The SpokenWeb Podcast

The SpokenWeb Podcast

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The SpokenWeb Podcast episodes

  • Welcome to Season 6!

    Hold onto your hats, because the SpokenWeb Podcast is back!

    This season, we'll continue to bring you episodes exploring the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds with all new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.

    Subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout.

    Cheers to Season 6 ~

    5 min
  • Open Door Listening, with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Bodies Press

    ShortCuts as a series on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed is coming to an end.

    For the past five seasons, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been bringing you deep dives into the archives. Through this process, ShortCuts has asked the question of what it means to listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ of audio. ShortCuts has become a sonic space to practice of feminist listening, and that listening has informed continued audio-based research, performances (including performances based on ShortCuts audio) and publications (such as “Archival Listening” and “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice”).

    For this final ShortCuts, we listen to Brandon LaBelle in a conversation recorded on-site at Errant Bodies Press in Berlin. Listen to hear a reading from LaBelle’s “Poetics of Listening” (as published in ESC “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies”), to hear about Errant Bodies Press and what it sounds like to be there, and to hear the open door as a way of listening. That open door listening will continue even after ShortCuts ends.

    Stay tuned for what is next!

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    SHOW NOTES

    More about Errant Bodies Press and The Listening Biennal. 

    LaBelle, Brandon. "Poetics of Listening." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 273-277. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903562.

    McLeod, Katherine. "Archival Listening." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 325-331. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903565.

    Copeland, Stacey, Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod. “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice.” Podcast Studies: Theory into Practice, eds. Dario Linares and Lori Beckstead, Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming in December 2024. 

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    APPLAUSE

    A round of applause for all who have been part of the production-side of ShortCuts, from 2019 to the present: Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor, Manami Izawa, Judith Burr, Kate Moffatt, Miranda Eastwood, Ella Jando-Saul, Kelly Cubban, Zoe Mix, Yara Ajeeb, James Healey, Maia Harris, and of course ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod. 

    22 min
  • Algo-Rhythms

    SUMMARY 

    How can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?

    In this live episode recorded during June's 2024 SpokenWeb Symposium, producers Nicholas Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.

    Thank you to interviewees Michael O’Driscoll, Kevin William Davis, and Kate Sicchio, as well as the live studio audience.

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    SOUNDFX & MUSIC

    The score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.

    Davis, Kevin William. “Elegia.” On Remembrance. Created with the Murmurator software in collaboration with Eli Stine. SoundCloud audio, 5:25, 2020, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/elegia.

    Davis, Kevin William. “From “From ‘David’”” From Three PFR-3 Poems by Jackon Mac Low for percussion quartet and speaker; performance by UVA percussion quartet. SoundCloud audio, 4:13, 2017, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/from-from-david.

    Pixabay. “Crane load at construction site.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/crane-load-at-construction-site-57551/.

    Sherfey, John, and Congregation. “Nothing but the Blood.” Powerhouse for God (CD SFS60006), Smithsonian Folkways Special Series, 2014. Recorded by Jeff Titon and Ken George. Reproduced with permission of Jeff Titon.

    Sicchio, Kate. “Amelia and the Machine.” Dancer Amelia Virtue. Robotics: Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo. Music: Melody Loveless, Kate Sicchio. Vimeo, uploaded by Kate Sicchio, 2022, https://vimeo.com/678480077.

    ARCHIVAL AUDIO & INTERVIEWS

    Altmann, Anna. “Popular Poetics” [segment]. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.

    Davis, Kevin William. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 25 Oct. 2022.

    Jackson, Mac Low. “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin.” Performed by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O'Huigin, bpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974. PennSound, http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mac-Low/CDs/Doings/Mac-Low-Jackson_09_Vocabulary-for-Mattlin_Doings_1982.mp3.

    O’Driscoll, Michael. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 23 Aug. 2022.

    Onufrijchuk, Roman. Performing “Tape Mark I,” a computer poem by Nanni Balestrini. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.

    Sicchio, Kate. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 4 Nov. 2023.

    WORKS CITED

    Balestrini, Nanni. “Tape Mark I.” Translated by Edwin Morgan. Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts. Studio International, 1968.

    Davis, Kevin William. From “From ‘David’” [score]. 2017. http://kevindavismusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/From-From-David.pdf.

    Dean, R. T., and Alex McLean, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Oxford University Press, 2018.

    Higgins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. University of California Press, 2002.

    Mac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 23 January 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.c, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.

    Mac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 19 September 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.d, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.

    Johnston, David Jhave. “1969: Jackson Mac Low: PFR-3” [blogpost] Digital Poetics Prehistoric. https://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/26/1969-jackson-mac-low-pfr-3-poems/.

    Mac Low, Jackson. A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. 1973. Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, CC-47567-68576.

    Mac Low, Jackson. Thing of Beauty, edited by Anne Tardos. University of California Press, 2008. https://doi-org.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/10.1525/9780520933293.

    O’Driscoll, Michael. “By the Numbers: Jackson Mac Low's Light Poems and Algorithmic Digraphism.” Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008, edited by J. Mark Smith. McGill-Queens University Press, 2013, pp. 109-131.

    Russo, Emiliano, Gabriele Zaverio and Vittorio Bellanich. “TAPE MARK 1 by Nanni Balestrini: Research and Historical Reconstruction.” The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, June 2017. https://zkm.de/en/tape-mark-1-by-nanni-balestrini-research-and-historical-reconstruction.

    Stine, Eli, and Kevin William Davis. “The Murmurator: A Flocking Simulation-Driven Multi-Channel Software Instrument for Collaborative Improvisation.” International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2018. https://elistine.com/writing-blog/2018/4/14/the-murmurator.

    FURTHER READING / LISTENING

    Higgins, Hannah, and Douglas Kahn, eds. Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. University of California Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520953734.

    Noll, Michael. “Early Digital Computer Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated,” LEONARDO, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 55-65.

    Reichardt, Jasia, ed. Cybernetic Serendipity. 1968. 2nd edition. Studio International, 1968.

    Rockman, A, and L. Mezei. “The Electronic Computer as an Artist.” Canadian Art, vol. 11, 1964, pp. 365–67.

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    BIOS 

    Chelsea Miya (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University where her research focuses on questions of ethics, gender, and sustainability in the context of digital cultures and design. She is a Research Affiliate with the SpokenWeb Network, and she has also held research positions with the Kule Institute of Advanced Study (KIAS) and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC). You can hear her other co-produced episodes "Sounds of Data," "Drum Codes," and “Academics on Air" on the SpokenWeb Podcast.

    Nicholas Beauchesne (he/him) completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Alberta in 2020, specializing in twentieth century occult literary networks and modernist “little magazines.” He is currently teaching at the U of A. Nick is an aspiring skáld, a teller of runes. He is also a vocalist and synthist performing under the pseudonym of Nix Nihil. His visionary concept album, Cassandra’s Empty Eyes, was released on the spring equinox of 2022 (Dark StarChasm Noise Theories Records). For a comprehensive overview of Nick’s and Nix’s academic, professional, mystical, and musical services, with links to his various social media, see: www.nixnihil.net.

    43 min
  • ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon

    SUMMARY 

    In this month’s episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts is taking over the airwaves. 

    ShortCuts is the monthly minisode that takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a short ‘cut’ of audio. In this fifth season, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been presenting a series of live conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium – and in this full episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moynan King, Erica Isomura and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of our then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt and our then-sound designer Miranda Eastwood, who was there behind-the-scenes recording the audio and who joins in the conversations too.  

    Listening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with the question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite an eclectic playlist and do check the Show Notes below for links. 

    If you like what you hear, check out the rest of Season Five of ShortCuts for conversations with Jennifer Waits, Brian Fauteaux, and XiaoXuan Huang. And, of course, this month’s episode with the longest ShortCuts yet: “ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.”

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    SHOW NOTES 

    TRACE at Theatre Passe Muraille

    Steve Roach, Quiet Music 1

    False Knees, Montreal-based graphic artist drawing birds talking

    Éliane Radigue

    Kishi Bashi, “Manchester.” (Did you catch that this song is about writing a novel and Erica had just talked about novels? Not to mention the bird references. There are many more Kishi Bashi songs to listen to, but linking this since we played a clip from this one in the episode for these serendipitous reasons!) 

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    BIOS 

    Moynan King 

    Moynan King is a performer, director, curator, writer, and scholar. She was the recipient of a 2020 Canadian Screen Award for her writing on CBC’s Baroness von Sketch Show on which she also made regular appearances as an actor. She is the author of six plays, and the creator of many performances including TRACE with Tristan Whiston. Moynan was the co-founder and director of the Hysteria Festival, the co-director of the Rhubarb! Festival (for four years), and has been the curator of multiple cabaret events including Cheap Queers. As an Assistant Artistic Director and Associate Artist at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre for a total nine years, they developed such works as The Beauty Salon and Bathory among many others. Moynan holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University. Her critical writing on theatre and performance is widely published and they are the editor of Queer Performance: Women and Trans Artists (CTR 149), Queer/Play: An Anthology of Queer Women’s Performance and Plays, and co-editor of Sound & Performance (CTR 184) with Megan Johnson. As of September 2022, Moynan will be post-doctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario working with Dr. Spy Dénommé-Welch on a sound-based research project entitled Queer Resonance.

    Erica Isomura

    Born and raised on the west coast, Erica H Isomura is a poet, essayist, and multi-disciplinary artist, exploring graphic forms and mixed-media art. Her work speaks to a complex relationship with land, politics, and yonsei 四世 Japanese and diasporic Cantonese identity. Erica's writing has appeared in Canadian literary and independent magazines, including ArtsEverywhere.ca, ROOM Magazine, Briarpatch, The Tyee, XtraMagazine.com, The Fiddlehead, Vallum, and carte blanche, among others. 

    In 2023, Erica was artist-in-residence at The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency in Steveston Village, BC. Erica is a recipient of ROOM magazine's Emerging Writer Award and won first prize in Briarpatch’s Writing In The Margins contest for creative non-fiction. Erica currently resides in Tkarón:to/Toronto, ON. https://ericahiroko.ca/

    Rémy Bocquillon

    Rémy Bocquillon is a Postdoctoral researcher and Lecturer in Sociology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany. His research interests revolve around epistemic practices bridging the gap between arts, science, and philosophy, which he explores through his own creative work as a sound artist and musician. His latest projects include the publication of his book “Sound Formations. Towards a sociological thinking-with sounds” and the sound installation “Activating Space | Prehending the City”.https://remybocquillon.eu/

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    Kate Moffatt (interviewer) is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include British Romanticism, women’s authorship, walking and pedestrianism, and print culture. She is the former supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, and she is the current co-host of The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast.

    Miranda Eastwood (sound recording) is a game writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal. Miranda holds a master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University, where they passionately pursued works of many forms, including the development of a radio drama, several ongoing comics, and the release of a full-length audiobook, and made audio as the sound designer for The SpokenWeb Podcast. https://mirandaeastwood.com/

    Katherine McLeod (producer) is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, in the Department of English at Concordia University. She is the principal investigator for her SSHRC-funded IDG project “Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research.” She has co-edited with Jason Camlot a recent special issue of English Studies in Canada, “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” She co-hosts The SpokenWeb Podcast and produces ShortCuts as a series for the podcast feed.

    55 min
  • ShortCuts Live! Turning Our Bodies Toward Sound with Xiaoxuan Huang

    This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. These ShortCuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.

    In this conversation, Xiaoxuan Huang talks about hybrid poetics (and more) with then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt. The audio that informs this conversation is a clip from an audio-visual poetry collage by Huang called “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”  The audio of this collage beautifully sets the sonic environment for this conversation. Listen, and find yourself turning towards the sound. 

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    EPISODES NOTES

    A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at [email protected] with your pitch.

    Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

    Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

    Sound Design: James Healey

    Transcription: Yara Ajeeb

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    AUDIO

    Huang, Xiaoxuan.  “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”

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    RESOURCES

    Read “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang, 

    26 min
  • Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival

    For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.

    Until recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary  event from the margins.

    This episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.

    ARCHIVAL AUDIO

    All archival audio played in this episode is from SpokenWeb’s Ultimatum collection—including interviews conducted by Mathieu Aubin and Ella Jando-Saul with Alan Lord, Fortner Anderson, Sheila Urbanoski and Jerome Poynton, as a way of building this archival collection—with the exception of one clip of Alan Lord sourced from here. 

    WORKS CITED

    Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013. 

    Aubin, Mathieu. "Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.

    FURTHER READING / LISTENING
    Lord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021. 

    Stanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.

    "What's that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival." Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023, 

    https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/


     

    45 min
  • Re-Listening to Improvisation in the Archives

    As April is the month of poetry, we’ve taken a pause in this year’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to one of the first episodes of ShortCuts, “ShortCuts 1.2 / Audio of the Month: Improvising at a Poetry Reading.” In the archival clip played in this episode, we hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder. She asks Andreas if he would like to improvise with her for the poem, “Shore Animals.” Listening now, we can ask: what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? It is a truly memorable moment of listening and worth returning to now in this fifth season of ShortCuts. 

    EPISODE NOTES

    A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at [email protected] with your pitch.

    Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

    Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

    Sound Design: James Healey

    Transcription: Yara Ajeeb

     

    ARCHIVAL AUDIO

    Listen to the entire recording of Maxine Gadd reading at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) here. 

    8 min
  • They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

    T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is arguably not a poem at all. To some readers and critics, it’s more like a play: a collection of voices thrown together without quotation marks or speaker tags. That’s how Eliot himself saw it; his working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices. The work comes alive in performance, where each reader must decide for themselves where one voice gives way to another, and what characterizes each voice. As a result, each reading is unique.

    In this podcast, Adam Hammond asks if computers can help us to decide which readers are best at “doing” the voices in the poem. Looking at performances by such readers as Viggo Mortensen, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Guinness, and using tools such as Drift and Gentle, he asks whether Eliot’s own reading of the poem — dry, monotonous, and hopelessly formal to the human ear — might sound more interesting to a computational listener.

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    Adam Hammond is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of Jett (Coach House, 2021) and Literature in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2016). His is editor of Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2023) and The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (forthcoming, Cambridge UP, 2024). He co-edits the series Cambridge Elements of Digital Literary Studies. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Wired.

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    Works Cited

    Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Cultural Analytics 3.1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022

    42 min
  • ShortCuts Live! Listening to Wide-Screen Radio with Brian Fauteux

    This ShortCuts presents one of the ShortCuts Live! conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us?

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    Brian Fauteux is Associate Professor of Popular Music and Media Studies. He holds a PhD in Communication from Concordia (Montreal) and has completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies music industries and music radio, often from the interrelated perspectives of cultural studies, history, and policy and is currently a co-investigator on a SSHRC-funded research project that investigates copyright and cultural labour in the digital music industries. His book, Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), explores the history of Canadian campus radio, highlighting the factors that have shaped its close relationship with local music and culture. The book traces how campus radio practitioners have expanded stations from campus borders to surrounding musical and cultural communities by acquiring FM licenses and establishing community-based mandates.

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    Show Notes

    Fauteux, Brian. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015

    deWaard, Andrew, Fauteux, Brian, and Selman, Brianne. "Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)." Popular Music and Society 45.3 (2022): 251 - 278. [open access]

    16 min
  • “Two girls recording literature”: Re-listening to Caedmon recordings

    In February 1952, Barbara (Cohen) Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell, two recent graduates of Hunter college, founded Caedmon records, the first label devoted to recording spoken word. In this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon records. They pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957 from and now held in SFU’s Special Collections. Michelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson, of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis, of SFU’s English department, about William Carlos Williams’ reading of “The Seafarer.” As they listen to the poems together, they debate what it means to listen to as opposed to read these poems, with the recordings providing what Holdridge described as a “third-dimensional depth, that a two-dimensional book lacked.”

    Featured graphic credit: photographs by Phillip A. Harrington, courtesy of Evan Harrington

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    Works Cited

    Onion, Charlie. “Caedmon Spoken-Word Recordings go Digital.” Wag: a magazine for decadent readers, June 2002, http://www.thewag.net/books/caedmon.htm. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.

    “Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration.” NPR, December 2002, https://www.npr.org/2002/12/05/866406/caedmon-recreating-the-moment-of-inspiration. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.

    “Caedmon.” HarperCollins.com. https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/caedmon. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.

    “Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading: Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Empson, Stephen Spender, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wilbur reading #604.” n.d. Sound recording. MSC199 #604.. Simon Fraser University Sound Recordings Collection, Simon Fraser University Archives, Burnaby, B.C. November, 2023.

    “Mattiwilda Dobbs – Bizet: FAIR MAIDEN OF PERTH, HIgh F, 1956 ” Youtube, uploaded by Songbirdwatcher, June 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxZZtxM8ykam-Rml9Q7ij4J2OIWLrx3lUB. 

    Etude 8 Dimitri by Blue Dot Sessions

    Frost, Robert. “After Apple-Picking.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking. Accessed 30 January 2024.

    “File:Mattiwilda Dobbs 1957.JPEG.” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mattiwilda_Dobbs_1957.JPG. Accessed 14 February 2024.

    Harrington, Philip A. “[Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen of Caedmon Publishing Company pushing a wheelbarrow full of boxes of their recordings of modern literature in New York City]”. December, 1953.

    “How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers.” Writers and Company. CBC, July, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-two-young-women-captured-the-voices-of-literary-greats-1.6912133. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.

    “January 20, 1961 - Poet Robert Frost Reads Poem at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration.” Youtube, uploaded by Helmer Reenberg, January 15, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AILGO3gVlTU.

    “Oread.” H.D. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48186/oread. Accessed 30, January 2024.

    “The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading 2LP Caedmon TC 2006 Vinyl Record.” Boundless Goodz, https://www.ebay.com/itm/374791681072?itmmeta=01HPJMRA2M8G311HNSS83Q5Z2G&hash=item5743533430:g:ESgAAOSwdLVkomcL&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8OcrOX8GrjGcCKd73gETrLCg9HgtTomQcdBFQsfuKIbZJCerwOPQAP8v95zLuLDTLfzKCEpHr6ciRZXXlKA1iJKJQIZBNBP68Ru6LBfSoa%2FfPEP7%2Fa%2BIRslUZ5i2RDM4SZwOC2l6XlwBx5qb9ihywjJIDK71WKdGDo8mhOnddK0NPBgnn26N5JH6N9DSuSkFkjy7BoQeE7hzXcLV76vAmN2Q6IKkpjLN5l%2B4M36eDSYpXhiFfxsmyok%2Bn1aYfEds46k8%2FfPX0doDJv7qXPKwVi5g99nrSnyZ95AdrCWpR3Tj3%2FkxYp0wlrb2dQ%2F%2FuEaktQ%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABFBMwHh1LRj. Accessed 14 February 2024.

    Williams, Williams Carlos. “The Seafarer.” University of Washington, http://www.visions05.washington.edu/poetry/details.jsp?id=18. Accessed 30 January, 2024.

    1 hr 3 min

About The SpokenWeb Podcast

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Every month The SpokenWeb Podcast brings you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across…

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