The SpokenWeb Podcast

SUMMARY

This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! Producer Katherine McLeod talks with Annie Murray about the EMI Music Canada Archives at the University of Calgary, and their way into these archives begins with a cassette tape. And not just any cassette tape. Listen to find out which tape and why this tape unfurls a story of recording not only in relation to what’s on the tape but also to archival collections of Canadian music. Audio objects are sonic objects in the sounds they hold, the stories they tell – both on their own as materials and in our affective attachments to them – and this episode of ShortCuts dives into all of this, and more. Annie and Katherine’s conversation about archives is full of whimsy, suspense, and even the sounds of a power ballad – yes, archival research can sound like this.

EPISODE NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. 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: Kate Moffatt

Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood

Transcription: Zoe Mix

RESOURCES

EMI Music Canada fonds, https://asc.ucalgary.ca/emi-music-canada-fonds/

Van Dyk, Leah and Murray Annie. “Audio Time Travel: An Interview with Annie Murray.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 15 December, 2022, https://spokenweb.ca/audio-time-travel-an-interview-with-annie-murray/

In the summer of 2022, research assistants Don Shipton and Teddie Brock took part in a roundtable discussion that explored the archival work of student researchers involved with the audio archives of Canadian poet, Fred Wah. Alongside his literary and academic work, Wah has had a longstanding practice of recording poetry readings, lectures, and conversations, documenting key moments in North American poetry.

This sonic-archival meditation highlights the impact of recording technology on the trajectory of poetic circulation and composition, as it brings together the ‘many voices’ that constituted Wah’s listening and recording practices as a young poet. The first part of this episode will revisit a recording of Wah’s conversation with Deanna Fong, co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive, in which Wah reflects on the significance of portable tape recording to literary community-building and the development of a poetic ‘voice.’ The episode will also present a selection of archival clips documenting the poets whose recorded voices Wah encountered throughout the 1960s, including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, among others.

Special thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for their production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books for hosting the “Mountain Many Voices” roundtable event.

SUMMARY 

This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! It is a conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya about their collaboration in producing “Academics on Air” (May 2022) for The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode became a paper that Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea co-presented at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. After that presentation, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod sat down with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea around a microphone in the SpokenWeb Amp Lab at Concordia University. They talked about processes of collaboration and archival listening that shaped their work. Starting with one audio clip as the short ‘cut’ that caught their attention in the archives, they talk about about context of that clip in the Voiceprint archives, the potential for podcasting to be a radical act of unarchiving, and what makes recordings of a radio show a unique task for cataloguers working with literary sounds recordings, and much more.

EPISODE NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. 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: Kate Moffatt

Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood

Transcription: Zoe Mix

AUDIO 

“Academics on Air.” Produced by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 2 May 2022, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/.

“‘A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio.” Presentation by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, a Graduate Symposium. Concordia University, 16 May 2022.

What is sound design? This is the question Miranda Eastwood, current Sound Designer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, is looking to find out. Exploring soundscapes of all shapes and forms, Miranda draws from interviews with friends, colleagues, and academics, as well as Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network to tackle this particularly tangled question. From sonic literature to audio walks, podcasting to music, this episode is a deep dive into what it means to “sound out” any and all audio texts, and the affective power afforded to sound as a medium of art and communication.

Show Notes

James Healey's music: https://thejupitermachine.bandcamp.com/album/soulless-days

Kaitlyn Staveley's music: https://www.youtube.com/@theradiokaityshow1481

Works Cited

Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. 1992. ‘General Introduction’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Brinkmann, M. (2018) The 'audio walk' as a format of experiential walking, Phenomenological research in education. Available at: https://paed.ophen.org/2018/06/25/gehen-spazieren-flanieren-das-format-audiowalk-als-erfahrungsgang/

Cardiff, J. and Miller, G.B. (no date) Walks, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Available at: https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/

Grint, K. and Woolgar, S. 1997. The Machine At Work. Cambridge: Polity.

Hutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42856294. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.

Kellough, Kaie, et al. “‘Small Stones’: A Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography.” “Small Stones”: a Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography - SpokenWeb Archive of the Present, https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/small-stones-a-work-in-poetry-sound-music-and-typography/.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.

McLeod, Katherine, host. “The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts, Season 3, Episode 5.

Mills, Mara. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press, 2015. “deafness” p.45-54.

Ricci, Stephanie. The Making of "Small Stones" (2021) SpokenWeb Archive of the Present. SpokenWeb.

SUMMARY 

This month, ShortCuts presents another episode of ShortCuts Live! This month’s episode was recorded as a live conversation on Zoom with the current curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, Faith Paré. As a former SpokenWeb undergraduate RA, Faith’s SpokenWeb contributions have included editorial and curatorial work on Desire Lines; an interview with Kaie Kellough on SPOKENWEBLOG; performing as a spoken word poet in Black Writers Out Loud; leading a virtual listening practice on Black noise; and a reading at SpokenWeb’s “Sounding Undernames” at Blue Metropolis. This is all to say that she had a wealth of experience to draw upon when, as a curator, she was handed a folder of recordings.

How to reactivate the archival past of a reading series while at the same time looking ahead? What is it like to curate the past and future of a reading series? Find out by listening to ShortCuts Live! A conversation with Katherine McLeod and Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project archives.

EPISODE NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. 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: Kate Moffatt

Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood

Production Manager and Transcriber: Zoe Mix

SHOW NOTES

The Atwater Poetry Project, https://www.atwaterlibrary.ca/events/atwater-poetry-project/

“Performing the Atwater Poetry Project Archives, guest curated by Katherine McLeod and Klara du Plessis, featuring the sounds of poets from the APP archives,” 20 February 2023, https://spokenweb.ca/events/performing-the-atwater-poetry-project-archive/

What makes a genuine conversation? And why is it so difficult to have one? Frances Grace Fyfe is on a quest to find out. This madcap talk therapy session has the SpokenWeb RA consider the literary concept of the dialogue, the verbatim transcription of speech in writing (through an exploration of—what else?—Charles Dickens’s early forays in court stenography), especially "expressive" phonemes, and david antin’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s. An investigative journalist, a peer supporter, and one especially sincere friend weigh in to help FG orchestrate the most genuine conversation of all: one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form.

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. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producer:

Frances Grace Fyfe is an MA student in English and Research Assistant for SpokenWeb at Concordia University. She’s interested in reading, writing, speaking, and the body—basically, everything. More recently, she’s thinking about “communication difficulty” in literature: how writers navigate what is too hard to say in the first place.

Citations:

antin, David. “Talking at the Boundaries.” How Long is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin. Edited by Stephen Friedman, University of New Mexico Press, pp. 31-64. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Strauss &  Giroux, 1975.

Diepeveen, Leonard. Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception. Oxford UP, 2019.

Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. Simon and Schuster, 2008.

Kreillkamp, Ivan. “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing.” Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 69-88.

Audio technology and audio data come in radically different forms. This month's episode, "Sounds of Data" is a follow up to Season Two’s “Drum Codes” and takes us deeper into the sonic world of data: from the sounds of surveillance to music of the stars to the wireless transmission of drum songs. Featuring interviews with sound artist and poet Oana Avasilichioaei, NASA sonification expert Matt Russo, and speech technologist Tunde Adegbola, each offering a unique perspective on the question: what does data sound like?

Special thanks to master drummer Peter Olálékan Adédòkun, whose music you hear in the first half of the episode. Original music and performance clips were also provided by Oana Avasilichioaei and by Matt Russo and his team at SYSTEM Sounds. Thank you, as well, to Sean Luyk, who co-produced the “Drum Codes” episode and played a significant role in conceptualising this follow-up.

Producer:

Chelsea Miya is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the SpokenWeb research team at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching interests include critical code studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and the digital humanities. She has held research positions with the Kule Research Institute (Kias), the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), and the Orlando Project. She co-edited the anthology Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers 2021), and her article “Student-Driven Digital Learning: A Call to Action” appears in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center (MIT Press 2021).

Guests:

Tunde Adegbola is a Research Scientist, Consulting Engineer and Culture Activist. As Executive Director of African Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i), Ibadan, Nigeria, he leads a team of researchers in appropriating human language technologies for African languages. In this regard, Alt-i partnered with Microsoft to localise Microsoft Windows and Office Suite for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. A Chevening Scholar, Honorary Fellow of the Linguistics Association of Nigerian (LAN), former Council Member of the West African Linguistics Society (WALS), former board member of West Africa Democracy Radio (Dakar, Senegal) and recipient of various academic and professional awards, he has published many papers and journal articles in local and international scientific journals in the area of Human Language Technology (HLT).

Oana Avasilichioaei’s practice interweaves various areas, including poetry, translation, photographic and moving image, sound, and performance. Oana often explores various means of translating between these areas, bringing aspects of one area into another as a way of putting pressure on the very meaning, conventions, structures, and genres of these fields. Some ideas she engages with include language as trace and resistance, polyglot and polyphonic poetics, phonotopes (intermediary spaces between words, sound and image), and transformation. Oana regularly performs her work and gives talks/presentations on poetics and translation in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe.

Matt Russo is an astrophysicist, musician, and sonification specialist who teaches physics at the University of Toronto. After completing degrees in jazz guitar and astrophysics he began to merge his two passions by founding the sci-art outreach project SYSTEM Sounds. His work has been featured in the New York Times and he frequently collaborates with NASA to make astronomy more accessible to the visually impaired. He is also a scientific consultant, having worked on Netflix's Umbrella Academy. Matt's TED Talk "What does the universe sound like? A Musical Tour" has been viewed almost 2 million times.

Peter Olálékan Adédòkun is a master of the Yoruba Batá “talking” drum as well as a drum maker and trainer, performer, and gospel artist. You can follow his work on Instagram: @lekan_drums_intl, @adedokun_peter_olalekan, @drumsvoice_of_Jesus, @iluyoruba_yorubadrums; and Twitter: @Drumsvoicej, @lekanadedokun1

This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out of the archives and into the world. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University in Montreal. It is a conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes.

At the time of recording this conversation, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” In fact, this paper was already in conversation – that is, part of a collaborative article in development with Dr. Deanna Fong and Dr. Karis Shearer who have developed feminist listening methodologies in their introduction to Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch and to their article, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” Listen to ShortCuts Live! to hear Sarah talk with Katherine about feminist redaction when working with sensitive materials in audio archives, and where this collaborative research will take her next.

EPISODE NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. 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: Kate Moffatt

Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood

Production Manager and Transcriber: Kelly Cubbon

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

Archival audio in this recording is from the SoundBox collection, housed at UBCO’s Amp Lab. Find out more about the SoundBox collection here. 

RESOURCES

Cipes, Sarah. “It’s more of a feeling… Digitizing Reel-to-Reel for the SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection.” AmpLab, online.

Fong, Deanna and Shearer, Karis. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 21 April, 2022.

Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch. Eds. Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer.  Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020. Print.

“The Night of the Living Archive” is an audio drama/mock interview between research assistant Liza Makarova and Fred Wah’s poems Mountain (1967), Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1987, 1989, and 1991), and Don’t Cut Me Down (1972), which currently live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca). 

Poems within the archive are independent documents that live incredibly interesting lives that are celebrated within this episode. Over a series of three interviews, Liza invites these poems, drifting in “the Great Universal Archive,” to speak about their existence in the digital realm. These poems are given the opportunity to speak their minds  on topics such as how digital archives are treated, the poems’ complex histories, and their relationships with each other on a literal and literary level.

This episode will also present excerpts of Fred Wah’s archive of audio recordings, ranging from his 1979 Poetry Reading Series to an interview which aired at a literary arts radio show in Calgary. As an artist, educator, and writer, Wah has built an incredible social network throughout generations through his poetry, which has the capacity to tell its own story.

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. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.

Episode Producer:

kurichkaaa (liza makarova) is an interdisciplinary artist, experimental playwright, and poet currently based on earth. kurichkaaa writes about love and grief, lesbians and communism, and how to empower people to feel hopeful about the future. they have read for the flywheel reading series by the literary magazine filling Station and will soon be published in The Capilano Review. They are in the process of developing a script with Playwright’s Workshop Montreal.

Works Cited:

In For Instance Radio Show: Literary Arts Program Interviewing Fred Wah, https://fredwah.ca/node/431

Poetry Reading - March 8, 1979, https://new.fredwah.ca/node/438

Fred Wah: Classroom Conversation on March 9, 1979

Wah, Fred. Mountain. Buffalo, NY: Audit/East-West, 1967. Print.

https://fredwah.ca/content/mountain

Wah, Fred. Limestone Lakes Utaniki. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College P, 1989. Print.

https://fredwah.ca/content/limestone-lakes-utaniki

Wah, Fred."Limestone Lakes Utaniki." Karabiner: the Journal of the Kootenay Mountaineering Club 30 (1987): 9-12. Print. https://fredwah.ca/content/karabiner-journal-kootenay-mountaineering-club-30

Wah, Fred. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” So Far. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991. Print.

https://fredwah.ca/content/so-far

Wah, Fred. “Don’t Cut Me Down” Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community, 1972. Print.

https://fredwah.ca/content/tree

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. 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: Kate Moffatt

Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood

Production Manager and Transcriber: Kelly Cubbon

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

Check the transcript for the timestamps for where this audio appears in the episode and for a map for all of the sounds. Here is a list with links for finding out more about these archival recordings.

Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1 “Sounds”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds/

Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9 “Re-Situating Sound”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-situating-sound/

Archival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 reading, from ShortCuts 3.3 “Communal Memories”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/communal-memories/

Archival audio: Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980; Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981 — all from ShortCuts 3.6 “Listening Communities: The Introductions of Doug Barbour” (guest produced by Michael O’Driscoll): https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/

Archival audio, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4 “Sonic Passages”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/

Daphne Marlatt interview with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive” an episode of SoundBox Signals that was aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast (co-produced by Karis Shearer, Megan Butchart, and Nour Sallam), clipped on ShortCuts 3.4: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/

Interview with Kelly Cubbon, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, Creativity,” (co-produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod), S3E9 The SpokenWeb Podcast, June 2022: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/

Interview with Kaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5 “The Voice that is the Poem”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/

Archival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-event/

Archival audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: “What the Archive Remembers”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/

Archival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7 “Moving, Still”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/