Phantom Power

It’s summer and we are busy working on episodes for our fourth season. We’ve also rebuilt our website–check out the the fabulous new phantompod.org. There’s other great stuff in store for the podcast, so stay tuned!

But today, I want to share one of my favorite podcasts with you: Will Robin’s Sound Expertise. For those of you into musicology or popular music studies, there’s a great chance you’re already a subscribe. That’s because Will’s show is fantastic and I personally know many music scholars who are devoted fans of this show that features conversations with established and up-and-coming music scholars. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dr. Robin, you might remember that I quoted his New York Times obituary of R. Murray Schafer in our first episode on Schafer. He has written about music for the Times for at least a decade. He’s also an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland and the author of the book Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music. Sound Expertise will be dropping its third season in the fall.

The episode you are about to hear is one that I love as a media scholar. Will Robin interviews Dr. Paula Harper about her work on viral music videos and taste, specifically that terrible Rebecca Black video “Friday” that’s probably still rattling around in some dark recess of your brain. Dr. Harper digs into the awful virality of that video and all of its cover versions, discerning what this case study can tell us about genre, gender, and how and why sound travels on the internet. It’s a great discussion and I hope you enjoy it. And by the way, since this interview happened, Paula Harper has joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of music. So, who says YouTube rots your brain?

Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, had a formative influence on the then-nascent field of sound studies. His 2012 book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, was both a fascinating cultural history and a deep meditation on the purpose of compression technology in capitalism. Today, Sterne talks to Phantom Power about his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP 2022). Specifically, he tells the story of the “Dork-o-phone,” a vocal amplifier he wears to give talks or communicate in loud spaces. Jonathan explains why he wears the Dork-o-phone, what it’s taught him about voice, technology, and disability, and how his experience informs Diminished Faculties’ “phenomenology of impairment.”

This is the third and final part of our series, Voices. Although you don’t need to listen to the other episodes first to enjoy this one, here are the links to part one and part two.

All of this episode’s sound art and music are performed by Jonathan Sterne and/or groups he appears in:

* Cancerscapes: Recordings made during Sterne’s thyroid cancer treatment* Volte: An instrumental post rock band* The Buddha Curtain: solo electronic music

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology at McGill University. He does research in sound studies; media theory and historiography; science and technology studies; new media; disability studies; music; and cultural studies.

You can read Jonathan Sterne’s cancer diaries at https://www.cancerscapes.ca.

 

Transcript

[00:00]

Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.

[Transitional Noises]

Jonathan Sterne [Spacey Voice]: The interior voice is at least as much imagined as a reflection of external phenomenon.

And if you have a voice and never heard a recording of yourself speaking, you probably know that the auditory perspective between your ears is like nowhere else.

A shifting interior voice is an index to something very different from a stable interior voice.

[Transitional Noises]

[01:17]

Mack Hagood: Hey, it’s Phantom Power, a show where artists and scholars tell stories about sound. I’m Mack Hagood, and welcome to part three of our three-part series called Voices, this time we’re featuring sound studies scholar, Jonathan Sterne.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In part two of our three-part series “Voices,” we feature an exciting new voice in the world of sound studies, Stacey Copeland. 

In part one last month, we examined the role voices play in professional sports and unpacked some of the understandings of ability and masculinity that inform the sound of the quarterback’s voice in the NFL. Copeland’s audio documentary, “This is the Sound of My Voice,” examines another group of professionals—women broadcasters and podcasters, who struggle with sonic sexism from male colleagues, audiences, and sometimes, even themselves.

The documentary was originally presented on radio in three parts, but Stacey graciously edited a shorter version for this episode of Phantom Power.

Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier (CGS) Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Master of Arts from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program where she studied with a focus on radio production, sound studies, media culture and gender studies. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson University with a minor in English and a specialization in audio production for radio, music and film. It was during her Master’s work that Copeland co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto, Canada based feminist community radio collective. Currently, she is the supervising producer at Amplify Podcast Network, a collaborative project dedicated to reimagining the sound of scholarship.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this first episode of a three-part series called Voices, we’re listening to the sound of American football—specifically the role of voices in the NFL. We start with a rather quirky story from NFL history that speaks to how the voice intersects with our ideologies around both disability and gender. It’s about a player whose voice stopped working the way it once did, revealing that football isn’t just a competition between teams on the gridiron—it’s a competition of audibility and vocal toughness. And like the rest of our Voices series, it opens up fascinating questions about what a voice actually is, what it does, and what it means, to us and to those around us. 

Our guest is Travis Vogan, a prolific sports media scholar at the University of Iowa. Vogan has written books on ABC Sports, ESPN, boxing movies, and those “voice of God” NFL Films. We also hear briefly from sound scholar Jonathan Sterne, who will feature prominently in an upcoming episode of this Voices series.

Some of this episode is based on the article “The 12th Man: Fan Noise in the Contemporary NFL,” published in Popular Communication by Mack Hagood and Travis Vogan in 2016. If you don’t have institutional access, you can also find the PDF here.

Other things heard or mentioned in this episode:

“The Wild Story of the 49ers, Steve DeBerg, and a Shoulder-Pad Speaker System,” by Eric Branch, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2020.

“The UNBELIEVABLE Story of Steve DeBerg’s Loudspeaker Shoulder Pads,” by the Pick Six Podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode, we take you behind the scenes of Phantom Power. Producer/host Mack Hagood was invited by Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead to be a guest on their show, The Podcast Studies Podcast. As you may or may not know, there are a lot of academics out there not only making podcast themselves but also studying podcasts and podcasting as a genre and an industry–and Dario and Lori are in that camp. Their podcast is a tremendous resource for those who want to understand this emerging academic field.

In the interview, Dario prompted Mack to go pretty deep into the production of Phantom Power, exploring the techniques and philosophy behind the show, as well as the potential Mack sees for podcasting as a format for generating scholarly knowledge. And after the interview, Lori had some intriguing comments about what counts as “original scholarship” when we do it in sound. So, as we prepare our 2022 season of Phantom Power, we thought we’d share this discussion of how our sonic sausage gets made. And we’ll be back next month with a new original episode!

Things we talk about in this episode:

Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control by Mack Hagood (Duke, 2019)

“Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood (Real Life, December 3, 2020)

“The Scholarly Podcast: Form and Function in Audio Academia” by Mack Hagood in Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt, Eds (University of Michigan Press, 2021).

Ep. 8: Test Subjects (Mara Mills), Phantom Power

Ep. 29 | R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021) Pt.1, Phantom Power.

Ep. 30 | R. Murray Schafer Pt. 2: Critiques & Contradictions, Phantom Power.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The World According to Sound is the brainchild of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. It began as a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Then it became something much more ambitious: a live sonic Odyssey in 8-channel surround sound. Starting January, Harnett and Hoff bring their realtime soundtrips direct to your home headphones via the internet in their winter listening series.

We are sure that Phantom Power listeners will love this experience. And right now, you can buy tickets for 25% off with the promo code phantompower25. (As a public university employee, I should probably note that I am not receiving financial compensation through this promo code. –Mack)

In this episode, host Mack Hagood talks to Harnett and Hoff about why they grew frustrated with working in public radio and how they now assemble sonic experiences that don’t impose a fixed narrative on their listeners. We also listen to some fantastic excerpts from their upcoming listening series.

We also briefly discuss a sound art classic, I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier. You can hear Lucier perform the piece in this video from an MIT symposium in 2014. Shortly after our interview, Lucier passed away at the age of 90. May he Rest In Peace.

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

 

Transcript

[00:00]

Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.

[Snippet from The World According to Sound]

[00:59]

Mack Hagood: And welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, your monthly deep dive into all things sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood, and the audio you just heard comes from the long running project called The World According to Sound.

It started off as a podcast then it became a live listening series. Now it’s a virtual distributed experience, that’s available to folks online, streaming.

I mean, it’s a little bit hard to explain actually, but we’ll get into that.

But The World According to Sound is the brainchild of my two guests today.

Chris Hoff: I’m Chris Hoff. I’m actually based in San Francisco and yeah, I’m more of a sound engineer. I come from the public radio world. And I’m the co-creator of The World According to Sound.

Sam Harnett: I’m Sam Harnett, primarily a reporter, but now full-time World According to Sound co-creator.

Mack: Like Chris, Sam comes from the world of public radio, and as you’ll hear, they sort of have a complicated relationship with their old boss.

Sam: Well, we started basically as a reaction to public radio, I mean, Chris and I have both been doing public radio for over a decade–Chris as an engineer and me as a report.

And one day we were just like, “You know, as much as we love public radio, there’s like no sound on radio.”

If you listen to public radio, what you hear is people talking. You hear facts and information and stories and characters, but you hear very, very little sound.

[Snippet from The World According to Sound]

[02:41]

Mack: When I met Chris and Sam, they were in the middle of editing their latest project and you might say they were neck deep in what we could call “ancie...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this re-cast, we examine the sounds humans make in order to monitor, repel, and control beasts. Author Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed is a creative nonfiction book that explores the human-animal relationship through animal-centered sound art. When we first released this episode in 2019, Listen was a collection of short essays in search of a publisher, but today we are thrilled to announce its official release by New Rivers Press–we’re spreading the word by re-airing this powerful Phantom Power episode.

You’ll hear Mandy-Suzanne reading her unflinchingly reflective prose, mixed with the sound art she illuminates in these essays: works by Robbie Judkins, Claude Matthews, and Colleen Plumb. By turns beautiful and harrowing, these sounds and words reposition us, kindling empathy as we listen through non-human ears. Mack Hagood is joined by former co-host cris cheek for a four-legged listening session.

Links to works by the artists heard in this episode:

Mandy Suzanne-Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed. 

Robbie Judkins: Homo Tyrannicus, “Pest” (video), live in London, 2017

Claude Matthews: “DogPoundFoundSound (Bad Radio Dog Massacre)”

Colleen Plumb: “Thirty Times a Minute” (homepage), indoor installation (video)

Transcript

ethereal music plays]

 

[CRIS CHEEK]

This…is…Phantom Power.

 

[pig grunting]

 

[MACK HAGOOD]

Episode 10.

 

[CRIS]

Animal Control.

 

[MANDY SUZANNE WONG]

If humans did this to each other, they call it sonic warfare, terrorism or crowd control, depending on who did it and whom they did it to. They call the end result for the victims, that is post traumatic stress, but skunks aren’t human. They’re not even pets. Not like your spaniel who clearly enjoys notions of his own. Can a skunk suffer post traumatic stress? Aren’t they just wild animals? Yes and yes, sound is contact. Fear is a weapon. The wild is here.

 

[sounds fade out]

 

[MACK]

Welcome back to another episode of Phantom Power, where we explore the world of sound in the arts and humanities, I’m Mack Hagood.

 

[CRIS]

And I’m cris cheek.

 

[MACK]

Hi, cris.

 

[CRIS]

Hi Mack. How you doing?

 

[MACK]

I’m okay. We’ve got an interesting episode in store today I think.

 

[CRIS]

Good.

 

[MACK]

I spoke with an author of fiction and nonfiction work. Her name is Mandy Suzanne Wong. She hails from Bermuda. She’s got a PhD from the University of California in Los Angeles. You may have heard of the place.

[CRIS]

I have. she’s very interdisciplinary right?

 

[MACK]

Yeah, she’s another person that I met through that crazy conference for science literature and the arts. Like the other person that we met.

 

[CRIS]

Brian House.

 

[MACK]

Brian House, yeah.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to think about the contradictory figure of R. Murray Schafer? A renegade scholar who used sound technology to create an entirely new field of study, even as he devalued the very tools of its trade. A gifted composer who claimed a sincere appreciation for indigenous cultures, yet one who, perhaps, could only love them on his own terms, only as they fit into his sweeping vision for Canadian music. An erudite reader with a deep knowledge of world cultures, who nevertheless dismissed Canada’s most multicultural areas as less than truly Canadian. And a man, who despite a bomb-throwing persona on the page, is described by those who knew him as a kind and generous person.

Today we speak to Jonathan Sterne, Mitchell Akiyama, and Hildegard Westerkamp to learn the critiques and contradictions of Schafer. Perhaps the greatest testament to his lasting legacy is the fact that we aren’t done arguing with him.

Works discussed in this episode: 

Jonathan Sterne’s first book, The Audible Past, includes critiques of Schafer’s work, especially his concept of schizophonia. His chapter “Soundscape, Landscape, Escape” (PDF, in the edited volume Soundscapes of the Urban Past) traces the intellectual and audiophile histories of Schafer’s term soundscape.  

Listen, a short film on Schafer directed by David New, includes Shafer’s claim that recorded sounds are not “real sound.”

Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Sound Walk presents a subtler way of thinking about “schizophonic” sounds. Her chapter “The Disruptive Nature of Listening: Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow” (in the edited volume Sound Media Ecology) reexamines the World Soundscape Project through the political lenses of the 1970s and today.   

An episode of the CBC radio program “Soundscapes of Canada” is available at the Canadian Music Centre’s music library. 

Rafael de Oliveira, Patrícia Lima, and Alexsander Duarte‘s interview with Schafer in Corfu, Greece is available on YouTube.  

Mitchell Akiyama’s critique of the World Soundscape Project appears in “Unsettling the World Soundscape Project: Soundscapes of Canada and the Politics of Self-Recognition” (on the sound studies blog Sounding Out) and in his chapter “Nothing Connects Us but Imagined Sound” (in the edited volume Sound, Music, Ecology). 

The program notes (PDF) to Schafer’s North/White contain his dismissal of urban Canadians (page 43).

R. Murray Schafer recently passed away on August 14th 2021. If you’re someone who works with sound or enjoys sound art or experimental music–or you’ve just thrown around the word “soundscape”–you’ve probably engaged with his intellectual legacy. Schafer was one of Canada’s most influential avant-garde composers. He was also the creator of acoustic ecology, the founder of the World Soundscape Project, and the author of the classic book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. He brought a musician’s ear to the field of ecology and he brought an ecological perspective to music. And he bequeathed us a generative vocabulary for talking about and thinking about sound.

This is the first of a two-part series on R. Murray Schafer. Next month, we speak with two of Schafer’s critics–Mitchell Akiyama and Jonathan Sterne. But today, we speak with three of Schafer’s associates to understand the person, his creative works, and his lasting impact on the study of sound:

* Ellen Waterman, ethnomusicologist, flutist, and Schafer expert

* Hildegard Westerkamp, soundscape composer and member of the World Soundscape Project

* Eric Leonardson, sound artist and President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

Creative works heard on today’s show:

* Listen, a short film on Schafer, directed by David New.

* Snowforms, R. Murray Schafer

* The Greatest Show, R. Murray Schafer

* The Crown Of Ariadne, R. Murray Schafer

* Wolf Music V: Nocturne, R. Murray Schafer

* Le Testament, Ezra Pound

* Loving, R. Murray Schafer

* Beneath the Forest Floor, Hildegard Westerkamp

* Miniwanka, R. Murray Schafer

Special thanks to Elisabeth Hodges for translation assistance, Alex Blue V for our outtro music, and Craig Eley for his dramatic turn as R. Murray Schafer.

Today’s show was produced and edited by Mack Hagood with additional editing by Ravi Krishnaswami.

Transcript

 [00:00:00]

Ethereal Voice: This…is…Phantom Power.

[Crow Squawking]

R. Murray Schafer: A soundscape is any collection of sounds almost like a painting is a collection of visual attractions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, in honor of World Listening Day, we rebroadcast our story on renowned Australian sound composer, media artist and curator Lawrence English.

This episode of gets deep into English’s own listening practices as an artist, specifically a technique he calls Relational Listening. In fact, as you’ll hear, he describes himself not as a sound maker but as a professional listener—that’s how central the act of listening is to his artistic practice.

In particular he talks about his reworking of an important work in the fields of musique concrète and field recording, Presque Rien by Luc Ferrari, and the recent premiere of Wave Fields, his own 12-hour durational sound installation for sleepers at Burleigh Heads in Queensland as part of the Bleach* Festival.

Lawrence is interested in the nature of listening and the capability of sound to occupy a body. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of relation listening and perception, through live performance, field recordings and installation.

The show includes extracts from the following tracks:

Album: Cruel Optimism: “Hammering a Screw.”

Album: Wilderness of Mirrors: “Wilderness of Mirrors,” “Wrapped in Skin.”

Album: Songs of the Living: “Trigona Carbonaria Hive Invasion, Brisbane Australia,” “Cormorants Flocking At Dusk Amazon Brazil,” “Various Chiroptera Samford Australia.”

Album: Ghost Towns: “Ghost Towns.”

Album: Kiri No Oto: “Soft Fuse.”

Luc Ferrari: Presque Rien. 

Transcript

[♪ ethereal music playing ♪]

[CRIS CHEEK]

This… is… Phantom Power.

[COMPUTERIZED VOICE]

Episode 4.

[CRIS]

On Listening In.

[buzzing sounds fade in, and fade out as Cris begins to speak]

[CRIS]

The hive of the sugarbag bee, endemic to northeastern Australia.

[loud music starts abruptly]

The first notes of a piece called…

[more loud notes]

Hammering the Screw.

[scratching noises and metallic noises begin]

Found objects – a 44 gallon drum, a ghost town in far northern Australia.

[scratching sounds]

Just some small extracts from recordings made by today’s guest.

[MACK HAGOOD]

It’s Phantom Power, sounds about sound. That’s Cris Cheek, and I’m Mack Hagood.

[LAWRENCE ENGLISH, pre-recorded]

I’m Lawrence English, and I have been described as a professional listener.

[bullfrog sounds fade in]

Which does make me sound like a very second-rate therapist.

[laughing]

But, it is the kind of thing that I spend a lot of time doing in my everydays. There is a lot of listening that goes on, and I suppose in some respects you know, I’m increasingly interested in problematizing what that actually means,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices