wage: Working For The Man 

[30:10] Hussein Boon, Tinkering At The Edges

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Ethereal Music]

Steph Ceraso: We must treat voice holistically. Voices are more than people, more than technologies, more than contexts, more than sounds. 

Understanding voice means acknowledging the interconnectedness of these things and how that interconnectedness enables or precludes vocal possibilities.

[Ethereal Music Fades]

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Brian Harnetty’s recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty’s musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard. 

In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian’s process. Harnetty’s audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self. 

This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we’ve heard. 

(And, of course, we’ll have a longer version of the interview and our What’s Good segment for our Patrons.)

Who was Thomas Merton?

Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It’s hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948’s “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries. 

Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.”

Brian Harnetty

Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire).

Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University’s Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received

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Here is a preview of Mack Hagood’s full one hour and forty minute interview with soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp, which includes many details and stories we couldn’t fit into the three public episodes we featured her in. 

If you’re a Patron, this full episode has already dropped into your feed. If you’d like to become a Patron, visit Patreon.com/phantompower to see the options, which start at only $3/month.  

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